Vogue’s Picks for August

Charismatic men is the the theme for Vogue’s august picks…as Saiorse Ronan graces the cover & discusses her role as Mary Queen of Scots.

His Favorites

Following the accidental death of a friend, 15-year-old Joe Hadley Shows up mid-semester at a posh boarding school in Kate Walbert’s stunningly hazy novel His Favorites (Scribner). The new coed captures the attention of Master, a 34-year-old classics teacher whose boyish charm quickly turns predatory.  Master’s legacy becomes “a shadow across my life–a solid bar, a locked turnstile that brings me up short, trapped on the other side of where I thought I was going.”  Invoking the work of Wallace Stevens, Master’s favorite poet, and the bard of lost innocence, His Favorites becomes a layered, time-bending book that depicts the lingering effects of abuse.  In 2004, when Walbert was among five female novelists nominated for the National Book Award, critics caviled that the academy was lowering its standards by anointing obscure women writers.  Here, there will be no mistaking, Walbert for anything but devastatingly relevant.–Lauren Mechling, Vogue

The Incendiaries

Faith and its furies lie at the heart of The Incendiaries (Riverhead), R.O. Kwon’s disarmingly propulsive debut. The enigmatic Phoebe Lin and fellow Californian Will Kendall meet and fall in love at the prestigious Edwards University in upstate New York.  Having witnessed religion fail his ailing mother, Will breaks off from his fundamentalist Christian upbringing and strains to fill the ensuing void.  Haunted by her role in the death of her mother, Phoebe also needs a reason to believe, and falls in thrall to a religious cult run by a former missionary who boasts of having escaped a North Korean gulag.  It’s a combustive tale about the human compulsion to latch onto something  bigger than ourselves, no matter the cost.–Lauren Mechling, Vogue