With summer reaching its peak, maybe what you need is a short book—something you can read in a weekend or even a long, languorous day—to give you a feeling of accomplishment. A sense of humor would help, too. Here are a few suggestions.
Bring the House Down by Charlotte Runcie (Doubleday, July 8): Set in Edinburgh during the annual arts festival, Runcie’s novel centers on a negative review—so maybe I’m the target audience? When Alex Lyons writes a scathing takedown of a one-woman show, he doesn’t think twice about sleeping with the performer, whom he meets in a bar later that night. Of course, she hasn’t read the review yet, and once she does, she’ll rename her show The Alex Lyons Experience and devote herself to taking him down. But there’s much more to the book than that, and “the clarity of Runcie’s narration and her ability to consider both sides of an argument…[make] for an unusual, thought-provoking, multilayered read.”
Vera, or Faith by Gary Shteyngart (Random House, July 8): Vera Bradford-Shmulkin is an intensely smart 10-year-old with a Russian Jewish immigrant father, a New England WASP stepmother, a long-gone Korean mother, and an anxious need to hold her family together. The book is set in a near-future where a proposed constitutional amendment would give an “enhanced vote” to “those who landed on the shores of our continent before or during the Revolutionary War but were exceptional enough not to arrive in chains.” Our starred review says that “Shteyngart is doing his most important work ever, illuminating the current tragedy with humor, smarts, and heart.”
Maggie; or, a Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar, by Katie Yee (Summit, July 22): The narrator and her husband have two young children, so she’s excited when he suggests they get a babysitter and go out for dinner at an all-you-can-eat Indian buffet. But then he tells her he’s having an affair, and a few days later, she’s diagnosed with breast cancer. In between she tries to console herself by listing everything she finds annoying about her husband (“If he’s not in his work button-downs, he’s always wearing his Ivy League college sweatshirt”) and trying to make her kids think she’s funnier than he is. “The comedy here is never dark or desperate or manic,” our starred review says. “Instead, the narrator’s dignity and strength make this a novel that crackles with heartfelt intelligence and wit.”
An Oral History of Atlantis by Ed Park (Random House, July 29): This collection of short stories by Pulitzer finalist Park plays literary games with password prompts (“First time you had sex and did it count”), DVD bonus commentary, and other minutiae of contemporary life. “But Park isn’t just playing with unusual premises for their own sake,” according to our review. “He’s looking for the ways that human idiosyncrasies manage to poke up to the surface even while technology tries to keep us tidy and algorithm friendly….A collection that revels in its quirks, smart and sensitive in equal measure.”
Laurie Muchnick is the fiction editor.
