DrawSTRAWS

Gary Shteyngart by the seashore, Kate Broad at the club. It's a pool party in your beach bag with some of the summer's best books

Vanities /Books

SPECTACULAR THINGS

Beck Dorey-Stein's sophomore novel unspools the family secrets and sacrifices of US women's team goalkeeper Cricket and her older sister Mia—a complicated love letter to soccer and siblinghood. (Dial Press)

THE PAYBACK

Jada Williams, a retail worker with film school cred, a mild klepto streak, and mountains of student loans, wages war against the violent "Debt Police" in Kashana Cauley's riotous—and righteous— revenge plot. (Atria)

GREENWICH

From Kate Broad: In late-'90s Connecticut, 17-year-old Rachel summers at her wealthy aunt and uncle's house, spending time with her toddler cousin and the child's nanny before tragedy rends her life in two. (St. Martin's)

AN ORAL HISTORY OF ATLANTIS

From notes for a rogue translator to the commentary of an actress and her director about a film they've forgotten, Ed Park's stories are droll and lucid bites of life. (Random House)

I WANT TO BURN THIS PLACE DOWN

Taking aim at the price of insulin, Bill Clinton, and her own Big Five publishing house, Maris Kreizman delves into broken establishment norms and her own shifting relationship to them. (Ecco)

THE DANCE AND THE FIRE

Translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney, Daniel Saldana Paris's fever dream of a novel finds a choreographer and her friends revisiting young love as her work whips their Mexican town into a frenzy. (Catapult)

VERA, OR FAITH

A sharp 10-year-old girl in an unfair future America prepares for a classroom debate and tries to mend her parents' relationship in this funny, mournful, sweet-withno-treacle latest from Gary Shteyngart. (Random House)

BALDWIN: A LOVE STORY

Through interviews, newly unearthed archival material, and more than two decades of research, Nicholas Boggs constructs a richly complex portrait of the literary titan, his work, and his romances. (FSG)

Keziah Weir