One of the perks of long summer days: it’s not rude to simply roll over on your beach towel, away from your friends, and open a book. Below, you’ll find the best books coming out this summer, a few suggestions from the writer Melissa Febos, and a couple older books worth revisiting.
The 12 Best New Books of the Summer
Nicola Dinan’s novel about a trans woman in a new relationship delivers devastating one-liners, a perfect social read of the queer-literary scene, and a second-act twist. It also provides an irresistible critique of contemporary wedding culture, which is probably relevant for your summer plans.
Great Black Hope, a smart and sensitive new nightlife novel, features some fictionalized but recognizable characters who are fun to suss out. With a dark, glimmering plot, the novel covers everything from the wily nature of addiction to micro-influencer party girls. (“They seemed to live entirely by what looked best in retrospect.”)
Quiet but explosive, Among Friends begins as a man hits a stranger with his car. He remains deeply assured of his total faultlessness. The wallops keep coming in this brutal assessment of parenthood, punishment, and the impossibilities of reckoning with one’s own culpability. And there’s an excellent description of a smile: “Any broader and his mouth might have been slightly too large. Instead, his smile held like an embrace. Dazzling teeth, lips like folds of rich fabric, a smile in which one wants to believe.”
It’s astonishing how much the mid-century American designer Claire McCardell changed the way we dress. She invented mix-and-match separates and ballet flats, as well as introducing wrap dresses, leggings, hoodies, and jeans for women. She did it all with wit: “Like every woman in the world, after your first trip to Santa Fe, you are going to have a turquoise and silver period.” This biography is as appealing and clever as McCardell’s designs.
Benedict Nguyen’s debut novel is a confident, wry story of two extremely online trans women who are pro-volleyball players. Six and Green are in love, but also in competition with each other. A line on the strange conditions of being an online figure tied to identity politics: “Jumping from the political imperative to vindicate a hate crime to hawking subscriptions with hardly a beat between made their little scheme feel senseless.”
It’s bold to create a fictional persona with a strong resemblance to the provocateur and radio host Howard Stern. It’s even bolder to imagine a love-triangle between an aspiring novelist, the Stern-esque radio host, and his twenty-something daughter. Amy Silverberg has the wit, insight, and gumption to pull it off.
Aiden Arata’s essay collection includes everything from ruminations on the precarity of Los Angeles to essays on the strange realm of intellectual-influencers. On micro-influencing: “And then the product or the event arrived and it was a lipstick the cool mauve of a corpse, or it was a dinner at which I sat next to a public relations girl and sampled terpene-infused cocktails until the public relations girl, loaded on terpenes and recently single, dissolved over mention of Valentine’s Day and wept into my mushroom risotto.”
In the midst of breakdown, both mental and marital, John Gregory Dunne, the husband of Joan Didion, looks for a diagnosis for his melancholy. Dunne’s doctor informs him he has soft shoulders. Dunne writes: “Soft shoulders. If ever there seemed a perfect metaphor of my life that season, that was it. I did not seek another diagnosis.” From there, Dunne departs for Las Vegas, where he wrote this enigmatic, licentious, angry novel, which blurs memoir and fiction. First published in 1974, it’s being reissued by McNally Editions.
Stephanie Wambugu’s novel tracks the life-altering friendship between Ruth, a lonely only child of recent immigrants, and Maria, a talented and charismatic orphan. They meet in Catholic school in Providence, move to New York in the early-nineties, then fling themselves into the art world. Judgment, imitation, adoration, and suspicion abound.
Daniel Saldaña París’s novel, translated from Spanish by Christina MacSweeney, concerns the intense, tangled connection between art and the natural world. During raging fires in Cuernavaca, Mexico, three friends engage in a mystic, ecstatic dance to cope with the burning city. References include: Mary Wigman, Blockula witches, Aleister Crowley, Olof Bromelius, Paracelsus.
The essay collection Putting Myself Together traces the shifts in Jamaica Kincaid’s preoccupations—from the intricacies of social dynamics to the verdant dynamics of a garden bed. Highlights include a Pam Grier profile for the August 1975 issue of Ms., “Jamaica Kincaid’s New York” for the October 1977 issue of Rolling Stone, and “Her Best Friend Provokes Her to Write About Her Garden” for a 2002 issue of Architectural Digest.
This novel—whose primary preoccupations are mourning, lifetime loves, and forced intimacies—has more than aesthetics to offer, but the aesthetics offered are sumptuous. The three figures in this twisted love triangle are a jewelry designer, a flower-arranger turned restaurateur, and an alt-indie musician who goes by Separate Bedrooms. It’s full of great jokes: “A prayer for the rejected: Oh if ye be noble and true, may ye be blessed with running into the boy who dumped you after he’s had a terrible haircut.”
The Three New Books Melissa Febos, author of The Dry Season, is Reading This Summer
“Lydi Conklin is the master of the empathetic cringe—their second book and first novel follows a disgraced rock musician to a summer music camp for teens, where drama, romance, and more cringes ensue.”
“I adored Lin's first book, Gay Bar, and I'm loving this one, too—a history of the struggle for gay marriage in the U.S. combines with a blisteringly erotic and highly romantic love story; need I say more?”
“A deeply researched biography of the LGBTQI rights activist, artist, and hero of the Stonewall Uprising that is a feat of gorgeous storytelling and should be required reading for everyone in the United States.”
Not New, Not Classics, But Worth Reading This Summer
Thomas Savage’s 1967 Power of the Dog (made into a movie in 2021) explores mythical, homosocial attachments of the American cowboy. It’s spare, haunting, and decisive.
Through a series of connected stories, Fair Play inspects the talky, thinky, devoted relationship of a writer and artist as they squabble, press each other’s intellect, and consider whether their life is art. An ideal (potentially destructive) book to bring on a couple’s trip.
