What Barbara Kingsolver Is Reading
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.
