For the last six months, I’ve been reading and rereading Daniel J. Boorstin’s The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America. It was published in 1961 and written just before the dawn of some huge social and political upheavals. Boorstin’s main concern is that “what dominates American experience today is not reality.” The book is incredibly prescient, describing precursors to what we now know as postmodernism, hyperreality, influencers, the notion that one could be famous for being famous, content, doing it for the ’gram, and fake news. It’s both alarming and refreshing to see that we’ve been culturally concerned with the same problems for at least sixty-five years.

When he wrote the book, Boorstin was already well-cemented as a political conservative, a proponent of consensus history, a downplayer of class conflict, and a believer in the primacy of the American “national character.” But in his youth, he’d been a member of the Communist Party. This is partly why I was drawn to the book. Its author’s biography contains a phenomenon I see with some regularity: conservatives and leftists identifying the same problems but arriving at wildly different views of  their causes and solutions.

— Marianela D’Aprile is a writer based in New York City. Her work has appeared, among other places, in n+1, the Nation, and this magazine.

As a European who is regularly forced to think about the excesses of politics on the other side of the Atlantic, I have a penchant for American travel writing (preferably by non-Americans). Yet Vladimir Mayakovsky’s My Discovery of America  — a report of his journey to Mexico and the United States in the early 1920s, shortly after Russia’s revolutionary regime had properly installed itself — is not just an enjoyable piece of prose. In its conclusion, we already find a reckoning with the world the US was going to make in the twentieth century: “It could happen that the United States will jointly turn out to be the final armed defenders of a hopeless bourgeois cause.”

Every Marxist needs a textbook for history’s great transitions. There are several standard works that usually qualify for the early modern period, yet V. G. Kiernan’s State and Society in Europe, 1550–1650, a short monograph by the author’s standards at just 320 pages, of comparative studies contrasts each late medieval monarchy and their transition or nontransition into capitalist modernity. It is an underrated treat, both highly instructive, refreshing everyone’s materialist memory on the period, and a stylistic delight.

Finally, Peter Gowan’s The Global Gamble offers, to my mind, one of the most thoughtful responses to the question, what was globalization? In the 1990, the voguish term became the default mode through which specialists and laymen understood their newly unipolar world. Already at the time, it was clear that the idea hid as much as it revealed, mainly by turning a post-Soviet imperial strategy on behalf of the United States into a passive process of economic adjustment. Now that the 1990s are firmly, resolutely over, the question of what American world order is now being eclipsed is key. Gowan’s book offers the best Marxist treatment of this (recent) past.

— Anton Jäger is a lecturer in politics at the University of Oxford and a columnist for the New York Times.

Adam Shatz’s The Rebel’s Clinic is a well-researched biography of Frantz Fanon that skillfully connects his life and writings. Unlike many intellectuals’ lives, Fanon’s was one of “praxis”: his life, political engagement, and writings were all of one piece. Shatz does not ignore Fanon’s views on the use of violence. Instead he places them in historical and even psychological (Fanon was a psychiatrist by training) context.

V. I. Lenin wrote The State and Revolution just months prior to the October Revolution. Today it poses the fundamental question of what is to be done about the lack of representativeness within democratic institutions. Lenin’s solution was the system of worker’s councils (soviets). The State and Revolution also offers some of the most thoughtful examinations of the relationship between socialism and economic equality.

And finally, Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle is a brilliant book. He allows us to see all the elements of a society of “images,” network connections, social pretenses, and their commodification at their very inception (the book was published in 1967). Not only is it prescient, but it analyzes today’s “society of the spectacle” better than most contemporary attempts.

— Branko Milanovic is an economist, professor at CUNY, and author, most recently, of The Great Global Transformation: National Market Liberalism in a Multipolar World.

In Susie Boyt’s Loved and Missed, the narrator finds the novel’s title written on a headstone and starts laughing. “What’s funny about that?” asks her granddaughter, Lily, whom she has adopted because her daughter, Eleanor, is addicted to heroin. “Well it kind of sounds like the person tried to be loving but the target moved, or the aim was wrong and the love didn’t quite get through,” responds the narrator, Ruth. Then she starts crying.

A joke, told in a graveyard, amid an intimacy created by tragedy — this is the heart of Boyt’s warm and insightful novel. When Ruth, a bookish schoolteacher and single mother, had Eleanor, their closeness was like nothing she had experienced before. Yet so was anguish she felt as Eleanor grew into a stranger, a London street kid with track marks on her arms. Was their perfect bond an illusion, or did Ruth overlook a way to save it? Raising Lily brings Ruth the same joy and forces her to confront the same terror. Through their story, Boyt explores a fundamental dilemma for anyone who hopes to understand another human: the deepest relationships are the most dangerous, because failing to recognize the other can lead to the collapse of the shared world that has become your home.

Loved and Missed was published by the New York Review of Books in 2021, but I read it thinking that it had to be an NYRB Classic. The slight, elegant book has many of the qualities that contemporary novels are often said to lack — finely wrought prose, a full cast of complex characters, an interest in universal themes. By the end, you realize that “one of the chief facts about life is that you cannot prevent anything at all.” This might sound depressing. But as Ruth discovers, it’s no more possible to live without the comfort of true relationships than it is to avoid the perils of misunderstanding. If we miss, at least it implies that we have loved.

— Tadhg Larabee is an editor at Jacobin.

The Rise and Decline of Nations by Mancur Olson is perhaps not everyone’s idea of a beach read, but it’s a surprisingly therapeutic book. It’s easy to get overwhelmed these days. So much needs to be done, yet collective action seems harder than ever. Political economist Mancur Olson’s early work was an attempt to formalize our understanding of collective action failures by showing that large social groups with poor incentives can harm the common good. The Rise and Decline of Nations explores how small groups too can form administrative and regulatory barriers to safeguard their rents. These “distributive coalitions” have helped to produce a large part of our current malaise, from housing costs and inequality to economic stagnation and slow progress on decarbonization. The “abundance agenda” liberals are certainly on to something. But it’s about more than incentives. Providing public options in concert with some old-fashioned capital coercion will be necessary to “build more.” If Zohran Mamdani’s primary victory gave your political optimism a new lease on life, Olson’s 1982 work will help you think more clearly about what’s ahead.

— Dominik A. Leusder is an economist and writer from London.

The collapse of the Soviet Union toward the end of the last century produced numerous political entrepreneurs seeking opportunity in crisis. One such speculator was Yevgeny Prighozin, a criminal and hot dog salesman who would go on to establish the notorious private military company Wagner. John Lechner’s excellent Death Is Our Business chronicles Prighozin’s spectacular rise and fall, along with Wagner’s spread to theaters of conflict on three continents. Lechner’s book is an unusually sensitive piece of war correspondence, but it’s not just that. Lechner also argues convincingly that Wagner represents a new kind of warfare, one that emerged with the rise of globalization and mass privatization, including of war. Death Is Our Business starts with the breakup of Yugoslavia and the “Balkan Ghosts” of those wars that have haunted the world ever since. Vladimir Putin, Lechner reminds us, cited the Kosovo “precedent” as pretext for the annexation of Crimea, and Russian warlords like Igor Girkin (better known as Strelkov), a Bosnian War veteran, went on to play a preeminent role in Russia’s war in Eastern Ukraine. The book follows Wagner’s trail of destruction across the continents and offers evidence for the idea that the Yugoslav Wars never ended; they just entered into global circulation.

— Lily Lynch is a foreign affairs writer currently based in Istanbul.

I read books I and II of Solvej Balle’s still-in-progress seven-novel series, On the Calculation of Volume, in quick succession last month and haven’t stopped thinking about them. The plot is relatively straightforward: a woman wakes to find that it is November 18, a fact that would otherwise be unremarkable were it not the case that the previous day, and the day before that, was also November 18. Initially I found this conceit a bit silly — a kind of literary Groundhog Day — but over the course of the series (book III will appear in the fall) the books become what could loosely be described as a philosophical murder mystery investigated by a protagonist, Tara, who sets out to answer two questions: What killed the future? And does it matter?

I also read Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck recently. The book is a romance of sorts set in the German Democratic Republic (DDR) in the late 1980s. It follows a several-year-long relationship between a man in his fifties and an eighteen-year-old woman brought together by a chance encounter at a bus stop. Erpenbeck was born in East Germany, and reading the book you get a sense of what that was like but also of the reckless naivety of being young and drawn in by promises of romance.

— John-Baptiste Oduor is an editor at Jacobin.

I recommend taking Irving Howe’s Leon Trotsky to the beach. Howe distills Trotsky’s dramatic life into a single volume that’s lively, accessible, and insightful — perfect for those who don’t have the time to tackle Isaac Deutscher’s classic but daunting trilogy. It’s rare for political biography to feel breezy enough for summer, but Howe’s mastery of prose makes it happen.

— Bhaskar Sunkara is the founding editor of Jacobin and president of the Nation.

Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette by Judith Thurman and The Silent Woman by Janet Malcolm are two complementary books that can be read, I think, in either order. The first is a wonderful biography and the second a definitive meta-investigation of the genre. Thurman’s epic life of the French writer Colette follows every step in her journey from provincial schoolgirl to Olympian cougar with exactly the right amount of scholarship and breathtakingly judicious authorial interventions. “On every storm-tossed vessel filled with retching bodies,” writes Thurman, in a characteristic flourish, “there is usually one passenger, freakishly sound, who strolls the pitching deck on steady feet while insolently eating a ham sandwich. Colette was that sort of freak at the fin de siècle.”

Janet Malcolm’s slim gem about the legacy of Sylvia Plath and her estranged husband, Ted Hughes, is really about the “insecurity by which the reader of biography and autobiography (and history and journalism) is always and everywhere dogged” — as well as proper conduct in an interview, the delicate British railway system, and types of guys that flourished in mid-century America. Malcolm’s points about the inevitable failures and omissions of biography are hard to refute — and in this sense, psychoanalytic — but by no means lessen the pleasures of truly great life-writing.

— Krithika Varagur is a founding editor of the Drift and the author of The Call: Inside the Global Saudi Religious Project.

A key piece of the authoritarian right’s playbook since Donald Trump took office again in January seems to be a deliberate attempt to cripple the spirits of those of us who believe a just, democratic, and peaceful world is possible. Speaking for myself, I know they’ve succeeded more than occasionally. I don’t want to let these repulsive creatures win though, so in recent months, I’ve returned to texts that renew my spirit and drill down on some of the core aspects of being alive and in communion with my fellow human beings. One of them is Barbara Ehrenreich’s Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy.

Ehrenreich insists in this book that experiences of collective joy are not incidental to the human experience, but in fact are central to it. Through a whirlwind tour that begins in 10,000 BCE and works its way through Dionysus and Jesus Christ, Carnival and dancing rituals in Latin America and Africa, the Christian church in the Middle Ages and the French Revolution, the dawn of rock and roll and the experience of attending professional sports games, and many of the other major milestones of human history in between, Ehrenreich insists on the fundamentally democratic, anti-hierarchical nature of collective celebration — and the way elites have often perceived of such celebrations as a threat.

“Festivity breaks the boundaries down,” Ehrenreich writes. We on the Left have a tough road ahead of us at the moment, and we won’t be able to dance our way out of this mess. But at a time when the worst people in the world are hell-bent on rebuilding and fortifying the old boundaries, a book that celebrates the human propensity and necessity to enjoy each other’s company and occasionally lose ourselves in ecstasy at the miracle of our collective existence might be just what you need on the beach this summer.

— Micah Uetricht is the editor of Jacobin.