Nine Books to Read Right Now—And the Fabulous Bags to Put Them In

Betrayal, marital discord, and the shackles of expectation lie at the heart of D’Aprix Sweeney’s propulsive, character-steeped story of two best friends—a soap star and a voice-over actor—their friendship and marriages, and a long-kept secret, ordinary but devastating, of a lost wedding ring found in the wrong place.

Pictured with GUCCI bag.

Framed as the oral history of an unlikely ’70s rock duo written by a journalist with painful connections to one of the stars, Walton’s astute debut reckons with racial violence, the limits of storytelling, and fame. “You might find it at times untamed and unwieldy, and find that it contains no easy answers,” warns our narrator—happily, a kept promise.

Pictured with Alexander McQueen bag.

Vlautin’s unflinching, humane noir centers on a 30-year-old woman in Portland, Oregon, who’s dead set on buying the house she’s been renting with her depressive mother and developmentally disabled older brother—even if it means confronting the creeps who owe her and committing some corrective thievery.

Pictured with Hermès bag.

Dunn’s vast love letter is as gleaming and mesmeric as its tiny subject. His travels to observe the often elusive family Trochilidae take him from the smoky air of an Alaska besieged by wildfire, to coastal Santa Marta, Colombia. The book is packed with tidbits and anecdotes—Ian Fleming named his famous MI6 character after an ornithologist called James Bond; there was a 19th-century fraud of “manufacturing” Frankensteined bird specimens to sell to collectors—and is as much an ode to our world writ large as it is to one of its most captivating birds.

Pictured with Michael Kors Collection bag.

“She’d felt transfigured,” Andrews writes of young heroine Florence as she types out sentences from a beloved book, “like she’d been writing her own work with arthritic fingers and had suddenly found the cure.” In this addition to the list of reasons one should not travel to Morocco with a too-good-to-be-true new acquaintance, the dissatisfied young editorial staffer with lofty literary goals and a penchant for stealing her roommate’s yogurts falls into a dream gig assisting her mysterious favorite writer, Maud Dixon; false identities and murderous hijinks ensue.

Pictured with The Row bag.

This absurdist genre-mash romp of a story collection dials its modern subjects—like the phenomena of excessive workouts in advance of a wedding and the time and energy dedicated to celebrating adult birthdays—up to 11, and then blows up the amp, as in “Birthday Girl,” when a 34th birthday celebration includes a “trek to a dormant volcano, where we’d dive nude into an enchanted lagoon and the impure would die.” As Stephen Colbert writes in the foreword: “many of these stories feel warm and familiar, almost comfort food, but inside the burrito of this book there is a small dusting of broken glass—sparkling prettily but stinging.”

Pictured with Dior bag.

Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita is a notorious lightning rod; in this collection edited by the daughter of Walter Minton, Lolita’s first American publisher, 30 writers explore myriad aspects of the endlessly debatable book, with particular standouts by Stacy Schiff (on Véra Nabokov’s invaluable contributions to the writing and promotion), Alexander Chee (on his personal history with the novel), and Zainab Salbi (on the complexity of reading Lolita as a woman born and raised in Iraq, where men are allowed to marry girls as young as nine).

Pictured with Brandon Blackwood NYC bag.