Summer Reading Recommendations 2022
Our faculty and staff picks for your summer lounging and stolen breaks at work:
Elizabeth Bradfield recommends the essay collection Minor Feelings by Cathy Park Hong, a memoir exploring the author's questions about her Asian American identity. Also, the poems of Sarah Arvio in Cry Back My Sea, which Professor Bradfield calls "playful, surprising, and sound-driven."
From Department Chair John Burt, a handful of thoughtful beach reads:
- Normal People by Sally Rooney
- Paris, 7 AM by Liza Wieland
- Jamesland by Michelle Huneven
- The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles
- Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff
- The Dearly Beloved by Cara Wall
- We Got Him by Elizabeth Searle
Mary Baine Campbell writes, "For end of summer, an English novel from the 1920s about a family’s annual beach trip to Brighton, maybe for the last time, sweet, sweet and a little sad: The Fortnight in September by R. C. Sherrif. And of course, just as good for beach reading as for depths-of-winter, Dorothy Sayers’ great detective novel Gaudy Night. And if you like long books you can make friends with, The Love Songs of W. E. B DuBois by Honoree Fanonne Jeffers."
Brandon Callender offers some chilling picks: "Adam Cesare's Video Night: A Novel of Alien Horror - it's got a pretty fun throw-back horror feel: definitely great for summer. Stephen Graham Jones's My Heart is A Chainsaw is a very smart, fun, summer slasher homage. Michael Rowe's Enter, Night is great for vampire lovers, and Tananarive Due's The Good House is great for ghost-hunters, and both are great for folks looking for summer thrillers that are at once eerie, erotic, and brutal."
Billy Flesch's recommendation is Outline by Rachel Cusk. The novel is written as ten conversations between a novelist teaching a creative writing course in Athens one summer and the people she encounters there. From the publisher: "The people she encounters speak volubly about themselves: their fantasies, anxieties, pet theories, regrets, and longings. And through these disclosures, a portrait of the narrator is drawn by contrast, a portrait of a woman learning to face a great loss."
Caren Irr says of her recommendation, Patricia Lockwood's memoir Priestdaddy, "It's a hilarious, raunchy, inventive take on the coming-of-age of the artist narrative."
Lisa Pannella recommends The Feather Thief by Kirk Wallace Johnson: "Why would anyone steal 299 rare bird skins from a British natural history museum? The answer takes you on a wild ride into the unexpected!"
From John Plotz, a handful of reads to take you across the globe and around the universe:
- My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell
- Innocence by Penelope Fitzgerald
- The Balkan Trilogy by Olivia Manning
- The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin
- The Green Road by Anne Enright
Dave Sherman recommends "Gary Shteyngart's Our Country Friends, a COVID satire about a group of friends that quarantine together at a country house near NYC at the beginning of the pandemic."
Barbara Strauss has high hopes for Human Blues, out July 5. It's written by the department's own graduate Elisa Albert '00, who wrote the amazing After Birth and several other observant - piercing - books.
And Jerome Tharaud writes, "My summer reading suggestion would be D'Arcy McNickle's The Surrounded (1936). It's a great early Native American novel that gives a nuanced, evocative portrait of conflicts between Native people and settlers on the Flathead Reservation in Montana. It's also the selection for the Brandeis Novel Symposium in October." (More on the Novel Symposium coming soon.)