All this month we’re featuring a selection of fantastic summer reading selected by the experts at O: The Oprah Magazine. See more topics here.

The women at the center of these six essential titles are united in their attempts to navigate a host of fresh-off-your-Twitter-feed issues including but not limited to sexism, sizeism, public exhibitionism, boring boyfriends, violent boyfriends, cocaine, the internet, date rape, family secrets, judicial corruption, writer’s block, hookup culture, and Eastern European sex slavery. In genres ranging from memoir to crime thriller to short fiction, the scenes–even those that, on the face of it, seem far-fetched–are achingly familiar and all too real.

I’m Just a Person by Tig Notaro (Ecco)

Girl meets girl, girl gets life-threatening intestinal infection, girl’s mother dies, girl breaks up with girl, girl gets breast cancer, girl performs ground-breaking comedy routine about said tragedies, girl sky-rockets to pop-culture stardom. Notaro’s story is funny not because it’s true (although it is), but because it’s told by the world-class stand-up with wit and vulnerability. Start Reading Now on B&N Readouts.

Dating Tips for the Unemployed by Iris Smyles (Mariner)

The prodigiously inventive Smyles melds novel, autobiography, and all manner of asides as she flails at art, love, and friendship with the wry intelligence of someone just wise enough to realize they have no idea what they are doing. A flat-out joy to read.  Start Reading Now on B&N Readouts.

 

Hot Little Hands by Abigail Ulman (Spiegel and Grau)

In this sardonic, smart, and thoroughly modern debut collection, Ulman presents nine stories about young women on the verge of adulthood, motherhood, and more who make momentous decisions while delirious with desire. Start Reading Now on B&N Readouts.

 

 

Wilde Lake by Laura Lippman (Morrow)

Lippman draws on two decades-worth of crime reporting to produce a heart-stopping new thriller, which pivots on a state attorney’s drive and cunning as she unravels a puzzling murder case with personal implications. Start Reading Now on B&N Readouts.

 

 

Sex Object by Jessica Valenti (Dey St.)

A zesty, zeitgeisty memoir in three acts—bodies, boys, and babies—from the cofounder of the trailblazing blog Feministing.com. Start Reading Now on B&N Readouts.

 

 

 

Shrill by Lindy West (Hachette)

The literary debut of a critic unafraid to knee the patriarchy in the groin—to wit, her slogan: “Silence is not an option.” West takes no prisoners, whether on the topic of rape culture, internet trolls, or loud-and-proud fat activism. We’re all ears! Start Reading Now on B&N Readouts.

 

 

Looking for more inspirations for your summer reading? Explore more of The Best Books of Summer from the editors of O: The Oprah Magazine, in the B&N Review or in the pages of this month’s issue of O: The Oprah Magazine.

The Barnes & Noble Review http://ift.tt/29k46BG

All this month we’re featuring a selection of fantastic summer reading selected by the experts at O: The Oprah Magazine. See more topics here.

They say don’t meet your heroes, lest they disappoint you…. We say you should bring them along on vacation. These vivid portraits of rock luminaries, poets, provocateurs, and literary lights will provide scintillating companionship wherever summer finds you.

Paul McCartney: The Life by Philip Norman (Little Brown)

What’s left to reveal about one of the most chronicled musicians of the 20th century? As it turns out, a great deal. With the notoriously guarded McCartney’s “tacit approval,” Norman sheds new light on well-known Beatles stories and then goes further, forging a thoroughly absorbing account of McCartney’s life after the group’s breakup: business ventures, parenthood, personal tragedy, the struggle to live and create beyond the legacy of his fabled band. The result is a tantalizing trip down the legend’s own long and winding road. Start Reading Now on B&N Readouts.

 

Everybody Behaves Badly by Lesley Blume (HMH)

Few writers mythologized their own misbehavior with more gusto than Ernest Hemingway. In this history of the Spanish sojourn that inspired The Sun Also Rises, we encounter Hemingway before his fame—a charming, at times cruel social climber on the cusp of brilliance. Start Reading Now on B&N Readouts.

 

 

A Loaded Gun by Jerome Charyn (Bellevue Literary Press)

Still obsessed with his subject years after writing the 2010 novel The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson, Charyn converts his preoccupation into a magnetic nonfiction reevaluation of the mystifying, radical, perhaps bisexual, and maybe greatest-ever American poet. Start Reading Now on B&N Readouts.

Diane Arbus: Portrait of a Photographer by Arthur Lubow (Ecco)

A magnificent biography of an artist who trained her lens on unconventional subjects drag queens, circus performers, dominatrixes—knowing there were “things that nobody would see unless I photographed them.”  Start Reading Now on B&N Readouts.

 

The Sun and the Moon and the Rolling Stones by Rich Cohen (Random House)

A “rock-’n’-roll monotheist” riffs with revivalist fervor on the sacred relics of his devotion: Mick, Keith, and their music, “a saga in which a handful of musicians stand for the longings of a society. Start Reading Now on B&N Readouts.

 

 

Critics, Monsters, Fanatics, and Other Literary Essays by Cynthia Ozick (HMH)

Audacious, outrageously erudite, trenchant, and cranky as ever, one of our leading women of letters fixes her steely gaze on the essential role of the critic in witty, absorbing essays that encompass such literary heroes as Saul Bellow, W.H. Auden, and Franz Kafka. Start Reading Now on B&N Readouts.

 

Looking for more inspirations for your summer reading? Explore more of The Best Books of Summer from the editors of O: The Oprah Magazine, in the B&N Review or in the pages of this month’s issue of O: The Oprah Magazine.

 

The Barnes & Noble Review http://ift.tt/29mijdo

All this month we’re featuring a selection of fantastic summer reading selected by the experts at O: The Oprah Magazine. See more topics here.

Givenchy gowns. Penthouse apartments. Black Escalades. Private jets. The trappings of the 1 percent may seem as enticing as they are elusive, but is there something corrosive about überwealth? This mélange of titles (five novels and a memoir) look beneath the sheen of affluence to lay bare its not-so-appealing side–say, Park Avenue as prison, or a Dickensian alternate reality perfectly drawn for our status-obsessed era–and underscore the truth that in the end, mortality gets us all.

Smoke by Dan Vyleta (Doubleday)

If Bernie Sanders wrote a Victorian thriller, it might read something like this—a stunningly inventive social novel in which your economic class is revealed not by the car you drive or the school your kids attend, but by whether your body emits smoke when you think an impure thought. The poor are covered in soot, while the rich remain clean even when they think dirty—proof that the aristocracy has a divine right to rule. Or so it seems, until three teenagers risk their lives to expose the gritty truth. Start Reading Now on B&N Readouts.

Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty by Ramona Ausubel (Riverhead)

In 1976, amid the cloistered estates of Martha’s Vineyard, an idyllic vacation is cut short when a couple learns that the trust fund they’ve been living off of is kaput. Ausubel’s timely, sophisticated tale explores what happens when a charmed life loses its luster. Start Reading Now on B&N Readouts.

 

This is Not My Beautiful Life by Victoria Fedden (Picador)

The author was nine months’ pregnant when the feds raided her parents’ home and arrested her mother for fraud. A scandalously funny memoir about starting a new family while taking care of the felonious one you’ve already got. Start Reading Now on B&N Readouts.

 

 

We Could Be Beautiful by Swan Huntley (Doubleday)

A novel that is deeper than its heiress-meets-man-of-her-dreams setup. The reason: Huntley’s uncanny ability to detect the fault lines in Manhattan’s glitterati as if flaws in a precious diamond—and make us laugh about them. Start Reading Now on B&N Readouts.

 

 

Rich and Pretty by Rumaan Alam (Ecco)

Sarah, daughter of socialites, is rich. Career-driven Lauren is—you guessed it—pretty. Their sisterlike friendship is put to the test when one gets married and becomes a stay-at-home mom while the other remains in the fray. Can they find a new way of fitting together?  Start Reading Now on B&N Readouts.

 

Before the Fall by Noah Hawley (Grand Central)

A struggling painter is inexorably drawn into the lives—and fiery deaths—of two moguls, one financial, the other media, in the suspenseful new novel by the showrunner for FX’s darkly humorous hit series Fargo. Start Reading Now on B&N Readouts.

 

 

 

Looking for more inspirations for your summer reading? Explore more of The Best Books of Summer from the editors of O: The Oprah Magazine, in the B&N Review or in the pages of this month’s issue of O: The Oprah Magazine.

The Barnes & Noble Review http://ift.tt/29k4651

All this month we’re featuring a selection of fantastic summer reading selected by the experts at O, the Oprah Magazine. See more topics here.

If you’ve ever dropped everything to follow your heart, been betrayed or betrayed your own vows for lust, or magically found (or refound) “the one” after giving up hope, feast on these six delectable books, all celebrating the soul-reviving, hormone-pumping, faith-renewing power of love.

I Almost Forgot About You, by Terry McMillan (Crown)

Meet Georgia Young, a 50-something optometrist whose comfortable life is upended by news of her first boyfriend’s death in a car accident. Georgia reacts to the jolt by chucking her career, putting her house on the market, and resolving to track down all her past sweethearts. Lucky for her, two of her college friends and her daughters are always there to catch her if she falls. McMilllan paints relationships in joyous primary colors; her novel brims with sexy repartee, caustic humor, and a fluent, assured prose that shines a bright light on her memorable characters. Her very best since Waiting to Exhale. Start Reading Now on B&N Readouts.

Love Wins, by Debbie Cenziper and Jim Obergefell (William Morrow)

A galvanizing real-life account of how devotion in the face of terminal illness and disenfranchisement brought together a widower and a group of ferociously principled lawyers who waged and won the legal battle for marriage equality. Start Reading Now on B&N Readouts.

 

What We Become by Arturo Perez-Reverte (Atria)

This riveting, intricately layered historical novel follows two paramours: Mesha is the beautiful wife of a famous composer, and Max is a charming con artist and spy. Their illicit affair begins aboard a luxury liner traveling from Lisbon to Buenos Aires. Start Reading Now on B&N Readouts.

 

The Blackbirds by Eric Jerome Dickey (Dutton)

A hot-as-all-get-out novel about four women and the relationships—a fling with an older man, a toe-curling afternoon with another woman—that could end their friendships once and for all. Start Reading Now on B&N Readouts.

 

Modern Lovers by Emma Straub (Riverhead)

Even gentrifiers get the blues in this bittersweet novel following the intertwined lives of now-middle-aged Oberlin graduates, complete with historic homes, farm-to-table restaurants, and adolescent children who have—typically, yet shockingly—started sleeping with each other. Start Reading Now on B&N Readouts.

Invincible Summer, by Alice Adams (Little, Brown)

Four college besties are separated by time, experience, and geography, but when the chips are down, these friends with benefits find one another again, in a fun and frothy debut novel set in England, India, Spain, and beyond. Start Reading Now on B&N Readouts.

 

Looking for more inspirations for your summer reading? Explore more of The Best Books of Summer from the editors of O: The Oprah Magazine, in the B&N Review or in the pages of this month’s issue of O: The Oprah Magazine.

The Barnes & Noble Review http://ift.tt/29k4ekY

All this month we’re featuring a selection of fantastic summer reading selected by the experts at O: The Oprah Magazine. See more topics here.

In a world consumed by wars of all kinds, how do we make sense of the madness? Through peerless on-the-ground reporting, inquiries into the impact of “sanitized” modes of warfare, and fictional adventures and misadventures, these six books invite us to swim against the tides of violence and ask why we so often fail to give peace a chance.

Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War, by Mary Roach (W.W. Norton)

Our most consistently entertaining science journalist wanders into the “corners and crannies” of military technology. Roach goes where other writers wouldn’t dare (witness her classic take on cadavers, Stiff), here eyeing “the parts no one makes movies about—not the killing but the keeping alive.” And her search produces images—a kind of techno poetry—that are hard to forget: a cannon firing chickens into airplanes, urethra replacement surgery, a “brief history of stink bombs.” Start Reading Now on B&N Readouts.

The Way to the Spring, by Ben Ehrenreich (Penguin Press)

An American Jewish writer resides in the West Bank off and on for three years. What follows is an impassioned and humane story of Palestinian resilience in the face of daily humiliations, bloodshed, and a decades-long struggle for home. Start Reading Now on B&N Readouts.

 

 

Native Believer by Ali Eteraz (Akashic)

M.’s life spins out of control after his boss discovers a Qur’an in M.’s house during a party, in this wickedly funny Philadelphia picaresque about a secular Muslim’s identity crisis in a country waging a never-ending war on terror. Start Reading Now on B&N Readouts.

 

 

Love, Sex and Other Foreign Policy Goals by Jesse Armstrong (Blue Rider)

From the Oscar-nominated cowriter of the British film comedy In the Loop comes a blistering satire about a London theater troupe attempting to end the Bosnian conflagration of the mid-’90s, wielding only the weapons of youthful idealism and an unfinished script. Start Reading Now on B&N Readouts.

 

Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging, Sebastian Junger (Twelve)

Drawing on his extensive reporting in Afghanistan and marrow-deep empathy for veterans afflicted with post-traumatic stress disorder, Junger argues with candor and grace for the everlasting remedies of community and connectedness. Start Reading Now on B&N Readouts.

 

 

A Hero of France, by Alan Furst (Random House)

Considered one of the premier writers of historical spy fiction, Furst delivers a vivid portrait of a French Resistance fighter in World War II Paris and of a city still alive and very much itself—even as the Nazi grip tightens. Start Reading Now on B&N Readouts.

 

 

Looking for more inspirations for your summer reading? Explore more of The Best Books of Summer from the editors of O: The Oprah Magazine, in the B&N Review or in the pages of this month’s issue of O: The Oprah Magazine.

The Barnes & Noble Review http://ift.tt/29michV

All this month we’re featuring a selection of fantastic summer reading selected by the experts at O: The Oprah Magazine.  See more topics here.

A hero or heroine embarks on a voyage and in the process is transformed.  It’s the oldest story we tell.  Whether it’s the tragedies of the African diaspora, a scientist decoding the mysteries of medicine while unearthing family secrets, or a gourmand’s gastronomical quest among the cities and villages of China, these enthralling titles explore how personal journeys can mirror dramatic developments in the world and in our hearts.

Homegoing, Yaa Gyasi (Knopf)

Spanning two continents and three centuries, Yaa Gyasi’s luminous debut evokes the tortured legacy of the slave trade through the story of two half sisters and their descendants. The novel toggles between plot lines: one set along Africa’s Gold Coast, the other against the brutality of American racism. The author thrillingly depicts her characters’ migrations from mud hut villages to Harlem’s jazz clubs to Ghana’s silvered beaches, celebrating how place and fate shape us all. Start Reading Now on B&N Readouts.

The Noise of Time, Julian Barnes (Knopf)

Barnes’s exquisite new novel charts the peripatetic career of Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich (1906–1975), Stalin’s almost victim—spared so he could show the world the power of Soviet culture even as he grapples with troubling questions about politics and art. Start Reading Now on B&N Readouts.

 

The Gene, by Siddhartha Mukherjee (Scribner)

The Pulitzer Prize winner weaves an epic history of human speculation, error, discovery, and wonder about our genetic code in a close-to-the-bone story of hereditary mental illness in his own family. An unexpectedly enthralling inquiry into the realm of bioethics. Start Reading Now on B&N Readouts.

 

The Nordic Theory of Everything, by Anu Partanem (Harper)

After Newsweek declares Finland “the best country in the world” and the United Nations names it the second happiest, a Finnish transplant to the U.S. sets out to find a cure for her anxiety by looking homeward, in an engaging fusion of reportage and memoir. Start Reading Now on B&N Readouts.

 

Double Cup Love, by Eddie Huang (Spiegel and Grau)

When a Chinese-Taiwanese-NYC celebrity chef falls in love with an Italian girl from Scranton, Pennsylvania, he resolves to retrace his family’s migration to reconnect with his roots. From the enfant terrible behind Chairman Mao’s Cherry Cola Skirt Steak recipe and the hit memoir Fresh Off the Boat. Start Reading Now on B&N Readouts.

 

In the Darkroom, by Susan Faludi (Metropolitan Books)

When a feminist writer learns that her once-abusive father is now living as a woman, she flies to Hungary to meet the parent she never really knew and investigate urgent new questions of identity. Start Reading Now on B&N Readouts.

 

 

Looking for more inspirations for your summer reading? Explore more of The Best Books of Summer from the editors of O: The Oprah Magazine, in the B&N Review or in the pages of this month’s issue of O: The Oprah Magazine.

The Barnes & Noble Review http://ift.tt/29ig61j

 

All this month we’re featuring a selection of fantastic summer reading selected by the experts at O: The Oprah Magazine. See more topics here.

Somewhere in the endless vistas of our wide and deep country are young girls becoming indigenous berserks, little towns slowly and silently fading away, fruited plains and ferocious rivers, natural disasters and man-made ones, wild horses and their even wilder masters – all coexisting on a vast, mystic frontier.

The Girls by Emma Cline (Random House)

Evie is like most 14-year-olds: slightly awkward, beginning to be sexually curious, and constantly measuring herself against other girls. But it’s California in the summer of 1969, and these other girls are members of a Manson-like cult that Evie does not have the sense of self to resist. A mesmerizing debut from an author on intimate terms with the blood, sweat and tears of American adolescence. Start Reading Now on B&N Readouts.

Lions, by Bonnie Nadzam (Black Cat)

How long can a man believe he lives in a country that doesn’t actually exist…?” This is the question the people of the isolated fictional town of Lions, Colorado, must ask themselves in this story of haunted histories and broken promises. Start Reading Now on B&N Readouts.

 

 

The Sport of Kings, by C.E. Morgan (FSG)

The splendor and barbarism of horse racing and the legacy of slavery are just two of the threads in this sprawling, magisterial Southern Gothic for the 21st century. Start Reading Now on B&N Readouts.

 

 

 

Nitro Mountain, by Lee Clay Johnson (Knopf)

This darkly stunning tale of stark dramas and tragic lives plays out against a backdrop of mournful country music and Appalachia’s lush, lonely peaks. Start Reading Now on B&N Readouts.

 

 

 

Marrow Island, by Alexis Smith (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

A faltering journalist returns to an island abandoned after an earthquake released a toxic spill. That’s the beautifully wrought setting of this novel, which reunites two childhood friends, one of whom has joined a sect claiming it can heal the land. Start Reading Now on B&N Readouts.

 

 

Buffalo Jump Blues, by Keith McCafferty (Viking)

A small herd of bison stampede off a cliff. Among the carcasses is the body of a Native American man killed by an arrow shot. Enter P.I. Sean Stranahan and his ex, Sheriff Martha Ettinger, trying to find out whodunit without driving each other over the edge in this Montana-flavored mystery. Start Reading Now on B&N Readouts.

 

 

Looking for more inspirations for your summer reading? Explore more of The Best Books of Summer from the editors of O: The Oprah Magazine, in the B&N Review or in the pages of this month’s issue of O: The Oprah Magazine.

The Barnes & Noble Review http://ift.tt/29lByWZ

All this month we’re featuring a selection of fantastic summer reading selected by the experts at O: The Oprah Magazine. See more topics here.

What is America made of? Is it the landscape? The people? An idea? What we revolt against? What we produce? These nonfiction titles tackle those questions from exhilaratingly different angles—culture, crime, the natural and the bureaucratic—each enriching our understanding of our roots, our appreciation of home.

 

The Hour of Land , by Terry Tempest Williams (FSG)

Our national parks are memory palaces where our personal histories reside,” muses naturalist and activist Williams in her ode to the sacred spaces —millions of acres from Alaska to Maine—that are the legacy of Abraham Lincoln’s 1864 Yosemite Grant Act. Whether contemplating the spiritual life she finds “inside the heart of the wild” or marveling at the peaks and monuments that comprise “our best idea”—the National Parks system—Williams movingly urges us to remember that “heaven is here.” Start Reading Now on B&N Readouts.

Never A Dull Moment: 1971 – The Year That Rock Exploded, by David Hepworth (Holt)

A revelatory account of the bombshell 365 days that gave birth to what the author dubs “the rock era”—12 months when Marvin Gaye, Joni Mitchell, Sly Stone, and a host of others broke with convention to give us the music that made us. Start Reading Now on B&N Readouts.

 

 

The Lynching, by Laurence Leamer (Morrow)

Morris Dees, a civil rights attorney who cofounded the Southern Poverty Center and his landmark 1983 lawsuit on behalf of a slain black man’s family, are at the heart of this stirring true story of racial politics and the legal takedown of the KKK. Start Reading Now on B&N Readouts.

 

 

Witness to the Revolution by Clara Bingham (Random House)

A gripping oral history of the centrifugal social forces tearing America apart at the end of the ’60s—Nixonian corruption, the war in Indochina, the Black Panthers, psychedelic drugs, Cointelpro, youthquake, domestic terrorism—with recollections by Bill Ayers, Jane Fonda, and Carl Bernstein, among others. This is rousing reportage from the front lines of U.S. history. Start Reading Now on B&N Readouts.

Under the Stars by Dan White (Henry Holt)

Whether sharing the backstory of everyone’s favorite fireside dessert (s’mores, of course), roughing it in the buff, or braving the wilderness amenities in tow, the disaster-prone White revels in a cherished national pastime—camping—with curiosity and humor. Start Reading Now on B&N Readouts.

 

How the Post Office Created America, by Winnifred Gallahger (Penguin Press)

Without a postal service linking far-flung territories together like “a central nervous system,” our country’s story would have been radically different. Including American originals like Ben Franklin (the first postmaster general) and the young riders of the Pony Express, this invigorating book tells the unlikely story of snail mail—not at all dull, though perhaps soon to be extinct. Start Reading Now on B&N Readouts.

 

Looking for more inspirations for your summer reading? Explore more of The Best Books of Summer from the editors of O: The Oprah Magazine, in the B&N Review or in the pages of this month’s issue of O: The Oprah Magazine.

The Barnes & Noble Review http://ift.tt/29lBAy4