What Are You Looking Forward to Reading, Brenda Wineapple?

by David Haglund | Jun-28-2010

(photo: Marion Ettlinger)

What I look forward to reading this summer—even though it seems summer’s just about over (if July comes this week, can September be far behind?):

Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall (at last, which I’m told is actually as good as the press [and the NBCC! – ed.] says it is)

C. K. Williams’ meditation on Whitman, plus Whitman himself

Frederick Brown’s For the Soul of France

Joyce Carol Oates’s Little Bird of Heaven

David Malouf’s Ransom

And, if I’m lucky, a little Trollope, though I never know which.

And, of course, the serendipitous finds from a good used bookstore (remember those?).

Brenda Wineapple was a finalist for the 2008 NBCC Award for Biography for White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, which was also a New York Times“Notable Book.” Her other books include Genêt: A Biography of Janet Flanner; Sister Brother: Gertrude and Leo Stein; and Hawthorne: A Life. She is the direct of the Leon Levy Center for Biography at the Graduate School, CUNY.