Ice cream. Sunblock. Flip-flops. Rosé. What says summer to you? I always think of a paperback book, probably with sand between the pages. Summer is the season of pleasure reading, after all, when so many of us tote a book to the beach (after listening to an audiobook on the car trip there). If you’re this kind of summer person, then our seventh annual Summer Reads Issue is for you.

In the issue you’ll find an abundance of reading (and listening) recommendations from our editors as well as from favorite authors such as Xochitl Gonzalez, Scott Simon, Joanna Ho, Soman Chainani, and others. For our cover story, we speak with bestselling novelist Carley Fortune, whose latest book, Our Perfect Storm (Berkley, May 5), is looking like one of the hottest reads of the season.

For me, no summer is complete without a visit to Fire Island, that narrow strip of sand and pines reached by ferry from Long Island, about 90 minutes from New York City. The communities of Cherry Grove and Fire Island Pines have long been favorite destinations for queer people, many of them artists, and a new volume edited by John Dempsey showcases their work (including that of Paul Cadmus, Peter Hujar, and David Hockney). Our starred review calls Fire Island Art (The Monacelli Press, April 1) a “lush survey that makes a powerful case for Fire Island as a wellspring of queer art.”

Even if you aren’t a serious baseball fan, there’s no experience quite like sitting in the bleachers on a summer afternoon, beer and hot dog in hand, taking in this leisurely game. I don’t know if I’ll make it out to Citi Field in Queens to watch the Mets this year, but A.M. Gittlitz’s  The Metropolitans: New York Baseball, Class Struggle, and the People’s Team (Astra House, March 31) promises to immerse me in the history of this storied team and its die-hard fans.

We don’t necessarily celebrate it, but the summer job is as inescapable as other more pleasurable markers of the season. During the Bicentennial summer of 1976, Father James Martin, then 15, worked as a busboy and dishwasher at an ice cream parlor in a Philadelphia suburb—one of many gigs from his teenage and early adult years that he revisits in Work in Progress: Confessions of a Busboy, Dishwasher, Caddy, Usher, Factory Worker, Bank Teller, Corporate Tool, and Priest (HarperOne, Feb. 3). Our review calls the book a “pleasure for those who remember the lazy, hazy days of summer jobs at two bucks an hour.”

Finally, what would summer be without a summer fling? Kiran Millwood Hargrave’s novel Almost Life (Summit, March 24) gives readers an affair to remember: two women, one English and one French, meet on the steps of Sacré-Coeur on a sweltering July day in Paris in the 1970s. The encounter is, as they say in French, a coup de foudre. Though Erica returns to England at the end of the summer to start university, the relationship will haunt both women for decades. Ah, l’amour!

Tom Beer is the editor-in-chief.