As I was interviewing Natasha Pulley about her wonderfully strange new novel, The Salt King (out on Tuesday), the British fantasist mentioned something striking about the book's inspiration. Pulley grew up in the Fens, a flat expanse of marshland in eastern England, and, in fashioning The Salt King's fictional setting, she tried imagining how alien her hometown might look to an outsider. From there, she invented new races, religions, and laws of physics. One quick thought experiment helped her render the familiar into the fantastical. (The rest of our conversation is covered in my profile of Pulley, linked below.)

This week's slate of recommended new releases orbit similar acts of transformation. Jennifer Givhan's The Sleeping Sisters turns Aztec mythology on its head, Susan Farrell's Vonnegut's War sheds new light on the making of Slaughterhouse-Five, and Kailee Pederson's The Minimalist flips the act of composing music into something like bodily mutilation. All, somehow, feel like fitting picks for the dog days of summer.

As always, happy reading!

—Conner Reed