What makes a good beach read? Should it be pulpy and trashy and greasy with sunscreen? Or a gut-wrenchingly realistic commentary on the human condition? Ask Molly Young, a contributing writer for GQ and the New York Times Magazine, and she'd say a good beach read is easy enough to take frequent breaks, but "brain-gripping enough to provide a steady opportunity for escapism." That sounds about right. Right?

But then we asked a dozen more writers for their favorite beach reads and, well, it turns out there's really no consensus to be had. Which is kind of beautiful. So this list is eclectic-as-hell—it's got everything from science fiction thrillers to classic Japanese lit to contemporary poetry. Meaning there's something for everyone. Even if you like contemporary poetry.

Marlon James recommends American Spy

"Not a summer book, but a novel that will snatch your summer away. There has never been anything like it, and not because of the Black female spy telling the story, but the kind of story it is: espionage thriller, African political drama, wild romance, and doomed family epic."

Marlon James is an author and winner of the Man Booker Prize. His most recent novel, Black Leopard, Red Wolf, came out this February.

American Spy by Lauren Wilkinson $18 Amazon Buy Now

Ottessa Moshfegh recommends Say Say Say

"Say Say Say, Lila Savage's subversive debut novel, comes out in July. In it, Ella, a young woman living with her beautiful girlfriend in Minneapolis, works as a caregiver for Jill, a woman suffering from memory loss. Ella develops complicated feelings for Jill's husband, and familial tensions feed Ella's richly articulate consciousness. It's a riveting story and a meditation on work, loss, intimacy, and desire."

Ottessa Moshfegh is an author and winner of the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award. Her most recent book, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, is out in paperback June 25.

Say Say Say by Lila Savage $17 Amazon Buy Now

Chuck Klosterman recommends Empty Planet

"It's common to read a book and learn something interesting. It's pretty rare to stumble across a book that convincingly introduces the possibility that our most basic assumptions about reality might be totally backwards. Yet that's what happened when I read Empty Planet: The Shock of Population Decline. The premise of Empty Planet, written by two Canadians, initially struck me as an attempt at performative contrarianism. How could it be possible that the earth's population is on the verge of dramatically decreasing? Isn't global overpopulation a virtual inevitability? To be totally honest, I only started reading the book to figure out what weird political underpinnings would prompt people to make such a curious claim. But it turns out there aren't any. There is no agenda here. This is a situation where the paradoxical premise slowly starts to seem obvious. What the authors describe is hard to deny—as the world becomes more and more westernized, the human replacement rate will eventually fall below 2.1, which statistically guarantees that the world's population in 100 years will be considerably less than it is today. I'm not sure why this book isn't getting more attention."

Chuck Klosterman is an author, essayist, and journalist. His first short story collection, Raised in Captivity, is out July 16.

Empty Planet by Darrel Bricker and John Ibbitson $12 Amazon Buy Now

Karen Russell recommends Inland and A Sand Book

"We wait all year for summer to envelop us again, and let that anticipation warm our hands when the world is locked in ice; I do the same thing with books. For a new novel by Téa Obreht, I would wait another century, but lucky for me, I have just two months to go. Inland is a novel I plan to disappear with into the late light of August. The follow-up to Obreht's family legend and mythic Balkan masterpiece, The Tiger's Wife, it's been thrilling early readers. Set in 1893 in the thirst-crazed lands of the Arizona territory, Inland is grounded in the bedrock of real history: a story of a frontierswoman and a haunted outlaw whose solitary lives twine into an intricate new geometry. Obreht is a true landscape artist, and I can't wait to read her West. A starred Kirkus review describes Inland: 'A frontier tale dazzles with camels and wolves and two characters who never quite meet... a novel saturated in enough realism and magic to make the ghost of Gabriel García Márquez grin.' She had me at the camel cavalry.