I may have been too ambitious with this list. (I was definitely too ambitious with this list.)

But I couldn’t help myself! There’s too much of the weird, the fabulous, the grotesque, the forward-looking to ignore this summer. What better than to expand the mind in freaky directions while the body is busy melting. 

GRAPHIC NOVELS

BTTM FDRS (Ezra Claytan Daniels + Ben Passmore) and Alienation (Inés Estrada) pack a one-two punch of near-future body horror, allowing the all-too-real terrors of gentrification, displacement, and climate collapse to bob and weave around symbiotic life forms and posthuman parasites. And let’s not forget Smashed, the newest collection by Junji Ito, whose horror I always underestimate (and should not read at night).

Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up with Me (Mariko Tamaki + Rosemary Valero-O’Connell) carries all the pathos of teenage love, following the legacy of Tamaki’s previous home runs Skim and This One Summer. Hot Comb’s (Ebony Flowers) focus is also youth, a coming-of-age story set in a hair salon and rippling outward to touch on identity, sisterhood, race, and love. Michael DeForge’s comic-a-day experiment Leaving Richard’s Valley explores another kind of growing up as animals exiled from their cult fend for themselves in a transitional Toronto.

FICTION + POETRY

Form, function, and phantasm become unmoored in I Become a Delight to My Enemies (Sara Peters), where the voices of an unnamed town rise together to tell the story of the brutality they have survived. In Bunny, Mona Awad’s MFA protagonist falls prey to the sweetly sinister/sinisterly sweet clique of rich girls—the titular Bunnies—and their monstrous imagination. 

The tender cyborg of Franny Choi’s Soft Science grieves without shame, returning to the loss and pain of each new poem with an openness that should satisfy the most relentless Turing Test. Oval (Elvia Wilk) runs with this season’s themes of loss and urban planning, telling the story of a near-future Berlin in the grips of “sustainability”-driven redevelopment projects, and the young couple navigating mourning, income inequality, and artificial mountains. 

Non-Fiction

The non-fiction I want is one that looks to the future and offers hope and resolution. I will make an exception, however, for The Uninhabitable Earth (David Wallace-Wells), a call to action couched in ruthlessly researched pessimism. Alicia Elliott’s A Mind Spread Out on the Ground approaches suffering, legacy, and racism with fearlessness and grace. The collection of essays is as necessary as it is visceral, offering a deft touch that nevertheless refuses to turn away from the treatment of Indigenous people in North America

On a very different note, I Like to Watch by Emily Nussbaum brings together some of the television critic’s most intriguing work, incrementally painting the portrait of a writer committed to treating the medium with the respect and accountability that is its due. 

Finally (finally!) I’ll be hosting our next True Reads Book Club (August 19th!) and we’ll be discussing Rough Magic. A chronicle of Lara Prior-Palmer’s victory in the Mongol Derby, the quick compelling read is almost whimsical in its unwillingness to take the “world’s longest, toughest horse race” seriously. There’s a thoughtfulness that guides the narrative from impulsive beginning to thrilling finish line in what is less a coming of age than an unbridling of youth.