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When one looks in the box, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the cat.

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Are you looking for something? Look harder. Look right here. Focus on this. Right here, you will find what you need. Sometimes, we enjoy the liminal spaces, the in-betweens, stories that can’t quite be defined. This month’s genre-bending releases include short story collections by masters Paul Tremblay and Molly Gloss, a post-apocalyptic love story like no other in The Lightest Object in the Universe by Kimi Eisele, and a behind the scenes look at one of the best sci-fi films of all time, Alien.

Head below for the full list of genre-bending titles heading your way in July!

Keep track of all the new releases here. Note: All title summaries are taken and/or summarized from copy provided by the publisher.

 

WEEK ONE (July 2) 

Sealed—Naomi Booth (Titan)

Heavily pregnant Alice and her partner Pete are done with the city. Alice is haunted by the rumors of the skin sealing epidemic starting to infect the urban population. She hopes their new remote mountain house will offer safety, a place to forget the nightmares and start their family. But the mountains and their people hold a different kind of danger. With their relationship under intolerable pressure, violence erupts and Alice is faced with the unthinkable as she fights to protect her unborn child.

Growing Things and Other Stories—Paul Tremblay (William Morrow)

A masterful anthology featuring nineteen pieces of short fiction, The Growing Things is an exciting glimpse into Paul Tremblay’s fantastically fertile imagination. From global catastrophe to the demons inside our heads, Tremblay illuminates our primal fears and darkest dreams in startlingly original fiction that leaves us unmoored. As he lowers the sky and yanks the ground from beneath our feet, we are compelled to contemplate the darkness inside our own hearts and minds.

 

WEEK TWO (July 9)

Talking to Robots: Tales from Our Robot-Human Features—David Ewing Duncan

What robot and AI systems are being built and imagined right now? What do they say about us, their creators? Will they usher in a fantastic new future, or destroy us? What do some of our greatest thinkers, from physicist Brian Greene and futurist Kevin Kelly to inventor Dean Kamen, geneticist George Church, and filmmaker Tiffany Shlain, anticipate about our human-robot future? For even as robots and A.I. intrigue us and make us anxious about the future, our fascination with robots has always been about more than the potential of the technology–it’s also about what robots tell us about being human.

The Need—Helen Phillips (Simon & Schuster)

When Molly, home alone with her two young children, hears footsteps in the living room, she tries to convince herself it’s the sleep deprivation. She’s been hearing things these days. Startling at loud noises. Imagining the worst-case scenario. It’s what mothers do, she knows. But then the footsteps come again, and she catches a glimpse of movement. Suddenly Molly finds herself face-to-face with an intruder who knows far too much about her and her family. As she attempts to protect those she loves most, Molly must also acknowledge her own frailty. Molly slips down an existential rabbit hole where she must confront the dualities of motherhood: the ecstasy and the dread; the languor and the ferocity; the banality and the transcendence as the book hurtles toward a mind-bending conclusion.

The Lightest Object in the Universe—Kimi Eisele (Algonquin)

What if the end times allowed people to see and build the world anew? In this new world, Carson, on the East Coast, is desperate to find Beatrix, a woman on the West Coast who holds his heart. Working his way along a cross-country railroad line, he encounters lost souls, clever opportunists, and those who believe they’ll be saved by an evangelical preacher in the middle of the country. While Carson travels west, Beatrix and her neighbors begin to construct the kind of cooperative community that suggests the end could be, in fact, a bright beginning. Without modern means of communication, will Beatrix and Carson find their way to each other, and what will be left of the old world if they do? The answers may lie with a fifteen-year-old girl who could ultimately decide the fate of the lovers.

 

WEEK THREE (July 16)

The Adventure Zone: Murder on the Rockport Limited—Clint McElroy, Griffin McElroy, Justin McElroy, Travis McElroy, and Carey Pietsch (First Second)

In the second Adventure Zone graphic novel (adapted from the McElroy family’s wildly popular D&D podcast), we rejoin hero-adjacent sort-of-comrades-in-arms Taako, Magnus, and Merle on a wild careen through a D&D railroad murder mystery. This installment has a little of everything: a genius child detective, an axe-wielding professional wrestler, a surly wizard, cursed magical artifacts, and a pair of meat monsters. You know, the usual things you find on a train.

Unforeseen: Stories—Molly Gloss (Gallery/Saga Press)

Award-winning and critically acclaimed author Molly Gloss’s career retrospective collection, Unforeseen, includes sixteen celebrated short stories that have never been published together before and three new stories.

 

WEEK FOUR (July 23)

The Hound of Justice (The Janet Watson Chronicles)—Claire O’Dell (Harper Voyager)

It’s been two months since Dr. Janet Watson accepted an offer from Georgetown University Hospital. The training for her new high-tech arm is taking longer than expected, however, leaving her in limbo. Meanwhile, her brilliant friend and compatriot, Sara Holmes, has been placed on leave–punishment forgoing rogue during their previous adventure. Neither is taking their situation very well. Then an extremist faction called the Brotherhood of Redemption launches an assassination attempt on the president. Reunited once more, Dr. Watson, Holmes, and Micha embark on a mission through the deep South to clear Holmes’s name, thwart the Brotherhood’s next move, and most important, bring their nemesis to justice for the atrocities she’s committed in the New Civil War.

The Making of Alien—J.W. Rinzler (Titan)

In 1979 a movie legend was born, as Twentieth Century-Fox and director Ridley Scott unleashed Alien—and gave audiences around the world the scare of their lives. To celebrate the movie’s fortieth anniversary, author J.W. Rinzler (The Making of Star Wars) tells the whole fascinating story of how Alien evolved from a simple idea in the mind of writer Dan O’Bannon into one of the most memorable sci-fi horror thrillers of all time.

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