It's a Substack Summer (Reading List)!
BYOB, swimsuits optional
June approaches, the days stretch on, and things are about to get hot and swampy. I’m excited for summer this year. Not as excited as I was back when school took a 3-month hiatus, but still pretty excited.
Back in those halcyon days, I was never assigned a summer reading list; I read whatever I felt like. Usually, whatever books had dragons on the covers. I also played a lot of Command & Conquer because I had (have) body and self-esteem issues, but I digress.
This summer, I’m assigning myself a Summer Reading List and because it has been dubbed “Substack Summer” by the cool kids, I’ve decided to have that list consist of Substack books/stories. I’ll create a sub-heading specifically for Substack Summer and (try to) fiddle around with Substack to make it so you can either subscribe to only this or unsub from these particular posts.
Without further ado…
Substack Summer Reading List
Arranged in alphabetical order by author’s first name because I’m lazy.
Note for the authors1
Sprawling, fast-paced, and splashed with magical realism, Cubafruit is a deeply-researched story about political violence, the exilic experience, and the three-way scramble for power among those who seek it, those who lose it, and those who tell their story.
Alex Murka - Hell or Hangover (July release)
The main character in my novel is just a normal millennial guy who likes to party (and have consensual sex with women) because he isn’t ready to grow up and settle down. When he’s out partying, and very drunk one night, he thinks he’s found a woman worth changing his ways for. The problem is he blacks out and wakes up in his ex-girlfriend’s bed with no proof the woman he met actually exists (there are no pictures and he can’t find her on Instagram, Twitter, Google, etc…which means she doesn’t actually exist, right?) The main character goes on a week’s long wild (and drunken) goose chase trying to piece the night together, to find her, and to hopefully change his life in the process.
Andy Futuro - No Dogs in Philly
A Cyberpunk Horror Noir
Note from Andy: “WARNING: This cannot be unread!”
A satirical sendup of tear-jerking trauma plots with a tender portrait of friendship at its core, Victim asks what real diversity looks like and how far one man is willing to go to make his story hit the right notes.
See Less
From literary newcomer ARX-Han, INCEL represents the absolute frontier in transgressive psychological fiction. Savage, hilarious, and everything in between, INCEL is a pitch-dark comedy about one man's harrowing quest to ascend.
Daniel Falatko - The Wayback Machine
Nathan thought he'd hit his lowest point when he landed in a federal penitentiary on drug trafficking charges. Back in NYC and living in his dead friend's apartment, he's at risk of descending even further. But as an aging former blogger and internet-famous music critic of the 2000s, Nathan has one thing going for him: a story to sell. And he's on the hunt for the highest bidder from a new media wasteland of podcasts and YouTube channels. It's a story that threatens to bring down his former employer, BAD HABITS Magazine, now risen from the ashes of pre-gentrified Brooklyn's hipster utopia to become a mainstream media titan. What unfolds is a surreal cat-and-mouse game spiraling from the cold, dead heart of gentrified Williamsburg to the tent-colony-strewn streets of Westside LA. Zoomer podcast hosts, canceled media men, forgotten aughties indie artists, rockabilly Airbnb owners, and assassins in Jack White masks dot the landscape as Nathan races to promote his tale, while the media apparatus pulls out all the stops to kill the story-and perhaps Nathan himself.
Naomi Kanakia - Money Matters (novella) (and/or The Default World)
Jack’s immediate need is cash. An irresponsible steward of his life-transforming windfall, he’s fallen behind on his property taxes. Letters from the city are piling up. A lien is out, and his drug proceeds won’t cover it. The obvious solution—getting a proper job—is, for Jack, a non-starter: conventional work repulses him. Instead, he sets about evaluating the women in his life, including an ex-girlfriend, Cynthia, and his current kinda-sorta girlfriend, Mona, wondering what it would take to get one of them to cover his financial needs.
This darkly funny novel skewers privileged leftist millennial tech culture, and asks whether "found family" is just another of the twenty-first century's broken promises
Noah Kumin - Stop All the Clocks
Stop All the Clocks is a rare literary thriller where the crux of the whodunnit isn't a person but modern life itself, where the conspiracy lies within the dark magic of digital technology—the ones and zeroes to which everyone is beholden—and the motive is the beguiling power of the words on the page.
It's 1973 and Mona Glass is a 24-year-old amateur tennis star in a long-running affair with Saul Plotz, her former college professor. Her parents like Saul and desperately want the free-spirited Mona to marry. But 34-year-old Saul already has a wife and two children. One day, Saul happens on an idea: stage a fake wedding for the benefit of her old world parents, invite a few friends in on the joke, and go about their lives.
The ruse works. Except Saul realizes he actually wants to marry Mona, who vows never to permanently tie herself to a man. After losing her city job in the 1970s fiscal crisis, Mona becomes a freelance news photographer for a radical new tabloid. When she beats the competition to capture a photo of a murderous vigilante taking the city by storm, she finds herself falling for a colleague-and Saul, now a rising star in government who is butting up against a young man named Donald Trump, fears he has lost her altogether. Years later, the affair not quite dead, Mona realizes she is pregnant with Saul's child.
Meanwhile, Saul's adult son, Tad, is traveling aimlessly across America, hunting for answers as the 1990s bleed into 9/11. Tad decides to take the darker path of the very vigilante Mona once exposed. And in the shadow of terrorism and war, Mona and Saul raise their son, Emmanuel, together-keeping their life a secret from Saul's wife and children. Spanning from the 1970s to the pandemic, this soaring, heartbreaking novel is a tour de force of ambition and grace, a great American chronicle that marks the emergence of a major new talent.
Tom Schecter - The Shieldbreaker Saga (series)
Are you one of those people who, during your thrice-daily “thinking about the Roman Empire” time, finds themselves more intrigued by the empire’s collapse than by its peak? Have you ever wondered to yourself how you would do in a shield wall? Do you have strong opinions either way about the musical choices for the battle scenes in the 300 movie? Did that scene in GOT Season 8 where Grey Worm says “Half are gone” and everyone else just goes along with it piss you off? Do you like your protagonists unpredictable? You know, clever and well-intentioned, but maybe just, like, the tiniest little bit psychotic?
FREE SPACE2 - Leaving myself some wiggle room in case something catches my eye or these first ten are all terrible and I need to go read some Nora Roberts or something. I’m also open for additional suggestions in the comments.
Other News
Starting this week, I’m going to combine the Friday Mood Boost and the Sunday Digest into a single weekly post. Haven’t decided on the name or day of the week yet, but it doesn’t make sense to keep ‘em separated.
If you’ve got a favorite recurring section (Book Bits, Unsolicited Recommendations, Reads-family/journal updates, Mood Board, etc.) that you’d like to see continue, let me know in the comments.
And like I mentioned above I’m going to try to add headers/sections and mess with the Substack so you can opt-in/out of different topics. Assuming that works, I’ll update the About to provide some instructions.
Smell ya later.
— V
A note for the folks listed: if you’d like these links changed to a different page or to use a referral link or want a different summary or anything else, just send me a message.
Hell yea. Happy to be on this list of heavy hitters. Victim, Wayback Machine, and Cubafruit are all A+
Very cool. No Dogs goes sooooo hard.