Summer Reads

As much as Managing Editor Michelle Johnson loves traveling, she also loves returning home. Her summer reading list reflects a similar course this year. Elif Batuman The Idiot Penguin Even a fragment of the Boston Globe’s review of Elif Batuman’s debut novel would have hooked me: “At once a cutting satire of academia, a fresh take on the epistolary novel, a poignant bildungsroman, and compelling travel literature.”This summer I’ll travel to the Hungarian countryside (through Paris) with Selin, Batuman’s heroine. And because she is universally hailed for her sense of humor, and because I like to balance reading fiction and essays, I’ll order her essay collection as well—The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them. (I’m one of those people.) Omar El Akkad American War Knopf This dystopian debut novel imagines a second American Civil War in 2074. An award-winning journalist born in Cairo who now lives in Canada, Akkad looks into the US and asks, according to the publisher’s website, “what might happen if America were to turn its most devastating policies and deadly weapons upon itself.” Rilla Askew Most American: Notes from a Wounded Place University of Oklahoma Press Geographically speaking, these notes from a wounded place are, to some extent, notes from my wounded place—Oklahoma. Novelist and essayist Rilla Askew moved from Oklahoma to New York as a young woman and recently returned. Now in nine essays, Kirkus Reviews writes that “Askew considers her life in relation to the question of what it means to be Oklahoman and American.” Excerpt from Dissolve by Sherwin Bitsui A bottom-lit sea ponders the lake’s questions, their secret conversations thatch howls to whimpers exhaled from an isthmus of drowned wolves. Its glossary’s cataclysms smoothed over the hatchet tucked into a sheath of starlight locates fractures potted in cisterns of smog. The stitching then unthreads to muzzled worms pulsing where an arsonist begins to lather heat over his neck. Backlit by a caravan of wailing fathers he silences their smeared faces while kneeling in an arbor of mesh and steel. Nowhere streams in blips and beeps under them. Sherwin Bitsui (Diné) is the author of Flood Song (Copper Canyon Press) and Shapeshift (University of Arizona Press). He is of the Bįį’bítóó’nii’Tódi’chii’nii clan and is born for the Tlizilłani’ clan. He is from White Cone, Arizona, on the Navajo Reservation. His honors include the 2011 Lannan Literary Fellowship, a Native Arts & Culture Foundation Fellowship for Literature, a PEN Open Book Award, an American Book Award, and a Whiting Writers Award. Bitsui lives in Missoula, Montana, and teaches for the MFA writing programs of the University of Montana and the Institute of American Indian Arts. summer reads WORLDLIT.ORG 63 ...

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