RECOMMENDS ROUND-UP: AUGUST BOOK PICKS
We like books. You like books. Maybe we should talk about books?
Or better yet, we’ll let Laura Jaye Cramer - person-who-reads-books - lead us both through the best and brightest of September’s release schedule. A new one by rising literary phenom, Yaa Gyasi; creep and crawl (yes, both) by Jess Kid; a new “brutal” collection by K-Ming Chang and so much more.
SEPT. 1st
Transcendent Kingdom
Yaa Gyasi
Knopf
Yaa Gyasi is one of those writers who’d drive you absolutely insane if her books weren’t so damn good. (Case in point: Her debut novel Homegoing—which she published when she was 26—earned her the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Award for best first book and the PEN/Hemingway Award.) In Transcendent Kingdom, her newest, we meet a young woman trying to grapple with the grief of a Ghanaian-American family lost to addiction and depression—all while pursuing an ambitious PhD. It’s a life-affirming story for any year, but if 2020 is a time for anything, it’s to better understand the pressures of Black youth in America.
His Only Wife
Peace Adzo Medie
Algonquin Books
The concept of the “woman who can have it all” was created by some competitive hell-monster, and it makes real-life women across the globe pull their hair out and scream can I get a damn break already? Yes, women can obviously do anything; yes, it’d be great to have a perfect family and a perfect job; yes, we could hypothetically look like a smokeshow doing it. But to expect one person to do everything simultaneously? Club me. In His Only Wife we meet Afi, a young seamstress from a rural town in Ghana who is expected to “have it all,” and I’m beyond ready to sympathy-scream right alongside her.
The Last Story of Mina Lee
Nancy Jooyoun Kim
Park Row
The first time I knew I loved Los Angeles’s Koreatown was when I’d nearly devoured an entire serving of naengmyeon before my waitress even made it back to my table with a pair of scissors. She smiled kindly at me, a silly white lady who didn’t understand Korean table manners, while I made a mental note to learn anything and everything Korean—naturally, starting with Korean writers. And while Nancy Jooyoun Kim’s The Last Story of Mina Lee touches on how food shapes the community in Koreatown, the real meat of the story is watching a mother and her daughter navigate a complicated relationship as immigrants across generations living in America.
SEPT. 19th
I’ve never scarfed down a fistful of magic mushrooms and tried to read the Grimms Fairy Tales because I’m very certain that wouldn’t even kind of work. But how wild does that sound? And now that I’m too old and too boring to ever try it, I keep an eye out for books that start like Jess Kidd’s Things in Jars: “As pale as a grave grub, she’s an eyeful.” Dark, funny, and I’ll save some money on the shrooms.
SEPT. 28th
Dealing with family can feel like trying to find comfort in the jaws of a big, hungry beast. K-Ming Chang knows this, and pulls no punches in Bestiary, a modern juxtaposition between mysticism and the real lives of three generations of Taiwanese-American women. If that all seems a bit woo-woo, beware: it's brutal. Chang pulls no punches when it comes to desire, rage, or violence in all of its forms. You know, sort of like dealing with a real-life family.
Laura Jaye Cramer is an outspoken advocate for Dolly Parton, baby orangutans, and free refills.
