Essential Additions to Your Summer Reading
I’m no fool. I know that lists are not the most intellectually rigorous form of book criticism but I also know they get lots of clicks. And given that I spend a great deal of time in this column griping about AI and the publishing industry and media in general, I want to talk about great books. You know, the reason why we’re all here.
We’re halfway through 2026, and this year, much like in years past, great books have somehow managed to come into the world despite so many obstacles including low wages for (most) writers and corporate consolidation (I will call myself out by saying that three out of the six books on this list are published by imprints of Penguin Random House, and that’s really not great). My goal for the latter part of the year is to read more diversely by publisher. But in the meantime here are my favorites so far from 2026.
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Night Night Fawn, Jordy Rosenberg
A novel told from the point of view of a bitter miserable woman on her death bed may not sound like a hoot, but she also happens to be so damned funny it’s difficult not to enjoy spending time with her. Jordy Rosenberg’s extraordinary second novel contains the reminiscences of Barbara Rosenberg, a self-described yenta, bargain shopper, film buff, wannabe social climber, and incredibly wonderful conversationalist and vivid storyteller, who also happens to be a homophobe and a bigot and a terrible person. Tending to Barbara in her days of decline is her child, a trans man, who Barbara refers to as her daughter throughout. Time moves strangely. Dead naming abounds. Underneath all of that old Jewish humor is a woman who makes no effort to get to know the person her child has become, and who remains incurious about the parts of the world that don’t fit with her agenda. Despite all of the excellent jokes, ultimately Night Night Fawn can be nothing other than a tragedy.
Dog Days, Emily Labarge
Emily Labarge is a literary critic who was held hostage for seven hours along with her family while on a Caribbean vacation in 2009. Her stunning debut memoir is about how trauma upends narrative structures, and the struggle to write about it anyway despite its unwieldiness. The book is Labarge’s attempt to tell the story of what happened to her and her family without sanitizing what happened, which requires her (and the reader) to sit with thoughts that are sometimes incoherent and irrational. As Labarge experiments in crafting a narrative around violence and terror, she also looks to literature and cinema and art and music for guidance, from the films of David Lynch to the short stories of Amy Hempel. The result is a jarring, vivid account of the million and one ways of telling an untellable story.
On Toni Morrison, Namwali Serpell
I had a great conversation with Namwali Serpell about her last novel and its influences and afterward I found myself wishing that I could audit her English literature courses at Harvard. I was jealous of her students, the recipients of her intense and intensive talks on reading and writing, and how intellectually satiated they must feel. With the publication of On Toni Morrison you can have that feeling, too. Serpell revels in all of the complications and contradictions of Toni Morrison, treating her subject with both reverence and even some skepticism and never settling for the easy conclusion. She takes us through the works of Morrison with rigor, combining astute academic analysis and personal asides to create a celebration of genius that’s not just approachable, but truly welcoming.
A Violent Masterpiece, Jordan Harper
The Hollywood noir that captures the class rage of this new Gilded Age, A Violent Masterpiece is a damning portrait of the depravity of the very rich and the secrets they’d do anything to keep. Set in a Los Angeles where a serial killer nicknamed the LA Ripper begins to terrorize the city, the story is told from three points of view—a defense attorney who represents a Jeffrey Epstein-esque criminal; a concierge to the ultra-wealthy who will do (almost) anything to keep her clients happy; and a livestreamer who rides around LA with his police scanner on, looking for violent thrills. It’s a feat of storytelling by Harper that each voice feels entirely authentic, and that their separate threads come to intersect with such urgency. Every single page trembles.
This Is Where the Serpent Lives, Daniyal Mueenuddin
Evoking the scale and precision of the most celebrated Russian novelists, Daniyal Mueenuddin’s debut is a modern history of Pakistan told in four distinct parts, each of which follows a different main character with specific ambitions. Taken together, the individual sections become a meditation on large-scale corruption as well as the smaller-scale ways (the “accumulations of little thefts”) that ensures that everyone who lives under a feudal system is morally compromised, some more than others. This Is Where the Serpent Lives is a systems novel about who gets to have ambition in the first place in a country where a person’s caste still determines so much of the course of their lives.
Repetition, Vigdis Hjorth, translated by Charlotte Barslund
The Norwegian writer Vigdis Hjorth creates a whole world in very few pages in this novella-length work in which even the pacing of the narrative itself does so much of the storytelling. Repetition is composed of a novelist’s remembrances of her teenage girlhood, a tumultuous time no matter what. We see her doing regular teenage girl stuff: going out with friends and meeting up with boys and drinking. But we also see her mother’s outsized reaction, as if a daughter coming home one night smelling of cigarettes and beer is a major crisis. Repetition propels us towards one night in November of 1975 when everything changes, but not in the way the heroine (or the reader) was led to expect. It’s only towards the end of the novel that it becomes clear that Repetition has been a mystery novel all along, and when its final revelation hits the result is shattering.
