Best New Books Out This Month, BIPOC Edition

With August well underway, it’s a perfect time to consider the best books this month has to offer—many of which will have already released, while others require only a week or so to get. Each month, and sometimes even weekly, our editors and contributing writers round up the best books they think are coming out. For literary fiction lovers, this month is golden. There’s a new genre-bending work by Claudia Rankine, Paul Yoon, and Chang-rae Lee. There’s a previously lost, firsthand account from a Hiroshima bombing survivor, and historical fiction inspired by three real, trailblazing Black women at Oberlin College in the 1800s. There’s a contemporary romance, a dark academia romantasy, a seaside horror, an L.A.-set gothic, and lots more. Triage by Claudia RankineIs this one nonfiction? Is it fiction? Um…yes! Rankine is known for bending genre to her will: her poetry collection Citizen: An American Lyric used photographs, analysis, and quotations to meditate on race, stress, and prejudice. Now, in Triage, Rankine presents a sort of memoir, as two characters, the narrator and theorist, bounce off each other and try to find their place both in their relationship (described as sisters) an...