Excerpts: "Summer," "El Jefe," and "The Last Great Road Bum"

We may not be able to close the book on 2020 yet, as much as we all want to, but we can offer some closure.

Or, rather, author Ali Smith is providing it.

Smith’s seasonal quartet, which weighed in on current events as they took place (or as best as they could), has just wrapped up with the release of Summer.

Read an excerpt of Summer at Literary Hub and NPR’s review of Summer.

Two more new releases from today take us south of the border: Héctor Tobar’s The Last Great Road Bum, which makes a novel out of the true story of a man who grew up in central Illinois and died fighting with guerrillas in El Salvador; and Alan Feuer’s El Jefe, which details the rise and fall of cartel leader Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman.

You can read an excerpt of The Last Great Road Bum and an excerpt of El Jefe in the New York Times.