Summer Reads, Make Us Feel Fine
Here's what the FP team will be reading this summer:
Severance by Ling Ma
Farrar, Straus & Giroux
"I'm a sucker for dystopian novels and any book Jia Tolentino has good things to say about." —Hannah
Cult X by Fuminori Nakamura, translated by Kalau Almony
Soho Press / Soho Crime
"I've enjoyed all of Soho Press's Japanese crime/mystery titles, but this book seems truly nuts. It's impossible to not want to read this when looking at the rave reviews." —Jisu
Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo" by Zora Neale Hurston
Amistad
"As FP is gearing up for our fiftieth anniversary, I've been thinking a lot about legacy and how the past informs the present and the future. I'm inspired by the trails Hurston blazed for next-generation writers of color and beyond." —Jamia
Sodom Road Exit by Amber Dawn
Arsenal Pulp Press
"An excitingly queer story of a young woman returning home and coping with a complex mother-daughter relationship while also being trapped in the buzz, hum, and sweat of summer. There are also the elements of a ghost haunting and a now-abandoned amusement park that moves the book into fascinating supernatural territories." —Mya
The Incendiaries by R. O. Kwon
Riverhead Books
"I've been a fan of R. O. Kwon's writing about literature and book culture for a while now, so it's super exciting to soon be able to read her debut novel, The Incendiaries. It's a love story between Phoebe, a Korean American woman who attends an elite American university and gets pulled into a cult with ties to North Korea, and Will, a fellow student who struggles against fundamentalism and dedicates himself to finding Phoebe when she disappears. Sounds like a page-turner!" —Sophia O.