July 1, 2025, 7:22am

I hope you’re all safe and well, Dear Readers, as safe and well as anyone can be in this unsettling moment in a seemingly unending frieze of unsettling moments. No matter what happens, art remains important, both art that helps us heal and feel safe and the art that itself unsettles, and you’ll find both below, all of which I hope helps you make it through these head-shaking times.

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Below, you’ll find twenty-one new options to consider in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, including a history of the word “like”; a stirring collection of essays from Maris Kreizman on holding America accountable; a roving posthumous collection from the poet Neeli Cherkovski; a look at the good, the bad, and the oh-so-ugly of Clint Eastwood’s complex life and career; Benedict Nguyễn with a timely and delightfully titled new queer and trans volleyball novel; a new international fictional sensation from Francesca Giannone; a fresh look at the divisive figure of Thomas More; and much, much more (but not much more More, just the one, if you catch my meaning).

I hope these bring you some light in all this strangedark. Add these to your lists—it’s worth it.

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Nishant Batsha, A Bomb Placed Close to the Heart
(Ecco)

“Loosely based upon the real-life romance of Mexican Communist Party founder M.N. Roy and his first wife, journalist Evelyn Trent, A Bomb Placed Close to the Heart chronicles the interior and exterior lives of a couple under siege….Despite being set over a hundred years ago, many of the novel’s themes are strikingly contemporary…provides a glimpse into a fascinating and largely unknown chapter in America’s past.”
–BookPage

Benedict Nguyễn, Hot Girls with Balls
(Catapult)

“Benedict Nguyễn’s Hot Girls with Balls is literal genius: nailbiter sports fiction meets Kathy Acker on EMDR meets our shiny screentime moment, with all the desire & denial & overwhelm & the queer Asian trans girls at the heart of everything that matters. I love this book! It’s so observant & emotionally intelligent & moving & shot through with clarity. SO SO GOOD! & I like volleyball now.”
–Andrea Lawlor

Geovani Martins, Via Ápia (trans. Julia Sanches)
(FSG)

“Geovani Martins has written a funny, tender, kinetic, often brutal debut novel. Via Ápia cracks open a favela—built on a hill whose slope suggests both aspiration and danger—revealing a teeming, vivid motion that can only be found by observing real life without pity or fear. Martins’s eye is sharp, his ear true. Julia Sanches’s translation is hip and contemporary. This book is the beginning of something big.”
–Vinson Cunningham

Maris Kreizman, I Want to Burn This Place Down: Essays
(Ecco)

“What happens when we move from admitting America is no longer working to actively holding it accountable? I Want to Burn This Place Down is Maris Kreizman’s smart, humane and utterly reasonable response to a country that has refused to care for the majority of its citizens—even the ones we are told it favors…timely…a poignant testimonial to her own disillusionment and a powerful indictment of the capitalist cruelty that has brought us to this point.”
–Mira Jacob

Megan C. Reynolds, Like: A History of, Like, the World’s Most Hated and, Like, Misunderstood Word
(HarperOne)

“Valuable books have been written about ‘ain’t,’ ‘okay,’ ‘bullshit,’ and, as the title of Jesse Sheidlower’s classic puts it, ‘the F-word.’ We can add to that list Megan Reynold’s Like, a witty, informative, and thankfully non-judgmental deep dive into that beleaguered but extremely useful word.”
–Ben Yagoda

Joanne Paul, Thomas More: A Life
(Pegasus Books)

“A work of proper scholarly history as well as a wonderful narrative read. More is so often seen as either a saint, i.e. ‘The Man For All Seasons’ or the misogynistic bigot we see in Wolf Hall. In this superb biography, Joanne Paul goes back to the words More wrote himself, to try and get at More before fame and the accusations against him took hold. I so enjoyed the result.”
–Susannah Lipscomb

Marissa Davis, End of Empire
(Penguin Books/Penguin Poets)

“A rich, sprawling work that nods toward biblical and mythological references, history, and rural landscapes….Davis deploys her innovative approach to language and inquiry….The poems look closely at politics, a Kentucky childhood, the Black body, and human resilience with a skill that maps the interconnectedness of people, place, and consequence across time….One is encouraged to return for repeated and close examinations of a truly beautiful work.”
–Booklist

Neeli Cherkovski, The Portrait Gallery Called Existence
(City Lights Books)

“Neeli Cherkovski was a natural born poet. With every portal open to everything and each moment, he breathed poesy from the moment of his birth to his passing. For this last collection, as if to summarize his entire life, he curated a portraiture exhibition of his poetic, creative and biological ‘family’ including his own self-portrait. Here, we see his lineage and the vision ever so clearly.”
–Yuko Otomo

Claire Jia, Wanting
(Tin House)

“Wanting vividly traces the arc of adolescent friendship and love into adult hunger and hope. Whether for a wealthy immigrant YouTuber or the lonely strivers of the world she leaves behind, Claire Jia’s attention to her characters is at once compassionate and unflinching. This is a dazzling portrait of both modern China and the unrelenting ambitions of the human heart.”
–Belinda Huijuan Tang

Kathy Wang, The Satisfaction Café
(Scribner)

“Reading Kathy Wang is like talking to your best friend. The Satisfaction Café evokes the narrative power of classic Anne Tyler, tracing the journey of a Chinese-American woman with Wang’s signature humor, warmth and wisdom. I want to share this novel with everyone.”
–Janice Y. K. Lee

Francesca Giannone, The Letter Carrier (trans. Elettra Pauletto)
(Crown)

“Francesca Giannone brings the sun-soaked vineyards of southern Italy to life in this transportive and poignant novel. The Letter Carrier, set in the difficult decades before and after WWII, is a lush diorama of a village in flux. At the beating heart of it all is Anna, the rule-breaking, bighearted letter carrier, a woman ahead of her time and drawn movingly from the author’s own great-grandmother’s story. An arresting read by an important rising author.”
–Juliet Grames

Shawn Levy, Clint: The Man and the Movies
(Mariner Books)

“Film critic Levy (King of Comedy) argues in this sharp biography that Clint Eastwood is ‘an inkblot in whom we see a variety of opposing ideas at once’….Levy has a knack for memorable phrasing….It makes for a solid account of the good, the bad, and the ugly in the life of one of Hollywood’s biggest stars.”
–Publishers Weekly

Nathalia Holt, The Beast in the Clouds: The Roosevelt Brothers’ Deadly Quest to Find the Mythical Giant Panda
(Atria/One Signal)

“Valuable, revelatory, and contagiously page-turning: Holt has reconstructed a 1929 Himalayan expedition in new, immersive detail to show how proving the existence of the giant panda changed the lives of the two eldest sons of the original Teddy Bear, President Theodore Roosevelt, and forever altered the course of wildlife conservation.”
–David Michaelis

Molly Beer, Angelica: For Love and Country in a Time of Revolution
(Norton)

“n this rich and generous biography, Molly Beer uses an extra-large canvas to paint a portrait of one of the most notable women of the Revolutionary era. In following the course of her remarkable life, Beer fills in the backgrounds of the places she called home, from the very Dutch Albany of the 1750s to New York, London, and Paris. Along the way, we see a nation come into being as one of its founding women adroitly negotiates the social and political landscape.”
–Russell Shorto

Meg Waite Clayton, Typewriter Beach
(Harper)

“Nothing beats Grace Kelly on the Riviera, as seen in Alfred Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief. But Clayton’s portrait of an aspiring Hitchcock blonde has intrigue to spare. Fledgling star Isabella Giori’s rise is cut short when she gets pregnant, after which she makes a fateful friendship with a blacklisted screenwriter while the McCarthy hearings rage on. Fans of Hollywood’s golden age will fall in love.”
–Publishers Weekly

Rose Keating, Oddbody: Stories
(Simon & Schuster)

“Ten lurid stories of magic, metamorphosis, and real-world longing…Keating builds a macabre world in which her characters are utterly free even within their various compulsions, constraints, and grotesque circumstances. Compassionate, gross, deeply compelling. A must-read.”
–Kirkus Reviews

Nell Stevens, The Original
(Norton)

“What a bewitching book this is. A sinuous, thrilling meditation on fakes and forgers, with echoes of Daphne du Maurier and Sarah Waters and an audacity that is totally original to Nell Stevens herself.”
–Olivia Laing

Zara Anishanslin, The Painter’s Fire: A Forgotten History of the Artists Who Championed the American Revolution
(Harvard University Press)

“We know the American Revolution was fought with words and with arms. But with art? In her creative new book, Zara Anishanslin highlights how painting and sculpture could be surprisingly effective tools in the fight for freedom. No less importantly, she shows how artists of every stripe—men and women, the exiled and the enslaved—were passionately committed to the cause of American liberty.”
–Serena Zabin

Michael Grunwald, We Are Eating the Earth: The Race to Fix Our Food System and Save Our Climate
(Simon & Schuster)

“The quest to feed humanity’s voracious appetites is consuming ever more land around the world. We Are Eating the Earth is an indispensable guide to the thorniest problem in global economics and environmental policy—an issue that most advocates ignore, but that we urgently need to face if we want to have any hope of solving it.”
–Matthew Yglesias

Andrew R. Gallimore, Death by Astonishment: Confronting the Mystery of the World’s Strangest Drug
(St. Martin’s Press)

“Compulsively readable and impossible to put down, Death by Astonishment is a page-turning odyssey into the enigmatic history of the world’s strangest drug. Bringing together many of the most pivotal stories in psychedelic history, Gallimore not only connects the dots but also fills in the missing pieces, shedding new light on the mysteries of this extraordinary molecule.”
–David Jay Brown

Morgan Pager, The Art of Vanishing
(Ballantine Books)

“With irrepressible whimsy and a premise so original it enchants you instantly, The Art of Vanishing is a magical debut. Part love story, part heist, Morgan Pager’s novel is the perfect portal fantasy for anyone who has ever wandered a museum and wondered about the worlds, works, and lives on display. I flew through the pages and fell hard for this imaginative jewel.”
—Katy Hays