These Are the Best Books to Pick Up Before Summer Ends

In her magnificent latest—and Oprah's newest Book Club Pick— Isabel Wilkerson deepens and extends her examination of the inception and consequences of American racism, finding direct connections to the outcastes of India and the horrors of the Third Reich. Wilkerson unearths bone-chilling parallels in systems of oppressive regimes that otherwise seem radically dissimilar to explain caste and how it predated and helped define racism in America. Read the full review here. 

Edie, the capricious millennial narrator of Leilani’s strikingly observed debut novel, first encounters her lover—23 years her senior—in the flesh at Six Flags. What ensues over the next 200-plus pages is indeed a wild ride: an irreverent intergenerational tale of race and class that’s blisteringly smart and fan-yourself sexy. Read the full review here. 

Bender has a gift for rooting wonderfully inventive fables in a very recognizable, walkable world. As in her 2010 novel, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, the middle-class Los Angeles of backyards and hatchbacks, bus stops and craft shops, is overlaid with mythic events—modest miracles, observed by few, that expose a world of mystery. Read the full review here. 

Just Us is the opposite of a lofty, theoretical book on racism. Its author, Claudia Rankine, is one of our leading intellectuals and teaches a course at Yale called Constructions of Whiteness, yet this essential, timely work of nonfiction is more playbook than scholarly tome. The book urges us to step outside the safety zone of politeness to interrogate the uncomfortable and to listen, even (especially) when we don’t like what we’re hearing. Read our interview with Rankine here. 

Feeling like “an outsider among my blood,” the stellar essayist of This Will Be My Undoing sifts through the “scraps, rubble, and frayed threads” of her personal history—her father’s Southern roots, her mother’s Northern pedigree—and charts the path of the migrant diaspora in this edifying “journey in reverse.”  

In his assured debut novel, David Heska Wanbli Weiden melds the gritty realism of Dashiell Hammett with the lyricism of Tommy Orange. A fist for hire on a Lakota reservation in South Dakota, Virgil keeps microwaved pizza on the table by meting out payback on behalf of those denied justice. But when his nephew nearly dies of a heroin overdose, the revenge becomes personal. To carry it out, Virgil enlists an ex to smoke out a drug gang in Denver. Winter Counts is a portrait of a man who can’t quite reconcile his embattled culture with his desire to move forward. 

Building on her viral BuzzFeed piece parsing millennial burnout, Petersen’s third book, a highlight-every-sentence-in-recognition survey of the anxiety and exhaustion baked into the lives of myriad young people, dispels many of the myths and misconceptions—the laziness! the entitlement!—surrounding the generation that came of age amid the internet and economic collapse. Yet rather than pit millennials against boomers, Petersen makes meaningful and constructive connections between the toils and troubles of the two groups. 

Based in part on the author’s own family history, this sumptuous and intimate fictional epic follows a girl born in a claw-foot bathtub in 1950s Arkansas to a white mother and a Cherokee father. The latter—a gregarious raconteur—becomes her lodestar over the next few years as she learns to tell her own story.

In this richly anecdotal, vital account, the Nation writer argues that disunion is as American as baseball: “The possibility that it all might go to pieces...is a hidden thread through our entire history, from the colonial era to the early republic and the Civil War and beyond...up to our own volatile moment.” Kreitner deftly illuminates such footnote episodes as the Whiskey Rebellion, when Pennsylvanian frontiersmen rose up against George Washington’s taxes, and Aaron Burr’s plot to found his own Western empire to excavate the twisted roots of our country, ever susceptible to unrest.

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away—Long Island in the ’60s—a group of tech nerds huddled in a geodesic dome, hammering out algorithms that would mine personal data. Harvard history professor and New Yorker staff writer Lepore brilliantly expands on a chapter from her previous book, These Truths, revealing the origins of online social networks and their iron grip on our politics. Against a backdrop of Mad Men–esque ad guys and race protests, Lepore paints a lavish portrait of the long-forgotten Simulmatics Corporation, equal parts math geniuses and Keystone Kops, who “built a machine to control and predict what they could not. They are the long-dead, white-whiskered grandfathers of Mark Zuckerberg...and Elon Musk.” 

These transgressive essays inhabit the in-between—male and female, Wisconsin and New York, monogamy and kink—and probe the profound paradoxes of personhood, depicting “a place that transcends boundaries, that defies definition, a body that holds within it a multitude of identities.”

For Maxwell, an MSNBC political analyst and former Hillary Clinton campaign staffer, nearly as devastating as Clinton’s loss and Trump’s win was the fact that the postelection discourse still centered on the grievances of white male voters. The perspective of people of color, she writes, particularly Black women like her, “demands the attention of the entire spectrum of progressive politicos.” This clarion call and “statement of aspiration” advises that the path to winning future ballot-box battles lies in our listening to, and restructuring around, the voices of all Americans.

When a seemingly unclassifiable human being—genderless, racially ambiguous, mostly mute, sans memory—is discovered sleeping in a church, they become a scapegoat for the townsfolk’s own insecurities and identity crises in this wonderfully incisive parable.

Spiritual yearnings pulse through these dazzling stories, linked to Kenan’s own Yoknapatawpha County: Tims Creek, North Carolina. From a tourist who encounters a bitter Billy Idol to a conflicted faith healer, his characters grapple with the desires and disappointments of middle age. 

A young Nigerian man dares to carve out his own identity in an oppressive culture, forging bonds with women as he slips perilously closer to an appointment with the grim reaper. A graceful, searching work from the lauded author of Freshwater.

The Eisner Award–winning graphic novelist and New Yorker cover artist makes his memoir debut with a boisterous and heart-meltingly tender tale of reconciling the pratfalls of minor fame with the legacy-leaving poignancies of new fatherhood.

In this alluring cocktail of a novel, a dying dance teacher reminisces and records for posterity his memories of Detroit’s postwar ferment of Black artists, writers, musicians, and activists, a “caramel Camelot...a rare light and a heat,” with cameos by Ethel Waters and Dinah Washington.

Combining brain-boggling Gladwellian pop science and incisive social philosophy, an acclaimed poet offers a timely look at the tricks our minds play amid catastrophe.  

This lovely, coolly arresting story collection showcases mostly women and their morally fraught choices. From one-night stands in Kenya to Zuccotti Park protests to despair in a nighthawk café, Minot’s characters wrestle with loneliness and ennui, “enveloped in an individual daze...unencased.”

“We mark our existence with our creations,” writes the current poet laureate of the United States in this vital, centuries-spanning anthology of Native verse, a compendium of “songs of becoming, of change, of dreaming” destined to be studied and savored.