Summer officially started a couple of weeks ago and for many of us, we’re just starting to settle into the summer groove of things, not to mention trying to beat the heat. But if you’re trying to figure out what to read this summer, we’ve got your summer reading list covered. Plus, a peek at what some of the Entropy editors & contributors are currently reading.
Summer Reading List:
Neon Green (Unnamed Press)
by Margaret Wappler
“Neon Green is a time capsule: it captures a moment, a slice of recent history, a feeling, a way of life. Wappler writes with humor, warmth, and intelligence. Filled with jewel-like sentences and insights that add up to a rewarding and deeply affecting novel.” —Charles Yu, author of How to Live Safely in a Science Fiction Universe
Grief Is the Thing with Feathers (Graywolf Press)
by Max Porter
“Grief Is the Thing with Feathers” argues that books, literature and poetry can help save us. This book is a sublime and painful conjuring of a family’s grief and the misfit creature with the power to both haunt and help them. It is a complex story, not simply-told or sparse: Nothing is missing. Let it be a call for more great books of this length to be recognized for what they are — whole. Extraordinary is a book with feathers.”—Los Angeles Times
Sister (Noemi Press)
by Steven Karl
A ritual of grief & a hallucinatory journey through caring, Sister explores the emotions, contexts, & margins of loss. Karl moves from tight-lipped minimalism to expansive talkiness to a fabulism of beasts & insects, building poems out of the imagined landscapes of death, linguistic junk & prayer. He searches for that which poetry always searches, to say the unsayable. Sister is a beautiful book & a sad book & a cathartic book & you need to read it. —Mathias Svalina
The Reactive (Two Dollar Radio)
by Masande Ntshanga
“[The Reactive is] a searing, gorgeously written account of life, love, illness, and death in South Africa. With exquisite prose, formal innovation, and a masterful command of storytelling, Ntshanga illustrates how some young people navigated the dusk that followed the dawn of freedom in South Africa and humanizes the casualties of the Mbeki government’s fatal policies on HIV & AIDS.” —Naomi Jackson, Poets & Writers
A Collapse of Horses (Coffee House Press)
by Brian Evenson
“Violence is punishing but unbelievably subtle in Evenson’s delicate, minimalist stories. And ultimately, there is something cosmic — something utterly Lovecraftian, but without the baroque language — about this type of horror: Beneath the slippery, often abstruse plots lies a vast gulf of nothingness, in the purest and most unsettling sense of the word.” —NPR
The Black Maria (BOA Editions)
by Aracelis Girmay
“There is a saying in Spanish, ‘Cada cabeza es un mundo,’ which translates ‘every mind is a universe unto itself.’ And Girmay’s world, universe, opens new ways of seeing the simplest things and giving them voice. Everything contains some clue of another self, body or kindred spirit. Like an archaeologist, she digs deeply finding herself in every living thing, even in the inanimate. Her magic is poetry at its best.” —National Books Critics Circle
Vaseline Buddha (Deep Vellum)
by Jung Young Moon, translated by Yewon Jung
“Reality and fantasy, memories and dreams, Asia and Europe, all are equal partners in this literary meditation” — Christoph Hartner, Crown Newspaper (Germany)
World of Warcraft (Boss Fight Books)
by Daniel Lisi
Based on research, interviews, and the author’s own experience in a hardcore raiding guild, Lisi’s book examines WoW‘s origins, the addictive power of its gameplay loop, the romances WoW has both cemented and shattered, the enabling power of anonymity, and the thrill of conquering BlizzCon with guildmates you’ve known for years and just met for the first time.
The Narco-Imaginary: Essays Under the Influence (Ugly Duckling Presse)
by Ramsey Scott
With this stellar book, Ramsey Scott catapults into my canon of favorite literary visionaries. He performs political lament in compressed, exquisitely composed sentences, their gnomic austerity buoyed by humor, cynicism, critical edge, and spiky disclosures—his tone smartly poised on the borderline between the raw and the cooked, the elegiac and the confrontational. His heady syntax will thrill any reader hungry for gorgeous complication. Sonorous, libidinous, eloquent, and charmingly digressive, Scott’s the real deal.—Wayne Koestenbaum
The Big Book of Science Fiction (Tin House)
Edited by Jeff VanderMeer and Ann Vandermeer
“An enormous anthology of science fiction put together by two of our sharpest purveyors of the genre. . . . This volume is a perfect mix of the classic and the unexpected.” —Flavorwire
The Clouds (Open Letter Books)
by Juan José Saer, translated by Hilary Vaughn Dobel
“What Saer presents marvelously is the experience of reality, and the characters’ attempts to write their own narratives within its excess.” —Bookforum
Poor Love Machine (Action Books)
by Kim Hyesoon, translated by Don Mee Choi
“Kim’s poems, whether lineated or in prose, whether mythic or idiosyncratic (though rarely only one of these for long), reside at precisely those places between what the body is and what it is not, between the corporeal machinery by which meaning is generated and the meanings which thus emerge, tethered to the body by a string of cat guts and vibrating words.” – Jessica Lawson, Jacket2
Problems (Coffee House Press)
by Jade Sharma
“Sharma’s debut novel is an uncompromising and unforgettable depiction of the corrosive loop of addiction. . . . there is a propulsive energy in Maya’s story, guided by her askew yet precise perspective . . . in Maya’s voice, Sharma has crafted a momentous force that never flags and feels painfully honest.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review
Remembering Animals (Nightboat Books)
by Brenda Iijima
RememberingAnimals is Iijima at her most fearless and feral. Life comes at you fast and furious in this powerful book. Fonts, typefaces and punctuation leap about like nervous creatures made of flesh, hair and fat in a cautionary tale about the dangers of getting lost in a forest of deep forgetting. – JuliePatton
The Spoons in the Grass are There to Dig a Moat (Sarabande Books)
by Amelia Martens
“Whether she is proffering chilling indications of an apocalypse, agonizing over an earnest apology, or conjuring the latent melancholy of bedtime, [Martens] remains both playful and precise, at once whimsical and commanding…. As tangible as it is surreal.” —Booklist
The Kingdom (Soho Press)
by Fuminori Nakamura, translated by Kalau Almony
“Crime fiction that pushes past the bounds of genre, occupying its own nightmare realm . . . Guilt or innocence is not the issue; we are corrupted, complicit, just by living in society. The ties that bind, in other words, are rules beyond our making, rules that distance us not only from each other but also from ourselves. ” —Los Angeles Times
The Incantations of Daniel Johnston: a graphic novel (Two Dollar Radio)
by Ricardo Cavolo & Scott McClanahan
“[The Incantations of Daniel Johnston] captures Johnston’s visions—both artistic and hallucinatory—in an intensely colorful cartoonish style and vivid recurring images: frogs, cascades of pills, volcanoes, eyeballs of many varieties.” —John Williams, New York Times Book Review
The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe (NYRB)
by D. G. Compton
Like his peers Philip K. Dick, Bernard Wolfe, and J.G. Ballard, D.G. Compton had a special capacity for sensing the encroachment of what has in fact become our present life. And, as with those writers at their best—and The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe is Compton at his best —he found a way to embody his apprehensions with a sympathy and fascination and horror that puts the reader inside the skin of his characters, and inside the skin of the world. —Jonathan Lethem
Madeleine E. (Outpost 19)
by Gabriel Blackwell
“MADELEINE E. breathes new life into the novel, the monograph, the commonplace book, the memoir. . . This is a book that will be treasured by readers who are eager to glimpse the horizons of contemporary writing as well by those who appreciate a good old-fashioned page-turner. Gabriel Blackwell’s writing proves that a genre-defying literature is not only possible, it’s necessary.” – Evan Lavender-Smith
The Service Porch (Letter Machine Editions)
by Fred Moten
The third and final volume of Fred Moten’s poetic trilogy (including The Feel Trio and The Little Edges), The Service Porch is expansive meditation on black life, love, violence, and the adventure of making art. Moten returns here to reinvent some of his earliest poetic visions and strikes up a conversation with many of the most brilliant African American visual artists through a series of epistolary and ekphrastic poems. By turns mournful, tender, ferocious, and heart-breakingly honest, The Service Porch is an open letter, a play list, and a hive of prayer and joy.
The Hermit (The Song Cave)
by Lucy Ives
“Stray thoughts are the protagonists of THE HERMIT—they might be the aftereffects of intense focus, yet come across as decidedly eccentric in their resistance to systems (i.e. genre) that might dull their prismatic luminescence. Here they deliver proof of parataxis’s poiesis. Ives’s exquisite take on ellipsis as realism is a dream, as both vision and something that fully satisfies a wish.”—Mónica de la Torre
Where We Go When All We Were Is Gone (Black Lawrence Press)
by Sequoia Nagamatsu
“A combination of the mystical, magical, and marvelous, Sequoia Nagamatsu weaves a collection of bold, hysterical, and moving tales into an unforgettable debut. From shape-shifters, to star-makers, to babies made of snow, the characters in Where We Go When All We Were Is Gone form a community of longing, of the surreal, of wonder. What a joy it is to read each and every story.” —Michael Czyzniejewski, author of I Will Love You for the Rest of My Life: Breakup Stories
Antigona Gonzalez (Les Figues Press)
by Sara Uribe, translated by John Pluecker
“This brilliant and moving book revives the story of Antigone to confront the horrifying violence shrouded within the present landscape—Antigone, a solitary figure before the law, facing certain death, who invokes a way of resistance at once textual and political. Sophocles’ play resonates throughout this act of poetic testimony and fierce interpretation, making emphatic graphic marks precisely where there is no trace of loss.”—Judith Butler
The Transmigration of Bodies (And Other Stories)
by Yuri Herrera, translated by Lisa Dillman
‘The Transmigration of Bodies represents a highpoint in the genre of the novel. Herrera has been slowly building an oeuvre constructed on a singular conception of the world, in which literature’s past and present form a continuum. Reading him gives one the sense of diving into his library, a place that is unashamed of belonging to a tradition and being well-read and much-underlined.’ Álvaro Enrigue, author of Sudden Death
What We’re Reading at Entropy:
Joseph Milazzo:
- Miro Penkov, STORK MOUNTAIN
- Frank London Brown, TRUMBULL PARK
- Oscarine Bosquet, PRESENT PARTICIPLE
- Albert Saijo, OUTSPEAKS: A RHAPSODY
- João Cabral de Melo Neto, EDUCATION BY STONE.
Keith McCleary:
I have pushed aside all other reading obligations in order to read through the entirety of Frank Herbert’s Dune series. I read through the first three books a few years back, but stopped when the main character turned into a giant penis worm and the timeline jumped ahead a thousand years. (spoilers!) This summer I vow to get through all six books, plus the out of print Dune Encyclopedia, and the supposedly terrible sequels written by Herbert’s son. I have no idea if this entire exercise is completely self-indulgent or totally masochistic, but thus far it’s mostly making me feel like my summer is taking place in the seventies while smoking a lot of weed.
Michael J Seidlinger:
- FUTURE SEX by Emily Witt
- THE GENTLEMAN by Forrest Leo
- WHITE NIGHTS IN SPLIT CITY by Annie DeWitt
- THE CONTINUOUS KATHERINE MORTENHOE by DG Compton
- ARCADE by Drew Nellins Smith.
Kevin Catalano:
- THE FARMACIST by Ashley Farmer
- DANIEL JOHNSTON by Scott McClanahan and Ricardo Cavolo
- YOU WILL KNOW ME by Megan Abbott
- BLACK PANTHER issues by Ta-Nehisi Coates.
Sara Finnerty Turgeon:
I just got A Bestiary by Lily Hoang and I am very excited to read it.
Pansy Petunia:
- Gabrielle Lucille Fuentes’ The Sleeping World
- The Girls by Emma Kline
- West of Eden by Jean Stein
- Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi
- Daniel, Damned by TJY
Linda Michel-Cassidy:
- Among Strange Victims by Daniel Saldana París
- Amateurs by Dylan Hicks
- How To Pose for Hustler by Andrea Kneeland
- Little Labors by Rivka Galchen, The Blue Fox by Sjon (not new, but I love an icebound tale when the heat wave hits).
Cole Cohen:
Ocean Vuong’s Night Sky With Exit Wounds
Barrett Warner:
I’m looking forward to two books. George Scialabba’s “Low Dishonest Decades: Essays and Reviews, 1980-2015.” And Patricia C. Murphy’s “Hemming Flames.”
Andrea Lambert:
Melissa Broder’s So Sad Today
Sylvia Aguilar Zéleny:
- Conjunto Vacío by Verónica Gerber
- No aceptes caramelos de extraños by Andrea Jeftanovic
- Lullabies for little criminals by Heather O´Neill
