7 New Books You Should Read This July

Every month, Emma Alpern and Jasmine Vojdani recommend new fiction and nonfiction books. You should read as many of them as possible. See their picks from last month here.

A debut novel that people are already talking about

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A Real Animal, by Emeline Atwood
$29
$29

July 7

After experiencing a sexual assault while interning abroad, Lucy is trying to resume her normal life as a college student, but she’s now tapped into a new, zoological side of reality — one that leads her, in the opening pages, to climb a campus tree as “as the leopard.” From there, the novel moves through Lucy’s 20s as she searches, sometimes misguidedly, for agency and love. Raw and captivating, this bildungsroman is more rewarding than most others out there. —Jasmine Vojdani

Reported mother-daughter stories from an award-winning journalist

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You Won’t Get Free of It, by Rachel Aviv
$30
$30

July 7

Rachel Aviv follows her revelatory book about mental illness, Strangers to Ourselves, with a collection of revised stories originally published in The New Yorker while she was “feeling, existentially, like a daughter.” In the introductory text, Aviv explains that, looking back at the pieces she’s written about mother and daughters, she “somehow thought [she] was writing from the daughter’s perspective, only to realize how many stories were also about the mother.” The result — from Alice Munro’s concealment of her daughter’s abuse to a mother searching for her missing child — is a kaleidoscopic look at the inescapable complexity of mother-daughter relationships. —J.V.

A nonfiction work from a cinephile turned cinephobe

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A Sudden Flicker of Light: A Revisionist History of the Movies, by David Thomson
$26
$26

July 7

Thomson’s new book is an unusual thing: a history of film by a longtime critic that makes the case, again and again, that the medium has been bad for our senses of intelligence and empathy, inextricable from the 20th century’s atrocities. It’s not an argument against watching, exactly, but a fascinating work about the necessity of skepticism, even for people who can’t help but love the movies. —Emma Alpern

An audacious New York caper that’s back in print

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Fixer Chao, by Han Ong
$22
$22

July 14

William Paulinha, an aimless young hustler in New York, devises a plan to scam the city’s elite by posing as a feng shui expert, setting off a series of antic encounters around the city. First published in 2002, Fixer Chao is brilliantly funny and addictively caustic — it “raises nastiness to this near-transcendent level,” a reviewer at Salon wrote at the time. The novel is one of five books coming out this month from Outsider Editions, a just-launched imprint at Doubleday that’s part of a mini-wave of newish presses putting out intriguing reissues, among them Mandylion, Hagfish, and Faber’s US division. —E.A.

A memoir about grief where songs tell the story

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Rise Above, by Matthew Schnipper
$30
$30

July 21

Less than two years into his life, Matthew Schnipper’s son, Renzo Rollins, suffered a sudden aneurysm on Christmas Eve. His death was unexpected and unjust, and Schnipper and his wife found themselves in a new world of grief. “I spent a lot of time resentful, thinking about how the government should deliver me a check for a billion dollars to compensate me for my pain and suffering,” he writes. Schnipper is a music writer (and former Vulture staffer), and his memoir is inevitably woven through with music — the cathartic release provided by Black Flag; the songs he played for baby Renzo; the first concert, a minimalist performance by La Monte Young, that he could bear after his son had died. —E.A.

A big-city crime novel that ends a trilogy

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Cool Machine, by Colson Whitehead
$27
$27

July 21

Whitehead caps off his Harlem Trilogy, which started in 1959 with Harlem Shuffle and moved to the 1970s in Crook Manifesto, in a volume that jumps through a few years in the tumultuous ’80s. Furniture dealer and sometimes small-time criminal Ray Carney is drawn back into less-than-legal dealings in an effort to get enough money to help his wife start a travel agency. (His main character is “a real wife guy,” Whitehead has said.) The story starts small, but the stakes are bigger this time in keeping with the bravado of that decade. —E.A.

A contemplative travel novel

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Beginning Middle End, by Valeria Luiselli
$32
$32

July 28

The latest from the author of the haunting Tell Me How It Ends and Lost Children Archive follows a recently divorced woman and her 12-year-old daughter on a kind of ancestral trip to Sicily. In what begins as short titled sections weaving ancient Greek text, archeology, and geology, the narrator asks how to start again and what her family unit can look like as they forge new experiences together, all while her mother starts to lose her memory. But a miraculous inventive shift gives the daughter ultimate control of the story. —J.V.