If you haven't heard already, this year VCU chose Kenji Yoshino's Covering: the Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights by Kenji Yoshino for its Summer Reading Program book. This book is a nuanced exploration of identity and the ways that we reveal and conceal it. Yoshino is a poet and a law professor, and this shows through in both his lyrical prose and his dogged argumentation. VCU Libraries has many copies of this book available for checkout, and we also have a Web page with resources about the book.
Available at Cabell Library, Tompkins-McCaw Library for the Health Sciences, and online
In her first novel, Jhumpa Lahiri addresses themes of cultural identity and the immigrant experience with a quiet grace. Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli are Bengali immigrants living near Boston with their American-born children Sonia and Gogol, the namesake of the title. The novel follows Gogol Ganguli from birth through early adulthood as he struggles with his identity, embodied by an Indian surname, a Russian pet name that was never meant to be his first name, and his desire to be an average American boy. Gogol tries to distance himself from the Bengali immigrant community to which his parents remain tied by changing his name and traveling first to Yale and then to New York, where he works as an architect and dates Maxine, a woman whose upbringing and lifestyle is vastly different from his own. He appears content, yet the question of identity continues to haunt him – “he is conscious of the fact that his immersion in Maxine’s family is a betrayal of his own” – and throughout the entire novel Gogol searches for a place where he can truly belong.
This book is a riveting menagerie of story, from the overarching tale of the novel, to the stories contained within it, to the 
A fictionalized account of the murder of 
The comic strip 
The history of literary criticism is not among the world's most well-known leisure reading subjects, and yet this book is an engrossing study of how tastes in literature change. It's particularly relevant if you spend time thinking about whether what you're reading is good, bad, or indifferent. In 149 pages, Rónán McDonald travels from 
The story of 
This collection of short stories is a representative offering, showcasing Murakami's skills from his beginnings as an author in the late '70s to today. Shadowy jazz clubs, bizarre metaphysical conditions, high and low culture, Japanese work culture, political violence, nameless and subtly attractive women: all of his recurring obsessions appear here. The book has a loose, freewheeling feel, and is a fine place for a Murakami beginner. Read a few paragraphs of a story, and if you don't like it, move on to the next. Diverse as this collection is, you will eventually find something you like.
The 1992 death of the wanderer 
Not for the faint of heart, The Savage Detectives is a dreamlike and gritty tale of the fictional Visceral Realism poetry movement in 1970s Mexico City. The story follows the elusive ringleaders of this motley group of young writers – Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima – on their quixotic mission to find Cesárea Tinajero, the first true Visceral Realist. By turns ponderous and gripping, The Savage Detectives is an absorbing novel that is not to be missed, if only to experience Bolaño’s style and Wimmer’s superb translation.
In this debut novel, 
Hank Thompson, protagonist of 