Shari Altman

Summer Reading & Writing Bingo Picks - Peter Orner

It’s time for summer reading. Have you downloaded your Summer Reading & Writing Bingo card yet?

To help you complete your Bingo cards, we’re inviting members of the literary community to choose a Bingo square and share their must-reads for that category.

Next up is Peter Orner, the author of several books of short stories—most recently, Maggie Brown & Others—and a book of essays, Am I Alone Here? Thank you, Peter!

Peter’s Bingo square

Peter chose Winter in the Blood by James Welch for the Bingo square: Read a Classic You Should Have Read by Now.

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Winter in the Blood, by James Welch

Calling James Welch's Winter in the Blood "classic" makes it sound like required reading or something. This, Welch's first novel, came out in 1974 and blew the doors off anything that came before. It is also a gloriously funny and sad novel. One my absolute touchstones. The recent (and long overdue) removal of the weather vane atop Baker Library at Dartmouth College got me thinking: Let's remove offensive kitsch, change names of professional teams, and many more necessary things. But also let’s engage in an affirmative way. Reading a great book by a seminal Native American novelist is one way...

Summer Reading & Writing Bingo Picks - Rachel Barenbaum

It’s time for summer reading. Have you downloaded your Summer Reading & Writing Bingo card yet?

To help you complete your Bingo cards, we’re inviting members of the literary community to choose a Bingo square and share their must-reads for that category.

Next up is Rachel Barenbaum, whose novel, A Bend in the Stars, was just released in paperback in May. Thanks, Rachel!

Rachel’s Bingo square

Rachel chose On the Come Up, by Angie Thomas for the square Read a Middle Grade or Young Adult Novel.

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On the Come Up, by Angie Thomas

This is a book everyone in America should read. Bri is a Black girl bussed into a fancy white neighborhood to attend an elite public high school. Stereotypes have her fellow students thinking she's a hoodlum and when school security throws her down and cuffs her after a misunderstanding, rumors fly that she is a drug dealer. She's not. She sells candy. Every day she wonders if/when she will eat, if her mother will have the money to pay for electric or gas and if she can finally get a new pair of shoes since the soles of her current boots have peeled off from age. Timely, heart breaking, and brilliant, this book will lead to all the kinds of conversations we should be having today.

August New Releases

Each August we take a break from writing The Dipper to rest and refuel for the fall months. However, because there are so many good books coming out in August, we decided we needed to share them with you. Here are the books that have caught our attention. We hope you’ll find the perfect read for August.

August 4 releases

  • Guillotine, by Eduardo C. Corral (Graywolf Press)

  • The Death of Vivek Oji, by Akwaeke Emezi (Riverhead)

  • Here is the Sweet Hand, by Francine J. Harris (FSG)

  • Wandering in Strange Lands, by Morgan Jerkins (Harper)

  • Luster, by Raven Leilani (FSG)

  • Migrations, by Charlotte McConaghy (Flatiron)

  • Sometimes I Never Suffered: Poems, by Shane McCrae (FSG)

  • Talking Animals, by Joni Murphy (FSG)

  • Underworld Lit, by Srikanth Reddy (Wave Books)

  • Caste, by Isabel Wilkerson (Random House)

  • The Fixed Stars, by Molly Wizenberg (Abrams Press)

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August 11 releases

  • The New Wilderness, by Diane Cook (Harper)

  • The Unreality of Memory, by Elissa Gabbert (FSG Originals)

  • Difficult Light , by Tomas Gonzalez, translated by Andrea Rosenberg (Archipelago)

  • The Shame, by Makenna Goodman (Milkweed Editions)

  • Finna: Poems, by Nate Marshall (One World)

  • Bezoar, by Guadelupe Nettel (Seven Stories Press)

 
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August 15 to 18 releases

  • Lecture, by Mary Capello (Transit Books, August 15)

  • Northernmost, by Peter Geye (Knopf, August 18)

  • Summer, by Ali Smith (Pantheon, August 18)

 
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August 25 releases

  • Vesper Flights, by Helen Macdonald (Grove)

  • An Inventory of Losses, by Judith Schalansky, translated by Jackie Smith (New Directions)

  • Farewell, Ghosts, by Nadia Terranova, translated by Ann Goldstein (Seven Stories Press)

 
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Summer Reading & Writing Bingo Picks - Emily Arnason Casey

It’s time for summer reading. Have you downloaded your Summer Reading & Writing Bingo card yet?

To help you complete your Bingo cards, we’re inviting members of the literary community to choose a Bingo square and share their must-reads for that category.

Next up is Emily Arnason Casey, who is the author of Made Holy. Thanks, Emily!

Emily’s Bingo square

Emily chose Black is the Body by Emily Bernard for the Bingo square: Read a 2019 Award Winner. It won the Christopher Isherwood prize for autobiographical prose.

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Black is the Body, by Emily Bernard

Beginning with a stabbing in a coffee shop that injured Bernard in 2001 and moving through marriage, adoption of twin daughters from Africa, discussions of race with her students as a professor in Vermont, and her family life in Tennessee, Bernard offers readers an intimate view into her life and work, and the maternal line of story-telling that shaped her.

Summer Reading & Writing Bingo Picks - Makenna Goodman

It’s time for summer reading. Have you downloaded your Summer Reading & Writing Bingo card yet?

To help you complete your Bingo cards, we’re inviting members of the literary community to choose a Bingo square and share their must-reads for that category.

Next up is Makenna Goodman. Makenna’s debut novel, The Shame, comes out in August. Thanks, Makenna!

Makenna’s Bingo square

Makenna chose Passing by Nella Larsen for the Bingo square: Read a Classic You Should Have Read by Now.

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Passing, by Nella Larsen

Nella Larsen's Passing is brilliant—every word glimmers like a diamond—a novel about two women, long-ago childhood friends, who happen to meet again at an exclusive hotel bar years later. Both are black women who are "passing" as white (the hotel is for whites only), and one of them is hiding her true identity from her husband, resulting in drastic consequences. Everyone hides, at one point or another, but race as a secret in this novel is important on an epic scale.