Three Must-Have Summer Books

American Savage
by Dan Savage (Dutton, $26.95)
In his first book since his It Gets Better campaign launched a thousand YouTube videos, Savage updates readers on his teenage son (out as straight despite being raised by two gay men), the Folsom Street Fair (ineptly protested by a tiny splinter group), and Santorum after Savage redefined the word.

Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish
by David Rakoff (Doubleday, $26.95)
No one was more trenchantly funny than David Rakoff, the essayist and longtime This American Life contributor who died in 2012. Just before his passing, he finished Cherish, Perish, a rhythmic, rhyming novel that captures the lives of several generations of Americans, from a hobo riding the rails during the Great Depression to a man coping with AIDS in 1980s San Francisco.

Confessions of a Fairy's Daughter
by Alison Wearing (Alfred A. Knopf, $24)
When Wearing was 12, her father came out as gay. Nearly unheard of in 1970s small-town Canada, the revelation changed the course of her and her father's lives, both captured in Wearing's funny and moving memoir.