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Good morning! I’m the senior Books editor at The Atlantic. I’m taking over today’s culture edition of the Daily for something a little different: an exciting update from our Books section, and some recommendations for your summer reading list.
First, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:
Your Summer Reads
This past week was a big one at The Atlantic’s Books desk. Not only did we publish our annual summer reading guide (more about that soon), but we also relaunched the Books Briefing, our weekly newsletter where you can find all things bookish in The Atlantic: essays, recommendations, reports from the literary world.
One thing you should know is that our approach to books is a little different here. With all due respect to the traditional book review and its thumbs-up or thumbs-down assessment, we know that our readers want more than just to be told whether they should buy a book (though we hope to help with that as well). They want to understand how a novel might give them a new way to think about language or altruism. They want the concepts embedded in the best nonfiction books—whether it’s okay to live a “good-enough life,” for instance, or what the difference is between accomplishment and mastery—to be debated, not just named. And they want incisive profiles of storytelling masters, such as David Grann, and of novelists who are trying something strange and original, such as Catherine Lacey. They want the latest on book banning.
We’ve got all of it. And the Books Briefing will really be the best way for you to stay caught up. This week, for example, we’re pointing to our summer reading guide, which we just published. This is the annual opportunity our writers and editors get to share some of their favorites with you.
Many of the books on our list are older and have earned their place as treasured recommendations over time (one of mine this year is Lore Segal’s Her First American; you’ll never find a more eccentric love story). But we like to make sure our readers also know about some of the brand-new books out this summer that we think are worth picking up. Here are a few highlights:
- This year, my colleague Maya Chung looked at Emma Cline’s The Guest and the “feeling of sweaty anxiety” it creates through the story of a young grifter on Long Island who survives by taking advantage of nearly everyone she meets.
- Emma Sarappo, also an editor on the Books desk, read Samantha Irby’s Quietly Hostile, a hilarious collection of essays that tracks the great transition from being “young and lubricated,” as Irby puts it, to being middle-aged.
- Nicole Acheampong, on our Culture desk, delved into Brandon Taylor’s new novel, The Late Americans—a group portrait of a loose circle of friends in Iowa City fighting and loving and fighting as they come of age.
- And I took the nonfiction route and spent time with David Grann’s The Wager, about an 18th-century shipwreck off the coast of Patagonia and its mutinous aftermath—an incredible story rendered by Grann as a narrative that insists you keep reading.
For people inclined toward audiobooks (a newly acquired habit of mine), I’ll leave you with a recommendation from some of my recent listening. I’m a big fan of James McBride’s work and loved his last novel, Deacon King Kong, which I actually chose as one of my summer reads last year. His new book, The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, is out in August, and in anticipation, I decided to listen to his memoir, The Color of Water. The book is McBride’s love letter to his mother—a Jewish immigrant and the daughter of an Orthodox rabbi—who survived a brutal childhood in the South, left her family at 17, and married a Black man and raised 12 children in Brooklyn. The audiobook is read alternately by a voice actor who presents McBride’s narration (JD Jackson) and a different actor for the chapters in which Ruth McBride tells her life story in the first person (Susan Denaker). It’s a wonderful way to take in the memoir and appreciate McBride’s reconstruction of his family’s history, and the voice he gives back to his mother.
There’s a lot more if you check out our guide to summer reading. And sign up for our newsletter, where we’ll keep you plied with book recommendations and provocative ideas week to week.
Happy reading!
Read past editions of the Sunday Daily with Adam Harris, Saahil Desai, Yasmin Tayag, Damon Beres, Julie Beck, Faith Hill, and Derek Thompson.
The Week Ahead
- The Forgotten Girls: A Memoir of Friendship and Lost Promise in Rural America, in which the journalist Monica Potts uncovers the plight of girls and women in the nation’s rural towns (on sale Tuesday)
- Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, the long-awaited sequel to 2018’s “exuberant and inventive” Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (in theaters Friday)
- Searching for Soul Food, which follows the celebrity chef Alisa Reynolds in her quest to find out what soul food looks like around the world (begins streaming Friday on Hulu)
Essay
The 400-Year-Old Tragedy That Captures Our Chaos
By Megan Garber
This story contains spoilers through the ninth episode of Succession Season 4.
Roman Roy was ready. He had written his eulogy for his father—a great man, he would say, great despite and because of it all—on hot-pink index cards. He had practiced the speech in front of a mirror. He had “pre-grieved,” he kept telling people, and so could be trusted to fulfill, one last time, the core duty of the family business: to love in a way that moves markets.
More in Culture
- Yellowjackets, how could you?
- A Chinese American show that doesn’t bother to explain itself
- Tina Turner’s cosmic life
- You Hurt My Feelings is a hilarious anxiety spiral.
- We still don’t know Anna Nicole Smith.
- Chain-Gang All-Stars is Gladiator meets the American prison system.
- The 1880s political novel that could have been written today
Catch Up on The Atlantic
Photo Album
Check out the Chelsea Flower Show in England, a scarecrow fair in Italy, and the rest of our photo editor’s selections of the week’s best snapshots.
Kelli María Korducki contributed to this newsletter.
About the Author
