10 books you should read in August, including Michael Mann’s Heat 2 and T.J. English’s Dangerous Rhythms

Also check out Scenes From My Life, a moving memoir from late actor Michael K. Williams

By Cat Auer | July 28, 2022 | 8:00am

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10 books you should read in August, including Michael Mann’s Heat 2 and T.J. English’s Dangerous Rhythms

Clockwise from bottom left: Complicit (Image: Simon & Schuster), Witches (Image: Catapult), Didn’t Nobody Give A Shit What Happened To Carlotta (Image: Brown), Dangerous Rhythms: Jazz And The Underworld (Image: William Morrow), A Career in Books: A Novel About Friends, Money, and the Occasional Duck Bun (Image: Plume) Graphic: Libby McGuire

Every month, a deluge of new books comes flooding out from big publishers, indie houses, and self-publishing platforms. To help you navigate the wave of titles arriving in August, The A.V. Club has narrowed down the options to 10 of the books we’re most excited about, including an exploration of the ways jazz and the mob intertwined, an on-page follow-up to the on-screen classic Heat, a biography of Man Ray’s muse, and a memoir from the late Michael K. Williams.

Witches: A Novel

Brenda Lozano, translated from the Spanish by Heather Cleary (August 16, Catapult)Who needs a standard plot when you can write as exquisitely as Brenda Lozano? Feliciana is a curandera of rural Mexico, seemingly as old as the hills she hails from, her mystical healing powers borne from deep connection to nature and language. Zoe is a young journalist from the city, interviewing Feliciana about the murder of Paloma, the healer’s muxe cousin killed for daring to fully exist. Back and forth, the women reveal themselves, through stories of mothers, daughters, sisters, lovers—men are essential but peripheral, often dangerous—in a rhythm that enchants and floats the story forward, confirming the capacity of words to cast a powerful spell.

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