Welcome to June!
Here are four TBR suggestions to kick up your summer reading a notch, as Chef Emeril would say.
Hav: Last Letters from Hav of the Myrmidons, by Jan Morris, Foreword by Ursula K. Le Guin
Literary Fiction | Alternate History | Novel
From the publisher: Hav is like no place on earth. Rumored to be the site of Troy, captured during the crusades and recaptured by Saladin, visited by Tolstoy, Hitler, Grace Kelly, and Princess Diana, this Mediterranean city-state is home to several architectural marvels and an annual rooftop race that is a feat of athleticism and insanity.
Why we suggest this book: When the New York Review of Books reissues a lost “classic” we always take notice. People often speak of a place or setting as a character in a novel, but in these fictions, the place is the novel: character, plot, and place.
“A touching love-letter, not to an Invisible City but to life itself. Morris has penned a fable about an imaginary abroad to teach us about the here and now.”
–Peter J. Conradi, The Independent
Selected Poems 1966-1987, by Seamus Heaney.
Poetry | Contemporary
From the publisher: Selected Poems 1966-1987 assembles the groundbreaking work of the first half of Seamus Heaney’s extraordinary career. This edition, arranged by the author himself, includes the seminal early poetry that struck readers with the force of revelation and heralded the arrival of an heir to Gerard Manley Hopkins, W. B. Yeats, and Robert Frost.
Why we suggest this book: MFP staff has found these poems to stand within a comfortable landscape: fields, small towns, neighborhoods, yet take us beyond comfort into question one can answer only by living and reflecting.
“By electing to open Selected Poems 1966-1987 with ‘Digging’–a sign-post indicating the direction his future would take–and to put ‘The Mud Vision’ at the end, Mr. Heaney himself provides a trustworthy guide to his underworld”
—Anne Stevenson, The New York Times Book Review
Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov, Translated by Angela Rodel
Contemporary Fantasy | Science Fiction | Novel
From the publisher: Through sharply satirical, labyrinth-like vignettes reminiscent of Italo Calvino and Franz Kafka, the narrator recounts in breathtaking prose just how he became entrenched in a plot to stop time itself.
Why we suggest this book: Novels about time anomalies (rather than time travel) are another automatic interest for us.
“Bulgarian author Georgi Gospodinov masterfully stalks the tragedies of the last century, including our own, in what becomes a haunting and eerily prescient novel teeming with ideas. Exquisitely translated by Angela Rodel, Time Shelter is a truly unforgettable classic from “one of Europe’s most fascinating and irreplaceable novelists”
–Dave Eggers
No Right to an Honest Living: The Struggles of Boston’s Black Workers in the Civil War Era, by Jacqueline Jones.
History | African American | Nonfiction
From the Publisher: Impassioned antislavery rhetoric made antebellum Boston famous as the nation’s hub of radical abolitionism. In fact, however, the city was far from a beacon of equality.In No Right to an Honest Living, historian Jacqueline Jones reveals how Boston was the United States writ small: a place where the soaring rhetoric of egalitarianism was easy, but justice in the workplace was elusive.
Why we suggest this book: The history we think we know, that comes to us easily, what we think of first, is probably incorrect and deserves questioning. The idea that abolitionists were always moral, like any absolute, needs reexamination.
“A breathtakingly original reconstruction of free Black life in Boston that profoundly reshapes our understanding of the city’s abolitionist legacy and the challenging reality for its Black residents.”
–Pulitzer Prize jury
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