New School Summer Reading List
Add to your summer vacation or staycation reading list with engaging books from our critically acclaimed alumni and faculty writers. From haunting and insightful memoirs and captivating novels, to investigations of political media, food and lifestyle trends, and a slice of NYC bohemian culture, these books will take you on new adventures and faraway places.
Discover your next great read on the list below and browse The New School’s online bookshelf for more selections.
Fiction
Queen of the Conquered
Kacen Callender, MFA Creative Writing ’14
This enthralling tale of colonialism, conquest and revenge launches a new fantasy series exploring layers of power and privilege. An ambitious young woman with the power of mind control seeks vengeance against the colonizers who murdered her family, in a Caribbean-inspired fantasy world.
Perfect Tunes
Emily Gould, BA Liberal Arts ’04
Have you ever wondered what your mother was like before she became your mother, and what she gave up in order to have you? Gould weaves a poignant tale of motherhood, ambition, and compromise, exploring the fault lines in our most important relationships, and asks if dreams discarded can ever be reclaimed.
Sex and Vanity
Kevin Kwan, BFA Photography ’98
The bestselling author of the Crazy Rich Asians trilogy returns with a dazzling tale of love as a young woman finds herself torn between two worlds—the WASP establishment of her father’s family and George Zao, a man she is desperately trying to avoid falling in love with.
Processed Cheese
Stephen Wright, Part-time Assistant Professor of Creative Writing, Schools of Public Engagement
A dark and funny satire of American consumer culture, Processed Cheese uses a simple premise—a bag of cash falls from the sky in front of a down-on-his-luck protagonist, and finds himself being hunted by the billionaire who lost the bag—to expose the emptiness at the heart of modern consumerism. Wright’s novel takes a critical look at society’s obsession with money and material goods through characters who realize they’re trapped by these desires but don’t bother to try to evade its grip.
Nonfiction
Rage Baking: The Transformative Power of Flour, Fury, and Women’s Voices
Kathy Gunst, BA Liberal Arts ’80
Rage Baking mixes more than 50 cookie, cake, tart, and pie recipes with inspirational essays, reflections, and interviews with well-known bakers, activists, and other outspoken women that look into the dramatic changes in the U.S. since the 2016 election and to encourage readers to find ways to use baking to defend, resist, and protest.
Hungry: Avocado Toast, Instagram Influencers, and Our Search for Connection and Meaning
Eve Turow-Paul, MFA Creative Writing ‘13
Turow-Paul guides us through the corners of today’s global food and lifestyle culture and how 21st century innovations are redefining people’s needs and desires. Reporting from around the world, Hungry explores the modern hungers—emotional, spiritual, and physical—that drive our current desires and trends.
Chelsea Hotel: Living in the Last Bohemian Haven
Ray Mock, BA Liberal Arts ’02
This photographic tour of the iconic Hotel Chelsea vividly displays the enduring bohemian spirit of the hotel, amid the rapid transformation of New York City. Through interviews with nearly two dozen current residents who open up their unique spaces for documentation, Chelsea Hotel creates an intimate portrait of this landmark destination that has long been a magnet for artists, writers, musicians, and other creatives for decades.
Political Junkies: From Talk Radio to Twitter, How Alternative Media Hooked Us on Politics and Broke Our Democracy
Claire Potter, Professor of History, New School for Social Research
Potter reveals the roots of the internet’s chaotic influence on political culture by showing its place within the history of alternative political media. From independent newsletters in the 1950s to talk radio in the 1970s, cable television in the 1980s, and now email, social media, and blogs, this dive into seventy years of change in political media, shows how it transformed—and fractured—American politics.
Memoirs
Stray
Stephanie Danler, MFA Creative Writing ’14
The author of the bestselling Sweetbitter returns with a memoir of growing up in a family devastated by lies and addiction, and of one woman’s attempts to find a life beyond the limits of her past. An insightful look into what we inherit and what we don’t have to, this hopeful story shares what it’s like to let go of one’s parents in order to find peace, and a family of one’s own.
Blood
Allison Moorer, MFA Creative Writing ’17
Grammy- and Academy Award- nominated singer-songwriter Moorer’s haunting memoir delves into the meaning inheritance, shame, and trauma, prompted by the murder of her mother by her father, and his subsequent suicide. She shares how that moment forever altered her life and her sister’s, and how she found a way to carve a safe place for herself in the world despite the past.
Darkly: Black History and America’s Gothic Soul
Leila Taylor, MA Liberal Studies ’18
Part memoir, part cultural analysis, Darkly peers into the heart of American gothic, and how this romanticized melancholic style relates to race in America in the 21st century. Exploring the country’s legacy from chattel slavery, and the persistence and repercussions of white supremacy, Darkly examines how the gothic idea of metabolized fear finds expression in Black America.
Poetry
13th Balloon
Mark Bibbins, Part-time Assistant Professor of Creative Writing, Schools of Public Engagement
Bibbins’s book-length poem sequence brings the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and ’90s into new light. Addressed to a dead beloved, 13th Balloon inhabits the cloud-like space of grief by piecing together the fragmented experiences of youth and loss, anguish and desire.