The humidity as peaking. The sun is shining. The pace is slowing even if the workload isn’t. This can only mean one thing…August is officially here!
The tail end of summer can sometimes feel a bit like a dream state. Maybe it’s the weather or maybe it’s those memories of long, aimless summer days as a kid, but there’s something otherworldly about August. In the spirit of the season, our must-read books this month highlight that surreal, eerie vibe. Whether we’re breaking form in our poetry, exploring the life of one of sci-fi’s greatest visionaries, or falling into the endless pit of online mysteries, let this list be your go-to as you wade into the heat of the moment!
Resting Bitch Face
By Taylor Byas
Soft Skull
Taylor Byas’s followup to her 2023 Chicago Review of Books Award-winning collection I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times is here! Resting Bitch Face is a careful examination of the ways we view others—whether through painting, films, sculpture, and photographs—and how these mediums shape Black female subjectivity. Byas offers a corrective of some of art’s most famous depictions of womanhood, which in turn creates a new world of possibility for her subjects. Stunning in scale and ensnaring in its lyricism, Byas remains at the top of her game in Resting Bitch Face.
The Gossip Columnist’s Daughter
By Peter Orner
Little Brown and Company
Peter Orner’s latest follows a cold case of a young Hollywood starlet’s death and a contemporary writer who becomes committed to uncovering both the truth and the crime’s connections to his own family history. A Chicago novel through and through, The Gossip Columnist’s Daughter is a fascinating work of literary invention that sits perfectly at the precipice of history and fiction. Orner’s characters are messy, unsteadying, and utterly compelling; you won’t be able to turn away.
Archipelago
By Natalie Bakopoulos
Tin House Books
Natalie Bakopoulos delivers a masterful subversion of the Odyssey in her new novel, Archipelago. The novel’s unnamed narrator makes her way to a translation writing residency, where she strikes up a romance with an old friend who recently put a version of her in his book. From there, she embarks upon an impulsive road trip back to Greece, attempting to return home and to a self she understands. Archipelago is a haunting and dreamlike story, unraveling its mysteries for readers at an assured pace while offering plenty of glimmers of beauty along the way.
The El
By Theodore C. Van Alst. Jr.
Vintage
The El is one of our most anticipated novels of 2025, and for good reason. Theodore C. Van Alst Jr. delivers a vibrant, dangerous, and utterly cool vision of Chicago in the late ‘70s in this story about a young member of the Simon City Royals who must guide his friends home across hostile territory on the day the city’s gangs meet to form a unified force. From its heart-pumping pace and the I don’t give a shit attitude of its characters to the way the city comes alive in the sights and smells of late-summer humidity, simmering alleyway trash, and cooking oil, The El is one of those rare novels that delivers on its thrills while also offering a new look at Chicago that will stand the test of time.
Games For Children
By Keith S. Wilson
Milkweed Editions
Keith S. Wilson’s Games For Children is brimming with the possibilities of what poetry can be. Often form breaking and visionary in its imagination, his poems show how play is one of the highest forms of freedom and how we can reclaim it to lay bare our most tender truths. In one poem, he imagines an unrealized future Emmett Till by repurposing the Uncanny Valley diagram. In another, he gerrymanders a sentence diagram. Wilson is a poet at heart but an architect in practice: his poems offer new visual conventions and build entire worlds.
Dwelling
By Emily Hunt Kivel
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Struggling through grief and the pinch of time and money, Evie feels like the world is in a slow descent toward apocalypse. When every renter in New York is evicted en masse, leaving only the landlords and owners, Evie leaves the city to meet her second cousin in a strange Texas town called Gulluck. However, in Gulluck, nothing is as it seems. Emily Hunt Kivel’s debut is a surreal, hilarious, and slippery fairy tale about the unbearable weight of capitalism and our desire for belonging. Dwelling is our philosophical delight of the year!
Vulture
By Phoebe Greenwood
Europa Editions
Ever wonder where our modern Catch-22 is to reflect the world that often feels like a dark farce? Enter Vulture, which follows an ambitious young journalist who is sent to Gaza to cover a war from a four-star hotel where the staff works tirelessly to provide safety and comfort. As witty as it is wicked, Phoebe Greenwood’s novel is a razor-sharp skewering of the war news industry that highlights both its absurdities and inhumanness in the face of unacceptable atrocities.
Where Are You Really From
By Elaine Hsieh Chou
Penguin Press
Where Are You Really From, the latest from acclaimed author and screenwriter Elaine Hsieh Chou, offers six surreal short stories and a novella that prod at the intersections of identity and desire. A mail order bride from Taiwan is packed up in a cardboard box and express shipped to California for an older husband. A father reunites with his estranged daughter as a background actor on the set of her film. Reading Where Are You Really From feels like exploring a liminal space; her stories are deeply witty and slightly off-kilter, nestled perfectly at the boundary between the impossible and the all too plausible.
Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia E. Butler
By Susana M. Morris
Amistad
For our Octavia E. Butler fans, you don’t want to miss out on this deeply researched biography. In Positive Obsession, Susana M. Morris places Butler firmly within the cultural, social, and historical context of the Civil Rights Movement, Black Power, women’s liberation, queer rights, and Reaganomics. Showing readers how these movements shaped her life and her work, Morris also highlights how Butler envisioned a future with Black women at the center while also allowing her characters to remain tough, flawed, and necessarily complicated. Combining first-hand interviews, archival material, and selections from unpublished manuscripts, Positive Obsession is a can’t-miss look at one of American literature’s greatest writers.
All Trap No Bait
By Joseph Worthen
Tortoise Books
Terminally online and stuck in a hot Alabama summer at the height of the pandemic, Beverly Jane Ornett’s life takes a dark turn when she receives a chat message from a demon asking for favors and threatening to reveal her secrets online. Diving deep into the world of viral rap stars, webcam girls, and the seediness of both the internet and the city of Mobile, this twisty thriller offers plenty of secrets and strangeness to sink your teeth into. Combining Southern gothic and the mysteries of the cyber age, Joseph Worthen’s All Trap No Bait is a spectacle that you won’t be able to put down.
Black Cherokee
By Antonio Michael Downing
Simon & Schuster
Black Cherokee follows Ophelia Blue Rivers, a woman caught between worlds and a descendent of Cherokee Freedman: Black southerners formerly enslaved by rich Cherokee. When her town of Etsi and the river that sustains it are threatened, she must reckon with her identity and uncover what it means to truly belong. Antonio Michael Downing delivers an unforgettable fiction debut with Black Cherokee.
The Dilemmas of Working Women
By Fumio Yamamoto
Translated by Brian Bergstrom
HarperVia
Offered for the first time in English translation, The Dilemmas of Working Women provides a curious look into the interior lives of Japanese women and the ambivalence of modern life. When it was first published in Japan in 2000, the collection was an immediate best-seller and won the prestigious Naoki Prize in Literature. Funny, at times self-deprecating, and unafraid to lean into the darkness, Fumio Yamamoto’s masterpiece is sure to find resonance with readers today.
