Books Briefing: August books

August 4, 2020

Hi readers,

Here’s your weekly catch-up on everything you need to know going on in the book world.

The news:

August is typically a slow month for publishers, but not this year. Here are 13 new books to watch for, including Isabel Wilkerson’s “Caste,” Kurt Andersen’s “Evil Geniuses” and Ali Smith’s “Summer.”
It’s been nearly 15 years since “Twilight” hit bookstores and kicked off a global phenomenon. We talked with Stephenie Meyer ahead of the release of her new novel, “Midnight Sun,” which retells the romance at the heart of “Twilight” from Edward Cullen’s point of view.
It’s hard to go wrong with any of Tana French’s novels — they’re all superb. But if you want to brush up on her books before her new one comes out in October, don’t miss our guide to every book she’s written.
We caught up with Raven Leilani, whose debut novel, “Luster,” explores the creative process and the experience of a Black woman adrift in work and life. “I wanted to write a story about a Black woman who fails a lot and is sort of grasping for human connection and making mistakes,” Leilani said. “I didn’t want her to be a pristine, neatly moral character.”
Jesse Eisenberg wrote and stars in the new audio drama “When You Finish Saving the World,” with Finn Wolfhard of the TV show “Stranger Things” and Kaitlyn Dever of “Unbelievable.” The drama, available on Audible today, grew out of a conversation between Eisenberg and a friend who confessed he had no emotional connection to his newborn daughter. “The internal struggle of a character who is emotionally a bit stifled seemed perfect for that medium,” Eisenberg told us.
Fiction out today: “The Death of Vivek Oji,” by Akwaeke Emezi; “Luster,” by Raven Leilani; “Midnight Sun,” by Stephenie Meyer; “Tender Is the Flesh,” by Agustina Bazterrica; “A Saint From Texas,” by Edmund White; “The Tunnel,” by A. B. Yehoshua;
Nonfiction out today: “Caste,” by Isabel Wilkerson; “Life of a Klansman,” by Edward Ball; “After the Last Border,” by Jessica Goudeau; “My Life as a Villainess,” by Laura Lippman; “A Furious Sky,” by Eric Jay Dolin; “The End of Everything,” by Katie Mack; “Wandering in Strange Lands,” by Morgan Jerkins; “Owls of the Eastern Ice,” by Jonathan C. Slaght; “Looking for Miss America,” by Margot Mifflin; “Fallout,” by Lesley M.M. Blume; “Inferno,” by Catherine Cho; “Migrations,” by Charlotte McConaghy; “Unconditional,” by Marc Gallicchio; “The Book of Atlantis Black,” by Betsy Bonner.

The critics:

Dwight Garner calls Isabel Wilkerson’s new book, “Caste,” about America’s system of racial hierarchy, an “instant American classic.” As he writes, the book grapples with racism in the U.S. “with more humanity and rigor than nearly all but a few books in our literature.”
Parul Sehgal assesses “Luster,” Raven Leilani’s debut novel about a young Black woman who gets involved in an older white man’s open marriage. The book has received attention for its writing about sex, but “this is less a story about coupling than it is one about work,” Sehgal writes. “The spikiest, funniest scenes send up corporate life, with all its feints at inclusion and its complacent racism.”
Sehgal also reviews Yiyun Li’s new novel, “Must I Go,” which examines what it means to survive the death of a child. This and Li’s “Where Reasons End” “are among the loneliest books I’ve ever read,” Sehgal writes. “At times they seem more like ruins; the chipped sentences and broken structures let you see all the devastated, discarded certainties.”
And Jennifer Szalai writes about two new books on immigration, Julia Rose Kraut’s “Threat of Dissent” and Jacob Soboroff’s “Separated.” Taken together, she says, they give a sense of how U.S. laws can be weaponized.

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That’s all for now. Please stay in touch and let me know what you think — whether it’s about this newsletter, our reviews, our podcast, our literary calendar, our Instagram or what you’re reading. We on the Books desk read all of it, and I’ll make every effort to write back. You can reach me at books@nytimes.com.

All my best,

Joumana Khatib

Books at The New York Times

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