Twelve Books to Read This Summer
Two new novels, one reissue you missed in 1994, and a history of the American grocery store.
A list, lightly annotated, of the twelve books our culture desk pressed on its friends this June. Two novels on top, then the reissue, then the nonfiction we could not stop talking about at the assignment meeting.
The new novels
Cassie Chen's The Long Weekend, out from FSG in April, is the best novel about a marriage anyone has published in five years — which is saying something about a category that never runs short. Torrey Peters' next, Yates, is a wildly different book from Detransition, Baby, and better.
The reissue
Anne Enright's What Are You Like?, first published in 1994 and out of print in the U.S. for years, has been reissued by New Directions with a new introduction. It is, on rereading, the funniest thing she has written.
Nonfiction we loved
Benjamin Lorr's follow-up to The Secret Life of Groceries, called The Aisle, is a full history of the American grocery store from the A&P forward. It reads like the best kind of business reporting — patient, specific, and unafraid of the arithmetic.
The rest, in short
Rachel Kushner's new essays, out August 12. A slim, strange collection from Marie NDiaye. The paperback of Percival Everett's James for the friend who has not read it. Simon Winchester on the Mississippi. A first novel by Zain Rishi that has been quietly moving from editor to editor since March. Alice McDermott's shortest and most autobiographical yet. Robert Caro's Working, if you still have not.
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