Wordplay

The authors of eight of 2023's buzziest books share their favorite gifts for the shelf.

Vanities /Books

VINTAGE FICTION

Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance (1995) is "the kind of book that stops time," says Abraham Verghese, author of The Covenant of Water. "You enter another world, live a full lifespan, and return to find that it's only Tuesday!"

DARK COMEDY

Death Valley by Melissa Broder (2023) is about "grief and whether or not to take the road less traveled," says Samantha Irby, author of Quietly Hostile. "It's also extremely funny!"

SUPERB NOVELLA

"I know of no other work that portrays more convincingly the mind and soul of an animal than Tibor Dery's Niki: The Story of a Dog (1956), translated from the Hungarian by Edward Hyams," enthuses Sigrid Nunez, who wrote The Vulnerables.

ART HISTORY

Painter "Leonora Carrington had a rich and, at times, tumultuous life," says Katy Hessel, who wrote The Story of Art Without Men. "Surreal Spaces (2023), a new biography, is penned by her long-lost cousin, Joanna Moorhead."

CLIMATE FABLE

"Martin Amis's Money (1984) is the cityscape as artwork we've left behind in exchange for brooks and trees and what the biologists now call major fauna," says David Lipsky, author of The Parrot and the Igloo. After reading, you'll want to "live vegan and recycle."

PARENTING

NOTES

Jenny Xie, author of Holding Pattern, calls Molly Lynch's The Forbidden Territory of a Terrifying Woman (2023) "a gorgeous novel about how intimately acquainted one becomes with fear and love after motherhood."

SPORTS CENTER

Per Adam Gopnik, who wrote The Real Work, George Plimpton's Mad Ducks and Bears (1973), about Detroit Lions linemen, shows "that mastery of even the most 'corporeal' of crafts is an inimitable and ever-changing compound of determination, accident, and the power of human will."

TREE TALES

In Tom Wessels's Reading the Forested Landscape (2005), "the forests of the past continue to haunt the forests of the present," says Daniel Mason, North Woods author.