Female Literati Pick Summer's Best Books

"Uncanny Reader edited by Marjorie Sandor ($17, amazon.com) is a collection of riveting stories of hauntedness and horror."—Joyce Carol Oates, author of Lovely, Dark, Deep

"Atticus Lish's Preparation for the Next Life ($10, amazon.com) is a love story with such high stakes that it makes other contemporary novels seems like—well, novels. An illegal Uighur immigrant from China meets an Iraq veteran , and for the rest of the novel I pled telepathically with the author to make it come out right for them. I can't think of any novelist who inhabits his characters more completely, or makes us care so passionately about what's going to happen to them." —Nell Freudenberger, author of The Newlyweds

"The book that's carrying me to summer is the excellent, sad, exhilarating Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel ($12, amazon.com). When I read as the sun comes up, I can feel the perfect loneliness at the heart of a disaster, the person thrown into immediate understanding of his mortality. In perfect tandem, the book conveys the sadness and even buoyant joy of saying goodbye to this beautiful world. All that lyricism is bound up in a really suspenseful story—part thriller, part elegy for the lost world." —Rebecca Lee, author of Bobcat and Other Stories

"The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman ($13, amazon.com) is a 2010 novel about an English-language newspaper in Rome and the people who work there over the years. It's a wonderful book with outsized, memorable characters whom we bump up against and then perhaps lose sight of—just the way we do with people in real life. It's moving and funny and knowing and true."—Meg Wolitzer, author of The Interestings

"Reading Alice Munro's The Beggar Maid ($14, amazon.com), originally published in 1979, is like going to the Sierras a century after the gold rush and stumbling right onto a mother lode. It's thrilling. The stories follow two very fierce, funny, and troublemaking women, Flo and her stepdaughter Rose, and they're startling and beautiful and unruly, studded throughout with Munro's observations on their inner lives, which are so penetrating it sometimes feels she might be reading one's own mind."—Susan Choi, author of My Education

"I return to Jane Gardam's Old Filth ($13, amazon.com) again and again in an effort to understand how the author, in her mid-seventies, conjured up this story of a Raj orphan, now a ninety-year-old retired and revered judge, who finally takes a hard look back and peels off the layers that have prevented him from accessing his own life. He's one of the most poignant, vulnerable, and endearing characters I've ever encountered, and this novel is an emotional and intellectual triumph."—Lily King, author of Euphoria

"Maggie Nelson organically weaves theory into her own messy, real life (conception, death, motherhood, gender transformation). She does this so warmly that you dilate with her, softening where you might have instinctively clenched with fear. I read The Argonauts ($16, amazon.com) in one breathless, tearful, mind-blown day and I'm still recovering." —Miranda July, author of The First Bad Man

"Amitav Ghosh's Flood of Fire ($20, amazon.com) is one of my most-anticipated summer reads. It's the final installment in his spectacular Ibis Trilogy, which follows the lives and changing fortunes of a huge cast of characters across England, the subcontinent, and Asia during the height of the opium trade. The books are not only operatic—big personalities, lots of drama—but a compelling and vividly imagined chronicling of the height of British colonialism, and the development of modern Asia." —Hanya Yanagihara, author of A Little Life

"Make Your Home Among Strangers by Jennine Capó Crucet ($20, out in August) is summer reading that evokes the coming fall. Lizet, the daughter of Cuban immigrants, is the first in her family to go to college, a prestigious northeastern university to which she applied—and was accepted—without her parents' knowledge. Lizet's attempt to navigate the world of high privilege—and the campus's efforts to accommodate 'diverse' students—is spot-on, and makes for a gripping, touching story." —Adelle Waldman, author of The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.

"If you'd like some dark humor and gritty truth-telling to keep you grounded during the sunshine months, I recommend Kirstin Valdez Quade's Night at the Fiestas ($20, amazon.com). Set in the arid landscapes of the West and Southwest, her stories tackle oft-neglected emotional territory: how small, petty feelings of inconsequence can make people struggle desperately to assert their existence. There's gorgeous, unpredictable writing here, abundant family drama, and fresh takes on frailty and yearning." —Maggie Shipstead, author of Astonish Me

"The Ballad of Barnabas Pierkiel from Magdalena Zyzak ($23, amazon.com) is a comedy set in an unnamed East European country during World War II. The novel is framed as an epic tale about Barnabas Pierkiel, a swineherd, and follows his adventure to seek love and fame. The ingeniousness of the novel, like the best comedies, is not that characters are made into clowns, but that clowns as they may choose to be, they have, slapped by the senselessness of history, come to grief."—Yiyun Li, author of Kinder than Solitude