Don't sleep on the dog days of August for some excellent publications. It's true, the heavy hitters come out in the fall, but we're very excited about the titles below that will publish in the coming weeks. In other news, the Booker longlist came out, with our dear friend Kenan Orhan, who we interviewed in April, grabbing one of the coveted spots for The Renovation, which we also featured in our very first edition of "Books We Like the Looks Of" back in February. This is to say, we have great taste and you should subscribe to Who Even Reads to discover the Next Big Thing before the Booker people get their grubby hands all over everything. Speaking of which, here are the Books We Like the Looks Of coming out this August.

Good-Looking Books Coming Out This August

Triage by Claudia Rankine

Aug 4 | Graywolf Press | 192 pages

Claudia Rankine’s Triage is in some ways similar to her last two books, Citizen (2014) and Just Us (2020), in that both consist of short bursts of text interspersed with visual art and other imagery. However, unlike these other two, it crafts a more straightforward linear narrative, one that might or might not be fictional. A first-person narrator recalls the highlights of her lifelong friendship with someone she calls only “the theorist,” whom she first met in college. Over the decades since, they have both pursued intellectual careers, but in many ways they couldn’t be more different. And this is a large part of what the book is most interested in telling us—that people handle conflict, political upheaval, and oppression (their own and other people’s), and fear and despair quite differently. The narrator is troubled by the fact that the theorist sees her as a person more comfortable with thought than with action, though she knows it’s undeniably true. Triage slowly builds momentum from the conflict of two opposing approaches to our historical moment, and in the final pages readers are left with a very clear directive in terms of what it means to do the right thing. A bracing, much-needed dose of moral clarity from an expert. Read my full review here. —Lisa

The Minimalist by Kailee Pedersen

Aug 18 | St. Martin's Press | 272 pages

I’m not generally a huge horror reader, but I have a high tolerance for the kind of things other people might find disturbing or upsetting in literature as long as the story has a bit of a gothic flavor or philosophical poise or is about people lost in the throes of the niche romantic world of something like chess or piano. This makes me believe that I belong to the segment of “[s]trong-nerved readers” Publishers Weekly says will be “intoxicated” by Kailee Pedersen’s The Minimalist, of which you can read an excerpt on the Criminal Element website. Mia is a composer and student of the famous minimalist Ryder Wakefield. She came of age and grew into her career alongside Ryder’s son, Oliver. Mia and Oliver, both Asian American adoptees, were in a romantic relationship at one point, but, it seems, became toxic to one another since, and then Oliver died by suicide. When Ryder also dies unexpectedly, Mia finds herself in the position of trying to finish his last composition, and begins to lose her grip on everything else. Author Dan Chaon says, “Written with a sinister, Nabokovian sumptuousness, this gothic tale of music, doomed love and madness only further cements Kailee Pedersen as one of the best and most original writers of her generation.” —Elisabeth

The Book of Chuck by LaToya Watkins

Aug 18 | Tiny Reparations | 320 pages

The Book of Chuck is LaToya Watkins’ second novel, after Perish (2022), which I also read and loved. Both novels are centered around Black Texan families, and both are dark reckonings with the generational trauma born from abuse and neglect. In The Book of Chuck we follow Chuck Gardner, the mother of his children Lettie, and their three girls, in particular the youngest daughter Baby. Chuck, Baby, and Chuck’s mother Nannie, who abandoned him, all have a disturbing “gift” that allows them to see when a person is going to die, assuming that death is coming in the near future. Through three generations we see how this gift (or curse) affects the lives and relationships of those it touches, and how challenging it is to reverse course once one has tried to disengage from family life. As the title suggests, the novel is also heavy on religious themes, in particular abuse of power by those who claim religious authority against those who are already oppressed by the state, i.e., Black people and women. If you’re thinking this sounds depressing, first of all, so what? What’s your problem? Secondly, The Book of Chuck is also full of heart and soul and the inimitable joy of loving someone. If you can’t handle The Book of Chuck at its worst, maybe you don’t deserve it at its best, just saying. Lots of starred early reviews for this one, so you don’t have to take my word for it, and there's a sample available on the publisher's page. —Lisa

Unprecedented Times by Malavika Kannan

Aug 18 | Henry Holt and Co. | 416 pages

Covering the start of the Covid pandemic and told from the perspective of a queer college student and daughter of immigrants to America, Malavika Kannan’s debut novel Unprecedented Times speaks for a generation whose burgeoning adulthood was and continues to be unceremoniously derailed by the political and social mess of a world they are only just beginning to inherit. But main character Rishi heads into the school year with the sense that she is lucky, remarking that if she had been born a hundred years earlier, she would be married by eighteen, and if she had been born a hundred years later, it would be into environmental catastrophe, whereas in the present, she gets to “attend college for the main purposes of reading books and kissing girls.” Kannan’s prose is offbeat but solidly built, offering reflections on the profound, lasting emotions of youth, such as in a passage in the first pages that references Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God: “It is my idiot year, my plague year, my pizza-crust year of odd ends and beginnings, and I remember it only more clearly as time passes. It is a year that asks questions, to quote my favorite novel. I am still waiting on some of those answers.” —Elisabeth

A Very Special Episode by Camille Acker

Aug 18 | Random House | 308 pages

I’m not sure why more people aren’t talking about this one! Camille Acker’s first book, a collection of stories called Training School for Negro Girls, got excellent reviews, and based on the publisher’s description and sample, her first novel sounds like it will be a lot of fun. Like her previous work, A Very Special Episode has a satirical edge, finely honed to slice through respectability politics and the white saviors who exploit Black suffering. The book follows Nina, who is about to take her mother’s place as leader of The Tenth, an organization celebrating Black excellence since its founding by Nina’s great-great grandmother forty years after emancipation. To get funding for The Tenth, Nina agrees to help a white woman named Sienna Masters (!) on a “mysterious project” involving a former public housing complex. “Come for the laughs, stay for the spot-on commentary about race, class, and family,” blurbs Deesha Philyaw. Will do, I love spot-on commentary! —Lisa

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