What Barbara Kingsolver Is Reading - The New Yorker

Barbara Kingsolver’s books have been everywhere since the nineties: your neighbor’s bookshelf, your college lounge, your grandmother’s coffee table, your schoolteacher’s desk, every lake house in the Lower Forty-eight. Kingsolver clawed her way onto the best-seller lists with her third novel, “Pigs in Heaven” (1993), but she started camping out there for months at a time with “The Poisonwood Bible” (1998), her epic about an American missionary family’s experiences in revolutionary Congo. That was followed by an alternating pattern of somewhat smaller domestic novels, like “Prodigal Summer” (2000), and somewhat larger historical novels, like “The Lacuna” (2009), until a whole other generation got knocked over by her work with a perfect combination of the two: the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Demon Copperhead” (2022).

If you haven’t already read “Demon Copperhead,” well, what can I tell you? Pick up a copy, turn off your phone, and cancel your plans for the next twenty-four hours. The novel isn’t just a Dickensian homage; it’s practically a séance. Damon Fields plays the part of rural America’s own David Copperfield with so much velocity that you’ll get papercuts trying to turn the pages quickly enough. It’s Kingsolver’s own elegy for Appalachia, a plea for readers to remember the generation of children orphaned and abandoned by the opioid crisis, struggling to survive and make sense of an epidemic the rest of the country has already forgotten.

Kingsolver’s newest novel, “Partita,” is out next week, and, in keeping with that pattern of expanding and contracting scales, it’s shorter and more intimate. I visited with the author earlier this year for a Profile in this week’s Fall Books Issue, and she described her new book as “a nesting box” of love letters, narrated by the daughter of a dairy farmer, who hopes to become a concert pianist, but whose life is derailed while at observatory. Some of the book’s most beautiful passages are those that interrogate the mysteries of why we love what we love, whether it’s a piece of music, a person, a place, or anything else. Kingsolver, who trained as a classical pianist, says that even though her nineteenth book may seem small it wrestles with big ideas: who the arts belong to, and how, be it a symphony or a piece of fiction, a work of art can change our lives.

It’s always interesting to visit with authors in their homes, and Kingsolver’s is a very storied farm in Meadowview, Virginia. Readers already got a thorough tour of the property in her memoir “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle” (2007), which documented her family’s attempt to live almost entirely off what they or their neighbors could grow in southwest Virginia. Along with advice for cultivating tomatoes and pickling cucumbers, Kingsolver offers a hilarious riff on turkey sex and a prescient discussion of technology in the Amish community. I didn’t have room in the Profile for one of my favorite features of Kingsolver’s home: the stack of books she keeps beside the standing desk in her office like a to-do list: to read, to shelve, to find another home for, to revisit. Below are a few to consider for your own stack, written by living authors Kingsolver loves.

“Ply,” by Hernan Diaz

Kingsolver had not yet started this new sci-fi novel by her “Pulitzer Twin.” The two shared the prize in 2023, her for “Demon Copperhead,” him for “Trust,” which was the first time in more than a hundred years that a pair of novelists were recognized together. Another writer might have resented having to share, but Kingsolver delighted in it. When she picked up “Ply,” she told me that she found the cover too abstract, its origami lettering making the title hard to decipher, but if you read Kathryn Schulz’s review in this week’s issue you know the style resonates with the novel’s playful, layered structure.

“The Weedy Garden,” by Margaret Renkl

Another Southerner, Renkl was until very recently a columnist for the Times, based in Nashville. She and Kingsolver are both avid Instagrammers, and often admire photographs of each other’s gardens. Unlike Renkl’s earlier works of nonfiction, “The Weedy Garden” is a kid’s book, a gorgeous romp of mixed-media collages, made by her brother Billy Renkl, accompanying short songs of prose which encourage readers to make wild friends in their own back yards. Having failed to get traction with a few picture-book ideas of her own before finally co-authoring “Coyote’s Wild Home” with her youngest daughter, Kingsolver knows how challenging a task it is to please young readers.

“All These Ghosts,” by Silas House

When I visited her, Kingsolver had just returned from Greece, where she and fellow Appalachian author Silas House had led a workshop together in Patmos. The pair have been friends and readers of each other’s work for years, and she’s especially partial to his poetry. Like Kingsolver, the Kentuckian writes patiently and rapturously about the natural world: from katydids and kudzu to wild grapes and dogwoods. He has a new novel coming out this month, too—“The Tulip Poplars”—which she says is his best yet.

Read Cep’s Profile of Kingsolver »

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Everybody’s talking about:

• The Booker Prize shortlist. Here to comment is our books editor Victoria Uren:

“My favorite Booker book that I read this year (caveat!—I didn’t read them all) did not make it onto the shortlist. Makenna Goodman’s ‘Helen of Nowhere’ is a slim little prism of a book: hold it one way and it looks like one thing, turn it a few degrees and a whole new form of light seems to be coming through. It’s a weird novel, with some (brief) parts in which I felt perhaps a little too unmoored, but I loved the way it threatened assumptions both aesthetic and moral.

“ ‘John of John’ and ‘May We Feed the King,’ two of the shortlisted books that I have read, both seem to me like they could win, though for different reasons: I read the Douglas Stuart months ago, but I still sometimes feel twinges of the alienation, anger, and tenderness that one of his protagonists, Cal, endures in the story. Rebecca Perry describes her own elegant book as being about ‘memory, agency, and imagination,’ but to me it is about subduing the violent emotions of grief and mortal fear—and the cost we pay to subdue them.

“That said, I’m rooting for ‘The Disappearers,’ in which I am currently knee-deep. Nowadays, I go to books for so many things, not only pleasure—but I think in my heart what I still want most is to be kidnapped by a novel. And Marlon James has kidnapped me.”

Coming soon:

• David Byrne, of Talking Heads fame, has a book coming out on October 6th called “Sleeping Beauties,” about how big ideas are sometimes slow to take hold.

• “Fair Ones,” a new novel by Lydia Millet, is told from the points of view of two Brooklyn women grappling with the murder of their friend. It’s also publishing on the 6th.

• Meghan O’Gieblyn’s memoir, “Will and Attention,” comes out on the 6th, too. It’s about her evolving relationship with both organized religion and alcohol. The title comes from the philosopher Simone Weil, who wrote, “We have to try to cure our faults by attention and not by will.”

• Yiyun Li’s “Music Against the Night” is out on the 13th. The New Yorker’s editorial director Henry Finder writes that it is one of those rare works in which the form is in elegant dialogue with the subject.

• “Kill Jackie,” a new series starring Catherine Zeta-Jones and adapted from the Nick Harkaway novel “The Price You Pay,” will be available on Amazon Prime starting Friday.

P.S. The entertainment agent Ari Emanuel, who has a new book out, spoke with David Remnick on The New Yorker Radio Hour last week about his dealings with Donald Trump and Elon Musk, and about mixing business with politics.

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