August, amazingly, approaches, the final month in a summer that has at once felt slow and like it has slipped by with the curious swiftness of a half-remembered dream. Still, the summer is not over, and August is a perfect month to do all the things for the season that you haven’t yet had the time to—and catching up on that ever-more-towering TBR pile, or doing the all-important work of adding even more glorious to-be-reads to it, is a fine thing to do indeed.
To that august August end, I’ve selected nineteen great new books to check out this August, each in an exciting new paperback reprint edition. You’ll find much-praised and buzzed-about novels from Jason Mott, Eimear McBride, Addie E. Citchens, Jessica Francis Kane, and many others; expansive fiction in translation; a compilation of Jamaica Kincaid’s lifetime work that shows her remarkable range; Margaret Grace Myers’ defining history of America’s fraught attempts to teach sex ed against the backdrop of a country’s complicated self-identity; poems by Steven Duong that chronicle ruptures and aftermaths; and much, much more.
While I try to always balance the genres represented in these lists, you’ll see that fiction is particularly heavily represented in what’s being released this August, but I hope you’ll find wonder, joy, contemplation, and calls to action in all of the books below. Stay safe, as always, and let those TBR piles continue to grow!
