To whoever is reading this: this is for you. While maybe that statement doesn’t have such a grand implication that, say, a 100,000-word novel would, nonetheless the meaning is the same. I spent my time, my effort, my very thoughts on this piece of writing for you to read. Hopefully, you will enjoy it, but you and I both know there’s never a guarantee there when it comes to writing. Regardless, this is for you.

Author dedications are one of the most personal and human-seeming parts of a published book. The acknowledgments, too, give an insight into the who behind the bound book in a reader’s hands in a way the author bio’s couple of sentences does not. But the dedication is so very personal, I can’t help but infer what is meant in the white space around the handful of words.

But where did this practice of writing the briefest love letter at the beginning of a novel come from? Dear reader, let’s take a little walk back through history and find out together.

I didn’t grow up a reader. I grew up a storyteller and writer, but not a reader. There are a lot of reasons for this: my undiagnosed ADHD, my parents’ strict rules around consuming any non-Christian media, lack of access to books (my tiny Christian school didn’t have a library), ignorance that there were books available for kids my age, and fear, to name a few.

In college, I majored in English. You’d think that an English major would be reading non-stop for their classes. For neurotypical English majors, you’d be right. I can only remember finishing one book for school at the time. In the campus bookstore, I brought stacks and stacks of required reading to the checkout desk. “English major?” the clerk inquired.

“English major,” I confirmed. While I bought all these books and used all of them in my classes, I never finished them. I went to class, paid attention, took copious notes, and read just enough from the books to pull quotes for supporting evidence in whatever paper I was writing. I wasn’t stupid, even though I questioned that at the time. I found coping mechanisms to get through college. I knew that if I majored in something that I could write my way through, instead of test through, there’d be a good chance I’d graduate.

It was a weight around my soul, the secret shame of being an English major who didn’t read. I decided to take up reading the classics I missed in high school (see Christian education). As many times as I picked up The Great Gatsby or The Catcher in the Rye, I couldn’t finish. I’d fall asleep, even when reading at the dining room table.

Then I found Twilight and Chick Lit, which was at its peak, and I started to read in earnest. But the shame remained. I didn’t want to like these books. I wanted to like books I thought of as the Great American Novel. I wanted to be a serious reader and a serious writer. So I stopped reading YA and Chick Lit. But the problem was, I didn’t start reading anything else.

Road trips are often the subject of uplifting or heart-tugging stories — tales of friends bonding as they travel across the country, couples rediscovering why they love each other, or family members hashing out old arguments and ending the journey with a deeper understanding of each other. But sometimes, road trips can take a dark turn. You can break down and end up stranded in an unfamiliar place, surrounded by hostile people. You can end up fighting to survive harsh weather or hostile landscapes, risking freezing to death in the snow or being swept away by tornadoes. And let’s not even get into the terrifying possibilities that could occur after picking up a seemingly-pleasant hitchhiker.

A road trip always has the potential to turn into a horror story, and many writers have picked up on this. Horror road trips are a small but fun niche in horror, and they give the writer a lot of scope to structure their story in an interesting way. Horror road trip stories can be wide-ranging, using the scope of a long journey to build the horror; conversely, if the author decides to use the “we’ve broken down” trope, they can use the small space of the car or van to create a tight, claustrophobic story that ramps up the tension. However they play out, horror road trips can make for terrifying reads — so pick one up, settle in for the ride, and make sure not to stop the car for any strangers.

Just as artists explore other genres or forms of art, authors also dabble in new literary territories. Generally, when a new author starts their publishing journey, they must decide whether to go “young adult” or “adult.” That is, they must decide whether to write for young adult or adult audiences. A YA romance is vastly different from adult romance. YA contemporary fiction is not the same as new adult fiction. As a voracious reader, you would definitely tell the difference.

Although it’s possible for an author to write for both, usually only those that already have a solid history of work can manage to pull it off successfully. First-time authors don’t usually have this privilege because publishers don’t like to risk confusing readers. What if the author’s YA fanbase stumbles upon the adult (and steamy) book of the author? The experience can be jarring, messing up their unestablished branding. Thus, most authors in their early careers are advised to focus on one audience. Some writers get creative by using pen names for each genre or audience they want to write in, allowing them to easily switch between different writing styles. But the general consensus is that writers should build a strong foundation in one genre or audience first before trying out another one, or that they should make a transition or crossover to a closely related genre (for instance, from middle grade to YA, not YA to medical nonfiction all of a sudden).

Writing for a different audience is vital for career longevity and creative freedom. Here are eight YA authors who made the switch to adult audiences:

I like to think of literature as a second language—especially the second language of the monolingual. I’m thinking, naturally, about those of us who never systematically studied a foreign language, but who had access, thanks to translation—a miracle we take for granted all too easily—to distant cultures that at times came to seem close to us, or even like they belonged to us. We didn’t read Marguerite Duras or Yasunari Kawabata because we were interested in the French or the Japanese language per se, but because we wanted to learn—to continue learning that foreign language called literature, as broadly international as it is profoundly local. Because this foreign language functions, of course, inside of our own language; in other words, our language comes to seem, thanks to literature, foreign, without ever ceasing to be ours.

It’s within that blend of strangeness and familiarity that I want to recall my first encounter with the literature of Alejo Carpentier, which occurred, as I’m sure it did for so many Spanish speakers of my generation and after, inside a classroom. “In this story, everything happens backward,” said a teacher whose name I don’t want to remember, before launching into a reading of “Viaje a la semilla” (“Journey to the seed”), Carpentier’s most famous short story, which we would later find in almost every anthology of Latin American stories, but which at the time, when we were thirteen or fourteen years old, we had never read. The teacher’s solemn, perhaps exaggerated reading allowed us, however, to feel or to sense the beauty of prose that was strange and different. It was our language, but converted into an unknown music that could nonetheless, like all music, especially good music, be danced to. Many of us thought it was a dazzling story, surprising and crazy, but I don’t know if any of us would have been able to explain why. Because of the odd delicacy of some of the sentences, perhaps. Maybe this one: “For the first time, the rooms slept without window-blinds, open onto a landscape of ruins.” Or this one: “The chandeliers of the great drawing room now sparkled very brightly.”

Although our teacher had already told us that everything in the story happened backward, from the future to the past, back toward the seed, knowing the trick did not cancel out the magic. The magic did come to an end, though, when the teacher ordered us to list all the words we didn’t know and look them up—each of our backpacks always contained a small dictionary, which, we soon found, was not big enough to contain Carpentier’s splendid, abundant lexicon.

Was that how people in Cuba spoke? Or was it, rather, the writer’s language? Or were we the ones who, quite simply, were ignorant of our own language? But was that our language? We discussed something like this, dictionaries in hand, while the teacher—I don’t know why I remember this—plugged some numbers into a calculator laboriously, perhaps struggling with his farsightedness.

I lived in Moscow during the summer of 1992, just after I graduated from college. The attempted coup by hardline communists to oust Mikhail Gorbachev had failed, the USSR had collapsed, and Russia was officially open to the West. Religious organizations were flooding in—including the one I’d signed up with at my university. We were there to teach English using a simplified version of the Gospel of Luke, a strategy I didn’t question back then. Most of my students wanted to learn American slang. One young man brought in a Sports Illustrated he’d purchased on the black market. He asked me to read aloud phrases he’d highlighted, then repeated what I said, copying my accent and cadence. Those were my favorite sessions.

What a time to be there, amid the influx of Westerners shopping in the dollars-only markets. Not the people I was with. The mission organization believed, rightly, that we were guests in the country and should live as the locals did. We waited in breadlines, milk lines, egg-shop lines, pretending that for us, too, times were hard. But there was no ignoring the imbalance between our dollar and the ruble. I hired a cab to take me from my hotel—the Hotel Akademicheskaya, a mile from Gorky Park—to the American embassy. The total cost was 300 rubles. For me it was the equivalent of about thirty cents; for a Russian, it was tantamount to spending $300 on a twenty-minute car ride. A bottle of Fanta was forty rubles, or about four cents. Imagine spending forty dollars on a bottle of soda. Still, in the tiny apartment where we were sharing a meal, one of my students pulled out bottles of Fanta and said, “I am sorry it is not Coca-Cola.”

I was reminded of this lost world in June, when I saw the photographer and filmmaker Diana Markosian’s “Santa Barbara” at the Fotografiska Museum in Stockholm. The show opens with a placard displaying Markosian’s words:

When I was seven years old, living with my family in Moscow, my mother woke me up in the middle of the night and said we were going on a trip. The year was 1996. The Soviet Union had long collapsed, and by then, so had my family. We left without saying goodbye to my father, and the next day landed in a new world: America.

August is coming to its end—a blessing or a curse, depending who you ask. Here’s what the Review’s staff and friends are doing these days, before we all go (metaphorically) back to school.

Summer Streets, August 26: It is the last weekend of New York’s Summer Streets, so take advantage now, runners, bikers, and amblers. Huge stretches of the city will be shut down between 7 A.M. and 1 P.M. this Saturday in Brooklyn and the Bronx; vendors will be hawking wares like coconut water, ice cream, and Coca-Cola. Our web editor, Sophie Haigney, will be jogging merrily along the car-free expanse of Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn.

New York Liberty vs. Las Vegas Aces at Barclays Center, August 28: Our assistant editor Oriana Ullman encourages everyone to turn out for the tail end of the WNBA season, one of summer’s great sporting pleasures. “This is the last matchup of the year between the league’s two superteams,” Oriana tells us. “The Liberty just beat the Aces in the Commissioner’s Cup, but go to get another preview of what the Finals showdown will probably be.” (The playoffs begin September 13.)

The U.S. Open at USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center, August 28–September 10: Our managing editor, Kelley Deane McKinney, recommends going on opening day, when there will be matches happening on twenty-two courts. A day pass will get you access to twenty-one of them. She advises anyone attending to skip the main court, Arthur Ashe: “The stadium is too big for tennis and the good seats are all corporate boxes full of people who don’t know or care about the games and chat loudly the whole time,” she says. “Real heads know that Louis Armstrong is the better show court, only seating fourteen thousand.” A tip: sections one and two get the most shade during the day, but every seat has a great view! You can skip the signature cocktail, the Honey Deuce, which features tennis ball–shaped honeydew pieces floating in spiked raspberry lemonade “for, like, twenty-two dollars. This year I bet it’s twenty-five.”

I began writing this essay while putting off writing another one. My apartment is full of books I haven’t read, and others I read so long ago that I barely remember what’s in them. When I’m writing something, I’m often tempted to pick one up that has nothing to do with my subject. I’ve always wanted to read this, I think, idly flipping through, my eyes fixing on a stray phrase or two. Maybe it will give me a new idea.

In this moment of mild delusion, I’m distracted. I’ve always wanted to write an essay about distraction, I think. Add it to the laundry list of incomplete ideas I continue to nurse because some part of me suspects they will never come to fruition, and so will never have to be endured by readers. These are things you can keep in the drawer of your mind, glittering with unrealized potential. In the top row of my bedroom bookshelf is a copy of Flaubert’s final novel, Bouvard and Pécuchet. Something about it seems appropriate, though I’m not sure exactly what. I pluck it down.

***

When asked whether he was going to watch Barbie or Oppenheimer first, Tom Cruise responded with, and I quote, “What’s great is you’re going to see both on the weekend.” 

“It’ll probably be Oppenheimer first and then Barbie,” the greatest living actor continued. “Oppenheimer’s going to be on a Friday—do you know what I mean? I’ll probably see it in the afternoon; you want that packed audience. And then I wanna see Barbie right afterwards, with a packed audience.” 

But first, I was going to see Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One on a Monday. I wanted that packed audience, so I picked the earliest screening possible at the TCL Chinese Theatre—a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument and home to one of the largest commercial movie screens in North America. Despite various rounds of rebranding, the TCL Chinese Theatre—formerly known as Mann’s Chinese Theatre and before that Grauman’s Chinese Theatre—will basically always be the Chinese Theatre. I first encountered it in the film critic Nick Browne’s classic 1989 essay “American Film Theory in the Silent Period: Orientalism as an Ideological Form,” which examines the Orientalism of early film aesthetics, and the twenties trend of exotically decked-out American movie palaces that culminated, in 1928, “in the construction of Sid Grauman’s still famous (indeed iconic) Chinese Theater in Los Angeles, described as deriving ‘its inspiration from the Chinese period of Chippendale.’ It opened in May with the premiere of De Mille’s King of Kings with an evening of high ceremonies hosted by D. W. Griffith.”

I’m interested in stories that gently erase the boundaries between love and friendship, featuring characters who shuffle the two feelings in unexpected ways. I like narratives that navigate contradictions and do away with false binaries, illustrating the complexity of what we humans call intimacy. Who is really capable of drawing a hard boundary between feelings? My story in the Summer issue of the Review, “My Good Friend,” follows two elderly friends who have shared a lifetime of friendship right in the neighborhood of romance. For these two old folks, friendship is the mountain one climbs to reach a deeper viewpoint on love.

Simone de Beauvoir’s novel The Inseparables, about the friendship between two young girls, Sylvie and Andrée, is one of the many gems I’ve encountered. Based on de Beauvoir’s own passionate friendship that began in youth, with a girl named Zaza, the book was written five years after she published The Second Sex, and it’s clear how the feelings born from that friendship structured her personality and helped to shape even her philosophical interests. “Nothing so interesting had ever happened to me,” Sylvie says of the first time she met Andrée. “It suddenly seemed as if nothing had ever happened to me at all.”

Young Sylvie wants to express this feeling somehow, to tell her friend about the transformation that has happened inside her. On Andrée’s thirteenth birthday, Sylvie carefully and anxiously sews a silk purse by hand as a gift, hoping it will tell her friend something that words can’t quite. Sylvie hands the bag to Andrée and, seeing her astonishment, she has the impression that something would have happened between them, maybe a tender kiss, had it not been for the presence of their mothers.

Together they become teenagers, and Andrée, the more extroverted of the pair, begins a little romance with a boy against her mother’s wishes. Sylvie starts to feel jealous before she even knows the name of the feeling. Andrée is forced to admit to her mother that, yes, she had kissed the boy, she had kissed him because she loved him. She later tells Sylvie, who is overcome by complete shock: “I lowered my head. Andrée was unhappy and the idea of it was unbearable. But her unhappiness was so foreign to me; the kind of love where you kiss had no truth for me.” After a few pages we realize that a kiss is something of a metric of passion for the two young girls, the naive way in which they measure the beginnings of love even as they wrestle with the ambiguity of their own relationship.

Artists & Writers Annual Charity Softball Game in East Hampton, August 19: Should you be lucky enough to find yourself in East Hampton at a loose end this coming Sunday, it is the annual artists vs. writers softball game. In fact, it is the seventy-fifth anniversary of said game, which began as a picnic in 1948 and has seen the likes of Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, and Joan Mitchell at bat. Anyone can spectate. (The Review’s softball team, meanwhile, is coming off three straight rainouts.) 

U.S. Open qualifiers at Flushing Meadows, August 22–25: Next week, 128 men’s players and 128 women’s players will be vying for the final 32 spots in the tournament. The beauty of this particular week is that it’s 100 percent free and open to the public. Our intern Izzy Ampil plans to be in attendance, and friend of the Review and Club Leftist Tennis cohead Charlie Dulik says it’s a “great way to scout up-and-coming guys in the tennis world.”

What That Quilt Knows About Me at the American Folk Art Museum, through October 29: This exhibition, recommended by our intern Anna Rahkonen, showcases forty quilts, some dating back to the nineteenth century. The quilts were made by a wide-ranging group of artists and craftspeople, among them a pair of enslaved sisters from antebellum Kentucky and an unnamed British soldier during the Crimean War. 

Kazuo Hara retrospective at Anthology Film Archives, August 16–31: At Anthology, a run of the intimate, activist documentaries of the Japanese filmmaker Kazuo Hara—including portraits of life with cerebral palsy (Goodbye CP, 1972); victims of asbestos exposure (Sennan Asbestos Disaster, 2016) and mercury poisoning (Minamata Mandala, 2020); and an increasingly unhinged Pacific War veteran seeking answers about the mysterious deaths in his regiment (The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On, 1987). Most exciting to our associate editor Amanda Gersten: the by all accounts brutally voyeuristic Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974 (1974). After Hara’s ex-wife leaves him for a relationship with a woman, he follows her to Okinawa for a year, where she opens a nursery for the children of sex workers, joins a women’s commune, begins seeing an American GI, gives birth to her second child on camera, and enumerates Hara’s many flaws for his then girlfriend (who is also the film’s producer).

The Maison de Balzac is located in the sixteenth arrondissement at 47, rue Raynouard, Paris, in the heart of the former village of Passy. If you visit, chances are you’ll approach it along the rue de l’Annonciation, which is pleasantly quiet and perfectly shaded, and boasts, according to Google Maps, a Pizza Hut that I don’t remember seeing when I visited in April. What I do remember seeing was an unaccompanied Alsatian with some sort of harness girding its chest, loping through a small nearby park. When I looked around, vaguely nonplussed, I noticed a clinique vétérinaire directly across the street.

If I’d had to explain to myself why, with only three days to spend in Paris, I felt such an acute need to visit the home where Honoré de Balzac, a writer I wasn’t even that familiar with, had composed the bulk of The Human Comedy, a fictional project I’d barely even dipped my toes into, I’m not sure what I would have said. Probably it just seemed that if anyone would have had an interesting house, it would have been him. Open one of his novels at random, and chances are you’ll find a gratuitous description of a room and its furnishings, a flurry of signifiers that, today, can seem hard to place. Take Monsieur Grandet’s living room, for instance, as it appears in the opening chapter of Eugénie Grandet. We learn the room has two windows that “gave on to the street,” that its floor is wooden, that “grey, wooden panelling with antique moulding lined the walls from top to bottom,” that its ceiling is dominated by exposed beams. “An old copper clock, inlaid with tortoiseshell arabesques, adorned the white, badly carved, stone chimney-piece,” Balzac goes on. “Above it hung a greenish mirror, whose edges, bevelled to show its thickness, reflected a thin stream of light along an old-fashioned pier-mirror of damascened steel.” I don’t know what a pier-mirror is, and I couldn’t begin to differentiate an old-fashioned model from a sleeker, more modern one. In a sense, this feeling of being lost was part of the appeal of Balzac’s world as I’d imagined it. 

Which is another way of saying that when I contemplated a sort of generic Balzacian space, a vision of plushness, of pure and overwhelming material profusion would unfurl in my mind: a little room fitted out with dark wood and damask curtains, gilt mirrors and stubbornly bombé furniture, its walnut shelves and limestone mantelpieces offering stable quarters to a full range of dandy’s trinkets, like engraved pistols and silver-handled riding whips and even, glowing palely in the manufactured dusk like a sturdy snowball, a fine Sèvres sugar bowl—every detail, down to the motes of light-struck dust spinning in the sepia-toned air, tuned precisely to some ideal of costive, costly languor. You know, luxus, as the Romans must have done it. Who wouldn’t want to disappear into this?

So, here I was. There was a false start: a pleasant little gate with a plastic-sheathed slip of paper taped to it declaring that the gate was no longer the entrance to the Maison de Balzac. Through the gate I could see a set of steps leading down to the grounds of the museum, which occupies a sort of plateau between the rue Raynouard above and the rue Berton below, but I was directed instead down the road some thirty yards, to a squat, flat-roofed, glass-walled hutch. When I entered, the young woman manning the information desk swiftly rerouted me to a side door, which deposited me at the top of a set of open-air stairs that, it turns out, are completely accessible from the street. Dizzily, I descended.

The painter Alex Katz is best known for his portraits—colorful, flat, rich, and realistic, in a style that has become immediately recognizable as his own. Katz has always been fascinated by poetry, and especially by the work that came out of the New York School in the fifties and sixties. “What Katz found so compelling about this scene was its complete disregard for aesthetic precedent, irreverence for an academy of poetry, and gravitation toward vernacular expression, where words were less pondered and possessed an immediacy that spoke of nowness,” writes the art historian Debra Bricker Balken in the forthcoming book Alex Katz: Collaborations with Poets. These qualities have something in common with Katz’s own work, which might help to explain why he has been so drawn to collaborations with poets—among them illustrations, prints, and covers for books by Ted Berrigan, John Ashbery, Alice Notley, and Ron Padgett. Katz has also painted portraits of a number of poets, including his personal favorite, Frank O’Hara, who was himself interested in the crossover between painting and poetry, and occasionally jealous of painters themselves. (“I am not a painter, I am a poet,” one O’Hara poem begins. “Why? I think I would rather be / a painter, but I am not.”) Below are several of Katz’s literary collaborations, including a cover he made for this very magazine in 1985.

Saturday was Richard’s birthday, and we drove to Yaddo, in Saratoga Springs, where we met seventeen years ago. We hadn’t been back to the artists’ colony together since. Standing on the lawn, looking up at the great mansion, we were a bit like bears on the wrong side of the zoo. When we were residents, we were free to roam the grounds, walking so close our coats swished together as we circled the four small lakes that dot the rich people’s estate. You don’t even notice there are visitors, welcome only on some woodland trails and in the rose gardens, laid out like those at a French palace. 

Whatever memories were stirred as we retraced our steps weren’t sharp. It was like rewatching a movie with different actors in the parts. Even if we’d entered the buildings now and the rooms where we’d talked, I doubt it would have made much difference. The movie I watch is in my head, and I run it more or less all the time.

This is the movie. I arrive at Yaddo lost. I’m absolutely lost in my life, and I turn sixty at the colony, and there’s something about a man there I find easy to be with. The first time we talk, we’re in a little parlor outside the room where meals are served, and I don’t know how Foucault comes up. It will turn out Foucault is always on Richard’s mind the way this conversation in the little parlor is always, more or less, on my mind. I say, “I find Foucault overdetermined.” Or maybe I say, without qualification, “Foucault is overdetermined,” and even though Richard loves Foucault and doesn’t for one moment believe this is true, he bursts into a smile because he’s never heard anyone say this before, because he’s not sure what I mean by it, and because he’s astonished by the chutzpah of such a blunt summation. 

Book lovers, take heed! Hundreds of hardcovers are on sale for 50% off at Barnes and Noble now. If you’ve had your eye on a bestseller or new release, here’s your chance to stock up. You’ll find both fiction and nonfiction for adults, YA titles, and kid lit, too. From memoirs and epic fantasy to mysteries and mythology, there’s something for everyone.

Below are some of the most popular titles offered. The prices listed factor in the sale. Happy book buying!

Earlier this summer, I shared the news that Brave Books — a right-wing publisher creating books with a pro-God, pro-“Liberty” conservative angle authored by right-wing “stars” like Kirk Cameron — planned to do a nationwide storytime on August 5. People across the country who follow this publisher made room reservations at their local libraries to host these events under the banner of “free speech.” Hosting such storytimes at the public library would “prove” how much they are needed.

Right-wing conspiracy theorists have loved playing victim these last few years. They continue to claim their beliefs are under attack and that places like public libraries have been at the forefront of purposefully silencing them and have turned to indoctrinating children with a pro-LGBTQ+, anti-white agenda. We know this to be completely false and fabricated, but truth doesn’t get many clicks on Fox News or other such outlets. Truth also doesn’t allow washed-up stars and proud homophobes and insurrectionists to perpetuate their persecution complex. The Brave Books storytime was the perfect opportunity to prove some kind of point about their rights being squashed and that the masses are demanding more books and events at public libraries aligned with a single-minded, right-wing hate agenda.

But…how did the event actually go?

There is nothing on Brave Books’s website to suggest it was an overwhelming success. There are no photos from events that took place across the country, though their website claims that they’ll be hosting this as an annual event “to promote free speech and traditional values in public institutions.” They may have hosted 300 events in 46 states but a few wingnuts renting a room and sharing propaganda does not a success make.

According to journalist Steve Monacelli in the Texas Observer, some of the Texas events had a solid turnout, but others had fewer than 20 show up; he rightly points out that these same “free speech” defenders are those actively seeking to get books removed from the very facilities which allowed them to use the space for their prayer circles and bigotry-based book sharing. Monacelli points out on social media that the leader of the largest event in Texas has been photographed with a confederate flag and has been interviewed by the January 6 commission, claiming to be a member of the Oath Keepers — a truly upstanding citizen to put in front of children that the same people claim need to be kept pure and innocent.

If you’re using books in part to escape from the world for little blips of time as a breather to recharge your batteries, August book clubs once again offer a huge array of excellent picks for you. Most are exclusively virtual book clubs, one is in-person, and a brand new book club will do both. Bonus: many of them are author-inclusive if you’re a fan of hearing the author chat about their own work.

Let’s start by playing my favorite game: did more than one book club pick the same book this month? The answer is: Yes! And it’s a tense read!

For those who like backlist books, you have one memoir, one essay collection, and one picked on its 25th anniversary by a beloved author! There’s a sweet summer book by an author with a deep backlist, a popular reviewer has a new book club with a powerful nonfic selection, there’s a coming-of-age novel, and there’s a debut contemporary. You also have options for romance picks, and the first adult novel from the author of The Poet X! It’s another great month to join, or follow along, with a book club!