Summer Reader 2020

Take solace in lockdown with this summer’s best reads, selected by president of New York-based publisher New Directions, Barbara Epler, London-based curator Gregorio Magnani and writer and poet Ahsan Akbar, co-founder of the Dhaka Literary Festival. As the language around our current moment increasingly calcifies into circular patterns, these books provide a kaleidoscopic portal into new and expansive worlds. In this issue, you’ll discover a cabinet of curiosities, housing everything from a rambunctious chicken-heist novel to gentle, minimalist poetry.

• New works from Doon Arbus, Namita Gokhale and Susan Howe and republications of classical masterpieces from Heinrich von Kleist, Alexander Lernet-Holenia and Intizar Husain
• Historian Faisal Devji unearths the covert radicalism in our response to the current crisis  
• Lukáš Likavčan and Leonardo Dellanoce discuss planetary infrastructure in Hideo Kojima’s Death Stranding
• Plus, interviews with writer Carmen Maria Machado on her new book In the Dream House, sociologist Taghi Azadarmaki on social trust post-Covid-19 and poet Wayne Koestenbaum on the educational properties of dizziness