Hannah Jocelyn
Newsletter editor

“There is no good way to say this,” Yiyun Li notes at the opening of her memoir “Things in Nature Merely Grow,” mimicking the words used by a police officer to inform her of the death by suicide of her son, a little more than six years after the death by suicide of her other, older son. The stunning book, for which Li won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Memoir or Autobiography, was first excerpted in The New Yorker. “In this life of mine,” Li writes, “which makes some fiction feel pale and feeble, there are other facts that I need to establish.” Li is also the author of several works of fiction, including the beautiful novel “The Book of Goose,” about a fiercely close friendship between two girls in France. I recently asked her about her reading habits.

Our conversation has been edited and condensed.

What is the book you might, while writing, want open to any given page?

“The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens.” The book sits on my right-hand side with my journal, so any time of the day I may reach for it and read a poem, or a stanza, or just a couple of lines on a random page. I’ve often returned to this stanza, which has a clarifying effect for my mind, and the phrase “acutest speech” speaks aptly of my aspiration in writing:

To say more than human things with human voice,
That cannot be; to say human things with more
Than human voice, that, also, cannot be;
To speak humanely from the height or from the depth
Of human things, that is acutest speech.

Ann Goldstein, Elena Ferrante’s translator, has said that she likes the books that put “solid English rhythms” in her head. Are there any works that do that for you?

“Moby-Dick” and Shakespeare’s plays, particularly “Richard II.” My writing voice doesn’t necessarily resemble Melville’s or Shakespeare’s, but their words go on circulating in my head like the best music.

Do you have a favorite book to recommend?

Rebecca West’s novel “The Fountain Overflows,” about the children of an unstable father and an eccentric mother. I’ve purchased many copies to give away to people, and I’ve also recommended it to many more. My late friend Edmund White even wrote this recommendation of mine into his memoir, “The Unpunished Vice: A Life of Reading”: “Yiyun Li told me to read Rebecca West’s The Fountain Overflows. I’ll always be grateful to her.”

A Terrible Intimacy

By Melvin Patrick Ely (Holt)

This history, by a Bancroft Prize winner, analyzes six trials that took place in Prince Edward County, Virginia, between 1825 and 1861, illuminating the complexity of interracial relationships in the slaveholding South. Ely calls upon a wide range of sources to illustrate the ways in which physical proximity between enslavers and enslaved people created “crosscurrents of community life,” including moments of recreation, socializing, trade, and sex. His most compelling observations arise from smaller details he teases out of the trials’ testimony, which capture the texture of the everyday—from how people travelled at night to the manner in which they kept time.

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This Is Not About Running

By Mary Cain (HarperCollins)

In the U.S., running is a sport marked by the achievements of female teen-age prodigies, who set impossible records and then disappear. In this memoir, Cain, arguably the greatest high-school runner of all time, recounts how her success led to bullying from teammates and their parents and online attacks from men who dissected her prepubescent sex appeal. She also details the abuse she faced at the hands of Alberto Salazar, the now disgraced former head of Nike’s distance-running program, whom she left her high-school team to work with when she was sixteen. As Cain describes her decision to walk away from the sport, the book becomes a rejoinder to the fifteen-plus years of vitriol she faced during her career.

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The Summer Boy

By Philippe Besson, translated from the French by Sam Taylor (Scribner)

“I have a feeling that nothing will ever be the same again, that my adolescence is over,” the eighteen-year-old protagonist of this bildungsroman, Philippe, remarks as he and his parents descend upon the island where they summer each year. Though the terrain is familiar, uncharted interpersonal dynamics emerge among Philippe and his vacation friends as they navigate budding love and the sense of imminent loss. Philippe observes that he and his cohort are “so preoccupied with our own pleasure, our own worries” that they often fail to heed other people’s “distress signals.” For the first time, Philippe and his peers face the consequences of their egocentrism, and begin to understand “the darkness of the human soul.”

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The Children

By Melissa Albert (Morrow)

As this lightly speculative novel begins, its protagonist, Guinevere Sharpe, has just published a memoir about being the daughter of an enigmatic children’s-book author, who died before she could complete a celebrated series of novels about a shadowy figure who extracts children’s dreams to create fantasy worlds. The launch coincides with news that Guinevere’s brother, from whom she has long been estranged, will soon open an art installation titled “Mother” at a gallery. Albert’s prose sometimes strains for lyricism, but the mysteries embedded in the novel—creative, familial, and supernatural—exert a powerful draw.

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Our editors and critics choose the most captivating, notable, brilliant, surprising, absorbing, weird, thought-provoking, and talked-about books. Find your next great read »

Everybody’s talking about:

• J. D. Vance’s “Communion,” which Jessica Winter reviewed, “communicates little of spiritual hunger, of crises of faith, of temptation or redemption or awe, or whatever else one might want or expect from a conversion tale.”

Coming soon:

• Lucy Caldwell’s new collection of short stories, “Devotions,” is out on June 30th.
• “On the Origin of Sex,” by Lixing Sun, explores the bewildering variety of ways life-forms reproduce. It’s also out on June 30th.
• Rachel Aviv’s “