Looking for something to read this season? Here’s a selection of what’s on my shelf.
Joan Wickersham’s 2012 collection The News From Spain: 7 Variations on a Love Story. Each piece includes that line—”the news from Spain”—and each one explores, in wonderfully tender and clever ways, something about what it means to love and not be loved.
Joe Mungo Reed’s 2025 novel Terrestrial History. Speculative literary fiction that destroyed me in the best way.
Charles Baxter’s 2022 craft book Wonderlands: Essays on the Life of Literature, in which he writes beautifully about dreams, nightmares and the value of “noticing and remembering settings, and objects, and feelings before they go away.”
Brian Klaas’s 2024 non-fiction book Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters. The TLDR: We each have very little individual control, and a whole lot of influence.
Dan Leach’s 2025 novel Junah at the End of the World. It’s sad, and wonderful, and funny. “Secretly, though,” Leach writes, “I was short on logistics. I knew Y2K had something to do with computers, something to do with banks, and possibly something to do with God. The connections were stated but nebulous.”
