{"id":913,"date":"2016-06-15T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2016-06-15T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.publicbooks.org\/public-picks-2016\/"},"modified":"2026-01-16T20:20:35","modified_gmt":"2026-01-17T02:20:35","slug":"public-picks-2016","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.publicbooks.org\/public-picks-2016\/","title":{"rendered":"Public Picks 2016"},"content":{"rendered":"

Finals have been graded, graduates have been feted, and the days are still getting longer. That means one thing: time to start planning your summer reading! Each year around this time, the editorial staff at Public Books<\/i> gathers together to draw up a list of our favorite books of the past 12 months. The list reflects our catholic tastes: you\u2019ll find addictive page-turners and heady novels of ideas, gripping social histories and gorgeous comics, laureled best sellers and deserving underdogs.<\/p>\n

Special thanks go out to Jared Gardener and Marah Gubar, who helped us select some of the year\u2019s best graphic novels and children\u2019s\/YA literature, respectively. Thanks, too, to the section editors and contributors who told us, in their own words, why they loved the books they loved. Whether you plan to spend your summer at the beach or in the tub, on a train or in the rain, you won\u2019t be wanting for recommendations. From all of us at Public Books<\/i>, here\u2019s to a book-filled summer!<\/p>\n

\n
BEACH READING<\/b><\/div>\n
\"<i>Men
Men reading aboard USS <\/i>Lexington. US National Archives \/ Flickr<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u2022\u00a0Laura Barnett,\u00a0The Versions of Us\u00a0<\/i>(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)<\/p>\n

\u2022\u00a0Rafael Chirbes, On the Edge<\/i>, translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa\u00a0<\/i>(New Directions)<\/p>\n

Summer reading: why not something solid? In particular: Rafael Chirbe\u2019s deeply satisfying novel, On the Edge<\/i>. Imagine Thomas Bernhard (C\u00e9line\u2019s love child on Proust) in post-boom coastal Spain. A dirty angry Proust stranded in the wreckage, keeping the beach real.
\n\u2014Simon During<\/b>, Public Books<\/i>\u00a0contributor (\u201cStop Defending the Humanities<\/a>\u201d)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u2022\u00a0Nick Drnaso,\u00a0Beverly<\/i> (Drawn and Quarterly)<\/p>\n

\u2022\u00a0Ariana Kelly, Phone Booth<\/i> (Bloomsbury Academic)<\/p>\n

With touching personal narrative and a keen eye to cultural oddities, Kelly ruminates on this rapidly disappearing object. In so doing, she has created an elegant epitaph for the phone booth.
\n\u2014Christopher Schaberg<\/b>, Public Books<\/i>\u00a0contributor (\u201cThinking Critically About Critical Thinking<\/a>\u201d)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u2022\u00a0Anna North, The Life and Death of Sophie Stark<\/i> (Blue Rider)<\/p>\n

\u2022\u00a0Megan Pugh, American Dancing: From the Cakewalk to the Moonwalk\u00a0<\/i>(Yale University Press)<\/p>\n

PARK READING<\/b><\/div>\n
\"<i>Ralph
Ralph Ellison<\/i>. Library of Congress<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u2022 Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City<\/i> (Crown)<\/p>\n

\u2022 Thomas Frank, Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?<\/i> (Metropolitan)<\/p>\n

\u2022 Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul<\/i> (Crown)<\/p>\n

My colleague Eddie S. Glaude\u2019s new book has forever transformed my understanding of US racial politics. It is a brilliant and timely work, theoretically rich with a palpable passion for justice running through every page.
\n\u2014Imani Perry<\/b>, Public Books<\/i> contributor (\u201cThe Year of Black Memoir<\/a>\u201d)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u2022 Adam Hochschild, Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936\u20131939<\/i> (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)<\/p>\n

At first glance, Spain in Our Hearts<\/i> may seem like another unfortunate example of the Americanization of world history; that is, the need to find American interlocutors to offer perspectives that make sense to US readers. Rather, the book offers a reframing of the Spanish Civil War beyond its well-known status as a \u201cdress rehearsal\u201d for WWII and a technological and ideological petri dish for Stalinism and Nazism. By focusing on the Lincoln and Washington brigades, Hochschild shows how the War split the Depression-era American left and right. Millions of invigorated union members demanded arms for Republican Spain (which they never received) and business elites often supported Franco, such as the chairman of Texaco, who gifted the Nationalists oil on credit. Most of all, the book is a moving portrait of the thousands of young idealistic Americans who volunteered\u2014most of whom were working-class New York City Jews who were members of the American Communist Party and City College students\u2014and how they died in desperate attacks in villages and olive groves, often shy of their 21st birthdays.
\n\u2014Max Holleran, Public Books<\/i> contributor (\u201cHow Gentrifiers Gentrify<\/a>\u201d)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u2022 Margo Jefferson, Negroland<\/i> (Pantheon)<\/p>\n

\u2022 Dana Spiotta,\u00a0Innocents and Others<\/i> (Scribner)<\/p>\n

TRAIN READING<\/b><\/div>\n
\"<i>Passenger
Passenger on the Lone Star<\/i>. Photograph by Charles O\u0019Rear \/ US National Archives and Records Administration \/ Wikimedia Commons<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u2022 Samuel Archibald, Arvida<\/i>, translated from the French (Canada) by Donald Winkler (Biblioasis)<\/p>\n

\u2022 Aimee Meredith Cox, Shapeshifters: Black Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship<\/i> (Duke University Press)<\/p>\n

This lively book, Cox\u2019s account of her work as a participant-observer in a Detroit homeless shelter for teen girls, reveals both the many obstacles faced by young women of color and the creative ways in which they use self-expression (language, music, fashion, and dance) to find a new way to live otherwise. The stories, harrowing and fascinating, shine a light on the lives of our least empowered citizens\u2014teenage African American girls\u2014while Cox\u2019s thinking helps us see the power of being able to shape-shift.
\n\u2014Anne Fernald, Public Books<\/i> contributor (\u201cIn the Great Green Room: Margaret Wise Brown and Modernism<\/a>\u201d)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u2022 Sophie Goldstein, The Oven<\/i> (AdHouse)<\/p>\n

\u2022 Eka Kurniawan, Beauty Is a Wound<\/i>, translated from the Indonesian by Annie Tucker (New Directions)<\/p>\n

\u2022 Sunjeev Sahota, Year of the Runaways<\/i> (Knopf)<\/p>\n

\u201cDickensian\u201d is a much-abused adjective, but Sunjeev Sahota\u2019s compulsively readable group portrait of migrants in Sheffield looks back to the 19th century in its braiding together of lives from different social classes and its rueful reminders that individual emotions and economic contingencies are just as tightly interwoven. A different 19th-century author comes to mind in the Dorothea Brooke\u2013like figure of the only woman in the group, a heroine whose efforts to act under conditions of imperfect knowledge provide a self-deprecating image for the novel\u2019s own sociopolitical ambitions.
\n\u2014Leah Price<\/b>, Public Books<\/i> contributor (\u201cBooks on Books<\/a>\u201d)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u2022 Riad Sattouf, The Arab of the Future: A Childhood in the Middle East, 1978\u20131984<\/i> (Metropolitan)<\/p>\n

\u2022 Carla Shedd, Unequal City: Race, Schools, and Perceptions of Injustice<\/i> (Russell Sage Foundation)<\/p>\n

Unequal City<\/i> reveals how schools shape the lived reality of Chicago\u2019s youth. Through moving accounts of, and administrative data on, the divergent social worlds of four schools, Shedd identifies the role of schools\u2014beyond that of police and courts\u2014in the reproduction of perceptions of social inequality and criminal injustice.
\n\u2014Matthew Clair<\/b>, Public Books<\/i> contributor (\u201cBlack Intellectuals and White Audiences<\/a>\u201d)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

BATHTUB READING<\/b><\/div>\n
\"Jean-L\u00e9on
Jean-L\u00e9on G\u00e9r\u00f4me, Les Baigneuses<\/i> (c. 1889)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u2022 Jos\u00e9 Eduardo Agualusa, A General Theory of Oblivion<\/i>, translated from the Portuguese by Daniel Hahn (Archipelago)<\/p>\n

\u2022 Brian Blanchfield, Proxies: Essays Near Knowing<\/i> (Nightboat)<\/p>\n

In 1658, Sir Thomas Browne declared, \u201cTis time to observe Occurrences and let nothing remarkable escape us.\u201d With Proxies<\/i>, poet Brian Blanchfield has assembled a collection of essays that are as expansive in their intellectual reach as they are profoundly committed to sounding the tender archive of memory\u2019s embodied afterlife. \u201cPermitting shame, error, and guilt,\u201d Blanchfield\u2019s essays take up owls and abstraction, foot-washing and frottage, and provide us with a vital and vibrant map of the thrill and the pain of contemporary life. To read Proxies<\/i> is to be pulled along by a mind in the vertiginous thrall of wandering, \u201cready to be any thing, in the extasie of being ever.\u201d
\n\u2014Patrick Abatiell<\/b>, Public Books<\/i> contributor (\u201cOn Writing and Restaurant Labor<\/a>\u201d) and section editor<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u2022 Amelia Gray, Gutshot<\/i> (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)<\/p>\n

\u2022 Leah Hayes, Not Funny Ha-Ha<\/i> (Fantagraphics)<\/p>\n

\u2022 Alexandra Kleeman, You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine<\/i> (Harper)<\/p>\n

\u2022 Thomas W. Laqueur, The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains<\/i> (Princeton University Press)<\/p>\n

The Work of the Dead<\/i> is an astute cultural history of why the dead matter, ranging across periods and places from the Greeks to the present.
\n\u2014Arianne Chernock<\/b>, Public Books<\/i> contributor (\u201cQueen Victoria\u2019s Power<\/a>\u201d) and section editor<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u2022 Adrian Tomine, Killing and Dying<\/i> (Drawn and Quarterly)<\/p>\n

PLAYGROUND READING (FOR BABY BIBLIOPHILES)<\/b><\/div>\n
\"<i>Gertrude
Gertrude Stein with Jack Hemingway<\/i>. JFK Library<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u2022 Jim Averbeck and Yasmeen Ismail, One Word From Sophia <\/i>(Atheneum)<\/p>\n

\u2022 Susan E. Goodman and E. B. Lewis, The First Step: How One Girl Put Segregation on Trial<\/i> (Bloomsbury)<\/p>\n

\u2022 Emily Hughes, The Little Gardener<\/i> (Flying Eye)<\/p>\n

\u2022 Vaunda Micheaux Nelson and R. Gregory Christie, The Book Itch: Freedom, Truth, and Harlem\u2019s Greatest Bookstore<\/i> (Carolrhoda Picture Books)<\/p>\n

\u2022 Zachariah OHora, My Cousin Momo<\/i> (Dial)<\/p>\n

CHILDREN\u2019S ROOM READING (FOR YOUNG LIBRARY-LOVERS)<\/b><\/div>\n
\"<i>Virginia
Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell playing cricket<\/i>. Harvard Theatre Collection<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u2022 Cassie Beasley, Circus Mirandus<\/i> (Dial)<\/p>\n

\u2022 Katherine Catmull, The Radiant Road<\/i> (Dutton Books for Young Readers)<\/p>\n

\u2022 Jennifer L. Holm and Matthew Holm, Sunny Side Up<\/i> (Graphix)<\/p>\n

\u2022 Joel Ross, The Fog Diver<\/i> (HarperCollins)<\/p>\n

\u2022 Laura Amy Schlitz, The Hired Girl<\/i> (Candlewick)<\/p>\n

SUMMER CAMP READING (FOR TEENAGE BOOKWORMS)<\/b><\/div>\n
\"<i>Student
Student in a Black Studies class on Chicago\u2019s West Side<\/i>. US National Archives \/ Flickr<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u2022 Francis Hardinge, The Lie Tree<\/i> (Macmillan Children\u2019s)<\/p>\n

\u2022 Julie Murphy, Dumplin\u2019<\/i> (Balzer + Bray)<\/p>\n

\u2022 Daniel Jos\u00e9 Older, Shadowshaper<\/i> (Arthur A. Levine)<\/p>\n

\u2022 Maggie Thrash, Honor Girl<\/i> (Candlewick)<\/p>\n

\u2022 Siobhan Vivian, The Last Boy and Girl in the World<\/i> (Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Finals have been graded, graduates have been feted, and the days are still getting longer. That means one thing: time to start planning your summer reading! Each year around this time, the editorial staff at Public Books gathers together to draw up a list of our favorite books of the past 12 months. The list […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2497],"tags":[147,17,134,197,20,33,150,196],"pbpartner":[],"section":[],"pbseries":[],"class_list":["post-913","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-comics","tag-fiction","tag-humanities","tag-lists","tag-literature","tag-nonfiction","tag-novel","tag-public-picks"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nPublic Picks 2016 - Public Books<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Finals have been graded, graduates have been feted, and the days are still getting longer. 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