Ten for the Road: Hot Summer Reading from New School Writers
Two full houses – fiction and nonfiction – of seasonal reading suggestions.
FICTION
The Other Black Girl
by Zakiya Dalila Harris (MFA Creative Writing 2016); Simon & Schuster.
A novel for anyone who has ever felt overlooked, overworked, and manipulated on the job. Two Black women climb the career ladder in the hypercompetitive world of elite New York City publishing in a witty, highly acclaimed debut novel that the Washington Post describes as “initially satirical and then spectacularly creepy.”
No Heaven for Good Boys
by Keisha Bush (MFA Creative Writing 2015); Random House.
In contemporary Senegal, six-year-old Ibrahimah leaves his rural home, ostensibly to study in the capital city of Dakar. Instead, he is plunged into a world of poverty and danger as he is turned out to beg in the streets. He and a cousin resolve to find a way home, in an ultimately triumphant Oliver Twist for our times about the search for love, fulfillment, and security.
by A.E. Osworth (MFA Creative Writing 2016); Hatchette Book Group.
When Eliza Bright, an elite video game coder, goes public with the harassment and hostility she faces from male co-workers, she gets fired, doxed, and also becomes a feminist cause celebre. Male gamers start to stalk her every move, while an underground collective known as the Sixsisterhood takes her in and protects her. A tense cat and mouse game, online and in real life, results and builds to a dramatic climax.
by Alexandra Oliva (MFA Creative Writing 2011); Random House.
In a suspenseful near-future thriller, a young girl grapples with the question: What if your past wasn’t what you thought? After escaping a solitary life in a walled-off estate in rural Washington, she enters a social media-saturated modern world that seemingly won’t accept her for who she is. Then a fire at her childhood home forces her to return and unravel mysteries of memory and family, and find out: How real is your past if you can’t remember it?
by Mary Dixie Carter (MFA Creative Writing 2017); St. Martin’s Publishing Group.
A sought-after photographer well-versed in creating better-than reality images starts to branch out into emotional manipulation, too. After shooting a family’s birthday party photos, she steadily, skillfully, and obsessively inserts herself into their lives. A psychological thriller built around mind games and a surprise twist at the end that spells “beach reading” this summer.
NONFICTION
What Happened to Paula: On the Death of An American Girl
by Katherine Dykstra (MFA Creative Writing 2005); W.W. Norton and Company.
In 1970, 18-year-old Paula Oberbroeckling left her home in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and never returned. Four months later her murdered remains were found in a nearby riverbank culvert. The homicide case was never solved. Dykstra pieces together police records, high school yearbook entries, interviews, and other sources in a blend of true crime investigation and cultural memoir focused on issues of gender, autonomy, and the meaning of being a woman, then and now.
by Barbara Becker (MA Media Studies, 2000); MacMillan.
When a close childhood friend is diagnosed with a terminal illness. Becker, an interfaith minister, confronts anew the question of living life fully in the face of mortality, pain, and trauma. She volunteers at a hospice, accompanies her own parents during their final days, and writes about what can be learned by turning toward loss and grief, rather than away from it.
by Tyler Kelley (BA Liberal Arts Literature 2007); Simon & Schuster.
America’s three greatest rivers --the Mississippi, the Missouri, and the Ohio – are the lifeblood of the nation’s geography, economy, history, and our mythology. They’re also contained and regulated by an aging infrastructure battered by the effects of climate change. With what The New Yorker’s Ian Frazier praises as “careful, artful reporting,” Kelley tells the stories of these three powerful streams, the people who live along them, and what the future may hold for them.
The World We Need: Stories and Lessons from America’s Unsung Environmental Movement
by Audrea Lim (MA Philosophy 2008); The New Press.
Telling the often-overlooked stories of underfunded, grassroots struggles, largely in communities of color, Lim describes how they are succeeding in changing local economies – as well as the face and trajectory of the nation’s environmental movement. In the process, Lim has written what climate change author and activist Bill McKibben describes as “a truly important book piecing together the story of a massive uprising for environmental justice.”
Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism
by Mariana Mazzucato (MA Economics 1995, PhD Economics 1998); HarperCollins.
Taking inspiration (and the book’s title) from NASA’s storied drive to reach the Moon, a renowned economist and author argues that unleashing the power of government to attack today’s critical missions – from the environmental crisis to suppressing future pandemics – can save capitalism by, in the words of a Guardian review, infusing it with “public interest rather than private gain.”
Sierra Lewandowski is a research assistant and Bruce Cory is editorial advisor at the Center for New York City Affairs at The New School.