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1 week ago | 
billwolfe.substack.com | Bill Wolfe
In December 1960, my grandparents were killed in an airline collision in the blustery skies over New York City. My mother was fourteen at the time, and her parents were traveling from Columbus, Ohio, to seek placement of their family’s iconic magazine, Highlights for Children, on the newsstands. I was born six years later to a mother suffering from protracted mourning. I knew very little about this life-defining tragedy while I was growing up.
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1 week ago | 
billwolfe.substack.com | Bill Wolfe
Book awards season has begun in earnest with three somewhat lesser known, but still important, prizes: the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes. Jennine Capó Crucet and Willy Vlautin were named winners of the Joyce Carol Oates Prize for Say Hello to My Little Friend and The Horse, respectively.
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3 weeks ago | 
billwolfe.substack.com | Bill Wolfe
I was on the third day of a bicycle trip from Lisbon, Portugal to the Alhambra in Granada, Spain, and had just huffed and puffed up a steep hill to a Celtic standing stone circle.
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1 month ago | 
billwolfe.substack.com | Bill Wolfe
The last two weeks have felt fragmented. First, there’s the anti-democratic chaos [waves arms wildly in all directions], which has been totally distracting, infuriating, and frightening. I've been working extra hours before I go on vacation. And I’ve had a pretty good cold for the past week. The first week of the month I read Jennifer Haigh’s excellent Rabbit Moon (review to come). But for now, I’ll just say that you should read any (or all) of her books.
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1 month ago | 
billwolfe.substack.com | Bill Wolfe
The first thing I learn in our newborn-care workshop is that babies like the dark. Their room should be so dark that you can’t see your hand in front of your face, the teacher instructs. She tells us not to worry, they aren’t scared. They don’t know a fear of the dark yet; that will happen later. And she is right: It is when my daughter is two that she suddenly says, “Too dark!” after we turn out the light. She thinks there is something under the bed, in the closet.
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1 month ago | 
billwolfe.substack.com | Bill Wolfe
What if there was a biological clock for extinction in every living creature’s DNA and there are only four generations left for human beings? In her thought-provoking debut, Lauren Stienstra examines this shocking situation. Twin sisters Charlie and Maggie Tannehill decide to join the Mendelia, a government-run human husbandry program that designs embryos in the hope that a particular combination of genes will lead to a mutation that can save humanity.
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1 month ago | 
billwolfe.substack.com | Bill Wolfe
I'm late in getting to my Women's History Month post (it's been that kind of month). But I figure better late than never because most of you read historical fiction by and about women year-round. So here are ten books (plus a bonus) to consider reading, whether sooner or later. I made my selections based in part on whether a book had not received as much attention as it deserves. (That’s why this list doesn't include books like Pachinko, Great Circle, Hamnet, The Love Songs of W. E. B.
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1 month ago | 
billwolfe.substack.com | Bill Wolfe
On February 10 I wrote a piece about seven books published in January-February that I was looking forward to reading. Today’s post is a follow-up preview of books that will be published in April and May. I’ve read two of them already, and the others are on the top of my TBR stack. You can’t go wrong with Jennifer Haigh, Amity Gaige, Anne Berest, Mary Morris, and Barbara Linn Probst.
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Feb 10, 2025 | 
billwolfe.substack.com | Bill Wolfe
Like many readers, I maintain a TBR (To Be Read) list. And if you spend any time in the Bookstagram community or reading book-oriented websites and publications, you're going to end up adding a lot of books to your list, to the point that it becomes ridiculously unwieldy. Then it's time to decide which recent and upcoming books you really want to read.
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Jan 31, 2025 | 
billwolfe.substack.com | Bill Wolfe
I think we’ve all had the experience of reading a book that reminded us of another book we’ve read, whether in its subject matter, setting, or writing style. When that happens to me, I always think, “These books should be read back to back. They belong together!” So today I’m sharing four pairs of books that I think will provide you with a deeply satisfying reading experience.
