Are you too online? So are we! Summer is almost here, and with it opportunity (hopefully) to log-off and settle down with a good book. If you’ve got no clue what to read, here are some summer book recs from the ace i-D team:
JACKSON BOWLEY, photo editor
Now: I bought Amerika by Franz Kafka about a year ago in a charity shop because I was feeling inspired to move stateside… It has been in my bag ever since and I will finish it! I’m also reading 1984 but we don’t need to talk about that.
Next: The camera manual for my Nikon F5.
NICOLAIA RIPS, senior editor
Now: I have been slowly, very slowly, reading Girl on Girl by Sophie Gilbert. This is not a reflection of the book but of my own processing abilities, sluggish by years spent consuming the same clogging agents (Reality TV/Instagram/TikTok) that Gilbert makes light work of, tipping cultural dominoes with a careful hand to reveal the full spread. Good stuff: fun, smart and just serious enough.
Next: Every summer I go method about a specific thing (past summers: Food Writers, Byzantine Art, Vampiric History). This summer it’s magazines, and I’m starting with The Vanity Fair Diaries by Tina Brown. I have been told, by various respected editors, that The Vanity Fair Diaries is basically media cocaine. Time to take Tina Brown straight to the dome! After that I will be stealing Steff’s Graydon book right off her desk.
ROBBY KELLY, head of social
Now: The Snakehead by Patrick Radden Keefe. Last year Patrick Radden Keefe’s seminal book Say Nothing about The Troubles in Northern Ireland, got a 9-episode fictionalized spin-off on Hulu. The book (more acclaimed than the show) bridged the gap between intense history buffs and Dua Lipa book club members. Back in 2023, A24 picked up the rights to one of Keefe’s earlier works, The Snakehead, which is rumored to debut on-screen next year. Centered around New York City’s Chinatown neighborhood, it’s a timely insight into the realities of American immigration and the American dream packaged into what feels like reading a downtown, neo-noir crime thriller.
Next: The Stories of John Cheever.
DOUGLAS GREENWOOD, entertainment editor
Now: I’m a man of macabre taste, and so tend to be drawn to deeply upsetting books. Sleeping Children by Anthony Passeron, a strange mix of memoir and a straighter form of non-fiction, taps into that. Passeron’s uncle had long been a mysterious figure in his life, visible in minimal pictures and seldom spoken of, so he dug into his own family history, asked difficult questions, and the result is a lucid and painful image of France in the ‘80s. Through his research, we learn about his uncle: a heroin addict whose habits coincide with the arrival of HIV in the country. In every alternating chapter, is the story of how French doctors, on a much wider scale, tried to make sense of the disease in its early days. It’s both moving and articulate, precise and sweeping, and one of the best books I’ve read in a long time.
Next: The Venn diagram for depressing writing and queer writing is, for the most part, a perfect circle nowadays. At this point, I find myself drawn to vintage gay writing: The Temple by Stephen Spender. Stephen Spender—sexuality undisclosed, he was rumored to be with both men and women— was one of the great writers of the 20th century to deal with the subjects. His novel, loosely inspired by his own youth, and his friendships with the writer Christopher Isherwood and the poet W.H Auden, was a Bildungsroman about his trip to a liberal, open-minded Germany as a university student. Spender wrote it in the 1930s, but owing to its explicit threads of gay romance, it wasn’t published until 1988. I think it might be out of print at the moment, but you can find copies of it dotted around second hand websites instead.
STEFF YOTKA, global editorial director
Now: I’ve been addicted to memoirs and biographies recently—obviously I scooped up When the Going Was Good by Graydon Carter the day it came out. I’ve been working through the chapters, really enjoying the quaint Canadian beginning of one of our greatest magazine editors. (Also a great job interview tip: just reach across the desk, put your hand on the interviewer and say I really need a job—now.) I’ve been alternating Carter with Dalí: Surreal: The Extraordinary Life of Gala Dalí by Michele Gerber Klein. It’s also a tale of someone from a small town arriving in—and then defining—the scene. Gala Dalí has long stood in her husband’s shadow, but as I learned from a Q&A with the author at The Met, she was more than a wife, she was an agent, a deal-maker, and of course a muse to the boys of the Surrealist clique. I sat at a dinner across from the Dalí’s lawyer who explained that every now-and-then they would send him to Paris (hotel: Le Meurice) to transport wads of cash back to Geneva. The best memoirs or biographies have tales wilder than fiction.
Next: I’m in search of my next great summer beach read. I like to flip through short stories in summer—easy to take swimming breaks—and I’ve waded through Updike, Cheever, Borges, and Nabokov over the past couple summers. Any suggestions?
SARA MC, contributing editor
Now: I’ve loved Angela Carter since I was old enough to know what I was reading, but not quite sure what I was feeling—the perfectly normal sick little things young women feel guilty about. Her books felt like magical fuckery: sexy, disgusting, surreal, and most of all fun. Book of Wayward Girls and Wicked Women by Angela Carter isn’t a novel written by her, but a collection of stories she chose, and is exactly what it says it is: a book of wayward girls and wicked Women, with a collection of stories about and by women, including Colette, Bessie Head, Jamaica Kincaid and other literary legends. A whole spectrum of smart, sexy, sickening writing (short, too, so you can dip in and out).
Next: I’ll read anything Fitcarraldo Editions puts out, so next on the shelf is Big Kiss, Bye-Bye by Claire-Louise Bennett. I don’t even need to know what it’s about before buying. So maybe just trust me blindly like I trust them?
ALEX KESSLER, deputy editor
Now: A woman wakes up in Paris and the date never changes—no sunsets, no tomorrows, just an endless loop of 18 November. What sounds claustrophobic turns hypnotic fast. In On the Calculation of Volume (Book I) by Solvej Balle, she journals, tweaks tiny details, rewatches her day like a scratched film reel, and spirals into a strange, beautiful meditation on time, memory, and the quiet horror of being stuck. It’s slow cinema in book form, and I’m weirdly into it.
Next: Make It Ours by Robin Givhan. After all that stillness, I need a jolt. Virgil Abloh didn’t just design clothes—he reshaped the cultural blueprint, pulling streetwear into luxury, and shifting how power looks and moves. Givhan, a critic with bite and clarity, isn’t here to mythologize—she’s here to analyze. I’m reading for the sharp takes and the kind of criticism that actually says something.