Reading List
Xochitl Gonzalez
Novelist and Staff Writer at The Atlantic
Xochitl Gonzalez spent more than a decade running a wedding planning business in New York before enrolling in an MFA in her forties and publishing Olga Dies Dreaming, a novel about a Brooklyn wedding planner and her congressman brother that became a bestseller and a television series. Anita de Monte Laughs Last, drawing on the death of the artist Ana Mendieta, followed in 2024. She writes a column for The Atlantic on class, gentrification and who gets taken seriously in American cultural life.
The Sense of an Ending
by Julian Barnes · 2011 · Fiction
“I loved this wrenching, sophisticated campus novel, which is as much about memory as it is about the specifics of things remembered.” — via Article
The Altar of My Soul
The Living Traditions of Santeria
by Marta Moreno Vega · 2000 · Memoir
“In this heartfelt memoir, Moreno Vega recounts her journey around and into the faith, offering up a story of personal growth and spiritual homecoming.” — via Article
Widow Basquiat
by Jennifer Clement
“With sparse prose, the book beautifully examines the tumult, violence, and creative breakthroughs that can arise when two artists come together.” — via Article
The Shining
by Stephen King · 1977 · Fiction
“The Overlook Hotel in winter serves as a Gothic symbol of the confines of domesticity and the dangers of male insecurity and thwarted ambitions.” — via Article
Essential Labor
Mothering as Social Change
by Angela Garbes · 2022 · Nonfiction
“This compulsively readable book dives into the ways that parenting is a critical and yet undervalued form of labor.” — via Article
When I Sing, Mountains Dance
by Irene Sola · 2019 · Fiction
“This slim, gorgeous novel is ostensibly about a valley in the Pyrenees” — via Article
