Summer Reads

This summer Web Editor Jen Rickard Blair is planning to read a balance of books that refuel calm and creativity as well as examine human nature and our shared history. She hopes to read these under the shade of big trees, in the company of friends, or in the cool of coffee shops where iced drinks can keep the heat at bay. Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London Lauren Elkin Farrar, Straus & Giroux This work of nonfiction explores a distinctly female perspective on “the creative potential of the city and the liberating possibilities of a good walk.”Having just read Mrs. Dalloway, I’m particularly looking forward to Elkin’s literary portraits of Virginia Woolf and many other creative and inspiring women with restless, wandering spirits. A Zero-Sum Game Eduardo Rabasa Trans. Christina MacSweeney Deep Vellum I picked up Rabasa’s debut novel at last fall’s Texas Book Festival, and I’m looking forward to reading this Orwellian satire that tells the story of a small community where a rich money-lending“spectral power”named Selon Perdumes has exerted his power. Delivering a challenge to society’s endless consumerism, this tale promises to be a compelling mix of satirical humor and chilling realism. What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours Helen Oyeyemi Riverhead Books After reading glowing NPR and Vox reviews of Helen Oyeyemi’s“wholly original”storytelling and her sentences where“every image is as precise and well-placed as though it were cut from glass,”I knew I had to read this book. Oyeyemi’s loosely intertwined short stories are also purposefully united with a recurring theme of keys both literal and metaphorical. The Moth Presents All These Wonders: True Stories about Facing the Unknown Edited by Catherine Burns Foreword by Neil Gaiman Crown Archetype The Moth podcast has made for itself a compelling space of vulnerable storytelling, and, as an occasional listener, I enjoy the way it invites the audience to absorb the stories of others with nonjudgmental ears. This book offers a selection of forty-five stories touching on themes of risk, courage, and facing the unknown, including an Afghan refugee learning how much her father sacrificed to save their family, an astronomer’s first gaze at the surface of Pluto, and stories from familiar voices like Tig Notaro and John Turturro. WORLDLIT.ORG 39 Water is life. Yearning for waves so far from any shore. – Heid Erdrich, “Liminal” Invasion Quincentennial, 1992, central flyway, Norman , Oklahoma, near Lake Thunderbird and adjacent to the Canadian River floodplain, Oklahoma waters eventually flowing to Eufaula Lake and into the Arkansas, and so the Mississippi and down to the Gulf of Mexico. Returning the Gift. University of Oklahoma, Norman , 1992. It was a confluence of many effluents, the most celebrated first- and second-wave Native Renaissance . Trauma examinations: the Quincentennial and the twenty-first-century turn. The departure into the cusp of twenty-first-century Native Literature was already evident in a bussed-in crew, emerging poets and writers also leaned and led, and through time they traded places and still serve the point though many others have come forward to fill that space and to allow them to be themselves and enjoy the plenty, out of respect, and earned place as elders in the midst. From where behind you ancient light enters. A fissure in the propriety of reason. – Kim Blaeser, “A Crane Language” With the busload from the Sangre de Cristos, a dozen new IAIA writers readied to meet up with the whole. It was a year of reckoning, quincentennial of invasion that destroyed so many of their ancestors, the atmosphere forever changed and methane swarmed in place of oxygen and some say the birth of climate change today, these killings. connecting the ink-soaked shores of our name less bodies to anchors of swans coughing dune sand onto a dry riverbed. – Sherwin Bitsui, “Flood Song” Water is life. On the Platte River each spring we deerwalk out into starry night. We move through night immersed in chortling sax throaty love songs, those warrior guard birds, the sandhill cranes, standing in shallows far from predator reach. By the...

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