When I was writing my book Raising Hell, Living Well I would repeatedly state to anyone who would listen that this was not a how-to or self-help book. Nothing against self-help books. I’ve been a reader of them my entire life, having found everything from answers to inspiration to backbone within their pages. They line my shelves like memories of old selves and old lives that were shed because of them. Their bindings are something I look back upon with pleasure, pride and sometimes—pain. The writers who share their talents, wisdom, philosophies, and intellect to make the world a better place to inhabit are my icons, idols, and a handful of times, saviors.

I found my way into writing through how-to books, whether it be the tattered and worn Making a Living Without a Job by Barbara Winter (which I haven’t let go of since I bought it at the age of 18), Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, Susan Shapiro’s The Byline Bible, or the essential Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott. I found my way towards an ownable and personal stance on religion and spirituality thanks to Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now and Sam Harris’ Waking Up. I found my way through my career with the help of Cal Newport’s Deep Work, Tim Ferriss’ 4-Hour Work Week and Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. I found an escape from unhealthy or unhappy relationships thanks to The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work by John Gottman or the Art of Letting Go by Damon Zahariades. And I found myself in the books that brought me back to center like Jonathan Fields’ How to Live a Good Life, Brené Browns’ Daring Greatly, Paulo Coelho’s the Alchemist, or Quiet by Susan Cain. Whether it was love, guts, money, purpose, career, or kids I knew there was always someone smarter that I could turn to in the self-help or how-to section of my bookstore.

But if the whole thesis of my book is that by opening readers eyes to the culture of influence, they can hope to escape it, having it be a practical how-to felt contrary to its core. My subtitle literally says: Freedom from Influence in a World Where Everyone Wants Something from You (including me). If I wanted my readers to think, discover, and explore on their own so they could fully embrace their autonomy and freedom, I didn’t want to tell them how to do anything, especially how to live.

Instead, I set out to make a book that was a how-come, opening their eyes to the programming of cultural, economic, geographical, historical, biological, educational, psychological, political and sociological influence to which we are all subject. Because in a world that had become much more unwell, unhappy, and unhinged despite all the how-to books, I saw a glaring hole in the market for understanding why we are the way we are. Maybe I could show that it wasn’t us that was the problem but rather something below the surface, below the mountains of influence throughout all of time and space culminating in this very moment. A root cause. My hypothesis was that all the productivity hacking, wellness seeking, and minimalism detoxes in the world cannot fix what’s ailing us if in fact, it is not us who are actually sick.

At different points in my life, I’ve sought out further understanding on topics that range from politics to persuasion to motherhood and culture. I have gone deep down the research rabbit hole to understand things like “what the Internet is doing to our brains?” or “why women make less money than men?” or “what’s the makeup of resilient people?” or “why do some people have all the luck?”. I like to ask big picture questions but also, I like to question why those answers are what they are. Along the way to writing Raising Hell, Living Well there were key books that answered some of these questions, creating the foundation of how I now think and view the world. While some might be shelved as how-to’s, they ultimately helped me understand how-come.

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Freakonomics by Steven Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner

I can’t begin this list without starting with the very first book that opened my eyes in understanding that there is so much more hidden below the surface than we ever were taught in school or around our kitchen table. Or as the authors of Freakonomics say, that there is a “Hidden Side of Everything”. My first introduction to behavioral economics thanks to Steven Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner lit a new curiosity for the world in me, through the lens of their quirky analyses of why things are the way they are. This book implanted a “question everything” mentality in me in my formative years.

The Laws of Human Nature by Robert Greene

If it’s not the luck of height, right birth month, family, or zipcode that propels some forward and not others, it’s the ability to understand human nature and instincts. As Robert Greene, the author of The Laws of Human Nature says, knowing why people do what they do is the most important tool we can possess. Understanding how-come someone might seek money, status, power, or fame allows you insights on their motivations and you can adapt yourself accordingly. This book beautifully draws on ancient stories and philosophies that are brought to life through the modern lens. My perceptions of others as well as myself changed drastically after reading this book.

Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely

And if you’re not able to understand why someone is the way they are, the book Predictably Irrational shows us what happens below the surface. Author Dan Ariely picks apart how-come we are not to trust our assumptions, because even experts can be irrational. He reveals our cognitive biases and the tricks at play but delivers his experiments and research in a light-hearted manner, making our past mistakes more palatable. Most importantly, he shows us how-come we repeat mistakes time and time again, arguing that the irrationality is so patterned that it’s predictable. By knowing these patterns, it’s possible to stop falling into the traps our brain makes.

Untamed by Glennon Doyle

Speaking of mistakes I’d be remiss to not mention a book by Glennon Doyle that I still can’t shake out of my brain. Her book Untamed shines a spotlight on the repeated mistakes that are so commonplace we accept them as fact. I was already a feminist, but this book showed me how-come I was the way I was despite all my best attempts to not be boxed in. I was a product of the culture that surrounded me, and the cages it produced for me as a woman. I spent much of my twenties and thirties operating as a man would in a system built by men that prioritized men. I was so under the influence of this culture that I didn’t even know I was reinforcing the cage I was attempting to escape.

The Nineties by Chuck Klosterman

No book helped me appreciate that we are a product of the influences of our generation’s zeitgeist more than Chuck Klosterman’s The Nineties. How-come I was so obsessed with digital culture and nostalgia in my later life was because my formative years happened at the nexus of pre-internet/post-internet. The nineties were when I consumed my core intakes of the world around me and boy did it influence who I would become! Looking back on that time period and my place within it, allowed me to see myself with new eyes.

Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino

My fascination with the current era only grew as I consumed books about the digital revolution, the digital divide, the algorithms, technology innovation and regulation, social media and loneliness, connection and neurology. But it wasn’t until I read Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror that someone was zooming out on the entirety of the modern world to pick at scabs below the surface of our self-delusions that affected everything from how we see ourselves to how we see others. Jia’s work wasn’t just a reportage on all that ails us, and it wasn’t the first how-come that tied together personal narratives with philosophy and criticism of the modern world. But it was the first one I had read from a woman who came from almost the same generation as me, and it gave me a different perspective from those written by older PhDs, from the male dominated world of theory, criticism, and technology.

Monsters by Claire Dederer

When I picked up Claire Dederer’s Monsters on a whim (I loved the cover) I had to buy it. But it was the first page that had me immediately tucking myself away like ten-year-old Bastian in the Never-Ending Story. Just me, my book, an apple and a blanket while I journeyed through a world I had never known before. The writer’s entire book was a question: can we separate the art from the human? In fact, the book continued to pose many questions. Is using the word “we” a cop out in criticism? Why are specific individuals considered geniuses? Who crowned them so? And why? Or how-come? As with Trick Mirror, reading a female perspective in a genre often dominated by men shifted everything. Dederer resisted tying up her book with authoritative statements, telling us if we should or should not ban Picasso for his actions or if we can still dance to R. Kelly. Her book didn’t tell us how-to think about it. She lead the reader through her exploration on how-come we think, believe, and act certain ways based on culture and allowed them to decide for themselves.

Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari

When I began putting this list together I started with my own mind, moved through others’ minds, and zoomed out into social structures, accepted norms, technological systems and culture. But no book zooms out like Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens. This is the final book in my list because his work is the ultimate how-come book. Tackling everything from our revolutions (industrial, cognitive, scientific, agricultural, etc.) through to huge events like the invention of language, his book threads needles to tie momentous moments in history to issues like happiness, poverty, and sexuality. It’s hard to understand how-come if we don’t fully see the whole.

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Jessica Elefante’s Raising Hell, Living Well: Freedom from Influence in a World Where Everyone Wants Something from You (including me) is available from Ballantine Books.

When I was in college, a man cornered me in my apartment after getting me drunk. He tried to have sex with me, relentlessly, until finally I found a way to hide in the bathroom, rendering myself both unavailable and abject, so that he would leave. It was an experience that felt both ordinary and cataclysmic, one that reverberated through my adult life for many years to come. How could I describe what had happened back there? How could I capture the banality of my disgust and fear, along with the violence of knowing what would have happened if I had fought, or if I had acquiesced to what he wanted?

I write about this experience in my new book, Touched Out: Motherhood, Misogyny, Consent, and Control, but I have been trying to find the language for that experience for many years. In writing the book, I often found myself up against the edge of the kinds of violation for which we have a name. We have so few terms to describe how women are wronged by men—harassment, assault, rape, attempted rape, coercion. I don’t favor the phrase “gray area” experiences, which is too indecisive, too uncertain. The legal stakes are also too high for those who come forward about abuse to call these experiences “gray.” But culturally, politically, and legally, we often lack the terms to capture what it feels like to live as a woman in a misogynist culture that sees our bodies as disposable, and in which having one’s body taken and used has become so commonplace.

This reading list features seven novels that deal with questions of consent and coercion. Some are grim and dystopian; some are campus novels that consider the power of age and status; others depict the slow and even glittering violence of having one’s identity, and one’s body, shaped by a culture that reduces women’s bodies to their ability to provide sexual pleasure to men, or to reproduce. As I have been, the characters in these books are sometimes at a loss at times for the words needed to describe what others have done to them. This can make the pain they feel confounding, alienating, shameful, but it is no less real, or true.

Many of these books also explore, as mine does, how the institution of motherhood shapes who and what we believe women’s bodies are for, and how such beliefs provide a distorted rationale for the many ways women’s bodies are exploited in a patriarchal culture. All these books offer new ways of understanding what it’s like to live in a culture of male control, showing how narrative can be a tool for expanding the language we have to describe women’s pain, as well as for resistance.

Daisy Alpert Florin, My Last Innocent Year

Florin’s debut novel is set on a university campus, supposed paragon of liberal ideals, and follows the aftermath one young college student feels after a fellow student abruptly and inelegantly has sex with her without asking for consent. The novel powerfully explores the fear and dissociation that arises in these scenarios, and the trouble young women have explaining the violation they feel when neither “rape” nor “nothing” seem to capture what’s been done to them.

J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace

I write about one scene from this novel in my book, Touched Out. In the scene, a student, Melanie, “moves of her own accord” during a sexual experience with an older male professor, “but not quite of her own volition,” as philosopher of misogyny Kate Manne notes in her book, Entitled. The scene, referred to by the male professor as “not rape, not quite” shows how, in Manne’s words, a woman can be “cast into a cultural script in which a man’s sexual desire has outsize ethical importance,” how a lack of agency can lead her into unwanted sex, and how, in the aftermath of such a violation, she may even feel obligated to protect the man who has mistreated her.

Allie Rowbottom, Aesthetica

An utterly propulsive narrative about one women’s slow descent into the world of social media and plastic surgery. Like my own book, this novel explores the desire many women have to remove the marks misogynist standards have made on their body—in this case through a surgery that reverses previous cosmetic procedures—alongside a nuanced exploration of assault.

Miriam Toews, Women Talking

Toews’ novel opens with a note about “the wild female imagination”—something men weaponize to silence women when they come forward about abuse, but also a weapon that women themselves can wield to survive in a world that disavows their reality. I love how this book circles around the limited options women feel they have available in the face of violence—as if the only choices are to fight or flee—and how it highlights the power of community and public speech to move beyond those limits.

Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

A classic exploration of Lily Bart’s loss of self to New York high society by a classic American writer. The close encounter with rape in this novel is often underexplored, but the scene illustrates well the economics of sex, and how women often feel compelled to let their bodies be used in exchange for other forms of power—and how this can get turned against them when public perception mistakes male violence for feminine indecency.

Jessamine Chan, The School for Good Mothers

Chan’s eerily familiar dystopian world imagines a society in which bad mothers are sent away to a school that will, supposedly, make them good. Chan’s first-generation Chinese-American protagonist, Frida Liu, who is eighteen months postpartum and struggling with little sleep, leaves her child alone at home for a few hours, which leads authorities to sentence Frida to a year at the school, alongside other mothers who have committed a range of offenses, from coddling their children to throwing them into pits. A complex portrayal of state control that begs us to reconsider the unevenly distributed standards we have for mothers.

Leni Zumas, Red Clocks

Another innovative dystopian world in the vein of The Handmaid’s Tale, Zumas explores an era not unlike our own, in which abortion is illegal and embryos have full personhood under the law. The book explores the question of who and what, in such a world, is a woman’s body for?

Raven Leilani, Luster

This exploration of power, race, and pleasure follows a young woman in a relationship with a married man. It’s a searing and funny exploration of desire, choice, race, and how we understand what we want, much less who that makes us.

Kathy Acker, Blood and Guts in High School

An experimental, genre-defying, parodic, smutty exploration of empire and love by a revolutionary queer writer. This wild novel explores patriarchal violence in all its forms, from the kind that is wielded in history and intellectual thought, to the kinds caused by The Father. Includes illustrations that are NSFW.

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Touched Out by Amanda Montei is available now via Beacon Press. 

At 22, I became enthralled with Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and the two vagabonds who wait on the side of a road in a post-apocalyptic world, searching for something to do to pass the time. To fill the hours, they tossed their hats, argued, reminisced, told bawdy jokes, thought about suicide, threatened each other, asked rhetorical questions, and lapsed into silence, until the day ended, and they began again.

Intellectually, I understood the play: Beckett was suggesting that if we had no meaning, no shape to our days, time became “a great deadener.” But the more visceral impact of the play evaded me until two years later, when my mother was diagnosed with stage four breast cancer. At first doctors gave her three months, but she lived for almost two years.  During that last year of her life, I watched her spend entire days like the vagabonds, looking for things to do. When her efforts failed, she, like them, quieted, and fell into prolonged silences.

“What do you think about?” I once asked her. “Trying to fill the time with something purposeful until it stops,” she said. “Some days I look at the leaves shimmering in the sunlight or listen to the wind. Other days, I pick at my nails or tell myself long stories like Scheherazade.”

My mother wasn’t alone in her struggle. Two years after being diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma, eight blocks away, my closest friend, Carolyn, was dying. “The hardest thing about dying,” she told me one gray January day, “is finding something that will make you stop remembering you’re dying.” She, like my mother, had tried watching the sky and the trees, listening to the kids outside, and recalling the meager 23 years of her life. Years later, my father too would lament his desire to fill the hours with something consequential. “I wish I had more time,” he said, “but not this kind of time, this sick time. It’s horrible.”

Eventually, my mother found something to occupy her mind and hands: unraveling an old knit blanket, thread by thread. Carolyn too found her way through the hours, and so did my dad. One doctor told me this was “an acceptance” of their fate, a recognition that they were dying. I didn’t believe him, at least with my mother. At 47, she didn’t want to die.

My book, The Black Angels, deals intimately with death, or dying, as it chronicles the courageous Black nurses who stood on the front lines in the fight against tuberculosis at Sea View Hospital, a behemoth municipal tuberculosis sanatorium in Staten Island that housed 1,800 of New York’s poorest residents. Those stricken with TB spent their days lay in iron-framed beds languishing from what was then an incurable disease and renowned for annihilating the body in unthinkable ways. The microbe had evolved to torture and kill very slowly, leaving those afflicted with a lot of time to fill.

While writing, I thought about my readers, how I wanted them to pause and sit bedside with the sick and the dying and reckon, if even for a moment, with their own mortality; to see and feel and think about what it meant to live in a body that was fading away.

To do so, I turned to books that had been written about illness and the seemingly unpassable hours that trudged on while the body failed more and more each day. The five books below reckon with time and mortality in different ways: a woman battling a mysterious illness watches a snail; a former magazine editor blinks his eyes to communicate; on a farm in rural Massachusetts, an 87-year-old man spends his last eight days recalling his entire life; a newly minted neurosurgeon with incurable lung cancer finds his greatest joys in watching his newborn daughter; and in 19^th century Russia, an aristocrat screams into the darkness hoping to thwart off death.

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Elizabeth Tova Bailey, The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating

 Elizabeth Tova Bailey’s memoir The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, is a gorgeous meditation on finding meaning while suffering from a punishing illness. This slim 120-page book opens with a fantastic scene in which her friend brings a snail to put in the violet plant on her nightstand. Bedridden with a bacterial infection, Bailey is confused by the gift as she has little interest in snails. There she is, stuck with a body that’s gone haywire, a tiny snail, her mind, which “runs like a bloodhound,” and the daunting task of finding ways to “get through each moment.”

To her surprise, as the snail settles in and she continues contemplating her life, she develops a fascination with the tiny nocturnal creature who “moved leisurely,” who pondered “its circumstances,” “waved its tentacles,” and could even be heard as it ate! Soon it becomes her companion, a guide releasing her from the tedium of human visitors and leading her from the white walls of her room into another world: “If life mattered to the snail and the snail mattered to me, it meant something in my life mattered, so I kept on…”

Jean-Dominique Bauby, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is another slender book that tells the story of Jean-Dominique Bauby, a well-known French journalist and editor of Elle magazine. At 45, he suffered a massive stroke that caused locked-in syndrome, a condition the paralyzes the body but leaves the mind intact. When Bauby finally woke from his coma, he’d lost the ability to speak and move any part of his body except his neck and his left eye.

While lying in bed hearing machines beeping and watching as people moved around him, often touching and turning him in ways that he hates, he becomes determined to restart time, which he said had become motionless: “in my contracted world, the hours drag on but the months flash by.” The way out of this stagnant state is to tell the story that lives in his head. His nurse becomes his translator by standing in front of a board, reciting the alphabet until he blinked at the correct letter.

What emerges is pure poetry, brush strokes that paint a picture of a man closed off from life, save for the memories that flutter in his mind’s eye with the quickness of a butterfly, and because of the slow process of reciting and blinking, he can only capture snippets. But what falls on the page is exquisite and draws us deeper into his paradox: the anguish of his condition and the joy of writing: “Capturing the moment, these small slices of life, these small gusts of happiness, move me more deeply…”

One of the patients I interviewed for my book reminded me of Bauby’s story. She came to Sea View to die but survived. For months, she lay in the “incurable ward” racked with fever, unable to move, measuring the hours by staring out the window “at the shifting sky and recalling her moments of her life”— these she said, “made me want to keep living.”

Paul Harding, Tinkers

Paul Harding’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Tinkers, tells the story of George Washington Crosby, a clock repairer, who lays dying in his living room. Surrounded by his kids, Crosby spends the last eight days of his life drifting in and out of consciousness, recalling the ecstasy and agony of his upbringing in Maine in early 1900. His memories, delivered in elegiac prose and steeped in the natural world — light and shadows and trees — contemplate the impermanence of time and reality, something Crosby desperately fears: “I will remain a set of impressions porous and open,” he says, and then slips back into memory, as if there he will solidify the image.

When his life comes to an end, Crosby finds solace in understanding that life is a series of fleeting moments, flashes of light that shine bright and fade away, and it’s the moment that matters, not what happens after: “Everything is made to perish…What persists beyond this cataclysm of making and unmaking?”

Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air 

This searing memoir that follows the author’s diagnosis of terminal lung cancer at age 36 — just after finishing ten years of medical school for neurosurgery — through to his death two years later. (I should note that he died before finishing the book, but his wife completed it). Although the book is tragic, Kalanithi’s story “is not a tragedy,” as his wife says, because it is more about living than dying. He struggles with magnificent existential questions – most notably, “What makes life meaningful enough to go on living?” – and arrives at an answer: he and his wife decide to have a baby.

Kalanithi’s hours are filled with something deeply profound and difficult but also joyous: watching his infant daughter Cady live while his own body collapses into decay. At Sea View, I heard many stories of mothers who were in Kalanithi’s position, watching their children teem with life as their own body failed, and while devastating, it was also the impetus to keep living in that moment. As Kalanithi reminds us, “There is a moment, a cusp, when the sum of gathered experience is worn down by the details of living. We are never so wise as when we live in this moment.”

Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych 

This masterpiece tells the story of a judge, Ivan Ilych, who has never thought about mortality until the day he finds himself dying. Lying in his room with a gnawing ache in his side, Ilych struggles to discover whether he’s truly lived, as those around him grow impatient that he’s not dying quickly enough.

As he turns inward and contemplates his life, he struggles with that insidious thing called Time: “Morning or night, Friday or Sunday, made no difference, everything was the same: the gnawing, excruciating, incessant pain; that awareness of life irrevocably passing but not yet gone; that dreadful, loathsome death, the only reality, relentlessly closing in on him; and that same endless lie. What did days, weeks, or hours matter?”

Ilych cannot find solace in ephemeral things — sunlight, memories, visitors, snails. Instead, he marks the hours through the unrelenting pain that drags him deeper into the abyss of himself, causing him to scream “Oh” for three straight days. When he finally stops shouting, he has a reawakening, that moment of clarity that Kalanithi found in his daughter and Bailey in the snail. This is not the end of life — which will go on without him — but it is the end of death: “Death is finished, he said to himself. It is no more!”

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The Black Angels: The Untold Story of the Nurses Who Helped Cure Tuberculosis by Maria Smilios is available from G.P. Putnam’s Sons.

It may not be technically fall just yet, but the weather is beginning to cool (at least here in the Northeast), the days are getting shorter, and Pumpkin Spice Lattes are back on the menu—so it’s basically time to pull out your boots and blankets. And, of course, your stack of fall books. If you need a little guidance, here are the books of the season that the Literary Hub staff loved best—if you read any of them (or read something else great that we missed!), let us know what you think in the comments.

Zadie Smith, The Fraud (Penguin Press, September 5)

Zadie Smith has done what she never wished to do: she wrote a historical novel. Thankfully for her, and for us, she managed to take this form and spin it into something entirely new, a feat only Smith could undertake. The Fraud is about the Tichborne Trials in London in the late 19th century, trials that have fascinated the British public since they occurred, and it’s also about the cloistered literary scene of that time, which inarguably will include that larger-than-life, omnipresent figure, Charles Dickens. But even still, it’s hard to sum up exactly what this heady, clever book is about. It takes those sturdy plot-points and then shoves them into the background, instead centering on a housekeeper named Eliza Touchet, who serves in the household of William Ainsworth (a once-successful British novelist who has been pushed into obscurity in the past hundred or so years.) Mrs. Touchet is sharp, much sharper than Mr. Ainsworth, and it is in her head and through her eyes we witness this time in history: the mostly male, self-congratulatory novelists she waited on, the household she gave her life to, and the trials that transfixed the nation. It’s an extremely smart and involved novel that asks all the right questions about morality and nuance. I would describe The Fraud as I would describe life: it’s complicated, deep, ridiculous, scary, and funny. It took a genius to write it, and cements Zadie Smith as the British novelist of our time. –Julia Hass, Contributing Editor

Claudia Dey, Daughter (FSG, September 12)

At one point during my breathless, two-sitting reading of Claudia Dey’s third novel, I thought, “Oh! This is a literary Succession.” And I was pleased to read Dey referencing that parallel, too. It’s almost impossible not to: though Mona Dean, a young playwright who appears frustratingly enigmatic to everyone other than her husband, Wes, and sister, Juliet, is the protagonist of Daughter, it’s her father, the former literary giant and beguiling patriarch Paul Dean, around whom the world spins. Paul leaves women and children (most especially daughters) in his wake as he flits from relationship to relationship, absorbing love and affecting innocence, expecting the women in his life—even those he’s unceremoniously abandoned—to bolster him, enable him, tell him what to do. I couldn’t help but think of Ferrante, too: how the greatest stakes are drawn from the most domestic scenarios, how the sentences sometimes extend beyond themselves and other times conclude in a cold staccato. Never have I felt more tense about a dinner between a father and his adult daughter than I felt in the final scenes of this book.

Dey’s last novel was the eerie, original, highly atmospheric novel Heartbreaker (if you haven’t read it yet, stop what you’re doing and track down a copy—never will you read better prose narrated by a dog), but Daughter is much more in the vein of her 2018 Paris Review essay “Mothers as Makers of Death.” In fact, I reread that essay and recognized several images from the novel (when you’ve got great material, reuse it!). I realize I’m saying very little about plot here, but if you like the Paris Review essay, you’ll love this book. –Eliza Smith, Special Projects Editor

Lauren Groff, The Vaster Wilds (Riverhead, September 12)

Groff’s bravura latest is the story of a teenage servant girl who flees from a famished settlement in colonial America, braving the hostile fauna and frigid temperatures of the titular wilds as she plods stoically onwards, first in panicked flight and then in search of some vaguely imagined salvation. As she forages for food, takes shelter from the elements, slinks away from predators, and suffers through bouts of fever and injury, she looks back on a life of servitude that began in a hellish English poorhouse and ended in a godforsaken colony on the other side of the ocean. The girl recalls the cruelty of her mistress’ son, the vanity and hubris that prompted the family’s voyage to the New World, the frailty of the doomed child in her charge. Groff’s depictions of the untrammeled natural world, in all its beauty and brutality, are gorgeously rendered, as is the psychological portrait of her indefatigable protagonist, whose light blazes and then dims as her fortunes change. To be honest, I came into this one anticipating a bit of a slog, but instead found myself transfixed, and awestruck by the end. –Dan Sheehan, Book Marks Editor-in-Chief

Mona Awad, Rouge (Simon & Schuster/Marysue Rucci Books, September 12)

The latest novel to emerge from Mona Awad’s wonderfully deranged brain hits me unfortunately close to home: that is, right in the self-care. In it, a lonely woman (who is of course named Belle) who is obsessed with watching skincare videos (and with following their instructions religiously) finds herself dealing with her estranged mother’s affairs after she dies mysterious—affairs that include a crumbling condo, a sexy window washer, thousands of dollars in debt, a magical (?) pair of red shoes, and a spa (?) called La Maison de Méduse, whose treatments are beyond anything that Belle had ever imagined. Of course this is a Gothic fairy tale about the beauty industry, and the novel is much more about vibes than plot, but the vibes are immaculate, as the kids say—if by “immaculate” the kids mean albino jellyfish and tiny keys and Tom Cruise coming sexily out of a mirror, which I think they do. –Emily Temple, Managing Editor

Christine Lai, Landscapes (Two Dollar Radio, September 12)

A quiet, melancholic novel set in a near future when climate change has reshaped the world, Christine Lai’s debut novel follows an archivist named Penelope as she catalogues the library of the English country estate she’s lived in for the past two decades. Mornington Hall, once a grand home, now serves as a crumbling refuge for people displaced by climate disaster; Penelope lives there with her partner, Aidan, who grew up in the house, but they’ve been forced to sell it, and it will soon be demolished. In an act of good will, Aidan and Penelope have invited Aidan’s estranged brother, Julian—a violent and materialistic man, who Penelope once dated—to say his goodbyes to Mornington. As Penelope hurries through the archive, and mourns the loss of great art in this era of peril, she also revisits the trauma that Julian inflicted.

This all might sound devastating—and it is!—but there’s also something strangely beautiful and comforting about the ways that Penelope and Aidan are responding to their slow apocalypse: by making their world smaller and helping others, and accepting the heartbreaking temporality of all things, even art. “Each time I experience a sense of loss,” Penelope says to us, “I remind myself that none of this was mine to begin with, and none of it was as important as it seemed.” It’s a difficult perspective to accept, and yet one that we’ll likely face, if we haven’t already. –ES

Nathan Hill, Wellness (Knopf, September 19)

If you, like me, have been waiting impatiently for the last seven years for the follow-up to Nathan Hill’s rich, toothsome, very funny debut The Nix, you won’t be disappointed by his triumphant sophomore novel. It’s to this books credit that it makes me want to rely on the trite language of blurbs. Unputdownable, whip-smart, keenly observed—they all fit! Wellness tells the story of Jack and Elizabeth, who meet (cute) as artistic college students in the ’90s in Chicago, and who then, for better or worse, grow up together. Years later, they’ve fallen into the bourgeois routines and grievances of life as married parents, and into the thick of some not-so-cleverly-disguised cults that prey on the disaffections of middle age. Ultimately, this is a warm, wise, and deeply readable story about a marriage, and (sorry. Sorry!) what it means to be human.  –Jessie Gaynor, Senior Editor

Jessica Knoll, Bright Young Women (S&S/Marysue Rucci Books, September 19)

Jessica Knoll is a careful writer, and this, her third novel, is a perfect match for her cold dissection of social mores and her fierce rage at misogyny. Knoll takes on the story of Ted Bundy, told from the perspective of a student who survives a horrific attack on a sorority house. She then must fight to preserve her sisters’ dignity and get the truths of their last moments as the world around them fetishizes their killer and attempts to make jokes of their deaths. Some may claim that the crime genre is rift with misogyny; those people have not read Jessica Knoll. She tears apart the restrictive world of women’s roles and lays bare the purpose of such hobbles: to keep women from making a scene, to keep them from seeking justice, and most of all, to keep them from seeking their own lives. –Molly Odintz, CrimeReads Senior Editor

C Pam Zhang, Land of Milk and Honey (Riverhead, September 26)

If you’re vulnerable to feeling that we are living through a kind of pre-apocalypse, you will likely find a lot to chew on in C Pam Zhang’s lightly ~antihuman~ story about the world after smog engulfed America and vaporized the world’s animals and plants. In Land of MIlk and Honey, the narrator is a chef who finds her way to a mountaintop in Italy where her employer has cultivated a farm full of forbidden meats, salvaged seeds, and genetically modified grasses that taste like honey and other lost flavors. There, she earns her keep cooking haute cuisine for the global elite who have a taste for suffering, above all else (eat the rich!), and is required to inhabit the costume and name of her employer’s missing wife, Eun-Young, in the process becoming attached to Eun-Young’s daughter Aida. Zhang is very good at writing the world in a way that is prosaic enough that overdone ideas about capitalism, nationalism, and classism feel new and fresh. Land of Milk and Honey feels quintessentially like a pandemic novel, but leaves an intriguing aftertaste—Pig meets Noah’s Castle meets Steinbeck. –Janet Manley, Contributing Editor

Sam Rebelein, Edenville (William Morrow, October 3)

My friend Emily Hughes described this to me, before I read it, as “if Stephen King and Terry Pratchett wrote a riff on The Library at Mount Char”—and if that sentence means something to you, I’ll bet you’re already hooked. If you need a bit more enticement: Campbell P. Marion, a should-know-better millennial horror writer, decamps from Brooklyn for a teaching gig upstate, bringing along his girlfriend Quinn (who isn’t quite sure about Campbell or the gig or the area, having grown up there and experienced some its weirdness first-hand). He’s also been having weird dreams and the staff of the creative writing department seems to know all about them—and all about Campbell, in general. To say more would be criminal: Rebelein’s debut is its own wild and woolly beast, frequently unpredictable and frankly utterly insane at times. I feel like Rebelein and I must’ve ingested a lot of the same weird stuff as a kid—stuff like Goosebumps, Eerie Indiana, Barnes & Engle’s Strange Matter. I hope I get to go back to Renfield County again, before too long. –Drew Broussard, Podcast Producer

Elizabeth Hand, A Haunting on the Hill (Mulholland Books, October 3)

Elizabeth Hand’s new novel A Haunting on the Hill marks the first time a novelist has been permitted by the Shirley Jackson estate to continue the story of the The Haunting of Hill House, and this makes perfect sense. Since Jackson, there have been few writers as capable of summoning atmospheric foreboding tones through elegant prose stylings as Elizabeth Hand. And, like Jackson, Hand’s specialty is bringing creepy places to uniquely unsettling life (like an amusement park in Gilded Age Chicago that becomes the hunting ground for a serial killer, or a luxury property in present-day Hawaii where interlopers vanish without a trace), and A Haunting on the Hill is another triumph in this vein. It’s a marriage made in heaven. Or, really… hill. (Sorry.) –Olivia Rutigliano, CrimeReads Associate Editor

Alix E. Harrow, Starling House (Tor Books, October 3)

Harrow’s The Ten Thousand Doors of January is one of those books where people who’ve read it fall all over themselves to push into other readers’ hands (I am one such person) and her growing legion of devoted readers will be happy to know that Starling House is a full-bore masterpiece. Harrow takes the fiery sense of justice and family that lit the engine of The Once and Future Witches, grafts on an aching and honest depiction of life in coal country, and wraps it all up in the story of a haunted house for the ages. It’s a misty eerie aching book, the kind of story that earns all the gauzy instagram filters that’ll get washed over photos of the book on porches or near cups of tea and blankets. There might not be witches here, but there’s no better place to get your hocus pocus this spooky season than Starling House. –DB

Benjamin Labatut, The MANIAC (Penguin Press, October 3)

Yes the end of Oppenheimer is a really unsettling contemplation of the nuclear age, but have you even read Labatut, bro?

When We Cease to Understand the World took the literary world by storm two years ago, ending up on all kinds of honors and lists—and now Labatut delivers his first novel in English, another semi-factual tale of great figures in recent history. This time, it’s about (mostly) John von Neumann and the computing revolution. If WWCTUTW built towards that great aching black hole that was the atomic bomb, The MANIAC arrives not a second too late to help us make sense of the burgeoning AI revolution. It will still drive mad the readers who need a more distinct line between fact and fiction, but Labatut’s smooth prose and steady hand on the narrative tiller should win him even more converts. It’s a necessary book, a harrowing one, and it will change the way you look at the world around you (or the device on which you’re reading this article). –DB

Lydia Davis, Our Strangers: Stories (Bookshop Editions, October 3)

New work from Lydia Davis is always cause for celebration—but this new collection of stories isn’t just a book. It’s also an experiment: if a book is published without being distributed to Amazon, will it still make a sound? (It’s being distributed only to independent bookstores and through our friends at Bookshop.org)

It’d be a worthy effort even if the book was second-rate—but happily, the collection is a delight through and through. Some of the stories are barely as long as their titles, many of them are lightly off-kilter in one way or another, and I found it best read like a poetry collection: dip in, dip out; read one every night before bed for a week, then put it aside and pick it up again later. A good read and a good cause—an experiment worth investing in. –DB

Justin Torres, Blackouts (FSG, October 10)

Justin Torres’s first novel, We the Animals, has become something of a contemporary cult classic since it was published in 2011. It’s no wonder—it’s a lovely, lyrical book, heartbreaking and heart-bolstering in equal measure, and for the book nerds out there, it does something very deft with point of view. Like many slim, intense, poetic novels, it feels like something just a step outside the ordinary. I remember, reading it a dozen years ago, feeling as though Torres had opened a kind of door. This can be a novel?

Now, finally, Torres is back, with another book that stretches the boundaries of the idea of the novel. I’m less naïve now. I know anything can be a novel. But I was still surprised and enchanted by Blackouts, in which a young man sitting at the deathbed of an older man, as they tell each other the stories of their pasts.

For Juan, the dying man, those stories revolve in part around a book, Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns, whose heavily redacted pages appear in this book, and the mysterious Jan Gay on whose research it was based. This is a real book. Also real are the artifacts, photographs, documents, and works of art that are interspersed throughout the pages, mostly without direct acknowledgement or explanation, but which work to create a strange dream-like, reality-like patchwork, compelling and alienating at once.

This is a book about erasure and time, about storytelling and art and science, and also, if you’ll forgive me, about love. I couldn’t put it down. –ET

Bryan Washington, Family Meal (Riverhead, October 10)

Bryan Washington is as prolific as they come; this is his third book in four years, including two novels and a book of short stories. Washington, as an author, seems to have a certain project in mind, using and reusing specific places and themes in his work, trying to get to the center of it, the meat of it. This tactic always reminds me of T. S. Eliot’s line: “a heap of broken images”. When image and place continue to haunt an author throughout their work, it feels so honest and clear that they have a story to tell about these things, maybe still trying to get it exactly right. For Washington, these places and themes are Houston, Japan, food, grief, family, sex, and friendship. They’re all tied together too, they’re all about intimacy, trying to find home. Family Meal is about Cam returning to Houston after the death of his partner, as he tries to rebuild his life and his relationships with those he left behind in Texas. The depiction of his relationship with TJ, his sometimes stand-in brother, sometimes best friend, sometimes hookup buddy, is such a recognizably messy portrayal of queer friendship. Washington has carved out a voice for himself, with his spare, colloquial dialogue, and his portrayals of the dissonance between the casual, distant sex his characters engage in, and the domestic scenes they crave and return to: someone waiting on the porch, someone driving them home, and always, something cooking in the kitchen, someone waiting to eat it with you. –JH

Molly McGhee, Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind (Astra House, October 17)

I do love a high concept, even (especially?) if it makes me sad. In Molly McGhee’s debut, Jonathan Abernathy is, in his own words, “a failure in all things.” Most of all, he is a failure in being financially solvent, and having defaulted on his debt, he finds his way to Archival Office 508, where he is given a job as a dream auditor—that is, cleaning up the dreams of unknowing American workers, so that they can worker harder, better, faster, and longer in their waking hours. Except that he begins to recognize some of the dreams, or maybe its that the dreams do not necessarily stay dreams, and soon the distinction between Jonathan Abernathy’s “work life” and Jonathan Abernathy’s “real life” begins to blur, with disastrous effects. All of this is rendered in McGhee’s clipped, knowing, and often very funny prose, which somehow manages to infuse the book with both levity and dread. Just like late capitalism, you know? –ET

Teju Cole, Tremor (Random House, October 17)

In music, you can change the shape of the note head to indicate vocal effects (screaming, shaking, a non-pitch pitch), something I remembered while reading Teju Cole’s Tremor, a novel bookended by the thoughts of Tunde, a West African born Ivy-league professor and photographer who is fixated on the difficulties of portraiture, and the inadequacy of human efforts to mark a death. Also, by extension, the untold stories and deaths attached to the atrocities that shaped the current world map. The voices in the book include a small anthology of Lagosian storytellers, and issue from Tokyo and Cape Town and Lahaina and Beirut and Mali and outer space. The story is short and long at the same time, just like life, with small moments like Tunde lying in bed with his wife Sadako trying to fall asleep, or watching a walking school bus of toddlers go by (“a segmented brightly colored crocodile making its way along the sidewalk”) stretching into something bigger. Cole is very good at inventing within the novel—it’s notes, but they sound like nothing you’ve heard before or know how to name.

Adam Thirlwell, The Future Future (FSG, October 17)

I guess this is technically a historical novel about the rise and fall of one woman’s fortunes in a rapidly changing world. Marie Antoinette is in it, if that gives you a sense of the period. But Thirlwell renders it all in a contemporary attitude, with contemporary language that underscores how little some things have changed—particularly the systems of power, and the ways in which we use writing to defame, deface, connect to, and save one another. More importantly, this novel is a joy to read: extravagant and funny and insightful about the nature of experience and love and gossip, with sentences that trip and shimmer off the page. Like all of my favorite books, it is like nothing I’ve ever read before. –ET

Sandra Newman, Julia (Mariner Books, October 24)

SEXCRIMES WITH THE TOTALITARIANS. That’s what I might have called the feminist retelling of George Orwell’s 1984, which this time focuses on the larger story of Julia, Winston Smith’s sexy mechanic paramour. Sandra Newman is at home peeling the contradictory threads of womanhood from patriarchy (see also: The Men), and here she boosts the unsung hero of 1984, starting by acknowledging outright the limited intellectual firepower of Winston, and broadening the novel’s lens to take in to the lives of Airstrip 1/Oceania’s “Future Now” women who carried babies for Big Brother, and then expected to be vaporized. O’Brien, the big bad in 1984’s Room 101, is revealed to be a mansplainer—a prisoner inside the Ministry of Love tells Julia that she was the one who came up with the catchphrase about a boot stamping eternally on a human face: “The man never had an original idea in his life.”—and Julia’s experiences go deeper than horror, love, and hate, extending to the distress of boredom, of revulsion, of pity. I can’t remember who said it, but doublethink: isn’t that what women have to do everyday? –JM

Jesmyn Ward, Let Us Descend (Scribner, October 24)

Jesmyn Ward does not miss. The fourth novel from the two-time National Book Award winner, MacArthur “Genius” fellow, and heir apparent to Toni Morrison is every bit as haunted, furious, and beautiful as 2017’s Sing, Unburied, Sing. Let Us Descend, Ward’s first full work of historical fiction and her first novel not set in the fictional Mississippi town of Bois Sauvage, begins in the rice fields of Carolina, where Annis’ fearsome, loving, rock of a mother—the daughter of an African warrior woman sold into bondage—is stripped from her arms and sold down the river. Annis soon suffers the same fate and finds herself on a death march to New Orleans, where she is bought by the mistress of a hellish Louisiana sugar plantation. All the while, Annis communes with, and rails against, the elemental spirits once called upon for guidance by her mother and grandmother. The powerfully conjured horrors of the antebellum South are infused with a sort of meditative magical realism, as Annis searches for solace, strength, and answers in the vault of her memory and the mists of the world just beyond this one. Let Us Descend is another triumph. –DS

E. J. Koh, The Liberators (Tin House, November 7)

At the height of South Korea’s military dictatorship, and in the wake of a shocking loss, young couple Insuk and Sungho (with Sungho’s bilious mother-in-law in tow) move to California. Now a young mother, still hobbled by grief and cruelly isolated within her own household, Insuk begins an illicit relationship with an enigmatic fellow exile. That brief synopsis only scratches the surface of what this kaleidoscopic work of politically-charged fiction is all about. A family saga which manages to infuse the historical with the mythic, blend the epic with the intimate, this extraordinary debut novel from E. J. Koh (The Magical Language of Others) is an exquisite portrait of a divided and brutalized nation, and of a diaspora attempting to process and transcend the traumas of the past in order to find some measure of peace. Koh, who is also an award-winning poet, brings a fierce lyricism to some of Korea’s most horrendous national traumas while never losing sight of the quiet internal struggles of the individual. Oh, and there’s a chapter from the perspective of an aging dog that will shatter your heart. –DS

Sigrid Nunez, The Vulnerables (Riverhead, November 7)

While it’s easy to recommend a book by Sigrid Nunez, it’s harder to blurb a book that’s essentially a series of meditations on what it means to be alive (not unlike her National Book Award winning The Friend). Also narrated by a solitary female writer, largely unplotted and peppered with ruminations on friendship, writing, and existence itself, Nunez’s ninth novel is a reading experience—existential, beautifully written, funny, and even hopeful. The Vulnerables takes place in the early days of lockdown at the start of the pandemic, where a “vulnerable” older writer takes up residence in a friend of a friend’s luxury New York City apartment to look after their “spirited” parrot—a miniature macaw name Eureka. The bird has been abandoned by its bird-sitter, a young college student, but the student soon returns and they (Eureka included) become inadvertent roommates. Inside the apartment there are small kindnesses, outside there are empty streets and the unknown. But throughout, there is Nunez’s guiding light, revealing with almost perfect clarity what it means to be here, at this moment, in crisis. –Emily Firetog, Deputy Editor

Ed Park, Same Bed Different Dreams (Random House, November 7)

I’m in awe of this book—a brilliant postmodern romp rife with nested narratives, imaginary novels, and ecstatic digressions, which happen to be all of my favorite things. It’s a breath of fresh air, really—novels are never ambitious in quite this way anymore, and I almost forgot how good it feels to be dunked in someone else’s extravagant puzzle-making. (The brain-exploding qualities call to mind Infinite Jest while being much friendlier to read; I suspect it will be widely compared to Pynchon, and probably DeLillo, but Park’s moment-to-moment generic flexibility also brings peak David Mitchell to mind.) Though the novel takes us what feels like a million places, the core of the book is wrapped around an alternative history of Korea, one in which the Korean Provisional Government, a government in exile formed in response to Japanese occupation in 1919, never disbanded, and rather continues to operate in secret to this day. And yes, if like me, you can’t remember anything from your history classes to save your life, reading this book will probably spool outward into several other connected reading rabbit holes, but it will all be so interesting that you will not complain. –ET

Michael Cunningham, Day (Random House, November 14)

Michael Cunningham’s latest novel is, I believe, his best work yet. Day follows a family—Dan and Isabel, a married couple drifting out of love; their two young children, Nathan and Violet; Isabel’s brother, Robbie, a struggling public school teacher who has long nursed a possibly-reciprocated love for Dan—on one April day, across three years, beginning in 2019. I wasn’t sure I was ready to read a true novel of the pandemic, but Cunningham captures the loneliness, the complexity, the fear, the tenderness of the crisis so beautifully that I didn’t want to stop reading, even when the book was over. (Finishing it left me slightly bereft.) On its own, every sentence is a marvel—poetic without ever tipping into maudlin, perfectly attuned to the beauty of the quotidian—and taken together, they reveal an absolutely stunning portrait of humanity, of a time most of us are just barely beginning to sort through, but which Cunningham has managed to turn into a masterpiece. –JG

Lexi Freiman, The Book of Ayn (Catapult, November 14)

A firecracker of a book, The Book of Ayn, is one to tear through. It zooms all over the globe and tramples over ideas and virtues and identities, and I mean this all as a compliment. Anna, a 30-something writer whose novel was “canceled” by The New York Times falls into the writing of Ayn Rand and makes it her whole personality. It’s irreverent and ridiculous, sarcastic and flippant, and also there’s something very real at the core, something tender, as Anna searches deeply for meaning in a culture of vapidity and reactionary politics. Lexi Freiman is a step ahead of the reader at every page: if you start to make a judgment about the protagonist, there it is in writing in the next line. If you start to wonder something about the world or her circumstances, there she is answering your unspoken question. I’d compare it to Tell Me I’m an Artist by Chelsea Martin in its powerful voice, extreme wit, and incisive observations about the world and artistry in general. It’s a bold take on political culture, virtue signaling, and the attempt to be unique and also right in a world such as ours, and it manages to do it all with humor and depth. –JH

When reading about mothers and daughters, we might feel grateful we didn’t have to endure such conflict and trauma. We might long for what we, ourselves, never had. But then again, we might feel seen. More often, literature reflects troubling, toxic, or estranged mother-daughter relationships than they do healthy, positive, even inspiring ones. Many works of literary prose—novels, essay collections, memoirs—portray relationships between mothers and daughters who embrace the complexity of their respective identities and personalities, of their own and of their mothers/daughters.

One year, I gave my mother Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club in hopes that the novel would speak for me, say what I couldn’t say—I could understand you better if I knew you more, if I knew what you went through, before me.  I remember watching Terms of Endearment, the film adaptation of Larry McMurtry’s novel, in the 1980s every time it came on cable, identifying with Emma’s longing to escape her my mother’s insistences, too young to understand that the conflicts between she and her mother would always leave Emma missing her mother when she was miles and states away, the cords of their landline phones a tether.

When my mother died in 2018, my grief was compounded by how much I didn’t know about my mother, of my mother, and when I had a daughter in 2002, I knew I wanted my daughter to know me, the girl I had been, the young woman I missed, yet often regretted, and the woman I am, as me, as Jill, the woman beyond her mother.

I dedicate the books I write to my daughter, Indie, as an extension of this desire for her to know me, and to know how I saw and see us. I consider them a record—an artifact even. In 2019-2020, as Indie’s senior year of high school began, I wanted to catalog the year, to trace, in real time, the moments before she left home for college. I raised Indie on my own, and her leaving meant that the one person I had shared my life with for eighteen years would be on her own soon, and so would I.

The essays that I began writing in the fall of that year, November, appeared in column in The Paris Review Daily, and they ran each season, each Friday in November, January, March, and August. The Last Year: Essays is based on that column and focuses on not only that year, the present and pressing moment, but also the past eighteen years of our lives as we looked ahead to the future.

I have been moved, and at times, envious of the mothers and daughters in the books on this list. Whether it’s Jo Ann Beard’s recognition and portraiture of her mother as her own woman or the note Miranda writes her mother to go with her gift at the end of Rebecca Stead’s young adult novel, When You Reach Me, Durga Chew-Bose’s celebrations of the “practical details,” or Adrienne Brodeur’s decision to alter a matrilineal pattern in her family and with her own daughter, all of these books also reveal moments when a mother or a daughter does something wrong, or gets it wrong. Ultimately, these books all include moments—from borrowing a mother’s scarf for the cold walk to school or bringing safety pins to the funeral home so that her gray suit will fit after her illness—that show how some mothers and daughters get it right.

Cheryl Strayed’s memoir, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Trail, begins with the death of her mother from cancer at the age of forty-six. Strayed’s grief is so devastating that she loses the woman she had been before her mother’s death. In an attempt to be “the woman my mother raised,” Strayed hikes the Pacific Crest Trail from the Mojave Desert through California and Oregon to Washington State, alone, in the summer of 1995, at the age of twenty-six—a rugged and arduous trek that allows her to understand she doesn’t want a way out, an escape, but a way in—to herself and to what’s true, and at the center of that is the mother she has carried with her on the trail, the mother she always will carry with her.

When we write about people in our lives, we write them fully—combining the traits we admire and celebrate and love with those qualities we question, the (in)actions or words that confuse or disappoint us—to convey the perplexity of who we are as humans.

Late in the memoir, Strayed hikes on what would have been her mother’s fiftieth birthday. She writes, “I passed by high lakes and crossed over rocky volcanic rocks as the night’s snow melted on the hardy wildflowers that grew among them” as she “painstakingly” creates a mental list of the ways in which her mother had “done wrong.” The length of the items expands as the list progresses, ending on the longest, number seven: “When I was a senior in high school, [my mother] didn’t ask where I would like to go to college. She didn’t take me on a tour….I was left to figure it out on my own.”

After a few more moments of hiking, Strayed thinks, Fuck her, a new layer of grief, this time at what her mother’s early death took away from Strayed—the chance to grow up and “confront her about the things I wished she’d done differently and then grow older and understand that she had done the best that she could.”

Note: My mother loved this book. Beyond To Kill a Mockingbird, it was her favorite. She kept copies to give to friends when they were ill or going through a tough time. “It’s about obstacles and overcoming them,” she always told people. After she died, I found six copies in the house, and I’m grateful to have her copy, the one with her name written in her beautiful handwriting inside the front cover.

Rebecca Stead’s 2009 Newberry Medal winning, When You Reach Me, tells the story of eleven-year-old Miranda and her single mother, living in an apartment in New York City in 1978, the year Miranda’s mother practices for her upcoming appearance on the $20,000 pyramid and Miranda begins receiving anonymous, mysterious notes. Early in the novel, Miranda explains: “[I]t’s because I never had a father that I don’t want one now. A person can’t miss something she never had.”

I read the novel to Indie the year it was published, several chapters at each bedtime. Indie was seven that year—the two of us riveted by the story’s mystery, but mostly drawn to reading about a relationship and a life like ours—a mother stealing supplies from work to cut costs; the way Miranda doesn’t “see” the barrenness of her home until she’s the homes of her friends; the ways they look out for each other. Late in the novel, after Miranda befriends a homeless man (something Indie did at the age of five) by giving him a sandwich, her mother “blows up” at her. And moments later, she comes to Mira’s room to apologize:

“I don’t want to make any more mistakes. I don’t think I can bear to make one more mistake.” When Miranda asks, “What mistakes?” Her mother laughs, “Are you kidding? Where should I start? I’ve made about a million mistakes. Luckily, you outweigh almost all of them.”

I look back at so many of the years that Indie and I struggled financially or with the fact that my position was temporary, and we’d have to move. Again. The nights I blew up in the living room, not at her but at the world, a night she claims not to remember, though there were other times I yelled that she does. Regret will always have a place at the table of any parent’s memories of raising a child. As Miranda says, “Trying to forget doesn’t work. In fact, it’s pretty much the same as remembering.”

While the focus of Beard’s seminal essay collection Boys of My Youth does not solely focus on mothers and daughters, Beard’s mother shines in the first half of the collection. In the preface, Beard recalls a pre-verbal memory—a night in her crib when she cried and cried and could not be consoled by her parents. Years later, when she asks her mother to confirm her memory, as many essayists do with the people we write about, her mother answers: “I don’t remember a night that wasn’t like that.”

Beard’s affection and admiration for her mother, as a young girl to an adolescent and eventually adulthood rings through Beard’s descriptions—the mother who’s smoked the same cigarette for thirty years, (Salem)’ the one who tells her sister, “We got our girls we wanted so bad, didn’t we?”; the one who can end an evening’s fun with one word—bath; the mother who hangs Hal, Beard’s doll, upside down on the clothesline after an bath time experiment gone awry; the mother who runs to rescue her daughter from a bike accident on a street she wasn’t supposed to be on; and the daughter, the daughter who brings a prescription bottle full of safety pins to the mortuary so that her mother’s pale gray wool suit and pink blouse fit.

The opening chapter of Sarah Perry’s After the Eclipse: A Memoir begins, “I want to tell you about my mother.” The memoir alternates between chapters labeled “before” and “after,” a reference to the night Perry’s mother was murdered in their home as young Sarah, only twelve, hid in her bedroom. The memoir subverts the true crime genre by focusing on the life of the victim, rather than the perpetrator or the details of the crime—casting a glow on the relationship between Perry and her single mother. In the first chapter, across six pages, Perry explains:

My mother was full of energy and passion. She believed in the soul of housecats and in the melancholy of rainy days. She believed in hard work, and the energy she poured into her job—hand-sewing shoes at a factory—seemed boundless . . . She was graced with bright red hair, a golden tone of red I’ve seen only a handful of times….In the short Maine summer, she sunbathed for hours . . we would drive to the ocean just south of Portland. Her favorite thing to collect from the beach was sand dollars, and I loved walking up and down the yellow sand and finding them for her….The clicking of her high heels on our kitchen floor meant happiness to me. . . In her romantic selections, she could have done better, and she could have done worse. She was often imperfect in her own love….Because of her, I will always believe love is possible.

When we write about those we have lost, we have to show readers what has been lost, and Perry’s memoir achieves this in a way that drew out an ache in my chest as I read it through her elegant elegy, not only to her mother, but to the loss of beach walks and car dancing, shared salon visits and sunbathing, the living and the laughter once shared by mother and daughter.

During the first year that Indie was gone, her first year of college, I read Adrienne Brodeur’s Wild Game: My Mother, Her Secret, and Me. It’s a mesmerizing portrait of Brodeur’s mother—a vivacious woman with allure and an affinity for creating feasts “whose aromas alone would entice ships full of men onto the rocks, where she would delight in watching them plumb into the abyss,” identifying her mother as akin to the Sirens of Greek mythology.

The memoir begins on a night when Brodeur’s parents host a cocktail hour and dinner with her father’s best friend and his wife, a night that ends when Brodeur’s mother wakes her daughter, then fourteen, to confide in what would be the beginning of an affair. With this confession, Brodeur’s mother turns her daughter into a confidante, one who helps to orchestrate the ongoing affair for years. When Brodeur’s own daughter turns fourteen, she realizes, “[T]here is something noxious in our matrilineal line. [My mother] was the only mother I had, but she was not the mother I wanted to be….There had to be another way and I owed it to my daughter to find it.”

When I finished the memoir, I told Indie about it during one of our Zoom visits, explaining how it reminded me of us, especially the ending. A few weeks later, Indie read it, crying at the end as I had, once again recognizing the two of us on the page in someone else’s story:

My daughter is almost fourteen—the age I was when my mother woke me to tell me about Ben’s kiss. And although she and I bear a strong resemblance to each other—bone structure, build, coloring—my daughter is fully herself. She and her grandmother have always had a special bond, one that is pure.

Durga Chew-Bose’s debut essay collection, Too Much and Not the Mood, takes its title from a line in Virginia Woolf’s dairy, a bold reference that Chew-Bose’s essays deserve. The essays—contemplative, interrogations of the self and memory—range from ninety-three pages in the opening essay to two pages. They are form-forward essays, as Chew-Bose relies on intricate braiding or collage or enumerated pieces, even an essay in the third person, an objective presentation of the self.

Chew-Bose, at twenty-eight in the essays, lives alone, walks to movies alone, thinks about writing, about a vacuum cord winding along a library floor, about advice her mother gives her in the car one day: “People don’t change,” and Chew-Bose spends pages speculating about their possible meaning. What the persona in these essays never has to wonder about is her mother’s love for her and in turn, her love for her mother.

Chew-Bose describes her “beautiful mother” growing out her gray, wearing a rotation of t-shirts when she’s cooking, doing things in time—”wonderfully exonerative time—peel[ing] two clementines and [making] a cup of tea before unpacking her groceries,” and being nourished by “replenishing ease.” Looking back at her childhood, a time after her parents’ separation, she understands how she was she was too young to notice that her mother bought a new shade of lipstick, Brick, which she still wears today or how angry and rude she was toward any man near her mother, but she remembers the cool touch of her mother’s palm on her forehead before bed, a mother whose love “has never been—not once—hesitant.”

In the last essay of the collection, Chew-Bose sits on the front porch of her parents’ home, listening to the sounds of her mother and father inside cooking dinner—utensils slide in a drawer, the fridge opens and closes. It’s these kinds of quotidian moments that drive Chew-Bose collection and convey, again and again: “This is love; it lives in the practical details.”

In Bring Down the Little Birds: On Mothers, Art, Work, and Everything Else, a lyrical memoir-in-fragments, Carmen Giménez Smith writes about the moment she learned that her second child is a girl: “Daughter, I whisper to myself. Daughter.” She begins to speculate:

I will infuriate her. She’ll resist the sweaters I pick for her. Often she won’t’ take my calls. She’ll date blond boys of whom I disapprove, wild girls of whom I disapprove. She’ll make an effigy of my disappoint and she’ll marry it. She’ll be me and I’ll hate it.

I will laugh with her at the lady with the dog next door. I will talk to her three days times a day about nothing. She will send me pictures of boyfriends, of girlfriends. She will ask me eagerly, What do you think?

Giménez Smith illuminates the difficulties of being a mother, an artist, a professor, and daughter of an ailing mother—offering realizations and epiphanies that any parent (or person) will recognize, “I was sandwiched between who I was and who I must be.” As a new mother, Giménez Smith looks to her own mother’s example of motherhood as a guide as she wonders, “She had given herself over entirely, but who knows what her dreams were, really?”

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The Last Year by Jill Talbot is available via Wandering Aengus Press.

I’ve always loved the novella, which Henry James called “the beautiful and blessed nouvelle” and which Joyce Carol Oates deemed “the most difficult, at least for me” of “all the literary prose forms.” Its length makes it seem grander and more important than a mere short story, while its brevity means that the reader can finish scores of them in the time it takes to plow through a long novel. More to the point, the novella has made an outsized impact over the past two hundred years. The Metamorphosis introduced us to Gregor Samsa and the alienation of modern experience, while nearly a century before that Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener (1853), with its strange law clerk whose response to the demands of capitalism is an indifferent “I prefer not to,” would prefigure the Occupy Wall Street movement of 2011. Particularly popular in 19th-century America, publications such as The Atlantic Monthly, Colliers Weekly, and Scribner’s Magazine would publish them in full. Masters of the form like Henry James and Edith Wharton regularly appeared in their pages.

But since the time of James and Wharton, in the U.S. the novella has largely been an orphaned form that struggles to find a home in today’s publishing industry. For most commercial book publishers, it’s too short. For magazines and literary journals, it’s too long. For whatever reason, my own short fiction often runs long. My first two story collections both contain novellas and many of the stories in my new collection, The Flounder, are around ten-thousand words.

But is the novella experiencing a resurgence? It’s been a great year for the form. One of the modern masters of the novella, Annie Ernaux, won the 2022 Nobel Prize, which made her slim books disappear from shelves and online retailers overnight. Meanwhile, the Irish short story writer Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These became the shortest ever stand-alone book to make the Booker Prize shortlist. While many excellent novellas hide inside short story collections, my list below consists entirely of novellas published as stand-alone books. A number of these books were recommended to me by friends, one of whom called her recommendation a two-commute book, meaning she could finish it on the Boston T in a single trip back and forth from the office. This points out another virtue of the form: its relative accessibility to those of us (probably most of us) who are constantly on the move and whose attention is in short supply. Given our contemporary inability to sit still and concentrate, the novella may be the perfect long(ish) form for our frantic and screen-obsessed age.

Before offering my definition of a novella, I’ll concede that anything I say can easily be disputed. Great writers transcend the expectations of their genres. Alice Munro’s short stories often feel like novels, encompassing whole lives, while Nicholson Baker’s first novel (which I would call a novella, though his publisher does not), The Mezzanine, takes 135 pages to tell the story of its protagonist’s single escalator ride in an office building. Nonetheless, I’ll say that prose fiction around 15,000 to 50,000 words is a novella. A hybrid of the short story and the novel, the novella combines the compression and power of the former and the expansiveness of the latter. Like the novel, it can take on large scopes of time, years and even decades, and offer multiple perspectives (see Minor Detail or The Buddha in the Attic below) and still offer us the possibility of reading it in one or a few sittings. Novellas will rarely have space for tangents, multiple plots and subplots, as do many big novels, which Henry James referred to as “large loose baggy monsters, with their queer elements of the accidental and the arbitrary.” The concision of the novella means it can, like short fiction, heighten the emotional power of an event or series of events through a singular focus (see Claire Keegan’s Foster).

Finally, while I hope that the novella will make a resurgence and appear more often on bestseller lists, most of the below titles are published by small and independent presses. This means that readers will have to search these out. On the other hand, the form’s freedom from commercial expectations means that novellas can take risks, transgress, test boundaries, and innovate, which many of the below books do with abandon and artistry.

I’ve ordered my list of nine novellas by the date of publication in the United States, with the most recent titles first.

*

Shy by Max Porter

In 2016, Porter wowed readers with his debut novella, Grief Is the Thing with Feathers (a movie is in the works starring Benedict Cumberbatch), and is just out with his third book, Shy. His brief, emotionally resonant books are all formally innovative, featuring verse, sentences fragments, narrative prose, and dialogue, which makes the clarity and compulsive readability of his work the more surprising. In Shy, the reader meets the eponymous character, a troubled youth in a detention facility. Without pathologizing his young protagonist, Porter shows us the violence, emotional turmoil, and vulnerability of a young man as he makes the decision to continue living or to end his life. What’s most surprising here: the humor.

Foster by Claire Keegan

Though this book first appeared in the United Kingdom in 2010, in the U.S. it came out last year as a follow up to Keegan’s international bestseller Small Things Like These. Both these novellas are keenly observed tales of provincial family life that focus on children. Her mother preparing to have yet another baby, the young girl and narrator at the center of this novella spends a summer living with the Kinsellas, a childless couple, and gradually pieces together the tragedy in this household (the Kinsellas’ son recently died). Perceiving the world through vivid, sensual detail, the child comes to understand that she wants and needs this couple, who offer her attention, delicious food, and new clothes, as much as they want and need her: “Walking back along the path and through the fields, holding [the woman’s] hand, I feel I have her balanced. Without me, I am certain she would tip over. I wonder how she manages when I am not here….”

The Employees: A Workplace Novel of the 22^nd Century by Olga Ravn

Just in time for our obsessions with AI, this innovative science fiction novella from Danish writer Ravn takes the form of a report “by the committee” focused on gaining a “knowledge of local workflows” on board the interstellar Six Thousand Ship. The corporate jargon is eerily familiar yet charged with a melancholy lyricism that gives this series of cosmic memos the feel and radiance of prose poetry. Ravn raises the question of what it means to be human, which takes on new meaning when posed by thinking and feeling machines that stage a mutiny. When humanoids assert their dominance, the human characters come to question the importance of their own humanity: “Would it be so terrible not to be human? Would it mean not dying? I’m not sure I still feel pride in my humanity.” Utilizing multiple voices and points of view, this book will make readers wonder if a human or humanoid is speaking at any given time.

Minor Detail by Adania Shibli

Palestinian author Shibli makes fascinating use of two different point-of-view characters in her harrowing account of a crime that takes place in the aftermath of Israel’s 1948 war known as the Nakba (catastrophe or disaster) to Palestinians. Told in two parts, this novella first gives an account of the crime and then moves to near present-day where a traumatized narrator attempts to investigate the incident. The clinical, detached narration of the first half, told in the language of the oppressor, offers a vivid contrast to the harried, uncomfortably close, and finally panicked first-person account of the second half. Anyone interested in better understanding life in the Occupied Territories needs to read this powerful tale, a finalist for the National Book Award for translated literature.

The Taiga Syndrome by Cristina Rivera Garza

For readers unfamiliar with MacArthur “Genius” Grant winner Cristina Rivera Garza, this strange, inscrutable book, which explores the borders between prose and poetry, realism and parable, civilized and wild spaces, is a great place to start. An atmospheric retelling of Hansel and Gretel in the noir genre so important to contemporary Mexican literature, this novella follows a detective who sets out with an interpreter into a taiga in search of a woman who has left her husband. In addition to the folk and fairy tales referenced in this novella, readers might think of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and much of the evocative and layered work of Anne Carson.

Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill

Upon its publication in 2014, this brief novel, told in prose-stanza form, became a literary sensation. It tells the story of a young wife whose ambition to be an “art monster” seems out of reach when she becomes a mother and fails to find the time and space to complete her second novel. The humor and intelligence here are sharp. When the narrator’s household is besought with bedbugs, she quotes this Lebanese proverb: “the bedbug has a hundred children and thinks them too few.” At the same time, of course, she’s struggling with her one daughter. While the plot centers around infidelity, this novella contains multitudes: musings on the space race between the Soviet Union and the United States, astronomy, philosophy, theology, mental health struggles, the teaching of writing, and much more.

Train Dreams by Denis Johnson

A finalist for the Pulitzer in 2012, when the prize was not awarded to any book of fiction, this marvel of compression and lyricism showcases the unique prose style that readers first encountered in Jesus’ Son. Perhaps its length was one reason it didn’t win the prize. It’s certainly not its quality. Johnson, who died in 2017, was an impressively versatile writer, a poet who won the National Book Award for Tree of Smoke, a novel of over 600 pages about the Vietnam war that does what many big books do: offers compelling exposition, backstory, voluminous characterization, and builds to a harrowing climax. While these are both amazing books, to my mind Train Dreams is more unique. Often hallucinatory, with lyrical, muscular prose, the story documents the trials of a day laborer, Robert Grainier, who falls in love, marries, builds a home in the wilderness of the American West at the beginning of the 19th century then loses everything, including his wife and small daughter, to a forest fire. This happens in the middle of the book, which asks, among other questions, how one can begin again while burdened with grief and the literal ghosts of one’s past.

The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka

Told in the third-person plural (“we”), this best-selling immigrant story follows a group of young “picture brides” as they travel from Japan to San Francisco, where they meet their husbands for the first time and finally disappear from their homes when they and their families are taken to internment camps. With section headings like “Come, Japanese,” “First Night,” “Whites,” “Babies,” “Traitors,” and “A Disappearance,” this novella mixes irony, humor, and pain in telling the story of what happens to a generation of Japanese women newly arrived in the U.S. While Otsuka shows us the injustice of their situation, these women who speak in one voice nonetheless are various, individualized, and occasionally active agents within their admittedly constraining and oppressive social world.

Happening by Annie Ernaux

A story of a young woman’s struggle to get an abortion in 1960s France, this novella was made into a stunning film released in the U.S. in 2022. In the wake of Roe versus Wade’s demise, Happening takes on an increasingly urgent topic. American readers may appreciate the absence of the life-versus-choice debate in Ernaux’s account. Instead, this tale foregrounds questions of class and the protagonist’s dogged struggle to save her mind, body, and career from the fate of impending motherhood. While the experience of receiving an illegal abortion is graphically depicted, the novella also insists on the act of documenting the experience as similarly taxing and important. The idea of writing as a public and, at times, private responsibility is moving, especially in relation to this topic. “Maybe the true purpose of my life,” muses the narrator in the final pages, “is for my body, my sensations and my thoughts to become writing…something intelligible and universal, causing my existence to merge into the lives and heads of other people.”

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The Flounder by John Fulton is available from Blackwater Press.

Somehow, the year is already half over—time flies when you’re reading good books. Now that it’s July, the Literary Hub staff is looking forward to all the books coming out in the rest of 2023—from fiction to nonfiction to poetry.

JULY

Kate Zambreno, The Light Room
Riverhead, July 4

When Annie Ernaux says you’ve captured a new form—“a kind of absolute present, real life captured in closeup”—you know you’re doing something right. And so says the Nobel Laureate of Kate Zambreno’s latest, a memoir about parenting and creating art through the precarity of a pandemic and climate change. I did not parent through a pandemic (I do not parent at all), but that didn’t prevent me from appreciating Zambreno’s wise, multifaceted musings about isolation and nature, making art and making humans.  –Eliza Smith, special projects editor

Jericho Brown, How We Do It: Black Writers on Craft, Practice, and Skill
Amistad, July 4

As previously recommended: It’s right there in the title. Poet Jericho Brown has assembled an all-star lineup of Black writers holding forth on the nature of their art and how it relates to who they are in the world. With writers like Rita Dove, Camille T. Dungy, W. Ralph Eubanks, Angela Flournoy, Nikki Giovanni, Terrance Hayes, Mitchell S. Jackson, Barry Jenkins, Jamaica Kincaid, Jacqueline Woodson, and many more, this collection is for anyone who’s ever tried to put thought and feeling into words.  –Jonny Diamond, Editor-in-Chief

Sarah Weinman, Evidence of Things Seen: True Crime in an Era of Reckoning
Ecco, July 4

As previously recommended: The last decade has seen true crime as a genre—be it audio, in print, or on screen—grow into a billion-dollar industry, as demand for digestible, narrativized accounts of humanity’s darker side has proven bottomless. But with money to be made, standards inevitably drop… So how do we distinguish between the exploitative sensationalists and the thoughtful reporters? Luckily we have Sarah Weinman’s new anthology, as good a starting place as any for the best in true crime, featuring writers like Wesley Lowery, Justine van der Leun, May Jeong and more, who get to the bottom of the story without scraping the bottom of the true crime barrel.  –JD

PATRICK DEWITT, THE LIBRARIANIST
ECCO, JULY 4

As previously recommended: Full disclosure: I will read anything Patrick DeWitt writes. The Sisters Brothers is one of the funniest novels in recent memory, and French Exit was purely, and darkly, delightful. So, though my buy-in was all but guaranteed, and The Librarianist—which tells the story of a retired librarian who tries to inject meaning into his newly wide open days by volunteering at a senior center—seems like a perfect showcase for DeWitt’s wit(t), and for his funny, off-kilter, beautifully human characters.  –Jessie Gaynor, Senior Editor

Colin Dickey, Under the Eye of Power: How Fear of Secret Societies Shapes American Democracy
Viking, July 11

As previously recommended: We can think of no better writer than Colin Dickey—who has written beautifully for this site—to examine America’s foundational obsession with conspiracy. From Salem to John Birch to Pizzagate, the “paranoid style” has been a part of this country’s identity long before it was given name by Richard Hofstadter in 1964. But what are we to do when people would rather ascribe their ill fortune to shadowy cabals of powerful puppet masters than the randomness of the universe? For Dickey, the first step is admitting we have a problem.  –JD

Nicole Flattery, Nothing Special
Bloomsbury, July 11

As previously recommended: A novel set Andy Warhol’s grubby-but-glamorous (at least ostensibly) Factory in which Drella himself barely features, where hedonistic parties are drowned out by the furious clack of typewriter keys, and where Edie Sedgwick and Ondine become tertiary players in the story of two forgotten schoolgirls, Flattery’s coming-of-age debut novel is a bold and brilliant examination of an iconic—and ultimately hollow—movement from the vantage point of its most invisible cogs.

Mae is a disaffected seventeen-year-old New Yorker, searching for an escape from the tedium of school and the claustrophobia of home life, who finds, or believes she finds, purpose in the two-person typist pool of Warhol’s celebrity petri dish (a “doll house, with girls arranged everywhere”). Each day, for eight hours straight, as lithe models lounge nearby, postmortem-ing the previous night’s bacchanal, Mae and another too-odd-for-the-spotlight runaway named Shelly transcribe every word or a mammoth recording that will eventually become Warhol’s experimental “novel,” a, A Novel (1968). The quest for meaning, for immortality, for an antidote to their societal alienation, in this obliterative work is what bonds Shelly and Mae to one another to the bitter end.

I was entranced by this novel. The subversive approach to a familiar modern mythos, the cool-but-crackling dialogue, the knotty psychological portrait of its rescued-and-reimagined protagonist. Between this brava debut, and her weirdly-compelling 2020 collection Show Them a Good Time, Flattery has already established herself one of the most talented and intriguing writers at work in Ireland today.  –Dan Sheehan, Book Marks Editor-in-Chief

John McPhee, Tabula Rasa (Vol. 1)
FSG, July 11

As previously recommended: John McPhee, often heralded as one of our greatest of nonfiction chroniclers (for good reason), has written about what seems like every imaginable topic, from oranges to Alaskan fur trappers to Wimbledon’s legendary Center Court… But what about all the pieces McPhee didn’t write? Serving as something of answer to that question, Tabula Rasa is a charming compendium of McPhee stories in various states of incompletion, the beginnings and sketches of scores of profiles and wanderings that never quite made it to print. Necessary reading for lovers of serious nonfiction.  –JD

Daniel Hornsby, Sucker
Anchor Books, July 11

As previously recommended: Let Daniel Hornsby invite you into the chum-tank for a rollicking Silicon Valley tech satire in his novel Sucker. Charles Grossheart is a failson with past dreams of punk music production who has stumbled into the orbit of Olivia, an Elizabeth Holmes tech-type who has a “pet forest” in her company’s headquarters, and is working on a project to solve cancer, or mortality, or humanity generally, walking around charismatically with her bald head in remission, swathed in layers of sweaters: her signature look. Needless to say, the motivations at work are darker than at first they seem; this is a parable of vampire capitalism with a room full of deformed monkeys to answer to.

Most importantly, it’s very funny—more Total Recall than Neuromancer, with nods to David Graeber and Joshua Ferris—and Hornsby has a knack for pillorying the vast industries of bullshit that dominate America c. 2023. “I just think the obsession with climate change is so shortsighted,” says one tech-poseur, and perhaps the most damning part of the book is the way poets are folded into the disruption process and housed in a corporate Art Barn. Let Hornsby set us free!  –Janet Manley, contributing editor

Sarah Rose Etter, Ripe
Scribner, July 11

As previously recommended: Millennial, anti-capitalist malaise-lit isn’t exactly new at this point, but Ripe, while all of those things, manages to skewer workplace politics and the vacuousness of modern existence in a way that makes it feel like a fresh subject. Cassie works in the classic dead-eyed field of technology in Silicon Valley, each day spent working for a morally-vacant company, each day increasingly severing herself from her true personhood, cleaving herself into two beings: the fake, cheery self at work, and the real self, who does cocaine every night by the light of the refrigerator and feels a black hole devouring herself from her center.

Sarah Rose Etter captures the cruel facts of San Francisco well: the dystopia that that eden-like setting has turned into. As Cassie watches the sun set over the water from the train, pink and light and heavenly, a man asks her for a dollar and she refuses. Maybe Etter’s not saying anything radical, but every reminder of the daily cruelties of life in this city (not that it’s just there), and our own complicity in it, is sickening. There’s more to come, more we can’t look away from: things at work take an illegal turn, an unplanned pregnancy occurs, suddenly everything feels very delicate, like one wrong move could shatter the illusion of a life, and the truth is, it probably can.  –Julia Hass, Contributing Editor

Gloria Dickie, Eight Bears: Mythic Past and Imperiled Future
W.W. Norton, July 11

As previously recommended: How many of the eight extant bear species can you name? The first four aren’t all that hard (think about it), but unless you know, the last four are… tough. Give up? Sorry, you’re just going to have to read nature writer Gloria Dickie’s sprawling travelogue about ursine life on planet earth. Not only does Dickie go in-depth on the latest efforts to save habitat for the eight species, she unpacks the history of each species in relation to humans, from myth to fairy tale to urban legend. As both ecological wake-up call and cultural deep dive, Eight Bears is an important document of what we have, and what we stand to lose. (Ok, fine: Polar, Panda, Black, Brown, and… Asiatic Black, Spectacled, Sloth, Sun.)  –JD

Ruth Madievsky, All-Night Pharmacy
Catapult, July 11

As previously recommended: All-Night Pharmacy feels like reading the diary of your most off-the-rails friend— the one who’s so unpredictable that it’s almost frightening to be around her, but so fun and endearing that you would never leave her side. The friend who you’re always surprised to hear from on Monday because you were certain she died over the weekend.

The book begins with our unnamed narrator following her older sister, Debbie, into a divey LA bar, and from there the novel unravels at a breakneck pace, flying nonstop down a steep street until the final page. Along the way, Debbie goes missing, our narrator falls into a pill addiction, our narrator is helped out of her pill addiction with the help of a hot psychic, gay things happen (yes, with the hot psychic), trips to the former Soviet Union are taken, an iguana is begrudgingly adopted, family trauma is unearthed, and the bonds of sisterhood are questioned.

The book covers about a year in our narrator’s life as she navigates sobriety, queerness, trauma, healing, and family. It doesn’t shy away from the difficult moments, the unexpected moments, the sexy moments. It’s a book about how hard it is to be a person, how it feels to navigate a life.  –McKayla Coyle, Publishing Coordinator

Tessa Hadley, After the Funeral and Other Stories
Knopf, July 11

Tessa Hadley writes the kind of books that many people think are easy to write—we’re overrun with domestic novels about relationships, family, tragedy, life complications, the kind of events and dynamics that everyone has experience with. But Hadley, unlike most people, has the ability to evoke the depth and complexity that life truly holds. After the Funeral—a collection of short stories about siblings, about aging, about death, about obsession— promises to be no different.  –JH

ANDREW LIPSTEIN, THE VEGAN
FSG, JULY 11

As previously recommended: I inhaled Andrew Lipstein’s debut novel Last Resort (which just came out in 2022, damn him), a book about storytelling and greed and New York and artistic ownership, so I’m eagerly anticipating his next, which seems to be equally invested in asking questions about the murky nature of morality in our modern world. Andrew Martin called it “a feverish, fantastically surprising parable about guilt, money, and (curveball) the lives of animals,” and writes that it “reads like the unholy offspring of Saul Bellow’s Seize the Day and Julio Cortázar’s cosmic short fiction, or Crime and Punishment for the Brooklyn brownstone set,” which is about as good a blurb as you could get.  –Emily Temple, Managing Editor

Kathleen Alcott, Emergency: Stories
Norton, July 18

I’ve been pressing Kathleen Alcott’s most recent novel—the multigenerational epic America Was Hard to Find—into the hands of as many people as I possibly can over the past four years. I consider it to be one of the finest works of American fiction of the 21st century, and its omission from 2020’s list of Pulitzer Prize finalists still rankles. I hope that this exquisite collection, Alcott’s first, brings a host of new readers to her entire body of work. Each of these seven stories—about unmoored women dealing with crises of identity, creeping despair, and the psychic wounds left by corrosive men—is a small marvel: intense, cerebral, and tender.  –DS

Colson Whitehead, Crook Manifesto
Doubleday, July 18

As previously recommended: Pulitzer Prize winner Whitehead continues his journey through the history of modern New York City, this time taking on the 1970s, as the cast of characters from Harlem Shuffle get swept up in political action, civil unrest, corrupt policing, the rise of Blaxploitation culture, and more. It’s a rich backdrop for Whitehead’s powerful human dramas, and he paints a vivid portrait of people moving between the straight and the crooked world, just trying to get by.  –Dwyer Murphy, CrimeReads Editor-in-Chief

Helen Hester and Nick Srnicek, After Work: The Fight for Free Time
Verso, July 18

As previously recommended: Bookstore shelves are veritably sagging under the weight of corporate-inflected, tech-centric self-help guides to maximizing time or reclaiming time or saving time… But why? What are we doing with all that extra time? This is one of the many questions pondered by Helen Hester and Nick Srnicek in their forthcoming treatise on the nature of so-called free time, particularly as it relates to what we do at home when we’re not working. Obviously, this equation has changed radically in the last few years with the remote work revolution, but Hester and Srnicek take things much further back, looking at the last century of domestic existence, and how the maintenance of the house has become a second job for most of us. The ultimate question, though, that After Work seeks to answer, is how do we change that?  –JD

Caleb Azumah Nelson, Small Worlds
Grove Atlantic, July 18

As previously recommended: Azumah Nelson’s follow up to Open Water, his multi-award-winning 2021 debut, is an ode to the West African immigrant community in London, a coming-of-age tale of young love and yearning, and a quietly powerful meditation on intergenerational conflict and trauma. Stephen, a first-generation Londoner born to Ghanaian parents, is a budding trumpeter in deep (and lyrical) love with his orphan bandmate Del, with the transporting power of music and dance, with the little moments of wonder he sees each day in his Peckham community.

Over the course of three summers, we follow Stephen from London to Accra and back again as he deals with the consequences of a major life pivot, and the rift it opens between himself and his more traditionally minded father. Small Worlds is an achingly tender, exquisitely rendered portrait of a truly beautiful soul.  –DS

Nora Neus, 24 Hours in Charlottesville: An Oral History of the Stand Against White Supremacy
Beacon Press, July 18

As previously recommended: We seem to live in an era of great forgetting. Events that would have been era-defining 20 years ago now come and go like so many digital headlines, explained away by conspiracy theorists and ideological denialists as just more fake news. That’s why books like Nora Neus’s 24 Hours in Charlottesville are so important, particularly as the very history we teach in public schools is at risk of disappearing altogether. So, a reminder: in August of 2017 a horde (a khaki? a basement? a whine?) of neo-Nazis descended on Charlottesville, Virginia to chant racist slogans and buy out the local tiki torch supplier. But for all their deeply embarrassing posturing, the weekend was no joke: As Neus’s gripping account reminds us, based as it is on multiple first-person accounts, the events of that weekend led up to the tragic murder of anti-racist activist Heather Heyer at the hands of an unhinged white supremacist. This is America, and we cannot forget it.  –JD

Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Silver Nitrate
Del Rey, July 18

As previously recommended: Both of Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s parents worked in radio, so perhaps that’s part of the inspiration behind this bonkers ode to sound engineering and the (literally magical) power of the human voice. Silver Nitrate features a sound editor and a has-been actor as they befriend an elderly icon from the Golden Age of Mexican cinema, only to find themselves drawn into a vast conspiracy to harness the magic of the silver screen and bring an occult-obsessed Nazi back from the dead. This book has everything, and I could not recommend it enough!  –Molly Odintz, CrimeReads Senior Editor

Richard Wagamese, Walking the Ojibwe Path: A Memoir in Letters to Joshua
Milkweed, July 18

As previously recommended: The late Richard Wagamese’s 2012 novel, Indian Horse, is one of the great underrated works of fiction of the 21st century (and though its concerns are much broader, it should also be in conversations about the all-time best sports novels). Walking the Ojibwe Path is a collection of letters that Wagamese—who died in 2017—wrote to his estranged six-year-old son, Joshua, in accordance with the Ojibwe tradition that calls fathers to guide their children through the world. For Wagamese, that means being open and honest about his own troubled path through life, from being separated at an early age from his family, to struggles with substance abuse, to incarceration, to his eventual rebirth as the teller of his own story. There are lessons in this book for all of us.  –JD

Dwyer Murphy, The Stolen Coast
Viking, July 18

As previously recommended: Look, if it’s a heist novel, I’m probably going to read it. But if it’s a heist novel set on the New England coast featuring retired spies, disenchanted lawyers, and diamond thieves, I’m probably going to enjoy it. If it’s a novel featuring all those things and it’s written by Dwyer Murphy, I’m probably going to love it.

Now, you might be thinking, “Dwyer Murphy is your boss” and yes that is true. But I would not have volunteered to endorse this book if I weren’t also such a fan. His previous novel, An Honest Living, a literary Chinatown-inspired PI mystery about rare books set in fading, post-millennium New York City, was an absolute delight. I’d say I tore through it, but that’s too aggressive a description for what is one of the most tranquil reading experiences I’ve ever had.

Dwyer’s prose is direct and straightforward, but with an air of the fanciful. He is a watercolorist when it comes to genre and style—the allusions and frameworks are all visible, but he doesn’t lay them on thick. He lets everything softly, gently blend together—a bit wistfully, a bit meditatively. His heroes are wandering thinkers, navigating bustling modern worlds and finding romance in them, too. I can’t think of a better combination for Dwyer’s stylings than a heist novel set along the misty, craggy seaside. In short, I cannot wait for The Stolen Coast.  –Olivia Rutigliano, CrimeReads Associate Editor

Terrance Hayes, Watch Your Language: Visual and Literary Reflections on a Century of American Poetry
Penguin Books, July 25

As previously recommended: When one of America’s great poets assembles his poetic origin story in a collage-like collection of mini essays, illustrations, prose fragments, and assorted feuilletons of a life in poetry, it behooves us all to pay attention. In examining his own path to poetry, Terrance Hayes also manages to excavate a century of nearly forgotten African American poets, reminding us all of the very narrow poetic canon that predominates to this day in the academy. Essential reading.  –JD

Terrance Hayes, So to Speak
Penguin Books, July 25

A new collection by National Book Award winner Terrance Hayes is a Poetry Event. All the more reason to celebrate: His seventh collection will be published simultaneously with Watch Your Language, a work of (illustrated) literary criticism. Hayes’ poems never fail to play, thrillingly, with the constraints of form, and they engage with culture, past and present, while remaining deeply rooted in the personal. Don’t miss this one.  –JG

Wang Xiaobo, tr. Yan Yan, Pleasure of Thinking: Essays
Astra House, July 25

Previously untranslated essays from celebrated Chinese novelist and thinker Wang Xiaobo, who died in 1997, make up a collection described by the publisher as “as riotous as it is contemplative…examin[ing] modern life with the levity missing from so much of today’s politico-cultural discourse.” Dive in if you dare!  –ET

Harvey Sachs, Schoenberg: Why He Matters
Liveright, July 25

As previously recommended: Arnold Schoenberg is not an easy listen. The frowny father of the 12-tone musical system revolutionized so-called classical music with his complex, superficially dissonant compositions. Schoenberg caused an enormous stir in the 1920s with his studies in atonality, music that put the burden on audiences to think through what they were listening to.

But as a Viennese Jew, his angular compositions were readily labeled degenerate by the Nazis, and Schoenberg soon made his way to America where as a teacher and composer he would have a huge influence on a generation of post-war avant garde musicians. But as Harvey Sachs recounts, Schoenberg’s music gradually fell out of style, to a point where it’s hardly ever performed—and for Sachs, that’s a problem. Why He Matters makes the case for Schoenberg’s importance in the avant garde canon, arguing that anyone who cares about 20th-century classical music needs to care about Arnold Schoenberg.  –JD

Richard Russo, Somebody’s Fool
Knopf, July 25

The latest novel from the Pulitzer Prize winning author of Empire Falls and Straight Man (one of the best campus novels in recent history, recently adapted into a series starring Bob Odenkirk), completes the North Bath trilogy begun with Nobody’s Fool in 1993. A good excuse to start exploring Russo’s work if you haven’t yet!  –ET

Michael Hann, The Hold Steady, The Gospel of The Hold Steady: How a Resurrection Really Feels
Akashic Books, July 25 

As previously recommended: There’s a very short list of contemporary American songwriters who would also make wonderful short story writers and The Hold Steady’s Craig Finn is on it. As virtuosic chroniclers of a Midwestern demimonde that gives lie to the pervasive myth of the wholesome heartland, The Hold Steady has earned its place as one of the great American rock bands of the 21st century. And now, in The Gospel of The Hold Steady, the storytellers will have their story told, through essays, firsthand oral histories, and over 200 photographs. A must-have for both Hold Steady diehards and rock and roll fans of all persuasions.  –JD

Peter Heller, The Last Ranger
Knopf, July 25

From the bestselling author of The Dog Stars and The River comes a novel about a Yellowstone National Park ranger who chases down poachers and wrangles tourists, until he becomes embroiled in a mysterious range war. The result is, as the publisher describes it: “a portrait of the American west where our very human impulses–for greed, love, family, and community–play out amidst the stunning beauty of the natural world.”  –ET

Andrew Leland, The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight
Penguin Press, July 25

As previously recommended: As a teenager, Andrew Leland was diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa, a rare eye disease that results in progressive vision loss over the course of years or decades. Now, at midlife, Leland embarks on a journey to understand the cultural history of blindness and where he fits into it. What follows is a moving and fascinating account of the blind community—its politics, customs, and pioneers—and a personal exploration of making a sometimes frightening, sometimes invigorating life transition as a writer, husband, and father. A brilliant investigative memoir written with humor and heart.  –ES

JoAnna Novak, Contradiction Days: An Artist on the Verge of Motherhood
Catapult, July 25

As previously recommended: We’re big fans here at Lit Hub of JoAnna Novak’s poetry, which is intense, often unexpectedly discursive, and most certainly always unflinching. It is this last quality that Novak brings to bear on her memoir, Contradiction Days, in which she recounts a harrowing month midway through her pregnancy when, appalled by her doctor’s reaction to her depression, she instead looks to the artist Agnes Martin to help navigate the darkness. And by look, we mean mirror, as Novak heads to Taos to live as Martin did: no phone, no email, no contact with her husband, total solitude. What follows for Novak is a series of revelations about her work, her body, and what it is to be both artist and mother. –JD

What makes a summer novel? It might be set in during a summer (One Fateful or otherwise), or it might be, for one reason or another, particularly appealing to read during the summer, or it might simply . . . feel summery. That’s right, I’m afraid the answer is: vibes. In other words: you know it when you see it.

So if you’ve already blazed through the season’s new books (good for you) or just prefer to read something no one else you know is reading (good for you!), but can’t decide what to put in your beach (good for you) bag, here are a selection of very good summer novels, as the Literary Hub staff defines them, published in any year other than this one.

NB: You’ll notice that this list skews “literary”—surely at this point no one need suggest that the books of Emily Henry or Elin Hilderbrand make for good beach reading, so hopefully you’ll find some less obvious suggestions here. (Which is not to say this list is wholly without obvious suggestions.) Also, there are plenty more books in this category, so as ever, if you are so moved, please add your own favorite novels to read during the summer to the list in the comments.

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Renata Adler, Speedboat

In 2013, NYRB reissued Renata Adler’s 1976 novel Speedboat, and everyone was talking about it. It was modernist, told in vignettes, full of aphorisms; there was no plot; the characters were privileged and smart and caustic and did boring things like go to parties and speak about the essence of life. Cumulatively, the book somehow exposed the horrible reality of a bourgeois life you hate yourself for aspiring to. Jean Fein, our protagonist, is a reporter for a tabloid paper. She travels, has advanced degrees, teaches, takes Valium, sleeps with men, gets pregnant. There is therapy, there are cabdrivers, and the greatest little section about running away from rats. Which is all to say, this is a very New York novel, perhaps the most New York novel. And for me, the summer is always about New York.

I am a native Brooklynite, and therefore better than you. I have always made certain to spend the summer here, when the city is hot and horrible. Even as a kid, I’d look forward to August when all the rich people left for their cooler, bigger houses in the country or at the beach or some other unbelievable place, when my parents would delight in the availability of parking spots and the chance for us to eat together in empty restaurants. My summer read is not an escape, but a bedding in. Speedboat is the type of book you can read on the subway, each short section timed almost perfectly to last from Dekalb to West 4th; or you can read it in its entirety one perfect afternoon, sitting at a terrible aluminum patio table, switching chairs to stay out of the direct sun.  –Emily Firetog, Deputy Editor

Jacqueline Susann, Valley of the Dolls

Who gets to decide the definition of a “summer read”? For me, summer reading isn’t so much a chance to shut off my brain, but an opportunity to lose myself in another world. When I pick a book to read at the beach, I want to be entertained by the storytelling as much as I want to dive into the depths of the human condition. Jacqueline Susann’s best-selling 1966 novel, Valley of the Dolls, has it all: sex, scandal, a dashing English playboy who (I imagine) looks like Cary Grant, glamour, stardom, and DRAMA. Susann’s debut centers on three young women who are hoping to make it on their own terms. Anne Welles is a Radcliffe-educated beauty from Massachusetts who moves to New York City to escape her judgmental hometown. Seventeen-year-old Neely O’Hara (birth name: Ethel Agnes O’Neill) is a lifelong vaudeville performer aching for Broadway acclaim. Jennifer North is an up-and-coming blonde bombshell whose looks rival Marilyn Monroe.

The three women have very little in common, but their professional and social circles collide, resulting in a bond born from the shared understanding of what it means to exist as a woman under patriarchal rule. Each woman seems to simultaneously play into and revolt against their archetype: Anne is a bookish “good girl” who, like Belle in Beauty and the Beast, craves adventure, excitement, independence, and true love. Neely, supposedly modeled after Judy Garland, is the child star who grew up too fast and dreams in dollar signs and bright lights. Jennifer, echoing the tragic legacy of Monroe, battles against the stereotype of the “dumb blonde,” but ultimately succumbs to defeat.

I know most people of discerning literary taste probably dismiss the novel as “chick lit” or a “low-brow soap opera,” but to reduce Susann’s work to such one-dimensional labels trivializes its cultural impact. Before we were wondering if women could truly have it all, Susann offered a satirical yet recognizable portrait of heterosexual womanhood. Perhaps not in the sense that the three women were “relatable,” but they deal with the same issues that impact women today: body image, gender roles, sexism, the pressures of aging, and misogyny. This isn’t to say Susann was focused on redemption arcs. Most of the men in Valley of the Dolls are cheaters, liars, or both—damaged goods who wholly subscribe to the Madonna/Whore complex. Many of the women are status-obsessed and needy, quick to backstab other women to reach the top.

Dolls, which celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2016, was never meant to be a feminist awakening. According to Susann, the book “showed that a woman in a ranch house with three kids had a better life than what happened up there at the top.” Critics panned the book; Gloria Steinem notably titled her New York Herald Tribune review “A Massive Overdose.” Regardless of the novel’s positioning as a now-dated cautionary tale, its campiness is irresistible. The 1967 film adaptation is just as campy and features Sharon Tate as Jennifer. Patty Duke provides an unforgettable turn as Neely (truly iconic scenes: flushing Helen Lawson’s (Susan Hayward) wig down the toilet; screaming her own name in a deserted alley).

Both the film and source material are first-rate escapism, eschewing the notion of “likeability” for memorable characters who would rather die than beg for empathy.  –Vanessa Willoughby, Assistant Editor

André Aciman, Call Me By Your Name

Nothing says summer like intense romantic obsession, gut-wrenching interiority, languid afternoons and . . . yes, juicy peaches. Anyone who has ever been a teenager with too much time on their hands will recognizing the racing mind of Elio, who is spending the summer with his parents at their Italian villa (like you do) when he meets the older Oliver, who is so alluring that the beginning of the novel is mostly taken up with Elio’s frantic attempts to put a finger on him (metaphorically and literally), obsessing over the tiniest details, like the color of his palms (“almost a light pink, as glistening and smooth as the underside of a lizard’s belly. Private, chaste, unfledged, like a blush on an athlete’s face or an instance of dawn on a stormy night”). The novel is all like that—repeated ecstatic descriptions of minute ecstatic moments, all of it infused with the knowledge that it will end all too soon. Again: nothing says summer.  –Emily Temple, Managing Editor

Charles Portis, Norwood

I always recommend True Grit, with its perfect first paragraph (and pretty much perfect everything that follows), and surely it is good for any season, but perhaps for a dedicated summer read you’d like a road trip novel, in which case, try Portis’s debut, a delightfully surreal tale about an ex-Marine who travels, mostly by bus, from Texas to New York City, to find someone who owes him $70. Americana and strangeness abound.  –ET

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, The Love Songs of W.E.B Du Bois

Some of us (not parents) seem to have extra time in the summer—even if it’s only extra sunlight. Which makes this the perfect time to sink into a big (in this case 800+ pages), juicy, gorgeously written (in this case by a poet) American epic, which manages to wrap up decades of history in the engrossing story of one family. One of the most convincing recent contenders for the title of “the Great American Novel.”  –ET

Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano

I first read Under the Volcano during the darkest part of a Montreal winter, snowed into the fourth floor of a tiny walk-up apartment that seemed to deny even the possibility of natural light; Lowry’s dizzying, elliptical account of fallen British diplomat Geoffrey Firmin’s day-long mezcal bender, in the bright and blurry streets of Oaxaca City, was about as close as I got to sun for a week. A decade later, I took the same fat and pulpy paperback copy with me to the Yucatan and read it all again; and though I was in a very different part of Mexico I was at least able to feel the same kind of sun, drink the same kind of mezcal as Firmin, if somewhat less burdened by thoughts of mortality and infidelity.

Under the Volcano was written to be reread: Lowry, whose booze-sodden, allusive modernism blossomed in the isolation of his own alcoholism, wrote the book so you could start reading at any point, the “story” built around not much more than the tidal pull of Firmin’s sadly compelling consciousness. And if there is sunshine in the book, it is there to render the shadows that much darker: the nearby mountain, the Second World War, the end of a marriage, the nearness of death, the oblivions of alcohol… Obviously, it’s the perfect beach read! (Look, my son’s middle name is Lowry.)  –Jonny Diamond, Editor-in-Chief

Tove Jansson, The Summer Book

Jansson’s beloved novel is a series of gently funny, beautifully written vignettes about the life of a little girl and her grandmother on a small Finnish island. The perfect thing to dip in and out of, to set down and pick back up, to carry around for extra joy and solace in spare moments.  –ET

Joan Lindsay, Picnic at Hanging Rock

Talk about vibes. Lindsay’s swoony, mysterious novel about a group of boarding school girls who disappear without a trace from a day trip to Australia’s Hanging Rock in 1900. Though the cut final chapter, which (sort of) explains what happens to them, has since been published, the whole thing still feels like a tantalizing mystery.  –ET

Sarah Schulman, After Delores

As far as summer reads go, Sarah Schulman’s 1988 novel After Delores, the gripping, fast-paced story of a lesbian woman on a revenge mission against the girlfriend who betrayed her, might be a bit of an unusual pick—but it’s a book I associate with the season. Maybe it’s the way the narrator moves at a fevered pace around New York City’s Lower East Side, plotting and flirting, heartbroken and enraged, at a level of intensity best matched by the heat of summer—that is, when she’s not drinking from the corner of some forgotten bar, lost in daydreams and memories, a mood to fit the energy crash of a summer afternoon fading away. When it was published, After Delores brought readers into the emotionally anarchic world of a community that was invisible, disregarded, and disrespected by the mainstream, showing the consequences that this abandonment had for its members. It is as revealing now as it was then, in addition to being a suspenseful, thoroughly engrossing read for summer.  –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

It takes place over a whole year, and maybe I’m influenced by the hazy sunlight of Sofia Coppola’s interpretation, but there’s something very specifically summer about the kind of obsession and deluded romance that Eugenides so convincingly portrays here.  –ET

Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca

Besides being gripping and immersive and strange like the best (and worst) summer nights, this novel could make the list for the rhododendrons alone.  –ET

Terry McMillan, Waiting to Exhale

The contemporary classic was one of the earliest breakthrough novels to focus on middle-class Black women’s friendships—but its historical importance isn’t the real reason to read it. The real reason to read it is that it’s a delightful, irreverent, and sometimes raunchy novel about figuring it out (or not) with your friends—and a welcome hit of 90s nostalgia for those of us who are into that sort of thing.  –ET

Sharma Shields, The Sasquatch Hunter’s Almanac 

I went through a pretty intense Sasquatch phase the summer when I was ten (what, you didn’t?), so when I stumbled on The Sasquatch Hunter’s Almanac as an adult, I bought it on the title alone—and can I just say that I’ve never had less of a clue of what I was getting into with a book, and never been more pleased about it? The novel opens with nine-year-old Eli Roebuck watching his mom walk off in the woods with Mr. Krantz, a large, hairy man who sure seems like he might be Bigfoot—and then it spirals out over sixty years and four generations, as Eli’s obsession with finding Mr. Krantz/Sasquatch affects every relationship for the rest of his life—most notably, with his two wives and two daughters.

Each character gets their own parable, or fairy tale, or horror story, because they all have their own supernatural forces to contend with, from tentacled lake monsters to ghosts to Elusive Dads, which creates a structure that’s both propulsive and conveniently suited to breaking between chapters for a swim or a nap or whatever it is people do on vacation. Beyond being weird in the best of ways (a perfectly suitable metric, but only one on which this novel succeeds!), it’s also a deeply moving portrait of family and abandonment and the chaos we create from being, well, all too human.  –Eliza Smith, Audience Development Editor

Lauren Wilkinson, American Spy

Summer is always the best time to curl up with a good page-turner, and Wilkinson’s brainy, original take on the Cold War thriller, inspired by true events, checks all the genre’s boxes and then some.  –ET

Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine

Bradbury’s most personal (and least pyrotechnic) work, a gentle and engrossing novel of loosely connected stories about a 12-year-old boy’s fleeting summer in 1928.  –ET

Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet 

Maybe ten or eleven years ago I booked a cheap, weeklong holiday to a small tourist town in Spain with my brother and two of our friends. It was at the tail end of a summer in which we had done nothing, achieved nothing, enjoyed nothing, and we were trying desperately to salvage some joy from the watery dregs of the season. By the time we arrived, however, the town had pretty much shut down for the year. There were no potential love interests left in the bars, nobody offered to rent us jet skis or take us water skiing, and the sun refused to shine on our pale Irish bodies.

Everyone was miserable. Everyone, that is, but me. Why? Because I had my copy of Salman Rushdie’s 1999 novel The Ground Beneath Her Feet with me, of course. While three-quarters of our party stomped around the rented apartment moaning about the trip being “a complete waste of time and money,” “the worst, most embarrassing holiday ever,” and “a load of shite,” I lay on the sand and read the entirety of Rushdie’s epic, sprawling, big-hearted 20th century rock n’ roll reimagining of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth. It was delightful.  –Dan Sheehan, Book Marks Editor in Chief

Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley

It’s no secret that I’m obsessed with The Talented Mr. Ripley. It’s a book that reminds you how easily beautiful exteriors can hide deteriorating insides. But really, it has everything you could ever want in a summer novel: steamy Italian beaches, complex love triangles, travel, boating excursions, murder, impersonation, murder, escaping by the skin of your teeth and feeling pretty good about it, actually. But more importantly, it is compelling in the best way: Ripley is an intoxicating character, even (especially) in his amorality, and you find yourself wanting him to succeed, no matter what he does—and more than anything else, wanting to keep reading, no matter what’s going on around you. And not for nothing, I think of it every time I’m squirming around on the floor of my apartment, trying to catch the sunlight on my body, so that my stomach isn’t too pale when I meet my friends on the beach. That’s a normal thing to do, right? –ET

James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

Love, murder, wine, Paris, swooning, hand-wringing, desire, shame—essential summer reading for brokenhearted and blossoming lovers alike.  –ET

Quan Barry, We Ride Upon Sticks

Sure, it mostly takes place during the school year, but this is such a fun, nostalgia-soaked romp of a novel that it doesn’t really matter. The vibes are on point: witchcraft and sports and teenage angst and the unholy, enduring power of Emilio Estevez.  –ET

Melissa Bank, The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing

I first read Melissa Bank’s collection of linked short stories the summer after seventh grade, because I saw it advertised in a women’s magazine I read on the floor in Barnes & Noble, and carrying it up to the cashier at the same Barnes & Noble made me feel impossibly sophisticated. I’d say, conservatively, that about 75 percent of the references—to literature, to sex, to The Rules, to working in publishing—went right over my head, but I when I got one, (like when Jane, the protagonist, threatens to report her boyfriend for “work harassment in a sexual place” when he badgers her about her job search in bed), I felt like I was in on something glamorous and grown up and exciting.

Which is what I remember most about those early teenage summers: getting to try on adulthood, with none of the responsibilities. I recently re-read The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing after many years, and was delighted to discover that it retains much of the magic, even as I reside full-time in adultworld (and get all the references). It has the feel of a smart rom-com—sharp, spare, and breezy—and it takes place entirely over summers. In short, it’s seasonal perfection, whether you’re a disaffected youth or a disaffected geriatric millennial.  –Jessie Gaynor, Lit Hub Senior Editor

Rachel Ingalls, Binstead’s Safari

Reader, meet Millie. She’s the too-often-ignored wife of a boring, egocentric academic. His studies bring them on a safari through Africa, in search of lion myths. While he’s off doing research for his stupid book, Millie is having the time of her life. Sometimes a woman needs a vacation! She gets a haircut, she buys some new clothes, and she struts down the streets with a brand new attitude, charming everyone she encounters. Much to the dismay of her husband, she’s even caught the eye of someone better. (“The sound of his voice came to her hardly as part of the exterior world, but as though inspired within herself, like the beat of a second heart.”) Essentially, Rachel Ingalls was the first one to say Hot Girl Summer.  –Katie Yee, Book Marks Associate Editor

Margarita Liberaki, Three Summers

Along with the bright and fevered rush of summer, the season for me has always been tinged with the knowledge that it will end: it will come again, but you will be older, things will have changed, you will never be as young as you were. This is so sad, this cannot be, but this is life. Reading Three Summers is a relief to know someone else feels the same as I do: the translated Greek novel follows three sisters through three summers, as they love and lose and adapt to adulthood, the come down that is the loss of innocence. It’s funny, insightful, and a perfect summer book to balance out the beach reads and murder mysteries. I can’t recommend it enough.  –Julia Hass, Contributing Editor

Edward P. Jones, The Known World

Sometimes you just want to sink into a big, moving, brilliantly written historical novel, the kind of book you’ll look up from to find that somehow hours have passed in the real world and you didn’t notice. In fact, it is Jones’s delicate and innovative use of time that makes The Known World, which takes as its subject the life and legacy of a Black slave owner in antebellum Virginia, a forever classic.  –ET

Richard Hughes, A High Wind in Jamaica

In which the children of an English family living in the heat of post-Emancipation Jamaica (“not a naked fish would willingly move his tail”) are sent, after a hurricane destroys their home, on a merchant ship back to England—a ship that is soon captured by pirates, which is not entirely unpleasant for (most of) the children. In fact, the whole thing soon takes on a distinctly surrealist air, especially in the prose, which is a constant delight (despite some outdated language and attitudes), but its wackiness is frequently pinned to the deck by moments of violence, sadness, and profound truths about the nature of experience. It’s the kind of book that makes me remember how much I liked reading before I did it for a living.  –ET

​​Edward St Aubyn, Mother’s Milk

Edward St Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose novels are dark, funny, and beautifully written; and the fourth book in the five-book series, Mother’s Milk, takes place over four successive Augusts on the Melroses’ summer vacations. Each section is told from a different character’s point of view—Patrick and Mary’s five-year-old son Robert; Patrick, now in his early 40s and no longer a heroin addict, who drinks a lot instead and justifies his mid-life crisis affairs; Mary, who has devoted herself so entirely to the care and wellbeing of her sons that Patrick is an afterthought; and then, finally, the whole family. The title, in St Aubyn’s usual mix of witty and a bit cruel, forefronts the role of mothers, their either unlimited (in the case of Mary) or twisted (in the case of Patrick’s mother) capacity for love. And in typical holiday vacation situation, nobody is having a very good time.  –EF

Kobo Abe, tr. E. Dale Saunders, The Woman in the Dunes

I love to recommend this novel—in which a man is kidnapped by a mysterious community and forced to live at the bottom of a hole in the sand, forever digging to prevent its collapse—as a sort of anti-beach read, because, you know, it doesn’t exactly make you want to go wandering off into the dunes. But it’s so hypnotic, and so weirdly funny, that despite its bleakness it’s actually kind of perfect to read on vacation. As long as someone knows where you are.  –ET

Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

“Deep in the heart of Summer, sweet is life to me still, / But my heart is a lonely hunter that hunts on a lonely hill.”

Yup, this line from William Sharp’s (aka Fiona MacLeod’s) 1901 poem “The Lonely Hunter” is where Carson McCullers got the title for her canonical novel of small-town southern life, which for many readers is really just a novel of small-town southern childhood. That’s because the most memorable character by far in the ensemble cast is the young teenage tomboy, Mick Kelly, whose longing for—and curiosity about—the wider world recalls to us what it meant to yearn for something we couldn’t possibly understand.

And though the novel’s action isn’t limited to a single summer, its pivotal scene—one of the most beautiful in American literature—has Mick Kelly sat beneath the window of a house on the rich side of town, drawn to the miraculous (and new to her) music of Beethoven on a gramophone, playing in transportive counterpoint to all the rich sounds of a summer night in Georgia.

And if you’d care to dispute the idea that The Heart is a Lonely Hunter doesn’t count as a summer novel, allow me to draw your attention to the first half of the couplet above, which is maybe the best possible distillation of what makes McCullers’ 1940 masterpiece so achingly beautiful.  –JD

E.M. Forster, A Room with a View

A Room with a View (the first Forster novel I ever read), was the first book I thought of for this list. The thing is, I don’t remember if it literally takes place in summer (although it partially takes place on Summer Street!), but it feels like it, to me. It’s about a group of Edwardian British tourists on an excursion to Florence where some of them (the younger folks among them) wind up feeling things and become changed, and then wind up having to confront all this when they return to real life in England, later on. So… discovering one’s passions while on vacation in Italy? Seems like a summertime story to me.  –Olivia Rutigliano, CrimeReads associate editor

Vendela Vida, The Diver’s Clothes Lie Empty

I am here from the future to tell you to read this one on the beach (or some equally sunny location), a thought I had mere paragraphs into reading; unfortunately I couldn’t bring myself to set it aside, but you have a chance! Told in one long, hypnotic take—in a shockingly successful second person POV, no less—it’s the story of a woman traveling alone to Casablanca, who loses all her identifying documents and so starts to take on the identity of others. Her longest con is as a stand-in on set for a famous American actress, which might be my new career goal. Simmering and tense yet wickedly funny and at times devastating—sounds like a day at the beach, yes?  –ES

Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing

Summer, despite its reputation for brightness, is prime time for hauntings. This brutally beautiful novel is full of ghosts both literal and figurative, plus a road trip, secrets, swamps, and—like summer itself—time that slips and bends and pulls us up short when we’re least expecting it.  –ET

Douglas A. Martin, Outline of My Lover

This slim novel, the story of an obsessive love between a young man and the older musician who keeps himself at a distance, is a pitch-perfect summer read: it’s intense, sexy, gratifying even while it’s breaking your heart. Douglas A. Martin captures that specific moment in which you will do anything to keep a particular person in your life; as his narrator submits to desire, his story becomes one of wandering, shifting identity, and the moment-by-moment calculations of an intense, unstable love.

As Hugh Martin writes in his introduction to a recent Nightboat Books edition of the book, he takes on “a rarely articulated position: the cunning pathétique, whose acts of submission are as calculated as they are genuine. He gets what he wants by becoming what is wanted.” A classic of queer literature and an inventive, gripping story, it’s a good choice for the season.  –CS

Lydia Millet, A Children’s Bible

There is a narrative tidiness to the summer novel, fitting as it does so neatly between seasonal signifiers of rebirth and death. And I’d wager that a disproportionate number of summer novels feature children at their center for similar narrative simplicity: who better to inhabit the full world of a single season than characters for whom it means so much?

Which leads me to Lydia Millet’s riveting (and funny) dystopian tale of one summer in the lives of an apostle’s dozen of wayward children. Basically abandoned by their affluent, checked-out parents while on a multifamily vacation at a sprawling country mansion, the young heroes of A Children’s Bible must reckon with the failure of the older generation as they confront a devastating weather event that tips the northeast into something approaching a Hobbesian nightmare.

Millet, as ever, has the lightest of touches with the heaviest of subjects, drawing out comically imbalanced intergenerational relationships fueled almost entirely by scorn. But insofar as A Children’s Bible also serves as a clear analog of the absolute mess that older generations have bequeathed today’s youth, it reminds us that winter, eventually, is coming.  –JD

Helen Fielding, Bridget Jones’s Diary

Everyone knows that Literary Hub is firmly on the side of Bridget Jones’s Diary, one of the funniest novels ever written, and somewhat unfairly shunted to the side as “chick-lit” (not that such a designation hurt its sales any). With Bridget by your side for summer reading, you can have your cake and eat it too—it’s a breeze to read, but unlike with plenty of books marketed for this time of year, you won’t be wolfing empty calories.  –ET

Jane Bowles, Two Serious Ladies

Contemporary novels about women on a strange spiral into depravity wish they could be this insane; in Bowles’ under-the-radar Modernist classic, both Miss Goering (unlikeable from birth), and Mrs. Copperfield (respectable in every way), are moved to slip the shackles of convention, mostly by sleeping with people they shouldn’t (a gangster, a teenage prostitute). “In order to work out my own little idea of salvation I really believe that it is necessary for me to live in some more tawdry place,” Miss Goering says. Is this novel about salvation? It depends on how you squint; either way, it will be a funny and mysterious companion on whatever semi-reasonable summer adventures you have planned.  –ET

David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

Like a tasting menu for novel styles; a good choice to bring on vacation when you really can’t decide what you’re going to be in the mood for, but want to be fully engrossed in what you’re reading nonetheless.  –ET

Alex Garland, The Beach

Nothing says summer like a nice beach, and there are few literary beaches beachier than the titular beach from The Beach. Beach. Alex Garland’s 1996 debut—now rightly considered one of Gen X’s Mount Rushmore novels—is the darkly hallucinogenic tale of a restless English backpacker’s search for a fabled island paradise off the coast of Thailand, and the nightmarish unraveling of the utopian community he discovers therein.

I, like thousands upon thousands of similarly gormless Banana Pancake Trail-ers, read The Beach while backpacking around Southeast Asia. It was the summer of 2008, and I was young and wild and free… sigh… Anyway, The Beach holds a special place in my heart, as does the flawed-but-fun 2000 movie adaption. I heartily recommend both.  –DS

Italo Calvino, The Baron in the Trees

A book that simply demands to be read outside.  –ET

Colson Whitehead, Sag Harbor

Sag Harbor is the ultimate “becoming someone else over the summer” novel. It is the story of fifteen-year-old Benji and his brother Reggie, two affluent teenage brothers spending their summer vacation in the idyllic Hamptons-adjacent beach town of Sag Harbor. There, they cross paths with many of the friends and classmates from their fancy Manhattan prep school, all refashioning themselves into their carefree vacationing alter-egos. It’s the summer of 1985. There are no parents around. Benji, a nerd still in braces, wants to be cool. It’s long understood that this, Whitehead’s third novel, was a more personal project than his previous two novels—a retelling of his own teenage years growing up in these wealthy New York communities, and what it means to be a Black teenager in these mostly white spaces.  –OR

Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

It’s not exactly light, breezy reading, but hear me out—besides being set in the appropriate season, with the titular lighthouse a promise and a boat ride away, Woolf’s novel is an exercise in both busy excitement (everyone’s consciousnesses filling the pages, overlapping and infecting each other) and the lack thereof (the emptiest house in all of literature). It’s also as sad as we sometimes forget summer can be.  –ET

Kevin Kwan, Crazy Rich Asians

For pure, unadulterated fun, you want Kevin Kwan’s satirical literary rom-com, set among the richest of the Singaporean rich, and concerning (of course) a lavish wedding.  –ET

Patrick Modiano, translated by John Cullen, Villa Triste

A quintessential Modiano novel, and an utterly, fantastically specific summer novel layered with memories, mysteries, and inchoate desire. As with nearly all of Modiano’s fiction, we follow a man’s interrogation of his own past, in this case a peculiar summer spent hiding out (or was he?) in the area of Lake Annecy, a resort area seemingly in a state of perpetual vanishing, its chic impossibly lost, its magic dwindled, its mainstays reduced to half-remembered names in a hotel ledger. In this land of summer possibility, the young man adopts a new name and identity and takes up with an actress and a seedy, charismatic doctor from an old Haute Savoie family. Together they amble through hotel and beach club communities causing minor scandals.

The climax comes with possibly the most memorable, and certainly the most exuberant, set piece in Modiano’s oeuvre: the Houligant Cup, a “concours d’elegance,” on which seemingly all the characters’ hopes and dreams are momentarily riding, a brief and wondrous absurdity that perfectly captures the strange summer atmosphere in Annecy, distorted by time and memory.  –Dwyer Murphy, CrimeReads editor-in-chief

Erin Somers, Stay Up with Hugo Best

A sometimes-overlooked quality of summer is that it’s the favorite season of ostentatious displays of wealth. We might know that extremely rich people are off somewhere being extremely rich in winter, too (skiing? Drinking port by the fire?), but in the summer they’re all so obviously summering and spending time on their grounds. So in case you need a reminder of the dissatisfaction and melancholy that can accompany even the fanciest in-ground pools, I recommend Erin Somers’ excellent debut. Even if you’re not in the market for schadenfreude (ugh, fine), the (sharp, wrenching) novel, which tells the story of a young comedy writer’s fraught Memorial Day weekend at the country house of a late-night legend, makes for excellent summer reading.  –JG

Marguerite Duras, The Lover

A glorious, slender novel about a forbidden love affair. May or may not inspire you to purchase an extravagant summer hat.  –ET

Jennifer Egan, The Keep

Egan’s best novel (that’s right, I said it) has everything I want in a summer read: a mystery, a medieval castle, a tinge of menace, a twang of metafiction, and atmosphere for days. Those who first encountered her with Good Squad and never bothered to read backward: you’re in for a treat.  –ET

Raven Leilani, Luster

This was the best book I read in summer 2020, the summer of Covid and protest. But it also evokes all of the best qualities of the season: a sense of thrill and danger, a sparkling irreverence, freedom and play. Also… it’s kinda hot. In that gross, sticky way, sure, but also in the other way. What more could you ask for?  –ET

Max Frisch, translated by Geoffrey Skelton, Montauk

Did I purchase Montauk, Max Frisch’s very autobiographical 1975 novel, from a Hamptons bookshop last summer because I loved the cover art? Yes! But then I read it and was very glad I took the plunge. The story is about a writer (Frisch, it is very obvious) who spends a summer weekend in Montauk with a younger woman with whom he is having a short love affair. As the hours pass, he remembers things about his life and writes them down. He observes things and writes them down.

The novel is kind of about nothing, in this way, but it is also possibly about everything in this way. Mostly, for me, it seemed to capture the kind of narration we (or at least I) do in our heads when we’re experiencing something ordinary but are wondering if it is secretly profound.  –OR

Hiroko Oyamada, translated by David Boyd, The Hole

This was the book that my two friends were each reading on the beach when I was reading Montauk (see above), and their descriptions were enough to make me seek it out. Asa is a young, newly married woman who moves with her husband to the country, near where his parents live. This is all during an extremely hot and unpleasant summer, and she, bored and restless, spends her time half-exploring, half-wandering around, until an encounter with a strange animal leads her to fall into a giant hole, a hole that has been waiting specifically for her.  –OR

Karen Russell, St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

Karen Russell stories always make me think of the summer months. Probably because they all take place in the warm swamp of the Florida Everglades, and the environment breathes down your neck the whole time. Alligators, crab shells, and houseboats abound! The boundaries of reality get quite hazy in these stories in a way that echoes the way summer can feel ripe with unburdened possibility. One wild story in particular is set in a sleepaway camp for disordered dreamers, and is exactly the kind of story you want to tell while sitting around a campfire.  –KY

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

It’s kind of boring to include The Great Gatsby on lists like this, but in this case I can’t help myself, because it really is the perfect summer novel—it’s short, it’s tragic, it’s beautifully written without being dense, it’s about wealth and striving and reinvention, and of course, it roughly spans a single summer. Then there’s the swimming pool… a true American summer novel.  –ET

Peter Benchley, Jaws

A very good reason (or two) to stay on the beach.  –ET

I have loved reading science fiction since age ten, when my school librarian handed me a copy of Jill Patton Walsh’s The Green Book. I fell in love with romance after reading Jane Eyre, which my uncle gave me. When I became a writer, my focus was on the former, but my stories often include a romantic relationship, sometimes at its start but just as often in its later stages.

When I sat down to write my latest novel, Meru, I knew I wanted to write an interstellar epic but I didn’t have a plot, so I drew upon one of my favorite Indian mythological stories, “Nala and Damayanti.” Unlike many love stories, this one is about a couple whose adventures begin mostly after they get married. The central question isn’t, “Will they or won’t they,” but rather, “How will they find their way back to each other?”

When most people hear “space opera,” they probably think of Dune or Star Wars rather than romance, but I’ve discovered that many books blend these two genres. Here are some of my favorites. They range from older works to some that came out in the last few years.

A common theme across all of these is that the two leads not only cross the vast distances between stars; they also bridge the treacherous gaps between cultures. My own novel is no exception. Space travel creates worlds with varied societies and life forms. It provides a fertile soil in which to explore romantic relationships, taking the subgenre beyond wormholes and laser battles.

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Sharon Lee and Steve Miller, Agent of Change

The first book of the long-running Liaden Universe series. The main characters, Val Con and Miri, are a spy and mercenary pair, but they’re not your typical couple. The Liaden Universe contains three different species of humankind, with Val Con being a Liaden–a more advanced species–and Miri being a Terran, a more typical human.

This creates some additional sparks and complexity to their relationship as they go on the run against some common enemies. Both characters’ points of view are represented.

I suspect that having two authors of different genders added an extra dimension to the writing. The series continues today, so there are many more books with new characters, twists, and turns, but this one still makes a great entry point.

Lois McMaster Bujold, Shards of Honor

Book One of the Vorkosigan Saga, a series that spans multiple generations and centers on a complex and quirky family. This first novel is full of space battles, science, and politics. It also features the romance that ultimately results in the conception of the lovable, inimitable Miles Vorkosigan.

The two central characters here are Aral Vorkosigan and Cordelia Naismith, who find themselves on opposite sides of a war. Their relationship develops slowly and is quite mature as the two of them deal with complex ethical and emotional situations.

This is definitely not your standard enemies-to-lovers story, and the book sets the stage for repercussions that will echo through the rest of the series.

Valerie Valdes, Chilling Effect

The first in a trilogy, this debut novel features an interspecies romance between a human starship captain and her alien crewmate. It’s a slow burn that’s complicated by the fact that Captain Eva Innocente is highly conflicted by her attraction to her subordinate, not to mention the many high-stakes situations that keep them both too busy to explore their feelings.

As with other space operas, there’s a lot of fast flying, fighting, and general hijinks in the vein of Firefly, along with a wonderful found-family crew and some heartbreaking moments of introspection and growth. Last but not least, there’s the pesky telepathic cats who get loose on board the ship.

Arkady Martine, A Desolation Called Peace

A follow-up to Martine’s breakout debut, A Memory Called Empire. The sequel gets deeper into the relationship between Mahit Dzmare, an interstellar diplomat, and Three Seagrass, an agent of the imperial Information Ministry, who first acknowledge their feelings for each other at the end of book one. In this novel, the two women are thrown together once again, this time while dealing with an alien first-contact situation that teeters on the brink of catastrophe.

Romance doesn’t take center stage in their interactions, but sparks definitely fly even as Martine goes deeper to explore cross-cultural relationships and the challenges associated with them.

Malka Older, The Mimicking of Known Successes

A novella by the author of Infomocracy, that takes place after Earth’s ecosphere has been rendered uninhabitable. The primary plot here is a murder mystery set on artificial rings built around Jupiter, and the vibe has a strong steampunk overtone even though the setting is in our future. The romance takes place between a detective, Mossa, and her academic ex-girlfriend, Pleiti.

This is a second-chance story that follows the two as they find clues, track down suspects, and discover that they have both changed just enough to find their love again—all while possibly saving the future of humanity.

______________________________

Meru by S. B. Divya is available via 47North.

The end of 2022 draws swiftly near, and with it the inevitable deluge of best-of lists. Have no fear; ours is coming. But first, and before things get truly hairy, we at Literary Hub wanted to take a moment to appreciate some of the books we’ve read recently that won’t be winning any new prizes or making a thousand lists—because they weren’t actually published this year. (Imagine that!) We live in a culture of hysterical newness, but luckily, books don’t expire—they have lives that stretch for months and years and decades after their publication. So to that end, are the non-2022 books we loved best in 2022.

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Laurie Colwin, Family Happiness (1982)

Reading a Laurie Colwin novel is sort of like watching a Nora Ephron movie. There is something deeply comforting about its familiar rhythms and its witty repartee. You are guaranteed a good story, typically one about misadventures in love. In Family Happiness, we meet Polly. Polly seems to have it all. She’s got a lawyer husband, cute children, a magazine-worthy home—and a lover on the side. Yup. Polly has always been the perfect mother, daughter, and wife; she is sick of contorting herself to fit into the spaces left by other people. In this affair, she finds refuge from the storm of her life. She finds the companionship and romance that her husband no longer offers her, but at what cost to her conscience? How can Polly be the person she truly wants to be? With this novel, Laurie Colwin puts daily family living under the microscope and asks cutting questions about sacrifice, the limits of love, and how to take the reins on a life barreling down the same old train tracks.  –Katie Yee, Associate Editor

Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, Murray Silverstein, et al., A Pattern Language (1977)

I moved this year, and had occasion—though mostly theoretical—to dip in and out of this cult classic: an oddly poetic, somewhat radical guide to architecture and community building. Principles include limiting buildings to four stories (“There is abundant evidence to show that high buildings make people crazy.”), the placement of grave sites (“No people who turn their backs on death can be alive.”), and the importance of carnivals (“Just as an individual person dreams fantastic happenings to released the inner forces which cannot be encompassed by ordinary events, so too a city needs its dreams.”). The effect is like opening a jewel box, one which continues to surprise, delight, and invite the reader to reconsider their surroundings.  –Emily Temple, Managing Editor

James Galvin, Resurrection Update (1997)

The last few years haven’t been great. Between the ambient alarm of cascading climate crises, the malign discord of incipient fascism, and the ever-present thrum of pandemic anxiety, life for most of us has gotten harder. Which is why so many have turned to poetry in whatever form it can be found. For me, that’s a slow, companionable reread of America’s great existentialist pastoralist, James Galvin. Though I love his lone novel, The Meadow, it’s Galvin’s poetry that has gotten me through the long, high winter of HOW WE LIVE NOW. It is not easy to balance lyricism and realism, but in this collection, spanning over 20 years, one is brought short again and again by the stark clarity of image and idea both.

There are ways of finding things, like stumbling on them.
Or knowing what you’re looking for.
A miss is as good as a mile.
There are ways to put the mind at ease, like dying,
But first you have to find a place to lie down.

–Jonny Diamond, Editor in Chief

Toni Morrison, Sula (1973)

Every bit as brilliant and devastating and darkly funny as I’d been led to believe, Sula (which had been sitting on my bookshelf, unread, for more years than I care to admit) has, I think, overtaken Beloved as my favorite work by the late Nobel laureate. Published in 1973, Morrison’s slim, gothic sophomore novel—a story of intense friendship and seismic rupture, motherhood and sexual freedom, buried trauma and unforgivable betrayal, set in the black neighborhood of a small Ohio town in the 1920s and 30s—is a marvel.  –Dan Sheehan, Book Marks Editor-in-Chief

Barbara Pym, Excellent Women (1952)

Brought to my attention by the Lit Century podcast, Barbara Pym’s comedy of manners stars 30-something spinster Mildred Lathbury in 1950s post-war London, and let me tell you, Mildred is queen of the silent burn. I wouldn’t call her scathing—she’s far too pious for that—but she notices things. She notices that her two new housemates, a young couple who seem mismatched, aren’t buying any toilet paper for the communal bathroom (“The burden of keeping three people in toilet paper seemed to me rather a heavy one”); she notices when her dinner companions are sloppy eaters (“Surely many a romance must have been nipped in the bud by sitting opposite somebody eating spaghetti?”); she notices that when men refer to her as an “excellent woman,” it’s something of an insult (“Virtue is an excellent thing and we should all strive after it, but it can sometimes be a little depressing”).

There’s no use describing the plot as it’s really Mildred’s voice that carries the novel. Indeed, one gets the feeling that Mildred might be a stand-in for the (unmarried) author herself. Thinks Mildred, “My thoughts went round and round and it occurred to me that if I ever wrote a novel it would be of the ‘stream of consciousness’ type and deal with an hour in the life of a woman at the sink.” Would read! Sorta did.  –Eliza Smith, Special Projects Editor

Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day (1989)

At the start of this year I decided I was going to listen to audiobooks. Not just “an” audiobook, but to dive right in and become a full on audiobook devotee. I listen to audiobooks when I’m running, when I’m doing the laundry, when I’m walking the dog, while I’m at my kids’ soccer practice and have to “watch” them (they’re little, it’s not so much playing as chasing a ball). And let me tell you, I’ve “read” twice as many books this year as I did last year. I’ve found that I especially like to audio-reread books that I first read years ago, which led me to listen to Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day over five days of running at the beach this summer.

And yes, the story of lifelong butler Stevens recalling his service at Darlington Hall in post-WWI England as he motors to meet Miss Kenton in post-WWII Oxford is strange Jersey-shore reading. But since The Remains of the Day is a perfect novel, it is readable anywhere. Stevens is the best unreliable narrator, so clear in his memories and beliefs and yet so blind to their results. I love the way Ishiguro moves in between the present and the past, and how the past can double on itself. This time, I felt so much more pity for Stevens than I did a decade ago on my first reading, when I thought the most interesting facet of the novel was the idea of England’s national identity. Now it’s the love story that appealed to me most—the lack, the loss. Poor Mr. Stevens!  –Emily Firetog, Deputy Editor

Werner Herzog, Of Walking In Ice (1980, trans. by Martje Herzog and Alan Greenberg)

I love Werner Herzog’s slightly unhinged diary of his journey on foot from Munich to Paris to “save” the life of Lotte Eisner. It was early winter 1974 and Herzog, 32 at the time, believed that if he could just suffer the three-week trek it would somehow keep Eisner—his dear friend and fellow filmmaker—from succumbing to grave illness. She was 78 at the time and… guess what? She lived another nine years. Herzog’s account shifts between the observational (“Many, many ravens flying south. The cattle keep stamping during transport, they are restless.”), the meditative (“The loneliness is deeper than usual today. I am developing a dialogical rapport with myself.”), and the mundane (“my left thigh has an ache in it up to my groin”). Through it all, though, Herzog is good company, and reminds us of what it means to make grand—possibly useless, possibly magical—gestures.  –Jonny Diamond, Editor in Chief

Tara Isabella Burton, Social Creature (2018)

I’m not sure if I can recommend this book, because at some point you will finish it, and then you’ll spend at least the next year searching for another exactly like it. Still, if you’re willing to take that chance, you’ll be rewarded with the perfect literary thriller for New York literary society looky-loos (and really, for anyone who loves impeccable plotting and taut, brutal prose). While the echoes of Tom Ripley are clear throughout the book, Social Creature stands on its own as a dark, nail-biting, and at times hilarious story of wealth, ambition, envy, and of course, literary magazines.  –Jessie Gaynor, Senior Editor

Tove Jansson, Fair Play (1989)

 Some books come along exactly when you need them; Fair Play arrived in my life this spring, its unassuming story filled with profound assertions about love, art, and partnership between women. Tove Jansson, mainly known for her prolific work in children’s literature, also authored a number of books for adults, including Fair Play, which she published in her mid-seventies (and which was reissued by NYRB in 2007, translated from the Swedish by Thomas Teal). By then, she had been partnered with the graphic artist Tuulikki Pietila for decades; the two women lived together between homes in Helsinki and the tiny Finnish island of Klovharun, their time there punctuated by adventures around the world.

The parallels, here, are clear: Fair Play follows the relationship between Mari, a writer and illustrator, and Jonna, a visual artist, as they live and work on a small Finnish island (and travel). There is no tense build-up here, no pent-up secrets or dramatic conflict. What drives the narrative is the more ordinary, thrumming question that so many of us encounter:  how do all the strung-together moments of a life become something meaningful? This story is a quiet delight; I hope it finds you, too, if and when you need it.  –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Tessa Hadley, Late in the Day (2019)

Generally considered Tessa Hadley’s best novel, I know I am not alone in loving Late in the Day the way I do. A perfect domestic novel, written in spare, pure language, telling you exactly what you need to know—nothing more, nothing overwrought, nothing dramatic in the conveyance. It’s the dichotomy between the huge, revelatory, plotty events that are occurring, and the way it is told, that makes it all the more strained and intense, the pain pushing at the limits of what can be said in simple prose. It’s a story of marriage, not just of the two couples, Christine and Alex, and Lydia and Zachary, but the marriage of the couples to each other. Christine and Lydia, Alex and Zachary, Christine and Zach, Alex and Lydia: the combinations within, and the entity as a whole, something that works best, or maybe works at all, with all four of them.

But immediately the foursome is shattered by the death of Zachary. It’s a loss of a husband and a friend, but it’s also the loss of what these couples could be to each other. Until he died, they didn’t realize what a delicate balance they were all hanging in, perfectly evened out, just the correct amount of close and separate for the marriages and friendships and group as a whole to keep going, keep loving each other. In the wake of his death, in the midst of her grief, Lydia moves in with Alex and Christine. The balances are upset, they are all unmoored in their positions to one another: something unforgivable occurs. What’s even worse than the fact of what happens, is how human it all is, how predictable even. Both human and surreal, lovely, and devastating, it’s everything I could hope a novel to be.  –Julia Hass, Contributing Editor

Aimee Bender, The Color Master (2013)

Aimee Bender is a wizard of language. I don’t know how she manages to compress so many big, blobby feelings into such perfect pages. She’s a master of distillation, I guess, is what I mean. If I had one wish, it would be to sit inside her brain and see how she comes up with these things. As per usual, The Color Master is off-kilter and fable-like in the best ways. In one story, a college student ends up at an old man’s house in the middle of the night and discovers some eerie coincidences between herself and his estranged daughter; in another, a person finds that they are losing their vocabulary. In the titular story, a renowned village clothing shop is tasked with replicating the sheen of the natural world in their designs: shoes the color of rocks, a dress the color of the moon. (This one blew my freaking mind.) Every conceit feels so fresh; every sentence slices cleanly. As a writer, she’s obsessed with evolution; at every turn, she is asking smartly: how did we get here? Honestly, I put off finishing this collection for days and days because after this, I knew I was done with her oeuvre. Aimee Bender, on the off-chance that you are reading these, please! I am hungry for more.  –KY

Don DeLillo, White Noise (1985)

Nobody told me that this novel was so damn funny, and tender, and existentially terrifying (ok, plenty of people told me that it was existentially terrifying). Now, I know what you’re thinking: he only read White Noise this year because the movie is coming out. First of all, shut up; you don’t know my life. And secondly, so what? I liked Libra. I liked The Body Artist. I was going to get to White Noise eventually. The trailer for Noah Baumbauch’s adaptation just gave me a little nudge. So, thank you, Noah. Even though I don’t particularly care for your films, I’m grateful that you brought Jack Gladney, his crippling fear of death, his unconventional (and often wildly ill-informed) family unit, his libidinous and endlessly-theorizing colleague, and his tin ear for German, into my life.  –DS

Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking (2005)

When Joan Didion died late last year, I decided I would reread her novels, memoirs, and essays. The Year of Magical Thinking might be her very best. In it, Didion recounts her experiences of grief after the death of her husband John Dunne. She remembers the night he died, the vacations they took, the deadlines they faced together; she recounts and analyzes his novels and hers, and describes the angst of telling her daughter Quintana, who is hospitalized with pneumonia, about his death. Didion writes with the clarity we all crave when trying to understand our own lives, and sheds light on the way we feel and the people we want to be when faced with tragedy.  –EF

Louise Erdrich, Future Home of the Living God (2017)

Louise Erdrich’s 2017 novel cropped up on several post-Roe reading lists this year, and rightly so: not only is there an abortion on the first page, but the story revolves around the policing of women’s bodies as evolution kicks into reverse, throwing the future of humanity (and Earth itself) into question. Our narrator is pregnant 26-year-old Cedar Hawk Songmaker, an Ojibwe adoptee who grew up with liberal white parents in Minneapolis. Scared, alone, and on a frightening Most Wanted list of sorts, Cedar seeks refuge with her biological family and keeps a record of her life in notebook entries addressed to her unborn son. In the background, signs of the end times (or the beginning times?) emerge: ancient species reappear, fundamentalist religions take hold, reproductive bodies are forced to reproduce. At the same time, Cedar’s Ojibwe tribe regains its land, and her depressive stepfather finds hope in their people’s continued evolution. Erdrich writes along the tight rope of optimism and despair in this tense, pensive novel that often feels like a thriller.  –ES

Muriel Spark, The Girls of Slender Means (1963)

I believe everything about this book is perfect, starting with its title. Muriel Spark’s (slender) novel, set in just-postwar London (“when all the nice people in England were poor, allowing for exceptions”), follows of the inhabitants of the May of Teck Club, a residence hall established “for the Pecuniary Convenience and Social Protection of Ladies of Slender Means.” The novel, which moves easily among the young women’s stories, is a masterclass in polyphony, and a mind-boggling combination of savage humor and lightly obscured (for a while, at least) tragedy. It’s also one of the most economical and precise books I’ve ever read—every detail is the correct one, and not a word is out of place. I suspect this one will be on my re-read list for years to come.  –JG

Izumi Suzuki, Terminal Boredom (2021)

Published last year by Verso Books, Terminal Boredom gathers seven stories by Japanese countercultural legend Izumi Suzuki, translated by Polly Barton, Sam Bett, David Boyd, Daniel Joseph, Aiko Masubuchi, and Helen O’Horan. In spite of all the truly good science fiction out there, it isn’t normally my thing; Suzuki blasted through any hesitation I had with this blunt, restless collection. Don’t take anything for granted in a Suzuki story; the worlds she creates are absurd, her narrators alternately testing the social constrictions of their respective worlds and worn out by the impossibility of resisting authority. Verso also announced last year that it will publish Love < Death, another Suzuki collection, at some point in the future, for which I’m already excited.  –CS

Miriam Toews, Irma Voth (2011)

I’m a Miriam Toews completist, or at least an aspirational one, just to give a sense for why I’m perpetually recommending her. While not my absolute favorite of Toews’ novels, her writing is so consistently faultless, that even her worst work (not that this is that!!) would be better than most things I read. From 2011, it reads as still working up to her greater novels (All My Puny Sorrows, Fight Night), though still rife with typical Toews-isms. It centers around a Mennonite community, and a plucky, funny female protagonist who can’t quite live the way her devout and terrifying father wishes her to. She’s managed to escape, in a sense, through her marriage to Jorge, yet he too ends up wanting something from her that she can’t give.

The rigidity of the roles in a Menonnite community are so completely at odds with the full, messy, spark-plug characters running through all of Toews’ novels. These characters have a life-force that pushes them out and away from the community they were born into, and yet they still wish to belong, still wish for family, unconditional love, still wish to understand their place in the world. It’s a dramatization of how any human feels, trying to learn how to live, but Irma Voth is having to build it all from the ground up. The writing mirrors the process: rushed, urgent, hilarious, confused, halted by grief and failure, and yet kept afloat, kept joyful, by light and jokes and sisters and hope.  –JH

Ruth Ozeki, The Book of Form and Emptiness (2021)

Ruth Ozeki’s wildly inventive novel is like nothing I have ever read before. This is the story of Benny Oh, who starts to hear voices after his father’s tragic death. For Benny, the voices have a clear source: they are the objects around him speaking to him. Some of them have a chipper tone, but others come across as much more sinister. As his grieving mother becomes a hoarder, Benny can’t seem to find peace in his home; the voices are too loud. He finds sanctuary at the public library, where everything is a whisper. (This is a real book lover’s book.) At the library, he also meets a beautifully strange cast of characters—and his own Book, who talks to him, guides him, and helps him learn to tell his own story.

What’s really spectacular about this book is Ruth Ozeki’s ability to walk the line of mental illness and magical realism. (An early line: “Music or madness. It’s totally up to you.”) Of course, in a way, this is a story of a mourning family and the mental health problems that intense loss triggers. This is not glossed over; there are sections that take place in a psychologist’s office and in a mental health facility. But it’s a story that also meets the characters where they are and takes their lived realities seriously. There are whole swaths of the novel that are told from the perspective of Ben’s Book; we hear what he hears. The world Ruth Ozeki has created here is laced with magic.  –KY

Art Spiegelman, Maus (1991)

Beautiful and horrific, a rendering in miniatures of the most monumental and incomprehensible of horrors, I couldn’t tear my eyes away from Art Spiegelman’s masterwork—its crowded expressionist panels spilling over with brutality and humanity, its tender but unsparing framing narrative, it’s refusal to deify its heroic, haunted protagonist—which, I was pleased to discover, was not banned and/or removed from my local library here in Wyoming. Heralded as a genre-definer for a reason.  –DS

Simone de Beauvoir, tr. Sandra Smith, Inseparable (2020)

The moment I started this book, I felt as if I were back in Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels: two precocious young girls, the narrator not just admiring of but entirely enamored by the other. It feels authentic partly because it is: the novel is based on de Beauvoir’s pivotal relationship with her best friend, Élisabeth “Zaza” Lacoin, who died at the age of 22—“murder[ed] by her environment, her milieu,” de Beauvoir later wrote in All Said and Done, Zaza’s milieu being the bourgeoisie and organized religion, both punishing and repressive of her natural zeal for life. Originally written in 1954 and deemed by its author “too intimate” to publish, Inseparable is moving and distressing, infuriating in its incompleteness, and a must-read for de Beauvoir and Ferrante fans alike.  –ES

Joanna Faber and Julie King, How to Talk So Little Kids Will Listen (2017)

We often turn to books as an alternative to shrieking into the void, but when you’re the parent of a toddler, you also need them when the void is shrieking into you. (In this case, yes, the void is the toddler. I love my precious void. I’m very tired.) Perhaps the most helpful book I read this year, in a purely pragmatic sense, was How to Talk So Little Kids Will Listen, which offers legible advice on exactly what its title promises. While it might not offer the electric prose or masterful world-building (just guessing) of some of the other titles on this list, if you have a young child who screams like they’re auditioning for Jason Blum through every. Single. Car ride, I can’t recommend this one highly enough. (Regarding the car, ours is now equipped with an ice cream button, a pretzel button, an Elsa and Olaf button, and a nice dinosaur button, all of which we encourage our kid to press whenever she’s feeling the need to shriek. Amazingly, this actually works.) –JG

Rachel Carson, Under the Sea-Wind (1941)

Rachel Carson’s first book, Under the Sea-Wind, which grew from her work as a writer for the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries, brings together the stories of the ocean’s inhabitants in a pluralistic celebration of its beauty and complexity. Spending any amount of time with this book feels like standing at the water’s edge with Carson as a patient guide; it is a beautiful work of deep observation, an informative look at the ecology of ocean habitats, and an amazing achievement of environmental writing. Spending time with it this year felt like taking an antidote to everything that feels overwhelming in the world.  –CS

Beth Morgan, A Touch of Jen (2021)

A Touch of Jen is so bonkers and unhinged it’s hard to even know fully what to say about it. It’s a tale of obsession, social media, desire, and the void at the center of our fixations on aesthetic, and other people’s lives. If you’re like me, you might be immediately tired by descriptions lauding a book for tackling our social media age and internet culture. Kind of like how books about Trump or the pandemic can sound god-awful: we can’t escape it in life! Why would I read about it too? All to say, it’s a high compliment when a book manages to center itself in the internet universe and still pierce through the immediate wariness. It’s ludicrous, extremely discerning, and totally bizarre: you’ll just have to read it to know what I mean.  –JH