What to Read in July

Made for Love by Alissa Nutting: “Hazel has just moved into a trailer park of senior citizens, with her father and Diane—his extremely lifelike sex doll—as her roommates. She’s just run out on her marriage to Byron Gogol, CEO and founder of Gogol Industries, a monolithic corporation hell-bent on making its products and technologies indispensable in daily life. Perceptive and compulsively readable, Made for Love is at once an absurd, raunchy comedy and a dazzling, profound meditation marriage, monogamy, and family.”

Draw Your Weapons by Sarah Sentilles: “Through a dazzling combination of memoir, history, reporting, visual culture, literature, and theology, Sarah Sentilles offers an impassioned defense of life lived by peace and principle. It is a literary collage with an urgent hope at its core: that art might offer tools for remaking the world.”

Moving Kings by Joshua Cohen: “The year is 2015, and twenty-one-year-olds Yoav and Uri, veterans of the last Gaza War, have just completed their compulsory military service in the Israel Defense Forces. They come to New York City and begin working for Yoav’s distant cousin David King—a proud American patriot, Republican, and Jew, and the recently divorced proprietor of King’s Moving Inc. What starts off as a profitable if eerily familiar job—an ‘Occupation’—quickly turns violent when they encounter one homeowner seeking revenge.”

Also this month: We’ll interview Scaachi Koul, review the movie Fish Tank, and hear from Omar Robert Hamilton about The City Always Wins.

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