Since it opened in 1999, the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers has had seventeen classes of fellows in residence at The New York Public Library. These gifted independent scholars, creative writers, academics, and visual artists have produced more than one hundred books since 1999, and we recommend fifteen of their recent titles for 2016 summer reading.

Chronicle of a Last Summer by Yasmine El Rashidi (June 2016, Tim Duggan Books)
Subtle and strong, this slim first novel draws a portrait of daily life and political struggle in Egypt as seen through the eyes of a young woman over the course of twenty years.

Sudden Death by Alvaro Enrigue (Riverhead, February 2016)
Tennis balls made from the hair of the beheaded Anne Boleyn rocket across court in a match between the Italian painter Caravaggio and the Spanish poet Quevedo, with a delightful cameo appearance by The New York Public Library.

Little Labors by Rivka Galchen (New Directions, May 2016)
A gem of a book: witty, unsentimental essays on motherhood, childhood, and literature.

Diane Arbus: Portrait of a Photographer by Arthur Lubow (Ecco, June 2016)
This fascinating, thoughtful biography of one of the most important figures in modern photography takes a far deeper, more searching look at the artist’s life and work than we have had until now. Don’t miss the exhibition of Arbus’s early photographs at New York’s Met Breuer this summer.

Here by Richard McGuire (Pantheon, 2014)
Time travel without leaving the corner of a room: McGuire’s stunning art book imagines events taking place in a single space over thousands of years.

Strangers Drowning: Grappling with Impossible Idealism, Drastic Choices, and the Overpowering Urge to Help by Larissa MacFarquhar (Penguin Press, 2015)
In her close look at extreme virtue, MacFarquhar profiles people whose altruism and ethical commitments go far beyond what most of us consider normal. What drives them? How should we regard them? Are there dark sides to doing good?

The Twelve Tribes of Hattie by Ayana Mathis (Knopf, 2012)
Mathis’s powerful first novel tells the intimate stories of Hattie, swept up in the Great Migration north from Georgia in 1923, and her descendants over the ensuing decades.

The Sport of Kings by C.E. Morgan (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, May 2016)
Morgan’s ambitious new novel takes in generations of Kentucky history as it follows two families, one black, one white, through dramas of race, racing, poverty, wealth, solitude, prison, lineage, and pain. One critic calls it “a high literary epic of America.”

Black Deutschland by Darryl Pinckney (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, February 2016)
The lure of Europe for black Americans has a long literary history, and the novel Black Deutschland, set in Berlin and Chicago in the 1980s, places Pinckney in the company of James Baldwin and Richard Wright. An observation of his central character has terrible new resonance in the summer of 2016: “I wanted to live where authority had little interest in black men.”

Thunder and Lightning: Weather Past, Present, Future by Lauren Redniss (Random House, 2015)
Perhaps best described as a graphic biography of weather, this gorgeous art book tells riveting stories about the physical world we inhabit – most of the time without thinking about it—and which we’re likely to be destroying through climate change

The Other Paris by Luc Sante (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Fall 2015)
A rich and detailed alternate history of Paris, populated by the “boulevardiers, rabble-rousers, and tramps” who are not the usual focus of the city’s history and art.

Children of Paradise: The Struggle for the Soul of Iran by Laura Secor (Riverhead, 2016)
Though Iran is more in the news than ever, it has remained a closed mystery to most of the world since its Islamic Revolution in 1979. Secor takes us deep inside the courageous movements that have resisted theocracy and fought for political and cultural change.

The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606 by James Shapiro (Simon & Schuster, 2015)
Four hundred and ten years ago, during a series of tumultuous political changes in England, Shakespeare wrote King Lear, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra. Adding tremendous depth to our understandings of history and literature, Shapiro brilliantly sets these great plays in context.

The Lost Time Accidents by John Wray (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, February 2016)
A complex tale of lost love and family secrets, Wray’s novel tours the chaos of the twentieth century with a man who has been “excused from time.”

Multiple Choice by Alejandro Zambra (June 2016, Penguin)
Designed to look like the “blue book” of a standardized test, Zambra’s new novel, at once playful and deeply serious, is a marvel.