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| Hisham Matar |
21 Books You Should Read This July
PART THREE
We Asked Lit Hub Contributors About What They're Looking Forward To
Seinfeldia, Jennifer Keishin Armstrong (Simon & Schuster)
I think about Seinfeld a few times an hour. There’s always something happening that has me flashing back to the show that I’ve watched all the way through at least three times, but I didn’t realize how little I knew about the history of the show until I read Jennifer Keishin Armstrong’s wonderful deep dive into the “show about nothing.” Really a must for any fan of the show, or just a really weird and wonderful moment in television history.
–Jason Diamond (Lit Hub contributor)
The Return, Hisham Matar (Random House)
Hisham Matar’s first novel, In the Country of Men, was narrated by a nine-year-old who watches Gaddafi’s dictatorship divide his country and his family and wonders, “Can you become a man without becoming your father?” That novel was a National Book Critics Circle and Man Booker finalist. Matar’s memoir tells of life under the dictatorship, of exile, and the ongoing grief of losing his father, a major opposition leader. (His father was kidnapped from their apartment in Cairo in 1990, and imprisoned in Libya, never to be seen again.) After the revolution, he returns to find out his father’s fate. Grief is “a divider,” he writes. “It moved each one of us into a territory of private shadows, where the torment was incommunicable, so horribly outside of language.”
–Jane Ciabattari (Lit Hub contributor)
The Storyteller: Tales Out of Loneliness, Walter Benjamin, illustrated by Paul Klee (Verso)
In college I carried around an acid-yellow copy of Illuminations and waxed haughty-as-a-motherfucker about the angel of history and the aura of authenticity and the arcade and the flaneur. But time rushes on (with its face to the past) and life presents ever fewer opportunities to take a Hegelian-Marxist-Kabbalistic-Romantic deep-dive. Until you find out Benjamin wrote riddles that are weirder and even more tender and arch than you’d expect (and make you feel like a genius to solve). And then you find out he wrote fiction too.
–Emily Firetog (Lit Hub Managing Editor)
How to Be a Person in the World, Heather Havrilesky (Doubleday)
As a Virgo, and thus, a detail-oriented rule follower, I am particularly amenable to being told what to do. This is doubly true when I’m being told by Heather Havrilesky, the woman behind The Cut’s (previously The Awl’s) Ask Polly advice column and several of my least disastrous personal decisions. If you’re in need of someone to tell you, lovingly, how to get your shit together, in prose expertly seasoned with “fucks,” I am certain this book will do the trick. (Havrilesky also writes an excellent column for Bookforum. She’s not paying me, I promise).
–Jess Bergman (Lit Hub Assistant Editor)
Problems, Jade Sharma (Coffee House Press/Emily Books)
Since it was announced, I’ve been very excited for Coffee House’s new imprint, Emily Books; their first title is Jade Sharma’s debut novel, Problems. Although, as the title suggests, the book deals with a host of serious issues (including, but not limited to, the narrator Maya’s “heroin hobby,” deeply troubled marriage, chronically ill mother, eating disorder, and much older, ex-professor lover), the voice is incredibly funny, offhandedly insightful, and captivating.
—Blair Beusman (Lit Hub Associate Editor)
The Heavenly Table, Donald Ray Pollock (Doubleday)
The Heavenly Table—a darkly comic new novel from “Hillbilly Gothic” maestro Donald Ray Pollock about a trio of dirt-poor Ohio brothers who, in the throes of their newfound zeal for violence and mayhem, cross paths with a down-on-his-luck farmer named Ellsworth. Set against the backdrop of America’s entry into WWI, with the echoes of the Civil War still reverberating through the country, it looks like a hell of a ride.
–Dan Sheehan (Lit Hub Assistant Editor)
On Trails, Robert Moor (Simon & Schuster)
After walking the length of the Appalachian Trail, from Georgia to Maine, Robert Moor returned to New York City and began to see trails everywhere: ants marching across his windowsill, dirt-track shortcuts across the corners of parks, the feint grooves in old stone steps… Fascinated by the way we create trails (and how they create us) Moor’s On Trails is a thoroughly researched blend of science and philosophy that offers a fresh perspective on the lived world.
–Jonny Diamond (Lit Hub Editor)
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