19 Books We Can’t Wait to Read: July 2025

Fiction

Hot Girls with Balls by Benedict Nguyen — July 1 (Catapult)

“Benedict Nguyễn’s Hot Girls with Balls is so fun, so adrenalized, as grippy as Pilates socks, that it seems a little unfair that it’s also smart as hell. It's a novel that’s utterly contemporary, vividly specific, funny, and moving. Nguyễn has given us a kinetic, deeply pleasurable satire that I’ll be pressing into many hands, this volleyball season and after.” — Sarah Thankam Mathews, author of All This Could Be Different

Long Distance by Aysegül Savas — July 8 (Bloomsbury Publishing)

A masterful and tender debut collection of stories from the acclaimed author of The Anthropologists, about distance and closeness in the age of connectivity. Long Distance showcases Savas’s devastating talent for the short story. Her shrewd encapsulations of contemporary life often center on characters displaced more by choice than circumstance, characters both determined to install themselves in new lives and preoccupied with the people they’ve left behind.

Sunburn by Chloe Michelle Howarth — July 8 (Melville House)

“Intense and all-consuming—like the first love it describes—Sunburn transported me to the heart of summer and the heady days of late adolescence. I won’t soon forget Chloe Michelle Howarth’s addictive, lushly written debut.” — Laura Sims, author, How Can I Help You

The Other Wife by Jackie Thomas-Kennedy — July 15 (Riverhead Books)

“Captures the dizzy angst of young romance so well that it felt like Jackie Thomas-Kennedy had a surveillance camera in my college dorm room...Following Zuzu over decades as she navigates growing up is a heart-rending, funny and relatable journey. I could not put the book down.” — Jessica Grose, author of Soulmates

Absence by Issa Quincy — July 15 (Two Dollar Radio)

“Through its archive of narratives nestled within narratives, this exquisite novel creates a beguiling soundscape of echoes and murmurs that reverberates in the mind long after the reading. In lucid, captivating prose, Issa Quincy constructs a palimpsest composed of the fractals and losses that define the numberless strata of the past. Recalling the novels of W. G. Sebald and the films of Chris Marker, Absence is a mournful and luminous meditation on the work of remembering.” — Christine Lai, author of Landscapes

Information Age by Cora Lewis — July 15 (Joyland Editions)

“Welcome to the zeitgeist viewed from the Manhattan news desk of a shrewdly inquisitive young journalist…[In] Cora Lewis’s delectable and harrowing and often very funny debut novella, she affords the reader the unparalleled joys and horrors of recognition, all while applying the flashing precision of a surgical tool to the material of our daily lives.” — Kathryn Davis, author of The Thin Place and Duplex

House of Beth by Kerry Cullen — July 15 (Simon & Schuster)

“House of Beth perfectly captures that tenuous moment in your twenties when your adult life doesn’t yet have a solid foundation. Cassie—seemingly irresponsibly—decides to walk away from New York City and her job in publishing, only to end up in a marriage, a ghost story, and a new life so strange that it matches the strangeness she has always carried inside her. A lovely story about how even though unraveling a life can be dangerous, there are possibilities in the heart of that darkness.” — Ann Napolitano, author of Hello Beautiful

Make Your Way Home by Carrie R. Moore — July 15 (Tin House Books)

“With pitch-perfect attention to place, belonging, and the reverberations of history through several generations of Black men, women, and families in the American South, Make Your Way Home is a collection that moved me to my core. Carrie R. Moore conjures the complicated longing for home and connection with nuance, compassion, and grace. A powerful meditation on ancestral inheritance and contemporary love, Make Your Way Home is an extraordinary and luminous debut by a singular talent.” — Megan Kamalei Kakimoto, author of Every Drop is a Man's Nightmare

If You Love It, Let It Kill You by Hannah Pittard — July 15 (Henry Holt and Co.)

“Hannah Pittard has always been so adept at delving into the interior, unafraid of what might reside there, able to create stories where the specificity of relationships and family and identity touch you in these unexpected ways. If You Love It, Let It Kill You asserts that it is ‘neither a comedy nor a tragedy but something much worse: real life’ but Pittard and these characters know better. Real life, the strangest place to reside, is where Pittard does the most incredible work.” — Kevin Wilson, New York Times bestselling author of Nothing to See Here

Mendell Station by J. B. Hwang — July 22 (Bloomsbury Publishing)

“Achingly gorgeous and quietly devastating, Mendell Station is a work of genius about the collision of grief and faith and a love letter to community set during the rapture event and purgatory of the pandemic. Rarely have I felt so much while reading a book. It will stay with me for a long time.” — Ling Ling Huang, Lambda Literary Award-winning author of Natural Beauty

First Time, Long Time by Amy Silverberg — July 22 (Grand Central Publishing)

“First Time, Long Time by Amy Silverberg is the consummate L.A. story. Here is a brilliant novel about searching for answers that can’t be found and making grand mistakes and becoming more the person you're meant to be, all held together by the yearning and striving and ambition of any creative person who finds themselves in the City of Angels. Silverberg is a witty, charming storyteller with a bold, unique voice that makes the writing leap off the page and into your heart.” — Roxane Gay, author of Bad Feminist and Hunger

Necessary Fiction by Eloghosa Osunde — July 22 (Riverhead Books)

“I can’t believe how alive Eloghosa Osunde’s Necessary Fiction is, how supersaturated and smart. Osunde writes with the cataclysmic dazzle and sneaky spiritual ache of Denis Johnson but pitches it toward us here in the digital age. I love their prose, their characters. Hustle, heart, privacy, sex, yearning so strong it buckles you — it’s all here. The ink practically hovers off the page.” — Kaveh Akbar, author of Martyr!

Florida Palms by Joe Pan — July 22 (Simon & Schuster)

“If Florida is purgatory with a sun, Florida Palms exposes what happens to the young men who grow up in the shadows—a tightly plotted page-turner filled with gangsters, brotherhood, and betrayal. Joe Pan is an extraordinarily skilled writer, but his genius is his empathy, understanding that good people sometimes do bad things. What if you turned eighteen in the wrong neighborhood and found yourself surrounded by drug dealers, bikers, and eccentric hitmen? These are characters no reader will forget.” — Alexander Boldizar, author of The Man Who Saw Seconds

Maggie; or, A Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar by Katie Yee — July 22 (S&S/Summit Books)

“Maggie is a stunning novel. With sharp wit and a keen eye for the messy intricacies of human connection, Yee has written a story as playful as it is profound. I immediately loved the narrator and was captivated by her journey, her humor, and insight. Maggie is a gem of a novel, one that will make you think, make you feel, and make you laugh.” — Alison Espach, author of The Wedding People

Lonely Crowds by Stephanie Wambugu — July 29 (Little Brown and Company)

“Stephanie Wambugu has written a coming-of-age friendship novel for the ages. Her prose and vision are sharp and she writes about art and ambition with a rare combination of frankness and grace.” — Gary Shteyngart, author of Our Country Friends

Non-Fiction & Poetry

I Want to Burn This Place Down by Maris Kreizman — July 1 (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. In this timely collection of essays, Kriezman has given us a poignant testimonial to her own disillusionment and a powerful indictment of the capitalist cruelty that has brought us to this point.” — Mira Jacob, author of Good Talk

Specimen: An Essay by Sienna Liu — July 15 (Split/Lip Press)

“I smiled with my whole body—sometimes with tears, sometimes with laughter—the whole time I was reading Specimen. Liu turns sentences into little emotional whirlwinds. She flays friendships open for what they really are: our greatest unwritten love affairs. An ode on fire to youth.” — Simon Wu, author of Dancing on My Own

You Have a New Memory by Aiden Arata — July 22 (Grand Central Publishing)

“Aiden Arata's You Have a New Memory is utterly startling in its generosity: like any perfect gift, it is very hard at first to believe one deserves it. This opalescent collection holds, somehow, the inner light of the universe. Arata’s gaze is keen and gentle, graceful and curious, and there is no subject too large or too small for her—animal consciousness, human violence, Dalmatian-print tights, deep time; the call of the silica gel packet, the threat of the germ and of the corporation, it’s all here: the unbearable terror and beauty of life as it is right now, and as it has always been. To share the space of Arata’s eyeline is to be changed.” — Alexandra Tanner, author of Worry

Sloppy Or. Doing It All Wrong by Rax King — July 29 (Vintage)

“It is frankly rude to take a book full of such poignant insights and sharp jokes and call it Sloppy, but that's what Rax King did with her tender and charming new essay collection. I hope this book sells one million copies, because the writing deserves it, and also because then Rax can pay back the money she borrowed from me when she was doing all those drugs.” — Josh Gondelman, comedian and author of Nice Try