for the beach

Summer reading lists are dripping with  short novels. Why lug a big one around when you can fit a couple short ones in your bag?

We've scanned summer reading lists and found 13 short novels for under the sun. Here's a few:

• Beijing Sprawl by Zechen Xu. A very contemporary and intimate view of city life in Beijing as a seventeen year old from a small village arrives to make it big.
• Open Throat by Henry Hoke."A lonely, lovable, queer mountain lion narrates this star-making fever dream of a novel." One of ELLE's Best Summer Books of 2023, and one of i-D's Fiction to be Excited for in 2023. Named a Most Anticipated Book by The New York Times, Vanity Fair, Buzzfeed, Nylon, Alta, Shondaland, Chicago Review of Books, Philadelphia Inquirer, and Literary Hub
• I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home by Lorrie Moore. From "one of the most acute and lasting writers of her generation" (The New York Times)--"a ghost story set in the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries, an elegiac consideration of grief, devotion (filial and romantic), and the vanishing and persistence of all things--seen and unseen."

Plus historical fiction, comedy, horror and more LGBTQ authors. Stay tuned. We'll suggest more summer reading next month too.

The Shortish Project is an evolving database of new and classic short novels from publishers big and small. Find the latest. Discover hidden gems. Search by author, book title or ISBN here.

Or lean in and do a random scroll through the full Shortish database (600 titles or so)!