Summer Reading Recommendations from Fordham’s English Faculty
By Meghan Maguire Dahn
With Memorial Day Weekend a moment away, we thought we’d let you know which books English Department Faculty are planning on bringing poolside. Our recommendations span genres and purposes – whether you’re looking for an escape or a deeper understanding of our world.
Heather Dubrow is looking forward to reading Perplexing Plots, an investigation of crime fiction and its analogue in film, by Davide Bordwell, as well as Beforelight, the debut poetry collection by our own Matthew Gellman.
Speaking of Matthew Gellman, he’s planning to read The Idiot, by Elif Batuman. If you haven’t read one of her novels yet, she’s perfect for English majors and alums. Another selection that will work well for flexing your literary acumen comes from Elisabeth Frost, who is getting ready to dig into James by Percival Everett. His earlier novel Erasure was adapted into last year’s award winning film American Fiction. She also just finished the audiobook of Lauren Groff’s Matrix and can’t recommend it highly enough. “The writing is stunning,” she says, “and the audio performance is brilliant.” Professor Frost reports that she felt herself “propelled into the 12th century abbey and its complex, fractious, truly glorious community of women.”
If you’re interested in other work that plumbs the depths of social matrices, Mary Bly, who is about to go on a very well-earned sabbatical, reports that she recently became obsessed with Elizabeth Taylor’s novels. Taylor was known for crafting detailed, often uncompromising views of middle class and upper class British life. Many of her novels, which Professor Bly calls “insouciant, domestic, [and] slightly mad,” can be found in Virago Classics editions.
In the vein of slightly mad domestic novels, Jessica Denzer recommends Magda Szabó’s The Door. Also in her to-read pile are Lucia Berlin’s A Manual for Cleaning Women, Hanif Abdurraqib There is Always this Year: On Basketball and Ascension, and the short stories of the recently deceased Nobel Laureate Alice Munro (always good to revisit even if you’ve read them before).
Ed Cahill, whose own novel (Disorderly Men) was recently shortlisted for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, offers a range of books to last you through the summer, including: Upcountry by Chin-Sun Lee; A Thousand Moons by Sebastian Barry; American Scholar by Patrick Horrigan; Less is Lost by Andrew Sean Greer; The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel; Monstrilio by Fordham’s own Gerardo Sámano Córdova; Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin; Night of the Living Rez by Morgan Talty; The Singularities by John Banville; Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adele-Brenyah; and Free Indirect: The Novel in a Postfictional Age by Timothy Bewes.
John Hanc writes that watching the “acclaimed and terrific FX remake of Shogun” made him want to revisit the book by James Clavell, which Hanc read decades ago and remembers as a “perfect summer reading escape.” As for new books, one of Hanc’s favorite writers of narrative history is Hampton Sides, author of Ghost Soldiers (among many others). His latest book, The Wide Wide Sea, is a new look at Captain Cook’s final voyage.
Other nonfiction recommendations come from Stephen Romagnoli, who will be reading They Called Me a Lioness: A Palestinian Girl's Fight for Freedom by Ahed Tamimi, Gaza: An Inquest into Its Martyrdom by Norman Finkelstein, and The Rebel's Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon by Adam Shatz. For fiction, he seconds Elisabeth Frost’s recommendation of James: A Novel by Percival Everett.
As for me, here’s what’s in my summer stack. For poetry, I’m itching to read Root Fractures by Diana Khoi Nguyen, Modern Poetry by Diane Seuss, and Light Me Down: New and Collected Poems by Jean Valentine, who passed away in 2021. If you are a Joan Didion fan, you should get your hands on The Uptown Local by Cory Leadbeater, which comes out in June. I’ve been devouring it in preparation for an interview he and I are doing. It’s a memoir about working and living with one of the great prose stylists of our time in the last decade of her life. For fiction, I’m looking forward to Blackouts by Justin Torres and Never Whistle at Night: An Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology (edited by Shane Hawk and Theodore C. Van Alst Jr.).
If you value emerging, experimental, or marginalized authors, one really important thing you can do is find a small, independent press you like and read from their catalog. Many presses were affected by the sudden closure of Small Press Distribution this spring and they are struggling. Here’s a list to get you started.
We’d love to hear what you’ve been reading, too. Please reach out and share your recommendations. Have a wonderful weekend – wherever you are – filled with friends, festivities, and phenomenal books!
Meghan Maguire Dahn is a Lecturer in English at Fordham University, where she is also the Editor of English News. She is the author of Domain, a collection of poems, as well as the chapbook Lucid Animal. If you have English-related news you’d like to share with her, please feel free to email her at mdahn@fordham.edu.