Books

6 Hazy Summer Quotes from New June Books

I believe it was LFO who sang, "I think it's fly when those books come out in the summer, in the summer." Summer reading, like clean sheets or fresh doughnuts, is one of the perks of being alive. Here, lines we love from June's new releases all about the the lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer.

by Claire Luchette

Summer reading on summer: Meta!

I believe it was LFO who sang, "I think it's fly when those books come out in the summer, in the summer." Summer reading, like clean sheets or fresh doughnuts, is one of the perks of being alive. Here, lines we love from June's new releases all about the the lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer.

'Bad Monkey' by Carl Hiaasen

"Evan Shook believed that only a masochist or a moron would stay in the Keys all summer. The humidity was murderous and the insects unshakable, yet here he was. His sons were jacking off at a summer camp in Maryland, his wife was on an Aegean cruise with her book club and his mistress was camping at a bluegrass festival in Vermont, probably balling some goddamn banjo player." (Knopf)

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'The Shining Girls' by Lauren Beukes

"There was a bantam cockerel on the farm that used to have seizures. You could bring them on by flashing a light in its eyes. Harper would lie on his stomach in the long grass that made his head feel ripe in the summer, and use a bit of broken mirror to stun the rooster." (Mulholland)

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'Sisterland' by Curtis Sittenfeld

"Our windows were open, and the radio had been playing continuously—not one but two Billy Joel songs had come on during our drive--and the air was dense with the humidity of a midwestern summer, weather that even then made me homesick, though it was hard to say for what." (Random House)

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'Taipei' by Tao Lin

"Annie's boyfriend had gone to India after college. When he returned to America, he died for a reason that Paul, who was thinking of how spring was to summer like a morning was to an entire day, brief and lucid and transitional, didn't hear." (Vintage)

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'We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves' by Karen Joy Fowler

"And then, one night at supper, Lowell said suddenly, 'Fern used to love corn on the cob. Remember what a mess she'd make?' and I got a flash of yellow kernels pasted across Fern's little pegs of teeth like bugs in a screen door. Probably we were having corn on the cob when Lowell said this, which would mean it was summer again—thunderstorms and fireflies and nearly a year since Fern had been sent away." (Putnam)

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'The Joker' by Andrew Hudgins

"Griffin had a large municipal pool built by the Works Project Administration, and a couple times every summer Buddy took my brothers, cousins and me for an afternoon of splashing, hot dogs, ice cream, and sunburn" (Simon and Schuster)

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