Books
Book Stack
Ursula’s Summer Reading List
From the Ursula staff, a handful of the books we’re throwing into beach bags, squeezing into suitcases or adding to our nightstands this summer.
Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art by Lauren Elkin
Elkin unravels how female artists challenge societal norms through provocative, boundary-pushing work. Exploring themes of bodily autonomy and abjection, woven in with Elkin’s experiences in the first person, Art Monsters investigates women’s stories as told through grotesque, transgressive, bodily art—reclaiming what it means to be monstrous.
—Ellie Dunbar
The Hearing Test by Eliza Barry Callahan
After awakening one morning to a deep drone in her right ear, the narrator of The Hearing Test is diagnosed with Sudden Deafness—cure uncertain, cause unknown. She records the year that follows, a collection of conversations and encounters—with neighbors, an ex-lover, his new partner, doctors and strangers—that coalesce into a deeply compelling meditation on sound and silence, language and loneliness.
—Francesca Cosslett
Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art. Courtesy Vintage, Penguin Random House
The Hearing Test. Courtesy Peninsula Press
Living Things by Munir Hachemi
Translated by Julia Sanches
Following four young men one summer in the south of France, this debut novel unfolds into a banal and dystopic meditation on human experience in the shadow of economic and ecological uncertainty. Hachemi adopts the form of a journal, wittily blending storytelling with an examination of what it means to write.
—Francis Till
The Lover by Marguerite Duras
With Marguerite Duras, less isn’t more, it’s everything. Like eye contact. Her sentences, like “tiny piece[s] of mirror,” are “always the whole mirror” (Clarice Lispector). Set in pre-war Indochina, The Lover is the fragmented memory-story of a young French girl and her older Chinese lover. An any—or every—season read.
—Jana Horn
Living Things. Courtesy Fitzcarraldo Editions
The Lover. Courtesy Pantheon Books
Evenings and Weekends by Oisín McKenna
Set in London 2019, Oisín McKenna’s debut novel follows a web of intricately linked friends stuck at home on a summer weekend during the city’s hottest heat wave in memory. The weather isn’t the only scorcher: Laced with secrets, conflicted desires and heartbreak, Evenings and Weekends is a powder keg of a novel that hooked me in immediately and had my heart in my throat until the end.
—Alexandra Vargo
Highway Kind by Justine Kurland
Justine Kurland has spent much of her career on the road, making pictures of what she came across along it: drifters, seekers, small-town car mechanics, teenage girls lighting fires in lush countryside. For much of the time she was doing this work, she was also raising her son, Casper. The photos featuring Casper are warm and sentimental, as Kurland watches him grow over a span of five years in makeshift beds in the backs of vans, along dusty edges of dirt road and railways, toying with Legos and playing pretend. There’s a freedom in these portraits that harkens back to Kurland’s collection Girl Pictures (2018), a depiction of overlapping worlds in which it seems as if anything goes. Her landscapes, by contrast, loom with complicated beauty around the locomotives that score them. Kurland says it was her son’s love of trains and cars that drew her to photograph them, but in this retelling, as Cho points out, Kurland uses the images to subvert “the myths of the triumph of man against nature, of human engineering over the recalcitrance of canyons and mountains” and to show as both a love song to a little boy, her son and only child, and also an allegory for the world.
—Emily Bergerson
Evenings and Weekends. Courtesy 4th Estate
Highway Kind. Courtesy Aperture