It’s summer time and you know what that means (for most of us anyway)? Heat! Heat in all of its forms. Sunburns, sitting by a campfire, lighting off fireworks. It’s tank top and flip-flop and stop at the gas station for an Icee season. It’s the smell of sunscreen on everything season. It’s road trips and beach days and outdoor concerts and begrudgingly working between all of the things you have planned. Especially in the areas where the winters are so dark and cold, the changing of the seasons is cause for celebration marked by breaking out the box fans and packing the winter coats into storage. Finally, we say. Finally. The warmth is here again.

But sometimes the summer isn’t so sunshine and rainbows. Sometimes the heat isn’t a welcome addition to the season, but instead, a sweltering, oppressive thing hanging over everything. Sometimes there’s no escape from the sun’s long-reaching rays no matter what you do. Sometimes you get sunburned despite the million layers of sunscreen. Sometimes the campfire becomes something far too out of control. Sometimes the heat becomes a thing of its own, festering inside someone until they snap.

So, in light of the season, stay cool and read these hot horror novels.

I’m back with another list of award-winning books you’ve probably never heard of! This time, we’re talking memoirs. Since I started making these lists, I’ve become fascinated by the whole culture surrounding literary awards and especially how we talk about those awards. There are some high-profile awards, like the National Book Awards, the Booker Prize, and the Pulitzer, where the winners and finalists of these mega prizes seem to get a lot of attention and recognition. But as soon as you start to dig a little deeper (and you can dig very deep — there are so many prizes!) it’s apparent that the vast majority of award-winning books don’t actually get that much recognition.

The books on this list have from 20 to 3,000 ratings on Goodreads, with most of them falling in the low hundreds. Three thousand may sound like a lot at first — but compare it to the number of ratings this year’s Pulitzer Prize winner, Demon Copperhead, has (132k) and suddenly it seems like a tiny number. All of which is simply to say: the world of book awards is vast and there is so much to it beyond the big awards that everyone’s heard of. There are so many great books out there that have been recognized by literary organizations, panels of authors, and critics, but that lots of readers have still never heard of.

So let’s fix it, one list at a time. These memoirs will take you from Nigeria to China to the UK. They’re about science, gender, immigration, illness, family legacies, and so much more.

You’ve seen the trends. Books shelved backward. Books shelved by size, theme, or genre. If you’re less into trends and more into organization, you can shelve your books alphabetically by author, or chronologically. I don’t know anyone who has shelved their books autobiographically, à la John Cusack in High Fidelity, but I would love to see it.

It’s a brilliant idea. It also might take you the rest of your life. So, probably better to stick to the most fun of all book-shelving options: rainbow order. There are a billion reasons to shelve your books this way. They are all Very Right and Proper. There is literally not even one silly reason to shelve your books by color. Promise.

Boasting both a hit anime series adaptation and a blockbuster live-action film series adaptation, Tokyo Revengers by Ken Wakui is one of the manga world’s most recent can’t-miss franchises. The series blends two popular manga tropes — gangs and time travel — and is filled with great fight scenes, an excellent and compelling plot, well-developed characters, and more. And there’s plenty of it to catch up on! The original Japanese run of the manga concluded in 2022, and the complete English-language release is available digitally through Kodansha, with the print release still in progress from Seven Seas. The second season of the anime concluded in April of this year, with the third planned to begin in October. In addition, there are three live-action movie adaptations, the latest of which was released in Japan just a couple weeks ago. But if you’re already a fan and itching for more stories like it, look no further than these wonderful manga like Tokyo Revengers to keep you satisfied!

The manga is an excellent blend of action, science fiction, and emotional drama, so it is no wonder it’s enjoying such popularity and enthusiasm among manga and anime fans. While it can certainly be tough to find a perfect comp for a story that has become such a phenomenon, the following manga like Tokyo Revengers share common themes — namely gang wars or time travel — in combination with dynamic and effective storytelling and character development.

An early-summer, late-afternoon light was catching a porcelain figurine of the Virgin Mary and Baby Jesus on the windowsill of Johnnie’s Italian Specialties, the twenty-eight-year-old family-owned restaurant in South Philly where, in May, I dialed up my personal hotspot, hoping to get tickets to the Taylor Swift concert taking place in the city later that night. My cheesesteak sub was dry and insufficiently cheesy and entirely beside the point—it was a formality, if a regionally appropriate one, meant to justify my seat at this funky restaurant as my sister and I refreshed four different ticket resale websites waiting for prices to drop. We were not two of the lucky 2.4 million who had gotten tickets to the Eras Tour when they’d gone on sale several months earlier, in a rollout so vexed and disorderly it caused an investigation by the U.S. Justice Department into antitrust violations by Ticketmaster and Live Nation.

At first, this didn’t bother me. I do not have the patience to wait in something called a virtual queue, and also I have a job. So I’d resigned myself to the fact that I would not be attending the Eras Tour, Swift’s 131-show survey of her ten studio albums—which I suppose we now call eras and not albums—and the logical, world-beating end point of her willful evolution from gee-whiz country darling to too-big-to-fail pop supernova. But then, in March, the Eras Tour commenced, and for several weeks thereafter my Twitter feed was overrun with clips from the show, which runs close to three and a half hours, includes forty-four songs, and is structured episodically as a Homeric celebration of Swift’s discography. It looked like the sort of thing I’d regret missing, the premise of a memory I could tell my kids or at least my friends’ kids about. 

Nine days earlier, my sister had texted me to see if I’d be down to drive to Philadelphia from New York the day of the concert on a lark. “Idk how I feel about that,” I wrote back. “Is that a thing?” I am constitutionally risk averse, and the idea of driving there and failing to get tickets was less attractive than not having them at all. But Swift herself once said that nothing safe is worth the drive, and my sister had done her due diligence. On TikTok, she told me, a whisper network of unticketed Swifties were documenting their journeys to whichever city Swift was playing that night, scooping up the remaining tickets at 5 or 6 P.M., when scalpers realized they could not sell them for $2,500 a pop. Not unjustifiably, Swifties get a bad rap. They are defensive and belligerent, boastful about streaming numbers and record sales and tour profits, which is a function of Swift’s own valedictorian disposition. But they are also funny, resourceful, canny creatures of the internet whose parasocial hungers Swift not only treasures but responds to, like a benevolent monarch. 

It was Swiftie plaintiffs who, in righteous indignation at price gouging and incompetence more generally, forced Ticketmaster executives to appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee earlier this year. (It was also Swifties who forced me to witness Amy Klobuchar interpolating the lyrics to “All Too Well” in a pandering screed against the ills of corporate consolidation.) Swifties make Twitter accounts, like @ErasTourResell, to sell available tickets at face value to real fans, thereby keeping them out of the hands of scalpers. “LA SWIFTIES ,” goes one tweet, which is best read in the voice of an auctioneer. “We have a seller …” When Swifties demanded additional tour dates in neglected cities, Swift, who had initially overlooked Singapore, responded with six of them. And on TikTok and other sites, they document and live stream the Eras Tour rigorously for absent fans, so much that I could find out, from an account called @ErasTourUpdates, that Swift changed her costume for the 1989 portion of the concert in Cincinnati—from a beaded lime green top and skirt to an identical set, but in fuchsia—thirty seconds after she appeared on stage.

Péter Esterházy once wrote that Péter Zilahy is the white raven of Hungarian literature who can observe the world each time as if for the first time, always fresh and original. While it’s labeled a novel, The Last Window-Giraffe is essentially uncategorizable, a hippogriff of a creation fashioned from fragments of history, autobiography, and wild invention. How such a wealth of elements—from childhood memories to political atrocities to the poignant evocation of the correspondence between sexual awakening and the deaths of dictators—could be gathered and spun into such a coherent narrative is a kind of aesthetic miracle.

Zilahy uses the Hungarian alphabet to present a wonderful mix of historical facts, poetry, and visual images, an approach inspired by the time he spent in Belgrade in 1996, when citizens took to the streets to protest Slobodan Milošević’s electoral fraud. The Last Window-Giraffe evokes many memories of my own past in the former Yugoslavia. There’s a wizardry in Zilahy’s ability to shrink an entire historical epoch to human scale while at the same time elevating ordinary experience to mythic significance. This is intellectual alchemy of the highest order, executed with wit and compassion. Zilahy can murder a sacred cow and canonize an unknown victim of totalitarianism in a single sentence.

H is for:
három puszi = three kisses
háború = war
harag = anger
halál = death
hatalom = power
híradó = news bulletin
hazudnak = they’re lying

U is for:
ur = space
ur = blank
ur = nothingness

Hangovers announced themselves on the wan faces on the District line to SW19 on the first Sunday of Wimbledon. Maybe I was projecting. It was a shame, people noted in low tones, that all the British players were now out. A pair of men splitting a salmon-colored broadsheet wondered which BBC presenter was at the center of a recent grooming scandal. “Last night was a proper, proper … if you saw the amount of tequila we were putting away,” said one handsome man, sitting between two heavily made-up girls. All of us filed out, in no particular rush, at Southfields. I went into Costa for an iced Americano before my friend arrived. 

“Careful, dear,” tutted an elderly woman, gesturing to my wide-open tote, the only bag I had in London. “I have no spatial awareness at all,” I admitted, surveying some almonds, a packable quilted jacket, and a copy of Persuasion, all ripe for the picking. “It’s not a rough crowd, of course,” she said, adjusting a georgette shawl, that was the same pearl color as her fluffy hair. “These days, you just never know …” She trailed off. We’d realized, I think simultaneously, that we were in our first queue of the day at Wimbledon, which isn’t just the world’s oldest tennis tournament but a pageant of exuberant restraint, where orderly lines and enclosures have the quality of rites. 

Louis arrived, wearing a gray wool suit, and we submitted ourselves to the flow of the crowd. A specter was haunting the weekend outfits—the specter of the Italian player Jannik Sinner’s huge Gucci duffel bag. Logomania was back, all around us: Goyard and Chanel bags, giant plastic Prada sunglasses, even several pairs of those Obama-era Tory Burch medallion flats. I complimented the sturdy unmarked sweater of a teacher from Somerset, who had, in recent years, become both a Wimbledon regular and a self-published author of over two dozen books on the pedagogy of drama. “I was actually going to wear my jumper printed with strawberries,” she said, “but we had a mishap with the dog this morning.”

At the corporate suite that housed our tickets, I asked a three-time seasonal employee if he’d ever encountered misbehavior at Wimbledon. Not really, he said. Had anyone ever, like, passed out? No. Had he ever heard an ambulance called? He jogged his memory for a moment, but also no. “I think,” he conjectured, “that people just sip on their drinks all day, but it’s a long day, so they end up absolutely fine.”  

On the first day, God said, “Let the atmospheric water vapors condense and become rain,” and so there was a downpour, and it was inconvenient. But we had ponchos. It was November at Disney World, and ponchos were like noses or smartphones in that every visitor had one, of course they did, it wasn’t even a question.

Soon the rain turned horizontal and worked itself inside the ponchos, and now the condensation cycle in the sky was being restaged on an individual level. You’d think this situation—thousands of humans being dumpling-steamed in plastic and packed into a slow boat or a shuttle simulator—would create a terrible odor, but Disney World was one step ahead: employees (“cast members”) stationed at the threshold of each attraction kindly asked guests to remove their ponchos before entering, and all obeyed, crumpling wet balls into pockets and backpacks … and we saw that it was good.

I’d intended to keep a detailed diary at Disney World but totally failed. My notebook has only two notes, both scribbled at Living with the Land, the EPCOT ride where you hop into a boat and glide past an idyllic farmhouse and through a series of greenhouses to learn about crop rotation and pesticide reduction. “In our search for more efficient ways to grow food, we often fail to realize the impact of our methods,” a narrator explained, channeling Wendell Berry. When we passed a thicket of tomatoes, the narrator revealed that one of EPCOT’s tomato plants had yielded “thirty-two thousand fruits.” A gasp went through the crowd. 

As it turned out, Living with the Land features the greatest fantasy in all of Disney World: no dirt. So the first note in my notebook was:

Love to read but hate to choose? Starting today and through Labor Day, you really can have it all when you subscribe to both The Paris Review and The New York Review of Books for a combined price of $99. That’s one year of issues from both publications, as well as access to their entire digital archives—seventy years of The Paris Review and sixty years of The New York Review of Books—for $60 off the regular price!

Ever since The Paris Review’s former managing editor Robert Silvers cofounded The New York Review of Books with Barbara Epstein, the two magazines have been closely aligned. So start your summer with an inspired pair, and you’ll have access to prose, poetry, interviews, criticism, and more from some of the most important writers of our time, including T. S. Eliot, Sigrid Nunez, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Joan Didion, and Jamaica Kincaid.

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