11 Books We Can’t Stop Thinking About This Month

Summer is upon us, this season of blankets spread out on the grass of parks and the sand of beaches, of long days and plane trips. Worn paperbacks soaked with salt water, crisp hardcovers squeezed into overstuffed suitcases, moldy mysteries pulled from vacation home shelves. Read-a-Thons. Library air conditioning. Good reading. —Keziah Weir

On the surface, a novel about gays in finance, failed artists, and, above all, the 2016 election may not seem like a good time’s idea, but on the surface Daniel Leffertin the right hands, it’s a real riot. Leffert’s exciting first novel, The means and methods, follows Alistair McCabe, a brilliant and extremely ambitious NYU Stern student whose drive to change his and his mother’s position in life ends up being his Achilles heel. After moving from Binghamton, New York to the big city, Alistair finds himself unwittingly falling into a group with Mark and Elijah, a listless but attractive gay couple who should have broken up ago years (if I had a penny…) via her relationship with Mark. and Elijah, Alistair finds himself working for a billionaire businessman whose policies are questionable at best, on the brink of the most important election in our nation’s history. Given the way things are looking for 2024 (wait, can a convicted felon be president?), Leffert’s wry examination of the societal and economic changes that led to once-unthinkable strikes incredibly close to at our place. (Abrams, 2024) —Chris Murphy

Fittingly, I discovered this book on Instagram. American problem by Andrea Orejarena & Caleb Stein falls into an altered reality where the digital world and all its aberrations have somehow infiltrated the “real” world. Images of sevenfold rainbows, chasms, mirages, unidentified flying objects, and U.S. military training exercises in a book the size and color of a MacBook Pro evoke a spirit of paranoid hive informed by endless hours on the Internet. Of course, there is also humor in these visual “problems”. Imagine jpeg images of angel-shaped clouds and scans of FBI documents dealing with “mind-reading espionage!” » An attempt at David Campagne and shorter texts from 36 contributors add to this wildly inventive set of images that asks all the questions we might not want to answer. (Gnomic Book, 2024) —Madison Reid

giants is a substantial and boldly designed catalog of artworks from The Dean Collection, the private art collection of Swiss Beats And Alicia Keys. Accompanying a major exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum (and a report in Vanity Fair), curation is guided by the desire that living artists, and particularly artists of color, receive timely and deserved recognition for their work, which is no small feat. With the phrase “standing on the shoulders of giants” in mind, Dean and Keys present side-by-side works from several generations of Black American, African, and African Diaspora artists: a stainless steel sculpture of Hank Willis Thomaselegant portraits of the painter Toyin Ojih Odutolaand a mix of images by photographer Gordon Parks, among many others. Colorful pages with artist questionnaires and detailed artist biographies elevate a museum catalog to an encyclopedic necessity for anyone interested in contemporary art. (Phaidon, June 2024) -M

The Victoria and Albert Museum is displaying an 18th-century work entitled ‘The Tiger of Tippoo’, which the museum describes as “one of the V&A’s most famous and intriguing objects”. It is an almost life-size wooden sculpture depicting a tiger mauling a British soldier, fitted with a crank which, when turned, moves the soldier’s arm and an internal organ simulates the moans of a dying. The creators of this singular object, whose identity has been lost to history, serve as a vital force for Tania James‘ exquisite novel, out in paperback this month: Abbas, a teenage wood carver, is placed under the wing of French watchmaker Lucien du Leze, whom the ruler of Mysore, Tipu Sultan, has commissioned to create an automaton to give to his son. But Carving the Tiger is only Abbas’s first attempt in what becomes an epic saga of loss and romance, in a novel that raises questions of art, artifice and authorship; of power and plunder. (Button, 2023) —K.W.

Over the past couple of years, I’ve been trying to make up for a life of reading where I felt strangely intimidated by poetry, and therefore avoiding it. This warm, crystal-clear guide to one of our country’s most popular contemporary poets is an enjoyable and accessible course of inquiry, drawing examples from Emily Dickinson, Robert Lowell, John Keats, and many others to demonstrate the measure , form, diction and imagery. “Handbook” has a cold, utilitarian sound, but Oliver brings the concepts to life. “Don’t forget,” she writes, “that language is a living matter, full of shadows and sudden moments of leaps and infinite nuances. She notes that pentameter is the predominant verse length because it most closely corresponds to human lung capacity, and that if a “poem is thin, it is probably not because the poet does not know enough words, but because he didn’t hold on.” long enough among the flowers – I didn’t see them in a fresh, exciting, worthwhile way. (Ecco, 1994) —K.W.

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