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Suddenly the rectory door opened and his wife, the photographer Jill Krementz, popped her head out. She said, "Kurt! Hurry up! Come inside. The people are waiting. They've got coffee and doughnuts for you."

Kurt, his face covered in cigarette smoke, took a deep drag of his filterless cigarette and said, "But dear, I just brushed my teeth."

We went inside, and during the Q&A, a woman said, "Why don't you two speak out against the Iraq war? You're writers! Why aren't you doing something to let people know what's going on?"
Kurt said, "Miss we don't have the power you think we have. They affirmation you want, we cannot deliver to people who aren't listening."

And therein lies the problem. We live in a society so wired everyone can write a book about nothing. My plumber is writing a book. My marriage therapist is writing a book. My ex-wife is writing a book, presumably about our marriage therapist. Newt Gingrich wrote a novel and he's a short story. Bill Clinton wrote a biography and he's a novel. Barack Obama -- all book writers. In fact, I can't think of anyone offhand who is not either writing a book or who does not believe their life is worthy of one. With all these people writing books, there's no one left to read them. So I think fewer people should write books, and more people should spend time thinking.

What all this blogging and the internet chit chat has done, is given us the chance to talk more about nothing. Just because some rant on television or radio sells toothpaste and sneakers and beer does not mean the person saying it is smart or a valid political movement. They're just salesmen with different titles, selling a different kind of drug, the drug of obedience, the drug of compulsory behavior disguised as patriotism or religion. But I remember Kurt Vonnegut. His kindness. His talent. A veteran and former P.O.W. who swore off all wars forever, because he saw its destructiveness. His widow Jill was one of the first women photographers to work in Vietnam.

The PEN Faulkner organization supports the NEW Kurt Vonneguts and the NEW Jill Krementzes in its school program. That's why I'm wearing this tux. And that's why my fellow writers and I gather nervously before you like sheep, in a town that, at times, seems to be is living proof that the world is run by gangsters. You are a few of the good. Thank you for keeping up the good. God is watching. He will bless you for your good, and in the end, right all wrongs in this world. That's the real Writing On The Wall. It's also the prayer on my lips every night.

James McBride

"The Lovely Leave," a short story by Dorothy Parker in the Viking Portable Dorothy Parker, brings home the pain of a young married couple's separation and the anguish of an all-too-brief leave with aching immediacy.

Guard of Honor, by James Gould Cozzens, which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1949, is technically a military story, but it takes place on a base in Florida and is really about the military on the home front.

Tales of the South Pacific, by James A. Michener, is, as the title implies, set in a war zone, but the battles that rage are not military, and the original Nellie Forbush in the story did not have nearly as good a time as she did in the smash musical.

Everyone knows the movie, The Best Years of Our Lives, but few have read the long narrative poem by MacKinley Kantor that it was based on. Though I have nothing on which to ground my speculation, I cannot help thinking Kantor was trying to do for World War II what Stephen Vincent Benet had done for the Civil War in John Brown's Body.

Collections of letters from men and women serving in the military, while not technically about the home front, provide vivid pictures of life during the war.

As Always, Jack: A World War II Love Story, by Emma Sweeney, which will be reissued in January, 2012, is a beautiful tale of the author's parents' courtship as told through her father's letters.

War Letters: Extraordinary Correspondence from American Wars, edited by Andrew Carroll, has a deeply moving section of World War II letters.

Since You Went Away: World War II Letters from American Women on the Home Front, edited by Judy Barrett Litoff and David C. Smith, reveals what it was like for the women once the men went to war.

General nonfiction

Don't You Know There's a War On, by Richard Lingeman, presents a bird's eye view of America in the throes of war, including such fascinating tidbits as the fifty-three girls who were sent home from the Vought-Sikorsky Aircraft factory on "moral grounds" because they wore sweaters to work on the assembly line. For some reason, the women who wore sweaters to work in the office were not deemed immoral.

G.I. Jews: How World War II Changed a Generation, by Deborah Dash Moore, examines what it was like for the roughly half million young Jewish men who served in the war.

Fighting in the Jim Crow Army: Black Men and Women Remember World War II, by Maggi M. Morehouse, does the same for the one million African-Americans who endured the same segregation and injustice in military life as they did in civilian.

Virtue Under Fire, by John Costello, is a study of changing sexual mores and morals during the war.

I am lying in my tent in Haiti, typing on my iPhone under a flashlight. A full moon is leaking in through my window and 47 ½ palm trees are casting Halloween shadows on my roof. Mutant dinosaur mosquitoes buzz in my ears in search of a landing zone, and the cock-a-doodle-doo rooster's body clock is out of whack.

How can I tell you about the things I have seen without making you cry into your cereal? I'll spare you the details of babies dying in their own vomit, but I will tell you that after our first night at St. Mark's hospital our medical team broke down and cried, helpless at not being able to save everyone. Out here you are only as good as your last prayer, and God's inbox is backed up.

On my first night in the ER I walked the ward alone checking on IVs while sick people called out in Creole. I don't have a clue what they were saying but I do know they were dying, and I could smell it in the air. Je t'aime was the only French word I knew, and a few weak smiles leaked out. That night I felt like an alien on Planet Cholera. While checking out the morgue I ran into Loune from Partners in Health as she was unloading heavy boxes of supplies from a truck. I felt a swell inside me as I watched her slave away in the dark. She's a quiet hero of the cholera outbreak and deserves a trip to Disneyland. There are many quiet heroes here mopping floors and cleaning contaminated fluids for 30 hours straight.

The good news is that today, after visiting hospitals and clinics in St. Nicolas, St. Marc, Bocozelle, Pierre Payen, Villard, and l'Artibonite valley (where the cholera started), the cholera is in a lull and has leveled off, and patient numbers have dropped. We will continue to monitor the situation and are working with pastors and leaders to educate villagers on cholera. Ted Steinhauer from Medical Teams International (who started the Quisqueya operation after the quake) is leading good teams and carefully studying the stats.

Haiti is a land of rumors and we need focused communications directly from the source. I have seen all these briefs and stats with my own blue eyes. I'm on my 24th Clif Bar and am craving seared tuna sushi with jalapeño from Nobu.

Love,
Alison xxx

For more dispatches from Alison Thompson, follow her twitter feed at http://twitter.com/lightxxx

Tea Party: "One of the key psychological characteristics of the Tea Party is its oxymoronic love of authority figures coupled with a narcissistic celebration of its own "revolutionary" defiance."

Sarah Palin: "Being in the building with Palin that night was a transformative and oddly unsettling experience. It's a little like having live cave-level access for the ripping-the-heart-out-with-the-bare-hands scene in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. A scary-as-hell situation: thousands of pudgy Midwestern conservatives worshipping at the Altar of the Economic Producer, led by a charismatic arch-priestess letting loose a grade-A war cry."

Michelle Bachman: "Minnesota congresswoman who thought the movie Aladdin promoted witchcraft and insisted global warming wasn't a threat because 'carbon dioxide is natural.'"

Barack Obama: "proved to America is that his government couldn't even win back the right to truly regulate this massive industry, even with a historic mandate at his back and after giving away everything he had to trade, conceding even the power to tax."

Rahm Emanuel: "an overconfident and immensely unlikable neo-Svengali, who resembles Karl Rove, only more driven, and with better hair."

CNBC: "more or less openly a propaganda organ for rapacious
Wall Street banks, funded by ad revenue from the financial services industry."

Rick Santelli: "basically a half-baked PR stooge shoveling propaganda coal for bloodsucking transnational behemoths like JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs."

David Brooks: "the archpriest of American conventional wisdom."

Goldman Sachs: "No one ever just referenced "Goldman"; they would say, "those motherfuckers" or "those cocksuckers"or "those motherfucking cocksucking assholes at Goldman Sachs."

Geithner, Bernake, Paulson, Larry Summers, et al:
scrambled to find ways to use taxpayer money to subsidize megamergers that left the banking sector even more concentrated than before.

Sovereign Wealth funds: Imagine the biggest and most aggressive hedge fund on Wall Street, then imagine that that same fund is fifty or sixty times bigger and outside the reach of any major regulatory authority, and you've got a pretty good idea of what an SWF is.

Ben Nelson: One of the all- time leaders in insurance company largesse--no other industry has given him more money in his career, a total that currently stands at over $1.2 million.

Horizon Blue Cross: Operates like a Mafia gang that insists on its protection money.

Billy Tauzin: The principal author of the Bush-era prescription drug benefit bill of 2003--a massive giveaway to the pharmaceutical industry that barred the government from negotiating bulk rates for Medicare purchases of drugs.

Alan Greenspan: The biggest asshole in the universe.

Read an excerpt of NOTHING TO ENVY: http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780385523912&view=excerpt

See the complete list of National Book Award finalists: http://www.nationalbook.org/nba2010.html

"A groundbreaking work of literary nonfiction" (Slate), NOTHING TO ENVY is a riveting, never-before-seen view into one of the world's most repressive regimes through the lives of six ordinary citizens.

Read an excerpt of NOTHING TO ENVY: http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780385523912&view=excerpt

See the complete list of National Book Award finalists: http://www.nationalbook.org/nba2010.html

My mother-in-law, Dorothy, is showing me the red spiral notebook that's almost as precious to her as my husband's baby pictures. Inside, in Dorothy's distinctive script, is a list of every book she has read since 2007. For some people waking up in the middle of the night is a terrible curse; unable to drift back to sleep, they're confronted with a big gaping hole that represents hours of lost time. For my mother-in-law, that time is a gift. At 87, she is acquiring the education she never had by working her way through the canon of great literature. She has now read close to 100 books, including every single novel by Anthony Trollope, Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, Edith Wharton, Henry James and Thomas Mann.

My mother-in-law discusses her newfound passion with the enthusiasm of a young girl, although she can also be a very tough critic...To continue reading please visit: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/03/theres-more-than-enough-hours-in-every-day/?scp=1&sq=morrisroe&st=cse

Below is a recent Reuters article about Somaly Mam, a grassroots activist whose mission is rescuing and rehabilitating girls and young women sold into sexual slavery in Southeast Asia. Her courageous efforts to fight the sex-trafficking industry drew the attention of The Body Shop, who recently partnered with the Somaly Mam Foundation to raise awareness of the sex trade worldwide. Somaly's extraordinary memoir, The Road of Lost Innocence, is now out in paperback.

We are proud to publish authors dedicated to making a difference in the world.

For more information, please visit www.icmec.org and www.somaly.org.

Former sex slave seeks help as 4-year-old found in brothel
Mon Aug 3, 2009 12:54am EDT

By Belinda Goldsmith
CANBERRA (Reuters Life!) - A former sex slave on Monday launched a global campaign against trafficking, saying the age of girls forced into prostitution keeps getting younger.

Cambodian Somaly Mam, whose eponymous foundation is dedicated to fighting the $12 billion a year sex-trafficking industry, said a four-year-old girl was found last month at a brothel in Cambodia after being reported by a male client.

The youngster had been sold to the brothel by her mother, who is also a prostitute.
She is now being cared for at one of the seven shelters run by the Somaly Mam Foundation in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam set up to protect and rehabilitate girls rescued from sex slavery. The group also has an office in Thailand dealing with repatriation.

"You just have to hold her and stay with her and show her that you love her. Children can become children again," Mam told Reuters as she launched a joint venture with cosmetics retailer The Body Shop to raise awareness of sex trafficking.

"There is this belief that having sex with a virgin will cure you of HIV so there is an increasing market for younger and younger girls. In my time it was girls aged 15 or 16 but it has got younger and younger."

The United Nations estimates that two million women and children are trafficked every year, with 30 percent of these in Asia. Poor families sometimes sell a daughter to pay off debts.

To continue: http://www.reuters.com/article/lifestyleMolt/idUSTRE5720FH20090803?sp=true

Tough Trip Through Paradise by Andrew Garcia. This is an account of a kid who gets a loan to buy equipment and supplies in Bozeman, Montana, and then takes it into the Musselshell Valley to trade with the Indians for furs. This during 1878 and 1879. Some historians accuse of Garcia of playing hard and fast with the truth, which is probably true, but his account provides an astonishing look at the culture and sex lives of Indian tribes that were edging toward the end of their free existence on the Great Plains.

Interior and Northern Alaska: A Natural History by Ronald L. Smith. Boring as hell title, yes, but this guy really knows his stuff. If you're at all interested in the finer, interconnected workings of the natural world, I suggest this book. And it doesn't just relate to Alaska. It's full of stuff that anyone who loves nature should know.

Red Rover by Deirdre McNamer. Full disclosure: Dee, as her friends call her, is a wonderful friend of mine. But I can't let that stop me from adding her fourth novel to this list. She is a beautiful writer, and her prose is dark, precise, and unsettling. If you need to be in a sunny, carefree mood over the next few days, better put this one off for now. But don't wait too long.

Son of the Morning Star by Evan S. Connell: Simply the greatest thing ever written about the American west. Period.

To continue, please visit: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/travel/destinations/india/article6676174.ece

Julie Grau, Publisher: On deck for my vacation is THE GREAT MAN by Kate Christensen, which comes emphatically recommended by my big sister--a great reader who turned me on to Edna O'Brien when I was thirteen and has been making great recommendations ever since. She says it's one of the best novels she's read in recent years.

Mya Spalter, Editorial Assistant: My next door neighbor has it in for me. She must have known what would happen when she gestured to the pile of black, glossy paperbacks. The TWILIGHT series sat stacked on her hall table. "You can take those if you want," she said. Her nonchalance was staggering. Never have seven deadlier words been spoken. I read the first three books over the course of a single week. I was transformed. I no longer needed to sleep or eat. My eyes took on a reddish hue. I spent sunny afternoons indoors. But alas, that lifestyle proved unsustainable-- by the end of book three I knew I had to postpone my enjoyment of the fourth if I hoped to hang on to some shred of humanity. It waits on my bedside table, coiled as if to strike.

Chris Jackson, Executive Editor: I met Chimamanda Adichie at a star-studded literary conference in Aspen a couple years back (Ngugi Wa'Thionga and Wole Soyinka were among the other attendees) and was awed by her grace and intelligence and wit. I read HALF OF A YELLOW SUN when I got back to New York and loved it - it told the tragedy of the Biafran War in a way that owed something to the post-colonial African masters, but also felt totally fresh in its rhythm and tone and sense of freedom. It wasn't burdened by any agit-prop obligations; its power was in its portrayal of the full humanity of its rotating narrators: heroism and folly and passive suffering, yes, but also humor and vanity and cowardice and desire and moral compromise. I'd love to read her new collection of stories, THE THING AROUND YOUR NECK, even though the title feels like an old drive-through horror movie from the '50s.

When I was a boy, I prayed for straight hair. You have to understand, I grew up on heavy metal. Iron Maiden and Judas Priest to start. Then Anthrax and Exodus, Megadeth and Metallica. My friends and I gathered in living rooms and basements and empty lots and banged our heads to "Damage, Inc." and "I Am the Law." If you nearly snapped your neck, you were doing something right. We were a pretty wild mix: a Persian kid, a Korean, a couple of white guys, and me--the only one with a tight, curly Afro. The rest had straight hair, grown long, and when they thrashed to the music, their hair bounced and whipped like it was supposed to. I'd watch them pull off this casual magic and wish I'd been so blessed. But I was black, and there was no enchantment in that. It actually felt like a kind of curse. I'm so embarrassed to admit any of this.
Now, heavy metal may be to blame for any number of ills (my tinnitus, for instance), but I can't really say it spawned my self-loathing. Instead, let's head upstairs, to my family's apartment in Flushing, Queens. We won't meet the guilty party there, just another link in a long chain.
My mom grew up in East Africa. Uganda. A member of a tribe called the Baganda, the largest ethnic group in the country. Daughter of a proud and courageous mother and father. They worked to eject the British colonial powers; they were one small part of the Pan-African movement. My grandfather helped oust the British and set up schools in rural Uganda. He made sure his own kids were educated. For college, my mother packed off to Canada. In Kitchener-Waterloo, she was denied housing, mistreated and maligned in school and on the street. Finally, she moved to America to escape the racism. That poor woman--she didn't understand what was happening to her. What had already happened. Somewhere, flying over the Atlantic Ocean maybe, she'd stopped being a Muganda, a Ugandan, or even African. She had become black.
The original American slaves weren't black, either. They were Ashanti and Ewe and Fanti, among others. The slaves' path to Christianity has been told and retold as the great conversion story of Africans in the Americas. But that's not the only conversion story. There's the legal conversion: from humans being into chattel. And there's the cultural conversion: A wealth of ethnicities became one black race. This must have shocked those Africans as much as it did my mother.
To continue, please visit: http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/016_01/3516

My earliest memories are of camping outside Rebecca's bedroom door, where I waged a nightly campaign of tears until my parents relented and let me sleep in her bed; she and I running around the gym of our elementary school, shirtless, flapping our arms as we played the nonsensical diversion we'd dubbed The Chicken Game; me trying to keep up with her on her bike as I trailed behind on my loud, loping Big Wheels. Growing up, when I wanted to know what to wear, what magazines to read, what music to like-when I wanted to know how the world worked and how I was supposed to work within it-I looked to her.

So the idea of siblings has always been of interest to me, and in particular the power older siblings hold over younger ones. I have been fascinated by what my friend Luanne calls "The Little Sister Syndrome." Luanne, like me, grew up with an older sister who was, roughly, the sun and moon to her. Now Luanne calls me days after her sister has made a cutting remark ("I've decided to spend Christmas with my husband and kids from now on. No extended family"), still bruised from it. This, according to Luanne, is a classic case of Little Sister Syndrome. No matter how old or accomplished or out from under our older siblings' sway we consider ourselves, they still wield a unique ability to influence and penetrate, rendering us into earlier versions of ourselves: young and spazzy, suddenly unsure of the ground beneath us.

When I decided to explore these tensions in my first novel, I had little interest in writing a thinly veiled story about Rebecca and me. We lacked the requisite conflict. Decades later, we still live seven minutes from each other. She still tops of the list of people I call when I have news: grad school, engagement, book deal. She's still the person I spend birthdays and holidays with, though the guest list now also includes her husband and mine, and her two young daughters.

As one of my favorite authors, Charles Baxter, wrote, "All happy couples are alike, it's the unhappy ones who create the stories."

I needed to invent some unhappy siblings.

And one day, a single scene came to me: a teenaged girl is traveling through her neighborhood, distributing posters of her missing older brother to local businesses. She gets into an argument with a convenience store clerk who refuses to hang the poster. That was it. My sole idea. So I wrote the scene. From there, The Local News was born.

I only knew two things when I began. One, I knew that Lydia Pasternak, the narrator, did not get along with Danny, her missing older brother. Two, I knew the outcome of Danny's disappearance. Everything else I discovered in the two years of writing the book. What fascinated me the most-more than the search for Danny, or the tumult of Lydia's high school life, or the rapidly crumbling Pasternak family, all of which I loved writing about in their own right-was the jumble of love/hate feelings Lydia had toward Danny, and the power Danny had over Lydia, and the way that power was complicated and deepened and muddied and intensified by the fact that he was suddenly missing. Their relationship turned out to be neither as simple nor as bleak as I had initially imagined, their shared orbit far more nuanced and multi-layered than my early ideas of it.

Rebecca was one of the earliest readers of the finished book. I was well into a successful writing career by then. I'd landed my first book deal. I'd won awards and fellowships. I knew that I was a good writer, that this was a good book. But still I waited in the anxious way little sisters do, to find out what my big sister thought.

He wouldn't shake hands. "All the infections going around? Fuck that. Get in." He said he used to be an emergency-room doctor at the Touro hospital, but that he "got tired of the politics and the insurance fraud. Ordering more bloodwork than necessary, ordering more chext x-rays than necessary, just to pump up the bills, you know?" I couldn't follow the story about how he'd acquired the hearse. "To get what I've got, you'd have to put yourself in the system to be evacuated, and a lot of people don't want to do that. This is the choice they give you: you want to get the medicine you need, you have to leave the city. So I'm driving around providing care. To get supplies, I loot. Do you think they'll ever be able to use anything that's in Touro ever again? After the filth and the dead bodies lying in there? They're going to have to throw away everything anyway, so why shouldn't I go in there and get it? And in the pharmacies, the people don't know what that stuff is and it's better off with me anyway so people don't use these things incorrectly. So yes, I'm a looter. Fine. You got me. But I have things even the ambulances don't have. You go to a first aid station or an ambulance and ask for Diavan. They'll say what the fuck is that. Ten minutes ago, you should have been here, the fucking FBI pulls up, like eight agents, and they surround the car. They're like, who the fuck are you? What are you doing with all these stuff? Is it stolen? Who do you think you are, driving around giving out medicine. I say, I'm a doctor. They ask for my license. But I don't carry my license with me because I don't want to lose it. I show them this, this old Tulane ID, which is expired, and they say, fuck, this is expired. Who the fuck are you? So we go round and round. One of them says, what are you some kind of weirdo? This is a car of death, and you paint a cross on it? What are you, sick? Then they find this" - he reached under the seat and came up with a huge Bulgarian army pistol - "and that was another whole go-around. It was just a big fucking hassle, like they don't want anybody freelancing - you know, helping people. They finally left me alone, though they took all the bullets." He took a breath and his eyes seemed to focus on me for the first time. "What do you need? Nothing? Then get out."

Leslie T. Chang is the author of Factory Girls.

Suddenly the girls spotted someone they knew on the street outside and took off in a hurry; they were so new to the city that they didn't know their dormitory phone number and did not have mobile phone numbers to give me. We agreed to meet two weeks later, in the same public square where we had first met. I flew down from Beijing at the appointed time and waited for two hours, but they never came. I had no way of finding them again.

In the four years during which I researched and wrote Factory Girls, whenever I went to Dongguan, I scrutinized the faces of the young women on the street, hoping to find Yongxia and Dali again. If an unfamiliar number showed up on my mobile phone, I thought immediately of them. And whenever I met someone new, I always asked for multiple ways to contact them--mobile phones, factory phones, the numbers of friends and relatives, and even the names of their farming villages. Eventually I found two young women, Min and Chunming, who became the book's main characters. Even now that the book is done, I continue to call them regularly. I know how quickly I will lose them if I stop calling.

To lose someone for all time, I discovered, is the central experience of factory life. Min lost her mobile phone--and with it, any way to find her two best friends or her boyfriend. Chunming lost touch with countless acquaintances over thirteen years in the city; during that time, she had switched residences seventeen times. Occasionally there were stories of people found. A young man struck up a conversation at a bus stop with Chunming and then mentioned her to a young woman he knew; the woman turned out to be a good friend with whom Chunming had lost contact eight years before, and so they were reunited. "This is the meaning of fate," Chunming told me.

The fear of losing people lent urgency to my reporting--I came to realize you could just as easily lose a place, even one as vivid and specific as Dongguan. To spend time in China today is to know that this historical moment will not last. People will not be forever experiencing the city for the first time; owning a mobile phone, dating someone from another province, and living among strangers will lose their novelty. I suppose this same conviction drives many writers: I must tell this story, or it will be lost for good.

These days I find myself thinking of all the people I left out of the book. They come before me, bright-hued and unchanged from the day we met. There is Li Wenfang, the young woman with a "stifling" job as an elevator operator, who dreamed of attending beauty school; when I called the number she had given me, she had already left. And Ding Xia, the prostitute who vowed to save another one hundred thousand yuan and quit the karaoke clubs forever--did she? And the two girls I met on a Dongguan street who could not have been more than twelve or thirteen, with no evident source of income. "We are just in the city to have fun, not to work. We want to have fun all day long," one of the girls said, her too-insistent young voice telling me that what she said could not be true.

Seven months after my first visit to Dongguan, my phone rang. "Guess who I am?"

I named several migrant women I had recently met.

"This is Yongxia," she said, sounding peeved that I had not guessed. "We met on the square, remember?"

She was now working at the Aigao electronics factory, which paid better than her old job. "We work until eleven or twelve every night and never have a day off," Yongxia told me, cheerful and matter-of-fact. "But we have three days off for the National Day holiday. Will you be around?"

I told her I wouldn't but that I hoped to see her on my next trip to Dongguan. "Is there a number where I can reach you?" I asked.

"No."

"Do you ever have a day off so we could meet?"

"No."

Finally I told her that we should keep in touch and hung up. I had found Yongxia, only to lose her again.

How was she doing? Was she happy? And what had possessed her to keep my number and to phone me, after all this time? I'll never know, because she never called again.

Leslie T. Chang is the author of Factory Girls.

When I think of "summer reads," I think of books I read when I was a kid, when summers seemed like magic and the thrill of a trip to the bookstore was on par with the race down the street to meet the ice-cream truck. Perhaps there's a theme here in my top three picks . . .

Helter Skelter by Vincent Bugliosi—I think I was about twelve when I read this super scary page-turner about Charles Manson and his notorious "family"--and was possibly scarred for life.

The Electric Kool-Acid Test by Tom Wolfe--From the Manson family to the Merry Pranksters. I'm not sure exactly how old I was when I came across this gloriously strange "nonfiction novel." But it doesn't really matter, now, does it? It was the eighties, and I was a teenager. But as far as I was concerned, it was 1964, and I was on the bus!

Papa John by John Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas--A juicy autobiography with an endlessly fascinating photo insert. It was the summer of '87, I was seventeen, and I had recently discovered "California Dreamin'" on the local classic rock station. I had the mass market edition, and it had a blue cover with pink type.

From Mike Mezzo, Editorial

Twilight by Stephenie Meyer--If summer is the time to indulge in guilty pleasures, well, then, I'm guilty. On a whim while killing time at Grand Central one recent summer Friday, I dropped ten bucks on the first installment of this bestselling young adult vampire saga, figuring if I found it too simple or too stupid, I wouldn't regret the cost so much. Forty-eight hours and five hundred pages later, I was hooked on the romance between mortal Bella and bloodsucking Edward--impossible love, vicious predators, gloomy weather, and teen angst mingle to make for a very addictive summer read.

The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber--On a weekend trip to Cape Cod with friends several summers ago, rain kept us all indoors with our noses in books. I had picked up Michel Faber's massively long saga, along with another friend, and within the first several pages we found ourselves in a race through the next thousand or so, riveted by the story of Sugar, a Victorian London prostitute who uses her wiles to rise from the gutter to the upper echelons of society. Sex, duplicity, obscene wealth and poverty, outrageous coincidence, and, most important, wicked humor, stitch together a novel with so many subplots and characters you'll wonder how it all came from the mind of one man.

Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates--I read Richard Yates's perfect novel of suburban despair maybe five or six summers ago, and it still rests comfortably at the top of my list of favorites. It's rare to read a book in which every single sentence is so expertly crafted, and it's rarer still when such beautiful prose is the vehicle for a genuinely harrowing story--a story so gripping that it makes a literary novel almost as page-turning as a mass-market thriller.

From Gretchen Koss, Publicity

The Abstinence Teacher by Tom Perrotta--I am reading this right now and it is vintage Perrotta--funny, smart, and sarcastic. Right up my alley.

Geek Love by Katherine Dunn--Oh how I loved this book in all of its twisted glory. I could not wait to pick it up at the end of the day and hear more about the Binewski family. Please write another book, Katherine!

A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving--I know, I know everyone loves this book but it remains, to this day, the most memorable summer book ever. I read it while backpacking through Europe in 1990 and would scream with laughter every time Owen Meany TALKED IN ALL CAPS.

From Meghan Walker, Marketing

The Amityville Horror by Jay Anson--I didn't so much read this book as it provided me with a very memorable "summer reading" experience. It was the summer between fourth and fifth grade and I was a very precocious (and young for my grade) nine-year-old. We were asked to select one book to read over the summer and submit a book report on it in September. When I alerted my teacher about my selection she insisted it was too hard for me and too scary. All you had to do was tell me I couldn't do something to make me want to do it ten times more. So I insisted. Lo and behold, she was right. It was both too hard and too scary. In a panicked moment in August, rather than admit defeat, I decided to crib from the jacket copy to write my "report." This didn't go over too well when school started up again as I knew nothing about the characters or plot and was immediately found out. I never did read this book, but I will never forget it all the same.

Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt--Everyone I know was reading this book at the same time over the course of the same summer and no one could stop talking about it. In fact, you could look up and down the beach, and this book was propped up by tan arms in front of every third beach chair. I love Frank McCourt and I love this book.

Beach Music by Pat Conroy--Pat Conroy is a genius and a tortured soul who I just want to give a big hug. Beach Music is epic and completely captivating. It takes you from the marshes of the South Carolina coast to the piazzas of Italy (with some amazing food writing) all the while giving you a front-row seat to the most messed-up family dramas you can imagine. Just looking at the cover takes me back to a zoned-out sand-between-the-toes state of mind. Great stuff.

What's the Matter with Kansas by Thomas Frank--Summer 2004. Anti-Bush sentiment is at a fevered pitch. I'm about to board the ferry to Block Island for a family vacation the last week in August. There's a guy standing there with this book in his hands, proselytizing to the dude next to him about how good it is. Between that and everything else I'd already read and heard about it, my mind was made up. We get to Block. I go to the bookstore and buy this book. Later that week I watched Barack Obama deliver the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention on a tiny, crappy TV in our rental house. "Who was that?" my husband said. "I have no idea but I think we just saw our next Democratic president." (Let's face it, Kerry's campaign was abysmal.) So I will forever associate Thomas Frank's book with that summer.

All We Ever Wanted Was Everything by Janelle Brown--Yes, it's S&G. What do you want from me, I'm in marketing. But even if I didn't get paid to pimp our own stuff, I would be an evangelical for Janelle Brown's debut novel. It is so delicious with three amazingly well-drawn female characters and a plot that never quits. You blaze through it so fast and immediately want everyone you know to read it too. If that doesn't describe the perfect beach read, I don't know what does.

From Sonya Cheuse, Publicity

The Mother Knot by Kathryn Harrison's --A raw yet beautifully told memoir about her relationship with her mother. It's both haunting and healing.

Lipshitz Six, or Two Angry Blondes by T. Cooper--An engrossing story that includes a quirky Jewish immigrant mother, Charles Lindbergh, and an Eminem-impersonator, what could make for better summer reading!?

Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez--I was completely and utterly swept away in mind and heart.

From Mya Spalter, Editorial

Farewell, My Lovely by Raymond Chandler--While enduring the sweltering, stereo-less, nine-hour drive from Maine in fourth of July traffic, I read this hardboiled detective classic out loud (with voices!) to my travel companions to great effect. Chandler's dialogue is like poetry written in wet cement and Detective Phillip Marlowe's 1940's L.A. is a dizzying carnival of vice populated by cops, thugs, wannabe-starlets, and society matrons, whose lives depend on an alcoholic, smart-mouthed, private dick's ability to connect the dots.

From Laura van der Veer, Editorial

Straight Man by Richard Russo--A wonderfully witty and sweet book about academia. A joy to read.

The Good Soldier Svejk by Jaroslav Hašek--Svejk is hopelessly endearing. A great antiwar novel cloaked in delightful humor. It's nothing if not long, but it's definitely worth the read.

Distortions by Anne Beattie--I love short stories in the summer; they provide such a satisfying sense of accomplishment. This collection is quiet but powerful, and a great introduction to her writing.

From Kelsey Nencheck, Marketing

Anybody Out There by Marian Keyes--My summer would not be complete without my chick-lit fix. Keyes is one of my favorite authors, and this book touches on a profoundly sad time in a woman's life yet still manages to make me laugh and smile--the best of the genre.

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald--This book was assigned summer reading in 1997 before my first year of high school. Though I usually cringed at the thought of "homework," I was totally captivated by the story, imagining what it would be like to know Nick Carroway and Jay Gatsby. Worthy of many summer re-reads.

A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson--A fast-paced journey following a middle-aged Bryson on his journey through the Appalachian Trail. Bryson's fear of bears is both too funny and realistically scary. I read this on a long plane ride and almost fell out of my cramped seat and made a few passengers concerned because I was laughing so hard.

From Lauren Lavelle, Publicity

She's Come Undone by Wally Lamb--Wally Lamb's writing always impresses me (so true to life!). This is the first book of his that I read, and I picked it up one summer when I was at the beach on vacation. I was so hooked and impressed, I spent all day in the same position on my beach towel reading it--I didn't go inside to eat, go swimming, turn over to even out my tan lines, nothing. I finished all 500 plus pages in one day, and I regret nothing (except for the horrendous, blistering sunburn I got that day . . . shudder)

The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky--This book was published the summer before my freshman year of high school, and my friends and I were obsessed with it. It was our modern-day Catcher in the Rye--It's a coming-of-age tale of a high school boy who is troubled with all sorts of teenage angst, most of which I couldn't relate to. What did get me, though, were the great lines that summed up perfectly what my friends and I, and probably everyone else on the planet our age, felt about life and about each other. Reading it now, I would probably find those lines a little cheesy and obvious, but back then, in those times, at that age, with those friends . . . life-changing.

When You Are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris--I love David Sedaris, but who doesn't? Even though this is an obvious choice, I had to add it to the list because it's been the perfect accessory to my lazy summer weekends spent lying in the sun in Riverside Park. It has thoroughly entertained me and has thoroughly annoyed my sister as I continuously force her to listen to me read sections out loud. Entertaining, funny, easy to put down and pick up....the perfect summer read.

Cindy Chen, Publicity

Atonement by Ian McEwan--This book always reminds me of summer, or at least what a summer would be like if I lived in an English manor in 1935. The languid but evocative first half of this book captures the perfect sinful summer: languishment in heat followed by guilty secrets and unexpected passion. Of course the climax of the first half sets the mood for the heartbreaking second half, but what's summer without a little heartbreak?

The Ghost Writer by John Harwood--The perfect antidote for a hot summer day, The Ghost Writer will provide just the right amount of thrill and chill. And what's more scandalous than reading a booked filled with disturbing family secrets, gothic ghost stories, and a very mysterious and--perhaps a little dangerous--femme fatale?

Use of Weapons by Iain M. Banks--For the science fiction guy or gal. If you're bored and waiting for Battlestar Galactica to come back, here's the perfect book to tide you over. For a book that has all the hi-tech gadgetry, space travel, and sarcastic AI to set a fanboy's heart aflutter, it's also incredibly intelligent and one of the most entertaining and interesting ruminations on war that I've ever read.

Artie Lange is the author of Too Fat to Fish, coming November 2008.