“I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer,” wrote Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby. This summer we’re all feeling a bit of that sentiment, of life restarting after a long, long winter. Here we offer seven pieces to inspire days of reading by the sea, or on the sofa. It’s summertime—let’s lean into it.
Derek Walcott
Bleecker Street, Summer
It is a month of street accordions and sprinklers.
Justin Cronin
My Daughter and God
The Best American Essays 2015
The dunes, the ocean—all would be the same.
Erin Rose Belair
A Place Like This
I enjoy being drunk. The sun is warmer.
Ann Beattie
Fifteen Ways to Avoid Gardening
We’re supposed to think that the rake ran off with the trowel.
Austin Smith
Friday Night Fish Fry
This light especially loves children, farmers, lonely women.
Chris Abani
Four Poems
A red sky and angels thick like palm trees.
Lynn Freed
Sunshine
2011 PEN/O. Henry Prize
They’d found her curled into a nest of leaves.