6 new books out this week, including true stories of trailblazers

When we were kids, summer was graced with the tang of saltwater and possibility, and the fading song of school’s final bell. But for many working adults these days, the season often just kind of feels … the same as the rest of the year. Except with, maybe, a few more bugs and a bit more sweat.

So perhaps our notion of a “beach read,” that quintessential artifact of the season, ought to evolve too. Sure, there will always be room for breezy books, but this week’s publishing highlights at least feel refreshingly different — if only because these books, filled as they are with historic firsts, complex lives and destructive loves, don’t promise too much escapist refreshment at all.

Consider them, instead, as windows on a complicated world that’s always with us, whatever the calendar may say.

@UGMan by Mark Sarvas

Don’t be fooled by the triumphalist lie trumpeted by those Billy Goats Gruff: The troll never really died, he just traded his underbridge lair for the less literal — and more insidious — darkness of social media. And he has a lot to catch you up on. In this disquieting novel, Sarvas’ third, a protagonist known better by his online handle (@UGMan, natch) allows readers into the barbed tangle of his thoughts in an multiform monologue that recalls the captivating obsessives created by the late great Thomas Bernhard.

I’ll Be Right Here: A Novel by Amy Bloom

Half a decade removed from her husband’s decision to pursue assisted suicide — an experience she chronicled in a devastating 2022 memoir, In Love — novelist Amy Bloom is returning to the comparative succor of fiction. Her latest novel weaves intimacies on an expansive loom of decades, following a found family of immigrants and sparkplug friends in New York City. The intergenerational saga, as reviewer Heller McAlpin notes for NPR, “once again showcases Bloom’s signature open-armed embrace of love in its many forms.”

Make It Ours: Crashing the Gates of Culture with Virgil Abloh by Robin Givhan

By the time Abloh died of cancer in 2021, the 41-year-old had ascended the commanding heights of the fashion world. Men’s creative director at Louis Vuitton, founder of a label repped by hip-hop’s household names – Off-White, IKEA collaborator and former architecture student, the renaissance man was many things — including, simply and perhaps most powerfully, a Black man. Givhan, a Pulitzer Prize-winning fashion critic, followed the trailblazing designer’s rise as it took shape; now, in a book that’s equal parts biography and essay, she is reflecting on a legacy that defied the limits of the runway.

Misbehaving at the Crossroads: Essays & Writings by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

A poet and professor whose work has been steeped in memoir and archive-plumbing biography, Jeffers made a monumental pivot to fiction with 2021’s centuries-spanning epic, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois. Though certainly a leap, her debut novel continued what has become something of a career-long project for her, foregrounding the stories of heroic Black women. Now, Jeffers is carrying that project forward in still another mode, turning to personal and political essays to reflect on the complicated — at times seemingly impossible — position that Black women like her occupy in a culture determined to reduce them to virtually anything but themselves.

Room on the Sea: Three Novellas by André Aciman

The author best known for Call Me By Your Name, the lush portrait of young same-sex love adapted into a beloved 2017 film, here presents a triptych of novellas rooted in the same sweetly painful intimacies. The three stories collected in Room on the Sea all concern the kinds of quiet, complex love that refuse to fit neatly on a greeting card. Swoonworthy though their settings may be, these relationships look less like the scenes on postcards than the images we catch in passing patinated mirrors.

Trailblazer: Perseverance in Life and Politics by Carol Moseley Braun

Moseley Braun, more than most, has heard her fair share of the word “first.” The politician made history as the first Black woman elected to the U.S. Senate, back in 1992, and later as the first Black woman to serve as ambassador to New Zealand. Yet, as glamorous as that word may be, the necessary flipside of “first” is the struggle that comes with occupying spaces that aren’t used to people who look and talk like you. In Moseley Braun’s memoir, she reflects on a life lived in the public eye, which in her words, “has always been an uphill climb.”