Camp Levi—nestled in the Mississippi countryside—is designed to “cure” young teenage boys of their budding homosexuality. Will Dillard, a Midwestern graduate student, spent a summer at the camp as a teenager, and has since tried to erase that experience from his mind. But when a fellow student alerts him that a slasher movie based on the camp is being released, he is forced to confront his troubled history and possible culpability in the death of a fellow camper.
As past and present are woven together, Will recounts his “rehabilitation,” eventually returning to the abandoned campgrounds to solve the mysteries of that pivotal summer, and to reclaim his story from those who have stolen it. With a masterful confluence of sensibility and place, How to Survive a Summer introduces an exciting new literary voice.
“Clear and moving, revealing White’s talent in evoking the complexities of the rural South.”
—Publishers Weekly
“While reading Nick White’s How to Survive a Summer, I found myself nodding along with White’s remarkably accurate depictions not just of the conversion therapy practices many of us survivors know all too well but also of the years of denial and humor we hid behind in an effort to put the past thoroughly behind us. At turns funny and moving, White’s novel is an essential catharsis.”
—Garrard Conley, author of Boy Erased
Author Bio: Nick White is an Assistant Professor of English at Ohio State University. A native of Mississippi, he earned a Ph.D. in English from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. His short stories have been published in a variety of places, including The Kenyon Review, Guernica, Indiana Review, Day One, The Hopkins Review, and elsewhere. 
