It’s summer time and you know what that means (for most of us anyway)? Heat! Heat in all of its forms. Sunburns, sitting by a campfire, lighting off fireworks. It’s tank top and flip-flop and stop at the gas station for an Icee season. It’s the smell of sunscreen on everything season. It’s road trips and beach days and outdoor concerts and begrudgingly working between all of the things you have planned. Especially in the areas where the winters are so dark and cold, the changing of the seasons is cause for celebration marked by breaking out the box fans and packing the winter coats into storage. Finally, we say. Finally. The warmth is here again.

But sometimes the summer isn’t so sunshine and rainbows. Sometimes the heat isn’t a welcome addition to the season, but instead, a sweltering, oppressive thing hanging over everything. Sometimes there’s no escape from the sun’s long-reaching rays no matter what you do. Sometimes you get sunburned despite the million layers of sunscreen. Sometimes the campfire becomes something far too out of control. Sometimes the heat becomes a thing of its own, festering inside someone until they snap.

So, in light of the season, stay cool and read these hot horror novels.

I’m back with another list of award-winning books you’ve probably never heard of! This time, we’re talking memoirs. Since I started making these lists, I’ve become fascinated by the whole culture surrounding literary awards and especially how we talk about those awards. There are some high-profile awards, like the National Book Awards, the Booker Prize, and the Pulitzer, where the winners and finalists of these mega prizes seem to get a lot of attention and recognition. But as soon as you start to dig a little deeper (and you can dig very deep — there are so many prizes!) it’s apparent that the vast majority of award-winning books don’t actually get that much recognition.

The books on this list have from 20 to 3,000 ratings on Goodreads, with most of them falling in the low hundreds. Three thousand may sound like a lot at first — but compare it to the number of ratings this year’s Pulitzer Prize winner, Demon Copperhead, has (132k) and suddenly it seems like a tiny number. All of which is simply to say: the world of book awards is vast and there is so much to it beyond the big awards that everyone’s heard of. There are so many great books out there that have been recognized by literary organizations, panels of authors, and critics, but that lots of readers have still never heard of.

So let’s fix it, one list at a time. These memoirs will take you from Nigeria to China to the UK. They’re about science, gender, immigration, illness, family legacies, and so much more.

You’ve seen the trends. Books shelved backward. Books shelved by size, theme, or genre. If you’re less into trends and more into organization, you can shelve your books alphabetically by author, or chronologically. I don’t know anyone who has shelved their books autobiographically, à la John Cusack in High Fidelity, but I would love to see it.

It’s a brilliant idea. It also might take you the rest of your life. So, probably better to stick to the most fun of all book-shelving options: rainbow order. There are a billion reasons to shelve your books this way. They are all Very Right and Proper. There is literally not even one silly reason to shelve your books by color. Promise.

Boasting both a hit anime series adaptation and a blockbuster live-action film series adaptation, Tokyo Revengers by Ken Wakui is one of the manga world’s most recent can’t-miss franchises. The series blends two popular manga tropes — gangs and time travel — and is filled with great fight scenes, an excellent and compelling plot, well-developed characters, and more. And there’s plenty of it to catch up on! The original Japanese run of the manga concluded in 2022, and the complete English-language release is available digitally through Kodansha, with the print release still in progress from Seven Seas. The second season of the anime concluded in April of this year, with the third planned to begin in October. In addition, there are three live-action movie adaptations, the latest of which was released in Japan just a couple weeks ago. But if you’re already a fan and itching for more stories like it, look no further than these wonderful manga like Tokyo Revengers to keep you satisfied!

The manga is an excellent blend of action, science fiction, and emotional drama, so it is no wonder it’s enjoying such popularity and enthusiasm among manga and anime fans. While it can certainly be tough to find a perfect comp for a story that has become such a phenomenon, the following manga like Tokyo Revengers share common themes — namely gang wars or time travel — in combination with dynamic and effective storytelling and character development.

Hangovers announced themselves on the wan faces on the District line to SW19 on the first Sunday of Wimbledon. Maybe I was projecting. It was a shame, people noted in low tones, that all the British players were now out. A pair of men splitting a salmon-colored broadsheet wondered which BBC presenter was at the center of a recent grooming scandal. “Last night was a proper, proper … if you saw the amount of tequila we were putting away,” said one handsome man, sitting between two heavily made-up girls. All of us filed out, in no particular rush, at Southfields. I went into Costa for an iced Americano before my friend arrived. 

“Careful, dear,” tutted an elderly woman, gesturing to my wide-open tote, the only bag I had in London. “I have no spatial awareness at all,” I admitted, surveying some almonds, a packable quilted jacket, and a copy of Persuasion, all ripe for the picking. “It’s not a rough crowd, of course,” she said, adjusting a georgette shawl, that was the same pearl color as her fluffy hair. “These days, you just never know …” She trailed off. We’d realized, I think simultaneously, that we were in our first queue of the day at Wimbledon, which isn’t just the world’s oldest tennis tournament but a pageant of exuberant restraint, where orderly lines and enclosures have the quality of rites. 

Louis arrived, wearing a gray wool suit, and we submitted ourselves to the flow of the crowd. A specter was haunting the weekend outfits—the specter of the Italian player Jannik Sinner’s huge Gucci duffel bag. Logomania was back, all around us: Goyard and Chanel bags, giant plastic Prada sunglasses, even several pairs of those Obama-era Tory Burch medallion flats. I complimented the sturdy unmarked sweater of a teacher from Somerset, who had, in recent years, become both a Wimbledon regular and a self-published author of over two dozen books on the pedagogy of drama. “I was actually going to wear my jumper printed with strawberries,” she said, “but we had a mishap with the dog this morning.”

At the corporate suite that housed our tickets, I asked a three-time seasonal employee if he’d ever encountered misbehavior at Wimbledon. Not really, he said. Had anyone ever, like, passed out? No. Had he ever heard an ambulance called? He jogged his memory for a moment, but also no. “I think,” he conjectured, “that people just sip on their drinks all day, but it’s a long day, so they end up absolutely fine.”  

On the first day, God said, “Let the atmospheric water vapors condense and become rain,” and so there was a downpour, and it was inconvenient. But we had ponchos. It was November at Disney World, and ponchos were like noses or smartphones in that every visitor had one, of course they did, it wasn’t even a question.

Soon the rain turned horizontal and worked itself inside the ponchos, and now the condensation cycle in the sky was being restaged on an individual level. You’d think this situation—thousands of humans being dumpling-steamed in plastic and packed into a slow boat or a shuttle simulator—would create a terrible odor, but Disney World was one step ahead: employees (“cast members”) stationed at the threshold of each attraction kindly asked guests to remove their ponchos before entering, and all obeyed, crumpling wet balls into pockets and backpacks … and we saw that it was good.

I’d intended to keep a detailed diary at Disney World but totally failed. My notebook has only two notes, both scribbled at Living with the Land, the EPCOT ride where you hop into a boat and glide past an idyllic farmhouse and through a series of greenhouses to learn about crop rotation and pesticide reduction. “In our search for more efficient ways to grow food, we often fail to realize the impact of our methods,” a narrator explained, channeling Wendell Berry. When we passed a thicket of tomatoes, the narrator revealed that one of EPCOT’s tomato plants had yielded “thirty-two thousand fruits.” A gasp went through the crowd. 

As it turned out, Living with the Land features the greatest fantasy in all of Disney World: no dirt. So the first note in my notebook was:

Love to read but hate to choose? Starting today and through Labor Day, you really can have it all when you subscribe to both The Paris Review and The New York Review of Books for a combined price of $99. That’s one year of issues from both publications, as well as access to their entire digital archives—seventy years of The Paris Review and sixty years of The New York Review of Books—for $60 off the regular price!

Ever since The Paris Review’s former managing editor Robert Silvers cofounded The New York Review of Books with Barbara Epstein, the two magazines have been closely aligned. So start your summer with an inspired pair, and you’ll have access to prose, poetry, interviews, criticism, and more from some of the most important writers of our time, including T. S. Eliot, Sigrid Nunez, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Joan Didion, and Jamaica Kincaid.

Subscribe today and you’ll receive:

—One year of The Paris Review (four issues).

—One year of The New York Review of Books (twenty issues).

1.

It’s the silent abandon with which they kiss, as if they are aware of someone striding toward them, this someone’s finger wagging, telling them, “No, no, not here, stop that now, or I’ll be forced to separate you, you profligate negroes.” But before this imagined censor can reach them, they pull each other close and kiss again, their mouths disappearing into each other, their mouths taking the shape of their longing. They touch each other as if they have just been released from something, as if their license to touch is short, stolen, or forged. In Something Good, which features the first known on-screen kiss by a Black couple, filmed in 1898, it appears as if the two actors, a peach pit–toned Black man wearing a bow tie and jacket and a peach skin–toned Black woman wearing a ruffled collared dress belted at the waist, are touching each other after a long period of denial, as if they have forgotten what the other’s mouth and hands and neck feel like and are now voraciously reacquainting themselves with each other. The pit of the peach swaddled by its flesh, becoming whole there on the limb of the day. Voraciously seeking itself, making itself happen—be. No, not quite voraciously, but without caution or care for who’s watching, though they are both aware, and we, too, are aware that someone is watching their performance.

They do whatever they like, their arms swinging back and forth between forays of kissing, as if they were going to a carnival down by the railroad tracks or have suddenly come out of a clearing, the man having drunk water from a stream, the sky all in it, and when he looked up, there she was, this peach-skinned woman. The man’s mouth moves as if he were remembering the taste of water, and the woman moves about him as water and as what he could not predict, which is the sky, and the shore that makes the water possible. In less than twenty seconds, they move together as earth moves with water, unpredictably, their kissing meeting and coming apart without a preordained or announced rhythm. Earth and water. Peach swelling into its flesh and pit on the limb of the day.

2.

One of the most provocative sequences of Kenneth Anger’s career appears in an early short film (and my favorite), Fireworks (1947): a sailor opens his fly to reveal a Roman candle spitting sparks at the camera until it explodes, drenching the frame with spurts of white light. This image would later establish Anger as a seminal figure in the history of queer film, but it also resulted in an obscenity trial—gay sexuality was criminalized, and the Hays Code had a vice grip on Hollywood. A countercultural icon and lifelong Angeleno, Anger died in May at age ninety-six. The body of work he left behind stands beside that of American avant-garde filmmakers like Maya Deren, Sara Kathryn Arledge, Stan Brakhage, and Jonas Mekas: experimental shorts, made predominantly between the forties and seventies, that combine surrealism and scenes of stylized violence with a heavy dose of occult symbolism.

Fireworks, which Anger made at twenty in his parents’ Beverly Hills house while they were out of town, is a gorgeous fourteen-minute film with no dialogue, set to orchestral music. The nameless protagonist, played by Anger himself, leaves his bed, wanders through a homoerotic dreamworld in search of a light, and meets a group of beautiful sailors. They flex their cartoonishly massive biceps for him and light his cigarette with a flaming palm frond but then turn hostile, chasing the dreamer down to deliver a beating. There’s a flurry of white-clothed limbs as they tear his clothes off, whip him with chains, pour milk over his lips and eyes, and gouge open his chest with a shattered beer bottle to expose the face of a compass buried among his internal organs. The dreamer’s expression passes from ecstasy to agony and back again. A few hallucinatory moments later, the fireworks go off.

At the heart of Anger’s work is a question about the erotics of masculinity. The biker film Scorpio Rising (1963), for example, is an ambiguous exploration of fascist aesthetics: high-gloss rider jackets, Nazi iconography, an obsession with the perfected physical form—and the attendant unspoken racial implications. Like the sadomasochistic brutalization of the dreamer in Fireworks, the scenes in which the biker gang lovingly assemble their looks for the night—peaked caps, imperial eagle insignia, and leather—are suffused with desire. It’s one of the hardest watches of his oeuvre for me, but is emblematic of Anger’s work: shorts that span a vast imaginative territory, a sort of psychosexual underworld, where repressed fantasies of the American unconscious can take shape and move around unfettered. He takes dreams seriously as a subject worthy of art and utilizes them to develop scenes that operate on multiple registers. Though it might have been part of a strategy to avoid censorship, the Roman candle in Fireworks reads to me like an homage to the props enjoyed by a certain kind of transmasculinity. Like a strap-on or a souped-up packer, the prosthetic phallus allows the wearer to bathe in the pageantry of a particular type of queer masculinity, whose aggressive quality in this scene is undercut by a sense of comedy, magic, and mischief. Here, and elsewhere, Anger is able to observe the inner workings of desire—its pursuit, suspension, satisfaction, and fluctuation.

—Jay Graham, reader

The following letters were sent by David Wojnarowicz to his Parisian lover Jean Pierre Delage in 1979, as part of a three-year transatlantic correspondence that ended in 1982. In them, the artist details his day-to-day life with the type of unbridled earnestness that comes with that age, providing a picture of a young man just beginning to find his voice in the world and of the love he has found in it. Although the two exchanged letters in equal measure, Delage’s have largely been lost, leaving us only with a glimpse into the internal world of Wojnarowicz during what turned out to be his formative years. 

Capturing a foundational moment for Wojnarowicz’s artistic and literary practice, the letters not only reveal his captivating personality but also index the development of the visual language that would go on to define him as one of the preeminent artists of his generation. Included with his writings are postcards, drawings, Xeroxes, photographs, collages, flyers, and other ephemera that showcase some of Wojnarowicz’s iconic images and work, as well as document the New York that formed the backdrop to his practice.

—James Hoff, editor

New York City
June 14, 1979

Each time I return to Mexico I find myself marveling at how many elements of daily life there could, in some way, be described as Baroque: our sunsets, our cuisine, our pollution, our corruption. Century after century, the country has exhibited a great tendency towards exuberance, and a natural bent for the strange and the marvelous. There’s a constant play between veiling and unveiling (even in our newscasts, one senses indirect meaning in everything), as well as a fluidity of form, in which excess triumphs, every time, over restraint.

Three hundred years of colonial rule produced an intense syncretism of indigenous and European cultures, a bold new aesthetic accompanied by many new paradoxes, and these can be glimpsed today in both lighter and darker manifestations, some playful and others barbaric.

Mexican Baroque emerged from the conquest of the New World, from the long, fraught process of negotiation and subjugation that began to unfold once the Spaniards established their rule in 1521. The European monarchs wanted as much gold as their conquistadores could plunder, while their missionaries sought to convert the pagan savages to Catholicism. The Aztecs of course had their own gods, a monumental pantheon that included the fierce and formidable Quetzalcoatl and Huitzilopochtli, yet these ancient powers proved no match for colonial rapacity.

There was one pivotal overlap between the two religions, however, a fortuitous convergence which helped ease the transition from the Aztec cosmology to the Catholic faith. And this was the “theater of death” present in both religions. Accustomed to their own culture of human sacrifice, the Indians identified with the Crucifixion and with other violent chapters in the new theology, and were thus gradually lured by its passions and taste for the macabre. In artistic portrayals of certain scenes from the New Testament, the blood and the drama were laid on thick.

When he walked into my bedroom for the first time, he pointed at the top right corner of the room. “What is that?”

The answer was a hole. Directly above my closet and several inches below the start of my ceiling is an obvious nook—a deep-set crawl space suspended inside my wall. If that weren’t fun enough—“fun” said through gritted teeth, like how the realtor said “Now, this is fun” when he showed me the nook—there’s another feature: a bolted door within the nook. A dusty, intrusive, and creaky wooden door that points up to the sky. Between the bolts that secure the door is a sliver of light, slim enough that you can’t see what’s on the other side.

My building is an old Boerum Hill brownstone with a criminal exterior renovation. Inside my bedroom, though, the floors slant and the ceiling droops. It’s a beautiful princess bedroom, if the princess never got saved and lived forever unmedicated in her virginal bedroom. It’s a room of illusions, and the nook is its most illusive element. The nook is the last thing I see every night before I go to sleep. Goodnight Moon, good night dollhouse room, good night nook.

He was the first person I dated after a catastrophic college relationship. He was sweet. He reminded me of a portrait of a medieval saint or a beautiful lesbian. He asked questions.

Pasolini’s pen was preternatural in its output. Collected by the publishing house Mondadori in their prestigious Meridiani series, his complete works in the original Italian (excluding private documents such as diaries, and his immense, largely unpublished, epistolary exchanges in various languages) fill ten densely printed volumes. The twenty thousand or so pages of this gargantuan oeuvre suggest that, in the course of his short adult life, Pasolini must have written thousands of words every day, without fail. 

Allusions to painting—and to the visual arts more broadly—appear across the full range of Pasolini’s writings, from journalistic essays to poetry and work for theater and film. The intended destination of the textual fragment below, which remained unpublished during Pasolini’s lifetime, remains uncertain. We know, however, that it was most likely penned in 1974. The “characterological” novelty of Caravaggio’s subjects, to which Pasolini alludes in passing, underscores some of the parallels between the two artists’ bodies of work: an eye for the unlikely sacredness of the coarse and squalid; a penchant for boorishness to the point of blasphemy; an attraction to louts and scoundrels of a certain type—the “rough trade,” of homosexual parlance.It is striking, for instance, that some of the nonprofessional actors that Pasolini found in the outskirts of Rome and placed in front of his camera bear an uncanny resemblance to the “new kinds of people” that Caravaggio “placed in front of his studio’s easel,” to quote from the essay presented here. Take Ettore Garofolo, who for a moment in Mamma Roma looks like a tableau vivant of Caravaggio’s Bacchus as a young waiter. Even the illness that ultimately kills that subproletarian character—so often read as a metaphor of the effects of late capitalism on Italy’s post-Fascist society—is born out of an art historical intuition that is articulated in this fragment on Caravaggio’s use of light. 

But it was equally an exquisite formal sense—a search after “new forms of realism”—that drew Pasolini to Caravaggio’s work, particularly the peculiar accord struck in his paintings between naturalism and stylization. Pasolini professed to “hate naturalism” and, with some exceptions, avoided the effects of Tenebrism in his cinema. It is, instead, the very artificiality of Caravaggio’s light—a light that belongs “to painting, not to reality”—which earns his admiration.

The Roberto Longhi mentioned below is Pasolini’s former teacher, an art historian at the forefront of Caravaggio studies. It was Longhi who resurrected the painter from a certain obscurity in the twenties, arguing for the consequence of his work to a wider European tradition from Rembrandt and Ribera to Courbet and Manet.

It has been years since talking about the meanings behind words used to discuss book bans and censorship. Although we might all think we’re using the words the same way, in many cases, the nuance and gravity of language can be lost when the wrong word is used. It might sound nitpicky, but it’s not. Clarity around language and meaning around book bans is important. To communicate the true extent of what is happening and on how many different levels, a shared understanding of words and their meanings is crucial.

This week, for example, an author talked on Twitter about how his book was being “soft censored” because a school board decided to pull the book from shelves before it could raise a concern from community members. Though it conveys the same thing, this is not actually what soft censorship is. This is textbook censorship, no softness about it.

Here’s a short introduction to the nuances of language around book bans, censorship, and more.

More specifically, censorship means that suppression is coming from a government body, a private institution, or other group with authority. These authorities are intentionally suppressing or removing information from those who do not have the same level of power or authority that they do.

This has been the longest June in a long time, hasn’t it? We’re wrapping up a Pride month that has been joyful but also one tinged with ongoing fear about the future for queer people in America. I don’t need to tell you this, and I also don’t need to say that celebrating queer folks is an all-year thing that begins at the voting booth, continues in school and library and community board meetings, and shows up everywhere along the way. We emphasize that libraries are safe places for ALL and we also acknowledge that showing up looks different for everyone. Maybe you’re at the board meetings to talk or maybe you’re writing a letter; both matter, both make a difference, and both require work and effort on everyone’s part. One other small thing you can do to celebrate queer people all year long is to identify yourself as part of or ally to the community. Again, acknowledging rainbow capitalism is important, but so, too, is in supporting queer people and creators.

All of that is to say, have you seen the fun bookish Pride mugs floating around? There are so many, and they offer an opportunity to enjoy your favorite warm beverage (or cold, I’m not judging how you drink your cold stuff) in a mug that celebrates queer people and/or supports their creative work.

Grab your wallet. It’s time to do some bookish Pride mug shopping.