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What should a summer book provide? Escapism, sure—no one wants to sit on a sun lounger reading about a sweaty commute. Also, stimulation: This is your time to read something that is mildly edifying, a nourishing break from the Insta-guff being pumped at you through your phone (quite probably on said sweaty commute). It is also, of course, a chance to find out what the publishing world has been up to so far this year, from the gripping best sellers that you’ve seen around to the unsung literary gems. We’ve made a selection from this year’s best books to get you started.
Ben Lerner’s deceptively slight novel begins with a familiar journalistic nightmare. A writer travels to Providence to the house of a venerable academic and his former teacher, whom he hopes to interview. Only he’s messed up his phone and can’t record it—and, for somewhat mystifying reasons, decides not to confess. But instead of turning into a comedy of hapless errors, Lerner’s book becomes a deeply unexpected juxtaposition of monologues that pose questions about connection, legacy, and the nature of authenticity.
I’m sorry to speak about sweaty commutes just one more time, but this will almost certainly have been where you first caught a glimpse of the bright-yellow cover of Asako Yuzuki’s monster hit Butter. This novel was actually written first—and that arguably shows—but if you are craving some more exploration of the excesses of female obsession in modern-day Tokyo, then this one, about the friendship between two lonely women and, as a leitmotif, one rapacious fish, will tide you over.
I’m rewatching Girls right now, partly because I was reminded to do so by the first third of its creator’s memoir, in which Dunham reveals the mechanics and machinations behind the era-defining HBO show. Some have found less to enjoy in the later chapters—as Dunham details a litany of physical symptoms that have come to dictate much of her life—but I found her unblinking reflections on female bodies, on addiction and emotional dependence, on ambition and love, to be scintillating to the not-so-bitter end.
For some reason, things just happen to David Sedaris. The essayist seems to have an endless supply of peculiar incidents to report, as he does in his new collection, which recounts a tryst with Duolingo, say, and navigating his partner Hugh’s hip replacement. But of course Sedaris doesn’t have different things happen: He has the same stuff as us—traveling, aging, being part of a family—only he observes and records with a laser-sharp wit and deceptive lightness.
If you’re invested in the rake’s progress of Ray Carney, Colson Whitehead’s sometime furniture salesman, sometime criminal and the protagonist of his Pulitzer-winning Harlem Shuffle and its follow-up, Crook Manifesto, then you’ll want to complete the Harlem trilogy with this one. Now we’ve moved on to New York in the ’80s—so fun! Well, kind of—and Carney is once again drawn into the city’s seedy underworld.
Writer Lauren Elkin (Art Monsters) was a child soprano, so she would understand better than most the relationship between the three elements in her new book’s subhead: women, music, and power. From Homer’s sirens luring Odysseus and his crew toward the rocks to the punk singers who weaponized their voices’ perceived ugliness and imperfections, Elkin examines the way that the female voice has been demonized, manipulated, controlled, and, most cruelly, silenced.
Lázár is a book that you’ve probably read about. This knotty tale of a Hungarian family dynasty caused a sensation when it was published in March; even more so because its author, Nelio Biedermann, is a debut novelist and, to make matters worse, was only 22 at the time. With the adulation—the New York Times profile, the comparisons to Thomas Mann—has come the inevitable blowback, arguing that it’s slighter than it at first seems. Well, you’ve got some time on your hands this summer, so decide for yourself.
In this tale as old as time, a middle-aged man enduring a low-level crisis of purpose finds his lust for life renewed by a vigorous sporting activity. In this instance, the man is Ned, and the vigorous sporting activity is tennis. In Ashton Politanoff’s deftly funny novel, Ned’s newfound obsession pulls him into a web of competitive excitement and tennis-club-related intrigue. In a parallel tale that’s also as old as the hills, his wife is mystified by the whole thing.
An academic couple and their two children move from California to Vermont to pass what they hope will be a restorative year in the countryside. But your problems, it turns out, are prone to travel with you, whether they be the lag effects of serious illness (Kate, the mother) or the deflating tedium of not quite finishing your Ph.D. (Miles, the dad, over a decade in and counting). Daniel Mason, a Pulitzer prize finalist for North Woods, pokes fun at his well-meaning characters with careful tenderness in this sweet, summery satire.
Writer and regular Esquire contributor Matt Blake bought a haunted house. He didn’t mean to, of course, but a mysterious carpet stain and strange goings-on in the dead of night caused him to dig into the history of his new home in Walthamstow, East London, to see what might be up. And in a classic case of seek and ye shall find, his house did have a dark past, sending Blake, a natural skeptic and an engaging narrator, on a fascinating exploration into place, memory, and the paranormal.
Famously, when a friend has success, a little piece of you dies, but when Max Olesker, a former Esquire staffer, wrote his debut book, he had the good grace to ensure that a little piece of him died as well. Without wishing to give away any spoilers, it was quite a specific piece, to which the facts of his personal quest—to convert to Orthodox Judaism despite, in a peculiar turn of events, already being Jewish—provide a hint. But ultimately this isn’t a story of eye-watering surgery so much as a funny, insightful, and enormously engaging love story that has you invested till the end.
“The Balloon,” one of the stories in this collection of 13 from the author of The Friend, is little more than four pages long. And yet its nameless female narrator manages to describe a peculiarly alluring man, whose success with women—including her—is a source of admiration and bafflement. Also: heartache; also: resentment. It’s typical of Nunez’s astonishing precision as a writer, of which this collection provides a dazzling display.
Dave Eggers is a writer who can convey both warmth and darkness, often at the same time. As with The Circle and A Hologram for the King, he proves once again that he’s not shy of taking on big, powerful entities—in this instance, the art world. Contrapposto is a sculptural term for an off-center figurative pose, but it also translates from the Italian as “counterpoint,” a useful descriptor for the enduring friendship between Cricket and Olympia—underwritten, perhaps, by stronger feelings—that the novel describes.
There really isn’t a topic about which Simon Garfield can’t find a lively tale to tell. He’s written books on several typefaces, stamp collecting, and the color mauve. In some ways it’s extraordinary that he hasn’t yet written about the pen and the way this seemingly simple instrument has given our innermost thoughts both longevity and tangible form. From László Bíró and George Safford Parker to the exploding pens of James Bond, Garfield once again shows what a rich history there is to explore.
There may not be a nicer man in publishing, but Scottish author Douglas Stuart, winner of the Booker prize for his debut, Shuggie Bain, wears his success with considerable ease. In his latest novel, he tells a story of a father and son in Harris in the Outer Hebrides, where island life makes community ever important and buries secrets ever deeper. But while art graduate Cal may think he’s the only one who’s suffering from the strictures of a repressive upbringing, his father also bears the scars.
Is the title a little uncomfortably punny? Maybe. Did Patrick Radden Keefe make a mockery of the British press by investigating a huge story from right under their noses when he wrote his first article about the death of 19-year-old Zac Brettler for The New Yorker? Absolutely. In this expanded telling, he looks into the backstories of the fast-living friends and sinister criminals around whom the teenager built his extraordinary and tragic double life, as well as the family he kept it from.
