The Best Books to Give As Gifts, According to Your Favorite Authors
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Here at Esquire Book Club, we’ve had a big year. Tim O’Brien taught us how to lie professionally, Daniel Knowles encouraged us to ditch our cars, and Claire Dederer leveled with us about the problem of canceled artists. Oh, and Michael Finkel schooled us in the tricks of committing multi-billion dollar art theft (but you didn’t hear it from us).
As we considered how to ring in the holidays Esquire Book Club style, we realized: what better way to celebrate than to give the gift of great books? And so, we asked all of the authors featured in Esquire Book Club this year to share their best literary gifting recommendations. Those who were available to participate shared a bumper crop of surprising and tantalizing picks, from a comprehensive history of the bicycle to a far-out astrophysics book about interstellar apocalypses. As you head into holiday hibernation, read these books in good health and good spirits. We’ll see you back here in 2024 for more essential conversations with essential writers.
When We Become Ours: A YA Adoptee Anthology
This may be cheating, because I have a story in it, but I'm giving When We Become Ours: A YA Adoptee Anthology to everyone in my family this year. It's a collection of stories for younger readers, all written by adoptees. In short, it's a book I wish I had had as a kid. When I ask my students who they're writing for, so many of them give some form of this answer: they are writing for the kid they were who didn't have the book they needed. This is a book I needed. This is a book we need.
—Matthew Salesses, author of The Sense of Wonder
Family Abolition: Capitalism and the Communizing of Care
This holiday season, I recommend M.E. O'Brien's excellent new book, Family Abolition: Capitalism and the Communizing of Care, from Pluto Books. O'Brien is an editor at the magazines Parapraxis and Pinko, and for my money, she's one of the most important intellectuals working today. She also happens to be a great, clear writer, which is a whole different skill. Family Abolition takes one of Marxism's scariest concepts and unfolds it step by step, without relying on jargon or bluster or the reader's previous knowledge. By the end, you'll wonder what everyone was so afraid of. A great gift for parents and husbands.
—Malcom Harris, author of Palo Alto
Two Wheels Good: The History and Mystery of the Bicycle
I have been a cyclist for as long as I can remember, and a bicycle has been my primary way of getting around for almost my entire adult life. And yet I had no idea for most of that time quite how revolutionary an invention it was. Jody Rosen’s book, Two Wheels Good, helped to rectify that. It is less of a comprehensive social history than it is a joyous tour through various eras of cycling. The sections on Victorian women cyclists, replete with anecdotes from divorce courts where bicycles were blamed for wives wanting freedom, are especially illuminating.
—Daniel Knowles, author of Carmageddon
The End of Everything: (Astrophysically Speaking)
If you sometimes feel like the world is coming to an end, you’re right. In fact, the entire universe is coming to an end. The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking), by the physicist Katie Mack, is a mind-blowing tour of the universe, touching on the deepest possible questions: Where did we come from? Why are we here? Where are we going? The book is also witty, well-written, math free, and short. Reading about potential interstellar apocalypses somehow makes the all crazy shenanigans here on Earth feel a little less fraught. I’m gifting this to both the pessimists and optimists on my list.
—Michael Finkel, author of The Art Thief
The Long Form
A single mother reads Fielding's Tom Jones as she cares for her newborn. Briggs is brilliant, covering incredible narrative and conceptual distances in the few turns around the living room it takes to soothe her baby. It's quiet in some ways, explosive in others. Though The Long Form will resonate with parents, of course, it will connect with anyone who's performed acts of care-taking in their lives. When added to the complex excavation of the nature, purpose, and function of novels, you get a unique convergence of intellectual, narrative, and emotional knowledge. It's a true masterpiece and the perfect gift for the serious readers in your life.
—Josh Cook, author of The Art of Libromancy
Unearthing: A Story of Tangled Love and Family Secrets
I’ve gifted Kyo Maclear’s gorgeous and generous memoir Unearthing more than any other this year. Subtitled “A story of tangled love and family secrets,” the book begins with the author’s discovery, thanks to a DNA test, that she had been misled about the identity of her biological father. But this is no conventional “finding my roots” story. Instead, Maclear guides the reader on a mind-altering journey that challenges biological determination, while rooting family in the daily practice of care and love. After losing a key part of the story of who she thought she was, Maclear finds kinship and roots everywhere, including across the species line. Some of the book’s most moving passages tenderly explore the complexities of mothering her immigrant mother with dementia, a relationship that poses deep questions about the very possibility of a stable self.
—Naomi Klein, author of Doppelganger
Outerbridge Reach
While I haven't yet gifted Robert Stone's masterpiece Outerbridge Reach, I've been meaning to do so for years. On Christmas morning, 2023, my wife and two sons will each find a copy beneath the tree. Like Conrad's Lord Jim and Melville's Billy Budd, Sailor, Outerbridge Reach combines a classic sea yarn with a penetrating investigation of the human creature's fears, failings, doubts, deceptions, and fleeting moments of ecstatic purity. It's a sad novel, but exciting in its sadness, for it carries us to an icy, dangerous place inside ourselves that we might otherwise never go.
—Tim O'Brien, author of America Fantastica
God Went Like That
I’ll never regret reading a book that’s truly original—and I know I’m not alone here. So when I gift a book, I look for something people are unlikely to have encountered already and will never forget. God Went Like That, by Yxta Maya Murray, is what I’m passing onto my friends lately. Bureaucracy, science, justice, public health, catastrophe, the world… it’s all in here. Each character emerges as another galaxy, each page contains something unexpected. It’s vast and intimate, a work of extraordinary intelligence and grace. It’s the best new book I read in 2023.
—Joanne McNeil, author of Wrong Way
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