You’ll Want to Pack These Emerson-Authored Books This Summer

Summer is the quintessential time to become engrossed in a great book. Whether you’re in a beach chair, a blanket outside on a sunny day, or in your living room, there’s nothing like getting lost in a plot (or an idea).

No matter what genre you want to dive into — be it a crime thriller, historical fiction, children’s book, essays about motherhood — these books by Emerson College community members are great reads to check out this summer.

New York Times best-selling author Taylor Jenkins Reid ’05 continues to be a rising star in the literary world and Hollywood. Her new book, Atmosphere, came out in early June, and goes where no Reid book has gone before – space. This historical fiction is set during the 1980s Space Shuttle program, and focuses on a female astronaut, Joan Goodwin, who finds a passion and love she never imagined. The book quickly netted positive reviews, including being named the Good Morning America Book Club Pick for June.

Now in paperback, True Biz by Sarah Novik ’09, is also a New York Times bestseller, and American Library Association Alex Award winner. Novik herself is deaf, and is an instructor of Deaf studies and creative writing. The highly-praised novel provides insight into the students and staff of a school for the deaf, including the school’s golden boy, whose world is greatly affected when his baby sister is born hearing.

Released in June, Kill Your Darlings is the newest book by Peter Swanson, MFA ’00. The NYT best-selling author’s latest novel is a suspenseful read about a couple – a professor of English and his wife, a published poet – who live in a nice home without many worries. What could go wrong? Well, the title of the book is called Kill Your Darlings?! Check out a Wall Street Journal review of the book and it’s “star-crossed couple who’ve come to a spooky crossroads.”  

Taking a break from the business world for a spell but still thinking about how to come back stronger than before? Then check out Marketing Communication Professor Roxana Maiorescu’s new book Corporate Relationship Management Strategy. The book provides a reminder to corporate leaders to focus on building deeper connections with employees, consumers, and society at large, because strong relationships lead to healthy companies. Maiorescu discusses the importance of embedding corporate values in every practice, building and maintaining relationships, and the role that leadership styles play in relationship management.

If you’re looking to read a memoir, check out Where Every Ghost Has a Name by Kim Liao, MFA ’09. The book consists of two themes symbiotically woven together: her family’s history and Taiwan’s fight for freedom. In 2010, Liao traveled to Taiwan to learn about her family’s history, specifically about her grandfather, who had been a leader of the Taiwanese independence movement. At the time, his land was seized, his relatives were arrested, and his nephew was sentenced to death. Her grandmother, Anna, moved their four children to the U.S. and never spoke about her husband again. Six decades later, Kim was shocked to learn that KMT government had erased much of the story of Taiwanese independence from official historical record.

Also published in June was From the Distances of Sleep, a book of poems by Writing, Literature & Publishing Professor Daniel Tobin. Harvard Review Online raved about the book, saying that Tobin provides “a masterful disclosure of the light holding together the particular and universal” and that “Tobin’s poems are sonic meditations on the threshold of being—light and darkness, utterance and interval, presence and absence.” 

Former Boston Poet Laureate Danielle Legros Georges ’86 sadly passed away in February. Her last book, published in January, Three Leaves, Three Roots is a very personal book of poems. In the 1960s and 1970s, thousands of Haitians emigrated to Congo, and Georges writes in the introduction the immigrants sought to “escape repression in Haiti, start new lives in Africa, and participate in a decolonizing Congo.” Georges’ parents were among the many who moved to the Congo.

In Girls with Goals: How Women’s Soccer Took Over the World, author Clelia Castro-Malaspina, MA ‘13 provides an inspiring insightful look at the beginning at the birth of the sport in 19th century-Great Britain to modern times. Throughout the book, Castro-Malaspina examines the obstacles including bans on girls and women being allowed to play the most popular sport in the world.

It’s not often that an author’s first book gets a starred review from Kirkus and makes Most Anticipated Books lists, but that’s the case for Nicole Graev Lipson, MFA ’22. Her nonfiction essay book, Mothers and Other Fictional Characters, does not disappoint, and her essays have earned awards including a Pushcart Prize and been part of the Best American Essays anthology. The title of the book speaks to Lipson’s examination of how women are often reduced to ready-made templates and archetypes.

Here’s a fun fact: one of Lipson’s professors was Writing, Literature & Publishing Distinguished Professor Jerald Walker, who’s won quite a few awards himself. Last year, both Walker and Lipson had essays in the prestigious Best American Essays anthology (as well as a former professor’s of Walker’s!). Jerald Walker‘s  latest book, Magically Black and Other Essays, released in 2024, was one of five collections shortlisted for the PEN Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay.

In April, Lipson co-hosted a book reading event with her former teacher, Writing, Literature & Publishing Professor Emerita Megan Marshall. The Pulitzer Prize winning biographer published two new books in February — After Lives: On Biography and the Mysteries of the Human Heart, a collection of essays examining her life and its relationship to the lives of others; and Margaret Fuller: Collected Writings, a collection she edited with Noelle A. Baker and Brigitte Bailey.

If you’re looking for books for yourself and the younger members of your family – specifically botanically-based reads – then check out Molly Williams ’18 who had two books recently published in 2025. Jane Austen’s Garden: A Botanical Tour of the Classic Novels was released in March, and in February, her book The Junior Plant Lover’s Handbook: A Green-Thumb Guide for Kids was published.