Summer joys are spoilt by use,” Keats wrote, meaning the less you do between now and August, the better. And so it goes with reading. The beach read, the backpacker’s paperback, the road-tripper’s bible—the hullabaloo over our Summer Read exists because we don’t want to get it wrong. To that end, here’s a guide to the out-of-the-way pleasures coming to your bookstore soon (release dates are tentative and may vary by retailer). All of them will keep your travel bag light and your joys unspoilt.
Fiction
The best new work out this summer—with a few exceptions—will appear in translation, starting with Mandarins (July 7, Archipelago), a collection of short stories by famed Japanese author Ryunosuke Akutagawa (best known for Rashomon). This new translation by Charles De Wolf features three gem-like pieces never before seen in English.
If ninjas and samurai warriors are your thing, grab a copy of Heaven’s Net Is Wide: The First Tale of the Otori, by Lian Hearn (August 16, Riverhead). This fifth volume in the series recreates a medieval Japanese world by way of Taoist fable, historical fiction and high fantasy. Robert Walser’s The Assistant (July 27, New Directions), which tells the tale of a man “drowning in obedience,” has finally made it into English. So too has Peter Handke’s Crossing the Sierra de Gredos, (July 10, Farrar, Straus & Giroux), the mystical tale of a female banker on a Don Quixote–like odyssey.
This summer also features three intriguing coming-of-age stories: Rajaa Alsanea’s Girls of Riyadh (July 9, Penguin Press), the first chick-lit novel out of Saudi Arabia; Aoibheann Sweeney’s stylish Among Other Things, I’ve Taken Up Smoking (July 19, Penguin Press), the tale of a girl growing up in Maine in the shadow of her father’s re-translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses; and, straight out of Seoul, I Have the Right To Destroy Myself (July 2, Harvest), Young-ha Kim’s edgy story of two brothers in love with the same girl.
Some other notable debuts coming down the pike include Ron Currie Jr.’s God Is Dead (July 5, Viking), in which the good Lord comes down to earth and dies in a Darfur refugee camp. Nalini Jones’ What You Call Winter (August 17, Knopf) is a collection of stories set in a Catholic town in India. And in The Tenderness of Wolves (July 10, Simon & Schuster), British film director Stef Penney tells a gripping story about a mother tracking down her fugitive son.
School may be out, but several novelists will take you back. Stephen L. Carter’s New England White (July 2, Knopf) revolves around a prominent New England university and its divinity school (Carter teaches at Yale). Taylor Antrim goes old-school with his debut, The Headmaster Ritual (July 9, Mariner), a satire set on an Andover-like campus. And in Confessions of a Wall Street Shoeshine Boy (July 3, HarperCollins), Doug Stumpf writes of a man who earned his education at the feet of other masters.
At the other end of the age spectrum is G.B. Edwards’ The Book of Ebenezer Le Page (July 10, New York Review of Books), the ornery recollections of an old man living on the isle of Guernsey. If you plan to go to an island and not come back, bring David Malouf’s The Complete Stories (July 24, Pantheon); it’ll keep you busy ’til fall, and there’s hardly a dud in the book. If you want a smaller volume, you can’t go wrong with Tessa Hadley’s Sunstroke and Other Stories (July 24, Picador).
Finally, if all this takes you too far out on a limb, William Gibson will delight with Spook Country (August 7, Putnam), his follow-up to Pattern Recognition. Amy Bloom’s much-talked-about Away (August 21, Random House) will devastate. And Vermonter Jeffrey Lent has grown into his talent keenly with A Peculiar Grace (August 10, Atlantic Monthly), the story of a New England family of artists haunted by the past.
Nonfiction
Summer nonfiction is always a bit of a relief, because the publishing gods stop expecting you to read thousand-page biographies of minor English novelists and start cranking up the shoot-’em-up yarn-spinning we secretly crave. So we get books like Oliver August’s Inside the Red Mansion (July 18, Houghton), the story of the hunt for China’s most-wanted man—an illiterate billionaire gangster.
William Queen and Douglas Century mine similar territory—in America—with Armed and Dangerous (July 10, Random House), the tale of how Queen tracked down a survivalist Los Angles narco-trafficker known for his use of grenades. Patrick Symmes puts on his investigative shoes for The Boys from Dolores (July 10, Pantheon), which opens up Cuba of the 1940s and ’50s through a portrait of Fidel Castro’s Jesuit-school classmates. In a similar vein, John Matteson’s Eden’s Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father (August 20, W.W. Norton) sheds new light on the Concord clan.
If history is your thing, it’s going to be an Indian summer—as the world’s largest democracy celebrates its 60th birthday. You can track this journey with Alex von Tunzelmann’s Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire (August 7, Henry Holt). If that’s not enough, you can get all the details in Ramachandra Guha’s massive India After Gandhi (August 1, Ecco).
Summer’s always a great time for travel writing, and if you want to scratch that itch, pick up Colin Thubron’s magnificent Shadow of the Silk Road (July 3, HarperCollins), which follows ancient trade routes that connected China and the Mediterranean. If you’re feeling footloose, check into Wayne Koestenbaum’s Hotel Theory (July 25, Soft Skull), a meditation on hotels paired with a “dime novel” featuring Liberace and Lana Turner.
As the temperature rises, so do polemics. In The Fire This Time (June 28, Melville House), Randall Kenan pens a terrific homage to James Baldwin’s great essay, while African-American lesbian essayist Audre Lorde keeps the flames burning in the reissue of her Sister Outsider (August 1, Crossing Press). In Interventions (July 1, City Lights), Noam Chomsky sounds off on U.S. military interventions since 9/11.
If Michael Moore’s Sicko gets you riled up, stoke that rage pipe by checking out Loretta Schwartz-Nobel’s Poisoned Nation (August 21, St. Martin’s) and learning all about organizations whose products cause illness and how they profit from the treatment of those conditions.
If, after all this, your patriotism has taken a hit, re-up those ’merikan feelings with The Age of Lincoln (July 4, Hill & Wang), Orville Vernon Burton’s look at America during Honest Abe’s life. A more topical story would be Andro Linklater’s The Fabric of America (July 4, Walker), a look at how our borders—and our expansion of them—created American identity.