July 2023’s Must-Read Book Releases

A debut for those more enamored by a rusted, retro amusement park than Disneyland, this novel follows a loyal employee at a collapsing theme park who questions her sanity after a Hollywood starlet dies on-site, and employees start disappearing. It reads like a roller coaster dropping headfirst into the uncanny valley.

A haunting coming-of-age story set in a Silicon Valley startup hellscape. A young woman with a gnawing sense of dread has to figure out how far she’ll go for success — especially after she becomes pregnant — while her boss’ demands become increasingly less legal.

This coming-of-age story about a teenage girl working in Andy Warhol’s Factory as a transcriptionist in the 1960s is a gossip-filled, artistic romp through a turbulent era.

In this breathless fever dream of a novel, two sisters in Los Angeles share a bag of pills at a nightclub, causing one of them to commit an act of drugged-out violence — just before the other disappears, leaving one to figure out what happened. (Related: Ruth is very funny on Twitter.)

A portrait of a tumultuous year in the life of a Jewish family in the suburbs of Boston in 2013. It takes us from Brookline to Berlin to Syria as a seemingly exceptional family undergoes a series of scandals — and ultimately, as the title suggests, finds hope.

The English-language debut from celebrated author Yan Ge is a genre-bending short story collection that’s as haunting, dreamlike, and addictive as a melatonin-induced slumber. It’s got it all: poets, devastating earthquakes, college students who fall for their likely dead acquaintances, and Confucian scholars.

Loosely based off of a tragic 1995 Sampoong department store collapse in Seoul, South Korea, Michell’s novel follows a former journalist-turned-stay-at-home mom who ventures into South Korea’s underbelly to find her missing husband in this gripping story of love and disaster.

Joyce Carol Oates, fresh off having her novel Blonde adapted into the Ana De Armas film, is back with a bewitching collection of speculative stories about women dealing with society and violence. We see a group of high school girls exact revenge on sexual predators; a philosophy student bent on seducing her philosopher mentor but finds herself outmaneuvered — all with quintessential Oates intrigue and mystery.

For fans of A24 and Squid Game, this novel was originally conceived as a low-budget science fiction film. Part cyberpunk, part detective fiction, part parable of the effects of South Korea’s neocolonial ambition — it is quite the ride.

Summer is the best time to read short stories — in between dips in the pool, pages dotted with sunscreen and popsicle juice. In this triumph of a collection about people and coincidences, tiny moments are big revelations: Two estranged sisters run into each other at a posh hotel and ignore each other; a teenager on vacation in Florida with her parents starts seeing them through disenchanted eyes; a man reconsidered his affair with his wife’s friend after the death of his own best friend.

Drew Buxton’s debut short story collection exposes the wiry underbelly of things: schemes, addiction, dead bodies, intrusive thoughts, masculinity, American mythology, with a beating heart interested most in affirming the strangeness of everything in this life.