The Best New Book Releases Out July 16, 2024

Graham Jones stays doing the damn thing when it comes to horror that centers Indigenous stories. In his latest, it’s 1989 in the small, oil and cotton-driven town of Lamesa, Texas, and Tolly is a senior in high school who is about to “be cursed to kill for revenge.”

Just from the title, you know this YA horror collection is going to be subversive. Authors like Kendare Blake, Tiffany D. Jackson, Chloe Gong, Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé, H. E. Edgmon, and others share stories where the model minority myth is ripped to shreds using slasher tropes; the idea of gender is explored through body horror; and more.

Twenty-five years ago, two sisters walked to school, but one didn’t come back. Ever since her sister disappeared all those years ago, Willa’s life has changed. She’s assumed dead by everyone, except for Willa, who, during a dinner party, hears something that changes what she thought she knew about the past. With these new revelations, the truth of the past slowly starts to reveal itself.

Moddie is approaching middle age when she realizes that the man she’s been in a relationship with might, low-key, be a narcissist a little. That, plus the stress of city living sends her back to her Midwestern hometown. She returns with the mind to reconnect with old friends, but finds that the people she knew from back in the day are petty as can be. When one of them invites an East Coast artist to complete a winter residency at the town’s university, it pushes Moddie to confront some things.

Just so you get an idea of the pettiness going on, here’s a quote from the book’s official blurb: “Friends will become enemies, enemies will become mortal enemies, and old loyalties will be tested to their extreme.”

This coming-of-age memoir is being compared to Crying in H Mart and Minor Feelings. In it, Song recounts her days growing up in Texas as the daughter of Korean immigrants who spent so much of their time arguing and drilling into Song the importance of success above all else. She endures her parent’s fake Gucci business going under, racist white kids at school, and the soul-crushing demands of internalizing the model minority ideology. Eventually, the depression and mania that result culminate in a psychiatric hospital stay, where she starts to learn to peel back the layers of self-erasure.

The cover alone is giving glam, cute beach read, which it pretty much is. Bottle of sunshine Bhanu, runs into her work nemesis Sunny, the grump who has a “Denzel voice” (!!), while she’s visiting family in Hawai’i. She can’t stand him, sure, but she does feel a spark of empathy when she sees him getting berated about being single by his ex. So Bhanu, cuddle bug that she is, goes up to them and claims to be Sunny’s girlfriend to spare him. And, since Sunny’s ex has already texted his friend’s entire wedding party about it, he realizes that the best thing would be to go along with the rouse. And the rouse gets a little raunchy.