Since the days of the ancients, the dog days of summer have promised heatwaves, bug bites and quantities of sweat no antiperspirant can contain. For once, why not spare yourself its indignities? There are more than enough new book releases in August to keep readers contentedly antisocial and entertained until the humidity breaks. This month brings riveting novels about dogs, stars (the Hollywood kind), small towns and characters with bigger woes than just sweat stains.
Etna by Paul Yoon
Like a certain hero of Greek myth and big-screen blockbuster, the Etna of Yoon's title is the veteran of a catastrophic war, scarred in body and mind, dogged in pursuit of an improbable homecoming. Only, unlike Odysseus, Yoon's hero and narrator is, quite literally, a dog. And the book bearing his name is no ancient tome but a slim, spare novel set in an unsettlingly familiar landscape. Don't let the book's length mislead you, though: Etna's odyssey also deserves the epithet "epic," and the characters who populate it have lived on in my mind long past the book's final line.
Sunrise by Téa Obreht
Obreht's fourth novel finds her again treading new ground. After setting her wildly popular debut The Tiger's Wife in a Balkans suffused with myth and magic, the author turned in subsequent books to the Old West and a city redolent of New York. This time, she weaves a characteristically ambitious plot from three narratives revolving on the same mysterious spot in the Great Plains – albeit in different eras, ranging from today(ish) to the early 20th century, when charismatic traveler-cum-local hero Anton Vargas sets the whole mystery in motion.
A Tender Age by Chang Rae-Lee
I hope you won't cry spoiler if I just come right out and tell you the tender age right now: 10 years old. That's the age of the lead character of Lee's seventh novel; Jeon-Gi is a fumbling initiate into the bewildering mysteries of preadolescence. He narrates the story as an adult, looking back on a tumultuous, and ultimately formative, year that found the son of Korean immigrants navigating his ethnic identity, his first brushes with romance and, perhaps most alarmingly of all, summer camp.
Under the Falls by Richard Russo
Russo left the old mill town of his childhood long ago but that old mill town never really left Russo. Many of his novels, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Empire Falls, return to the same kind of small, blue-collar community he grew up in. "My fictional towns have become places where people are hanging on to hope and hanging onto pride, and hanging on by a thread," as Russo observed in a 2007 interview with Morning Edition. The lead of his latest novel, like Russo, managed to get out by making art for a living; unlike Russo, the character's art is music, and a show lures him back to the town he thought he had left behind forever — and maybe should have.
Big Little Truths by Liane Moriarty
Since publishing Big Little Lies in 2014, Moriarty has written four novels, produced the Emmy-winning miniseries that adapted Lies for HBO, and privately wrote a whole sequel of sorts solely to supply material for the show's second season. Later this month, she catches up at last with Celeste, Jane and Madeline in a novel meant for bookshelves, and finds the three moms a decade removed from the death that forged their bond but grappling with a whole new host of problems – including what appears to be a severed human finger.
Life of M by Rachel Cusk
I confess I didn't have this one on my bingo card. Cusk, best known for her trilogy of largely plotless novels, has gotten embroiled in a tabloid tempest involving a Hollywood icon precisely because of her new book's plot. The novel depicts the complicated relationship between a writer and a world-famous actress. Regardless of the speculations concerning the author's inspiration — see: the rest of the internet — it's enough just to have a new book from Cusk, whose celebrated Outline Trilogy is "one of the great fictional achievements of the new millennium," according to Fresh Air critic John Powers.
Makeshift by Peter Rock
When we meet Ari, Heiko and CeCe, the young sisters are alone. The only known survivors of a massacre at home and a dimly understood catastrophe abroad, they eke out a quiet, spartan existence together on a small island they call Makeshift, their only company the old shipwrecks littering its reef. But things are never as simple as they seem. What unfolds is a vision of apocalypse with troubling resonance in which the world as we know it ends — not with a bang or a whimper but with few seeming to notice or mourn it at all.
The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State by Jill Lepore
Lepore has had an eventful year. In addition to day jobs as Harvard professor and New Yorker staff writer, she has published an authoritative history of the U.S. Constitution, won a Pulitzer Prize for the book, and embraced a role as one of media's go-to guests to make sense of America's 250th birthday. Now, the public intellectual is back with a work of history and criticism in the tradition of Hannah Arendt, tracing the origins, development and disastrous future of what she calls the Artificial State: the increasingly swift abandonment of democracy and other human-centric institutions "for rule by automation, government by machine, and replacement by artificial intelligence."
Dèy, by Edwidge Danticat
More than 12 years have passed since the publication of Claire of the Sea Light, the last novel the versatile Haitian American author wrote with an adult audience in mind. That's not to say she hasn't been working; in that span, she has produced several collections of essays and short stories — one of which won a National Book Critics Circle Award — as well as works of memoir, criticism and children's literature. Still, it's hard not to celebrate Dèy as a return of sorts for Danticat, who first burst onto the literary scene as a 20-something wunderkind with the 1994 novel Breath, Eyes, Memory. Her latest features a Haitian American immigrant like herself, who survives terrible trauma only to realize it's unlikely ever to leave her.
Bookmarks
- Few writers manage the range evident in Claudia Rankine's tapestries of poetry, theory, history, memoir, fiction, occasionally even illustration — as in her latest book, Triage (August 4), which offers a fittingly multifaceted portrait of a long friendship.
- Emil Wilson's debut graphic novel, The Nightingales (August 4)
— about a daughter coming to terms with her family, her father's discomfiting guest and her own place in the world — radiates pathos and humanity in a manner reminiscent of another moving coming-of-age story, Alison Bechdel's seminal memoir, Fun Home. - This goes out to all the other inveterate sickos out there who, like me, consider a history of punctuation to be the definition of "beach read." If you do decide to devote any of your remaining summer to Florence Hazrat's engaging On the Mark: From Periods to Interrobangs, How Punctuation Remade the World (August 11), at least know you won't be alone.
- Dorthe Nors' Range (August 18), translated by Caroline Waight, continues Denmark's hot streak of literary exports, with a story of astrophysics and human connection that'll appeal to fans of the similarly reflective, strangely riveting novels by her Danish compatriots Solvej Balle and Helle Helle.
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