Summer Reading
"Iʼll keep after summer/until Iʼve forestalled his pretexts and lies,/Iʼll keep after him/and heʼll keep after me—/summer and a man/telling each other lies." —Najwan Darwish
Midnight is Not In Everyone’s Reach by António Lobo Antunes and translated from the Portuguese by Elizabeth Lowe
A woman stands in her childhood home in the middle of the night and listens to the sounds of the ocean and the swaying pine trees outside. In her mind, childhood memories of familial trauma swell and surge against a collapsing façade of adulthood. Antunes unspools a life through this image, sustaining poignancy and polyphonic depth for nearly 600 pages. Being my first Antunes, I found resonance with Jon Fosse’s flow, minimalism, and fluid conception of time, as well as with Clarice Lispector’s domestic mysticism. A novel to drown in.
My Death by Lisa Tuttle
Every serious reader I know has had the uncanny experience of recognizing themselves and their experiences in the writing of another. Lisa Tuttle’s masterful novella interrogates this phenomenon by reversing it, putting a mirror up to the face of a woman investigating the neglected life of an early modernist writer. Tuttle so expertly restrains a narrative perpetually held over the uncanny that when she lets go the novel, character, and reader are balanced directly on the border between reality and the unknown. It stands among my favorite titles from NYRB Classics.
Praiseworthy by Alexis Wright
Praiseworthy is more a painting than a novel—a tableau of an Aboriginal family in which the father chases after a vision of indigenous survival, the mother after moths and butterflies, the younger son after whiteness, and the elder after death. These four take up the majority of the book’s 600-700+ page count (depending on your edition), with minor figures bordering on the periphery, all painted in Wright’s thick brushstrokes made up of oral Aboriginal rhythms and a prose register rivaling that of Marguerite Young’s. Despite the beauty of its technique and its sharp wit and criticism, the latter half of the novel exhausts itself on reiterations and arbitrary asides. A short chapter in which Aboriginal Sovereignty is picked up by a nationless ship crew presents a stunning (if brief) apotheosis of the novel’s preoccupations.
I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman and translated from the French by Ros Schwartz
This is a novel of reduction. There are no answers, nor are we certain of what questions are the right ones to ask. What is here is humanity, ingenuity, and imagination.
The landscape of the novel is imprinted on my mind. It’s so ancient and ageless that it feels as if it was always there. The narrator, cut off from every idea of civilization, is us at our most fundamental. Her being raised without men and the world as we know it turns both into a perfectly unknowable other. It is about gender while also having nothing to do with gender at all.
I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness by Irene Solà and translated from the Catalan by Mara Faye Lethem
Irene Sola’s novel of mothers and daughters depicts a primal human magic, one far removed from the easily digestible pop-witchiness abounding now. Much of this novel concerns creatures rutting in muck and dirt—each woman in the family is associated with an animal, and the prose lingers on the similarity between their own sexual and culinary habits in relation to those of the animals that share the forest with them. It is also a novel of inherited traumas and sins, as one woman’s deal with the devil reverberates through the proceeding generations. Like Antunes in Midnight is Not In Everyone’s Reach, Solá takes a day and the memory of those living it to show how all of history is happening right now, in your body and mine, and that the past, present, and future are as far apart as a family of ghosts seated for dinner.
Scattered All Over the Earth, The Emissary, and Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel by Yoko Tawada. Translated from the Japanese by Margaret Mitsutani and from the German by Susan Bernofsky.
Yoko Tawada writes sleek novels of border crossings. Writing in both Japanese and German, her work explores the liquid nature of language and identity. I find comfort in her work’s acceptance of the state of not yet or no longer knowing. This is a state of disfluency. You will always be disfluent in something, even if you are exophonic. Tawada writes with the understanding that fiction is the unconscious, always in a disfluent relationship with consciousness. Her novels show the value of a not yet/no longer knowing where knowledge is reached by the unconscious through disfluency—through fiction.
The Jamaica Kollection of the Shante Dream Arkive by Marcia Douglas
My favorite new work of 2025, The Jamaica Kollection of the Shante Dream Arkive stands among the most innovative and forward thinking fiction of our time. Through music and ancestry, Marcia Douglas charts an epic of Jamaican history that seamlessly crosses time and space. Prose, poetry, images, and hybrid forms depict the journey of 20A, an undocumented Jamaican women on the run from ICE who finds herself spiritually connected to, among others, Zora Neale Hurston, a runaway slave stuck in space-time, and a woman she meets on a cross-country bus ride. A work of decolonial resistance and ecological renewal, the novel is a healing prayer for the world that charts new possibilities for literature in English.
Upcoming releases:
Lonely Crowds by Stephanie Wambugu (7/29/25)
Sunbirth by An Yu (8/5/25)
Stories of the True by Jeyamohan (8/12/25)
Schattenfroh by Michael Lentz (8/19/25)
We Computers by Hamid Ismailov (8/19/25)
Vilhelm’s Room by Tove Ditlevsen (9/4/25)
Swallows by Natsuo Kirino (9/9/25)
Exquisite Nothingness: The Novels of Yukio Mishima by David Vernon (9/23/25)
The Wax Child by Olga Ravn (9/23/25)
The Other Girl by Annie Ernaux (9/23/25)
Cécé by Emmelie Prophète (9/25/25)
The Endless Week by Laura Vazquez (9/30/25)
Playing Wolf by Zuzana Říhová (9/30/25)
Vaim by Jon Fosse (10/7/25)
The Calf by Leif Høghaug (10/28/25)
The Lord by Soraya Antonius (10/28/25)
False War by Manuel Carlos Alvarez (11/4/25)
Ice by Jacek Dukaj (11/6/25)
The Queen of Swords by Jazmina Barrera (11/11/25)
The Week of Colors by Elena Garro (11/11/25)
House of Day, House of Night by Olga Tokarczuk (12/2/25)
Three Stories of Forgetting by Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida (12/9/25)
Marayrasu by Edgardo Rivera Martinez (12/2025)
Palinuro of Mexico by Fernando del Paso (1/6/26)
The School of Night by Karl Ove Knausgaard (1/13/26)
Autobiography of Cotton by Cristina Rivera Garza (2/3/26)
White Nights by Urszula Honek (2/10/26)
A Tale Unasked by Lady Nijo (2/24/26)
The Enchanting Lives of Others by Can Xue (2/24/26)
A Table for Fortune by William Vollmann (3/3/26)
Night Night Fawn by Jordy Rosenberg (3/3/26)
The Beginnings by Antonio Moresco (3/24/26)
Fortress of the Forgotten Ones (3/24/26)
Sisters in Yellow by Mieko Kawakami (3/31/26)
Borges by Adolfo Bioy Casares (4/21/26)
Garden by Hiroko Oyamada (8/10/26)
The Abyss by Jeyamohan (7/2026)
Theodoros by Mircea Cartarescu (10/2026)