President Obama's 2024 Summer Reading List, Reviewed

James

As in his classic novel Erasure, Everett portrays in this ingenious retelling of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn a Black man who’s mastered the art of minstrelsy to get what he needs from gullible white people. Many of the same things happen as they do in Twain’s original: Jim escapes from enslavement on a Missouri farm and joins up with Huck, a white boy who’s faked his own death. Huck is fleeing from his abusive father, while Jim is hoping to find a way to free his wife and daughter. The main difference is in the telling. Jim narrates, not Huck, and in so doing he reveals how he employs “slave” talk (“correct incorrect grammar”) when white people can hear, to make them feel safe and superior. Everett also pares down the prose and adds humor in place of sentimentality. When Huck and Jim come upon a band of slave hunters, Huck claims Jim, who’s covered by a tarp, is a white man infected with smallpox (“We keep thinkin’ he gone die, then he just don’t”). Clever additions to the narrative include a tense episode in which Jim is fraudulently sold by a slaver to “Dixie” composer Daniel Decatur Emmett, who has Jim perform in blackface with his singing troupe. Jim’s wrenching odyssey concludes with remarkable revelations, violent showdowns, and insightful meditations on literature and philosophy. Everett has outdone himself. (Mar.)

There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

Cultural critic Abdurraqib (A Little Devil in America) returns with a triumphant meditation on basketball and belonging. Serving as a love letter to Abdurraqib’s hometown of Columbus, Ohio, and the state more broadly, the book is structured like a basketball game, divided into four “quarters” with game clock time stamps demarcating section breaks. The first quarter describes the collective ecstasy Columbus felt during a 2002 game in which the city’s nationally ranked high school basketball team held its own against an Akron team featuring up-and-comer LeBron James. Abdurraqib suggests the Columbus team’s respectable showing (they lost in overtime) asserted the greater community’s pride in spite of politicians and police who called Black Columbus neighborhoods “war zones.” Elsewhere, the author considers the “era of Ohio Heartbreak” that followed James’s decision to leave the Cleveland Cavaliers for the Miami Heat in 2010, and offers a lyrical account of the protests that followed Columbus police’s 2016 killing of 23-year-old Black man Henry Green. (He writes of the makeshift shrine on the sidewalk where Green was shot: “Whatever is left behind dries and turns a dark crimson, the wayward light from candles flickering over what remains—a strange kind of memorial, a strange kind of haunting.”) The narrative works as if by alchemy, forging personal anecdotes, sports history, and cultural analysis into a bracing contemplation of the relationship between sport teams and their communities. This is another slam dunk from Abdurraqib. Agent: Alia Hanna Habib, Gernert Co. (Mar.)

Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis

Blitzer, a staff writer for the New Yorker, debuts with a masterful portrayal of the trauma experienced by asylum-seeking migrants from Central America and the U.S. government’s often inept policy interventions. Blitzer organizes his narrative around four Central Americans, including Juan Romagoza, a doctor tortured in El Salvador for his political leanings who later cared for migrants in the U.S.; Keldy Mabel Gonzáles Brebe de Zúniga, who escaped violence in Honduras and was later separated from her children at the U.S. border; and Lucrecia Hernández Mack, a doctor and politician in Guatemala. Interwoven with descriptions of the struggles of these asylum seekers and activists is the tale of America’s chaotic immigration policy, beginning with the Reagan administration’s support of repressive anticommunist regimes in Central America (which led, according to Blitzer, to the gang violence, state repression, and unrelenting poverty that has triggered mass migration from the region). Blitzer has produced a model of long-form journalism that intertwines the personal and the political, describing how drug cartels and street gangs brought harm and death to prodemocracy activists and innocent bystanders, while those in power remained indifferent. This is a powerful indictment of U.S. immigration policy. (Jan.)

Correction: A previous version of this review misspelled the name of one of the book’s subjects and incorrectly summarized another’s biography.

Reading Genesis

Novelist Robinson (The Death of Adam) offers a dense yet immersive close reading of the book of Genesis. Employing literary and theological lenses, the author frames the biblical book as an exemplary narrative and the figures within it as characters with agency, motive, and backstory. For example, Jacob is a trickster who schemes with his mother to steal his brother’s blessing, while his “young, bright, and self-infatuated” son, Joseph, proves “blind or indifferent to the resentment that is stirring around him... in literary terms, a great character.” Writing that “the text perfected very early the art of showing rather than telling,” Robinson skillfully melds her literary interpretation with her theological one, offering a Christian Calvinist reading that centers God’s goodness and grace (“Grace modifies law. Law cannot limit grace”). From that theological stance, she explores God’s willingness to form a covenant—and generally put up—with imperfect humans, his “too-brilliant creatures.” Like the biblical book it explicates, Robinson’s offering is demanding, intense, and best read slowly. Patient readers will be rewarded. Agent: Ellen Levine, Trident Media Group. (Mar.)

Headshot

The smashing debut novel from Bullwinkel (after the collection Belly Up) takes the measure of eight teenage girls as they compete at a boxing tournament in Reno, Nev. The first match features Andi Taylor, troubled by memories of the boy who drowned at a community pool during her lifeguard shift, up against Artemis Victor, who’s from a family of fighters and is looking to show up her accomplished older sister. Next up is oddball Rachel Doricko, whose trademark raccoon-skin hat is just one way she keeps her opponents off-balance, taking on the more pampered, mathematical-minded Kate Heffer. Cousins Iggy and Izzy Lang have more than familial rivalry on their minds when they face off. Lastly, two vicious young Texans— Rose Mueller, a spiritual seeker who’s turned away from the Christian church she was raised in, and Tanya Maw, destined for semistardom—step into the ring to settle their differences. For all the toe-to-toe realism and visceral descriptions of the girls’ blood sport, Bullwinkel’s real interest is in their inner lives and the picture that forms when considered as a whole (“you can send your mind up through the hole of the worlds built by the other girl boxers [and] travel through the layers of different imagined futures, and the different ways each girl has of being”). The fragile lives of her weekend warriors are faithfully portrayed in prose that is intelligible but never commonplace, virtuosic yet grounded. Bullwinkel’s knockout performance mops the floor with rank pretenders. Agent: Jin Auh, Wylie Agency. (Mar.)

The God of the Woods

The gripping and revelatory latest from Moore (Long Bright River) revolves around a prominent banking family’s troubled legacy in the Adirondacks. In 1975, 13-year-old Barbara Van Laar goes missing near the end of her first summer at Camp Emerson. It’s the second time a Van Laar child has vanished from the area; 14 years earlier, Barbara’s older brother Bear disappeared from their summer house when he was eight. The nonlinear narrative lays bare the family’s pain and unhappiness, showing how Peter Van Laar pressures his wife, Alice, to have another child shortly after Bear’s disappearance, and how Barbara frustrates the couple by being comparatively more difficult as a young girl, leading them to send her to boarding school. Moore gradually reveals the truth behind Barbara’s disappearance in scenes told from the alternating perspectives of several characters, including her bunkmate Tracy, who helps Barbara sneak out of the camp to meet her boyfriend. Meanwhile, details about Bear’s disappearance emerge as state police detective Judyta Luptack investigates Barbara’s case. The beautiful and dangerous wilderness setting enhances the suspense as the narrative builds to a dramatic final act that sheds a glaring light on Peter’s reluctance to prioritize the family’s well-being over its reputation. This astonishes. Agent: Seth Fishman, Gernert Co. (July)

Beautiful Days

Williams’s remarkable debut collection explores grief and masculinity in stories that hint at their characters’ strange afterlives. The recently divorced narrator of “Trial Run” trudges into the office during a snowstorm, where he’s unhappily shut in with a conspiracy theorist security guard and a toxic coworker. The narrator has no love for either man, but by the story’s revelatory ending, he has turned his unforgiving gaze on himself. In “Red Light,” an oddball and increasingly tense tale, a man named Parker grows curious about the boyfriend of the woman he’s having sex with, who’s watching Parker and the woman while hiding in a closet. “Lucca Castle,” “Ghost Image,” and “Return to Crashaw” each follow a different man’s stumbling attempt to forge a new life after his wife’s death. Their respective settings—a yacht headquartering an anti-capitalist cult off the coast of Queens, N.Y., a bombed-out Disney World, and a sandstone monument that attracts UFO obsessives—are rendered in an unsettling and deeply captivating dream logic, hinting at the possibility that the narrators are already dead (the narrator of “Ghost Image,” who spots a “Hell Is Real” billboard while driving across the country, wonders if he’s “entered hell... the hell of earthbound ghosts that repeat the same actions, haunt the same spaces”). Williams’s tales deserve favorable comparison to the stories of Wells Tower and George Saunders. (June)

Martyr!

Poet Akbar (Calling a Wolf a Wolf) explores the allure of martyrdom in this electrifying story of a Midwestern poet struggling with addiction and grief. Cyrus Shams, an orphaned son of Iranian immigrants, is fixated on finding meaning in the deaths of his parents—his mother in a plane that was accidentally shot down by the U.S. Navy over the Persian Gulf, his father from a stroke. His obsession strains his relationships, particularly with his closest friend and roommate Zee Novak, as does his heavy drinking and drug use. Immersed in the study of martyrs throughout history, Cyrus finds focus for his project when he meets Orkideh, an older painter foregoing treatment for her terminal breast cancer, and he realizes he has an opportunity to interview a living martyr. More details would spoil the plot, which thickens when connections are revealed between Cyrus and Orkideh as well as secrets about Cyrus’s family history that inform his conflicted feelings about pursuing a queer romance with Zee. Akbar deploys a range of styles with equal flair, from funny wordplay (“Maybe it was that Cyrus had done the right drugs in the wrong order, or the wrong drugs in the right order”) to incisive lyricism (“An alphabet, like a life, is a finite set of shapes”). This wondrous novel will linger in readers’ minds long after the final page. Agent: Jacqueline Ko, Wylie Agency. (Jan.)

Correction: An earlier version of this review misidentified where the main character is from.

Memory Piece

Ko (The Leavers) spans past, present, and future with the astute story of three Chinese American women from the New York City tristate area over the course of their lives. As a teen in 1980s suburbia, Giselle Chin knows she wants to be an artist, and that her performance art will provide “a container for the uncertainty and overwhelm of the future.” At Chinese language school, she meets Jackie Ong, who’s drawn to computers and feels “more kinship to machines” than people. At a party, the two encounter Ellen Ng, who later gets involved in political activism and moves to a community squat in New York City called Sola. As Giselle gains fame in the art world, she wonders whether celebrity will compromise her true vision, and if so, which one she’ll have to abandon. Jackie, too, must decide what really matters to her as she attempts to balance integrity and success while creating an online social network just as the internet begins to take off, and Ellen worries Sola will be undone by gentrification. For much of the narrative, the women’s individual story lines feel a bit disjointed, but Ko brings them together in a satisfying final act in the 2040s, when America is an authoritarian police state. This is a worthy follow-up to Ko’s striking debut. Agent: Ayesha Pande, Pande Literary. (Mar.)

The Ministry of Time

British Cambodian writer Bradley’s clever debut features time travel, romance, cloak-and-dagger plotting, and a critique of the British Empire. The unnamed narrator, who works as a translator for Britain’s Ministry of Defence sometime in the near future, is selected by the government to aid a newly formed agency to process time travelers from the past. Her assigned “expat” is real-life polar explorer Lt. Graham Gore, who has arrived in the future sometime before his death during the ill-fated 1845 Franklin expedition, a mind-bender Bradley heads off at the pass (“Anyone who has ever watched a film with time-travel... will know that the moment you start to think about the physics of it, you are in a crock of shit”). The narrator, whose mother was a Cambodian refugee, feels a kinship with Gore’s sense of disorientation. The roguishly handsome naval officer lives with her as part of the terms of the assignment, and her account of their burgeoning mutual attraction is interspersed with episodes from Gore’s disastrous journey to the Arctic. A thriller-like scenario regarding mortal threats to the narrator and Gore feels secondary; more fruitful are Bradley’s depictions of the ways in which time travelers react to modern nightclubs, sexual freedoms, and the news that the empire has “collapse[d].” It’s a sly and ingenious vehicle for commentary on the disruptions and displacements of modern life. (May)

When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s

Ganz, author of the newsletter Unpopular Front, debuts with a lucid and propulsive narrative of the failed right-wing populism at the fringe of the 1992 U.S. presidential election. According to Ganz, the discontent exploited by bigoted Republican challengers Pat Buchanan and David Duke and the proto–“drain the swamp” rhetoric of independent candidate Ross Perot laid the groundwork for Donald Trump’s 2016 victory. The book profiles these and other figures—including New York City mayoral candidate Rudy Giuliani and mob boss John Gotti—and it’s woven throughout with astute analysis of the period’s political commentary (left-leaning historian Christopher Lasch critiqued liberalism as an “infinitely expanding universe of spoiled consumers and bureaucrats,” Ganz writes, while hard-right economist Murray Rothbard hoped Buchanan would “break the clock of the New Deal” and “repeal the twentieth century”). Ganz’s dry wit is ever-present; describing how media coverage of the early-1990s culture wars eclipsed George H.W. Bush’s attempts to stoke the fight against Saddam Hussein, he writes, “Apparently the ‘New Hitler’ wasn’t as juicy a story as the incipient totalitarianism of literature professors.” The book’s highlight is a long chapter focused on New York City, which Ganz portrays as a breeding ground for strongman leadership by comparing Trump to Giuliani and Gotti as outer-borough “arriviste[s]” who celebrated personal liberty, but preyed on fear. This is a revelation. (June)

The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact, and the Fateful Voyage of Captain James Cook

Bestseller Sides (On Desperate Ground) recreates in this propulsive account the final expedition of Captain James Cook (1728–1779), which culminated with his murder by native Hawaiians. Diving into the long-standing mystery of what went wrong, Sides spins an observation made by previous chroniclers—that “on his final voyage something wasn’t quite right with the famous captain... his personality had definitely changed”—into a sidelong indictment of imperialism. Tracing Cook’s transformation from toast of the Enlightenment, a heroic “mariner-scientist” who ferried naturalists around the world and made friends with Natives, to violent authoritarian who dispensed brutal punishments for minor infractions, like theft of supplies, against Indigenous communities as well as his crew, Sides eschews the conventional “medical” explanation of Cook’s “profoundly changed... outlook.” Instead, Sides insinuates, the “sinister force pulling at his psyche and his soul” was Cook’s growing conviction—heightened by increasingly frequent signs that Spanish vessels were exploring the same territories in the Pacific—that he must be more ruthless in claiming new land for Britain. With an admirably light touch, Sides teases out his convincing thesis amid a riveting day-by-day narrative of the voyage and fascinating asides on such matters as the fierce anthropological debate over whether the Hawaiians really considered Cook to be the god Lono. This exquisitely crafted and novelistic portrait of the mercurial captain enthralls. (Apr.)

Help Wanted

Waldman’s perceptive sophomore novel (after The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.) centers on the employees of a big-box store in Upstate New York. Nine of them are a part of the Movement team, arriving at four a.m. to unload trucks, unpack boxes, and stock the shelves before the store opens. Team manager Meredith, who’s under pressure from corporate headquarters to maintain the department’s budget, alienates the others by refusing requests for additional work hours or raises, contributing to their struggles to make ends meet. When the store manager announces he’s transferring to another location, and that corporate will be coming to interview employees to decide which team manager will take his role, Movement member Val sees an opportunity to get rid of Meredith by pushing to promote her. Val and the other team members put the plan in action, and several of them begin fantasizing about a promotion. Though Waldman touches only briefly on the employees’ personal lives, making it difficult to keep all the characters straight, the narrative builds to a satisfying and surprising conclusion. It’s a bracing and worthwhile glimpse of the high stakes faced by low-wage workers. (Mar.)