Summer Reads

Abstract

Lori Feathers (@lorifeathers) is a co-owner of Interabang Books in Dallas, Texas, and the store’s book buyer. She writes freelance book reviews, sits on the board of the National Book Critics Circle, and is a fiction judge for the 2018 Best Translated Book Award. The winter break was one of long reads: Exit West, If Beale Street Could Talk, Manhattan Beach, Little Fires Everywhere. After a busy four months of editing and teaching, with little time for reading novels, Managing and Culture Editor Michelle Johnson is looking forward to again immersing herself in other worlds. Here are three already on her list. Therese Bohman Eventide Trans. Marlaine Delargy Other Press Swedish author Therese Bohman, who is also an art-and-culture columnist, creates for her third novel an art history professor navigating the politics of the academic world. The publisher’s catalog describes the book as posing questions about the “distorted standards to which women are held in their relationships and careers.” The online reviews promise “crystalline reflections on art and culture” (Sylvia Brownrigg) and a protagonist who ultimately prevails. Rupert Thomson Never Anyone But You Other Press To continue reading about strong women, art, and culture, I’ve already set aside the advance copy of Rupert Thomson’s Never Anyone But You. This novelization of the lives of two revolutionary women, Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, traces their clandestine love affair in avant-garde 1930s Paris and Jersey. While smashing gender barriers, they played an influential role in the surrealist and dadaist movements and eventually risked their lives creating anti-Nazi propaganda. Tayari Jones An American Marriage Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill With both Edwidge Danticat and Jacqueline Woodson recommending it, this story of a wrongful conviction’s impact upon a marriage is a timely must-read. Though not a courtroom drama, the novel promises enough connection to the law-and-literature genre to satisfy readers who, like me, want to reflect on how the US legal system affects both those brought into it and their families. editor’s pick: summer reads with a woman. Lisa, his latest lover, understands his commitment to God and never asks him to choose between her and the church. When Lisa is diagnosed with terminal cancer, Father Abram feels helpless to her suffering and struggles to understand why God allows it. At the same time, he questions whether God truly forgives his repeated breach of his vow of celibacy. He despairs God’s silence in response to both his sins and his efforts to atone for them. Father Abram entangles himself in a tightening web of dishonesty as he tries to keep his relationship with Lisa concealed, and this causes him great shame. He comes to understand that his feelings of shame are a symptom of God’s grace—evidence that his striving to be good can never be finished. Unworthy is an immersive novel of one man’s fight to reconcile his flawed humanity with a godliness compelled by the sacred; his recognition that even the most devout face silence in their need for divine solace. Madame Nielsen The Endless Summer Trans. Gaye Kynoch | Open Letter The Endless Summer feels like a fairy tale—lyrical, poignant, and dreamy; a story set in an otherworldly, timeless space. A group of young people converge upon a ramshackle manor where they pass day after summer day in a state of hedonistic languor and ardent fascination with the beautifully poised and reserved matron of the house, referred to simply as “the mother.” This woman is indeed mother of three children: a teenage daughter, Stina, and two little boys. But for Stina and the handful of young men who decamp at the manor that summer (among them both Stina’s genderambiguous lover and her best friend from school), the mother is muse—enigmatic, beautiful, self-possessed—a being whose love and attention they all long to receive. To their great surprise, the mother takes a lover, one of a newly arrived pair of young men from Portugal hitchhiking across Europe. Months later the summer idyll abruptly ends when one of the group dies. Madame Nielsen fittingly subtitles her novel “a requiem,” and indeed it beautifully...