I have only had one interest, reading-wise, in the last weeks: Books by intelligent, urban women who are acerbic but not disaffected or alienated; women whose big brains almost, but don’t quite, overshadow their big hearts.

No book falls more squarely into this category than Suzie Boyt’s Loved and Missed, which I have recommended before and will surely recommend again. If you haven’t read it, go read it now.

If you have read Loved and Missed, I’m sorry to say that reading Boyt’s other novels won’t give you the same hair-standing-on-your-arms effect. But you know whose whole body of work will? Vivian Gornick.

I came to Gornick through her criticism years ago, but only recently did I read her other nonfiction, starting with the semi-sociological The Romance of American Communism. In it, Gornick travels the country, speaking to former Communist militants about the Party’s heyday in the United States and in their lives — and about what happened to them after Stalin’s cruelties became known internationally and American Communism fell apart. It’s at once heartbreaking and, in the most literal (and only acceptable) sense of the word, inspiring. I haven’t read a better chronicle of belief and commitment in my life.

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Did you enjoy your experience of America250? In D.C., heatwave aside, the prevailing sentiment—at least among the people I know—was that, with different national leadership and a different planning approach, it Could Have Been Cool. Sadly, though, I did not encounter any especially meaningful or interesting commemorations in my personal life, though I did review one for work.

I am attempting to commit to patriotism, generally speaking. From a Jewish perspective, it comes easily; I’ve written about it as an intellectual companion to anti-Zionism. From a more general political perspective, I feel that it’s neither smart nor useful to dismiss the country I live in. I’m a citizen. My job is to try to make it better here. My job is also to observe the ways in which it is and has been bad. This is a practical thing to do. You know the Marx line about history repeating itself as tragedy, then as farce? We seem to be at the farce stage, and I would prefer not to live through whatever comes next.

So, for your extended existential Fourth of July hangover, should you be sharing that emotion with me, I have some excellent novels of the American past. All but one are about the 20^th century, which is my taste in both history and literature, I’m not trying to be exhaustive in any way here. I just think these are good books to help you think about the United States.

An obvious starting point, in the context of this newsletter, is Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, an alternative history in which Charles Lindbergh becomes president and the U.S. descends into antisemitic fascism. It’s also a lovely and gently sad story of two brothers diverging; the parts of the novel I think about most are fictional Philip’s older brother Sandy doing his absolute best to become a Gentile, something little Philip can’t understand. Not incidentally, a lot of my ideas about patriotism are Roth-related.

On the subject of assimilating in a highly coercive situation, I also recommend Karen Tei Yamashita’s Questions 27 & 28, a kaleidoscope of a novel in which she tries to get her head and the reader’s around the loyalty questionnaire that Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans were forced to answer while interned during World War II. I reviewed it here.

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As you know, I believe in books as presents. Books for Father’s Day, though, are hard. You don’t want to get your dad, or your kid’s dad, a Cliché Dad Book. It will not make him feel seen. Besides, your 67-year-old father already knows about World War II. Your 37-year-old husband has already listened to six podcast interviews with Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson about Abundance. You can do better than that. I’m here to help.

If you’re thinking, Wait, but I do want to get my dad-boyfriend-husband-other-father-figure something a little bit obvious, then yes, I am here to help you too. If your giftee is a fiction reader, then give him what I believe is my dad’s favorite book about fatherhood: & Sons, by David Gilbert. It’s a gentle, meditative literary novel with an exciting little fizz of Manhattan wealth porn and a third-act twist that, shall we say, will appeal to anyone who likes Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. (You could also give your dad Never Let Me Go. Watch the movie with him once he’s done reading it and you can have a nice, bonding cry together.)

If he prefers nonfiction, then at least show him the respect of not gift-wrapping a book about the Battle of the Bulge. (No disrespect to the Battle of the Bulge.) Get him Paul Gillingham’s Mexico: A 500-Year History, an intellectually and literally gigantic plunge into the fascinating past of my own child’s father’s favorite country to read about. I will say, being married to somebody who is obsessed with Mexican history is highly educational and fun. Bonus recommendation for you!

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Housekeeping One: If you live in New York, I would love to see you on May 13^th at the Jewish Museum, where I’m doing an event that will be an entertaining first for me: a discussion of Jewish romance with Dahlia Adler, co-sponsored by the museum, the Jewish Book Council, and the Ripped Bodice. I may not be a romance writer, but I do have Thoughts about literary love stories involving Jewish characters. Not to spoil the point I will surely be making at this event, but it is supremely rare to read a modern American novel in which two Jewish characters have a successful and sustainable relationship. It’s even rare to encounter one in which the Jewish characters are hot! J’accuse, writers.

Housekeeping Two: Starting this month, paid subscribers will get a Hype Report, which is an update on a couple buzzy not-yet-released books. I will tell you whether you should request them from your library right now to beat the line or give them a highly informed and evolved miss.

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The best book I read last month was The Promised Party by Jennifer Clement. I picked it up at random while poking around Politics & Prose, which is, as we all know, the single best way to buy a book. (Doesn’t have to be Politics & Prose; does have to be an independent bookstore to qualify as single best. All browsing, however, is the best.) The Promised Party is half about Clement’s Frida Kahlo-haunted childhood among the artists and bohemians of Coyoacán, in Mexico City, and half about her raucous early adulthood in the ’80s Manhattan art scene anchored, until his death, by Jean-Michel Basquiat.

Basquiat’s relationship with Clement’s friend Suzanne Mallouk is central to the book, as it was to Clement’s Widow Basquiat, the book for which she’s best known. I like it, but I like The Promised Party—which is not a retread!—more, even though it’s several things I generally do not enjoy: fragmented, associative (that’s critic-speak for “disorganized”), a memoir. But how could I possibly say no to a book that smuggles in history through detail like this?

In our neighbourhood you could walk twelve blocks and visit General Obregón’s hand at Obregón’s monument. During the revolution, in Obregón’s battles against Pancho Villa in 1915, his right hand had been injured and then amputated. An enormous monument had been built to this hand, which had been kept in a glass jar of formaldehyde by the doctor who performed the surgery. The building was circular and the hand was displayed in the centre under a large spotlight. This was all that there was to look at. The hand was pasty white and veins and bones floated out of the severed wrist. If we had visitors from out of town, we took them to see the terrible hand as a rite of passage into Mexico.

This terrible-hand paragraph tells you what I like in memoirs, a form about which I am supremely picky (that’s critic-speak for “a hater”). If I’m going to read one, I want:

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I’ve never been happier that it’s spring. D.C. simply got too much snow this year. I’m essentially cold-blooded, and I need my time in the sun. My ideal forms of springtime Vitamin D manufacture are Nice English Lady activities: fussing in my garden, bracing walks, maybe a picnic. It seems apt, then, to have this be the month of (Not So) Nice English Ladies.

I’m not a Wuthering Heights girl. I am, frankly, not a Brontë girl—or, for that matter, an Austen one. Neither a truly gothic novel nor a true comedy of manners does it for me. What I love, though, is a book with a little bit of both; a novel whose characters behave faultlessly to cover gothically miserable inner experiences, or whose beautiful aristocratic lives are sliding into unacknowledged and irreversible decay. I like literature with edges honed so sharp they’re invisible, and the writers who do that best, to my mind, are a group (I use this term loosely) of modern and contemporary English women, including but by no means limited to Diana Athill, Susie Boyt, Elizabeth Jane Howard, and the true queen of my heart, Iris Murdoch.

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Years ago, in a review of Diana Athill’s novel Don’t Look at Me Like That, I described these writers as like “sea urchins: spiky outside, soft within.” The same is true of all these authors, who mix vulnerability and empathy (not so rare) with a real understanding of and comfort with human nastiness (extremely rare!). Athill sets herself apart with her comprehension of decay. She channeled a lifetime of ferocious independence into books that treat loss, depression, isolation, and, most of all, mortality as nuisances on the level of the carpenter bees in my backyard. They buzz around threateningly, yes, but what are you going to do, not go outside?

I love Don’t Look at Me Like That, which is Athill’s only novel, but, despite my general skepticism of memoirs, I have to send you to hers. Start with Stet, her crisply detailed account of her working life, then move on to the multivolume personal-life memoirs that begin with Instead of a Letter.

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If you’re here because of The End of Romance or The Invisible Years, thank you. If you came to see me on tour for The End of Romance or The Invisible Years, thank you. If you have engaged with those books in no way at all and are simply here for some recommendations, thank you! I live to serve.

One of my greatest treats is rereading books. Life as a critic is not especially reread-friendly, given that I’m always trying to keep up with new releases while also deepening and broadening the pool of other work I can compare those new releases to, and so I only let myself go back to old favorites under three circumstances: I have a writerly reason to do so; I need comforting; or I feel that I’ve been very, very good. #2 and #3 both applied to the week before The End of Romance came out, and so I permitted myself a second trip through Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty.

You need to read The Line of Beauty. It has some of the century’s most elegant sentences. Better depictions of love, longing, horniness, and doing cocaine in the immediate vicinity of Margaret Thatcher do not exist. But Hollinghurst is in the air lately. He gets discussed at length in this Critics at Large episode. I saw a cute boy reading The Line of Beauty on the Green Line (also a line of beauty) the other day. I think it’s Hollinghurst’s year, and I recommend you get on board.

But as you may have noticed from reading the start of this letter, I released not one but two books last month, which means I got not one but two rereads. My second choice was motivated by jealousy. My husband was reading Javier Cercas’s Soldados de Salamina, which I’d already read in Anne McLean’s translation as Soldiers of Salamis, and listening to him talk about it, I got so envious that I had no choice but to read it again.

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My second novel, The End of Romance, came out on Tuesday—wild words to write. It got a lovely review from the New York Times’s Alexandra Jacobs, and more in Time, Bustle, and BookPage. I’m taking it on the road this month: Brooklyn on Feb. 11th, Cincinnati on Feb. 20th, and Denver on Feb. 26th, plus events for my translation of Rodrigo Hasbún’s The Invisible Years in Houston on Feb. 27th and Dallas on Feb. 28th. Come see me!

The End of Romance is an anti-romance romance, which is to say it’s the tale of a woman who furiously resists falling in love but cannot help herself. It’s also a philosophical inquiry into the future of the heterosexual marriage plot—a State of the Straight Union, if you will. In its honor, I thought I would supply you with a list of my own favorite anti-romances. Happy Valentine’s Day!

I have to start with Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Marriage Plot, without which The End of Romance would not exist. A love triangle, set at Brown, about a girl who reads too much French theory, then tries to apply it to her relationship with a Troubled Hot Guy and makes a mess of her life—catnip and devastation! I read The Marriage Plot approximately twelve minutes after I graduated from Brown, and just remembering what it did to me then makes me vaguely sick to my stomach (compliment) now. Also, anyone who, like me, feels nothing toward Shane Hollander and everything toward Ilya Rozanov understands the appeal of Troubled Hot Guys.

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Some of you may be receiving this email twice due to rookie mistakes re: my paywall, which is now up. For this calendar year (and no longer!), paying subscribers will get an email full of reading recommendations once a month. I am highly grateful to anyone who opts in or forwards this newsletter to somebody else who might like to. I promise strong opinions and no bullshit.

I have two updates pre-paywall. One is that I am now a staff writer at the Atlantic! You can read my work here. The second is that The End of Romance comes out in less than a month! If you have pre-ordered, thank you. If not, you still can! You can also support the book by requesting it from your local library (this is huge) and by marking it as ‘Want to Read’ on Goodreads. You can enter this Goodreads giveaway too, should you desire.

And now, our feature presentation: what you should read in January!

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My translation of the Spanish writer Clara Usón’s The Shy Assassin came out last month. It’s a strange and slippery book, sometimes called a novel and sometimes called a memoir, that tells its protagonist’s story—I consider it a novel, since I like novels better—through the lives of Ludwig Wittgenstein and a soft-core porn star named Sandra Mozarowsky. I recommend it because I translated it, but I translated it because I so badly wanted people to talk about it with me.

In that spirit, I’m organizing today’s don’t-call-it-a-gift-guide around some books, shows, movies, and music your loved ones might be thinking about. I hope these ideas make for some good conversations.

Starting in January, I will be paywalling my recommendations. I’ll also use this newsletter—above the paywall, of course—to share updates about my novel (The End of Romance, out in February) and various translations. No matter how much you read, thank you for reading.

For a Person Thinking about American Canto

Go on eBay and get this person Nancy Lemann’s The Ritz of the Bayou. I cannot describe this book better than its subtitle does. The trials in question had to do with racketeering rather than sleeping with RFK, Jr., but it will scratch the political-intrigue itch while—more importantly—getting some good prose in this person’s worm-riddled brain. The Ritz of the Bayou is a gift that keeps on giving, since once a person reads one Lemann they need all the Lemann. She has a new book coming out in April, and I yearn for it.

For a Person Thinking about the Hot Rabbi Show

It took me a long time to watch Nobody Wants This, but eventually I accepted that it was my duty as a Jewish critic to curl up on my couch and watch Adam Brody flirt with Kristen Bell. I enjoyed it, but my main thought is that a rom-com about a cute Reform rabbi is for beginners. For Hanukkah, buy the person in your life who actually wants to think about Jews and sex a copy of Felicia Berliner’s Shmutz, a heartfelt proto-Portnoy about a nineteen-year-old Hasidic woman who gets addicted to porn. Berliner is upfront but not confrontational, a surprisingly difficult line to walk in literature, and her prose is light but not lightweight.

(Troll addendum: Pre-order this person a copy of Wayne Koestenbaum’s My Lover, the Rabbi—bonus points for the British cover—and don’t say anything about it. When it shows up at their house in April, they’ll know.)

For a Person Thinking about DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS

Unlike American Canto Person, this person is living well. We should all think more about Bad Bunny. He’s hot! He’s outspoken! He’s playful! He’s capable of mashing up six different musical genres and making them sound like they were always one! For a person who enjoys both the high-level experimentation and the hip-level danceability of DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS, the correct gift is a shaggy, innovative, intelligent book with a lot of parties in it. I suggest Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives or Michael Muhammad Knight’s The Taqwacores, a cult classic about Y2K-era Muslim punks in Buffalo. Both of them have characters with almost as much swagger as Bad Bunny, but not quite.

For a Person Thinking about One Battle after Another

This is not so much a recommendation as a recommendation section. I love all stories about ideologically degraded radicals, and One Battle after Another sent me on an absolute tear. Certain members of my household are calling this my “lit bro era,” and yes, there has been some Pynchon involved, but you don’t need me for that. (You may need me to remind you, I believe for the second time, that you should be reading Denis Johnson. Tree of Smoke isn’t about radicals, but its ’70s fug fits the bill nonetheless.)

If you’re dealing with a History Dad (gender- and age-neutral), the correct book to give is Bryan Burrough’s Days of Rage, an extensively researched and very well-told narrative history of the Weather Underground and the most important of the radical bombing movements that sprang up in its wake. I personally would pair this book with an eBayed copy of Jane Alpert’s memoir Growing Up Underground, which describes the five years she spent as a fugitive after she and her boyfriend blew up several buildings in New York.

If you have more of a fiction reader on your hands, the correct non-Pynchon book to give—is Dana Spiotta’s Eat the Document, a thoughtfully anti-paranoid novel about two onetime radicals who live underground so long they all but float away from themselves. One of Spiotta’s radicals notes, as she sheds her old life for the new, that “slovenliness and sloppiness” are now her greatest enemies, which I believe makes her the polar opposite of Leo in One Battle after Another.

If your gift recipient is equally interested in radicals and in film, they absolutely require Juan Gabriel Vasquez’s Retrospective, a true-story novel—both like and unlike The Shy Assassin—about a Colombian director whose leftist family moved to China to get trained in Maoism when he was a child, then went home to become guerrillas. The writing, in Anne McLean’s translation, is impeccable; the book’s construction is brilliantly intricate; and the story is just bats. After I, the Divine, it’s the best thing I read this year.

Nobody buys me books anymore. This is reasonable—I get at least one galley in the mail every day, and I also never stop book-shopping—and yet I still think books are the best gifts. What else can you curl up with ten minutes after unwrapping it? And how better can you demonstrate that you know and care what someone you love thinks about than by giving them a book that chimes with their obsessions?

These recommendations, then, are based less on person than preoccupation. All of them are books that, if I didn’t have them already, I would love to receive.

A note on buying them: I’m sure you don’t need me to remind you not to get books on Amazon, but I’m both an oldest daughter and a Jewish mom, which means it’s doubly my culture to be bossy. So—no Amazon! I’ll link to Bookshop and to some of my favorite independent bookstores, but I very much suggest and endorse shopping at your bookstores. For used books, I love (read: am addicted to) Thriftbooks. I also highly recommend eBay.

For A Person Thinking about Art, Parenthood, or Both

Most books about the intersection of art and parenthood are dour and dire. Ignore them! The person most worth reading on these subjects is the photographer Sally Mann, who is one of the greatest living artists of parenthood. In her memoirs, Hold Still and Art Work, she rummages gorgeously through her psyche and past. Both books are wise and shaggy, written with the loose animation that I often see in memoirs by artists and never in memoirs by memoirists. If I wanted to get an Art Parent a truly indulgent gift, I’d buy both of Mann’s memoirs and track down one of her photography books on eBay to go with them.

Incidentally, Art Work contains a mandate-cum-complaint that is perfect to me: “Every artist needs a dog. Every human needs a dog. Rescue a dog right now. But nowhere in the many books I’ve now read about the creative life does anyone talk about the importance of dogs.” Don’t read those books! Read Sally Mann.

For A Person Thinking about Writing A Book

Get them Rabih Alameddine’s second novel, I, The Divine, which came out in 2003 but is the best book I read this year. It’s written as a string of openings for a memoir that the narrator will clearly never complete—and it’ll discourage your gift-recipient, too!

Kidding, kidding. I, The Divine is brilliant. The structure, which sounds something between unappealing and insane, works. It’s tricky, charming, and propulsive all at once, and its sheer intelligence is enough to spur any writer to write.

For A Person Thinking about Ineffable Mysteries

Get this person Beings, by Ilana Masad. It’s a literary novel about alien abduction, a sad archivist, and a lesbian sci-fi writer making her way in the ’50s, but really, it’s about obsession, yearning, and the absolute unknowability of life on earth and beyond. It also has elegant, slinky prose of a kind that’s increasingly hard to come by. Subtle and great!

For A Person Thinking about Why the World’s Going to Shit

Do not give this person a book that purports to have answers! Nobody has answers. Instead, give them Vivek Shanbhag’s tight, ominous novel Sakina’s Kiss, translated from Kannada by Srinath Perur. In this book, the pressure of malevolent political forces and the protagonist’s inner malevolence build together to an unbearable point—and then, instead of resolving, the book simply bursts. You could consider giving this book to a person you dislike, since it makes the reader feel very, very bad.

For a Person Who Wants to Not Think

Get this person Kiran Desai’s new novel, The Loneliness of Sonia & Sunny. It’s nearly seven hundred pages, and every one of those pages is so descriptively and emotionally vivid—so stuffed with romance and malevolence and envy and outfits and architecture and Uruguayan restaurants in Queens—that it simply shuts the reader’s mind up. Having your inner monologue obliterated by the pleasures of a book is, in my opinion, bliss.

For a Person Who Is a Toddler Obsessed with Art Books

Sam Gilliam. Can’t tell you why, but I can tell you it’s a hit. More importantly, this monograph is a beautiful and luxurious gift to give any adult in your life, but especially an adult who is engaged with and respects the art and culture of Washington, D.C. Wrap this up with Edward P. Jones’s Lost in the City, and you will have given the most D.C. gift of all time.