Summer Reads 2016
Whether spent at home, driving cross-country, or venturing abroad, summer demands its own reading list. These new books of 2016 will more than fill a backseat, suitcase, Kindle, or hammock.
For Daytripping to Surreal PopSTock!, Mexico
Carlos Velázquez
The Cowboy Bible and Other Stories
Trans. Achy Obejas
Restless Books, January
For Friends Falling Out
Michèle Halberstadt
Mon amie américaine
Trans. Bruce Benderson
Other Press, April
For a Tragicomic Trip in Proustian Style
Juan José Saer
The Clouds
Trans. Hilary Vaughn Dobel
Open Letter, May
For Comprehensive Consideration of the Refugee Crisis
Elfriede Jelinek
Charges (The Supplicants)
Trans. Gitta Honegger
Seagull Books, May
For a Dose of Narrative Verve
Rita Indiana
Papi
Trans. Achy Obejas
Univ. of Chicago Press, April
For the Restlessly Creative
Toby Litt
Mutants: Selected Essays
Seagull Books, May
For Serious Contemplation
Alejandra Pizarnik
Extracting the Stone of Madness: Poems 1962–1972
Trans. Yvett Siegert
New Directions, May
Referencing an ancient medical practice, immortalized in a painting by Hieronymus Bosch, Alejandra Pizarnik’s collection of poems explores themes of depression, childhood, death, and the border between language and silence. Her poetry from the last ten years of her life, before her suicide at the age of thirty-six, is the first full collection translated into English and filled with a trepid balance between frenzy and melancholia.
For Dangerous Short Adventures
Mark Haddon
The Pier Falls
Doubleday, May
For Thoughtful Travelers
Githa Hariharan
Almost Home: Finding a Place in the World from Kashmir to New York
Restless Books, March
Straddling the past and present of such cities as New York, New Delhi, Mumbai, Tokyo, and such places as Kashmir and Palestine, Githa Hariharan’s ten politically charged essays narrate the way people, history, and landscape merge. Each travel essay shows the influence of colonization, poverty, and war, among other topics, on geography and people.
Take One Plague; Add One Hard-boiled Hero . . .
Yuri Herrera
The Transmigration of Bodies
Trans. Lisa Dillman
And Other Stories, July
For Translators Seeking Authors in Hiding
Idra Novey
Ways to Disappear
Little, Brown, February
For Exploring Distances
Sara Majka
Cities I’ve Never Lived In
Graywolf Press, February
Pick a Quiet Place . . .
Dana Gioia
99 Poems: New and Selected
Graywolf Press, March
For Electoral and Romantic Drama in Haiti
Mischa Berlinski
Peacekeeping
Sarah Crichton Books, March
For Trips in the Afterlife
Antoine Volodine
Bardo or Not Bardo
Trans. J. T. Mahany
Open Letter, April
For Those Returning Home
Serhiy Zhadan
Voroshilovgrad
Trans. Reilly Costigan-Humes & Isaac Wheeler
Deep Vellum, April
Blurring the boundaries between time and space as well as place, Voroshilovgrad narrates the journey of Herman, an advertising executive, who returns to his remote home after years of city living to find his missing brother.
Josefine Klougart
One of Us Is Sleeping
Trans. Martin Aitken
Open Letter, July
For the Intellectually Curious
Sarah Bakewell
At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails with Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Others
Other Press, March
For Those Being Visited
Charles Lambert
The Children’s Home
Scribner, January
For Haunting a 1950s Paris Café
Patrick Modiano
In the Café of Lost Youth
Trans. Chris Clarke
New York Review Books, March
For Those in Flight
Dorthe Nors
So Much for That Winter: Novellas
Trans. Misha Hoekstra
Graywolf Press, June
Comprised of two novellas, So Much for That Winter explores contemporary heartache through the breakups of two women. The novella Days uses lists to describe the disjointed life and emotional turmoil of a thirty-year-old woman. Minna Needs Rehearsal Space describes Minna’s flight from her friends to an island near Sweden, and also unfriending them on Facebook, after she is dumped by text message.
Daniel Saldaña París
Among Strange Victims
Trans. Christina MacSweeney
Coffee House Press, June
