Summer's here, sayeth the Quarterly Conversation!

The new Summer issue of the Quarterly Conversation is online and full of good reading to distract you from your work all week.

There's no review from me in this issue--though I'll soon be popping up with one of John Beer's The Waste Land and Other Poems--but that still leaves plenty more good pieces than I can highlight here:

• An impressionistic, elliptic review of Anne Carson's Nox by George Fragopoulos. "Family denies us the possibility of exclusion: one will always belong even if one belongs only in a sense of not belonging," writes Fragopoulos of Carson's book about her late brother. "But what happens when you alone are that center, you alone are the only one left to lay claim to that aspect of your identity? Can it even be said to exist anymore?"

• An essay by Gregory McCormick on Eileen Chang. McCormick argues that Chang's "tendency to emphasize the domestic over the national" has been borne out by the fact that "many of the overtly political novels from this period are largely forgotten, even in China."

• An excerpt from a new translation of Robert Juan-Cantavella's El Dorado.

• A review of Michael Marr's new Speak, Nabokov by Scott Esposito.

• A review of Christopher Ricks's new look at Geoffrey Hill, Anthony Hecht, and Robert Lowell, True Friendship, by Patrick Kurp, who recommends Ricks to those "readers uneasy with literary criticism, fearing they squander finite reading time when not attending to the objects of criticism (fiction, essays, poetry) but instead their parasitic offspring."

• And, as they say in advertising, much, much more!

Don't forget: a handful of TQC contributors and editors are also talking books every day at our still-relatively-new group bog, the Constant Conversation. Come on down and join in the conversation!