And for a slim novel which I always want to press into peoples’ hands: Dept. Recently I’ve given The Sleeve Ought to Be Illegal, an new anthology of short essays written by a long list of people about the art collection in the Frick Museum, with pictures of course. Susan Minot: Last year, many copies of Caste by Isabel Wilkerson. Kristen Radtke: I love giving Lynda Barry’s Syllabus to professors it’s a beautiful homage to the craft of teaching.
I hope you guys don’t edit out the swears for these, because to my mind that is a crucial one. Rax King: I often give my fellow leftist podcaster types a copy of Zoë Heller’s The Believers, to remind us all not to be so fucking self-important. Kerri Arsenault: Hot Cold Heavy Light by Peter Schjeldahl and anything anything anything by Natalie Ginzburg.Īzareen Van der Vliet Oloomi: Claudia Rankine, Citizen. When I read it, I realized just how much realism there is in Don Quixote, and how much it’s a commentary on the meanness of everyday Spanish life, and its great social and ethnic diversity. Grossman was the translator of many of Gabriel García Márquez’s novels into English, and she brings a deft, lively touch to Cervantes’s masterpiece. Héctor Tobar: Edith Grossman’s wonderful, 2003 translation of Don Quixote. I’ve handed out this book as a gift at least half a dozen times. Leif Enger: I want to give The Memory Police, Yoko Ogawa’s great 1994 novel, to everyone I know. The book puts lavish and loving photographs of these gory dollhouse dioramas within the context of proto-feminist work, and I live for it.Īlexandra Kleeman: Girls Against God by Jenny Hval, Garments Against Women by Anne Boyer, Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer are all books which I’ve given many times over and which contain a piece of my heart. These dollhouses were complete not only with tiny furniture and wee cunning bloodstains but also with itsy-bitsy stockings that Glessner knit with pin-sized knitting needles. In the 1940s and 1950s, Frances Glessner Lee painstakingly constructed accurate reproductions of actual crime scenes, which she called the Nutshell Studies. Summers: The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death by Corinne May Botz. Broom: I Live in Music by Ntozake Shange.Ĭheslea G. Laura van den Berg: I gift Alexander Chee’s essay collection How to Write an Autobiographical Novel all the time, especially to students. I gave it to a lot of people during lockdown. To a large extent it’s about how people find ways to be happy, make connections, and make a difference in one another’s lives, even during the strangest, saddest and most restrictive circumstances, when their worlds have been savagely transformed almost beyond recognition. It’s a wonderful book at any time, and over the last year and a half it’s had a whole extra layer of resonance. Tana French: Amor Towles’s A Gentleman in Moscow.
T Kira Madden: I think I’ve given every friend a copy of Lynda Barry’s Cruddy, and if they don’t like it, they’re not my friend. It’s weirdly so subtle about character and motivation and can be a really useful tool for conceptualizing motivation. Or The Spiritual Dimension of the Enneagram-I like to give this book to writers. It’s an architectural theory book but it’s so beautifully organized and considered. Lauren Oyler: It depends on the person! But The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt.Įmma Cline: The Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander. Tracy O’Neill: Stories of Your Life and Othersby Ted Chiang or Bluetsby Maggie Nelson.
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