Editors’ Picks: The Best Books To Take On Your August Vacation
The Dearly Beloved (Simon & Schuster)
By Cara WallCara Wall’s The Dearly Beloved is a novel about Presbyterian ministers, yet it refrains from quoting the Bible almost entirely. It’s an Oulipo-worthy challenge carried out with aplomb in this debut novel, prompting readers to think about faith as something that lives not in books but in relationships. The Dearly Beloved traces the 1950s beginnings of two sturdy marriages that grow across subtle gradations of faith: Charles, a seminarian who found religion in college, marries Lily, an atheist; James, a seminarian raised in a semi-observant Catholic family, marries Nan, the daughter of a Southern Baptist minister. When James and Charles are appointed to jointly lead a Presbyterian church, the couples are thrust together, and their differing attitudes towards religion and life make the pairing tumultuous. Though the action takes place in 1960s New York City, the conjunction of these four particular searches for solace gives the novel an allegorical bent. Wall’s clean prose and easy ability to move between the thoughts of her protagonists turn what could seem an inquiry into the nature of religion into a visceral look at how it binds people together. —Erin Vanderhoof, Associate Editor, VF.com
Normal Sucks: How to Live, Learn, and Thrive Outside the Lines (Henry Holt)
By Jonathan MooneyThe title might seem anodyne, but Jonathan Mooney’s memoir-meets-essay collection packs a wallop. The author of previous books about learning disabilities and special education, Mooney realized that the things he’s learned from reading about the history of disability and psychiatry could go a long way in answering that eternal child’s question: why are some people different? So he dives into the research head-first, wrapping it around heartrending stories from his own childhood experiences with dyslexia and how his self-image developed and changed as he became an adult. As you can tell from the title, he has an agenda, but his earnest case for the value of neurodiversity—that is, respecting rather than stigmatizing the natural differences in human brains—is an easy one to go along with. By the end of the book, Mooney has discussed the work of Michel Foucault with such verve and lucidity that French philosopher starts to feel like an old friend. As an accessible primer on reassessing disability and mental health, it’s invaluable, and as an exploration of what it’s like to grow up feeling different, it’s incredibly cathartic. —EV
Amazon
IndieboundIndiebound
Trick Mirror (Random House)
By Jia TolentinoOne of the saddest things about contemporary life seems to be its tendency to push us towards a semi-mindless existence. Passing hours scrolling zombielike through Instagram or Twitter; firing off emojis as responses; half-listening to podcasts while walking; allowing algorithms rather than actual browsing to choose our news, our movies, our books. One antidote to this knee-jerk malaise is Tolentino’s new collection of obsessively researched and dazzlingly wide-reaching essays, which excavate meaning and complication in 21st century life, from the rise of reality TV to the cult of Pure Barre to what it means to get married. She even pokes a hole in the idea behind this blurb: “People have been carping in this way for many centuries,” she writes. “In the eighteenth century, men complained that newspapers would be intellectually and morally isolating, and that the rise of the novel would make it difficult for people—specifically women—to differentiate between fiction and fact.” It’s true that the question of why we do the things we do—because we want to, have to, think we have to?—has always been worth asking. Trick Mirror is a reminder to ask. —Keziah Weir, Associate Editor, Vanity Fair
Brother of the More Famous Jack (Bloomsbury)
By Barbara TrapidoThe excellent writer Iva Dixit sent me this deeply English novel earlier this summer. I summarily devoured it and then recommended it to everyone I know. First published in 1982, the book is narrated by Katherine, who recounts her long relationship with a loving, eccentric family she met when she was eighteen. The Goldman clan is helmed by a professor and writer named Jacob and loving matriarch Jane, whose lusty devotion to one another results in a huge gaggle of children—Katherine quickly falls for Roger, the brooding eldest—with whom they delight in slinging insults and witticisms. (In a description of their charmingly disheveled house, Katherine notes the wall by the telephone. “Rosie has scratched up a conspicuous message in black marker pen for her father. ‘Jake must fone criss,’ it says. Underneath it, Jacob had written, ‘If criss fones me again tell him to phuck off.’”) The story follows a variously heartsick and adventurous Katherine from England to Rome and back again—and you’re glad to be with her every step of the way. For fans of Fawlty Towers, fisherman sweaters, Earl Grey tea, and The Royal Tenenbaums. —KW
Marilou is Everywhere
By Sarah Elaine Smith (Riverhead)When teenage Jude Vanderjohn goes missing during a weekend camping trip, the inhabitants of her rural Pennsylvania town become engrossed by the disappearance—and none more so than Cindy, our unusual, observant, and quietly seething young narrator. (She says nothing when a man gives her an unwanted, lingering look, but: “When he turned away, I wrote F-U-C-K-Y-O-U on my arm with a fingernail.”) As the months go by, Cindy, who is white, slips out of her own unsatisfying life—abuse and abandonment at home, where she lives with her two older brothers and often-absent mom—and into Jude’s, whose mother is white and father is black. Cindy finds comfort in her ever-more complicated relationship with Jude’s mother, an alcohol-addled self-proclaimed witch who fills her house with smudge sticks and crystals and floats between two states of belief: that her daughter is merely hiding from her, and that Jude is there with her, because Cindy is Jude. It’s a simmering mystery that confronts questions about the consequences of action and inaction alike, and what it means to belong. —KW
Pnin (Vintage)
By Vladimir NabokovIn a conservative estimate, I have read this book about fourteen times. At its surface, Pnin, published in 1953, is the story of a bumbling Russian professor, told in a series of comic vignettes. The eponymous Timofey Pnin gets on the wrong train, and feeds sneakers into a washing machine for the fun of watching them whirl, and commits comical attacks upon the English language (difficulty is pronounced “deefeecooltsee”; when asked to play ping-pong he replies, “I don’t any more play at games of infants”). But it’s also a visceral portrayal of an immigrant to America—one who has left behind a homeland steeped in tragedy—and a demonstration of how easy, and devastating, it can be to mock the other rather than empathize. If you’ve recently had your mind blown by the twisty narration and subversion of expectations found in Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s Fleishman is in Trouble, give Pnin a try. Revel in the sentences. Look out for squirrels. —KW
The Need (Simon & Schuster)
By Helen PhillipsThe eerie, near-mystical qualities of the postpartum period have inspired brilliant nonfiction (Molly Caro May’s Body Full of Stars, Meaghan O’Connell’s And Now We Have Everything, to name only two recent entries). But because it can be actually stranger than fiction, what with all the achy, leaky metamorphosing, it makes for ripe invention, too. The Need steps into that uncanny canon—along with Diablo Cody’s Tully, if you saw it; Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper, if you were assigned it; Elisa Albert’s After Birth, if you missed it. Told through the mind of paleobotanist Molly, perpetually exhausted by her two small children and her job excavating (increasingly mysterious) fossil fauna, The Need is a taut, thrilling rendering of motherhood at its most psychologically terrifying. —Claire Howorth, Executive Editor, Vanity Fair
Summerlings (Doubleday)
By Lisa HoworthBoyhood in all its charming grubiness and innocent wile is haunting fodder for Lisa Howorth in Summerlings, as it was in her first novel, Flying Shoes, based on the real-life unsolved murder of her stepbrother when he was only nine years old. Here, boys form an adorably spunky neighborhood gang in suburban DC, circa 1959 and the onset of the Cold War. As John, Max and Ivan roam Chevy Chase searching for potentially communist spiders, they uncover the secret life of their most alluring neighbor in a diplomat-heavy milieu, a Ukrainian woman who lets them sip Cuba Libres on the porch. (Editor’s Note: What's the use of a favorite-picks list if you can't put your own mother on it? She's a wonderful writer, after all.) —CH
The Yellow House (Grove Press)
By Sarah M. BroomSarah Broom's The Yellow House may technically fall under “memoir” at the bookstore, but the narrative reads far more like an American long poem—echoes of Jean Toomer, of Anne Carson, drawing on muses from Joan Didion to Lil Wayne—to chart a history of her family home in New Orleans East. "A blur calls at me" is how a person comes into focus. "My loneliness bored holes in me," Broom writes, and so eats "alligator pears" (her mother's inspired euphemism for avocados) in a physical quest to fill herself. Broom sketches Hurricane Katrina in a "Movement" titled “Water”—the storm comes within staccato chapters titled "Run" and “Survive.” Yet by the final page, and reading it 14 years later, the haunting devastation feels barely out of rear view. The overall effect of The Yellow House is of a sense of place, and the pain of displacement. —CH
Screen Tests (Harper Perennial)
By Kate ZambrenoI brought Kate Zambreno’s Screen Tests to the beach one weekend, and I couldn’t stop reading lines aloud. My friend, who is fortunately just as obsessed with good words, listened patiently as I picked them out: “The temporary clanging together of two fucked-up people.” “Thinking of the ways nostalgia can also be a disease.” “When we are stuck, we look to other signs and systems to be okay in the world. To relieve the burdens of personhood.” Zambreno’s very strange essay collection is full of these kinds of linguistic sucker punches. Her tight focus on the characters that wander through her inner brain sanctum—Meg Ryan, Susan Sontag, David Wojnarowicz, Kathy Acker—lets her build a thematic framework that touches on rejection, depression, and the precariousness of art, and that feels more familiar the deeper you get. —Claire Landsbaum, Senior Editor, The Hive
Everything Inside (Knopf)
By Edwidge DanticatEach new book by Edwidge Danticat recalls, for me, the spell first cast almost 25 years ago by her debut, Breath, Eyes, Memory. I remember the Vintage Contemporaries paperback staring out at me from a bookstore shelf and thinking how striking the title was—a perfect haiku of intimacy and longing. Since then, Danticat’s powers and stature have only grown over a career that has encompassed novels, stories, memoir, essays, and more. She’s won a MacArthur “genius grant” and the 2018 Neustadt International Prize for Literature. Her voice has woven its way into our consciousness with unforgettable tales of families and lovers—from Haiti to Miami, Brooklyn, and beyond—often struggling with an overwhelming sense of grief, loss, and missed connections. Her new book of stories, Everything Inside, again deals with, among other things, marriage and mortality, secrets and separations, as well as the physical and psychological aftershocks of Haiti’s devastating 2010 earthquake. —Anderson Tepper, Copy Production Director
Brazil—the so-called land of soccer, sun, and samba—has changed. The hardcore right-wing is in power, military police routinely storm the favelas, and machine-gun fire provides an everpresent soundtrack to the life of the urban poor. Welcome to the world of author Geovani Martins, a 28-year-old Rio native, who, according to his bio, was discovered in a creative writing workshop at FLUP, the literary festival of the Rio favelas. (We’re also told that he “supported his writing by working as a sandwich-board man and selling drinks on the beach.”) Martins’ writing is blunt, often brutal, but not without a sense of playfulness, as he careens between visions of adolescent hijinks and hard-partying and the more sinister menace of drug lords and government militias. A tantalizing haze of fear and paranoia hangs over Martins’ stories, as oppressive and mind warping as the Rio heat. —AT
This Does Not Belong to You/ My Parents: An Introduction (MCD/FSG)
By Aleksander HemonHow often has a memoir been driven by the bifurcation of a life—by war, by tragedy, by exile or immigration—and yet only Aleksander Hemon, to my mind, has thought of packaging his story as two books in one. (Kudos, too, to the folks at MCD who came up with the clever reversible design.) Actually, Hemon is concerned with how the war in Bosnia upended both his parents’ lives and his own. This Does Not Belong to You, the more impressionistic section about his youth in Sarajevo, provides a moving portrait of his infatuations with girls and rock music, as well the formation of his writerly self. “I’d be different after every journey, with every record,” he writes of his trips to the local record shop as a teenager. “I accumulated more myselves with each trip; each record promised something I could not imagine yet.” Hemon’s double memoir is like a favorite album where both sides are instant classics. —AT
