Writers’ picks

Jonathan Ames, author of I Love You More than You Know

A Sport and a Pastime by James Salter: I’m on a Salter kick after reading Light Years. The Night in Question by Tobias Wolff: I heard him read in San Francisco and thought he was amazing and was very sad that I had somehow not yet read him, but I want to make up for it pronto. A Heart So Whiteby Javier Marías: I’ve read one book, All Souls, by this Spanish author, and I want to try some more.
I thought I’d go with this one because of the title.

Jonathan Mahler, author of Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning

First on my list is Kevin Baker’s new novel, Strivers Row. It’s the last installment in his New York trilogy, set in 1940s Harlem, and if it’s anything like the first two, it’s guaranteed to be amazing. I’m also looking forward to reading a new nonfiction book: Spalding’s World Tour, by Mark Lamster, a narrative history of sporting-goods impresario Albert Spalding’s 1888 global baseball tour with the game’s 20 biggest stars. And I’m planning to (finally) finish a modern classic that I’m midway through and loving: Mark Helprin’s Winter’s Tale, a fantasy set in a mythical turn-of-the-century New York. It’s been years since I’ve read a book so lyrical and transporting.

Emily Barton, author of Brookland

Kate Ascher’s The Works: Anatomy of a City: A beautifully illustrated book that promises to explain the mysteries of infrastructure to the layperson—how subways, electrical power and traffic (and so forth) are routed. Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, because the first paragraph, about the fog, makes it look so good. The Collected Writings of Robert Motherwell, because it appears twice in the weirdly evocative endnotes to Amy Hempel’s novella Tumble Home; my curiosity is piqued. Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s Tastes of Paradise: A Social History of Spices, Stimulants, and Intoxicants: If the title alone is insufficient to explain my curiosity, a friend whose taste I greatly admire (in matters both literary and gustatory) also recommended it.

Toby Young, author of The Sound of No Hands Clapping (June)

Heat by Bill Buford: I’ve been working as a restaurant critic in London for the last four years, so this is right up my street. If it’s as good as Among the Thugs, Buford’s book about soccer violence in which he essentially became a football hooligan, it’ll be a real treat. What Did I Do Last Night: A Drunkard’s Taleby Tom Sykes: In the past decade, the confessional memoir has been subject to a kind of fishing-story inflation, with each tale of abuse, addiction and recovery becoming less and less credible. So it’s good to see the genre being reclaimed by a proper, old-fashioned drunk—particularly as, in this case, he’s a British journalist working in New York. I can’t help but wonder, though: Is Tom Sykes a pseudonym for Anthony Haden-Guest? Spy: The Funny Years by Kurt Andersen, Graydon Carter and George Kalogerakis: It’s nothing short of incredible that there hasn’t been an attempt to start a national humor magazine in America since Spy. Let’s hope this collection inspires another generation of journalists to reach for the gold ring.

Bridget Harrison, author ofTabloid Love (June)

Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts: I backpacked around India when I was 18 and was blown away by its combination of utter chaos and awe-inspiring spirituality. I like the idea that this book is a love letter to an incredible city and country, and is also about gripping stuff like drugs, guns and counterfeit passports.  The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger: Many friends have told me this is one of the most romantic books they’ve ever read, so I’ve been saving it for lying on the beach, when I can get totally engrossed and sob my eyes out without anyone noticing. Best Women’s Erotica 2006 by Violet Blue: Trashy erotica, and the trashier the better, is my favorite guilty pleasure. I always buy a book of it at Heathrow Airport when I’m flying back to New York, to make the journey go faster.

Cynthia Carr,  author of  Our Town

I’ve been following a recent trendlet—novels that address ’60s idealism run amok. Since I’ve enjoyed both Susan Choi’s American Woman and Sigrid Nunez’s The Last of Her Kind, I hope to get to Dana Spiotta’s Eat the Document. I regard the recently published Suite Française by Irène Némirovsky as a must-read novel about life under Nazi occupation, written while the writer experienced it. (She died in Auschwitz.) And speaking of citizens coping (or not) with their monstrous governments, I want to read Moses Isegawa’s Snakepit, his novel about life under Idi Amin. In Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide, I’m expecting a literary tour de force disguised as an adventure. Then, since I’m a feminist who knows almost nothing about Elizabeth Cady Stanton, I plan to read Vivian Gornick’s The Solitude of Self. I’ll leaven all this with a short stack of  P.G. Wodehouse.

Heather McGowan, author ofDuchess of Nothing

Orphans by Charles D’Ambrosio: I was a great admirer of Rebecca Godfrey’s Under the Bridge, the story of a 14-year-old schoolgirl who was killed by her classmates, so when I saw Godfrey reading this beautiful little book from Clear Cut Press, I immediately took it from her. Hydroplane by Susan Steinberg: I would read anything that John D’Agata blurbed. Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me by Javier Marías: Wyatt Mason’s article about Marías in TheNew Yorker made me want to read this. Phantom Pain by Arnon Grunberg: I pulled this from my agent’s shelf while I was waiting for him to get off the phone; I slipped it in my bag after reading the first page.

Mark Childress, author of One Mississippi (July)

Mother’s Milkby Edward St. Aubyn:This is a sequel to Some Hope: A Trilogy, an absolutely remarkable example of sharp, funny, nasty, brilliant prose writing. St. Aubyn is the Evelyn Waugh of drug addiction and modern upper- British twittishness, and I can’t wait to see his hero in another hilarious downward spiral.  Memories of My Melancholy Whores by Gabriel García Márquez: I’ve been saving this book for a long summer evening when I can read it all in one sitting.  I’m a sucker for first sentences like this one:  “The year I turned ninety, I wanted to give myself the gift of a night of wild love with an adolescent virgin.” Can’t Wait to Get to Heaven by Fannie Flagg: She’s the only novelist I know who can write a suspenseful, involving story in which nothing terrible happens to anyone. It’s all about the voice.

Lynne Tillman, author of  American Genius (September)

I’ll finish Matthew von Unwerth’s Freud’s Requiem: Mourning, Memory, and the Invisible History of a Summer Walk. I’m eager to read Dubravka Ugrešic´’s novel about exile, The Museum of Unconditional Surrender; Jeffrey DeShell’s fictive intellectual journey, Peter: An (A) Historical Romance; Mary Gaitskill’s 1980s AIDS novel, Veronica;and Stewart Home’s heroin-meets-politics-in-’60s-London novel, Tainted Love. Nonfiction includes Batchen’s Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography and Lyndall Gordon’s A Private Life of Henry James.