10 books to read in July: New releases from Colson Whitehead and more

New reads abound for your vacation tote throughout the weeks of July, with fiction picks featuring a Carnival cruise casualty, a highly entertaining jewel heist at the Waldorf-Astoria, and a Soviet-era madcap adventure. In nonfiction, authors consider how we define wild places, how we pigeonhole the aging, and how languages live or die. Happy reading!

FICTION:

A Real Animal: A Novel
By Emeline Atwood
Catapult: 368 pp., $29
(July 7)
After surviving a sexual assault, narrator Lucy stalks her college campus as a leopard. Don’t spend too much time worrying about whether this transformation is real, or not; Lucy’s knowledge of her fierceness is the point, a fierceness she employs as she struggles to negotiate her independence from parents who wish she’d come home to recover and men who offer up their desires and ignore hers. It’s an astonishing debut with a compelling voice.

Man Overboard!: A Novel
By Kathleen Rooney
Gallery Books: 208 pp., $27
(July 7)
Readers expecting something akin to Rooney’s wondrous previous novel, “Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk,” should remember that that book followed “Cher Ami “ and “Major Whittlesey,” a story about a pigeon and a World War I Army officer. In other words, Rooney doesn’t repeat herself, and in “Man Overboard!” she’s concocted a hilarious adventure tale of a man floating in the Gulf of Mexico, adrift with himself, his thoughts, and a few sea creatures.

Astronaut!: A Novel
By Oana Aristides
W. W. Norton: 272 pp., $28
(July 14)
Imagine a dystopia set neither in the future nor in fantasy; that’s the 1989 Romania 7-year-old Lia inhabits, its adults living in fear of Communist dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu, its infrastructure strained by deprivation, and its reality so scrambled that calling an explorer an “astronaut” instead of “cosmonaut” risks punishment. When Lia sets out to buy her mother a birthday gift, she sets in motion a series of weirdly probable yet totally weird events.

City of Widows: A Novel
By Nadia Hashimi
William Morrow: 432 pp., $32
(July 28)
During the two decades of American occupation, Afghanistan experienced a sort of peace, one in which women could be educated, work as professionals, and even serve in the military. When the U.S. left in 2020, those same women found themselves — regardless of their individual status — subject to Taliban restrictions that deny differences in gender, desire and ambition. Hashimi (“Sparks Like Stars”) shows how desperate and daring the women become.

Cool Machine: A Novel
By Colson Whitehead
Doubleday: 368 pp., $30
(July 21)
First “Harlem Shuffle,” then “Crook Manifesto,” and now, “Cool Machine,” the highly anticipated “Harlem Trilogy” conclusion from the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning Whitehead. The inimitable Ray Carney, who started out as a minor criminal, is now Sterling Furniture’s “Northeast Regional Dealer of the Month,” a respected businessman. It’s the mid-1980s, and when Ray’s beloved wife Elizabeth gets turned down for a small-business loan, he takes matters into his own hands, in his own former ways.

NONFICTION:

How to Kill a Language: Power, Resistance, and the Race to Save Our Words
By Sophia Smith Galer
Crown: 304 pp., $33
(July 7)
Smith Galer’s nonna spoke an Italian she called “dialet”; her mother spoke “dialet” and English; Smith Galer herself speaks only English. What do we lose, the author asks, when a language dies? The answers she found are powerful, like an enzyme to treat HIV that was found in a tree that was discovered because a researcher spoke Samoan. Unsurprisingly, she also found that language death often corresponds to ecological and cultural devastation.

The Earth Said Remember Me: How to Revive Our Memories and Restore Our Planet
By Jason Dove Mark
W. W. Norton: 224 pp., $25
(July 14)
Perhaps art will be the thing that preserves the environment, even if humans can’t save it. “Go outside. Bear witness. Make a record. Pass it on,” writes Mark in this eloquent, impassioned plea for us all to remain involved in environmental action. The more we appreciate the natural world, the more we’ll want to care for it, share it with others, and help future generations understand how some changes are natural and not all are inevitable.

Aging Out: An Exploration of Caregiving, Community, and How Americans Grow Old
By Lucy Schiller
Flatiron Books: 272 pp., $30
(July 14)
Services for the elderly range from luxury assisted-living facilities to special digital devices meant to bypass phone scams, but as Schiller explains, these things not only commodify a natural life passage — they separate older people from their natural communities. The author was inspired to investigate our country’s aging population when she cared for a grandmother who died from COVID; the book weaves the personal with the political in a meaningful way.

(Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schust)

Dad, Love, Me: A Memoir
By Matthew Quick
Avid Reader Press: 320 pp., $30
(July 21)
Novelist Quick (“The Silver Linings Playbook”) turns to memoir in recounting his contentious relationship with his father, whom he’s losing to dementia. While the author has had big highs (like the movie adaptation of “Playbook”), he’s also experienced deep lows, including alcoholism and severe creative block. Somehow, through recovery (which he credits to Jungian therapy), he affords both his imperfect, ailing parent and himself grace.

The Savage Landscape: How We Made the Wilderness
By Cal Flyn
Viking: 448 pp., $35
(July 28)
In “Downton Abbey”, the Dowager Duchess of Grantham starchily asked “What is a ‘weekend?’” In this book, journalist Cal Flyn asks — more affably, but with equal intensity — “What is a wilderness?” Her answer: Depends on your perspective. In other words, nearly every place on Earth teems with life. It’s only humans who have attached words like “wild” and “unexplored” to regions where they feel uncertain, afraid, and even awed.

Patrick is a freelance critic and author of the memoir “Life B.”

New reads abound for your vacation tote throughout the weeks of July, with fiction picks featuring a Carnival cruise casualty, a highly entertaining jewel heist at the Waldorf-Astoria, and a Soviet-era madcap adventure. In nonfiction, authors consider how we define wild places, how we pigeonhole the aging, and how languages live or die. Happy reading!

FICTION:

A Real Animal: A Novel
By Emeline Atwood
Catapult: 368 pp., $29
(July 7)
After surviving a sexual assault, narrator Lucy stalks her college campus as a leopard. Don’t spend too much time worrying about whether this transformation is real, or not; Lucy’s knowledge of her fierceness is the point, a fierceness she employs as she struggles to negotiate her independence from parents who wish she’d come home to recover and men who offer up their desires and ignore hers. It’s an astonishing debut with a compelling voice.

Man Overboard!: A Novel
By Kathleen Rooney
Gallery Books: 208 pp., $27
(July 7)
Readers expecting something akin to Rooney’s wondrous previous novel, “Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk,” should remember that that book followed “Cher Ami “ and “Major Whittlesey,” a story about a pigeon and a World War I Army officer. In other words, Rooney doesn’t repeat herself, and in “Man Overboard!” she’s concocted a hilarious adventure tale of a man floating in the Gulf of Mexico, adrift with himself, his thoughts, and a few sea creatures.

Astronaut!: A Novel
By Oana Aristides
W. W. Norton: 272 pp., $28
(July 14)
Imagine a dystopia set neither in the future nor in fantasy; that’s the 1989 Romania 7-year-old Lia inhabits, its adults living in fear of Communist dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu, its infrastructure strained by deprivation, and its reality so scrambled that calling an explorer an “astronaut” instead of “cosmonaut” risks punishment. When Lia sets out to buy her mother a birthday gift, she sets in motion a series of weirdly probable yet totally weird events.

City of Widows: A Novel
By Nadia Hashimi
William Morrow: 432 pp., $32
(July 28)
During the two decades of American occupation, Afghanistan experienced a sort of peace, one in which women could be educated, work as professionals, and even serve in the military. When the U.S. left in 2020, those same women found themselves — regardless of their individual status — subject to Taliban restrictions that deny differences in gender, desire and ambition. Hashimi (“Sparks Like Stars”) shows how desperate and daring the women become.

Cool Machine: A Novel
By Colson Whitehead
Doubleday: 368 pp., $30
(July 21)
First “Harlem Shuffle,” then “Crook Manifesto,” and now, “Cool Machine,” the highly anticipated “Harlem Trilogy” conclusion from the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning Whitehead. The inimitable Ray Carney, who started out as a minor criminal, is now Sterling Furniture’s “Northeast Regional Dealer of the Month,” a respected businessman. It’s the mid-1980s, and when Ray’s beloved wife Elizabeth gets turned down for a small-business loan, he takes matters into his own hands, in his own former ways.

NONFICTION:

How to Kill a Language: Power, Resistance, and the Race to Save Our Words
By Sophia Smith Galer
Crown: 304 pp., $33
(July 7)
Smith Galer’s nonna spoke an Italian she called “dialet”; her mother spoke “dialet” and English; Smith Galer herself speaks only English. What do we lose, the author asks, when a language dies? The answers she found are powerful, like an enzyme to treat HIV that was found in a tree that was discovered because a researcher spoke Samoan. Unsurprisingly, she also found that language death often corresponds to ecological and cultural devastation.

The Earth Said Remember Me: How to Revive Our Memories and Restore Our Planet
By Jason Dove Mark
W. W. Norton: 224 pp., $25
(July 14)
Perhaps art will be the thing that preserves the environment, even if humans can’t save it. “Go outside. Bear witness. Make a record. Pass it on,” writes Mark in this eloquent, impassioned plea for us all to remain involved in environmental action. The more we appreciate the natural world, the more we’ll want to care for it, share it with others, and help future generations understand how some changes are natural and not all are inevitable.

Aging Out: An Exploration of Caregiving, Community, and How Americans Grow Old
By Lucy Schiller
Flatiron Books: 272 pp., $30
(July 14)
Services for the elderly range from luxury assisted-living facilities to special digital devices meant to bypass phone scams, but as Schiller explains, these things not only commodify a natural life passage — they separate older people from their natural communities. The author was inspired to investigate our country’s aging population when she cared for a grandmother who died from COVID; the book weaves the personal with the political in a meaningful way.

(Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schust)

Dad, Love, Me: A Memoir
By Matthew Quick
Avid Reader Press: 320 pp., $30
(July 21)
Novelist Quick (“The Silver Linings Playbook”) turns to memoir in recounting his contentious relationship with his father, whom he’s losing to dementia. While the author has had big highs (like the movie adaptation of “Playbook”), he’s also experienced deep lows, including alcoholism and severe creative block. Somehow, through recovery (which he credits to Jungian therapy), he affords both his imperfect, ailing parent and himself grace.

The Savage Landscape: How We Made the Wilderness
By Cal Flyn
Viking: 448 pp., $35
(July 28)
In “Downton Abbey”, the Dowager Duchess of Grantham starchily asked “What is a ‘weekend?’” In this book, journalist Cal Flyn asks — more affably, but with equal intensity — “What is a wilderness?” Her answer: Depends on your perspective. In other words, nearly every place on Earth teems with life. It’s only humans who have attached words like “wild” and “unexplored” to regions where they feel uncertain, afraid, and even awed.

Patrick is a freelance critic and author of the memoir “Life B.”

New reads abound for your vacation tote throughout the weeks of July, with fiction picks featuring a Carnival cruise casualty, a highly entertaining jewel heist at the Waldorf-Astoria, and a Soviet-era madcap adventure. In nonfiction, authors consider how we define wild places, how we pigeonhole the aging, and how languages live or die. Happy reading!

FICTION:

A Real Animal: A Novel
By Emeline Atwood
Catapult: 368 pp., $29
(July 7)
After surviving a sexual assault, narrator Lucy stalks her college campus as a leopard. Don’t spend too much time worrying about whether this transformation is real, or not; Lucy’s knowledge of her fierceness is the point, a fierceness she employs as she struggles to negotiate her independence from parents who wish she’d come home to recover and men who offer up their desires and ignore hers. It’s an astonishing debut with a compelling voice.

Man Overboard!: A Novel
By Kathleen Rooney
Gallery Books: 208 pp., $27
(July 7)
Readers expecting something akin to Rooney’s wondrous previous novel, “Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk,” should remember that that book followed “Cher Ami “ and “Major Whittlesey,” a story about a pigeon and a World War I Army officer. In other words, Rooney doesn’t repeat herself, and in “Man Overboard!” she’s concocted a hilarious adventure tale of a man floating in the Gulf of Mexico, adrift with himself, his thoughts, and a few sea creatures.

Astronaut!: A Novel
By Oana Aristides
W. W. Norton: 272 pp., $28
(July 14)
Imagine a dystopia set neither in the future nor in fantasy; that’s the 1989 Romania 7-year-old Lia inhabits, its adults living in fear of Communist dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu, its infrastructure strained by deprivation, and its reality so scrambled that calling an explorer an “astronaut” instead of “cosmonaut” risks punishment. When Lia sets out to buy her mother a birthday gift, she sets in motion a series of weirdly probable yet totally weird events.

City of Widows: A Novel
By Nadia Hashimi
William Morrow: 432 pp., $32
(July 28)
During the two decades of American occupation, Afghanistan experienced a sort of peace, one in which women could be educated, work as professionals, and even serve in the military. When the U.S. left in 2020, those same women found themselves — regardless of their individual status — subject to Taliban restrictions that deny differences in gender, desire and ambition. Hashimi (“Sparks Like Stars”) shows how desperate and daring the women become.

Cool Machine: A Novel
By Colson Whitehead
Doubleday: 368 pp., $30
(July 21)
First “Harlem Shuffle,” then “Crook Manifesto,” and now, “Cool Machine,” the highly anticipated “Harlem Trilogy” conclusion from the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning Whitehead. The inimitable Ray Carney, who started out as a minor criminal, is now Sterling Furniture’s “Northeast Regional Dealer of the Month,” a respected businessman. It’s the mid-1980s, and when Ray’s beloved wife Elizabeth gets turned down for a small-business loan, he takes matters into his own hands, in his own former ways.

NONFICTION:

How to Kill a Language: Power, Resistance, and the Race to Save Our Words
By Sophia Smith Galer
Crown: 304 pp., $33
(July 7)
Smith Galer’s nonna spoke an Italian she called “dialet”; her mother spoke “dialet” and English; Smith Galer herself speaks only English. What do we lose, the author asks, when a language dies? The answers she found are powerful, like an enzyme to treat HIV that was found in a tree that was discovered because a researcher spoke Samoan. Unsurprisingly, she also found that language death often corresponds to ecological and cultural devastation.

The Earth Said Remember Me: How to Revive Our Memories and Restore Our Planet
By Jason Dove Mark
W. W. Norton: 224 pp., $25
(July 14)
Perhaps art will be the thing that preserves the environment, even if humans can’t save it. “Go outside. Bear witness. Make a record. Pass it on,” writes Mark in this eloquent, impassioned plea for us all to remain involved in environmental action. The more we appreciate the natural world, the more we’ll want to care for it, share it with others, and help future generations understand how some changes are natural and not all are inevitable.

Aging Out: An Exploration of Caregiving, Community, and How Americans Grow Old
By Lucy Schiller
Flatiron Books: 272 pp., $30
(July 14)
Services for the elderly range from luxury assisted-living facilities to special digital devices meant to bypass phone scams, but as Schiller explains, these things not only commodify a natural life passage — they separate older people from their natural communities. The author was inspired to investigate our country’s aging population when she cared for a grandmother who died from COVID; the book weaves the personal with the political in a meaningful way.

(Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schust)

Dad, Love, Me: A Memoir
By Matthew Quick
Avid Reader Press: 320 pp., $30
(July 21)
Novelist Quick (“The Silver Linings Playbook”) turns to memoir in recounting his contentious relationship with his father, whom he’s losing to dementia. While the author has had big highs (like the movie adaptation of “Playbook”), he’s also experienced deep lows, including alcoholism and severe creative block. Somehow, through recovery (which he credits to Jungian therapy), he affords both his imperfect, ailing parent and himself grace.

The Savage Landscape: How We Made the Wilderness
By Cal Flyn
Viking: 448 pp., $35
(July 28)
In “Downton Abbey”, the Dowager Duchess of Grantham starchily asked “What is a ‘weekend?’” In this book, journalist Cal Flyn asks — more affably, but with equal intensity — “What is a wilderness?” Her answer: Depends on your perspective. In other words, nearly every place on Earth teems with life. It’s only humans who have attached words like “wild” and “unexplored” to regions where they feel uncertain, afraid, and even awed.

Patrick is a freelance critic and author of the memoir “Life B.”

New reads abound for your vacation tote throughout the weeks of July, with fiction picks featuring a Carnival cruise casualty, a highly entertaining jewel heist at the Waldorf-Astoria, and a Soviet-era madcap adventure. In nonfiction, authors consider how we define wild places, how we pigeonhole the aging, and how languages live or die. Happy reading!

FICTION:

A Real Animal: A Novel
By Emeline Atwood
Catapult: 368 pp., $29
(July 7)
After surviving a sexual assault, narrator Lucy stalks her college campus as a leopard. Don’t spend too much time worrying about whether this transformation is real, or not; Lucy’s knowledge of her fierceness is the point, a fierceness she employs as she struggles to negotiate her independence from parents who wish she’d come home to recover and men who offer up their desires and ignore hers. It’s an astonishing debut with a compelling voice.

Man Overboard!: A Novel
By Kathleen Rooney
Gallery Books: 208 pp., $27
(July 7)
Readers expecting something akin to Rooney’s wondrous previous novel, “Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk,” should remember that that book followed “Cher Ami “ and “Major Whittlesey,” a story about a pigeon and a World War I Army officer. In other words, Rooney doesn’t repeat herself, and in “Man Overboard!” she’s concocted a hilarious adventure tale of a man floating in the Gulf of Mexico, adrift with himself, his thoughts, and a few sea creatures.

Astronaut!: A Novel
By Oana Aristides
W. W. Norton: 272 pp., $28
(July 14)
Imagine a dystopia set neither in the future nor in fantasy; that’s the 1989 Romania 7-year-old Lia inhabits, its adults living in fear of Communist dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu, its infrastructure strained by deprivation, and its reality so scrambled that calling an explorer an “astronaut” instead of “cosmonaut” risks punishment. When Lia sets out to buy her mother a birthday gift, she sets in motion a series of weirdly probable yet totally weird events.

City of Widows: A Novel
By Nadia Hashimi
William Morrow: 432 pp., $32
(July 28)
During the two decades of American occupation, Afghanistan experienced a sort of peace, one in which women could be educated, work as professionals, and even serve in the military. When the U.S. left in 2020, those same women found themselves — regardless of their individual status — subject to Taliban restrictions that deny differences in gender, desire and ambition. Hashimi (“Sparks Like Stars”) shows how desperate and daring the women become.

Cool Machine: A Novel
By Colson Whitehead
Doubleday: 368 pp., $30
(July 21)
First “Harlem Shuffle,” then “Crook Manifesto,” and now, “Cool Machine,” the highly anticipated “Harlem Trilogy” conclusion from the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning Whitehead. The inimitable Ray Carney, who started out as a minor criminal, is now Sterling Furniture’s “Northeast Regional Dealer of the Month,” a respected businessman. It’s the mid-1980s, and when Ray’s beloved wife Elizabeth gets turned down for a small-business loan, he takes matters into his own hands, in his own former ways.

NONFICTION:

How to Kill a Language: Power, Resistance, and the Race to Save Our Words
By Sophia Smith Galer
Crown: 304 pp., $33
(July 7)
Smith Galer’s nonna spoke an Italian she called “dialet”; her mother spoke “dialet” and English; Smith Galer herself speaks only English. What do we lose, the author asks, when a language dies? The answers she found are powerful, like an enzyme to treat HIV that was found in a tree that was discovered because a researcher spoke Samoan. Unsurprisingly, she also found that language death often corresponds to ecological and cultural devastation.

The Earth Said Remember Me: How to Revive Our Memories and Restore Our Planet
By Jason Dove Mark
W. W. Norton: 224 pp., $25
(July 14)
Perhaps art will be the thing that preserves the environment, even if humans can’t save it. “Go outside. Bear witness. Make a record. Pass it on,” writes Mark in this eloquent, impassioned plea for us all to remain involved in environmental action. The more we appreciate the natural world, the more we’ll want to care for it, share it with others, and help future generations understand how some changes are natural and not all are inevitable.

Aging Out: An Exploration of Caregiving, Community, and How Americans Grow Old
By Lucy Schiller
Flatiron Books: 272 pp., $30
(July 14)
Services for the elderly range from luxury assisted-living facilities to special digital devices meant to bypass phone scams, but as Schiller explains, these things not only commodify a natural life passage — they separate older people from their natural communities. The author was inspired to investigate our country’s aging population when she cared for a grandmother who died from COVID; the book weaves the personal with the political in a meaningful way.

(Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schust)

Dad, Love, Me: A Memoir
By Matthew Quick
Avid Reader Press: 320 pp., $30
(July 21)
Novelist Quick (“The Silver Linings Playbook”) turns to memoir in recounting his contentious relationship with his father, whom he’s losing to dementia. While the author has had big highs (like the movie adaptation of “Playbook”), he’s also experienced deep lows, including alcoholism and severe creative block. Somehow, through recovery (which he credits to Jungian therapy), he affords both his imperfect, ailing parent and himself grace.

The Savage Landscape: How We Made the Wilderness
By Cal Flyn
Viking: 448 pp., $35
(July 28)
In “Downton Abbey”, the Dowager Duchess of Grantham starchily asked “What is a ‘weekend?’” In this book, journalist Cal Flyn asks — more affably, but with equal intensity — “What is a wilderness?” Her answer: Depends on your perspective. In other words, nearly every place on Earth teems with life. It’s only humans who have attached words like “wild” and “unexplored” to regions where they feel uncertain, afraid, and even awed.

Patrick is a freelance critic and author of the memoir “Life B.”

New reads abound for your vacation tote throughout the weeks of July, with fiction picks featuring a Carnival cruise casualty, a highly entertaining jewel heist at the Waldorf-Astoria, and a Soviet-era madcap adventure. In nonfiction, authors consider how we define wild places, how we pigeonhole the aging, and how languages live or die. Happy reading!

FICTION:

A Real Animal: A Novel
By Emeline Atwood
Catapult: 368 pp., $29
(July 7)
After surviving a sexual assault, narrator Lucy stalks her college campus as a leopard. Don’t spend too much time worrying about whether this transformation is real, or not; Lucy’s knowledge of her fierceness is the point, a fierceness she employs as she struggles to negotiate her independence from parents who wish she’d come home to recover and men who offer up their desires and ignore hers. It’s an astonishing debut with a compelling voice.

Man Overboard!: A Novel
By Kathleen Rooney
Gallery Books: 208 pp., $27
(July 7)
Readers expecting something akin to Rooney’s wondrous previous novel, “Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk,” should remember that that book followed “Cher Ami “ and “Major Whittlesey,” a story about a pigeon and a World War I Army officer. In other words, Rooney doesn’t repeat herself, and in “Man Overboard!” she’s concocted a hilarious adventure tale of a man floating in the Gulf of Mexico, adrift with himself, his thoughts, and a few sea creatures.

Astronaut!: A Novel
By Oana Aristides
W. W. Norton: 272 pp., $28
(July 14)
Imagine a dystopia set neither in the future nor in fantasy; that’s the 1989 Romania 7-year-old Lia inhabits, its adults living in fear of Communist dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu, its infrastructure strained by deprivation, and its reality so scrambled that calling an explorer an “astronaut” instead of “cosmonaut” risks punishment. When Lia sets out to buy her mother a birthday gift, she sets in motion a series of weirdly probable yet totally weird events.

City of Widows: A Novel
By Nadia Hashimi
William Morrow: 432 pp., $32
(July 28)
During the two decades of American occupation, Afghanistan experienced a sort of peace, one in which women could be educated, work as professionals, and even serve in the military. When the U.S. left in 2020, those same women found themselves — regardless of their individual status — subject to Taliban restrictions that deny differences in gender, desire and ambition. Hashimi (“Sparks Like Stars”) shows how desperate and daring the women become.

Cool Machine: A Novel
By Colson Whitehead
Doubleday: 368 pp., $30
(July 21)
First “Harlem Shuffle,” then “Crook Manifesto,” and now, “Cool Machine,” the highly anticipated “Harlem Trilogy” conclusion from the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning Whitehead. The inimitable Ray Carney, who started out as a minor criminal, is now Sterling Furniture’s “Northeast Regional Dealer of the Month,” a respected businessman. It’s the mid-1980s, and when Ray’s beloved wife Elizabeth gets turned down for a small-business loan, he takes matters into his own hands, in his own former ways.

NONFICTION:

How to Kill a Language: Power, Resistance, and the Race to Save Our Words
By Sophia Smith Galer
Crown: 304 pp., $33
(July 7)
Smith Galer’s nonna spoke an Italian she called “dialet”; her mother spoke “dialet” and English; Smith Galer herself speaks only English. What do we lose, the author asks, when a language dies? The answers she found are powerful, like an enzyme to treat HIV that was found in a tree that was discovered because a researcher spoke Samoan. Unsurprisingly, she also found that language death often corresponds to ecological and cultural devastation.

The Earth Said Remember Me: How to Revive Our Memories and Restore Our Planet
By Jason Dove Mark
W. W. Norton: 224 pp., $25
(July 14)
Perhaps art will be the thing that preserves the environment, even if humans can’t save it. “Go outside. Bear witness. Make a record. Pass it on,” writes Mark in this eloquent, impassioned plea for us all to remain involved in environmental action. The more we appreciate the natural world, the more we’ll want to care for it, share it with others, and help future generations understand how some changes are natural and not all are inevitable.

Aging Out: An Exploration of Caregiving, Community, and How Americans Grow Old
By Lucy Schiller
Flatiron Books: 272 pp., $30
(July 14)
Services for the elderly range from luxury assisted-living facilities to special digital devices meant to bypass phone scams, but as Schiller explains, these things not only commodify a natural life passage — they separate older people from their natural communities. The author was inspired to investigate our country’s aging population when she cared for a grandmother who died from COVID; the book weaves the personal with the political in a meaningful way.

(Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schust)

Dad, Love, Me: A Memoir
By Matthew Quick
Avid Reader Press: 320 pp., $30
(July 21)
Novelist Quick (“The Silver Linings Playbook”) turns to memoir in recounting his contentious relationship with his father, whom he’s losing to dementia. While the author has had big highs (like the movie adaptation of “Playbook”), he’s also experienced deep lows, including alcoholism and severe creative block. Somehow, through recovery (which he credits to Jungian therapy), he affords both his imperfect, ailing parent and himself grace.

The Savage Landscape: How We Made the Wilderness
By Cal Flyn
Viking: 448 pp., $35
(July 28)
In “Downton Abbey”, the Dowager Duchess of Grantham starchily asked “What is a ‘weekend?’” In this book, journalist Cal Flyn asks — more affably, but with equal intensity — “What is a wilderness?” Her answer: Depends on your perspective. In other words, nearly every place on Earth teems with life. It’s only humans who have attached words like “wild” and “unexplored” to regions where they feel uncertain, afraid, and even awed.

Patrick is a freelance critic and author of the memoir “Life B.”

New reads abound for your vacation tote throughout the weeks of July, with fiction picks featuring a Carnival cruise casualty, a highly entertaining jewel heist at the Waldorf-Astoria, and a Soviet-era madcap adventure. In nonfiction, authors consider how we define wild places, how we pigeonhole the aging, and how languages live or die. Happy reading!

FICTION:

A Real Animal: A Novel
By Emeline Atwood
Catapult: 368 pp., $29
(July 7)
After surviving a sexual assault, narrator Lucy stalks her college campus as a leopard. Don’t spend too much time worrying about whether this transformation is real, or not; Lucy’s knowledge of her fierceness is the point, a fierceness she employs as she struggles to negotiate her independence from parents who wish she’d come home to recover and men who offer up their desires and ignore hers. It’s an astonishing debut with a compelling voice.

Man Overboard!: A Novel
By Kathleen Rooney
Gallery Books: 208 pp., $27
(July 7)
Readers expecting something akin to Rooney’s wondrous previous novel, “Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk,” should remember that that book followed “Cher Ami “ and “Major Whittlesey,” a story about a pigeon and a World War I Army officer. In other words, Rooney doesn’t repeat herself, and in “Man Overboard!” she’s concocted a hilarious adventure tale of a man floating in the Gulf of Mexico, adrift with himself, his thoughts, and a few sea creatures.

Astronaut!: A Novel
By Oana Aristides
W. W. Norton: 272 pp., $28
(July 14)
Imagine a dystopia set neither in the future nor in fantasy; that’s the 1989 Romania 7-year-old Lia inhabits, its adults living in fear of Communist dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu, its infrastructure strained by deprivation, and its reality so scrambled that calling an explorer an “astronaut” instead of “cosmonaut” risks punishment. When Lia sets out to buy her mother a birthday gift, she sets in motion a series of weirdly probable yet totally weird events.

City of Widows: A Novel
By Nadia Hashimi
William Morrow: 432 pp., $32
(July 28)
During the two decades of American occupation, Afghanistan experienced a sort of peace, one in which women could be educated, work as professionals, and even serve in the military. When the U.S. left in 2020, those same women found themselves — regardless of their individual status — subject to Taliban restrictions that deny differences in gender, desire and ambition. Hashimi (“Sparks Like Stars”) shows how desperate and daring the women become.

Cool Machine: A Novel
By Colson Whitehead
Doubleday: 368 pp., $30
(July 21)
First “Harlem Shuffle,” then “Crook Manifesto,” and now, “Cool Machine,” the highly anticipated “Harlem Trilogy” conclusion from the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning Whitehead. The inimitable Ray Carney, who started out as a minor criminal, is now Sterling Furniture’s “Northeast Regional Dealer of the Month,” a respected businessman. It’s the mid-1980s, and when Ray’s beloved wife Elizabeth gets turned down for a small-business loan, he takes matters into his own hands, in his own former ways.

NONFICTION:

How to Kill a Language: Power, Resistance, and the Race to Save Our Words
By Sophia Smith Galer
Crown: 304 pp., $33
(July 7)
Smith Galer’s nonna spoke an Italian she called “dialet”; her mother spoke “dialet” and English; Smith Galer herself speaks only English. What do we lose, the author asks, when a language dies? The answers she found are powerful, like an enzyme to treat HIV that was found in a tree that was discovered because a researcher spoke Samoan. Unsurprisingly, she also found that language death often corresponds to ecological and cultural devastation.

The Earth Said Remember Me: How to Revive Our Memories and Restore Our Planet
By Jason Dove Mark
W. W. Norton: 224 pp., $25
(July 14)
Perhaps art will be the thing that preserves the environment, even if humans can’t save it. “Go outside. Bear witness. Make a record. Pass it on,” writes Mark in this eloquent, impassioned plea for us all to remain involved in environmental action. The more we appreciate the natural world, the more we’ll want to care for it, share it with others, and help future generations understand how some changes are natural and not all are inevitable.

Aging Out: An Exploration of Caregiving, Community, and How Americans Grow Old
By Lucy Schiller
Flatiron Books: 272 pp., $30
(July 14)
Services for the elderly range from luxury assisted-living facilities to special digital devices meant to bypass phone scams, but as Schiller explains, these things not only commodify a natural life passage — they separate older people from their natural communities. The author was inspired to investigate our country’s aging population when she cared for a grandmother who died from COVID; the book weaves the personal with the political in a meaningful way.

(Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schust)

Dad, Love, Me: A Memoir
By Matthew Quick
Avid Reader Press: 320 pp., $30
(July 21)
Novelist Quick (“The Silver Linings Playbook”) turns to memoir in recounting his contentious relationship with his father, whom he’s losing to dementia. While the author has had big highs (like the movie adaptation of “Playbook”), he’s also experienced deep lows, including alcoholism and severe creative block. Somehow, through recovery (which he credits to Jungian therapy), he affords both his imperfect, ailing parent and himself grace.

The Savage Landscape: How We Made the Wilderness
By Cal Flyn
Viking: 448 pp., $35
(July 28)
In “Downton Abbey”, the Dowager Duchess of Grantham starchily asked “What is a ‘weekend?’” In this book, journalist Cal Flyn asks — more affably, but with equal intensity — “What is a wilderness?” Her answer: Depends on your perspective. In other words, nearly every place on Earth teems with life. It’s only humans who have attached words like “wild” and “unexplored” to regions where they feel uncertain, afraid, and even awed.

Patrick is a freelance critic and author of the memoir “Life B.”

New reads abound for your vacation tote throughout the weeks of July, with fiction picks featuring a Carnival cruise casualty, a highly entertaining jewel heist at the Waldorf-Astoria, and a Soviet-era madcap adventure. In nonfiction, authors consider how we define wild places, how we pigeonhole the aging, and how languages live or die. Happy reading!

FICTION:

A Real Animal: A Novel
By Emeline Atwood
Catapult: 368 pp., $29
(July 7)
After surviving a sexual assault, narrator Lucy stalks her college campus as a leopard. Don’t spend too much time worrying about whether this transformation is real, or not; Lucy’s knowledge of her fierceness is the point, a fierceness she employs as she struggles to negotiate her independence from parents who wish she’d come home to recover and men who offer up their desires and ignore hers. It’s an astonishing debut with a compelling voice.

Man Overboard!: A Novel
By Kathleen Rooney
Gallery Books: 208 pp., $27
(July 7)
Readers expecting something akin to Rooney’s wondrous previous novel, “Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk,” should remember that that book followed “Cher Ami “ and “Major Whittlesey,” a story about a pigeon and a World War I Army officer. In other words, Rooney doesn’t repeat herself, and in “Man Overboard!” she’s concocted a hilarious adventure tale of a man floating in the Gulf of Mexico, adrift with himself, his thoughts, and a few sea creatures.

Astronaut!: A Novel
By Oana Aristides
W. W. Norton: 272 pp., $28
(July 14)
Imagine a dystopia set neither in the future nor in fantasy; that’s the 1989 Romania 7-year-old Lia inhabits, its adults living in fear of Communist dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu, its infrastructure strained by deprivation, and its reality so scrambled that calling an explorer an “astronaut” instead of “cosmonaut” risks punishment. When Lia sets out to buy her mother a birthday gift, she sets in motion a series of weirdly probable yet totally weird events.

City of Widows: A Novel
By Nadia Hashimi
William Morrow: 432 pp., $32
(July 28)
During the two decades of American occupation, Afghanistan experienced a sort of peace, one in which women could be educated, work as professionals, and even serve in the military. When the U.S. left in 2020, those same women found themselves — regardless of their individual status — subject to Taliban restrictions that deny differences in gender, desire and ambition. Hashimi (“Sparks Like Stars”) shows how desperate and daring the women become.

Cool Machine: A Novel
By Colson Whitehead
Doubleday: 368 pp., $30
(July 21)
First “Harlem Shuffle,” then “Crook Manifesto,” and now, “Cool Machine,” the highly anticipated “Harlem Trilogy” conclusion from the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning Whitehead. The inimitable Ray Carney, who started out as a minor criminal, is now Sterling Furniture’s “Northeast Regional Dealer of the Month,” a respected businessman. It’s the mid-1980s, and when Ray’s beloved wife Elizabeth gets turned down for a small-business loan, he takes matters into his own hands, in his own former ways.

NONFICTION:

How to Kill a Language: Power, Resistance, and the Race to Save Our Words
By Sophia Smith Galer
Crown: 304 pp., $33
(July 7)
Smith Galer’s nonna spoke an Italian she called “dialet”; her mother spoke “dialet” and English; Smith Galer herself speaks only English. What do we lose, the author asks, when a language dies? The answers she found are powerful, like an enzyme to treat HIV that was found in a tree that was discovered because a researcher spoke Samoan. Unsurprisingly, she also found that language death often corresponds to ecological and cultural devastation.

The Earth Said Remember Me: How to Revive Our Memories and Restore Our Planet
By Jason Dove Mark
W. W. Norton: 224 pp., $25
(July 14)
Perhaps art will be the thing that preserves the environment, even if humans can’t save it. “Go outside. Bear witness. Make a record. Pass it on,” writes Mark in this eloquent, impassioned plea for us all to remain involved in environmental action. The more we appreciate the natural world, the more we’ll want to care for it, share it with others, and help future generations understand how some changes are natural and not all are inevitable.

Aging Out: An Exploration of Caregiving, Community, and How Americans Grow Old
By Lucy Schiller
Flatiron Books: 272 pp., $30
(July 14)
Services for the elderly range from luxury assisted-living facilities to special digital devices meant to bypass phone scams, but as Schiller explains, these things not only commodify a natural life passage — they separate older people from their natural communities. The author was inspired to investigate our country’s aging population when she cared for a grandmother who died from COVID; the book weaves the personal with the political in a meaningful way.

(Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schust)

Dad, Love, Me: A Memoir
By Matthew Quick
Avid Reader Press: 320 pp., $30
(July 21)
Novelist Quick (“The Silver Linings Playbook”) turns to memoir in recounting his contentious relationship with his father, whom he’s losing to dementia. While the author has had big highs (like the movie adaptation of “Playbook”), he’s also experienced deep lows, including alcoholism and severe creative block. Somehow, through recovery (which he credits to Jungian therapy), he affords both his imperfect, ailing parent and himself grace.

The Savage Landscape: How We Made the Wilderness
By Cal Flyn
Viking: 448 pp., $35
(July 28)
In “Downton Abbey”, the Dowager Duchess of Grantham starchily asked “What is a ‘weekend?’” In this book, journalist Cal Flyn asks — more affably, but with equal intensity — “What is a wilderness?” Her answer: Depends on your perspective. In other words, nearly every place on Earth teems with life. It’s only humans who have attached words like “wild” and “unexplored” to regions where they feel uncertain, afraid, and even awed.

Patrick is a freelance critic and author of the memoir “Life B.”

New reads abound for your vacation tote throughout the weeks of July, with fiction picks featuring a Carnival cruise casualty, a highly entertaining jewel heist at the Waldorf-Astoria, and a Soviet-era madcap adventure. In nonfiction, authors consider how we define wild places, how we pigeonhole the aging, and how languages live or die. Happy reading!

FICTION:

A Real Animal: A Novel
By Emeline Atwood
Catapult: 368 pp., $29
(July 7)
After surviving a sexual assault, narrator Lucy stalks her college campus as a leopard. Don’t spend too much time worrying about whether this transformation is real, or not; Lucy’s knowledge of her fierceness is the point, a fierceness she employs as she struggles to negotiate her independence from parents who wish she’d come home to recover and men who offer up their desires and ignore hers. It’s an astonishing debut with a compelling voice.

Man Overboard!: A Novel
By Kathleen Rooney
Gallery Books: 208 pp., $27
(July 7)
Readers expecting something akin to Rooney’s wondrous previous novel, “Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk,” should remember that that book followed “Cher Ami “ and “Major Whittlesey,” a story about a pigeon and a World War I Army officer. In other words, Rooney doesn’t repeat herself, and in “Man Overboard!” she’s concocted a hilarious adventure tale of a man floating in the Gulf of Mexico, adrift with himself, his thoughts, and a few sea creatures.

Astronaut!: A Novel
By Oana Aristides
W. W. Norton: 272 pp., $28
(July 14)
Imagine a dystopia set neither in the future nor in fantasy; that’s the 1989 Romania 7-year-old Lia inhabits, its adults living in fear of Communist dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu, its infrastructure strained by deprivation, and its reality so scrambled that calling an explorer an “astronaut” instead of “cosmonaut” risks punishment. When Lia sets out to buy her mother a birthday gift, she sets in motion a series of weirdly probable yet totally weird events.

City of Widows: A Novel
By Nadia Hashimi
William Morrow: 432 pp., $32
(July 28)
During the two decades of American occupation, Afghanistan experienced a sort of peace, one in which women could be educated, work as professionals, and even serve in the military. When the U.S. left in 2020, those same women found themselves — regardless of their individual status — subject to Taliban restrictions that deny differences in gender, desire and ambition. Hashimi (“Sparks Like Stars”) shows how desperate and daring the women become.

Cool Machine: A Novel
By Colson Whitehead
Doubleday: 368 pp., $30
(July 21)
First “Harlem Shuffle,” then “Crook Manifesto,” and now, “Cool Machine,” the highly anticipated “Harlem Trilogy” conclusion from the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning Whitehead. The inimitable Ray Carney, who started out as a minor criminal, is now Sterling Furniture’s “Northeast Regional Dealer of the Month,” a respected businessman. It’s the mid-1980s, and when Ray’s beloved wife Elizabeth gets turned down for a small-business loan, he takes matters into his own hands, in his own former ways.

NONFICTION:

How to Kill a Language: Power, Resistance, and the Race to Save Our Words
By Sophia Smith Galer
Crown: 304 pp., $33
(July 7)
Smith Galer’s nonna spoke an Italian she called “dialet”; her mother spoke “dialet” and English; Smith Galer herself speaks only English. What do we lose, the author asks, when a language dies? The answers she found are powerful, like an enzyme to treat HIV that was found in a tree that was discovered because a researcher spoke Samoan. Unsurprisingly, she also found that language death often corresponds to ecological and cultural devastation.

The Earth Said Remember Me: How to Revive Our Memories and Restore Our Planet
By Jason Dove Mark
W. W. Norton: 224 pp., $25
(July 14)
Perhaps art will be the thing that preserves the environment, even if humans can’t save it. “Go outside. Bear witness. Make a record. Pass it on,” writes Mark in this eloquent, impassioned plea for us all to remain involved in environmental action. The more we appreciate the natural world, the more we’ll want to care for it, share it with others, and help future generations understand how some changes are natural and not all are inevitable.

Aging Out: An Exploration of Caregiving, Community, and How Americans Grow Old
By Lucy Schiller
Flatiron Books: 272 pp., $30
(July 14)
Services for the elderly range from luxury assisted-living facilities to special digital devices meant to bypass phone scams, but as Schiller explains, these things not only commodify a natural life passage — they separate older people from their natural communities. The author was inspired to investigate our country’s aging population when she cared for a grandmother who died from COVID; the book weaves the personal with the political in a meaningful way.

(Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schust)

Dad, Love, Me: A Memoir
By Matthew Quick
Avid Reader Press: 320 pp., $30
(July 21)
Novelist Quick (“The Silver Linings Playbook”) turns to memoir in recounting his contentious relationship with his father, whom he’s losing to dementia. While the author has had big highs (like the movie adaptation of “Playbook”), he’s also experienced deep lows, including alcoholism and severe creative block. Somehow, through recovery (which he credits to Jungian therapy), he affords both his imperfect, ailing parent and himself grace.

The Savage Landscape: How We Made the Wilderness
By Cal Flyn
Viking: 448 pp., $35
(July 28)
In “Downton Abbey”, the Dowager Duchess of Grantham starchily asked “What is a ‘weekend?’” In this book, journalist Cal Flyn asks — more affably, but with equal intensity — “What is a wilderness?” Her answer: Depends on your perspective. In other words, nearly every place on Earth teems with life. It’s only humans who have attached words like “wild” and “unexplored” to regions where they feel uncertain, afraid, and even awed.

Patrick is a freelance critic and author of the memoir “Life B.”