Women in the Portal: Summer Reading 2026
Staff has lots of picks this summer! I’ve had the reading munchies all year: if I wasn’t in Wichita, warming my toes by a fireplace while reading The Bee Sting by Paul Murray, then I was texting during spring break about Vera, or Faith by Gary Shteyngart, getting sunscreen on my copy of Résister by Salomé Saqué, or else completely forgetting that I was on a ferry July 4th weekend because I was so locked into the final chapters of Night Night Fawn by Jordy Rosenberg.
I recommend all of the titles above, but I’d like to expand on more obscure and surprising picks from my list––the ones that, as I say, picked me, with their emphasis on the personal transformations that war, disease, and climate change foist upon us.
Toutes les vies, by Rebeka Warrior (2025, Éditions Stock)
“You don’t know Sexy Sushi?!” Indeed, my French punk literacy is poor, so I didn’t know Julia Lanoë aka Rebeka Warrior, DJ and punk artist, before my friend put her memoir in my hands this summer. Two pages in, I was sold. In an intimate, frank voice–– like a trusted friend on the couch –– Warrior recounts first falling in love with her wife Pauline, then losing her to metastatic cancer. It’s not that Pau’s illness precipitates Warrior’s own spiritual journey; rather, it transforms it, from self-indulgent to universalizing (toutes les vies: all life). Whereas a mix of drugs and philosophy once gave Warrior solace (during one of her wife’s remissions, she even tries to enroll in a philosophy degree), illness and caretaking manage to restructure, then obliterate, reality as it had been. As Pauline begins to slip away, Warrior’s seeking shifts to ascetic Buddhist meditation (though the drugs don’t disappear entirely).
Along the way, I was rooting for this punk queen: to own up to her anger issues; to keep loving Pauline through the darkest moments; to stick with her rigorous meditation practice; and to tell herself, and me, more of the truth. With real-time diary entries and extracts from her reading adventures, all woven into a propulsive decade-long narrative, Warrior lets us all in on her life’s secret: there is no solace. We will all suffer; if we’re lucky, we’ll do it in good company.
Endling, by Maria Reva (2025, Doubleday)
When my friend pitched me this work of feminist climate fiction, she mentioned the two protagonists: Ukrainian women, Yeva and Nastia. Yeva, a scientist who lives in an RV retrofitted as a lab, travels her country looking for near-extinct species of snails. Her monk-like devotion to her work––getting her snail “endlings” (the last of their kind) to mate––is mirrored quite ironically in her disdain for sex and romance with her own kind. This singleminded detachment makes it easier for Yeva to stomach her side-hustle: working at an international romance agency for Western men seeking Ukrainian wives. (Employees, called “brides,” are asked to use the greeting, “May you find The One.”) There’s no obligation to marry any of these dudes, so for the hours of parties and dates she endures, Yeva manages to earn enough to keep funding her snails. It is at these dimly lit, shmaltzy events that she meets eighteen-year-old Nastia and her older sister Sol. The sisters hope their own foray into the marriage industry will attract the attention of their mother, an erstwhile feminist activist who seems to be in hiding from Ukrainian authorities after too many notorious and high-profile stunts.
For me, this pitch was more than enough to make me pick up the novel straight away. But if the juxtaposition of snail sex and feminism doesn’t already do it for you, perhaps I’ll add that Canadian-Ukrainian author Maria Reva herself appears in her pages, transforming the whole tale into a meta-meditation on art-making in exile. As snails and creepy men alike seek The One amidst Russian invaders, Reva reminds us that the war going on in this book is not fictional––nor is it over.
Suite Française, by Irène Némirovsky (2004, Éditions Denoël; trans. Sandra Smith, 2006)
This book. THIS BOOK. I found it in the basement of Brookline Booksmith, of course. Somehow, my brain reminded me that literary queen Jia Tolentino had recommended it on the New Yorker Radio Hour during the pandemic. How did I remember that? Good thing I did. I snatched it up and gobbled it down. Then I realized it’s probably even better in the original French, so hours after I arrived in Paris, trudging through a heatwave in Ménilmontant, I located the nearest bookstore hoping to snag a copy.
It was a used bookshop with a sparse but curated collection. “Seeking a break from the heat?” the shopkeeper asked from behind his desk. I was too shy to tell him that I was on a mission. After fruitlessly searching alphabetically, I almost gave up, when suddenly I saw it: the cover facing out, a photo of the author on the cover. It was a paperback of Suite Française, en français, on sale for 1 euro. I gave the shopkeeper a 5. “I can’t possibly only give you one euro for this book; I love it,” I finally confided. “A 4-euro tip then?” he joked. He was pleased with my choice, and started to tell me about the book’s significance. Of course, I already knew the story by heart. Némirovsky was a Ukrainian-Jewish writer whose family relocated to Paris in the wake of the Russian Revolution. After finding success as a writer in the 1930s, she, her husband, and her two daughters were forced to flee when the Germans took Paris in June of 1940.
So begins Suite Française, a fictional account of those first days under German occupation, with free-indirect narration following the chaotic thoughts of French people across the class spectrum: wealthy bankers ordering their servant to find their way to Tours; middle-class parents of sons on the front, cautiously leaving their apartments behind; workers abandoning their callous employers to seek safety with their children in tow; artists, delusionally hoarding favorite objects despite the encumbrance––all driven out for fear of being bombed. This is a book about everything changing overnight; later, as we enter 1941, occupiers become unwelcome houseguests, and, in some cases, clandestine friends or lovers.
What’s significant about this novel is not only that its vivid details and satirical tone bring occupied France to life, but also that its author wrote the book freehand while she was experiencing it all. Then, before Némirovsky could finish her three-part tome, the Nazis caught up to her. She and her husband both died in Auschwitz in 1942. Her daughters survived, and one held onto the notebooks she thought were her mother’s diaries. Safekept them––until the 1990s, when she finally opened them to discover what she had preserved: her mother’s most brilliant work, a story tantamount to the Diary of Anne Frank and equally worthy of study in schools around the globe.
Taken together, these three stories share the psychology of facing unexpected crises, be they invasions by soldiers or cancer cells. To lose control; then, to try to regain it, however possible. It was a comfort to explore the dark humor and nauseating spirals of unvarnished survival––the non-linear vicissitudes that carry these characters (real, fictional, auto-fictional) through the portal of fear, and into a new reality.
****
Special thanks: to Erin for colloquializing the concept of the “portal”; to Arundhati Roy for her essay on portals during the pandemic; to Jia Tolentino for connecting me with Némirovsky; to Vio for gifting me her copy of Toutes les vies; to Laura for living in my favorite Paris neighborhood for book shopping; and to Grace for recommending Endling––and then taking me to the best Edinburgh bookshops to find it.
