After a busy summer in Kansas City, students are back in class across the metro. For them and educators like Mark Luce, chair of the English department at The Barstow School, it means getting back into the rhythm of weekly readings and classes.
But even for those of us no longer in school, the end of summer is the perfect time to refresh your reading list.
Up To Date’s literary experts offer a variety of recommendations to try, whether you’re into fiction, nonfiction or local authors. Luce, University of Missouri-Kansas City assistant professor of English Jennifer Maritza McCauley, and author and journalist Steve Paul shared their picks.
And if one doesn’t resonate, don’t fret. “Life is too short” to suffer through books you’re not enjoying, says Paul.
Mark Luce’s recommendations
“Speedboat” by Renata Adler (fiction)
This impressionistic, often hilarious, urbane novel is told in vignettes by journalist Jen Fain. Adler captures the 1970s with wicked precision, glorious panache, and narrative fearlessness. Structurally, Adler’s short blasts do for fiction what Frankenthaler’s color fields did for painting. Adler writes, “It could be that the sort of sentence one wants right here is the kind that runs, and laughs, and slides, and stops right on a dime.”
“The Last Picture Show” by Larry McMurtry (literary fiction)
This coming-of-age story is the basis for a film of the same name. Sonny, Duane and Jacy grow up in a small Texas town, becoming well-trained in the unsubtle art of self-destructive behavior. Workmanlike prose is paired with honest dialogue and splashes of lyricism and ribaldry. It’s like Dazed and Confused, without all the weed.
“A Different Drummer” by William Melvin Kelley (historical fiction)
Tucker Caliban and his forebearers worked for the Willson family, involuntary and sort of voluntary, for generations. Not one of the white folks – who narrate this stunning novel – question it, until Tucker salts his seven acres, burns his house down, and shoots his cattle before he and all the other Black residents of a fictional state between Mississippi and Alabama, leave the state. Through the book, Kelley explores what freedom actually means, the unrecognized duplicity of supposed white allies, and the rancid roots of American prosperity.
“Telex From Cuba” by Rachel Kushner (literary fiction)
In rural Cuba, United Fruit Company boss Malcom Stites must navigate an increasingly dangerous situation as president Fulgencio Batista’s power wanes. The indictment of American imperialism undercuts any romantic vision of early 1950s Havana. As a fan of Kushner’s later novels, reading this was like watching a ballplayer’s rookie year. There may be some occasional mistakes, but you know you are watching someone who’s gonna be a superstar.
“Stoner” by John Williams (literary fiction, Missouri ties)
Reading Stoner feels like you are sharing a drink with a stranger who tells you the saddest story you have ever heard. The yarn twirls around the University of Missouri English department in the early 20th century. William Stoner, a two-bit loser who chooses quite unwisely over and over and over, is disconnected from everything around him - his wife, his daughter, his department chair, his dean and even his own self. Williams’ prose strums a lament for poor Stoner with diamond-cut paragraphs of reflection and remorse.
“Thin Blue Smoke” and “The Night Office” by Doug Worgul (fiction, Kansas City ties)
For more than a decade, the seniors at Barstow have read Worgul’s Thin Blue Smoke as a summer book. The novel, set in Kansas City, traces an unlikely friendship between Laverne Williams, a Texas transplant and pitmaster, and Ferguson Glenn, a professor of divinity who may no longer believe in God. Worgul’s short chapter vignettes talk of baseball, barbecue, race, God, and the blues. In the sequel, Ignatius, a monk who has left a monastery featured in the first novel, serves as the novel’s emotional center. I love teaching this to students, not just for the local ties, but more for the warm heart that beats quietly in Worgul’s prose.
Jennifer Martiza McCauley’s recommendations
“What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez” by Claire Jiménez (fiction)
After thirteen-year-old Ruthy's disappearance, her family is devastated. Twelve years later, they turn on the TV to find that Ruthy might be appearing on a trashy reality show. The book meditates on why missing Black and Brown girls don't receive adequate media attention and are often sexualized or overlooked. As each character investigates what happened to Ruthy, they discover more about themselves.
“Triage” by Claudia Rankine (literary fiction)
This book blew me away. It's a vast masterpiece, a literary experiment, an “anti-memoir,” and a hefty work of literary criticism. The narrator has a longtime friend, a theorist, who is an amalgam of many friends Rankine knows. They share conversations and intimacies that, accompanied by visuals, make for a rich and kaleidoscopic reading experience. I won't spoil the ending, but Rankine never lets you go easy.
“birthdays” by Chiwan Choi (poetry)
It is so hard to nail a book that portrays such complicated grief as this one, and Choi does it well. There are birthdays, massive losses, immediacy, and mind-numbing changes all contained in this wonderful poetry collection. Choi is a master of human intimacy and vulnerability, and here it's naked on the page.
“If I Survive You” by Jonathan Escoffery (literary fiction)
This spectacular collection gripped me from the first page. Escoffery's rare combination of humor, cultural nuance and complexity, and emotional rigor equips his cast of characters— and especially narrator, a Jamaican American named Trelawny— with a sense of real, earned authenticity. This is a masterclass in perspective, emotional rigor and narrative control.
“Interstitial Archaeology” by Felicia Zamora (poetry)
It's not easy to depict several types of estrangement, and Zamora does so here. With her lovely handle on metaphor, bodily hauntings, vast imagination, and memory, this book is an excavation and a light. She also really knows how to hone in on how we as humans survive and how we archive our strivings and wonderings.
“Court of No Record” by Jenny Molberg (poetry)
Molberg is a poet I deeply admire based on her fearlessness, technical prowess, and brilliant understanding of how humans handle pain, loss, survival, and violence. It's a mix of confessional poetry and documentary work, and it absolutely seizes your heart and somehow makes you feel more fearless, too.
“Kansas City Gothic” by Alex Tretbar (poetry, Kansas City ties)
Tretbar is a recent graduate of the University of Missouri-Kansas City MFA creative writing program, and a remarkable poet. This collection covers a gamut of material with such aplomb that I was wide-eyed the entire time I was reading. This book is about more than the dark underbellies of Kansas City; there are also moments of hope amid powerful, nuanced conversations about incarceration, addiction, illusion versus grandeur, language, and survival. He also invokes interesting jazz improvisations and movements to really nail the KC experience.
“A Good Impression” by Daniel Barrios, coming in 2028 (short stories, Kansas ties)
A recently relocated professor to Dodge City, Kansas, Barrios depicts Staten Island with a rich and lush authenticity, an earned grace, and a tender but clear-eyed microscope on the lives we often forget, the promises we don't honor, the people we love and who leave us—or whom we leave—and the carnal, human desire to just leave a good impression. A powerful, sweeping collection.. It will be released in 2028, but readers should get it on their radar now.
Steve Paul’s recommendations
“London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family’s Search for Truth,” by Patrick Radden Keefe (nonfiction)
The true story of a teenager who plummets from an apartment tower into the Thames River under mysterious circumstances. Keefe’s investigation into the fascinating case navigates the young man’s complicated and largely fabricated life in Britain's evolving social scenes, through a milieu of wealth, drugs and Russian oligarchs.
“Cool Machine” by Colson Whitehead (fiction)
This is the third novel in the author’s trilogy about a Harlem furniture salesman and his encounters in a violent crime world. Like the two other installments, the book impresses with its crackling, page-turning style and moral complexities. The story of Ray Carney has utterly human dimensions, and incorporates vivid and deft observations of 1980s urban streetscapes and pop culture. Ray’s longtime muscle buddy, Pepper, takes center stage in the book’s middle section involving an African art heist and its violent consequences.
“Man Overboard!” by Kathleen Rooney (2026) (fiction)
This wildly inventive short novel features the self-reflections and hallucinations of a Gen-Zer, who happens to be treading water (metaphor alert) after leaping into the Caribbean off the side of a cruise ship and abandoning his wife and in-laws. Will he survive and conquer his despair? That’s for you to find out.
“Where the Music Had to Go: How Bob Dylan and the Beatles Changed Each Other—and the World” by Jim Windolf (nonfiction)
Readers of a certain age, and those with a hankering for pop-music history, will enjoy discovering the little-known connections between these superstars. The parallel rise to stardom of Dylan and the Beatles in the early 1960s includes numerous and often surprising convergences, conflicts and lyrical reverberations.
“The Insider: Malcolm Cowley and the Triumph of American Literature” by Gerald Howard (biography)
While not a household name himself, Malcolm Cowley, a memoirist, book critic, and editor, helped establish the literary careers of Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Jack Kerouac and numerous other American writers. This vivid portrait of Cowley’s literary legacy spans the cultural hothouses of Paris and Greenwich Village as well as the contentious politics of the 1930s, and the post-World War II flowering of American publishing.
“How It Feels to Be Alive: Encounters with Art and Our Selves” by Megan O’Grady (nonfiction, Kansas City ties)
O’Grady, a journalist and art critic, has roots in the Kansas City area and the Nelson-Atkins Museum. “How It Feels To be Alive” examines the ways visual art resonates with life— combining the author’s confessional personal history with biographical portraits and smart analysis while examining a wide-ranging roster of contemporary artists, including the photographer Carrie Mae Weems, the performance artist Pope.L, the digital sign-maker Barbara Kruger and the sculptor Beverly Pepper.
“Transcription” by Ben Lerner (fiction, Kansas ties)
The Topeka native’s latest novel is another brainy, angsty, and time-hopping stroll through an overgrown intellectual meadow. Through an interview with a beloved mentor and a meaningful bout of digital device despair, Lerner captures his narrator’s thoughts of past and present, of dreams and dialogues, of ideas of art, perception, history, reality versus fiction, miscommunication, love and parenthood.
- Mark Luce, chair of the English department, The Barstow School
- Steve Paul, author and journalist
- Jennifer Maritza McCauley, author and assistant professor of English, University of Missouri-Kansas City
