The 31 Best Beach Reads, According to Your Favorite Writers

What makes a good beach read? Should it be pulpy and trashy and greasy with sunscreen? Or a gut-wrenchingly realistic commentary on the human condition? Ask Molly Young, a contributing writer for GQ and the New York Times Magazine, and she'd say a good beach read is easy enough to take frequent breaks, but "brain-gripping enough to provide a steady opportunity for escapism." That sounds about right. Right?

But then we asked a dozen more writers for their favorite beach reads and, well, it turns out there's really no consensus to be had. Which is kind of beautiful. So this list is eclectic-as-hell—it's got everything from science fiction thrillers to classic Japanese lit to contemporary poetry. Meaning there's something for everyone. Even if you like contemporary poetry.

Marlon James recommends American Spy

"Not a summer book, but a novel that will snatch your summer away. There has never been anything like it, and not because of the Black female spy telling the story, but the kind of story it is: espionage thriller, African political drama, wild romance, and doomed family epic."

Marlon James is an author and winner of the Man Booker Prize. His most recent novel, Black Leopard, Red Wolf, came out this February.

Ottessa Moshfegh recommends Say Say Say

"Say Say Say, Lila Savage's subversive debut novel, comes out in July. In it, Ella, a young woman living with her beautiful girlfriend in Minneapolis, works as a caregiver for Jill, a woman suffering from memory loss. Ella develops complicated feelings for Jill's husband, and familial tensions feed Ella's richly articulate consciousness. It's a riveting story and a meditation on work, loss, intimacy, and desire."

Ottessa Moshfegh is an author and winner of the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award. Her most recent book, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, is out in paperback June 25.

Chuck Klosterman recommends Empty Planet

"It's common to read a book and learn something interesting. It's pretty rare to stumble across a book that convincingly introduces the possibility that our most basic assumptions about reality might be totally backwards. Yet that's what happened when I read Empty Planet: The Shock of Population Decline. The premise of Empty Planet, written by two Canadians, initially struck me as an attempt at performative contrarianism. How could it be possible that the earth's population is on the verge of dramatically decreasing? Isn't global overpopulation a virtual inevitability? To be totally honest, I only started reading the book to figure out what weird political underpinnings would prompt people to make such a curious claim. But it turns out there aren't any. There is no agenda here. This is a situation where the paradoxical premise slowly starts to seem obvious. What the authors describe is hard to deny—as the world becomes more and more westernized, the human replacement rate will eventually fall below 2.1, which statistically guarantees that the world's population in 100 years will be considerably less than it is today. I'm not sure why this book isn't getting more attention."

Chuck Klosterman is an author, essayist, and journalist. His first short story collection, Raised in Captivity, is out July 16.

Karen Russell recommends Inland and A Sand Book

"We wait all year for summer to envelop us again, and let that anticipation warm our hands when the world is locked in ice; I do the same thing with books. For a new novel by Téa Obreht, I would wait another century, but lucky for me, I have just two months to go. Inland is a novel I plan to disappear with into the late light of August. The follow-up to Obreht's family legend and mythic Balkan masterpiece, The Tiger's Wife, it's been thrilling early readers. Set in 1893 in the thirst-crazed lands of the Arizona territory, Inland is grounded in the bedrock of real history: a story of a frontierswoman and a haunted outlaw whose solitary lives twine into an intricate new geometry. Obreht is a true landscape artist, and I can't wait to read her West. A starred Kirkus review describes Inland: 'A frontier tale dazzles with camels and wolves and two characters who never quite meet... a novel saturated in enough realism and magic to make the ghost of Gabriel García Márquez grin.' She had me at the camel cavalry.

"And maybe you don't automatically reach for poetry when you're plugging the Coors into your beach cooler, but Ariana Reines' The Sand Book is an epic, perfect beach read. At nearly 400 pages, this gorgeous and terrifying travelogue and book of mourning has enough poems to get you from blue June to haunted October. Her titles alone give me chills: 'Gizzard,' 'The Saddest Year of My Life,' 'To Live in a Jewel Was Bliss,' 'Ditch Face,' 'Still Groaning Under All She Owed,' 'A Partial History of Iridescence.' Reines is a sorceress, a writer without limits. Ben Lerner calls her voice "a dialectic between the very ancient and the bleeding edge.'"

Karen Russell is an author and recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship. Her most recent story collection Orange World came out in May. Check out her classic GQ beach read, "The Blind Faith of Juan Jose Padilla, the One-Eyed Matador."

Tomi Adeyemi recommends An Ember in the Ashes and The Poet X

"An Ember is the epic, cinematic fantasy that made me want to write Children of Blood and Bone. It'll hook you from the first chapter, then it won't let you go. The Poet X is a sensational story told in verse with some of the most beautiful language I've ever read in my life!"

Tomi Adeyemi is the author of Children of Blood and Bone, the first book in the Legacy of Orïsha trilogy. Children of Blood and Bone won the Andre Norton Award and is currently being adapted into a feature film.

Tana French recommends Skippy Dies and Watership Down

"My summer reads are big, sprawling books that spin their own wild, flourishing, off-kilter worlds, scoop you in and keep you there for a long time. Paul Murray's Skippy Dies is one of my favourites: in a Dublin boys' school, the stories of various chaotic characters interweave to lead to Skippy's death, and create an exuberant, funny, incisive and heartbreaking book. And my all-time favourite summer read has to be Richard Adams's Watership Down, which I read for the first time the summer I was seven and have reread during plenty of summers since. It's about a group of rabbits striking out in search of a safe home, but that doesn't do justice to the stunning writing, the unbreakable grip of the plot, or the way our world transforms into a different place when it's seen through the rabbits' eyes."

Tana French is the author of several award-winning thrillers and crime novels. Her most recent book, The Witch Elm, is out in paperback July 30.

Drew Magary recommends The Municipalists and Louder than Hell

"The opening of Seth Fried's The Municipalists is so utterly convincing that I thought I was reading a PREFACE to the story, and that the events depicted therein were something that had happened to Fried in real life, and not the novel itself. That's no knock on Fried, because he's able to take a story about a procedural fetishist named Henry—who savors his role as a city planning pencil-pusher in a not-too-distant future America before he gets sent to the big city of Metropolis with a hyperintelligent AI projection named OWEN and stumbles upon a terrorist plot within the government to remake modern society, Ultron-style—and makes it feel fully formed. Real. Tangible. Fried eschews flowery prose in favor of grounding you in his future with pinpoint details and, oddly enough, convincing takes on urban design. The result is a sci-fi novel that reads like flawlessly researched nonfiction. Also, shit explodes in it.

"Then there's Louder Than Hell by Jon Wiederhorn and Katherine Turman. I would tell you that even non-metal fans will enjoy this exhaustive oral history of the genre, spanning from Sabbath to Mastodon, that includes eyewitness testimony from approximately 95 million different metal gods and their contemporaries. But no. That's a lie. To fully enjoy this shit, you need to be INTO Dio, preferably listening to 'Lock Up The Wolves' as you read. That's the best way to approach this tome, especially when you read Robert Patrick of Filter tell a story about Al Jourgensen of Ministry deliberately putting bleach AND motor oil into margaritas and then serving them to everyone, himself included. 'It was not enough to hurt anybody,' he remembers, 'but you still knew there was Clorox in your margarita.' M E T A L ! (:sticks tongue out:)"

Drew Magary is a frequent contributor to GQ.com. His most recent novel is The Hike.

Hanif Abdurraqib recommends A Jazz Funeral for Uncle Tom

"A poetry collection I've really been enjoying lately is Harmony Holiday's A Jazz Funeral For Uncle Tom. It is a book of both curiosity and invention. But more than that, it's also deeply rooted in history and artifacts. The work unearths both of these things, but also the text is interwoven with actual, touchable imagery. This is a book that requires such a full and immersive investment from a reader, and I will hold it close for many years to come."

Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and critic. His most recent book, Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to a Tribe Called Quest, came out in February.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner recommends Three Women and Little Children

"You should not take my word for any beach reads. I am currently re-reading The Corrections by the pool and I once read The Goldfinch at an all-inclusive resort. Still, I recommend the new book out from my former woman-writing-for-men's-mags compatriot Lisa Taddeo. It's called Three Women, and I only found out about it because we did an event together and ICM sent me the book. It's bonkers addictive, the story of three women and "desire," according to the flap copy, but really their sex lives. It's nonfiction, but I'll also rec a novel. The best book I ever read on a beach was Tom Perrotta's Little Children. It's not his most recent, but it's a summer book and has the most amazing town pool/suburb middle age lust around."

Taffy Brodesser-Akner is a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine. Her first novel, Fleishman is in Trouble came out this week.

Jeff Vandermeer recommends Kudos

"Rachel Cusk's Kudos turned out to be the perfect beach read for me. It's as deep and thought-provoking as Sebald but somehow a page-turner as well. The tangled tale of the narrator's attendance at a book festival is hilarious and melancholy by turn. Of course, I read it out of order—Outline and Transit come first—but it's a fine stand-alone."

Jeff Vandermeer won the Nebula Award and the Shirley Jackson Award in 2014 for the first installment of his Southern Reach Trilogy, Annihilation. His most recent novel is Borne.

Molly Young recommends Don't Point That Thing at Me, Tapping the Source, My Sister the Serial Killer, and The Player

"My personal metric for a beach read is that it's easy enough to be intermittent—you can pick it up or let it be without losing steam—but brain-gripping enough to provide a steady opportunity for escapism. This is also my criteria for the 'perfect friend.' Kyril Bonfiglioli's Don't Point That Thing At Me is a cult 1972 novel about a drunk aristocrat who solves crimes. It's like if Steve McQueen (director not actor) ghostwrote a P.G. Wodehouse novel.

"Surfing is nearly impossible to write about without sounding like a stoner, but Tapping the Source by Kem Nunn is a mind-shredding pageturner and also the source material for the klassic Keanu movie Point Break.

"My Sister the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite is about an Instagram hottie who goes on murder sprees. She is the voice of a generation that I want to be a part of.

"The Player by Michael Tolkin is a novel about a Hollywood producer who cuts deals, commits crimes, seduces women and eats Cobb salad. It is simultaneously a thriller and a treatise on entertainment politics."

Molly Young is a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine. She recently profiled St. Vincent for GQ.

Laura van den Berg recommends The Need

"Helen Phillips's new novel, The Need, is an existential pageturner that perfectly captures the fierce delirium of motherhood, the longing to understand the workings of our universe, and the wondrous, terrifying mystery that is time. A brain-bending heartbreaker of a novel, one I will be recommending a lot this summer."

Laura van den Berg is an award-winning author. Her most recent novel, The Third Hotel, is out in paperback August 2019.

Damon Young recommends Friday Black and Heads of the Colored People

"Summer is the time to escape—from work, friends and family, and, when necessary, white people. But if you don't possess the time, the money, the bandwidth, or the PTO days to physically get away, lose yourself in the worlds conjured by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah (Friday Black) and Nafissa Thompson-Spires (Heads Of The Colored People)."

Damon Young is the co-founder of Very Smart Brothas and a GQ.com contributor. His first book, What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Blacker, came out in March.

Patrick Radden Keefe recommends Furious Hours, Charged and The Queen

"It's been a hell of a season for great nonfiction. I galloped through Casey Cep's terrific Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee, and I'm now reading Charged, Emily Bazelon's brilliant look at how the unchecked power of prosecutors has warped American criminal justice. Next up: Josh Levin's The Queen."

Patrick Radden Keefe is a staff writer at The New Yorker. His most recent book, Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, came out in February.

Casey Cep recommends Ghosts of the Tsunami and Mules and Men

"I rarely look at the ocean without thinking of Richard Lloyd Parry's Ghosts of the Tsunami. It's a terror between two covers; a beautiful, haunted look at how disaster can strike even the most paradisal places. It pairs nicely with a very different book, which feels like a summer read no matter when you read it: Zora Neale Hurston's Mules and Men. One of the novelist's folklore collections, this one was gathered from sources around the Deep South, and like Parry's book it renders supernaturalism with sensitivity and seriousness."

Casey Cep is a contributor to The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The New Republic. Her first book, Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee, came out this May.

Patterson Hood recommends Working and Beastie Boys Book

"I'm not very 'beachy' but do love going to the Oregon coast and watching the waves hit the rocks. Right now I'm reading The Beastie Boys coffee table book. It's fucking fantastic. Hilarious and sometimes surprisingly poignant. I'm also looking forward to reading Robert Caro's book about writing Working. He's my favorite non-fiction author."

Patterson Hood is a co-founder of the band Drive-By Truckers.

Jaed Coffin recommends The Sound of Waves and Waylaid

"I was living in a sailboat in Southeast Alaska one summer during my early twenties when I read Mishima's The Sound of Waves, a simple novel about a fatherless young fisherman named Shinji, who must prove his worth to an island community. His great gift of character (as translated awkwardly into English): something called 'Get up and Go.'

"I'd also recommend Waylaid by Ed Lin. This is one of those weird little books that deserves a cult following. It's the hilarious story of a young Taiwanese-American boy who works at his parents' hotel on the Jersey Shore. Like boyhood, Waylaid is simultaneously lewd, raw, horny and aimless, but, for me, totally reset the dials on what an Asian American story could be."

Jaed Coffin is the author of the memoir A Chant to Soothe Wild Elephants. His new memoir, Roughhouse Friday, came out this week.

Originally Appeared on GQ