Every June, the editors and staff from the Kenyon Review come together to share recommendations of books they can't stop thinking about. The summer months offer long days and increased leisure time for many, perfect to spend with your nose in a book. From works that "dwell inside of gray areas" (to quote one contributor) to zippy beach reads best devoured in one sitting, this list contains genre-spanning suggestions sure to include something for everyone.
Frances Cannon, editorial reader
I don’t often re-read the same book in one season, but I made an exception for “Martyr!” by Kaveh Akbar (Knopf, 2024). This is not a light read; it wrestles with heavy themes of our complex human existence — death, addiction, estrangement, immigration, deceit, loneliness, violence, and war — yet these topics are rendered with nuance, humor, and reverence, and the overall effect is uplifting and even prompted me to laugh at least once per chapter. The main story follows Cyrus Shams, a recovering alcoholic, orphan, and aspiring poet living in the Midwest who works part-time at a hospital play-acting sick and dying. Cyrus wants his life and his death to matter, and he develops an obsession with historical martyrs, both religious and secular social/political martyrs, about whom he begins to write a book. Cyrus’s friend Sad James tells him about a contemporary artist named Orkideh whose Marina Abramović–style art performance at the Brooklyn Museum is to spend her final days in a gallery, speaking with strangers about her imminent death due to a metastasized breast cancer. Cyrus travels to New York with his roommate Zee Novak, and over the course of a few days he gets to know Orkideh and experiences several epiphanies about his life, his martyr-themed project, his death, his culture, his family, and his spiritual beliefs. There are a few love stories nestled within the larger plot, all of which — to my delight — are queer, slow-blooming and evolve into surrealist, dreamlike scenes of quiet rapture. One of my favorite scenes in the book involves two women in an alley near a bazaar in Tehran in 1987. To avoid spoiling the plot for you readers I won’t reveal the characters’ identities here, but they crouch in the dirt and listen for the elusive drumming of angels under the sounds of the market, and their active listening turns into a kiss:
“We were on our knees in the alley staring at each other like children. Like chickens. I felt dizzy again from aliveness. Flush with baffle and excitement, like the first person to taste snow. And then, natural as air, we stood up and walked back into the bazaar, where men were arguing about nonsense, where women swept dirt from dirt. After that first kiss, I wouldn’t have questioned anything. Possibility, freedom. If a great winged angel had come up from the earth and burst apart, I would have gathered its feathers.”
This sudden revelation in the mundane, this blend of sacred and profane, occurs frequently throughout the book: Cyrus experiences the hum of the universe as a buzzing sound in his ears and heat burning through his sneakers; Zee realizes his love for Cyrus while he rinses the blood from a foot wound in a stranger’s tub; Orkideh discovers grace in a stolen Persian-English dictionary. As a cynical agnostic, I found myself surprised to be drawn into the spiritual delirium of the book; I resonate with Cyrus’s exhaustion and rage at the folly of humanity, his hunger for meaning, his curiosity for inexplicable phenomena, and his awe of the world. This is an intense book. I might read it a third time to remind myself to keep looking and listening more deeply.
Lacey N. Dunham, digital archive associate
I love when books resist providing easy answers and instead dwell inside of gray areas. Colin Winnette’s “Users” (Soft Skull Press, 2023) is a vaguely menacing novel of existential dread set against the untetheredness of contemporary life, and one I can’t stop thinking about.
Miles is a dutiful employee at a tech company mining its users’ data by expanding its VR technology. The company invites users to become co-collaborators inside its “experiences” while also manipulating (or even creating) fantasies for them — though some users take things too far, populating experiences that Miles and his team are forced to purge from the platform, only to receive outraged cries of censorship rooted in bad faith arguments. Miles is also a lackluster spouse to his wife, whom he struggles to connect with, and a middling parent to his two energetic and imaginative school-age daughters, one of whom enacts violent fantasies upon her younger sister. Throughout the book, he receives written threats delivered through the mail slot of his ever-expanding, increasingly labyrinthine home. Miles can’t quite decide what to do about the threats, or whether he should even take them seriously.
Winnette skillfully endears Miles to readers, especially in the novel’s third act when his professional and personal lives fall apart after he invents a product for his company that exploits the conflation of our online lives and our private selves. Two scenes featuring Miles’s eldest, now-teenage daughter (one disturbing and the other brutally tender) deftly turn up the volume on the novel’s main preoccupations about our digitized era and what it means for our lives to be experienced simultaneously — perhaps even primarily — online. For example, how can we know whether our wants and desires are real, or whether they are implanted by companies whose goals are to grow their market share and deepen the pockets of shareholders? In a world where the concept of self is a consumerist creation digitally created, divided, and exploited, who are we really?
“Users” plumbs notions of privacy in the digital era alongside the seamless blur of reality and the virtual world. But the real devastation of “Users” is that even when screens are nowhere to be found, its characters are still limited by how well they can truly connect with those they love.
Nicole Terez Dutton, editor
Jennifer Croft’s “The Extinction of Irena Rey” is a gorgeous, rambunctious, smart and completely absorbing novel that tracks eight translators into the primeval forests on the border of Belarus as they search for the disappeared Irena Rey. Exquisite and sprawling, Linnea Axelsson’s Scandinavian novel-in-verse, “Ædnan: An Epic,” chronicles several generations of a Sami family, grappling with inheritance, tragedy, tradition, and the power of language. Shane Book’s third book of poems, “All Black,” is relentless and utterly beautiful. So much hard music and love packed into this slender volume.
P.D. Edgar, digital archive associate
Nora Treatbaby’s debut from Nightboat is like a RAW photo; there’s an absolute breadth, an uncompressed dimensionality to this collection in both subject matter and the use of language that kept me going and going as a reader. As someone who enjoys reading poems to myself both in my head and aloud, “Our Air” (2024) kept me on the edge of my own breath. Sometimes, it was at at a gallop, as through the spaced lines of “Of” (“To be sirening / a petal cage / hovering behind / my technology / I am a fully / realized mass of / oxymoron being so / true to annulment / having sunk so / deeply into beauty”). At the end of the book, in a series titled “Repetitions of Mistakes I Always Make Because Every Mistake Is the Same,” it was in a steady, low reflective voice that unfolds into revelation.
Another thing Treatbaby does masterfully, over and over, is their multiplication of the same term, or a similar starting point, to riff on multiple meanings, premised on page two as “…self dual / we are to be one / figment repeating yet / at some depth: it wavers, laughs.” In one section of the same poem, “Philosophy,” they say, “the image of image of // whatiswhatis: / a framework / a curiosity system,” playing on language that lands seriously in deep questions (“the world demands / you to imagine it / the situation goes on / and on/…”) and deep affirmations of oneself among those questions (“I cannot be achieved / I’m not a goal / I say give yourself when / you have yourself”). Treatbaby says, “I need clues, not answers.”
Last, “Our Air” is an epic interrogation of language grounded by a precision that holds “the soaring twig” and “subscribing to Hulu” in the same breath. It’s a cognizant picnic of loverfriends during a climate crisis, reminding me of the cicadas that choir together over my walk between the car and the Winn-Dixie, of the body that trembles equally at the largenesses of the worlds both outside and inside oneself. It affirms that I am worth making myself, worth “Turning towards / a deep romance / of possibility.”
Jennifer Galvão, KR fellow
I’d like to recommend two books I read recently and loved. The first is Kristen Gentry’s debut collection “Mama Said” (West Virginia University Press, 2023). The stories in this linked collection trace the intertwined lives of a Black matriarchal family. These stories are vast and intimate, painful and funny. Gentry renders Louisville, Kentucky, in all its rich history and possibility, a city that feels both swallowing and “small as the hallway.” Within Gentry’s tender, unrelenting stories, JayLynn and her cousins Zaria and Angel reckon with daughterhood, motherhood, and transformation. These are stories of women lying, praying, lashing out, longing, becoming. Since first reading, I’ve returned repeatedly to the image of a pregnant daughter waxing as her mother wanes with addiction: “patting her mother onto herself like makeup, rubbing her in like lotion.”
I also want to recommend “Of Cattle and Men” (Charco Press, 2023) by Brazilian author Ana Paula Maia. Translated into English by Zoë Perry, this spare, strange novel follows the men who work at Senhor Milo’s slaughterhouse, where they kill and dismantle cattle bound for the pristine, far-off hamburger plant. An invisible agitant has begun to unsettle the cattle, driving the animals — and the men — to increasingly disturbing behavior. Maia’s “Of Cattle and Men” is a brief, brutal contemplation of violence, labor, mercy, and consumption. I read it in a single, breathless sitting.
Connor Greer, digital archive associate
I have found myself thinking often these days about transformation, broadly construed (private and public; personal and social). Two books I have found helpful in this, and to put in conversation with each other (however obliquely), are “The Woman in the Dunes” by Kōbō Abe (Alfred A. Knopf, 1964, translated by E. Dale Saunders) and “Change: A Method by Édouard Louis” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024, translated by John Lambert). Perhaps they could prove helpful to you as well.
Geramee Hensley, social media manager
Noor Hindi can make you laugh, cry, and rally in just a couple lines. The breadth here is that lines like “Sometimes I get so sad / I think about eating a quesadilla” coexist with difficult uncomfortable truths: “My tax dollars pay for the bombs that kill my people.” And they must coexist. An important criticism is constructed alongside the wreckage wrought by imperialism — how the narrative is consumed and what metabolizing it inflicts upon our hearts. Exhaustion, rage, and wit all are wielded here with astonishing wisdom and potency. Friendship and solidarity play an integral role in where I find this book’s triumph. The spirit of friendship makes light lighter. How what is painful becomes easier to see and know. How a future becomes possible to imagine. How the splintering of the speaker across varying degrees of witness redeems itself in seeing and re-seeing Palestine. Triumph, of course, is not synonymous with resolution. For the rest of my life, I will be thinking about how the final images complicate earlier poems in the book, because these complications are for me, too.
“Dear God. Dear Bones. Dear Yellow.” (Haymarket Books, 2022) is a sharp book. Hold it close and correct.
Geeta Kothari, senior editor
I’ve been a fan of Kyoko Mori’s work for many years, so I was excited to read her newest book, “Cat and Bird” (Belt Publishing, 2024), an engaging memoir organized around the cats Mori has loved and the birds that have flown in and out of their lives. As charming as these animals are, however, I was ultimately drawn in by Mori’s observations on solitude and the writing life. Mori’s tone is soothing and meditative, even as she navigates huge transitions in her life — graduate school, moving, divorce.
Cat Ingrid Leeches, digital archive associate
I can’t stop thinking about Aurora Venturini’s “Cousins” (Soft Skull Press, 2024), and I plan to return to it throughout the summer. It is a gorgeous and funny book that is simultaneously obscene, depraved, and often cruel; think Katherine Dunn’s “Geek Love” meets Marie Redonnet’s “Forever Valley.” This is a family novel about mothers, sisters, and cousins (the men of the family are mostly absent) as they face misogyny and ableism in a 1940s La Plata. The story is narrated by Yuna Riglos, a gifted painter who finds punctuation exhausting and struggles with communication and social norms. Her descriptions of her family members are often merciless and downright vicious. “Cousins” is translated by Kit Maude, who also translated “The Naked Woman” by Armonía Somers (another fantastic and strange book).
Misha Rai, contributing editor
This summer I would like to recommend two debut books that have come out in the very recent past — “Mouth: Stories” by Puloma Ghosh (Astra House, 2024) and “The Turtle House: A Novel” by Amanda Churchill (Harper, 2024).
Like its suggestively sensuous and chilling book cover, Ghosh’s “Mouth” holds within it eleven excellent examples of spectral fiction where a hair-raising premise provides not only a fun read, but also allows entry into necessary feelings of grief, desire, loss, love, and alienation. I read a story a day from this collection to fully unpack the many-layered effect each of them had on me.
“The Turtle House” is a beautiful, intergenerational historical family saga that takes the reader into the inner worlds of a granddaughter, Lin Cope, and her grandmother, Mineko, whilst rendering beautifully the outer worlds they occupy — Curtain, Texas, in 1999 and Kadoma, Osaka Prefecture, in 1936. This is the kind of book you read in a sitting, devoting a whole summer afternoon to it, because the magic of Churchill’s writing draws you in completely and you find yourself, along with Lin, marveling at the ways in which family are bound to each other through the good and the bad.
Sergei Lobanov-Rostovsky, associate editor
I’ve always been interested in how contemporary writers reimagine Shakespeare: in my “Black Shakespeares” seminar at Kenyon, we read poems, plays, and novels by writers from the African Diaspora that respond to Shakespeare’s most challenging plays. This spring, I’ve been reading Isabella Hammad’s “Enter Ghost” (Grove Press, 2023), which narrates an Arabic production of “Hamlet” staged in the Occupied Territories. As the title suggests, there are many ghosts haunting this novel: family memory, a history of violence, a lost country. Israeli soldiers stand around in the shadows on the play’s opening night, unsure how to respond to a play that feels like an accusation. When Hamlet declares that Denmark is a prison, this audience knows exactly what he means. But the ghosts that haunt this story are both political and personal. Politics is literally the backdrop to this novel about making art, love, and family in the shadow of a separation wall. Hammad’s novel is wrenching and timely, mixing lyricism with political anguish at a moment when it’s crucial to recognize the shared experiences of these lives haunted by violence.
Jackson Saul, managing editor
Unfortunately, we don’t get the opportunity to live life over again and undo our mistakes. However, we can in some cases repeat our good choices, one such case being re-reading. I’ve been re-reading Jane Morton’s “Snake Lore” (Black Lawrence Press, 2024). The poems of this chapbook put us in a close-up world of open throats and wet mouths, blood, spit, and teeth, bellies and bruised skin. These bodily things glisten, spill, quiver, and throb in Southern heat and in the company of decimated chickens, crescent moons, and dirt that gets everywhere, as well as the titular, multiplying snakes. We see them through membranes and across boundaries, window blinds and “a veil of warm blood.” As much on the through of such mediation, the emphasis falls on the between: transition, mutability, and simultaneity are this collection’s go-to states. We get a smattering of aubades (inhabiting that space between sleeping and waking, marking a separation between two lovers), a twanging of the line strung between eroticism and violence, and the sometimes contradicting ingredients of victimhood (“the girl who let the snake / in her backyard drink / from her”) and aggression, as with bovine, avian, and canine threats to their own young and mates. The same speaker so concerned with such conditions that they feel the urge to touch an oposum vibrating with flies also has a preoccupation with ontology: one thing can be another (“I was the creek”), seem to be another (“How’d that ugliness convince us / it was romance?”), and succeed another (“I’ve traded self for self”), and yet not even be itself — like “woods / that aren’t quite woods. / Trees too pale and nervous to be trees.” If we receive the directive not to overinterpret (“it doesn’t have to mean / anything”), we can still enjoy each good line and subversion of expectation in this rich, probing collection.
Danilo John Thomas, assistant managing editor
In 2022, I was among what I can only assume were droves of other readers awestruck by Bora Chung’s collection of short stories, the National Book Award Finalist, “Cursed Bunny. I am not going out on a limb when I say that her follow-up effort, “Your Utopia,” once again translated by the excellent Anton Hur, does not cede ground. If anything, it furthers Chung’s status as a living master of the short story. Imbued with deceptively light prose, the stories within “Your Utopia (Algonquin Books, 2024) draw little attention to the language on the page while leaning into science-fiction elements that transport the reader to strange landscapes populated with immortals, an abandoned robot akin to Wall-E, or the noirish memories of an ill-fated criminal, to name just a few. Chung creates mad worlds and desolate hereafters for the reader to enjoy on a visceral, hey-the-walls-are-melting type trip, but it is her ability to embed her themes seamlessly into these narratives that makes her otherworldly. The occurences, characters, and settings are not thinly veiled metaphors for contemporary anxieties, but are absolutely necessary, part-and-parcel to each individual story. The anxieties of Chung’s stories, in their unique times and places, are not our own, they are of their own time and place, and yet, we so clearly see our faults and accomplishments through them. The stories, then, do not hold a mirror up, reflecting back something archetypal or uncanny, but rather, they become a lens, strangely filtered with zombie plagues and otherwise, through which we see our own shortcomings and dreams become all the clearer. In far-off places, each possibility becomes manifest.
Orchid Tierney, senior editor
“Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return” by CAConrad (Wave Books, 2024) is a sequel of sorts to CAConrad’s previous collection “Amanda Paradise” (Wave Books, 2021). Born in the uncertainty of the COVID-19 pandemic, this collection of somatic ritual is a celebration of “fellow animals who found ways to thrive in the Anthropocene.” This optimistic focus to life-as-it-continues feels like a welcome reprieve from the insurmountable human and non-human losses of our difficult era. Beautiful in its appreciations for queer human and more-than-human forms, “Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return” boils with curiosity (“I cannot stop / myself feeling / for words / before /they / arrive”) and our planetary brilliance (“it is easy to / forget there / are other stars when sunlight fills me / to the / gills”).