These Beacon Beach Reads Will Make You Water
August 08, 2024
Normally, we could keep our cool, but this season we’re wilding in a dangerous mood. Can you match our timing? Because we’re in a dangerous mood for some summer reading. These titles from our catalog will make you sweat, make you hotter, make you lose your breath, make you water. They will blow your mind! Hopefully, you can last the whole season.
“I guess I’m sort of a choice companion for the Shugers— professional watcher and listener that I am. People who know the Shugers’ story—or think they know it—wonder why I stay around them. I don’t know why I stay. I could try to come up with a motive, some cliche like ‘Catherine is the only one who accepts me without question.’ It’s not true. She’s wary of me; Ernest is too. They’re wary of me, but they take me in too. It’s like they need someone else to witness the shit, the spectacle they make of themselves . . . a private spectacle. Catherine has never tried to harm him in public. Even that time on the street in Detroit, as you know, it was a Sunday and the salvage dump was closed; no one else on the backstreet, and the bicycle spoke sticking out between the crevices of the wire fence.”
—Gayl Jones
A Black Girl in the Middle: Essays on (Allegedly) Figuring It All Out
“I’ve always wanted a nice butt. Always! In my fantasy with my big booty, it’s a sunny spring day and I’d walk down the street, maybe Tompkins Avenue or Quincy Street in Brooklyn, with my hair in a ponytail, wearing a white tank, a black leather jacket, acid-wash jeans, and heels. Think Beyoncé in her “Diva” video. I’d see a group of guys a few feet away and as I got closer, they would spot me, and their entire conversation would dip to a whisper. And then the really cute one, the Method Man out of the group, would make eye contact with me and I’d look back at him. As me and my booty sashayed down the block (I feel like my fantasy booty should have a name. Let’s call her Brenda.) with the spring breeze ruffling the tree leaves, somebody would drive by blasting Amerie’s “Why Don’t We Fall in Love.” These dudes would see me and Brenda and drool, but the Method Man look-alike would be caught up in the rapture just like Anita Baker said, and he and I would be in the rapture just raptured up together! They’d all wipe their mouths and one by one shout a cacophony of respectful and feminist-leaning compliments at me using language that evoked equality and awareness of their male privilege, along with the desire to do their part to destroy the patriarchy . . . But that fantasy was never going to happen, I mean, maybe the Amerie part, but the drooling over my ass wouldn’t take place because that’s not my body.”
—Shenequa Golding
Breaking Bread: Essays from New England on Food, Hunger, and Family
“I can’t remember if I was with my family or my boyfriend the day I was at Cowan & Lobel and paused in front of the display of local milks beautifully bottled in thick, traditional glass bottles. I grew up on plastic gallon jugs and cardboard containers of skim milk: I had only seen heavy glass bottles of farm-fresh creamery milk, the company names painted on in thick raised lettering, in old movies. The milk bottles stopped me in my tracks. I don’t think I was even a big milk-drinker by then. But the traditional quality of the packaging and the simple, pure product inside were beautiful to me.”
—from Arielle Greenberg’s “Glass Bottles of Local Milk”, edited by Deborah Joy Corey and Debra Spark
Don’t Wait: Three Girls Who Fought for Change and Won
“Weeks after Sonia came home to San Francisco from that trip, she was thinking about the faded yellow walls and hard floors of the youth program in South Africa. As she and her choir were leaving, after exchanging songs with the kids there and delivering some donations, the director handed Sonia her card. “If you want to help more,” she said, “get in touch.” That trip to South Africa—each summer the choir goes to a different country to tour—was her first time understanding viscerally that many kids don’t have the kind of access to important resources that she does.”
—Sonali Kohli
The Dragon from Chicago: The Untold Story of an American Reporter in Nazi Germany
“After Hitler’s rise to power, [Sigrid] Schultz found creative ways around the Nazis’ tightening control over the press. Described by fellow foreign correspondent Quentin Reynolds as “Hitler’s greatest enemy,” she reported on the passage of antisemitic laws, the opening of concentration camps, the closing of churches, and the reign of terror against Jews, Communists, and anyone who opposed Hitler’s government. She accurately predicted Hitler’s military intentions and shared details of Germany’s rearmament. She demonstrated how the Nazis manipulated and misreported the news to their own people and attempted to control the foreign press through a combination of bribery and threats. Her fearless reporting brought danger to both Schultz and her informants. But that danger was part of the job as she understood it.”
—Pamela D. Toler
“As I rode the trail away from the smoke and ashes that had been my life, I considered the face of my Sadie. I saw it there, bouncing against the saddle of the varmint that stole her, a little fuller than when we first met, just like the whole of her I reckon, but still it was the face of my woman. Naw, it weren’t the face of one of them showgirls in Dodge City what sings and dances, but it was the face I was used to waking up to, and it was thumping against some strange leather on a trail to God knew where. She was off to some horrible plight that I found generally unpleasant to consider, but that’s the way life is, though, full of strange leather.”
—Percival Everett
Is the soul solid, like iron?
Or is it tender and breakable, like
the wings of a moth in the beak of an owl?
Who has it, and who doesn’t?
I keep looking around me.
The face of the moose is as sad
as the face of Jesus.
The swan opens her white wings slowly.
In the fall, the black bear carries leaves into the darkness.
One question leads to another.
Does it have a shape? Like an iceberg?
—Mary Oliver, from “Some Questions You Might Ask”
Kindred: Young Adult Edition
with a foreword by Tomi Adeyemi
“I had been home to 1976, to this house, and it hadn’t felt that homelike. It didn’t now. For one thing, Kevin and I had lived here together for only two days. The fact that I’d had eight extra days here alone didn’t really help. The time, the year, was right, but the house just wasn’t familiar enough. I felt as though I were losing my place here in my own time. Rufus’s time was a sharper, stronger reality. The work was harder, the smells and tastes were stronger, the danger was greater, the pain was worse . . . Rufus’s time demanded things of me that had never been demanded before, and it could easily kill me if I did not meet its demands.”
—Octavia E. Butler
Momfluenced: Inside the Maddening, Picture-Perfect World of Mommy Influencer Culture
“[M]omfluencer culture offers us power and control. We cannot control our bodies during pregnancy. We cannot control who our children will be. We cannot control who we will turn out to be as mothers. I harbored grand fantasies of being a serene earth goddess mother before having kids, the type who would think about traveling across time zones with her baby as an adventure rather than a logistical, sleep-deprived nightmare. We cannot control how motherhood will make us feel . . . Ultimately, momfluencer culture allows us to control—at least to an extent—the mythology of our own motherhood.”
—Sara Petersen
No Meat Required: The Cultural History and Culinary Future of Plant-Based Eating
“What’s been strange as a food writer who has focused on meatless food is how, in the last five or so years, I have been distracted from the food that grows from the ground by products that promise innovation, that continue to hide the planet, to hide the joy of cooking—to indeed make, to use Carol J. Adams’s concept of the absent referent, the earth itself the new absent referent.”
—Alicia Kennedy
About the Author
Christian Coleman is the digital marketing manager at Beacon Press and editor of Beacon Broadside. Before joining Beacon, he worked in writing, copy editing, and marketing positions at Sustainable Silicon Valley and Trikone. He graduated from Boston College and the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers’ Workshop. Follow him on Twitter at @coleman_II and on Bluesky at @colemanthe2nd.bsky.social.