Department of English

Summer Reading Recommendations 2022

summer reading book covers

Our faculty and staff picks for your summer lounging and stolen breaks at work:

cry back my sea book coverElizabeth 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." 

the dearly beloved book coverFrom Department Chair John Burt, a handful of thoughtful beach reads: 

the fortnight in september book coverMary 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."

the good house book coverBrandon 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." 

outline book coverBilly 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."

the feather thief book coverLisa 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:

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."

human blue book coverBarbara 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.)