You’ve seen the lists of books meant to be read while suntanning at a resort, or sipping cocktails on a patio. Those lists are in every magazine these days, even the publications that barely deign to acknowledge the existence of literature during the rest of the year. Here, instead, is a list of books to be enjoyed by all of us homebodies and our hundred good reasons—financial, medical, ethical, circumstantial, or preferential—for going absolutely nowhere this season.
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The Kappa Child, by Hiromi Goto, is a trip all its own. This novel will grab you by the hand, giggling, and take you from the prairie to the metropolis, and surprise you with kappas and aliens along the way.
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Wayside Sang, by Cecily Nicholson, is a border-crossing poetry collection that is more concerned with navigating the complexities of family, home, and the landscapes and social systems that contain them, than with any superficial forms of tourism.
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Anatomic, by Adam Dickinson, is an intrepid poetry collection that takes the interior of the body as its frontier, tracing the interrelationships between environment and interior, as mediated by microorganisms.
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Bonavere Howl, by Caitlin Galway, is a novel suffused with the lush, brooding atmosphere of mid-twentieth-century New Orleans. It’s a story of madness and violence that upends the often ableist tropes of Southern Gothic lit.
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Crow Gulch by Douglas Walbourne-Gough, takes its title from a small community that once existed outside Corner Brook, Newfoundland, whose residents all “wore stigma in some form or another,” most because of their socioeconomic status and many because of their Indigenous ancestry. This poetry collection shows us how places are made—and unmade.
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lisan al’asfour, by natalie hanna, is probably everything a beach read is not. It’s a) poetry, and b) the most profound and urgent kind of political poetry—challenging, questioning, and confronting the reader, and offering perspective without proposing easy answers.
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Morse Code for Romantics, by Anne Baldo, is a short fiction collection that, yes, does have a few lakeside beaches in it, but I promise no one is relaxing, having a good time, or meeting their soulmate. Baldo’s beaches are melancholy, languid, shimmering liminal spaces—and possibly home to sea monsters.
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Tauhou, by Kōtuku Titihuia Nuttall, is a hybrid novel, weaving together multiple modes and narratives that reimagine Vancouver Island and Aotearoa New Zealand to tell stories tied together by family and community.
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Learn more about ANOMIA (which does include a beach, and a road trip, but is really more of a book about the woods, and being stuck in your hometown, so can probably also be used for staycation reading purposes):
In Euphoria, a small, fictional town that feels displaced in time and space, an affluent but isolated couple have vanished from their suburban home. Their estranged friend, Fir, a local video store employee, is the only person who notices their disappearance. When the police refuse to help, Fir recruits Fain, who moonlights as a security guard, and they set off on a seemingly hopeless search for the lost lovers. Their chance at an answer, if they can ever find it, lies on the wooded edge of Euphoria, where Slip, an elderly trailer park resident, finds a scattering of bones that cannot be identified. Distrusting everyone, Slip undertakes a would-be solitary quest to discover the bones’ identity. Yet secretly, Limn and Mal, two bored, true crime-loving teenagers from the trailer park, are dogging Slip. Determined to bring justice to the dead, Limn and Mal will instead bring the lives of all seven characters into fraught and tangled confrontation.
Beneath the familiar surface of this missing-persons novel lies an unparalleled experiment: the creation of a folkloric alternate reality where sex and gender have been forgotten. Expanding on the work of Anne Garréta’s Sphinx and Jeannette Winterson’s Written on the Body, and joining gender-confronting contemporaries like Joshua Whitehead’s Jonny Appleseed and Akwaeke Emezi’sThe Death of Vivek Oji, Anomia is an atmospheric exploration of a possible world, and a possible language, existing without reference to sex or gender.
