{"id":865869,"date":"2026-09-30T12:52:11","date_gmt":"2026-09-30T12:52:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/865869\/"},"modified":"2026-09-30T12:52:11","modified_gmt":"2026-09-30T12:52:11","slug":"what-barbara-kingsolver-is-reading","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/865869\/","title":{"rendered":"What Barbara Kingsolver Is Reading"},"content":{"rendered":"

Barbara Kingsolver\u2019s books have been everywhere since the nineties: your neighbor\u2019s bookshelf, your college lounge, your grandmother\u2019s coffee table, your schoolteacher\u2019s desk, every lake house in the Lower Forty-eight. Kingsolver clawed her way onto the best-seller lists with her third novel, \u201cPigs in Heaven<\/a>\u201d (1993), but she started camping out there for months at a time with \u201cThe Poisonwood Bible<\/a>\u201d (1998), her epic about an American missionary family\u2019s experiences in revolutionary Congo. That was followed by an alternating pattern of somewhat smaller domestic novels, like \u201cProdigal Summer<\/a>\u201d (2000), and somewhat larger historical novels, like \u201cThe Lacuna<\/a>\u201d (2009), until a whole other generation got knocked over by her work with a perfect combination of the two: the Pulitzer Prize-winning \u201cDemon Copperhead<\/a>\u201d (2022).<\/p>\n

If you haven\u2019t already read \u201cDemon Copperhead,\u201d 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\u2019t just a Dickensian homage; it\u2019s practically a s\u00e9ance. Damon Fields plays the part of rural America\u2019s own David Copperfield with so much velocity that you\u2019ll get papercuts trying to turn the pages quickly enough. It\u2019s Kingsolver\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Kingsolver\u2019s newest novel, \u201cPartita<\/a>,\u201d is out next week, and, in keeping with that pattern of expanding and contracting scales, it\u2019s shorter and more intimate. I visited with the author earlier this year for a Profile in this week\u2019s Fall Books Issue<\/a>, and she described her new book as \u201ca nesting box\u201d 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\u2019s most beautiful passages are those that interrogate the mysteries of why we love what we love, whether it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s always interesting to visit with authors in their homes, and Kingsolver\u2019s is a very storied farm in Meadowview, Virginia. Readers already got a thorough tour of the property in her memoir \u201cAnimal, Vegetable, Miracle<\/a>\u201d (2007), which documented her family\u2019s 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\u2019t have room in the Profile for one of my favorite features of Kingsolver\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Barbara Kingsolver\u2019s books have been everywhere since the nineties: your neighbor\u2019s bookshelf, your college lounge, your grandmother\u2019s coffee…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":865870,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[3357,223,2752,14487,88,28946,28945,117942],"class_list":["post-865869","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-books","tag-_sensitivecontent","tag-books","tag-digital_syndication","tag-disable-inline-signup-unit","tag-entertainment","tag-onecolumnnarrow","tag-textabovecentersmallwithrule","tag-what-were-reading"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/865869","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=865869"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/865869\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/865870"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=865869"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=865869"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=865869"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}