Greetings from Three Lives & Company!

As the holidays approach, you may be seeing a lot of two things: the “best of 2025” list, and the gift guide. The Three Lives newsletter is always a bit of both – we like to think so, at least – but it is not quite either one. While we always compile our favorite books read this year, many of those books are from previous decades (or centuries): each bookseller unfolds the sort of hyper-specific reading list that fills our staff favorites table with brilliant oddities and charming crowd pleasers all year round. You can find our year-end roundups along with our usual recent favorites below.

As for gifts, you will indeed hear us asking countless people across our green counters this month, “Anything to gift wrap?” (We wrap books all year, but December is something different entirely; you may even spot some guest gift-wrappers behind the counter!) This edition of our newsletter lacks some of the trimmings of the modern gift guide (no “books for Dad” column, alas…), but it is the holidays, after all, and to that end we have two special features that may be useful to those shopping for presents, for others or for themselves.

First, in her Small & Mighty kids’ book column, Miriam has written about an exciting new gift service for children’s books that we are debuting this season: read on to learn more! And Troy has a Cookbook Corner stuffed to the brim with cookbooks, food writing, recipe recommendations – all the cookery you need to carry you into the new year.

Here is a bulletin that is not explicitly holiday related, but thrilling in its own right: we will be hosting a signing event with Karl Ove Knausgaard for his new novel The School of Night on Tuesday, January 13, 2026. This will be a breakfast signing – 9 a.m. to 10 a.m., coffee and scones provided! It’s not a reading, and there is no need to RSVP, but we recommend arriving early if you can. If you would like a signed or personalized copy of The School of Night but you cannot attend the event, let us know before the 13th and we will arrange it for you.

Lastly, we would be remiss if we did not remind you to place your orders for holiday books as soon as possible. We are happy to special order titles not carried in the shop (or large quantities of things we do carry), but shipping times grow less predictable the nearer we get to Hanukkah and Christmas. If you know what you’d like, just call or email the shop, or stop by any time.

~ Recent Staff Favorites & Year-End Roundups ~

If you share my fascination with how cults form, read The Colony by Annika Norlin (Europa, translated by Alice E. Olsson), a psychological slow-burn that closes in like a vise as good intentions for a seemingly idyllic community turn sour. Each member brings to the group their own past suffering, their unique reason for wanting a different way of life. Norlin keeps their humanity stubbornly in the forefront, making it difficult to claim you would do much differently in the same circumstances. 

I was also very impressed with A Leopard-Skin Hat by Anne Serre (New Directions, translated by Mark Hutchinson). The narrator’s sometimes valiant, other times misguided attempt to understand his dear childhood friend, an enigma in all her chaotic glory, is mesmerizing. Maddening too.

Reading The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (Mariner) has convinced me that Carson McCullers was a genius far beyond her years. The way she writes about loneliness has forever changed the way I think about it. In a middle-of-nowhere Southern town, the intersection of each small but substantially complicated life holds a shock of meaning. 

Looking forward to early 2026, I am excited about the newest novel by Helle Helle, they (New Directions, translated by Martin Aitken), out in February. It’s a nimble story of a single mother and her teenage daughter, their lives intertwined in a way that sometimes makes it hard to tell whose perspective you are inhabiting. When the mother becomes ill, a calm landscape of youthfulness and domestic familiarity is destabilized by impending tragedy. Yet there is a well of warmth beneath it all.

Nancy Lemann’s The Oyster Diaries (New York Review Books) is out in April, and thankfully has the same dry, curmudgeonly humor as my other favorite of hers, Lives of the Saints (also being reissued in April by NYRB, and I think a necessary prequel to the new one). The Oyster Diaries drops us into the mind of Delery, her wastrel New Orleans youth far in the rearview, now grappling with aging parents, marriage woes, and the general discombobulation of the adult world. Delery upholds an obstinate exterior but reveals a large capacity for love of her city, her family, and her old friends – a woman after my own heart. I’d happily read on in Nancy Lemann’s world forever. – Elaine

Earlier this fall, when a regular customer came into the shop, I was surprised by the first words out of his mouth: “How did you know?” How did I know what? I replied. He proceeded to tell me how closely the last novel I’d recommended him, Nova Scotia House by Charlie Porter (Nightboat), had resonated with his own life. I didn’t know; I just knew it was a novel that had moved me enormously, and I hoped it might do the same for him. He was so affected by Porter’s novel, so grateful to have read it. As booksellers we can’t hope for more. 

A book like John Birdsall’s What Is Queer Food? (W.W. Norton) doesn’t come along often. That book astonished me, turning me on to so many things I just did not know. If that weren’t enough, it expanded my thinking about so many people – cooks, chefs, food writers – icons in the food world whom I knew of, but because of Birdsall’s reporting, I was understanding in a new way. This is a totally original book, one that only Birdsall could have written: a heartfelt thank you, John. 

We all have writers whose new work inspires special anticipation – mine include Michael Cunningham, Zadie Smith, and recently Samin Nosrat. And then, there is Patti Smith. Bread of Angels (Random House), her new memoir, is a look back very much in the spirit of 1992’s Woolgathering, but with a different focus, and revelations and insight that could only come with time. In an interview on the BBC with Katie Razzall, Smith says, the book “is a love letter to my parents, to my siblings, to my husband, to my brother, to all the people named and unnamed that helped shape me.” A gift to us all.

I’ve been wondering lately, how am I going to find the time and the energy to read during this busiest time of year at the bookshop, and in life? But someone in the shop inadvertently gave me the perfect solution. She said that she was listening to Zadie Smith read her new book of essays, Dead and Alive (Penguin Press). And I thought, “That’s it, it’ll be the first thing I do over a cup of coffee.” Thirty-eight essays, thirty-eight mornings with Zadie. – Troy

Folks, I’m calling it now – 2026 is going to be a good year for reading. For me, anything could beat 2025. So imagine my joy when I discovered that six of my favorite writers have new books landing in the first six months of the new year. My TBR is locked:

This Is Where the Serpent Lives by Daniyal Mueenuddin (Knopf, January, expect a brilliant panoply of voices narrating life in contemporary Pakistan)

Frog by Anne Fadiman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, February, let us thank our deities for another essay collection from Anne Fadiman, and if you don’t know what I’m talking about, drop everything and read Ex Libris)

The Irish Goodbye by Beth Ann Fennelly (W.W. Norton, February, the only writer I turn to for micro-memoirs, sure to make me laugh – and feel)

Brawler by Lauren Groff (Riverhead, February, I can never turn down a Lauren Groff short story)

Land by Maggie O’Farrell (Knopf, June, need I say more?)

Whistler by Ann Patchett (Harper, June, I repeat: need I say more?)

Happy holidays, and I wish you a stack of books that inspires similarly fervent anticipation. – Miriam

The year-end holiday newsletter is always a challenge, particularly this year as I liked a fair number of books (I started the year on an incredible roll of great reads). Now I am wondering what theme or thread might tie my favorites together. 

A young Taiwanese woman living under Japanese colonization (Taiwan Travelogue by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ, Graywolf, translated by Lin King). Mini-biographies and histories of Baltic citizens, notable and obscure (Baltic Souls by Jan Brokken, Scribe, translated by David Doherty). The impact of the ferocious fight for East Timor independence on the residents of a small village (People from Oetimu by Felix Nesi, Archipelago, translated by Lara Norgaard). An African American woman returning home after the death of her mother (Martha’s Daughter by David Haynes, McSweeney’s). The cataclysmic devastation and horror in Gaza over the last two years (One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad, Knopf). When I closed these books, I felt I had returned from the journey with a bit more knowledge of the world at home and abroad: a further awareness, a deeper understanding, a broader perspective on my own privileges and entitlements in this nation of immense wealth, global power and heaving consumerism. 

Aside from the critical perspective, another theme in my reading year has been the simple delight of being lost in great writing and storytelling, approaching an almost meditative state as I read. Charlotte Wood’s Booker Prize–shortlisted novel Stone Yard Devotional (Riverhead); Fonseca (Penguin Press), Jessica Francis Kane’s fictional account of English novelist Penelope Fitzgerald’s visit to Mexico in 1952; a history and memoir of queer food by John Birdsall, What Is Queer Food?; Nan Shepherd’s decades-long exploration and celebration of the Scottish mountains in The Living Mountain (Scribner); and, in Ian McEwan’s latest novel, What We Can Know (Knopf), a literary dinner party in 2014 as recounted by a British historian in 2120: all of these books gave me the pure pleasure of reading, the giddy joy of being enthralled by a story, each one a celebration. – Toby

“It is difficult to speak with those who have dementia,” Joy Williams writes in a recent Harper’s essay, “to reason or remember with them, to reassure them, for of what can they be reassured…?” Though the piece is about the death of Gene Hackman, Williams may well have been describing the characters in The Pelican Child (Knopf), her latest collection of short stories. These are tales of oblivion, eerie worlds in which words perpetually fail – to reason, to remember, to reassure. On a planet drained of life, in a language losing its purchase on reality, Joy’s people ready themselves for sudden transformation. 

If The Pelican Child feels like late style, a singular achievement by a master, Michael Clune’s novel Pan (Penguin Press) is just the opposite: a thrilling debut that is all about the new – using new language to describe new experience, the panic and churn of adolescent life. To balance all that novelty, I found my next favorite deep in the backlist (a publisher’s term we booksellers use to describe the older books that fill most of a shop’s shelves). William H. Gass’s Omensetter’s Luck (Penguin Classics) is a perfect emissary from this archive, a stunning anachronism mixing high modernist splendor with old-fashioned drama. Set in rural Ohio in the late nineteenth century, Gass’s novel pits a charmed frontiersman against a deranged town preacher, the latter one of the most genuinely unsettling narrators I have ever encountered. 

Of course my year-end list would be incomplete without a few new books about art. I have written previously about Celia Paul’s Self-Portrait (New York Review Books), a book that pairs quite well with Pat Lipsky’s new memoir Brightening Glance (University of Iowa Press). Rough contemporaries (they were born twenty years apart, though both are still alive and working), Paul and Lipsky write with bracing clarity about their lives and careers as women artists, condensing decades of wisdom into stories that illuminate the world of professional painting. As for art history, one book was enough: Joseph Leo Koerner’s Art in a State of Siege (Princeton University Press), a maelstrom of erudition and insight, dense with history yet surprisingly light on its feet. Why isn’t more academic writing this stylish and satisfying? Other Traditions (Harvard University Press), John Ashbery’s 1989 Norton Lectures on poetry (recently reissued), may not count as academic, but it is deeply informative, jovial and generous and good. It reawakened my love of poetry in the last months of this year. 

2026 promises new work from Karl Ove Knausgaard (The School of Night, published by Penguin Press in January, translated by Martin Aitken – no, I cannot believe he’s coming here to sign this book), George Saunders (Vigil, published by Random House in January), and Ben Lerner (Transcription, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in April). Now I know what you’re thinking. But really, what’s not to like? – Lucas

This year I seem to have veered away from novels almost entirely. With the exception of a few standouts – Pan by Michael Clune, Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin (Vintage), and Call Me by Your Name by André Aciman (Picador) – my favorite books this year were mostly short story collections and memoirs. 

I read Canoes by Maylis de Kerangal (Archipelago, translated by Jessica Moore) at the start of the year and credit it with my renewed love for short stories. There is such surgical precision to the way de Kerangal writes, and falling into her stories feels effortless. Each story confronts its protagonist with something freshly alien to them – a new country, a sudden and gaping grief, a visit from an old friend who is now unrecognizable, even a literal U.F.O. sighting. The alterations and disturbances in these characters’ lives shock them into an observational stillness, yet we know that each small shift will continue to reverberate long after the story has finished. 

As for memoirs, Swimming Studies by Leanne Shapton (Picador) certainly left an impression. Its hold is quiet and gentle: as Shapton looks back on her swimming life through a goggled lens, she remembers the snow outside the car window as her mother drove her to swim practice; the early dark mornings of setting the microwave timer to her goal race time, holding her breath while she waited; the various patterns and colors of her and her teammates’ nylon swimsuits, diligently recorded. Watercolors of the different shaped swimming pools she has swum in spread throughout the book. Shapton sees the value in every phase of her swimming career – from Olympic ambitions to the simple joy of floating in water with someone she loves. The title certainly fits: this memoir is a study, concentrating on a sport that has been a loose braid through her entire life. – Sarah

My most memorable reads of 2025 ended up being two works of historical fiction that couldn’t be more different. Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon (Picador) – the first book I read this year, and the biggest, and the one that took the most time to finish – is a cockeyed look at the American project through the partnership of the continent’s most famous surveyors. Deliriously overstuffed with history, politics and bizarre eighteenth-century Americana, Mason & Dixon is the rare novel that starts off good and just gets better all the long way to its final page.

Álvaro Enrigue’s You Dreamed of Empires (Riverhead, translated by Natasha Wimmer) flips the calendar back a further 250 years to the Cortés expedition’s arrival in Moctezuma’s Tenochtitlan. If Pynchon is expansive, Enrigue is claustrophobic. Pynchon’s people are weird and wonderful, larger than life, but Enrigue’s are sly and self-serving, and never quite as cunning as they believe themselves to be. Both novels are very funny, but Mason & Dixon is a buddy comedy, and You Dreamed of Empires is a farce of Aztec manners. (Enrigue’s upcoming novel, Now I Surrender – same translator and publisher, on sale March 3 – is one of the books I’m most looking forward to next year. This time he’ll tackle the American West.)

I’ve read a couple of very good books since our last newsletter hit the wires, and I’d be remiss not to mention them here. One was Pynchon’s latest, Shadow Ticket (Penguin Press), a noir-ish romp through Depression-era Milwaukee and a Europe readying itself for war. I also enjoyed Kiran Desai’s The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny (Hogarth), one of those big, sweeping tales with complicated family trees and a globetrotting spirit. Some of my very favorite books are sprawling, messy novels that tell a lot of stories and make you believe in their worlds beyond the page. In its best moments, Sonia and Sunny does exactly that.

I can’t let the holiday newsletter pass without mentioning some of the best true stuff I’ve read. William Dalrymple’s The Golden Road (Bloomsbury) and Nicolas Bouvier’s The Way of the World (New York Review Books, translated by Robyn Marsack) are two nonfiction favorites that I’ve previously written about, but here’s one I haven’t: Vincent Bevins’s The Jakarta Method (PublicAffairs), a terrific primer on the anticommunist devilry sanctioned, encouraged and perpetrated by the American government around the world in the twentieth century. – Ryan

~ Small & Mighty with Miriam ~

We have been delighted to see our kids’ book section explode in popularity (and selection) over the past five years, and to honor and support that enthusiasm, we’ve decided to launch a new program around children’s books. Without further ado, allow me to introduce The Little Post! The Little Post is a book subscription aimed at our youngest readers, aged from newborn to 13. Each month, we’ll choose a recent favorite board book, picture book, early reader chapter book, and middle grade chapter book and dispatch the age-appropriate pick to our subscribers. For a flat fee, the service runs for six months (and can always be renewed!). It’s never too early to inculcate a love of books, and we’re eager to share what’s exciting us in the realm of young people’s literature. We see The Little Post as the ultimate treat for the budding book lover: a mystery book arrives on their doorstep every month, and a brand new world awaits them in its pages. I cannot imagine a gift I would have loved to receive more when I was small – or a gift I would be more thrilled to receive for my daughter. We have a limited number of slots in this opening round, so if you’re interested in signing up a tiny human in your life, please contact us by phone or email.

Now, a book I wish we could be sending to every member of The Little Post because yes, I believe it is appropriate for ages 0-13 (sorry, I meant to say ages 0-103), is Random House’s recent reissue of Richard Scarry’s Biggest Word Book Ever!. (Exclamation mark deservedly in the title.) Ok, it is $45, but it’s also two feet tall and extremely, extremely amazing. This is Richard Scarry at his finest, and I dare child and adult alike not to be awed by this masterpiece. Each spread is themed – house, construction, maritime, aviation – and is chock-a-block with words and images. Countless hours of rapt attention and pleasure guaranteed. Come see it in person!

~ Troy’s Cookbook Corner ~

To begin my last Cookbook Corner of the year, I want to reflect on a few of the more special and unexpected happenings at the shop this fall. It gave me such pleasure to make Alice Waters a cup of tea when she visited to sign her new book, A School Lunch Revolution (Penguin Press). Alice was gracious, passionate, and determined to express how important it is that all children eat nourishing food while at school. Reimagining our food system, Alice hopes to create a direct relationship between schools and local farmers. That visit also gave me the opportunity to tell Alice how much her book We Are What We Eat (Penguin) meant to me when I read it this summer. It’s such an important book, a manual for living in these difficult times. 

A few weeks ago Alison Roman stopped by early on a Sunday morning to sign her new cookbook Something from Nothing (Clarkson Potter). Alison has a gift for connecting with her readers (she’s earned it with her previous three books!), with the ease and directness of a good friend. Just turn to the chapter on pastas and noodles, and you are met with these words: “If you’ve purchased this book and flipped straight to this chapter, I am you and you are me.” There’s not one recipe you will want to skip, but I’ll be making the Creamy Cauliflower Pasta with Pecorino Breadcrumbs first. This is a cookbook from which one feels like cooking and eating everything. For chicken lovers, Alison has a major chapter; and for veggie lovers, it’s brimming with veggie dishes too. And oh, how I love that pea green cover! 

Speaking of vegetables, Hetty Lui McKinnon, author of Tenderheart, has a new book, Linger (Knopf), with a focus on salads, sweets, and bringing people together. “To linger speaks of a reluctance to leave,” writes McKinnon, extolling the power of communal cooking to “flavor our food with humanity.” All this over a platter of pan-fried turnips, whipped pistachio feta, and handfuls of greens. Hetty’s an original, and so is each and every one of the dishes in this new book. It’s her Spiced Pumpkin Nian Gao (Mochi Cake) I’ll be making to bring in the Lunar New Year, or any ordinary day this winter. 

“Why is baking so important in the way we signify and strengthen the things that are meaningful in our lives?” Helen Goh poses this question in her new book, Baking and the Meaning of Life (Abrams). This book is a psychological journey of baking, told in chapters like Giving, Receiving & Sharing, Nurturing, and Ritual & Tradition, each one beginning with an essay. What kind of bakes are we talking? I’ll name just one, Helen’s Sticky Date Pudding with Miso Butterscotch. This is no ordinary sticky toffee pudding: it’s a “completely plant-based, sensational version accompanied by an easy and delicious vegan ice cream!” 

But if you are the kind of person who finds it difficult to justify dessert, please allow Samin Nosrat, in her new cookbook Good Things (Random House), to make the case for something sweet. “Our brains are hardwired to pursue not only pleasure but also sweetness,” Samin writes. “So to enjoy a dessert is to be utterly, beautifully human.” Yes to dessert, and yes to Good Things! 

If you are looking for a good book to keep on your bedside table – something that won’t wreck your sleep, but rather intrigue and delight – you can’t do better than Diana Henry’s new book, Around the Table: 52 Essays on Food & Life (Mitchell Beazley). “With food, you don’t have to buy an airline ticket or don a backpack,” writes Henry; “the magic of the unfamiliar is there, right beside the everyday, for you to bring into your kitchen.” She takes us to Rome in August, to the Crimson Lakes of Massachusetts, to Northern Ireland in October for blackberries. Each essay is a springboard for the best of dreams. 

As I always say, do make your way to the shop if you can ~ there are so many wonderful cookbooks that need a good home, and I’ll be around to help! 

~ Signed Editions ~

Fiction

Cursed Daughters by Oyinkan Braithwaite (Doubleday)

Dog Show by Billy Collins (Random House)

Tom’s Crossing by Mark Z. Danielewski (Pantheon)

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai (Hogarth)

The Wilderness by Angela Flournoy (Mariner)

Countries of Origin by Javier Fuentes (Knopf)

Sister Creatures by Laura Venita Green (Unnamed)

Amity by Nathan Harris (Little, Brown)

The Wayfinder by Adam Johnson (MCD)

Fonseca by Jessica Francis Kane (Penguin Press)

A Guardian and a Thief by Megha Majumdar (Knopf)

Don’t Be a Stranger by Susan Minot (Knopf)

Nova Scotia House by Charlie Porter (Nightboat)

North Sun by Ethan Rutherford (Strange Object)

Minor Black Figures by Brandon Taylor (Riverhead)

The Pelican Child by Joy Williams (Knopf)

A Little Life Box Set by Hanya Yanagihara (Vintage)

Nonfiction

The World in Books by Kenneth C. Davis (Scribner)

All the Way to the River by Elizabeth Gilbert (Riverhead)

Next of Kin by Gabrielle Hamilton (Random House)

Still Life with Remorse by Maira Kalman (Harper)

Walk With Me: New York by Susan Kaufman (Abrams)

We Survived the Night by Julian Brave Noisecat (Knopf)

Dining Out by Erik Piepenburg (Grand Central)

Something from Nothing by Alison Roman (Clarkson Potter)

Schott’s Significa by Ben Schott (Workman)

Dear New York, I Love You by Ria Sim (Countryman)

Dear New York by Brandon Stanton (St. Martin’s)

Notes on Complexity by Neil Theise (Spiegel & Grau)

A School Lunch Revolution by Alice Waters (Penguin Press)

The Cook’s Garden by Kevin West (Knopf)

The Heart-Shaped Tin by Bee Wilson (W.W. Norton)

~ The Three Lives & Company Bestseller List ~

1. Bread of Angels by Patti Smith (Random House)

2. Dear New York, I Love You by Ria Sim (Countryman)

3. Flesh by David Szalay (Scribner)

4. Something from Nothing by Alison Roman (Clarkson Potter)

5. 1929 by Andrew Ross Sorkin (Viking)

6. The God of the Woods by Liz Moore (Riverhead)

7. Jack the Modernist by Robert Glück (New York Review Books)

8. What We Can Know by Ian McEwan (Knopf)

9. An Almanac of New York City for the Year 2026 (Abbeville, edited by Susan Gail Johnson)

10. The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai (Hogarth)

11. The Land in Winter by Andrew Miller (Europa)

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ 

SPECIAL ORDERS:

A reminder that we specialize in special orders. In our small shop it’s always a challenge to find room for all the new, notable, and exciting books; if you’d like a book that we don’t have on hand, we are always happy to order it for you. We place orders almost daily and the usual turnaround time for a special order is two business days. For some books it may take longer, but we’ll be sure to discuss the particulars with you before we place an order. Additionally, we can ship books to you anywhere within the United States. Give us a call, send us an email, or stop in any time.

PREORDERS:

We are happy to take preorders for forthcoming titles, and we will let you know as soon as the book arrives. We are all too familiar with the fervid desire to possess a new book at the first possible moment, and we will do everything in our power to make sure the book lands in your hands hot off the presses.

GIFT CERTIFICATES:

We offer gift certificates, which you may purchase in any amount.