Every week, The New Yorker’s editors and critics select the best new books of the year so far. To mark the beginning of summer, we’ve also asked the magazine’s writers to name some of their favorite pocket reads—works short enough to finish in a single August afternoon. Their picks are below.

Rachel Syme on “The Girls of Slender Means”

There’s exquisite pleasure to be found in spending the summer tackling an epic book, chipping away at “Anna Karenina” or “Lonesome Dove” while plopped on various beach towels and picnic blankets. But there are moments of the season that simply call out for a brisk read. Sometimes you want to spend one perfect day hidden away from the heat inside an air-conditioned room, cracking open a fresh book in the morning and finishing it by sunset. When I am craving that feeling, I turn to the Scottish author Muriel Spark, who was the undisputed master of the compact novel: most of her twenty-two works of fiction fall between a hundred and three hundred pages and go down briskly and bitterly, like Campari on ice. Spark, who was born in 1918 and died in 2006, had a talent for writing wicked little books that defy easy categorization; her coming-of-age stories feel like horror stories, her horror stories feel like love stories, and her love stories feel like acid satire. Perhaps my favorite of the bunch is “The Girls of Slender Means” (1963), a fittingly slender volume (around a hundred and forty pages) about a group of young women living in a London boarding house at the end of the Second World War. The boarders are more preoccupied with their own petty squabbles over dresses and boyfriends than they are with the Blitz, nonetheless a mood of menace pervades the house. But the best way to start with Spark is to read “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” (1961), a hundred-and-sixty-page novel originally published in The New Yorker that is her most famous work for a reason. It tells the tale of Jean Brodie, a high-spirited teacher at the Marcia Blaine School for Girls, and a group of six girls who become her acolytes, known as the Brodie set. The book follows the Brodie set from age ten to seventeen (and in the case of the protagonist, Sandy, who becomes a nun, well into adulthood) as they navigate adolescence under Miss Brodie’s guidance. Even after Miss Brodie leaves the school, she still maintains a magnetic hold on the girls’ imaginations. Spark’s prose is witty, strange, and lean, though you never find yourself missing the fat. Every word is delicious.

Sarah Larson on “1967: How I Got There and Why I Never Left”

In anticipation of the July release of “Stranded in the Future,” the second short memoir by the brilliant and prolific British groover Robyn Hitchcock, I reread his recent first one, “1967: How I Got There and Why I Never Left,” an artistic bildungsroman bursting with whimsy and discovery. It begins in 1966, when he’s twelve and his parents drop him off at Winchester College, a boarding school for which he’s already learned ancient Greek. There, he contends with fellow-“inmates” Horse, Mudfellow, Scraper, and Gallows; reads Latin and German; learns that “the barber is the natural enemy of freedom”; feverishly explores such wonders as the Incredible String Band, “Highway 61 Revisited,” “Sgt. Pepper,” and Jimi Hendrix, “music to levitate to” (“SKRONK-SKREEK-SKRONK-SKREEK . . . I am a teenager on fire”); grows to six feet; and attends happenings (“Down I slither into a cellar that’s been there since 1382”) m.c.’d by a sage local art student, Brian Eno (“He seems to know something”). Hitchcock is the rare being who’s poised to delight whenever he writes or speaks, and his narrative voice hums right along throughout. The print edition, of a length and breeziness you can enjoy in a single Amtrak journey or an afternoon in a hammock, includes his pleasingly weird sketches; the audiobook, which he narrates, adds extra Hitchcockian zing to lines like “The bells ring loudly, peal across the flint and brick and stone of imposing English dismalia” and exclamations like “Yaysville!”

Jennifer Wilson on “The Captain’s Daughter”

I have a Ph.D. in Russian literature, so when people ask me for a book rec, I know they want me to play the part of literary dominatrix and name a work of punitive intensity. Virginia Woolf praised the novels of Dostoevsky as “seething whirlpools, gyrating sandstorms, waterspouts which hiss and boil and suck us in.” When it comes to the sick pleasure we take in Russian literature, size matters: the Russians aren’t famous for their brevity (“War and Peace” has two epilogues). Anyone seeking out a Russian novel is in the market for something weight-bearing, the kind of book that could keep a person occupied on a long march to Siberia. In fact, the novelist Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, whose family was targeted during Stalin’s purges, told The Paris Review that her great-grandfather instructed his children to memorize as much Russian literature as they could, as “when they ended up in a penal colony, they’d need something to entertain their fellow prisoners with.” Petrushevskaya started on Alexander Pushkin. A wise choice—his novels are shorter than those of his compatriots in terms of word count and conveniently full of tips on how to overthrow the government. The vibrant work of political fiction “The Captain’s Daughter” (translated by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler) comes in at a mere one hundred and ninety-two pages. It’s set in the seventeen-seventies amid a large-scale serf rebellion led by a Cossack named Yemelyan Pugachev who claims to be Catherine the Great’s slain husband, Tsar Peter III. The pretender theme is a classic of Russian literature, the country having endured not one but three False Dmitrys, men declaring themselves the son of Ivan the Terrible. So if you find yourself reading Russian novels and can’t keep track of the names, don’t worry—they had their own bookkeeping issues.

Kyle Chayka on “My Family and Other Animals”

Intimidated by the prospect of international travel with a five-month-old baby, I’m turning instead to literary tourism this summer. Expat memoirs are great at capturing the thrill of a new place; the author and the reader both fall in love with it. The British naturalist and zookeeper Gerald Durrell’s “My Family and Other Animals,” from 1956, does that trick for the island of Corfu, capturing the years of his childhood in which his family (a lackadaisical mother plus three quirky siblings) moved to Greece and inhabited a series of crumbling villas. It’s a speedy travelogue finishable in one long afternoon on the beach. Durrell alternates between slapstick domestic high jinks, wanderings through the lush natural landscape, and increasingly ambitious investigations of biological life, from tracking twitching bacteria in pond water to the mating habits of insects. His writing glows with his obvious love of plants and animals, not least his faithful dog, Roger. “My Family and Other Animals” was a best-seller, kicked off a craze for Corfu tourism, and has had a long afterlife. After finishing the book, you can turn to “The Durrells,” the enjoyably chill 2016-19 ITV adaptation that features Josh O’Connor just before his insurgent international fame. O’Connor plays Durrell’s older brother Lawrence, who became a famous author in his own right and wrote about Corfu as well. It’s a whole summer syllabus.

Jon Allsop on “Wigs on the Green”

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Recent summers in the U.K. have been marred by far-right rallies and riots. Already, this summer is no exception (and, technically, it’s still spring). It’s a timely moment, then, to revisit Nancy Mitford’s 1935 novel, “Wigs on the Green,” a sendup of that era’s fascist posturers. Eugenia Malmains, a wealthy and bored heiress, proclaims, on a Cotswolds village green, that the “British lion” must roar anew, while her nanny (a “filthy Pacifist”) beseeches her to stop. Eugenia recruits a cast of accomplices—each more vapid, vain, and venal than the last, though they lack her zeal. (One joins to oppose “foreigners,” even if he thinks Hitler might “carry things a shade far sometimes.”) The book culminates in a violent—if farcical—battle royale: Pacifists versus Union Jackshirts.

The book’s origin story is messy. Eugenia was clearly based on Mitford’s sister Unity, an obsessive Hitlerite, and another sister, Diana, would marry Oswald Mosley, the leader of the Jackshirts’ real-life analogue, the British Union of Fascists, whose supporters were known as Blackshirts. Nancy was, for a time, involved with that group (albeit, it seems, only out of familial solidarity), trying to persuade her sisters that “Wigs on the Green,” painted their cause in a positive light. They weren’t convinced; Nancy published anyway, and the family fractured. After the Second World War, she blocked the book’s republication, on the grounds that “too much has happened for jokes about Nazis to be regarded as anything but the worst of taste.” Fascism shouldn’t be underestimated, of course. But a little mockery needn’t impede that task. It might even help puncture the far right’s pomposity. Either way, Eugenia’s chant echoes the slogans of today in blending the menacing and the silly: “We will whack / And we will smack . . . All traitors to the Union Jack.”

Naomi Fry on “A Way of Life, Like Any Other”

I love stories about people on the come-up as much as the next gal, but there’s also nothing quite like reading about has-beens. Darcy O’Brien’s “A Way of Life, Like Any Other,” which was first published in 1977 and reissued a couple of decades later by the NYRB Classics imprint, is, in its way, a bildungsroman: a nameless boy comes of age in nineteen-fifties Los Angeles and learns how to contend with the world around him. The book’s more notable aspect, though, at least for me, is the protagonist’s divorced parents, a pair of faded Hollywood actors each lost and desperate in their own particular way. The mother, a onetime leading lady, is a drunkard searching for love, sex, and a meal ticket; the father, who was once a hero of Westerns, has turned to Catholicism and sad-sack musings in the wake of his marriage’s breakup, which he still laments. Meanwhile, the boy protagonist—both innocent and wry, and more mature than either parent—shuttles between the two, trying to keep them from falling apart entirely. If this sounds like a depressing read, it’s not. The book is funny and effervescent, while also poignant in portraying what it looks like when fame’s golden sun turns away from those who once basked in it, leaving them in shadow. A perfect, swift read.

Helen Rosner on “Great Granny Webster”

“Great Granny Webster” presents itself, at first, as a comic novel: a madcap portrait gallery of absurd aristocrats trapped in the self-created, self-imposed miseries of their haughty stations. It is funny, genuinely, but the comedy gives over, page by page, to something like dread—the accumulating weight of family history, the obligations of inheritance. Lady Caroline Blackwood drew on her own upper-class, Anglo-Irish upbringing for this autobiographical fiction about the multigenerational destruction of women by their own families, and the novel has the unshakeable, freaky urgency of truth.

Beyond its tartness, its specificity, and the sensuous, elliptical line work of its prose, the book serves as a vinegary corrective to the novel of nostalgic country-house girlhood. Blackwood, with her firsthand knowledge of drafty manors and unhinged families, explains with remorseless precision what lies behind the fantasy—what happens when the houses, and the people in them, are neither charismatic nor lovable. The novella’s three discrete portraits—each grotesque, farcical, and illuminating, especially Aunt Lavinia, a glitter-tragic screwball who deserves infamy on par with Zelda Fitzgerald and Holly Golightly—assemble into a working theory of the narrator herself, unnamed and for much of the book strangely blank, almost a third party in her own life.

“Granny” very nearly won the 1977 Booker Prize, Philip Larkin having rejected it in part on the grounds that it was too close to reality to count as fiction—a judgment that’s obviously outrageous, and likely sexist, and the edge of underdoggery it gives the book is so in keeping with its own narrative tone that it nearly feels contrived. I press this book into the hands of nearly every American woman I know who carries around an embarrassingly Anglophile fascination with family silver, marabou, and gin—there are so many of us!—and I have no intention of stopping.

Alexandra Schwartz on “Ballerina”

Whenever I pick up a book by Patrick Modiano, a writer I love, I feel that I am on a kind of diving expedition, going down, down, down into the hushed, clouded sea of memory. For Modiano, it is the past that is real. The present goes barely acknowledged in his many slim, enigmatic novels, except as a kind of disorienting rupture with the world he inhabits in his mind. Reading “Ballerina,” Modiano’s latest novel, from 2023 (it was translated from the French by Mark Polizzotti), I was startled by a glimpse of contemporary Paris: “It looked like a huge amusement park or the duty-free shops in an airport. . . . The passersby walked in groups of a dozen or so, dragging their rolling suitcases, and most of them wore backpacks.” (Backpacks? Quelle horreur!) But “Ballerina” is really set in the sixties, when the narrator, then a penniless writer of song lyrics, knew, and maybe loved, the dancer of the title, a young woman who had recently arrived in the city with her young son. They both have a strange connection to a possibly kind, possibly sinister landlord named Serge Verzini. But you don’t read a Modiano novel for plot. You read one for atmosphere. Think of Jeanne Moreau, wandering dark Parisian streets all night long in Louis Malle’s “Elevator to the Gallows” to the sounds of Miles Davis’s trumpet. This novel is like that: a hunt for a person long vanished, mournful and mysterious, as brief and beautiful as a flashbulb.

Hua Hsu on “Sojourn”

Amit Chaudhuri’s recent novels—“Friend of My Youth,” “Sojourn,” and the forthcoming “Château Rouge”—each involve an Indian writer on the road to give readings or guest lectures. We don’t know much about him, and in the course of these trips the writer seems to lose sense of who he is, dissolving into his surroundings, moored only by flashes of memory. Chaudhuri is a master of mundane, hallucinatory moments, calling to mind Rachel Cusk or W. G. Sebald. In “Sojourn,” the writer is in Berlin for a visiting professorship, initially fretting over matters of writerly ego, like whether his hosts have skimped on his accommodations. Was Kenzaburo Oe, for example, subjected to the same spartan toilet seat? He’s there to give talks on India as a “modern” (rather than colonial or post-colonial) idea, yet he doesn’t seem to care very much about persuading anyone. Perhaps he doesn’t believe that nations exist in such discrete phases. Instead, the writer surrenders himself to a series of mysterious locals who guide him through a hidden Berlin, one where he becomes attuned to, and almost obsessed with, history’s ghastly reverberations. By the end, you have no idea what was real and what was a fever dream. Either way, I’m eager to accompany the writer wherever his next invitation takes him.