July is for reading.

Some of my favorite books of the year are coming out this month and you should definitely pick them up. The first is my pick for the Fantastic Strangelings Book Club and it’s Meg Shaffer’s The Lost Story.

Inspired by C. S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia, this wild and wondrous novel is a fairy tale for grown-ups who still knock on the back of wardrobes—just in case.

Want a taste?

As boys, best friends Jeremy and Rafe went missing in a vast West Virginia state forest, only to mysteriously reappear six months later with no explanation for where they’d gone or how they’d survived.

Fifteen years after their miraculous homecoming, Rafe is a reclusive artist who still bears scars inside and out but has no memory of what happened during those months. Meanwhile, Jeremy has become a famed missing persons’ investigator. With his uncanny abilities, he is the one person who can help vet tech Emilie Wendell find her sister, who vanished in the very same forest as Rafe and Jeremy.

Or if horror is more your style, check out my pick for the Nightmares from Nowhere Book Club, I Was a Teenage Slasher by Stephen Graham Jones (one of my favorite horror authors).

This is one of the most anticipated books of the summer for good reason and I’m thrilled to tell you that we’ll be hosting Stephen on July 18th at Nowhere! If you’re a member of the Nightmares bookclub check the email I sent you a few days ago to reserve an early free ticket to the event. If you’re not a member we opened up ticket sales a few minutes ago ( ticket price = the price of the book which you’ll get when you arrive) today and I suspect they’ll go fast.

Need more than one book to get you through the month? I got ya. Here are a few July books I recommend:

Nicked by M. T. Anderson –  Based on a bizarre but true quest to steal the mystical corpse of a long-dead saint, Nicked is a fantastical, genre-defying historical romp.

Bury Your Gays by Chuck Tingle –  A nuanced and smart horror novel by one of my favorite weirdo authors.  A heart-pounding story about what it takes to succeed in a world that wants you dead.

Catalina by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio – A year in the life of Catalina, a smart but vulnerable student at an elite college forced to navigate the world as one of the undocumented. 

Colored Television by Danzy Senna – A suspenseful dark comedy about second acts, creative appropriation, and the racial identity-industrial complex.

We currently have spots available in the Fantastic Strangelings and Nightmares from Nowhere book clubs if you want join the club. It literally keeps our shop in business and we can’t thank you enough. Come read with us, friend.