The right book is critical for a summer vacation. Choose well and you’ve got all the time in the world to enjoy it; choose wrong and you’re stuck looking at the waves. This list of the top summer books has you covered, with everything from fantastic fiction to eye-opening history.
The Phoenix Economy: Work, Life, and Money in the New Not NormalBy Felix Salmon
Salmon, chief financial correspondent at Axios Media Inc. and host of a popular podcast, has made an ambitious attempt to articulate the changes wrought by the Covid-19 pandemic. Focusing mostly on Western societies, he sketches out changes in life and work, drawing connections among broader macroeconomic phenomena. The book is simultaneously of the moment and an attempt to predict trends that will have staying power. It’s a tricky balancing act and a valuable contribution to a growing mountain of literature grappling with the most universal and consequential tragedy since World War II. Out now, Harper Business
Bad Summer PeopleBy Emma Rosenblum
Rosenblum, a former editor at Bloomberg Businessweek and now chief content officer at Bustle Digital Group, nails the formula for a beach-book blockbuster. Set in a thinly veiled version of Fire Island’s Saltaire, the vacation town where Rosenblum spent summers growing up, her debut novel has it all: wealth, gossip, unhappy husbands and even unhappier wives, infidelity, still more gossip—and murder. (To be fair, this is less a whodunit and more a who’s-doing-it-with-whom.) Expect to see it on beach towels up and down the Eastern Seaboard. May 23, Flatiron Books
My Friend Anne FrankBy Hannah Pick-Goslar
Anne Frank’s diary brought the vast horror of the Holocaust down to a painful human scale. Pick-Goslar, who died last year at the age of 93, nearly suffered the same fate as her childhood confidante. After her family was forced to leave its comfortable life in Germany, she moved to Amsterdam and in time grew close with Frank. Pick-Goslar’s own story has been told before, but this memoir has lost none of its clarity and urgency. Her chronicle of her own time in Bergen-Belsen—as she watches her father, then grandmother, die—is wrenching. June 6, Little, Brown Spark
The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous ObsessionBy Michael Finkel
It is romantic to liken art thieves to Pierce Brosnan’s glamorous character in The Thomas Crown Affair. The reality is far less charming. Case in point: Stéphane Breitwieser, one of the most successful art thieves of all time. From roughly 1994 to 2001, Breitwieser executed more than 200 heists. The book’s first lesson? Europe has a lot of understaffed historic buildings. The second? Even a kleptomaniac with delusions of grandeur can be made mildly sympathetic in the hands of a skilled writer. June 27, Knopf
The Chieftain and the Chair: The Rise of Danish Design in Postwar AmericaBy Maggie Taft
Danish design (or at least stuff that looks like it) has been a fixture of American interior decoration since it was first imported in the 1950s. Pieces like Hans Wegner’s Round Chair and Finn Juhl’s Chieftain are ubiquitous, so it’s easy to forget that someone had to make people believe they were emblems of middle-class good taste before, you know, they actually were. Taft, an art historian and writer, uses this clear, tight book to trace the origins of these objects and in doing so demolishes some of the many myths about a field you know and (might) love. May 22, University of Chicago Press
The Making of Another Major Motion Picture MasterpieceBy Tom Hanks
Will the relentless cultural hegemony of Tom Hanks ever cease? Not content with his two Oscars and his status as America’s sweetheart, he’s set his sights on the world of literature. First there was a 2017 collection of short stories, which became a national bestseller. Now he’s written a novel, which tells the story of making a Hollywood blockbuster. Filled with insider-y tidbits and written in the same cadence Hanks speaks, the book is a winner. Look out, interpretive dance: You could be next. Out now, Knopf
Goodbye, Eastern Europe: An Intimate History of a Divided LandBy Jacob Mikanowski
The last millennium hasn’t been kind to people living in the area we call Eastern Europe. Its native pagan inhabitants were largely wiped out in the Middle Ages (some of the region’s first Christian kings got rich shipping locals to slave markets as far afield as Baghdad and Córdoba). Even under more enlightened rulers, the area became a hotly contested border between the great powers. Mikanowski, a journalist and historian, has timed his book all too well: After a post-Soviet period of relative calm, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has brought the unlucky region into the spotlight once again. July 18, Pantheon
Crook ManifestoBy Colson Whitehead
At this point, Whitehead’s two Pulitzer Prizes should condition readers to expect something skillful, but it’s still a rush to sink into his dazzling, lightly humorous storytelling. Set in 1970s Harlem, the book begins with a “one more job and then he’s out” setup: The protagonist, furniture salesman and erstwhile fence Ray Carney, needs impossible-to-get Jackson 5 tickets for his daughter. The plot quickly becomes more interesting and much more expansive, eventually encompassing a mosaic of criminal, oftentimes sympathetic characters, but the action remains rooted in Harlem as the neighborhood goes up in metaphorical (and literal!) flames. July 18, Doubleday
Pageboy: A MemoirBy Elliot Page
Page, now 36, rose to fame with the hit 2007 movie Juno, which chronicles the travails of a willful teenager who decides to go through with an unexpected pregnancy. Arguably the pinnacle of the early aughts hipster cultural canon, the film made Page, who then identified as female and went by Ellen, a star. So when he came out as a trans man in 2020, it was both a source of shock and celebration: Here was a rare celebrity able to articulate to the world the complexities and exigencies of a misgendered life. But how did Page actually feel about it all while it was happening? And how does he feel now? In this memoir, Page’s devoted public will finally find out. June 6, Flatiron Books
Countries of OriginBy Javier Fuentes
Fuentes, a 2018 Lambda Literary Fellow, has come charging out of the gate with a cool, terse debut that follows the tribulations of a very skilled pastry chef who’s been living in the US illegally. Fuentes’s protagonist, Demetrio, is from Spain. He’s spent his life in New York, getting by with fake papers and, it seems, raw talent. When the book begins, he’s working at a restaurant that bears more than a few similarities to New York’s Daniel. Soon enough, a background check forces Demetrio back to Europe, where he begins a new life with new anxieties and, encouragingly, new opportunities. June 6, Pantheon
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