Heading on vacation? Relaxing at the beach? Or just cooling down indoors? Our staff has you covered! Head out to your local bookstore and grab a copy of one of these great books for your summer reading list.

Senior Editor Elizabeth Ault, is returning to a classic this summer, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. “Amidst our national literacy crisis, I’m committing to a different kind of beach read: a Moby-Dick book club with a friend. I’ve never actually read the entire book (though I have read and loved Dayswork, a pandemic I guess we call it a novel about the writing of it)! I already love the technical whale parts, though; of course, the hubris of an aged white man ruining his ship in a futile quest to tame nature is really beyond on the nose as a metaphor at this point. Nevertheless, I am excited to close the 81 tabs of Heated Rivalry fanfiction I have open to lock into Melville’s wild weirdness.”

Book Designer Courtney Richardson highly recommends Caro Claire Burke’s debut novel, Yesteryear. “From start to finish, I could NOT get enough of this delicious page-turner of a book. Post-covid I decided if I wasn’t gripped by a book, I didn’t have to finish it—and this book literally barely spent time closed once it was in my hands. I was rooting so hard for the main character Natalie to find her way through the messy life she created, but then a major plot twist had me turning over my thoughts and feelings about it entirely. I couldn’t believe I had missed all the cues for the real story underneath the story. For anyone who has spent a great deal of time trying to make themselves palatable, only to fail miserably, you will not want to miss this book.”

Exhibit Manager Jes Malitoris says, “For those seeking something spine-tingly, I highly recommend Lover’s Leap, from local North Carolina author Rikki Goodwin. It’s a fun, fast novel about a haunted Bed and Breakfast with some great spooks and twists that surprised even me as a fairly genre-savvy reader. A perfect poolside read.”

For our nonfiction lovers, Associate Books Marketing Manager Chris Robinson suggests Index, A History of the by Dennis Duncan. “It traces the fascinating history of the index, something that seems so benign that a book about it couldn’t be interesting. Duncan spans antiquity to search engines, showing how the index evolved from something to catalog vast amounts of knowledge in scrolls, codices, and finally books printed with a printing press. Also, imagine being the person who invented the page number and applied it to an index! I learned that the way I organize my records—separating by genre, then alphabetical by artist, then chronological by release—is an indexing method that goes back to the 1300s.  The juiciest bits come when Duncan talks about how rival intellectuals and writers in the 18th and 19th centuries would make their own index to other writers’ books as a way to attack them. Such as ‘Flowers, Smith’s complete lack of knowledge about.’ Every book nerd should read this.”

Director of Marketing, Sales and Finance Cason Lynley highly recommends Kira Jane Buxton’s most recent novel, Tartufo. “Tartufo felt like a little holiday in the form of a book. Set in the beautiful medieval village of Lazzarini Boscarino, as nearly every character describes it when they mention the name of the village, the village is failing. Young people have left and only a small group of older villagers remain who are searching for ways to revitalize their village when their local truffle hunter discovers the world’s largest white truffle and an international auction invades the village, promising both financial gain and visibility to tourists. The cast of characters are delightful including the 22-year old mule, Maurizio, who is also a candidate for mayor, along with the descriptions of mouth-watering food (yes, I ate a lot of pasta while reading this) and the beautiful countryside.”

Books Marketing Manager Laura Sell suggests Lake Effect by Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney, calling it a perfect summer read. “A smoothly written domestic novel, it goes down like a nice rosé. It explores what happens when two families in a Rochester neighborhood in 1977 are overtaken by the sexual revolution. Like the lake effect snows of the region, the actions of two characters dump a huge storm on their families with repercussions that continue for years.”

What are you reading this Summer? Let us know in the comments!

No matter where or how you choose to escape the summer heat, we have you covered. Check out the great new titles coming out this July.

Making Gay History recounts John D’Emilio’s career as a public historian, activist, and academic. Tracing his involvement in developing LGBTQ history from the 1970s to the 1990s, D’Emilio paints a queer history both personal and national that helps us understand how the LGBTQ movement has grown.

In Cisgender, Perry Zurn turns an incisive yet playful eye toward the “norm” against which transgender gets defined. Utilizing unplumbed archives and fresh interviews, Zurn offers a critical history of the term cis. This unique examination of cisgender is a must-read for all readers invested in trans life and the futures of gender.

Written by longtime climber Hil Malatino, Climbing explores gender, class, and sizeism in climbing culture, as well as grief, addiction, queer and trans-worldmaking, and the tensions between conservation and recreation. Climbing teases out how the art of navigating across rock can help us learn how to revel in being weird, vulnerable, and radically interdependent animals temporarily gifted the complicated tragicomedy of a body.

In Going to the Moon, poet Sally Ashton marvels at the Moon’s powerful influence since the dawn of humanity—how we have, in our own ways, gone to the Moon, and what we have found. Contemplating lunar settlement in the light of history, culture, the rise of the space industry, and geopolitical conflict, Ashton shares her sense of wonder at the simple beauty of our unchanged Moon and reveals what is at stake in our contemporary attempts to colonize it.

In Alfredo Jaar, Florencia San Martín analyzes the work of the prominent Chilean-born artist Alfredo Jaar, whose work challenges the linear and triumphalist temporality of Western modernity that obscures the violence of colonization and globalization. Alfredo Jaar enables us to reimagine art history, offering a fresh paradigm with which to think about global contemporary art.

The Future of Totality, edited by Nicholas Brown, Maria Elisa Cevasco, Fabio Akcelrud Durão, and Robert T. Tally, brings together a selection of Fredric Jameson’s former students and other prominent scholars to represent future directions of Jamesonian thought. Serving both as a tribute to the scholar and as a space for thinking about the future of his work, these essays explore new and unforeseen dimensions to which Jameson’s work leads.

Placing pressure on what it means to “do” feminist philosophy, Feminist Making, Doing, and Sensing, edited by Lauren Guilmette and Ada S. Jaarsma, offers an innovative and critical rethinking of feminist philosophical practice and feminist philosophy as a discipline. The collection raises questions about how disciplines are made, how philosophy gets done, and the collaborative nature of thinking.

Inside the Body of Black Feminism connects historical studies of medical racism with Black feminist theories of the body to reimagine the material and metaphoric possibilities for political subjectivity across race, gender, and culture. Working through materials such as medical textbooks, memoirs, data visualizations, museum displays, speculative fiction, and horror films, Samantha Pinto explores how a visually inaccessible corporeal interior becomes discernible and racialized in the public sphere.

Providing a feminist ethnography of land politics, Surviving the State considers how the everyday, land-based practices of farmers in Myanmar’s Kalay Valley enables them to endure successive authoritarian regimes. Through robust ethnography, Hilary Oliva Faxon considers the centrality of land both to state efforts at control and to inhabitants’ ability to articulate claims.

Resurgency examines how Iraqi farmers outlast the long shadow of US military intervention as they return to repair their war-damaged homeland. Based on detailed ethnographic research, Kali Rubaii expands the temporal and descriptive definitions of war, displacement, and resistance.

In We Live with the Sea, Andrew Littlejohn addresses the implementation and controversy surrounding safety infrastructures following the March 2011 tsunami in northeastern Japan. Focusing on the tsunami survivors who resisted government plans for increased coastal defenses, Littlejohn argues that imposed modernist safety structures undermine the very things they claim to protect.

A critical and ethnographic exploration of wildfire management in Australia, one of Earth’s most fire-prone countries, Timothy Neale’s How to Control Fire on a Burning Continent ties contemporary wildfire problems to ongoing colonization and Indigenous dispossession, exploring Indigenous-led land management and cultural burning as a practical assertion of sovereignty.