{"id":383503,"date":"2026-07-02T12:18:16","date_gmt":"2026-07-02T12:18:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/383503\/"},"modified":"2026-07-02T12:18:16","modified_gmt":"2026-07-02T12:18:16","slug":"10-books-to-read-in-july-new-releases-from-colson-whitehead-and-more","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/383503\/","title":{"rendered":"10 books to read in July: New releases from Colson Whitehead and more"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Reading List<\/p>\n

10 books for your July reading list<\/p>\n

If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org<\/a>, whose fees support independent bookstores.<\/p>\n

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!<\/p>\n

FICTION:<\/p>\n

\"A <\/p>\n

A Real Animal: A Novel <\/a>
By Emeline Atwood
Catapult: 368 pp., $29
(July 7)
After surviving a sexual assault, narrator Lucy stalks her college campus as a leopard. Don\u2019t spend too much time worrying about whether this transformation is real, or not; Lucy\u2019s knowledge of her fierceness is the point, a fierceness she employs as she struggles to negotiate her independence from parents who wish she\u2019d come home to recover and men who offer up their desires and ignore hers. It\u2019s an astonishing debut with a compelling voice.<\/p>\n

\"MAN <\/p>\n

Man Overboard!: A Novel <\/a>
By Kathleen Rooney
Gallery Books: 208 pp., $27
(July 7)
Readers expecting something akin to Rooney\u2019s wondrous previous novel, \u201cLillian Boxfish Takes a Walk,\u201d <\/a>should remember that that book followed \u201cCher Ami \u201c and \u201cMajor Whittlesey,\u201d a story about a pigeon and a World War I Army officer. In other words, Rooney doesn\u2019t repeat herself, and in \u201cMan Overboard!\u201d <\/a>she\u2019s concocted a hilarious adventure tale of a man floating in the Gulf of Mexico, adrift with himself, his thoughts, and a few sea creatures.<\/p>\n

\"ASTRONAUT! <\/p>\n

Astronaut!: A Novel <\/a>
By Oana Aristides
W. W. Norton: 272 pp., $28
(July 14)
Imagine a dystopia set neither in the future nor in fantasy; that\u2019s the 1989 Romania 7-year-old Lia inhabits, its adults living in fear of Communist dictator Nicolae Ceau\u015fescu<\/a>, its infrastructure strained by deprivation, and its reality so scrambled that calling an explorer an \u201castronaut\u201d instead of \u201ccosmonaut\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

\"CITY <\/p>\n

City of Widows: A Novel <\/a>
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 \u2014 regardless of their individual status \u2014 subject to Taliban restrictions that deny differences in gender, desire and ambition. Hashimi (\u201cSparks Like Stars\u201d<\/a>) shows how desperate and daring the women become.<\/p>\n

\"COOL <\/p>\n

Cool Machine: A Novel <\/a>
By Colson Whitehead
Doubleday: 368 pp., $30
(July 21)
First \u201cHarlem Shuffle,\u201d then \u201cCrook Manifesto,\u201d and now, \u201cCool Machine<\/a>,\u201d the highly anticipated \u201cHarlem Trilogy\u201d conclusion from the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning Whitehead<\/a>. The inimitable Ray Carney, who started out as a minor criminal, is now Sterling Furniture\u2019s \u201cNortheast Regional Dealer of the Month,\u201d a respected businessman. It\u2019s the mid-1980s, and when Ray\u2019s beloved wife Elizabeth gets turned down for a small-business loan, he takes matters into his own hands, in his own former ways.<\/p>\n

NONFICTION:<\/p>\n

\"HOW <\/p>\n

How to Kill a Language: Power, Resistance, and the Race to Save Our Words <\/a>
By Sophia Smith Galer
Crown: 304 pp., $33
(July 7)
Smith Galer\u2019s nonna spoke an Italian she called \u201cdialet\u201d; her mother spoke \u201cdialet\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

\"THE <\/p>\n

The Earth Said Remember Me: How to Revive Our Memories and Restore Our Planet <\/a>
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\u2019t save it. \u201cGo outside. Bear witness. Make a record. Pass it on,\u201d 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\u2019ll want to care for it, share it with others, and help future generations understand how some changes are natural and not all are inevitable.<\/p>\n

\"AGING <\/p>\n

Aging Out: An Exploration of Caregiving, Community, and How Americans Grow Old<\/a>
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 \u2014 they separate older people from their natural communities. The author was inspired to investigate our country\u2019s aging population when she cared for a grandmother who died from COVID; the book weaves the personal with the political in a meaningful way.<\/p>\n

\"DAD, <\/p>\n

(Avid Reader Press\/Simon & Schust)<\/p>\n

Dad, Love, Me: A Memoir<\/a>
By Matthew Quick
Avid Reader Press: 320 pp., $30
(July 21)
Novelist Quick (\u201cThe Silver Linings Playbook\u201d<\/a>) turns to memoir in recounting his contentious relationship with his father, whom he\u2019s losing to dementia. While the author has had big highs (like the movie adaptation of \u201cPlaybook\u201d<\/a>), he\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\"THE <\/p>\n

The Savage Landscape: How We Made the Wilderness<\/a>
By Cal Flyn
Viking: 448 pp., $35
(July 28)
In \u201cDownton Abbey\u201d<\/a>, the Dowager Duchess of Grantham starchily asked \u201cWhat is a \u2018weekend?\u2019\u201d In this book, journalist Cal Flyn asks \u2014 more affably, but with equal intensity \u2014 \u201cWhat is a wilderness?\u201d Her answer: Depends on your perspective. In other words, nearly every place on Earth teems with life. It\u2019s only humans who have attached words like \u201cwild\u201d and \u201cunexplored\u201d to regions where they feel uncertain, afraid, and even awed.<\/p>\n

Patrick is a freelance critic and author of the memoir \u201cLife B.\u201d<\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Reading List 10 books for your July reading list If you buy books linked on our site, The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":383504,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[5661,24264,154920,144530,5679,48,52,51,14034,47,50,49,1555,6316,154922,24261,154921,63255,45758,154919,1557],"class_list":["post-383503","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-author","tag-book","tag-colson-whitehead","tag-desire","tag-july","tag-la","tag-la-headlines","tag-la-news","tag-language","tag-los-angeles","tag-los-angeles-headlines","tag-los-angeles-news","tag-man","tag-mother","tag-narrator-lucy","tag-novel","tag-old","tag-other-word","tag-pp","tag-sophia-smith-galer-crown","tag-woman"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/383503","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=383503"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/383503\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/383504"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=383503"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=383503"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=383503"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}