5 Authors Talk Their Highly-Anticipated Summer Books

Going through a sketch comedy phase is not a unique experience for the American pre-teen. But Carrie Courogen went much, much further down the rabbit hole at her local library and ended up with a copy of the legendary 1961 improv album Mike Nichols & Elaine May Examine Doctors. “It's one of those things where I just immediately was like, I love everything about this.” Courogen’s discovery of the groundbreaking comedy team Nichols and May led her to explore the latter’s almost mythic filmography, which includes directing The Heartbreak Kid and Mikey and Nicky; writing Heaven Can Wait and The Birdcage; and behind-the-scenes script doctoring of Reds and Tootsie.

Cut to 2019, when Courogen— a contributing editor to the online publication Bright Wall/Dark Room, which focuses on in-depth film essays—was working on a couple of pieces about May, and felt surprised that so few resources existed devoted exclusively to May herself, and thus the idea was born. The only problem? May is a notoriously private and, frankly, prickly character. Courogen was faced with the challenge of writing a biography of someone who, generally, refused to do press for decades, and wouldn’t stop by the press room after winning Best Actress for her performance as Gladys Green, a woman with Alzheimer’s, in Kenneth Lonergan’s The Waverly Gallery at the 2019 Tony Awards. This mystery only made the process more interesting, Courogen says: “That was part of the story: Why doesn't she want to talk? Why is she so private and so paranoid of the press?” The rest came down to Courogen’s professional interviewing skills and the power of very, very deep research. “I was very fortunate that a lot of people did end up speaking to me. I did do a ton of interviews,” she says. “I just found that by digging enough into all the various archives, and falling into these wormholes on the internet, I eventually collected so much more material than I really even thought was going to be there,” Courogen says. But the work was worth it to get May’s story out to a broader audience, because May was, as Courogen calls her, “the Godmother of modern American comedy.”

“Everything you love today ladders back to her and the rules of improv that she and Nichols invented at the Compass Players [the Chicago improv theater where they were charter members], the way that she and Mike Nichols revolutionized sketch comedy, and her work behind the scenes shaping so many great comedies of the ‘1960s, ‘70s, and ‘80s that are pillars of American culture,” she says.

If you’ve never heard of Casey McQuiston’s debut novel Red, White & Royal Blue, welcome back from whatever rock you’ve just crawled out from under. The book, chronicling the love affair between the son of the U.S. President and a prince of England still pops up on the New York Times bestseller list five years after its release, and Amazon Prime’s film adaptation instantly became one of the platform’s top-performing movies of all time when it premiered last August. As much as McQuiston loved their characters, even they were surprised by the reaction. “I wasn't sure what to expect; I was like, ‘If this book can find its people, it will do really, really well, like amongst other depressed queer millennials.’ What I didn't anticipate was how much broader of a category the readers of this book would be,” they say. “My life changed overnight, and in a crazy way, in a way that is really unusual for publishing.”

The latest entry into McQuiston’s oeuvre is The Pairing, which follows exes Theo and Kit as they accidentally end up on the same tour of Europe. Written while cooped up at home in the depths of the COVID pandemic, McQuiston put their longing for experiences on the page. “I was like, ‘What is the most opposite of an indoors book I can write? What is the most opposite of isolation I can do?’” 

Oh, and also on the priority list: “I've written three books in which the main character is openly bisexual, but none of those books are ever really categorized as bisexual,” they say, adding with a laugh, “So I'm kind of curious: What's the most bisexual thing I can write?” The result? A lush, “hedonistic” portrayal of food, travel, and sex—so much sex (“Truly living out what I imagined to be many people's dream, which is coming up with the hottest person you can imagine for every day, and then write that,” they joke)—that McQuiston says is their most ambitious yet from a craft level. Still, at The Pairing’s core is the heart that first captured fans of McQuiston three books ago. “Something that I'm always reaching for is that affectionate yearning, that feeling of yearning for something more, something better, a better world or a better life, or a place to call home. The yearning is not just the journey; it's also the destination,” they say. “The through line is irreverent queer joy.”

When Anna Marie Tendler first pitched her memoir, Men Have Called Her Crazy, she intended it to be a photo book with essays, an extension of a series of self-portraits she took in 2021 that went mega-viral. But her editor insisted that she needed to write a book without any images to distract from the power of her words. Tendler wrote a few sample chapters, and realized that he was right.

Writing a memoir was a “rollercoaster” for Tendler. “Emotionally, there were certainly parts of it that were difficult, or areas where I was like, I really want to get this right,” she explains. “The closer I got in time to my life now, the easier and more seamless the writing was, but also the more emotional, because it was just closer to the surface.” 

The memoir is less about getting into the gritty details of her own trauma and more about creating another vehicle through which Tendler can connect to other women. Just don’t go in hoping that Tendler will tell all about her 2022 divorce from comedian John Mulaney, which generated plenty of gossip and had internet sleuths dissecting her photos for clues about what might have happened behind closed doors. 

“I am a super private person; I try to keep my life behind the scenes, and it was hard to have those photographs go out there and have people pick them apart,” she says candidly. “That was very difficult, and also really played into this feeling that I have about the way that women's art and women's work is digested differently than men's.” It’s the latter that Tendler is most interested in exploring through Men Have Called Her Crazy: the intersection of mental health and female identity, or “how women function in a world that is male driven,” as she puts it. That is entirely what my book is about: The ways in which I have bumped up against men over and over and over again, and the way that it impacts mental health,” she says.

“Whether it be in photographs, through fine art, or in writing, it has the ability of transmuting the anger that I feel about the world or about women's place in the world into an artistic work, which then gets it out of my own body and head—at least for a short time until I find something else to be angry about,” she adds with a laugh.

It is understood that some of the best rom-coms in pop culture history are retellings of Shakespeare plays: 10 Things I Hate About You, Deliver Us From Eva, She’s the Man. There’s a reason that the Bard’s work is still inspiring writers over 400 years after his death. “There's a history of people who have used Shakespeare to influence their own writing— [James] Baldwin even wrote about how Shakespeare is something that he feels we can use as a tool to decolonize identity in interesting ways,” says author Nisha Sharma. “So I was like, what if I take these great story beats that Shakespeare laid out and push them through a South Asian experience?”

That was the spark of Sharma’s “If Shakespeare Were an Auntie” trio of romance novels: Dating Dr. Dil (Taming of the Shrew), Tastes Like Shakkar (Much Ado About Nothing), and the grand finale, Marriage & Masti, her take on Twelfth Night. The first in the series became an enormous hit on BookTok in 2022 and launched the author into the next phase of her career. “It was my ‘finally’ moment as a writer—and the ‘finally’ moment wasn't the accolades or the trending,” Sharma says. “When I started having South Asian readers come to me and they were like, I have never felt so seen, that was my ‘finally’ moment.”

The three can be read as standalones, though stories and characters thread together throughout the series. Marriage & Masti follows Veera and Deepak, the last two singles in their friend group, who are struggling personally and professionally. After Veera gets in a literal shipwreck, Deepak comes to her rescue, and, well—let’s let Sharma explain: “They get trashed, they get married, and they realize that this could be the moment that could save both of them and both of their careers.” Of course the lines between fake and real begin to blur (hello, this is a romance novel!), but more important than the sparks flying on the page are the real-life issues Sharma hopes her characters help her readers work through.

“We're taught to feel shame in so many different ways,” she explains. “The one thing I want readers to accept is that you're allowed to want to find love and not be ashamed of it. You're allowed to want to get married and not be ashamed of it; you're allowed to want to be single, or childless, or have children, and not be ashamed of it.”