➽ Greetings, readers! I’m Jasmine Vojdani, a senior newsletter editor at New York, where I also cover books and culture. I first moved to the city to start a degree in creative writing, choosing the M.F.A. and NYC (and, naturally, debt) — and I have lots of thoughts about that. I speak a few languages and read books in two. My Book Gossip predecessor Emily Gould has referred to me as a “tall sylph who lives in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, and knows everyone.” (Not sure I agree, but I’ll take the compliment.) I have more Libra placements than I know what to do with. I am constantly comparing notes with friends and colleagues about big upcoming releases and seeking out the smaller, weirder books that need to be on more people’s radars. My group chats are afire with who wrote what for where and whether it's good. I love a debut novel that’s surprising in its ambitions, a first-person narrative that’s so candid and specific it feels universal, and books with teeth that actually make me cackle. When the future of literacy looks so bleak, it’s amazing that anyone still does the reading — or at least pretends to at parties. Book Gossip is here to help you do both. XOXO,

RECOMMENDATIONS

Photo-illustration: by The Cut

Lately, I’ve been using the term “beach read” to refer to any book I’m looking forward to diving into while left to my own devices, preferably away and on vacation, preferably in a foreign country while on or near a beach. These books don’t have to be frothy, light, or dishy — they can be thick, challenging, or just genuinely excellent literature. I think that the beach is one of the last places in the world where your phone screen offers a less-enticing proposition than a book made of paper and ink. 

So I took a broad approach and asked some of my colleagues to tell me about the queer (because it’s still Pride!) works of fiction that they love that simply make them want to turn the pages. It turns out that a beach read is already in the eye of the beholder. A slim book that’s easy to carry in a day bag. A romantic, juicy story that might also make you cry healing vacation tears. A doorstopper that is best consumed in a few sittings. Something you’re excited to spend time with when there are so many demands on our attention. Love is love and a page-turner is a page-turner.

Literary academics and niche celesbians are two of my favorite groups to gossip about, and if that rings true for you, too, chuck Terry Castle’s The Professor in that little tote bag of yours. Susan Sontag once referred to Castle as “the most expressive, most enlightening literary critic at large today”; returning the favor, Castle called Sontag “often a great bore.” Whoops! “Desperately Seeking Susan,” the piece this quote comes from, will make you spit out your Spindrift — it is so deliciously rude — but there’s plenty of other good stuff in this collection of personal essays, including reflections on Castle’s tormented grad-school fling with her lesbian professor. Enjoy! —Cat Zhang, culture writer, the Cut

An exceedingly sly work of revisionist historical fiction that reimagines a legendary 18th-century thief as a gender outlaw — a secret discovered by a modern-day scholar in a baffling manuscript that shares the novel’s title. The manuscript’s anachronistic account of a recognizably transgender person, which may or may not be a result of textual doctoring, is a clever corrective to the fatuous notion that trans people “have always existed” — a claim whose motives I understand but which is easily parried and politically irrelevant. Rosenberg gently critiques the wishful thinking with which queer people turn to the historical record, even as he reminds us that there is no queerness without wishful thinking. And thank God for that. —Andrea Long Chu, critic, New York and Vulture

A beach read should be, by (my) definition, a behemoth but a quick one. Something propulsive but durable that shoots you along but will last longer than your SPF. Something plotty — nuance blanches in direct sunlight, as do attention spans, and you want to be able to doze off, dive in, and come back without getting lost. None of this requires trashy airport fiction. Sarah Waters’s historical novels hit every one of these marks. 

You may not have known you needed Victorian lesbian erotic thrillers. I didn’t. But Waters’s work convinced me. I’ve now read almost her entire canon, but my favorite remains my (though not her) first, Fingersmith, a Dickensian doorstopper about a cunning, brilliant orphan girl surviving on her wits, who would eat Oliver Twist before tea. (“Fingersmith” is Victorian slang for “pickpocket” though also, clearly, erotically evocative, and not by accident.) The Victorian set pieces are letter perfect — the spooky country manor, the rustle of ladies’ finery, dusty libraries — and the plot twists until the last pages. As a bonus, there’s a great (loose) film adaptation, perfect for when you’ve headed home after sundown: The Handmaiden, by Oldboy and Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance director Park Chan-wook. —Matthew Schneier, chief restaurant critic and features writer, New York

I first read this 1998 novel as a kid and have come back to it several times since. Part of its appeal is its vivid, lightly nostalgic portrayal of a trio of variably gay ballet-dancer best friends growing up and falling in and out of love with each other in the Chicago suburbs in the ’70s, which tends to comfort me as a Chicago-suburbs girl who was always doing that (not the ballet part). But there’s also a wrenching flash-forward section, wherein the novel’s protagonist, the lovingly drawn and delightfully named Walter McCloud, thinks back on his fretful, horny youth and grapples with guilt about his brother’s untimely death while living a lonely life as a gay man teaching high-school English in a small Wisconsin town. I realize as I write this blurb that this book is rather upsetting for a vacation read, but it’s also romantic and juicy and very funny. Also it can be very cathartic to cry on the beach. —Rachel Handler, features writer, Vulture and New York

You might come, as I did, for Jean Rhys — these days the most famous of the difficult women Plante mercilessly profiles in this notorious triptych — but you'll stay for Germaine Greer, who roars to life on the page as an unstoppable, foul-mouthed feminist driving drunk at insane speeds across American deserts and spreading her legs to flash her naked crotch at the passing gentiluomini in Italian palazzos. This is not a queer text per se, but Plante's queerness is the essential ingredient that both explains his obsession with these women and gives the book its exquisite tension. In one scene Greer chops up a testicle to feed her cats (presumably a cow’s testicle, "a large, yellowish lump with fleshy tissue hanging from it"), while Plante lounges with a glass of white wine and remembers how another woman scolded him for being "a cunt teaser." “I mustn’t do it,” he thinks to himself. “I mustn’t play with women.” But play he does. He doesn't want to fuck them after all; he wants to do something far more insidious: woo them, see through them, and ultimately betray them. —Ryu Spaeth, features editor, New York

The reissue of the 2001 cult classic arrives just in time for slut boy summer. It’s an overheated cross between John Rechy and Gregg Araki that follows two young sexpots on a funny, often poignant road trip of hedonism and self-discovery. It's a journey that allows our hero to move past a painful adolescence and come of age without losing his innocence. —Erik Maza, editor-at-large, New York

Daphne du Maurier is one of our many valued writers who was absolutely a trans man: born “with a boy’s mind and a boy’s heart,” in her own words, she found creative freedom in a jock alter ego named Eric Avon. That may explain why Rebecca reads like a fever dream brought on by compulsory femininity, a melodramatic gothic yowl of protest at having to be a woman. Rebecca has everything: shipwrecks, lingerie, Monte Carlo, lesbian undertones, incest overtones, one of the greatest twists of all time, outfit sabotage on a scale never before seen. Du Maurier doesn’t write women well in a completely novel way; no straight man could dream of the evil, sexy tulpa at the heart of this book. —Erin Schwartz, writer, the Strategist 

When I first read this book at 22, a stranger on a train platform asked me what it was about. He made a guess, based on the title and cover: "Privilege?" I told him it's mostly about love. All of Als's criticism and essays in this book were foundational for me. But the work of memoir that leads it, "Tristes Tropiques," is the one I can still quote from memory. It recalls a great love of Als's life, whom he refers to as Sir or Lady, or S.L., and other crucial beloveds. By the end of this 90-page exploration of heart-based sameness and external difference, he's bereft for having to call upon those loves in the first place. He's overcome by the act of trying to express what they mean to him: "Fuck them and love them for making me do it." Gay! Elsewhere, there is a killer essay about Lily Tomlin and Richard Pryor that sticks in my heart, too. Take it all in. —Amy Rose Spiegel, features editor, the Cut

Not everybody wants a book that goes down like candy. Sweet Days of Discipline is, to me, the platonic ideal of a beach read: It’s short, which functionally means it’s light enough to pack in a day bag, and quick enough that, depending on your speed, you can finish it in a matter of hours. But what really makes Sweet Days stand out is that its prose is ice cold. The book follows an all-girls’ school in chilly, postwar Switzerland and is narrated by a girl who becomes maniacally obsessed with a new student in the school, Frédérique. The book is never overly emotional, never twee, and never sentimental — but in the space between the lines comes a world of yearning. If you need a book to cool you down on a hot day, this is your best pick. —Jason P. Frank, writer, Vulture

This one overdoes everything that makes American Psycho feel excessive. Ellis's 1998 book about supermodels turned terrorists is the closest he's ever come to writing a postmodern systems novel. This international thriller satirizes (but just barely?) the culture industries — namely the publicity leviathan that keeps the whole thing humming. Here, as in American Psycho, there’s an insatiable bloodlust lurking beneath our culture of immaculate appearances. And it’s dishy. Our antihero, a model and man about town named Victor Ward, flits from scene to scene, taking inventory of rooms, and guest lists, sardined with extremely period-appropriate celebrities: Jenny Shimizu, Quentin Tarantino, Alicia Silverstone, Scott Bakula, Elisabeth Shue, Slash, Flea, Kato Kaelin(!), “Queen Latifah? Under Q or L?” Often, the most important bit of characterization — after their Zodiac sign — is who someone’s reps are. If you want to read about, say, Victor waving at a fictionalized John Cusack across a crowded room while Cusack shares calamari with Julien Temple, in addition to supermodels participating in high-stakes conspiracies, then this is the book for you. —Brandon Sanchez, newsletter editor, New York

God, to be a part of the "Pow! Biff! Bam!" era of sexuality that defined this pulpy, prizefighter lesbian book in 1962. (Actually, no thanks — all good to thug it out about pop-star gay-baiting online. Our forebears had it rougher than we can imagine so that we're able to be here now, as it always behooves us, in queerness, to remember.) Anyway: Beebo Brinker is an 18-year-old girl pizza-delivery boy. She careens around the Village, exploring gay bars with her Fagin-like mentor, Jack. Guess if she has fun? Her lover is named Venus. Venus gets outed. I love butch lesbians, and femme ones! And this book, for its portrayal of both. For fans of The Price of Salt (and its attendant Carol). —ARS

Have you ever thought, hmmm, what if a Golden Age mystery novel full of Bolsheviks and guys getting clubbed over the head and gumshoes and spies were also a quite sexy m/m romance? And maybe there were scenes where people get fucked all over the dusty shelves of a used bookstore? Well! Well. —Kathryn VanArendonk, critic, Vulture

The beach is for beautifully written family sagas in which characters related by blood or proximity spend four- to six-hundred pages and several decades failing to express themselves to one another. (See also Rebecca Makkai’s The Great Believers, Ann Patchett’s The Dutch House.) In America Was Hard to Find, Kathleen Alcott uses an affair of convenience to plunge an ambitious pilot and an aimless bartender into the bitter spotlight of the Space Race, anti-war protests, and the AIDS movement. Come for an alt-history take on the first man to walk on the moon, stay for prose that elicits the chill of a brand-new air conditioner working overtime in suburbia circa 1960. —Julie Kosin, senior editor, Vulture

I read this gorgeous, witty novella while solo in Marseille for a few days last summer, though I was late to the trend. It’s hard to believe this book, alternately narrated by two claustrophobically close college-age twins coming back together after months apart, was written in the ’60s, other than the fact that its queerness is mostly subtextual. But that’s part of what makes it feel so lived in. Judith is getting married (to a man) and the whip-smart Cassandra (who is gay and not quite out) is on the verge of a breakdown, certain that she is about to lose her No. 1 life accomplice forever. It’s a beautiful story about how much closeness can sting and what it ultimately takes to become yourself.  —J.V.

What are your reading recommendations this summer? Let us know