Summer Reading Recs 2026: Faculty & Staff Recs

Summer Reading Recommendations

Welcome to the English Department's 13th annual summer reading recommendations. Once you've explored this list, you can click on “summer reading” to see recommendations from previous years. Stay tuned for recommendations from members of the Student Advisory Council.


Michelle Filling-Brown

The Emperor of Gladness will have you contemplating what it means to truly live and find joy. The characters ask us to consider family, memory, choice, addiction, pain, empathy, and second chances. Although the novel has moments of deep sadness, the comedic scenes with the crew at HomeMarket, a fictionalized Boston Market-type restaurant featuring cornbread with a secret ingredient, bring warmth and absurdity that beautifully balance the profound darkness.

It’s this mix of heartbreaking generational trauma and ridiculous humor that drew me into this novel. Ocean Vuong’s prose is lyrical and immersive. He writes with such vivid detail that I’m convinced I know what the secret basement library with yellow, brittled books smells like and what it feels like to stomp on dinner rolls in the rain. The novel is haunting and stayed with me long after I finished my time with Hai, Grazina, Sonny, and the crew, reminding me that through human connection we can find happiness even in our lowest moments.

Adrienne Perry

A dear friend sent me Mon Cher Amour: The Love Letters of Albert Camus and Maria Casarès, 1944-1959 for my birthday. Translated from the French by Sandra Smith and Cory Stockwell, the hundreds of letters contained in this massive volume chronicle the life, love, carriers, and milieus of two absolute stars--Camus in the literary and political realm and Cazares as a renowned actor of radio, stage, and screen. I have only begun to read this marvelous book, but can already say it is a stunning, humbling example of the power of letters and correspondence. The letters' honesty and beauty remind me that seeking, reading, correspondence, connection, passion, and introspection can be part of everyday life and that we can wring more out of life through curiosity and feeling. I have long been an admirer of Camus, especially given his writings gathered into Neither Victims Nor Executioners, so I am eager to learn more about him, as well as Casares.

 

Tsering Wangmo

I’ve been carrying sentences from Arundhati Roy’s Mother Mary Comes To Me in my body months after reading it. The memoir tackles the author’s complicated and painful relationship with her mother, but like Roy’s last novel (The Ministry of Utmost Happiness) this text is also a critique of India under Prime Minister Narendra Modi. I so admire how Roy shows the scars from her childhood while achieving at the same time the reader’s understanding, even admiration, of Mother Mary as an educator and activist in addition to being a formidable mother. It’s Roy’s stunning tribute to her mother.

Last summer a friend from Argentina gave me Tender is The Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica, (translated from the Spanish by Sarah Moses) saying the plot builds around a society where animal meat is no longer edible after a virus outbreak. In an article in the The Irish Times on February 21, 2020, the author writes she wanted to tell a story about a time in the future when cannibalism could be legalised. Incredible plot, right? The novel made my friend think about capitalism, the normalization of cruelty, and language: what is done with words as well as the inadequacy of language in crucial moments. I was intrigued by the book’s effect on my friend and am eager to read the novel.

  

 

Mary Mullen

One book that I read and am stilling thinking about is Yasmin Zaher, The Coin. It’s zany and surreal. This story of a Palestinian woman who teaches middle school for underprivileged students and gets involved in a Birkin Bag swindling operation stuck with me both because of what it says about our world and because of the unexpected unfolding of its plot. There are stunning sentences throughout.

I look forward to reading a book I bought on the bookstore expedition: Elizabeth Taylor’s Angel. I enjoy Taylor’s subtle, sharp writing. I picked up this book because I think it is a story of what Jenny Offill calls an "art monster": a writer who prioritizes creativity over mundane responsibilities. What could be better?

 

Travis Foster

If you’re looking for something slim and mind-expanding, I highly recommend Emma Heaney’s 2025 This Watery Place: Four Essays on Gestation. Too often, we bury conception, gestation, birth, and infant care under falsifying spectacles. Heaney cuts through all of that by focusing on the knowledge of experience, grounding brilliant insights about reproductive freedom, cisness, and state violence in bodies and their lived reality.

For something completely different, Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks (1901) is one of the most enjoyable novels I’ve picked up in a long time. It's a 700-page German family saga tracking four generations of a merchant family, and it moves with surprising speed. Mann published this when he was only 26, and it remains easy to see why it then became central to his Nobel Prize. If you pick it up, I recommend the John E. Woods translation, which, I think, beautifully captures the humor and natural dialogue.

 

 

Yumi Lee

Kaori Ekuni – Twinkle Twinkle, or 반짝반짝 빛나는

One of my goals this summer is to improve my Korean language reading and writing, and a friend recommended, and lent me, a Korean translation of the Japanese novelist Kaori Ekuni’s Twinkle Twinkle. It’s about a gay man and his female friend who enter into a fake marriage to appease their parents; shenanigans ensue. My friend loved it and thought the translation was also very readable for my level, so I’m excited to give it a try.

Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon

Even as a scholar of 20th and 21st century American literature, and one who’s read, taught, and written about other Morrison novels, I’ve somehow never sat down and read Song of Solomon in its entirety. I started rectifying this shameful error on a recent short trip, and truly, what a treat to get to read a Morrison novel for the first time and luxuriate in the sentences, the imagery, the sensory details (her mind!!). Summer is also a perfect time to start a long book, I think, so I’m excited to get immersed.

Jean Lutes

I'm diving immediately into Tana French's The Keeper (Penguin Random House, 2026), the final book in her crime-novel trilogy featuring a retired Chicago detective in rural Ireland. French's atmospheric, subtle narratives always remind me of my mother, a devoutly Catholic daughter of Irish immigrants who was a devoted fan of the television police procedural. Then I'll reread Charles Dickens' Bleak House, a doorstopper of a Victorian novel that I've been wanting to revisit, partly because of its irresistible depiction of a legal system that perverts justice. After that, two books by colleagues (one about-to-be, the other longstanding) are at the top of my list.

First, I'll return to a book of poetry I encountered and appreciated, but lacked time to savor, during the bustle of the school year: Emily Skillings' Tantrums in Air (The Song Cave, 2025). Emily will join our department this coming fall, and before she arrives in person in August, I'm looking forward to spending more time with her poetry, which I find riveting: joyful, deep, funny, and pomposity-free. Then I'll reread Alice Dailey's Mother of Stories: An Elegy (Fordham University Press, 2024), a lyrical, challenging memoir about motherhood and stories. In recent years, it has been a thrill — and a reminder of the varied, always-emerging talents of our English department faculty — to watch Alice, a highly accomplished literary critic who taught in our department for many years, begin publishing creative nonfiction. This particular bit of summer reading is really cheating, however, since I'm teaching a course in Fall 2026 on Fictions of Motherhood, and I'll cite some of Alice's work in my class.

  

Megan Quigley

Three Guineas by Virginia Woolf

Woolf’s most overtly political essay, she maintains that war, patriarchy, and political institutions are intrinsically linked. In my two Woolf classes we read her fictional novels and memoirs (wonderful!) but I think perhaps we need to take off the gloves and read the polemics next time! So I want to re-read this work and look at why she decided to include photographs. I also will read Flush, her biography of a dog, for a bit more light-hearted fun.

Orbital by Samantha Harvey

Booker prize-winning lyrical novel about the experience of memory, time, and love when in orbit. I’ve been eager to read.

    

 

Joe Drury

I just tore through Patrick Radden Keefe’s new book, London Falling. It’s a masterful, gripping exploration of the financial-criminal complex that has transformed London over the last three decades and explains much of the world we now live in, though it starts out as an investigation into the mysterious death of 19-year-old Zac Brettler, who fell from the balcony of a luxury apartment building overlooking the Thames in 2019. After his death, his parents learned that he had been living a secret life pretending to be the son of a Russian oligarch. It’s a remarkable story with an astonishing cast of Trumpian grifters, mobsters, and confidence men, told with a Dickensian eye for the corruption and cruelty hiding beneath the city’s glittering surfaces. If you like this book, you will also enjoy Reefe's astonishing Say Nothing, another utterly enthralling investigation of a mysterious death, this time in Belfast, Northern Ireland in the 1970s, that turns into a complex, exhilarating exploration of the history of the IRA, the Troubles, and the legacy of British imperialism in Ireland. Warning: Keefe’s books will make you put off all the other things you have to do until you've finished reading them!

 

Lora Novak

I have three selections that our ladies' book club enjoyed:
1. These Precious Days by Ann Patchett
2. The Correspondent by Virginia Evans
3. Tell Me Everything by Elizabeth Strout

Kimberly Takahata

With the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence coming up in July, I've been thinking a lot about what the "early Americas" can teach us about our present moment, especially as the subject of contemporary reimaginings. I'll be diving into Laila Lalami's novel The Moor's Account this summer, which tells the story of Mustafa al-Zamori, an enslaved man called Esteban in Spanish agent Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca's 1542 account of an expedition through what is now the US south. They were two of only four men who survived. This book promises to help us reflect on the kinds of stories that survive across centuries and all the stories we still might discover.




Cathy Staples

I am always on the search for new books exploring our relationship with nature so one new book I am hoping to read is Michael Symmons Roberts' Dog Star. The publisher’s description is enticing: “Dog Star is a book of linked poems rooted in encounters with real, imagined or mythical birds, trees, fish, flowers, bacteria, chimeras – ancient connections reshaped by technological and political change and critically endangered by species and habitat loss.” I love the work of his I've seen online. Here's an excerpt from a poem from the Poetry Foundation website. If "Mapping the Genome: is not in his new book, I'll be ordering another one of his books!  

Somewhere out there are remnants

of our evolution, genes for how



to fly south, sense a storm,

hunt at night, how to harden

your flesh into hide or scales.



These are the miles of dead code.

Every desert has them......



Mike Malloy

I thought I’d recommend two very different books for summer reading: one long and cosmic, the other short and parochial.

 The long one even has a long title: The Day Lasts More than a Hundred Years, by Chingiz Aitmatov. Aitmatov was a Kyrgyz-Soviet writer who published this book in Russian in the 1980s, but it’s available in a very readable English translation by F.J. French. The story takes place over a single day and follows two narrative threads, one about a Kazakh man trying to bury his friend in a traditional manner, the other about a joint US-Soviet encounter with an extraterrestrial intelligence in outer space. The way these two narratives intersect, echo, and rhyme is deeply interesting, and the poetic evocation of the Kazakh steppe (and outer space!) is powerful.

The short one is also a translation into English, this one from Irish, and it’s Pádraig Ó Siochfhradha’s Jimeen (translated by Íde ní Laoghaire and Peter Fallon). This is a slice-of-life coming-of-age tale about a boy in the Munster Gaeltacht who gets into various silly scrapes and relates his adventures with a distinctive Huck Finn-esque narrative voice. It’s mostly light fun, but it builds to a surprisingly emotional conclusion as you realize the narrator has been growing up, almost imperceptibly, the whole time.

 

 

Amanda Eliades

So far, 2026 has been a great year of new releases for me and I am having the best time reading a lot of brand-new books! I have two recommendations and two hopefuls for this summer. Everyone has been talking about The Correspondent by Virginia Evans for such good reason. This is a wonderful epistolary novel about a retired lawyer who communicates with people in her life (and Joan Didion!) via beautiful (and funny) letters. This one made me laugh and cry, my favorite type of novel! I also loved Lady Tremaine by Rachel Hochhauser, a sort of Cinderella retelling from the stepmother’s perspective. I love fairytale retellings and this one does not disappoint. Female rage abounds!

I’m looking forward to reading Yesteryear by Caro Clarire Burke this summer. You can’t go into any bookstore or talk to a bookseller nowadays without hearing about this one. The main character is a “tradwife” influencer who wakes up in the 1800s and is forced to live the life she’s been sort of selling online. I am so intrigued by this one and can’t wait to see if I love it as much as everyone else has been lately. I’d also like to get to Thistlemarsh by Moorea Corrigan which takes place in a rundown cottage in the English countryside. The cottage may or may not be haunted, I think? I can’t wait to find out!

 

 

Alan Drew

We just had Alvaro Enrigue and his translator, Natasha Wimmer, here at Villanova for the 2026 Literary Festival. I loved his last book, You Dreamed of Empires, which is set in 1519 Tenochtitlan on the eve of the Spanish destruction of the Aztec and the larger Mexica civilization. It's a mind trip of a book which seeks to reimagine the fateful encounter between Cortez and Moctezuma amid a haze of magic mushrooms. (As I said, it's a trip.) This book, Now I Surrender, is also historical fiction, set in the 19th Century borderlands of Mexico and the United States as both countries' armies try to battle Geronimo and his band of Apache into surrender. Magic mushrooms or not, I'm sure this book will be a wild trip, too, that makes us rethink the histories we think we know.

Kamran Javadizadeh

Over the last year or so, I have become kind of obsessed with Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume. It’s a Danish novel that is being published in seven installments—the English translation of the Book IV came out this April, and Book V is due in October—and I think of it as a cross between Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and the Bill Murray movie Groundhog Day. The novel takes the form of the diary of a woman named Tara Selter, a rare book dealer, who has become “stuck” in a single day, November 18. It’s hard to describe. Because on the one hand very little happens, or rather very little can happen, since anything that does happen seems to get reset to nothing by the next day, the next November 18. But on the other hand, because Tara’s understanding of what is (or isn’t!) happening to her, and to the world she inhabits, grows and deepens, as the day keeps repeating, and as she learns what the “rules” of the repetition seem to be, the most minor variations begin to acquire this magical and sometimes even shocking quality. I’m currently reading Book IV, and, without giving anything away, I can say that things do happen in this world, and that Balle has written a high-concept, literary novel that also manages to be a page turner, one that makes its reader aware, again and again, of the strange temporal experience of reading itself.

Lara Rutherford-Morrison

I just finished reading Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer and highly recommend it if you enjoy unreliable narrators, sentient fungus, and worldbuilding that is both beautiful and extremely creepy. I’m also recommending the podcast LeVar Burton Reads, in which LeVar Burton reads short stories, mostly (but not exclusively) science fiction and fantasy, from a diverse range of authors. The back catalogue includes works by well-known authors like Kurt Vonnegut, Louise Erdrich, and N.K. Jemisin, as well as new stories by up-and-coming writers. I’ve discovered several authors I really enjoy while walking my neighborhood and listening to Burton’s wonderful voice.

    

Dr. Joe Drury's Presentation for the American Society for 18th Century Studies Conference

Dr. Joe Drury recently presented at the American Society for 18th Century Studies conference in Philadelphia, which took place April 9-11. At the event, Dr. Drury presented his paper, “‘A Singular Man’: James Boswell’s Oddness,” which posits Boswell’s “oddness” as whimsy, a trait characterized by his almost compulsive tendency to overshare. 

I was given the opportunity to sit down with Dr. Drury to discuss his paper in further detail. He cites Sianne Ngai’s book Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, and Interesting, as sparking his interest in whimsy. Ngai’s book, Dr. Drury explains, is a “cultural analysis of our everyday aesthetic vocabulary,” especially that vocabulary which extends beyond the popular yet constraining conception of aesthetics as beauty. While Ngai’s novel explores the “zany, cute, and interesting,” Dr. Drury is more interested in whimsy. Dr. Drury explains that whimsy “has its origins in the period that I study, the Enlightenment, the long 18th century…I begin with this idea: why did this word emerge? What is it?...What are people using it to do and say?”

To answer these questions, Dr. Drury turns to James Boswell, Scottish biographer and prolific diarist. Although best known for his biography of Samuel Johnson, Boswell’s journals, which were published posthumously, also sparked significant intrigue. Dr. Drury draws particular attention to The London Journal, the first of more than a dozen volumes of Boswell’s diaries. Dr. Drury explains of The London Journal, “it sold more than a million copies, in large part because Boswell describes his sexual escapades in some detail. But it’s also incredibly frank and open about himself.” Even before his journals were published, however, Boswell was often described by his peers as an “odd” individual because of his tendency to overshare. Dr. Drury notes that perhaps our contemporary age of social media is more comfortable with oversharing, “but in the 18th century, it was not common to do that, and particularly for men…Men were expected to be stoic, constrained and disciplined.” Boswell’s journals express his shame about his own character, but they also express moments of pride: Dr. Drury says, “I give all these examples of all the different moments where he acts on a whim or does something whimsical and appears to be quite proud of doing it.” 

Dr. Drury’s project thus posits Boswell’s “oddness” as a sort of self-aware whimsicality. Many of Boswell’s contemporaries, Dr. Drury explains, saw him as entirely unconscious of his character, as somewhat of a babbling fool. In contrast, Dr. Drury says that Boswell “knows what he’s doing and he thinks there’s value to it. He’s modern in the way that he thinks being open and vulnerable with each other is actually a way to form intimacy and is also a way to reveal the essential identity of an individual.” In this way, Boswell was not only conscious of his own whimsical nature, but also pushing the boundaries of masculinity in the 18th century. Dr. Drury notes, “this is about how Boswell’s candor and openness breached all these kinds of norms about what it meant to be a gentleman that were very shocking at the time.” 

Dr. Drury concludes by telling me that not only did The London Journal make him want to be a scholar of the 18th century, but that he will also be teaching the book in his upcoming fall 2026 course entitled “Serious Whimsy.” In his course, he’ll connect Boswell’s writing to an aesthetic of whimsy that Dr. Drury cites as “absolutely central to the 18th century.” If Boswell doesn’t intrigue you, Dr. Drury tells me that he’ll also be teaching Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes, the ending of which Dr. Drury describes as “rapturous.” Regardless of what brings you to Dr. Drury’s course, it promises to be a fascinating exploration of whimsy as a serious aesthetic and social force of the 18th century.

English Senior Book-Giving Ceremony 2026

On Friday, May 1st, 2026, we celebrated our graduating seniors with a book-giving ceremony in which each graduating senior was given a book by a faculty member who knew them and could speak to their academic strengths and interests. The ceremony concluded with a moving toast from Dr. Michael Dowdy. To learn a little more about these fantastic graduates and to get good recommendations for books to read this summer, this blog post includes the books faculty gave students and the reasons why below, as well as some pictures from the event.

Sophia Adams

Faculty Member: Megan Quigley

Book: Rebecca Solnit, Orwell’s Roses

Sophia this memoir thinking about the place of ‘moments of being’ through nature in a world in political crisis, connects to all the work that we’ve done together. My joy that our time together came full circle (Woolf in first year, Woolf TA in final year) was only matched by watching you become the educator I always knew you could be as you taught our ecco-feminist class so brilliantly. You will be terribly missed next year and I cannot wait to hear what you decide to do with your wonderfully perceptive skills of performance, writing, and reading.

Maria Andrinopoulos

Faculty Member: Lauren Shohet

Book: Karen Hesse, Out of the Dust 

Maria, the beautiful poems you wrote for your creative-response midterm and final in our Shakespeare course put me in mind of Hesse’s knack of evoking character and narrative in lyric form. I find this novel both sad and affirming, thinking about what we can take forward from loss, which I also find a through-line in your writing this semester about the figures of Tiresias and especially your extended consideration of Medusa. I admire the tenacity with which you pursue multiple ways to think about loss, recuperation, and transformation across the different genres we’ve studied together–and this seems a rich set of interests to take with you into your post-college life.

Margaux Barrett    

Faculty Member: Tsering Wangmo

Book: Ross Gay, Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude 

Margaux, in our first class of writing poetry last semester, you mentioned it was your first poetry workshop. It was such a pleasure to witness the delight you got out of understanding the vocal realities in a poem. In your poems and your critical essays you are attentive to the linguistic effects of syntax and sound. This semester you wrote on how Raja Rao is able to capture the tempo of life in India by examining the melodic and intimate notes in his sentences in the novel Kanthapura. Your poems make me wish to pause a little longer to listen closely to the effect of sound as you point to the cracks. I thought of Ross Gay when I was selecting a book for you for the following reasons: his deeply observant eye, his ability to make us see and hear the world we live in, and his wisdom making us realize that gratitude also observes the pain of reality. I think you’ll find many reasons to sing when you read his poems.

M.T. Barry

Faculty Member: Travis Foster

Book: Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

In your excellent senior capstone project, MT, you argue that Moby-Dick’s 96th chapter, “The Try-Works,” must be read through both senses of vanity at once: the overreaching pride that fuels Ahab’s monomania and the futility that shadows everything the Pequod pursues. You show how Melville’s italicized “All is vanity” anchors the chapter in scripture even as the novel’s bleakness and incessant questioning unsettle scriptural authority. I chose Wharton’s The House of Mirth for you because Wharton draws from the same source. Wharton’s title comes from Ecclesiastes 7:4—“the heart of fools is in the house of mirth”—and the novel turns that verse into its plot: her protagonist, Lily Bart, moves through glittering houses of mirth that slowly reveal themselves as houses of foolish futility and loss. I chose this novel for you because your deep interest in the question—what happens when writers turn from reading scripture to crafting stories—is so urgent and significant, and I hope you never stop pursuing it.

Bianca Brucker

Faculty Member: Jean Lutes 

Book: Charles Dickens, Bleak House

Bianca, I chose Bleak House by Charles Dickens for you because 1) I know you’re up for the challenge of reading this long novel, which juggles multiple storylines and dozens of characters, 2) I know you’re headed directly to law school and you have great interest in social justice, so I figured you would be fascinated by Bleak House, which is one of literary history’s great institutional take-downs of the legal system as an engine of human misery 3) the narrative voice of Esther Summerson in Bleak House expresses warm emotional connections and a grounded humanity that remind me of your own way in the world. The future needs your kindness, your work ethic, and your generous vision. I hope you enjoy Dickens’ unforgettable characters and find renewed resolve in his funny, maddening depiction of systemic injustices.

Lydia Chandler

Faculty Member: Lauren Shohet

Book: Elizabeth Jane Howard, The Light Years

Lydia, I chose this book for you because I hoped you’d enjoy it as a twentieth-century English counterpart to Alcott’s Little Women, which you’ve been writing about so interestingly in our senior seminar. I hope you’ll find the artistic endeavor and play of this girl-centered family as interesting as the Marches. I’ve been intrigued by your explorations as what counts as feminist agency, which in our adaptation seminar you’ve explored both analytically and by writing an admirable poem. This book is the first in a pentalogy, which takes the story from the interwar years of this volume up to the 1950s–perhaps you’ll be able to find space for more of these now that you’re heading out into a world without syllabi.

Isabel Choi

Faculty Member: Tsering Wangmo

Book: Dictee by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha

It’s been such a joy to read your work in the memoir workshop this semester. I admire the flexibility of your mind and the generosity with which you approach texts, those we’ve read together in class and those written by your peers. In your own work, you play with different registers of time and space to call into question conventional understandings of temporality, family, and place, and also to get closer to the emotional skeleton of a memory. I’ve selected Dictee by Theresa Kyung Cha for you because of your brilliant use of fragments, because of your investigations into themes such as immigration and assimilation, and because of the many ways you allow questions and contradictions into your work not with the ambition to resolve them for the reader but to live with them for a bit, with compassion. In your work, as in Cha’s, the emotional and historical significance is palpable. I’m so grateful to have been your reader.

Catherine Donnelly

Faculty Member: Yumi Lee

Book: Rita Bullwinkel, Headshot

Cate, I know that at Villanova, you’ve spent just as much time out on the water as the coxswain of the rowing team as you have diving into books for all of your English classes. With this in mind, I chose Rita Bullwinkel’s 2024 debut novel Headshot for you – it’s a novel that follows eight young women traveling to a boxing tournament, bringing us into their minds and emotions and struggles as they prepare their bodies to compete in the ring. I wonder if the way the novel evokes the joy (and pain) of pushing yourself to greatness will resonate with your own experiences here at Villanova. It was a joy to get to know you and get to be part of your journey during your time here – I hope you enjoy this book, and that you keep on rowing and keep on reading as you move onto your next chapter.

Paige Durham

Faculty Member: Lauren Shohet

Book: Chloe Dalton, Raising Hare

Paige, Chloe Dalton’s patient consideration of wildness and domesticity, comfort and danger, makes me think of your own constellation of animal-wisdom, poetic energy, and readerly appreciation. It has been lovely getting to know you this year, and I’m impressed by your consistent engagement with whatever you read. I’ve appreciated your generosity in sharing your dog-knowledge and your compassion about dog problems! I hope Raising Hare will be a welcome companion as you journey further into the multi-species world, and the many different kinds of texts you read and write.

Mary Kate Farrell

Faculty Member: Brooke Hunter

Book: Roger Deakin, Waterlog: A Swimmer’s Journey Through Great Britain

Mary Kate, I chose Roger Deakin’s Waterlog: A Swimmer’s Journey Through Great Britain. It’s an account of Deakin swimming his way through the lakes, lochs, moats, and other wild landscapes of Great Britain, and about his encounter with the natural, more-than-human world that he meets on that aquatic adventure. It’s a book about swimming, communing with the world in its wildness, and the lessons one can learn if you follow water and flow with it, to paraphrase Deakin. It’s also a funny and thoughtful view of swimming as a metaphor for life that I thought you might enjoy as you start your own wild new adventure post Villanova.

Charlotte Finch

Faculty Member: Jean Lutes

Book: Colson Whitehead, The Intuitionist 

Charlotte, I chose Colson Whitehead’s bold, genre-busting first novel, The Intuitionist, for you. It has an irresistible premise: it is set in an alternate mid-20th century city where elevator inspection is a serious profession divided into two warring schools — the Empiricists (who inspect mechanically) and the Intuitionists (who inspect by feel and inner perception). It sounds absurd, I know, but somehow it totally works. Because you wrote about the novel James, Percival Everett’s retelling of Huck Finn, with such insight for my class, I thought you would enjoy Whitehead’s novel, whose protagonist is the city’s first Black woman elevator inspector. She navigates a white male bureaucracy while pursuing a mysterious design for the "perfect elevator." I think you’ll find this novel a rewarding ride, given your gifts as a close reader, your wry sense of humor, and your subtle approach to agency.

Mackenzee Fritz

Faculty Member: Mary Mullen

Book: Agatha Christie, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd

Kenzee, I’ve loved your many contributions to two semesters of reading and community, where you showed your uncanny ability to not only evaluate but completely predict a plot. Because your predictions were the highlight of Anatomy of an Alibi–the book disappointed–I thought I’d give you another mystery to cleanse your palate. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is a classic, famous for its surprising, genre-defying ending. There is no pressure to predict the twist, but after witnessing your careful and brilliant reading, I know you have it in you!

Kaitlin Gibson

Faculty Member: Mary Mullen

Book: Elizabeth Bowen, The Last September

Kaitlin, it’s been such a pleasure witnessing you deepen your interest in and knowledge of Irish women’s writing. I had a hard time deciding what to select for you because I know you’ve already read so many of my favorites and I wanted to get it just right. I decided on Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September, a haunting big house novel about coming of age in Ireland as the world collapses. My hunch is that you’ll be inspired by Bowen’s prose and find pockets of hope and defiance from the descriptions of the ruins.

Gabrielle Girault

Faculty Member: Yumi Lee

Book: Bernardine Evaristo, Girl, Woman, Other

Gaby, it’s been a blessing to have you in class during your time at Villanova - keeping in mind your sharp insights into characters and context and your keen observational eye for the ways literature serves as a reflection of the world, I chose Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other for you. It’s an absorbing, thought-provoking, and beautifully written novel that tells the intertwined stories of a multigenerational cast of characters navigating the challenges of modern life; I hope it will inspire you, as it inspired me, to think deeply about where and how we inhabit the world and form community with others. We’ve been so lucky to get to do that together with you over these past four years. Congratulations!

Abigail Glynn

Faculty Member: Joe Drury

Book: Curtis Sittenfeld, Eligible 

Abby, I have loved having you in my classes over the last few years. You bring a bright, positive energy to everything you do and your work is always thoughtful and considered. I know you enjoyed the contemporary reimagining of Pride and Prejudice that we read at the end of our Jane Austen course last semester, so I thought I’d give you another one, this time set in Cincinnati, Ohio! It features Darcy as a hotshot brain surgeon and Elizabeth as a jaded New York reporter who has returned to her home town to help out with her tiresome family. Sittenfeld is a master of the preppy comedy and does a great line in embarrassing cocktail party chitchat, awkward social situations, and screwball banter between the two leads. I read it a while ago now, but I remember it fizzing along. I think you’ll find it a refreshing palate cleanser over the summer, as you prepare for the next chapter of your life. Congratulations!

Madeleine Guiliano

Faculty Member: Lauren Shohet

Book: Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis

Maddie, I chose this vivid, beautiful graphic novel for you because I so admire the way you express yourself in multiple forms: drawing, creative prose (like your Ovid adaptation via Bad Bunny!), and analytic responses. Satrapi’s reflections on how young people engage the world also resonate, for me, with your insightful discussions of identity, trauma, and longing in characters we’ve encountered in both Shakespeare and Ovid. I feel like your own energy balances contemplation and collaboration–so your interest in multiple media working in concert makes sense. I hope you enjoy all the different dimensions of Persepolis.

Jenine Hazlewood

Faculty Member: Adrienne Perry

Book: Deesha Philyaw, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies 

When I taught for Writers in the Schools in Houston, the fourth graders and I would start every lesson with the following mantra: “I am a writer. My voice matters. My words can change the world.” In Writing Creative Nonfiction last year, I thought of this mantra when reading your work. Jenine is a writer. Her voice matters. Her words can change the world. Now I don’t just think it; I know. As a writer, you take creative and stylistic risks that push the boundaries of form, narrative, persona, memory, and movement through time. You are funny, poignant, and vulnerable as hell. As a reader, you so often offer the comment that moves my thinking forward into new, more exciting terrain. It’s been a profound delight, in other words, to spend time in classes with your brain. All of this also puts you in good company with other writers, and which is why I thought you might enjoy Deesha Philyaw’s The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, a book Kirkus reviewers called “tender, fierce, proudly Black and beautiful.” We’re blessed to know you, Jenine, and to have had you among our ranks. As you head off into the coming year, I’ll give you a piece of advice from one of my beloved mentors. “Don’t look back. Don’t look down. Just fly.”

Kathleen Lewis

Faculty Member: Megan Quigley

Book: Zadie Smith, White Teeth

Katie! I hope you don’t already own White Teeth but it seemed to me that now that you’ve demonstrated that you are a Smith scholar by your Falvey Scholar award-winning research on Smith’s On Beauty, you should read her millennium book that was her big break out book! Katie, as you know, since the first moment you walked into my class as a first year and surprised me by your maturity, insights, and dead pan humor, it has been a delight working with you up through your honors thesis on the role of academic libraries, inclusivity, the american dream and the promise of universities.. I’m so excited for your opportunities at Suffolk law school and please always remember Villanova as your first home where you lived out your North-East coast campus novel dream. You will be missed!

Sinéad Masterson   

Faculty Member: Cathy Staples

Book: Annabelle Abbs, Windswept: Walking the Paths   

Sinéad, as poet and writer you know what it is to be in the hold of a landscape—that feeling of being almost inhabited by what surrounds you: a hillside, a spared tree or a grey mare come up to the pasture gate on which you are standing. And you well know that walking out-of-doors in all weathers sharpens the ear and eye, all the senses, even the uncanny ones. For these reasons, I think you’ll be intrigued by Annabel Abbs' fine book. As an English major, I suspect you’ll be surprised by the cast of women writers who walked and hiked. Some names you’ll know, i.e. Nan Shepherd and her beloved Cairngorm mountains from our Nature Writing Workshop, but also Frieda Lawrence, Daphne du Maurier, Simone de Beauvoir, Georgia O’Keefe, and British painter Gwen John. Annabel Abbs retraces the tracks of each woman’s journey on foot, noting the way that wild walking can fortify a woman’s artistic path and resolve. I hope this book will inspire you, Sinéad. It’s been a joy getting to know you, and reading your lovely work!

Zachary Murray

Faculty Member: Kamran Javadizadeh

Book: Seamus Heaney, The Spirit Level

Zach, you wrote a terrific final paper for “25 Poems” about Seamus Heaney’s “Postscript,” which is the final poem in the collection I’ve chosen for you, The Spirit Level. Your essay movingly examined Heaney’s advice in the poem: he tells his reader to take the time to “drive out west,” a phrase whose many potential meanings you thought through with real sensitivity, and to keep the heart open to what it felt when one extended oneself in that way. I thought you might treasure a copy of the book which that poem concludes. The poems in this book provide a rich mosaic of the life that Heaney knew, a life that included ordinary pleasures and extraordinary political strife. I hope you’ll keep it close as you leave Villanova and “drive out west,” whether literally, metaphorically, or (what I recommend) both!

Wyatt Oatman

Faculty Member: Brooke Hunter

Book: Gilead, Marilynne Robinson 

Wyatt, Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead is a story told through a letter from an aging father to his son. It’s a beautifully written musing on faith, family, and how enormous even the smallest moments of life can appear when viewed retrospectively. In Medieval Romance we read many narratives that used faith and retellings of the past to justify terrible actions. Gilead’s personal history and spiritual vision offer a counterview, however imperfect, to our class readings. As you take your first steps into the future after Villanova, I hope that you can enjoy the narrative of an old man recalling his time where you are now: at the beginning of a new narrative with so many wonderful possibilities.

Ella O’Shea

Faculty Member: Kamran Javadizadeh

Book: Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun

Ella, I had the great pleasure of teaching you in your first year at Villanova–not in English but in ACS. At the end of that year, you wrote a lovely essay about Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. I so admired how vulnerable and searching that essay was–you used the novel’s shocking revelations about a group of boarding school students in a kind of alternate universe England of the late-twentieth century to reflect on what had surprised and challenged you in your first year away from home here at Villanova. That essay brought out some of your unique strengths as a student: your sensitivity of mind and curiosity about the world, your willingness to turn your gaze inward. For you I’ve chosen Ishiguro’s latest novel, Klara and the Sun–which I won’t spoil for you! Except to say that I think you might be drawn to its account of what it’s like to grow up and seek out friendship and truth in a world that can feel unknowable and strange..

Molly Pawlik

Faculty Member: Adrienne Perry

Book: Stag’s Leap, Sharon Olds

Molly, one of the joys of this year has been getting to know you, your voice, and your story. I have been impressed and inspired by the way you dove into the English major as a junior, not to mention your critical thinking about the intersections between that major and your work in psychology. You understand—from the inside out—the way literature calls us to reckon with the complexity of human experience, both our own and others’. One of the writers I see as engaged in a rigorous inquiry of head and heart, like you, is the poet Sharon Olds. I began reading Olds in the 90s, and she has always struck me as fairly fearless, whether writing about a mother who funds a center for burn victims or the pain of watching a marriage of many years dissolve. Olds’ work is ruthlessly honest, emotional, yet generous, and deeply brilliant and surprising—much in the way your work operates. As you head to law school next year, I hope you can keep Olds and other poets and writers like her close, as they remind us of what it means to live a real life, an examined life, and the need to reckon with our pleasure and pain along the way. Congratulations!

Sean Rooney

Faculty Member: Alan Drew

Book: Borges, Collected Fictions

It was a pleasure getting to know you as a writer, both in Writing the Traditional Novel and in Writing the Short Story last fall. I was always struck by the quiet humor in your writing and the kindness with which you treated your characters. Your characters may have been screw ups, but they were screw ups a reader could root for and ultimately care about. In novel writing, your workshop comments often referenced Christopher Nolan films—even when the story we were workshopping wasn’t anything like a Nolan film! But that’s how I learned of your love for film and your desire to become a screenwriter. Nolan’s said that the work of Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges has had a significant influence on his films. Both Borges and Nolan share a fascination with time, memory, and the instability of reality. Like Nolan’s screenplays, Borges writes intricate, maze-like narratives where timelines split, loop, or coexist, turning stories into intellectual puzzles. His stories often ask readers to question what’s real and how perception shapes truth. So, as you take off for Los Angeles to get your MFA in screenwriting (congrats, by the way!), I thought I’d send you packing with Borges’s Collected Fictions. Perhaps you will find inspiration--as Nolan did before you--in these mind-bending stories to create ones of your own.

J.P. Tampe

Faculty Member: Michael Dowdy

Book: Alejandro Zambra, Chilean Poet

For JP Tampe, Alejandro Zambra’s Chilean Poet (translated by Megan McDowell): In apology, or in the spirit of the dialectic, or simply in the audacious life-force of a tortured Chilean poet, a book of levity, love and love lost, youthly adventures and misadventures, to counterbalance the utter darkness of another book of dastardly Chilean poets on their own horrific endeavors—Roberto Bolaño’s Nazi Literature in the Americas—that you so brilliantly encountered and wrote about in such searching (and award-winning) fashion, I am pleased to give you Alejandro Zambra’s delightfully mischievous novel Chilean Poet, a book I think you’ll love as you enter your next chapter.

Michael Turner

Faculty Member: Joe Drury

Book: Hanif Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia.

Mike, I chose this for you because I thought you’d enjoy the hilarious insight it provides into the 1970s British music scene, including the extraordinary, baffling moment in the middle of the decade when glam rock gave way to punk. Like you, Kureishi is a stylist with a dry wit. I think you’ll enjoy the satirical bite of his representation of post-imperial Britain, his spot-on critique of the narcissism of the counter-culture and its relation to modern neoliberalism, and his playful repurposing of the Bildungsroman genre. I know you’re a Jane Austen fan, but I think you will get a kick out of this very different kind of English comic novel. Congratulations!

Ailish Wilson

Faculty Member: Travis Foster

Book: Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day

In the first semester of your sophomore year, Ailish, you wrote an essay that predicts your future as a master of the dad joke, an essay that relishes as much in a good pun as one might expect from those gathered in this room. You argued that Dickinson’s “Much Madness is divinest Sense” hides a personal message inside a social critique: that poem’s demure exterior was itself a form of demurral. I chose for you that poem’s tragic mirror, Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day: where Dickinson’s mannered exterior conceals a defiant, secretly powerful self, Ishiguro’s protagonist mistakes deference for dignity and never demurs at all, never sends the hidden message, never lets the mask slip. I thought of this novel for you because it’s basically perfect and because I hope you carry with you not only the argument you articulated so beautifully in your reading of Dickinson, but the full weight of why it matters.