This month, sink into a season of sunny lounging with transportive books that range from a rich visual exploration of American affluence to a novel about a queer cougar roaming Los Angeles.
SUN SOAKED
The wet, hot American summer shines on, in a quartet of rich visual histories.
‘The Beginning’ by Tina Barney
This Tina Barney monograph spans 1976 to 1980, highlighting her early work that chronicles American affluence: the tennis lessons, private pools, and wallpapered interiors of vivid seasonal tableaux. (Radius)
‘Mystery Street’ by Vasantha Yogananthan
French photographer Vasantha Yogananthan returns to documentary with a free-flowing depiction of childhood in 2022 New Orleans: wheelies, merry-go-rounds, a hula hoop about to set spin. (Chose Commune)
‘The Pleasure of Seeing’ by Joel Meyerowitz and Lorenzo Braca
“The main story always was the light,” photographer Joel Meyerowitz tells the writer Lorenzo Braca. Their interviews accompany more than 100 images, including from the large-format series Meyerowitz shot on Cape Cod in ’76 and ’77, as pictured here. (Damiani) —Madison Reid
SIX PACK
Feline ponderings, knotty love, and more fresh novels.
‘Reproduction’ by Louisa Hall
A novelist considers birth and art—suffering morning sickness, miscarrying, conceiving of a novel about Mary Shelley, abandoning it—in this visceral, chimerical genre bender from Louisa Hall. (Ecco)
‘Farrell Covington and the Limits of Style’ by Paul Rudnick
Beginning with Farrell seducing Nate at Yale, through movie stardom and the AIDS epidemic, Paul Rudnick chronicles half a century of complex love. (Atria)
‘Maddalena and the Dark’ by Julia Fine
Julia Fine’s beguiling fairy tale dwells in 18th-century Venice, where teen girls—driven, orphaned Luisa and charismatic, wealthy Maddalena—collide at a rigorous music school. (Flatiron)
‘Open Throat’ by Henry Hoke
“I probably wouldn’t eat a child,” muses Henry Hoke’s mountain lion narrator. This lyrical story of loneliness and kinship in Los Angeles is, by turns, delightful and melancholy—and inventive throughout. (MCD/FSG)
‘Holding Pattern’ by Jenny Xie
Newly single and on leave from her PhD program, Kathleen Cheng moves into her mom’s Oakland home and takes a job at a “cuddle clinic” in Jenny Xie’s luminous, physical debut novel. (Riverhead)
‘Everything’s Fine’ by Cecilia Rabess
Cecilia Rabess spins a smart, tangly romance at Goldman Sachs between Jess, feminist mag employee turned lone Black woman analyst, and white, conservative Greenwich-born Josh. (Simon & Schuster) —Keziah Weir
GATHER ’ROUND
New works of nonfiction chronicle change and growth.
‘Built From the Fire’ by Victor Luckerson
This evocative history of Tulsa’s Black Wall Street (site of the 1921 race massacre) and the family behind its newspaper, The Oklahoma Eagle, captures ruin and endurance. (Random House)
‘Pageboy’ by Elliot Page
In an intimate memoir, the Juno actor excavates his dovetailing experiences of becoming a public star while, privately, discovering himself as queer and trans. (Flatiron)
‘George: A Magpie Memoir’ by Frieda Hughes
An unmoored painter and poet—daughter of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes—details finding “home” with a cheeky and beloved bird. (Avid Reader)
‘Young and Restless’ by Mattie Kahn
A galvanizing survey of the power of teen girls, from young suffragettes and civil rights advocates to Gen Z’ers fighting for bodily autonomy in post-Roe America. (Viking) —KW
