You think you know there are a lot of books, and then you try to pick out a handful of nonfiction titles coming out in July and then you feel that there are just so many books. Here are (just) a few notable nonfiction books coming out this month:

Scavenging Beauty by Angelica Glass – I am reading this one right now. Glass entered into a project to walk every road in Santa Cruz County, California, as a way of getting out of her bubble and seeing more of the world, causing her to consider and reckon with her past.

Biological War by Annie Jacobsen – Jacobsen is back to freak you out. After a breakthrough with Nuclear War, Jacobsen turns her attention not to bombs but to bugs (and chemicals and strands and other things that go squish in the night). It doesn’t go great!

Our Knives Will Save Us: Dispatches from a White Mountain Apache Chef by Nephi Craig – At 18, Craig, under court order, attended culinary school and found there a complicated respite from his own personal struggles. But even as he got more comfortable in the kitchen, his own battle with sobriety and confrontation with being the only Indigenous person in places serving largely European food precipitated a personal reckoning. 

Unsayable: A Life in Writing by Michael Cunningham – The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Hours documents a life in writing, or as he puts it, trying to say the unsayable. I need no more inducement than that. 

The Small Stuff by Ian Bogost* – As someone who rather enjoys walking to the grocery store just to get even one item, I am already sympathetic with Ian Bogost’s framing in this book: that as many things have become more convenient, they have also become less interesting. I don’t think The Small Stuff is a defense of errands, but it might not not be that in some small way. 

Shallow Blue Empire: A History of Pearl-Diving in the Indian Ocean, 1850-1930 by Tamari Surnani Fernando – I never thought about the history of Europe’s obsession with pearls, the global trade that intensified it, or the thousands of people that, for decades, went out every day to dive in an effort to slake this growing thirst. Shouts to the historians, one and all. 

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