The Atlantic's Summer Reading Guide
Tertulia
20 books in list
The Atlantic's summer reading guide is live! From backlist gems to brand-new buzzing novels, this list of 20 books is a solid bet for stocking up on books for the summer.
Heat Wave
Penelope Lively"The pleasure of Heat Wave is its slow, mesmerizing drama... Never has a mother-in-law’s judgment seemed so deliciously understated—and so devastating in its conclusion." Picked by Atlantic Deputy Editor Jane Yong Kim
Paperback, 1997
$13.99
Toy Fights: A Boyhood
Don Paterson"It makes you want to delete everything you’ve ever written and start again, this time telling the truth." Picked by Atlantic staff writer James Parker
Hardcover, 2023
$27.95
Love in Color: Mythical Tales from Around the World, Retold
Bolu Babalola"Babalola’s story collection updates and retells romantic myths and fables from a bevy of cultures, tossing a reader into the richly imagined world of characters..." Picked by Atlantic associate editor Emma Sarappo
Paperback, 2022
$16.99
Friday Black
Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah"Friday Black presents a warped reflection of our own reality that feels both horrifying and clarifying." Picked by Atlantic senior editor Lenika Cruz
Paperback, 2018
$16.99
The Kennedy Imprisonment: A Meditation on Power
Garry Wills"It’s a riveting critique of the first family of 20th-century liberalism..." Picked by Atlantic staff writer Franklin Foer
Paperback, 2002
$21.99
Travels in HyperReality
Umberto Eco"In the essays, the theorist and novelist plays a classic role: the foreigner who is alternately amused and appalled by American maximalism." Picked by Atlantic staff writer Megan Garber
Paperback, 2013
$18.95
The Last Whalers: Three Years in the Far Pacific with a Courageous Tribe and a Vanishing Way of Life
Doug Bock Clark"Clark recounts the lives of the Lamalerans with a deep respect, while also spinning a wondrous, thrilling story out of their struggles..." Picked by Atlantic senior editor Gal Beckerman
Paperback, 2019
$18.99
Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich, 1945-1955
Harald Jähner"Rendered with irony and based on skillful scholarship, Jähner’s book describes both a democratic rebirth and a moral evasion, uncomfortably and inextricably linked." Picked by Atlantic staff writer Franklin Foer
Paperback, 2023
$18.00
Francisco
Alison Mills Newman"Mills Newman’s novel feels like a long party, punctuated by difficult questions: about white standards of beauty, what it really means to be a revolutionary, how to be an artist, and how to be a woman partnered with a man." Picked by Atlantic associate editor Maya Chung
Paperback, 2023
$14.95
Elena Knows
Claudia Piñeiro"She describes Elena’s minute-by-minute experience so meticulously that I was almost able to comprehend—even just for a moment—the incredible multitude of perspectives that exist in this world at once." Picked by Atlantic senior associate editor Faith Hill
Paperback, 2021
$15.95
My Men
Victoria Kielland"The universe is a live wire in the hands of Byrnhild, later called Bella, later called Belle Gunness, in Kielland’s short, electric novel." Picked by Atlantic associate editor Emma Sarappo
Hardcover, 2023
$25.00
The Afterlives
Thomas Pierce"No matter how surreal things become, Pierce implies, people will keep moving forward in much the same way, living humdrum little lives together, wondering and hoping in the face of existential mystery." Picked by Atlantic senior associate editor Faith Hill
Paperback, 2019
$16.00
The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway
Merve Emre"Woolf’s daring experiment to find out whether 'the inside of the mind,' as she put it in her notebook, 'can be made luminous.'" Picked by Atlantic literary editor Ann Hulbert
Hardcover, 2021
$35.00
Her First American
Lore Segal"The originality of this love story between two outsiders in 1950s New York City, Carter Bayoux and Ilka Weissnix, cannot be overstated." Picked by Atlantic senior editor Gal Beckerman
Paperback, 2004
$18.99
The Stone Face
William Gardner Smith"Trapped by a dizzying moral question, Simeon is forced to confront the shifting realities of identity and racial allegiance as he fights the personal demons that have followed him across the ocean." Picked by Atlantic associate creative director Oliver Munday
Paperback, 2021
$16.95
Hotel Du Lac
Anita Brookner"The novel, Brookner’s fourth, drew uncharitable responses after it won the Booker Prize in 1984. But there’s fascinating, bracing tension amid the book’s women, each deemed unfit to be anywhere else..." Picked by Atlantic staff writer Sophie Gilbert
Paperback, 1995
$15.95
The Guest
Emma Cline"Alex, the protagonist of Cline’s second novel, is an escort in her early 20s... She’s broke, with a busted phone and nowhere to stay; she survives only by taking advantage of everyone who crosses her path." Picked by Atlantic associate editor Maya Chung
Hardcover, 2023
$28.00
Quietly Hostile: Essays
Samantha Irby"No one describes the human body quite like Irby. She’s a poet of embarrassment: Her confessional style is frank and unashamed about all of its possible fleshy or sticky causes." Picked by Atlantic associate editor Emma Sarappo
Paperback, 2023
$17.00
The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder
David Grann"Grann simultaneously reconstructs history while telling a tale that is as propulsive and adventure-filled as any potboiler." Picked by Atlantic senior editor Gal Beckerman
Hardcover, 2023
$30.00
The Late Americans
Brandon Taylor"The connections between Taylor’s multiple protagonists seem alternately random, doomed, and deeply romantic—much like the conditions that tie them to their creativity..." Picked by Atlantic associate editor Nicole Acheampong
Hardcover, 2023
$28.00