Summer Reading List
Books, essays, and poetry recommended by Dial contributors.
AUGUST 8, 2024
In summer, time can slow down. Whether you’re wandering empty city streets or sinking your toes into the sand and listening to the cicadas, August is a time to stretch out the hours before the regular pace of life takes over again. To help you make the most of these summer weeks, we asked Dial contributors to recommend the books they’ve most enjoyed losing themselves in.
JESSICA SEQUEIRA
Jessica has translated journalism and essays for The Dial, including “Cesar Aira’s Magic” and “The Woman Behind Borges”
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I’m reading The Return of the Caravels by António Lobo Antunes, which tells the story of the collapse of the Portuguese empire and the stranded, desperate men, no longer at home anywhere, who return from imperial outposts in India, Angola and elsewhere to a changed country peopled by immigrants from those once-colonized nations. The novel, translated by Gregory Rabassa, is a retelling of Luís Vaz de Camões’s epic 16th-century poem on the adventures of Portugal’s conquistadors — and with the liberty of fiction, Lobo Antunes lets both time periods overlap, creating a hallucinatory reading experience that mirrors the delusions of empire.
With its black sense of humor about what is, objectively, a moment of desperation and existential crisis both for a nation and its people, The Return of the Caravels shows Lobo Antunes to be a modern Camões who describes the travails of the modern world in poetry. Flocks of pigeons come and go “in a rustle of taffeta”; the days end in “slow, quince-jelly summer sunsets”; and people measure the “density of the night by the speed of owls.” The novel also includes astute speculations: “after a certain age,” he writes, “we spend our lives imagining, perfecting, polishing the macabre theatrics of our own funeral rites.”
LILY MEYER
Lily’s novel Short War was excerpted in our Pundits issue. She has also translated journalism and fiction for The Dial, including “The Aquatics’ Revolution.”
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I’ve been reading John Le Carré's late novels, which are astoundingly tight plot-wise while still feeling expansive in the way all of his work does. For years I’ve ignored Agent Running in the Field, his last book (except Silverview, which came out posthumously and which his son helped complete), because I felt like reading it would mean admitting he’s dead. But I just picked it up and could not put it down. Almost no one has written good fiction about Donald Trump or Brexit. Agent Running in the Field is both. It's also a beautiful portrait of disillusionment and love. And, of course, the prose is perfect.
I will say, though, that no one should start with Agent Running in the Field. If you’ve only read his early work, then A Legacy of Spies, which is the final Smiley novel, is the right place to start with the late stuff. If you've never read him at all, then start at the very beginning, with his 1961 debut Call for the Dead. It has the funniest first page I’ve ever read — or heard, actually, since I listened to this one, a truly great experience. If you’re planning a summer road trip, I suggest Call for the Dead as your company.
This year marks the centennial of Franz Kafka’s death, as I discovered after returning to his stories in preparation for my first visit to Prague. In his final months, Kafka wrote — and never properly finished — a lesser known story, “The Burrow.”
Translated into English by Willa and Edwin Muir, “The Burrow” is a first-person monologue of a soil-dwelling creature anxious that someone will intrude on his underground home. It is not the easiest read, and can feel tedious at times. But if you let it grow on you — or rather, if you let yourself be drawn deeper and deeper into the burrow — you will find a brilliant tale of self-inflicted helplessness.
As an Israeli, I read it as a poignant metaphor for the horrors that can unfold in the gap between our sense of security and actual security. Yet it also touches on universal themes: in a polarized world, we are constantly turning inward to protect ourselves from threats, imagined or real.
In the story, the dreaded enemy never actually appears. This is possibly not how Kafka envisioned “The Burrow.” His partner, Dora Diamant, is thought to have posthumously edited out a final scene of confrontation, possibly out of fear that the burrow analogizes their shared home. But keeping the story open to interpretation may have made it better, salvaging Kafka’s story as well as his narrator from self-sabotage.
SABRINA JASZI
Sabrina has translated journalism, fiction, and poetry for The Dial, including “Adopted by Russia” and “Youth.”
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Here are three sultry summer books from around the world, one old, one new –– one untranslated.
The old is Dark Avenues from 1943 by the Russian émigré writer and (underrated) Nobel Prize winner Ivan Bunin. The seedy, sensual stories in this book are “about love” but they are also about much more. The absorbing and self-absorbed male narration makes the unfairness of love and lust ooze off the page. The best book to read on a leaf-shaded bench.
New is Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck. Come for the steamy age-gap romance, and stay for the perfectly described East German realia. The novel was translated by the poet and writer Michael Hofmann. Whenever I am struggling to find the voice of a new translation, I return to his coolly poetic articulations, which occasionally cause me to stop and admire their beauty.
Untranslated is The World’s Secret, a new collection of short stories by Uzbek writer Salomat Vafo set in the Central Asian steppe and desert, and on the shores of the shrinking Aral Sea. The heat in this book comes from rising temperatures, airless relationships, and a sexual intensity that throbs in the railway towns and border outposts Vafo’s characters inhabit. Her work is published in English in this issue.
Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is an exhilarating tribute to storytelling as a means of enhancing the human experience. It is also a true gift for video game lovers, and will make you wish you were one if you aren’t already. The novel deftly tackles timely issues such as violence, rivalry, sexism in the industry, the families we choose (and that save us), and the pain that some people carry from early on in their lives. (Not exactly the lightest topics for a breezy summer read, but don’t we love doing this to ourselves?)
Much like the video games it lovingly describes, the book lets you “play” from the perspectives of various characters. You’ll find yourself desperately wanting to keep them safe, away from pain. But like in video games, there’s only so much a person can do. A truly breathtaking read.
Looking ahead to September, I’m also eagerly awaiting the release of Chris Knapp’s debut novel States of Emergency about a couple undergoing fertility treatment in Paris amid a heatwave, causing them to grapple with existential dread and cracks in their marriage
KATIE ASSEF
Katie has translated journalism, fiction, and essays for The Dial, including “Letters from Inside Evin’s Prison” and “Wartime Influencers.”
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A few months ago, at the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan, I experienced a mild attack of Stendhal syndrome by the Tintoretto and ducked into the museum café to recover. There I worked myself up even more by reading Danielle Dutton’s “A Picture Held Us Captive,” a remarkable essay from her new prose collection Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other. “The world is astonishing,” Dutton begins, and goes on to chart for us her decades-long obsession with writing — primarily fiction — that responds to visual art. She confides that her own encounters with art “frequently make the world strange, and it is when the world is strange, or when I am awake to its strangeness, that I am most compelled to write.” Reading Dutton’s book had a similar effect on me; its linked stories and essays feel like connecting rooms in a museum of personal disquiet, where a line or an image has the power to estrange and enchant in equal measure.
Having fully given up on recovering, I then reread Maria Gainza’s novel Optic Nerve (translated by Thomas Bunstead) on the train to Genoa. Gainza’s narrator, an art critic with a fear of flying, has learned to look deeply at the art in local museums. So deeply, in fact, that each work becomes a mirror, or a portal into an episode in her life: heartbreak, terror, love, death, ecstasy and, strikingly, a childhood affliction with diplopia (double vision). The world is astonishing.
While I was in Mexico working on a project about migration and disappearance, a friend lent me Alguien bailará con nuestras momias by Arnoldo Gálvez Suarez, a contemporary Guatemalan writer. “You'll understand Guatemala as you read,” he told me, as we discussed the complexities of Central American immigration to the United States and its implications for Mexico.
The book — beautifully, precisely, and rhythmically written — explores death and desire, sensitivity and perversion through three short novels. They depict daredevil narcos growing old, disappointed children mourning their parents and former lovers facing their demons with violence. They’re incredibly humane, and as I reflected at the end of each working day, filled with questions about how our communities could be so tainted with pain, seemingly so incredibly broken and resilient, I found a strange comfort in the depths of Gálvez Suárez: the comfort that comes from telling these stories, no matter how twisted, until everybody finally knows, until we cannot unsee it.
We were choosing a phrase for a tattoo, a sentiment to share for life. My friend suggested a familiar quote by Roque Dalton, the leftist Salvadoran poet, killed at age 40 by his own guerrilla peers in the paranoiac lead-up to a civil war. The quote declared that poetry and bread belong to everyone; we had found our tattoo, and our place among the many Dalton fans. Should you like to join us, you might start with the letters between Dalton and the women in his life — his mother, his ex-wife, his lovers. Unearthed by the Salvadoran novelist Horacio Castellanos Moya, the letters were written at a time when Dalton was living clandestinely and plotting revolution. Castellanos Moya weaves excerpts from them into essays that explore, for instance, how Dalton and his ex-wife, the mother of his children, wrote to one another about their new lovers and their children’s schooling, but also to create cover stories for his sudden absence that could fool even his own mother, and to decode the latest divisions within guerrilla ranks — infighting that would prove fatal.
Next up for me is Olivia Laing’s The Garden Against Time, because, much as in Dalton’s day, the Americas are burning, democracy hijacked by authoritarians, and I’ve found a salve in reading smart women. I want nuanced analysis of geopolitics, excoriation of cruelty-as-power and emotional buy-in. I sink into the couch with morning coffee and draw these pages open like curtains on a window at which we can sit and look and see.
TANIA ROETTGER
Tania wrote “Peace Means I Will Lose My Job” for our Parties issue.
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In the past year, I have gifted Still Born by the Mexican writer Guadalupe Nettel to several people; each of them read it quickly and loved it. The novel is about two women and how they negotiate their stance on having children or not and, subsequently, their relationship to a child. The title suggests there will be a problem, and while the story can be tragic, it is also gripping.
I am still looking for a beach novel. Last year’s was The Guest by Emma Cline; the year before, My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh. Both were light and fun and sometimes painfully embarrassing. This summer, my pre-holiday reading was a short book about Nietzsche’s visits to Venice by the German scholar Renate Müller-Buck. Using his own letters, the book portrays the philosopher as a fickle, spontaneous vagabond who insists on quiet and high ceilings to deal with his debilitating illnesses. As it reveals some of the philosopher’s eccentricities, it also makes a case for visiting Venice.
When the German translation comes out in September, I will immediately read Johanne Lykke Holm’s Red Sun. Her last work, Strega, was a beautiful and dark novel about a boarding school in the Alps where girls learn to become servile housewives. It’s as horrific as it sounds, and creates a highly evocative sensory landscape rarely achieved in writing (think almond biscuits and cherry juice).
Wormmaan, a novel by the Dutch author Mariken Heitman, takes the reader on a journey to rewild the pea, a plant whose domestication coincided with the onset of agriculture. Heitman does so on an island off the coast of the Netherlands, a country where hemming in water became the stuff of national mythmaking. Here, Heitman, who was trained as a biologist, raises questions about the tensions between the shape of things and the meaning we assign to them. She also asks if one of the narrators, who calls herself “androgynous,” can fit into a world built on binaries: sentient-unconscious, woman-man, water-earth. In Heitman’s world, non-human entities like worms, stones and long-dead ancestors have a voice of their own. Words, almost like earth, water, fire, and air, make up the components of a language she sculpts on the page. In a way, the story reminds me of the fairy tale of the princess and the pea. But where the princess proves her identity, her wholeness, with the pea’s intrusion, Heitman makes room for multiple ways of being — interweaving science, myth, and memory against the backdrop of a country increasingly at odds with her worldview. Her book was awarded the Libris Literatuurprijs, a prestigious Dutch literature award. It isn’t available in English yet. I hope it will be soon.
With the United States having just hosted a Cricket World Cup, some American readers of The Dial may have found themselves pondering the quirks of this unfamiliar sport. Cricket has some common features with baseball — there is a bat and a ball — but neither the rules, nor the cultural associations of baseball offer assistance in understanding a game which, in its pure form, is played over five days, often to a draw. The World Cup featured the shortest format of the game — hours, not days — but hardly to less perplexity among its local viewers. For weeks, social media was full of important questions: “What is an over?” “A googly?” “The block hole?”
If you were among those asking these questions, reader — and even if you were not — do I have the book for you. Published over 60 years ago, CLR James’s Beyond a Boundary is a classic and perhaps the best book ever on any sport. Asking “what do they know of cricket who only cricket know,” this book — part memoir, part history, part cultural criticism — sets out to situate cricket in the political and social landscapes of Britain and its empire. We learn from it about class and race, about the colonial condition and anti-imperial consciousness, politics and economics, England and West Indies, mavericks and public schoolboys, ancient Greece and modern education, Wisden and Vanity Fair, Leary Constantine and WG Grace. Above all, we learn from it the sheer joy of this improbable game, where hours of standing around and watching nothing happen can make for the most satisfying of days — and the most poignant of memories.
Someone I love remarked that he hasn’t seen me read a novel in the year that he has known me. His observation cut right to my core, because it was true. There has been philosophy, history, hybrids of memoir and criticism, but it has been a year without fiction. I have been a utilitarian reader, reading only what serves me in ways I can predict.
So I read Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, and I melted. The novel is set in 1950s Iowa. It is written as a letter from a preacher, John Ames, who is dying from heart disease, to his young son. He remembers his father and his grandfather, making it a story about four generations of men, a story of how to be alive given how profoundly ignorant and fallible we are. It is a book of grace and mercy, an antidote to pettiness and resentment, and it felt like a secular salvation in the midst of this politically manic summer. Ames imagines the dead coming back from “where everything is known,” hearing his sermons and knowing “the full measure of my incomprehension.” He does this to keep from “taking doctrines and controversies too much to heart.”
Anxious times breed terrific nonfiction. Everything is analyzed and explained at amazing speed, in books that keep our heads above water. Sometimes they let us use knowledge as a distraction, building forts of cleverness.
Gilead, on the other hand, is a drowner. It shows us death. Shows us loneliness. Shows us how small and soft we are, how mortal, sunken in something wet and very wide. It shows us the underbelly of toughness: “No one ever has that kind of courage that hasn’t needed it.”
The book gave me a tiny literary baptism. And it brought other things back with it. Music and dancing. Days spent in the mountains without podcasts. Attention to light. Porous states that explain nothing. All this in just the last three days.
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✺ Published in “Issue 7: Fiction” of The Dial
