The Stack for July
New releases and recent standouts that caught my attention this month.
MEMOIR
“Scavenging Beauty: A Memoir in Walks,” By Angelica Glass
After decades as a social worker among families struggling with addiction, abuse and neglect, Glass takes up walking to relieve the strain — an outlet that becomes a years-long project to cover every street in Santa Cruz County, camera in hand. The miles turn meditative, and she walks out the turmoil of her early years and her grief. For readers of Cheryl Strayed’s Wild.
July 7, 2026
Riverhead. 400 pp. Hardcover.
CONTEMPORARY FICTION
“Country People,” By Daniel Mason
Years late on a dissertation about Russian folktales, and owner of a truffle-hunting dog in a land with no truffles, Miles Krzelewski follows his wife to a visiting professorship in the Vermont forest and falls in with a ghostly tree surgeon, a scythe-mad biochemist and a photographer of snowflakes. As in North Woods, Mason keeps a patch of New England crowded with the improbable.
July 7, 2026
Random House. 320 pp. Hardcover.
HISTORICAL FICTION
“Should The Waters Take Us,” By Stephanie Soileau
Boy Broussard is living hand-to-mouth off land that isn't legally his and raising a daughter he barely knows when an offshore rig explodes and pushes a toxic plume across the Gulf toward his parish. A Lake Charles native with French-speaking Cajun grandparents, Soileau traces Boy's family for four hundred years, from France to Acadia to the Louisiana bayou.
July 14, 2026
Doubleday. 336 pp. Hardcover.
MEMOIR
“Dad, Love, Me: A Memoir,” By Matthew Quick
Matthew Quick tells his father he wants to be a novelist and gets one word back — "Idiot!" He writes The Silver Linings Playbook out of that wound and travels the world as a mental health success story, depressed and addicted the whole time. Years later, with his father sinking into dementia, Quick writes his first memoir as a letter to him.
July 21, 2026
Avid Reader. 320 pp. Hardcover.
LITERARY FICTION
“Cool Machine,” By Colson Whitehead
It's 1981, and Ray Carney has just been named Sterling Furniture's Dealer of the Month. His other line of work, fencing stolen goods, comes with no such recognition — and when the banks turn down his wife Elizabeth's loan for a travel agency, he gambles on one last heist. The final volume of the Harlem Trilogy, from the author of The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys, both Pulitzer winners.
July 21, 2026
Doubleday. 368 pp. Hardcover.
LITERARY FICTION
“The Winds of Maracaibo,” By María Elena Morán, transl. by Madeline Jones
Nina cleans houses in Porto Alegre and sleeps in a university storage room, sending money home to Maracaibo, when the texts come: her ex has taken their thirteen-year-old daughter out of the country. Getting Elisa back means following them to America, the one place Nina never wanted to call home. The novel, by a Venezuelan writer living in Brazil, won Spain's Café Gijón Prize.
July 28, 2026
Knopf. 208 pp. Hardcover.
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