Commentary |

“What Will You Read This Summer?” Thirty Writers List Some Titles

In this feature, thirty writers share their summer reading lists. Scroll down/search to find lists by Mona Simpson, Pierre Joris, CM Burroughs, Gail Mazur, Cyrus Cassells, Michelle Huneven, Jamaal May, Laila Lalami, Floyd Skloot, Joan Silber, Daisy Fried, Jess Row, Lucy Corin, Gillian Conoley, Tarfia Faizullah, Sally Ball, Sarah Vap, Shane McCrae, Steve Yarbrough, Victoria Redel, Will Boast, Laura van den Berg, Joanna Penn Cooper, Tsipi Keller, Lisa Russ Spaar, Paula Bohince, Erika Dreifus, Jennifer Jean, Daniel Lawless, Marion Winik, Wesley Rothman, and Castle Freeman, Jr. Many thanks to all for their generosity. RS

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Mona Simpson

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Far From the Tree / Andrew Solomon (Scribner). I loved The Noonday Day Demon, Solomon’s comprehensive atlas of depression, and I use it as a guide and compass. Solomon’s books demand time, engagement and intricate concentration and they reward the reader with a long afterlife.

Those Who Stay and Those Who Stay / Elena Ferrante (Europa Editions). The third volume of Ferrante’s great Neopolitan trilogy, due this summer.

Paper Lantern: Love Stories and Ecstatic Cahoots: Fifty Short Stories / Stuart Dybek (FSG). Two new collections of stories.

Ada / Vladimir Nabokov (Library of America). Even by my favorites there’s usually one I haven’t read.

Any new stories by Michelle Huneven, William Trevor, Alice Munro, Tom McGuane, Alice McDermott and Yiyun Li.

Mona Simpson is the author of six books. Her latest, Casebook, was recently published.

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Pierre Joris

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The Arimapaspia: Songs for a Rainy Season / Thomas McEvilley (McPherson & Co.)

Dictionary of Untranslatables. A Philosophical Lexicon / Barbara Cassin, edited by Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra & Michael Wood (Princeton University Press)

You Must Change Your Life / Peter Sloterdijk, translated by Wieland Hoban (Polity)

Abrasch (poems) / Nico Helminger (Edions Phi, Luxembourg)

An Etel Adnan Reader (2 volumes) / Edited by Thom Donovan & Brandon Shimoda (Nightboat)

Pessoa: The Transformation Book / Edited by Nuno Ribeiro & Cláudia Souza (Contra Mundum Press)

Pierre Joris’ translation of Breathturn Into Timestead: The Collected Later Poetry of Paul Celan (bilingual edition) will be published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in December, 2014.

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CM Burroughs

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Lament for the Makers: A Memorial Anthology / selected by W. S. Merwin (Counterpoint)

The Perversion of Virtue: Understanding Murder-Suicide / Thomas Joiner (Oxford)

Writing Is An Aid to Memory / Lyn Hejinian (Sun & Moon Classics)

The Artist’s Journey Into The Interior / Erich Heller (Harcourt)

Collected Poems / Robert Hayden (Liveright)

The Theory of Moral Sentiments / Adam Smith (Economic Classics)

The Bounty / Myung Kim (Clax Press)

Mad Honey Symposium / Sally Wen Mao (Alice James Books)

Tremolo: Poems / Spencer Short (Harper Perennial)

Barter / Monica Young (Graywolf)

Eve Escapes / Hélène Cixous (Polity)

Hughson’s Tavern / Fred Moten (Leon Works)

and then entwine / Jai Ravine (Tinfish Press)

CM Burroughs’ first book of poems, The Vital System, was published by Tupelo Press in 2012.

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Gail Mazur

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The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh / Nienke Bakker, editor (Thames & Hudson). From last year, still meaning to read it, which I read in the first years of my marriage. A most eloquent brilliant narrative of Van Gogh’s almost diaristic letters, with sketches, about his daily work, his ideas about art, the integrity of this struggle. About really becoming an artist. The most of them to his brother Theo, his champion. (Perhaps it was the THREE huge volumes that kept me from it last summer.)

The Age of Wonder: The Romantic Generation and the Discovery of the Beauty and Terror of Science / Richard Holmes (Vintage)

The World Without Us / Alan Weisman (Picador). I’ve begun it, a beautiful somehow reaffirming exploration of how this planet would recover from the depredations of centuries of abuse by Us. If human beings disappeared.

A Movable Famine / John Skoyles (The Permanent Press). His second memoir.

Always, poetry to re-read, no beginning and no end. And new books including first collections, like Sarah Peters’ 1996 (House of Anansi Press).

Figures in a Landscape (University of Chicago) is Gail Mazur’s sixth collection of poems. She is the Distinguished Writer in residence at Emerson College.

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Cyrus Cassells

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Goodbye to All That / Robert Graves (Penguin Modern Classics)

Man’s Hope / Andre Malraux (Modern Library)

The Big Sea: An Autobiography / Langston Hughes (University of Missouri)

Wonderland / Stacey D’Erasmo (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

Stay, Illusion / Lucie Brock-Broido (Knopf)

The King of Cuba / Cristina Garcia (Scribner)

Cyrus Cassells’ most recent collection of poems is The Crossed-Out Swastika (Copper Canyon Press).

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Michelle Huneven

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Far from the Tree /Andrew Solomon, (Scribner)

The Christopher Bollas Reader
foreword by Adam Phillips (Routledge)

Transfer of Qualities / Martha Ronk (Omnidawn)

Thunderstruck and Other Stories / Elizabeth McCracken (Dial Press)

Sodom and Gomorrah / Marcel Proust, trans. by C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright (Modern Library)

The Lost Estate (Le Grand Meaulnes) / Henri Alain-Fournier, trans. by Robin Buss (Penguin Classics)

So I Have Thought of You: Letters of Penelope Fitzgerald / Terence Dooley, editor (Fourth Estate/Harper Collins)

A Few Green Leaves / Barbara Pym (Bello)

The Doctor’s Family (Virago Modern Classics) and Salem Chapel (Ulan Press) / Margaret Oliphant

The Root and the Flower / L. H. Myers (NYRB Classics)

Michelle Huneven’s new novel, Off Course, has just been published by Sarah Crichton Books.

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Jamaal May

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Land of Love and Drowning / Tiphanie Yanique (Riverhead). This is a first novel from the author of How to Escape a Leper Colony: A Novella and Stories. And it’s magical realism, so I’m all the way in. This marks one of the rare occasions I’ve watched for a novel’s release date. July will be good to us this year.

Hustle / David Tomas Martinez (Sarabande Books) and The Tulip Flame / Chloe Honum (CSU Poetry Center). I got my hands on prerelease copies of both of these at AWP, but have only been able to read parts of them, one poem at a time, because of a difficult spring. I keep both near my workspace like a little candy jar I can reach into. Now I can finally take in every poem and spoil my dinner.

Saga / Brian K. Vaughn and Fiona Staples (Image Comics). This epic space opera is the latest from the creator of Y: The Last Man, and it’s coming back from hiatus this summer. This is a great gateway comic for smart readers. It may very well turn out to be the best ongoing series I’ve ever read when all is said and done.

me Aunt Jemima and the nailgun / Aziza Barnes (Button Poetry). This is the first chapbook from a series that I think will be important to watch. Button Poetry is on the front lines of a movement of young writers who are bringing poetry to larger audiences by diligently working to obliterate the line between so-called “literary” and “performance” poetry.

Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell / ed. by Saskia Hamilton & Thomas Travisano (FSG). I’ve been meaning to read this for a good while, but never felt a sense of urgency about it. For the first time in my life, I’m engaged in the kind of endless, life and art changing conversation that I’ve heard about but couldn’t fathom. Now I can’t stop thinking of the bounty these letters must hold.

The Art of Daring: Risk, Restlessness, Imagination / Carl Philips (Graywolf). Philips’s Coin of the Realm is some of the best prose on craft that I’ve ever encountered, while Graywolf’s The Art of Series … is home to some of the deftest and most immediately applicable craft writing available. Longenbach’s The Art of the Poetic Line and Voigt’s The Art of Syntax were life changing for me. I expect to lose the top part of my head for a while this August.

Jamaal May is the Pushcart Award winning author of Hum (Alice James Books), recipient of the American Library Association’s Notable Book Award and an NAACP Image Award nomination. He currently serves as a Kenyon Review Fellow and co-directs Organic Weapon Arts with Tarfia Faizullah.

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Sally Ball

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House of Deer / Sasha Steensen (Fence). Idealism, addiction, words as schlubby and solid as trowels: what I’ve read about (& from) this book has to do with back-to-the-land Ohio farmers in the 70s—nostalgia, myth-making, language’s role in the family drama.

You Feel So Mortal: Essays on the Body / Peggy Shinner (Chicago). “The bra fitter would appraise the bra; I however appraised the body.” More Shinner in BOMB.

A Cup of Water Turns Into as Rose / Lawrence Raab (chapbook, Adastra). An extended meditation that keeps not being the requested poem about love (or so it says–). But I think it is that poem. And also it’s about death, and dreams, and it has Raab’s very compelling slantwise instances of funny-ness or creepiness or mystical awe.

A Several World / Brian Blanchfield (Nightboat Editions). Blanchfield’s Tremolo interview + the beauty of Nightboat objects = yes.

Also: every possible thing by Rebecca Solnit….

Sally Ball is the author of Wreck Me and Annus Mirabilis, both from Barrow Street.

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Laila Lalami

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Untamed State / Roxane Gay (Grove/Black Cat)

Every Day is For The Thief / Teju Cole (Random House)

The Book of Unknown Americans / Cristina Henriquez (Knopf)

The Admiral and the Ambassador: One Man’s Obsessive Search for the Body of John Paul Jones / Scott Martelle (Chicago Review Press)

Laila Lalami is the author of Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits and Secret Son. Her new novel, The Moor’s Account, will be published in September 2014.

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Floyd Skloot

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The Victory Season: The End of World War II and the Birth of Baseball’s Golden Age / Robert Weintraub (Little Brown/Back Bay Books)

All the Light I Cannot See / Anthony Doerr (Scribner)

The Liar’s Wife, / Mary Gordon (Pantheon)

Tibetan Peach Pie / Tom Robbins (Ecco)

But Enough About You / Christopher Buckley (Simon & Schuster)

Burnt Toast Makes You Sing Good: A Memoir of Food and Love from an American Midwest Family / Kathleen Flinn (Viking)

I’ll also re-read John Williams’ Stoner, which I last read a decade ago, and read a selection of Philip Larkin’s poems chosen and introduced by Martin Amis, which I bought in England two years ago but haven’t gotten to yet.

Floyd Skloot’s new book of essays is Revertigo (University of Wisconsin Press).

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Joan Silber

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Wonderland / Stacey D’Erasmo (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
I’ve loved her other books.

From the Land of Green Ghosts: A Burmese Odyssey / Pascal Khoo Thwe (Perennial). I’m going to Burma this summer, and this memoir sounds extraordinary.

A Fine Balance / Rohinton Mistry (Vintage International). I’ve always meant to read this, and a friend just told me he considers it one of the best books he’s ever read.

Americanah / Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Knopf). I’m a fan of her short stories — this will be my first of her novels.

Joan Silber’s latest book, Fools: Stories, is now available in paperback from W.W. Norton.

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Daisy Fried

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Hoyoot: Collected Poems and Songs / Tom Pickard (Carcanet)

The Living Option: Selected Poems / Karen Solie (Bloodaxe)

Lost for Words / Edward St. Aubyn (FSG). His first post-Patrick Melrose novel; it got just the sort of bizarre negative review from John Banville in the New York Review of Books to make me think it’ll be really good.

Dear Gravity / Greg Djanikian (Carnegie-Mellon)

Drift / Caroline Bergvall (Nightboat ). Will it live up to the fuss?

The Old Curiosity Shop / Charles Dickens. A Dickens I haven’t read yet; one must often if not always be reading Dickens.

Daisy Fried is the author, most recently, of Women’s Poetry: Poems and Advice (Pittsburgh, 2013). She teaches in The MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.

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Jess Row

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Critique of Cynical Reason / Peter Sloterdijk (Minnesota)

Cruel Optimism/ Lauren Berlant (Duke)

On Trust / Gabriel Josipovici (Yale)

The Art of Cruelty / Maggie Nelson (Norton)

The Fun Parts / Sam Lipsyte (FSG)

Tenth of December / George Saunders (Random House)

Jess Row is the author of Your Face in Mine (to be published by Riverhead in August 2014) and two collections of short stories, The Train to Lo Wu and Nobody Ever Gets Lost.

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Lucy Corin

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Collected Poems, 1968-2012 / Louise Glück (FSG)

Spectacle / Susan Steinberg (Graywolf)

Something in My Eye / Michael Jeffrey Lee (Sarabande)

We the Animals / Justin Torres (Mariner Books/HMH)

The Book of Disquiet / Fernando Pessoa (Serpent’s Tail)

More Than You Know / Melissa Malouf (Dalkey)

Loving, Living, Party Going / Henry Green (Penguin)

Also, Middlemarch or The Mill on the Floss — I haven’t decided which to go for yet.

Lucy Corin’s One Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses was published by McSweeney’s in 2013.

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Gillian Conoley

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The Sixth Extinction / Elizabeth Kolbert (Henry Holt)

The Golden Apples / Eudora Welty (Harcourt)

Ark / Ronald Johnson (Flood Editions)

Selected Poems / Lisa Jarnot (City Lights)

And two mystics: John Ruusbroec, The Spiritual Espousals, The Sparkling Stones, and Other Works and Pascal’s Pensees

Words for Art: Criticism, History, Theory, Practice / Barry Schwabsky (Sternberg Press)

The Assistant / Robert Walser (New Directions)

Gillian Conoley’s seventh collection of poems, Peace, is just out from Omnidawn. City Lights will publish her translation, Thousand Times Broken: Three Books by Henri Michaux, in September.

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Tarfia Faizullah

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In the Light of What We Know / Zia Haider Rahman (FSG). Of this debut novel, New Yorker critic James Wood says, “Rahman is deeply suspicious of our claim to know things, and his long novel attempts to tell us, again and again, that we know much less than we think we do, that intellectual modesty in the face of mystery and complexity may be the surest wisdom.”

The Delicacy and Strength of Lace / Leslie Marmon Silko and James Wright (Graywolf). This eighteen month exchange between two astounding writers that ended with Wright’s death of cancer in 1980 has been on my to-read list for a long, long time.

Mad Honey Symposium / Sally Wen Mao (Alice James Books). Dave Eggers has commented on its “gritty, world-wise humor that gives her work heavyweight swagger.” The few poems I’ve read in journals astound me with their fearless vibrancy.

On Photography / Susan Sontag (Macmillan). As a writer and a novice photographer, I’m interested in the ethics and formats of documentation. I’m hoping this collection of essays by Sontag will raise important questions for me to consider as I continue to frame and reframe for myself what it means to be both an artist and human.

Negro League Baseball/ Harmony Holiday (Fence Books). After encountering a few of her poems after she won the Ruth Lilly Fellowship, I’m smitten. I can’t wait to read more of her luminescent and razor-sharp poems.

Collected Poems /Robert Hayden (Liveright). Detroiter Robert Hayden was not only a tremendous poet, but also the first African American Poet Laureate of the United States. I just moved to Detroit in the fall, and I’m looking forward to both filling in the gaps of my poetic education and reading poet Reginald Dwayne Betts’s foreword.

Tarfia Faizullah is the author of Seam (SIU, 2014). She is the Nicholas Delbanco Visiting Professor of Poetry at the University of Michigan Helen Zell Writers’ Program and the co-director of the Organic Weapon Arts Chapbook Press and Video Series with Jamaal May.

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Sarah Vap

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A Prayer Journal / Flannery O’Connor (FSG)

Mourning Diary / Roland Barthes (Hill and Wang; Tra Ant edition)

Histoire de Ma Vie / Casanova

The first few books of the Mahābhārata

In The House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods / Matt Bell (Soho Press)

Cruddy: An Illustrated Novel / Lynda Barry (Simon & Schuster)

Marketing the Menacing Fetus in Japan / Helen Hardacre (California)

Natural History Rape Museum / Danielle Pafunda (Bloof Books)

Sarah Vap is the author of End of the Sentimental Journey.Her sixth book of poetry is forthcoming from Noemi Books.

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Shane McCrae

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Corona: Selected Poems / Paul Celan, translated by Susan Gillespie (Station Hill)

The Ravicka Trilogy / Renee Gladman (Dorothy, a Publishing Project)

The Collected Poems / Barbara Guest (Wesleyan) and her Forces of Imagination (Kelsey St. Press)

I, Afterlife / Kristin Prevallet (Essay Press)

Speech and Theology / James K. A. Smith (Routledge)

Shane McCrae has published four collections of poems, most recently Forgiveness Forgiveness (Factory Hollow Press). He teaches at Oberlin College.

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Steve Yarbrough

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Starting Over: Stories / Elizabeth Spencer (Liveright)

In Strange Gardens and Other Stories / Peter Stamm (Other Press)

Fear / Gabriel Chevallier (NYRB Classics)

Margaret Fuller: a New American Life / Megan Marshall (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

Midnight in Europe / Alan Furst (Random House)

The Race Underground: Boston, New York, and the Incredible Rivalry That Built America’s First Subway / Doug Most (St. Martin’s)

… and along with these, as many Henry James novels as I can get through before going back to teaching in the fall.

Steve Yarbrough is the author of nine works of fiction, including The Realm of Last Chances, now available in paperback from Vintage. A native of Mississippi, he lives in Stoneham, MA and teaches at Emerson College.

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Victoria Redel

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No doubt, all sorts of books will sneak in to be read but as for “planning” I think it’s going to be a summer of big long books that I want to reread and ones I’ve never read. And I want to read biographies of painters, which has always been a reading treat for me.

Don Quixote / Miguel de Cervantes, translated by Edith Grossman (Harper)

My Struggle (book 2) / Karl Ove Knausgaard (FSG). I’ll slide right into the third book which has just been translated.

Sons and Lovers / D. H. Lawrence (Everyman’s Library)

War and Peace / Leo Tolstoy, translated by Richard Pevear (Vintage). Ok, confession, never read it.

Joan Mitchell, Lady painter, a Life / Patricia Albers (Knopf)

Victoria Redel is the author of seven books of fiction and poetry, most recently the story collection, Make Me Do Things (Four Way Books).

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Will Boast

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A Sentimental Education / Gustave Flaubert. I’ve meant to read this for years but keep getting hung up on which translation to get. I prefer Steegmuller for Madame Bovary, but it seems that he didn’t do the Sentimental Education. Or did he? If so, I’ve never found it.

Astonish Me / Maggie Shipstead (Knopf). Just got this in its beautiful hardback and can’t wait to dig in.

My Struggle / Karl Ove Knausgård (FSG). I’ve probably missed all the discussion on this multi-volume novel by a year or so, but remain intrigued. I’ve heard it dismissed as being quite boring, but I have an odd taste for boring in fiction.

Family Life /Akhil Sharma (Norton). Also just picked this up and looking forward to jumping in.

Russell Edson, all. He passed away recently, which is a sad but good reason to revisit his hilarious, bizarre, and entirely unique prose poems.

Will Boast is the author of a story collection, Power Ballads, and a memoir, Epilogue, which will be published by Norton/Liveright this September.

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Laura van den Berg

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Crystal Eaters / Shane Jones (Two Dollar Radio)

The Last Illusion / Porochista Khakpour (Bloomsbury USA)

Nobody is Ever Missing / Catherine Lacey (FSG)

In the Land of Steady Habits / Ted Thompson (Little, Brown)

An Untamed State / Roxane Gay (Grove/Black Cat)

The Great Glass Sea / Josh Weil (Grove)

In the Land of Love and Drowning / Tiphanie Yanique (Riverhead)

Laura van den Berg is the author of the story collections What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us and The Isle of Youth which received the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters. Her first novel, Find Me, is forthcoming in February 2015.

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Joanna Penn Cooper

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Nulls / Pattie McCarthy (Horse Less Press)

We Have Always Lived in the Castle / Shirley Jackson (Penguin)

Bough Down / Karen Green (Siglio)

Just the Thing: Selected Letters of James Schuyler / edited by William Corbett (Turtle Point Press)

Soul in Space / Noelle Kocot (Wave Books)

Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures / Mary Ruefle (Wave Books)

I started the Ruefle and Jackson this past year, but was too distracted by my son’s first year of life to finish them, even though they are both right up my alley. I have been a big starter of books this year. Now that I’m reading full books again, I’ll go back to those.

Joanna Penn Cooper is the author of The Itinerant Girl’s Guide to Self-Hypnosis (Brooklyn Arts Press) and What Is a Domicile (Noctuary Press). She lives in Brooklyn.

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Tsipi Keller

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The Collected Prose / Elizabeth Bishop (FSG)

Great Granny Webster / Caroline Blackwood (NYRB)

Mr. Fortune / Sylvia Townsend Warner (NYRB)

The Mystery of the Sardine / Stefan Themreson (Farrar Straus & Giroux)

Hobson’s Island / Stefan Themerson (Dalkey Archives)

Hope Against Hope / Nadezhda Mandelstam (Modern Library)

The author of nine books, Tsipi Keller was born in Prague, raised in Israel, and has been living in the U.S. since 1974. Her new novel is Elsa (Spuyten Duyvel).

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Lisa Russ Spaar

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Most of what I’m reading this summer relates to various forthcoming teaching and writing projects, but all of it is for pleasure, too. A sample:

Poetics of the Literary Self-Portrait / Michel Beaujour, translated by Yara Milos (New York University)

Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power / John Meacham (Random House)

The Letters and Journals / Paula Modersohn-Becker, ed. By Günter Busch and Liselotte von Reinken, ed. & translated by Arthur S. Wensinger and Carole Clew Hoey (Northwestern)

Death Sentences: Styles of Dying in British Fiction / Garrett Stewart (Harvard)

From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers / Marina Warner (FSG)

Caribou: Poems / Charles Wright (FSG)

Lisa Russ Spaar’s most recent book of poems is Vanitas, Rough (Persea Books). She teaches creative writing at the University of Virginia.

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Paula Bohince

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A Double Sorrow: Troilus and Criseyde/Lavinia Greenlaw (Faber)

Accepting the Disaster/Joshua Mehigan (FSG)

I Knew the Bride/Hugo Williams (Faber)

Bugs/Antony Dunn (Carcanet)

Money Money Money Water Water Water/Jane Mead (Alice James)

Paula Bohince’s third collection of poems, Swallows and Waves, will be published by Sarabande in 2016.

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Erika Dreifus

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Privileged Ones: The Well-Off and the Rich in America / Robert Coles (Hachette). I read this and other volumes in the Children of Crisis series many, many years ago. The recent focus on “privilege” in the media has made me want to read it again.

Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn and Other Identities / Anna Deavere Smith (Dramatists Play Service). I once had the great good fortune of attending a performance of this remarkable show. Several months ago, when I was still hopeful that I might spend some time learning the art and craft of playwriting, I bought a copy of the script. The likelihood that I’m ever going to write a play seems weaker every day. But I still want to read this script.

Lettre à un otage / Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (Gallimard). Learned about this one during a recent evening at The Morgan Library that featured a wonderful talk by Adam Gopnik in conjunction with The Morgan’s recent exhibit on The Little Prince.

The Assistant / Bernard Malamud (FSG). Because I should have read it long ago.

The Humanity Project / Jean Thompson (Blue Rider Press). On loan from a writer friend with impeccable taste.

Erika Dreifus writes prose and poetry in New York. Her story collection, Quiet Americans, was published in 2011 by Last Light Studio. Follow her @ErikaDreifus where she tweets about “things bookish and/or Jewish.”

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Jennifer Jean

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Breaking the Alabaster Jar: Conversations with Li-Young Lee / ed. Earl G. Ingersoll (BOA)

My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer / Christian Wiman (FSG)

The Letters of Denise Levertov and Robert Duncan / ed. Robert Bertholf, Albert Gelpi (Stanford University Press)

Radha Says / Reetika Vazirani, ed. by Ravi Shankar and Leslie McGrath (Drunken Boat)

Incarnadine / Mary Szybist (Grayworlf)

The Empathy Exams: Essays / Leslie Jamison (Graywolf)

Jennifer Jean’s new book of poems is The Fool (Big Table). She is co-director of the Morning Garden Writers Retreats, and she teaches Free2Write poetry workshops to sex-trafficking survivors.

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Daniel Lawless

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Lost for Words / Edward St. Aubyn (FSG)

The Iceland / Sakutaro Hagiwara, translated by Hiroaki Sato (New Directions)

Autobiography of a Corpse / Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, translated by Joanne Turnbull (NYRB)

Towards the One and Only Metaphor / Miklos Szentkuthy, translated by Tim Wilkinson (Contra Mundum Press)

Eva the Fugitive / Rosamel del Valle, translated by Anna Balakian (University of California Press)

Roget’s Illusion / Linda Bierds (Penguin)

Daniel Lawless is the editor of the popular online poetry magazine Plume and the Plume Poetry Anthology 2013.

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Marion Winik

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Let Me See It / James Magruder (Triquarterly). Linked short stories follow gay cousins through decades.

Wonder Boys / Michael Chabon (Random House). Rereading this as part of thinking about comic novels on writing teachers.

Thunderstruck / Elizabeth McCracken (Dial). Buzz on this is so good!

The Splendid Things We Planned / Blake Bailey (Norton). Memoir of dead brother by a great biographer.

Man Alive / Mary Kay Zuraveleff, (FSG, bbq theme + humor = summer book)

The King’s Question / Brian Culhane (Graywolf). Prize-winning first book of poems – finally tracked it down!

Essayist Marion Winik reviews books for Kirkus and Newsday, teaches writing at U of Baltimore, and is working on a novel.

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Wesley Rothman

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Drown / Junot Diaz (Riverhead)

When My Brother Was an Aztec / Natalie Diaz (Copper Canyon Press)

Shadow & Act (Vintage) and Living With Music (Modern Library) / Ralph Ellison

Seam / Tarfia Faizullah (Southern Illinois University Press)

American Noise / Campbell McGrath (Ecco)

The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens / Random House

Wesley Rothman’s poems and prose have appeared in 32 Poems, Crab Orchard Review, Prairie Schooner, The Rumpus, Vinyl, and The White Review. He edits Toe Good Poetry and teaches throughout Boston.

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Castle Freeman, Jr.

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Updike / Adam Begley (Harper)

A Time To Be Born / Dawn Powell (Zoland/Steerforth)

Someone: A Novel / Alice McDermott (FSG)

Le Divorce: A Novel / Diane Johnson (Plume)

History / Herodotus (Grene trans.) (University of Chicago)

Castle Freeman, Jr., is a writer living in southern Vermont. A collection of his stories, Round Mountain, was published in 2012 by Concord Free Press.

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