For home chefs: Historian Toni Tipton-Martin’s cookbook, Jubilee: Recipes from Two Centuries of African American Cooking, celebrates the diverse culinary heritage of US American cuisine. Inspired by the biblical Jubilee, Tipton-Martin’s collected recipes simmer with liberatory joy. At my house, we keep the warming combo of West African groundnut stew and rich buttermilk cornbread on rotation during the cooler fall and winter months, and one of these days I’m going to give the curried pastry crust a whirl. I don’t reach for this cookbook only as a tool for orchestrating holiday gatherings or weeknight dinners. I also read its mini essays for insights into the country’s identity and the kind of ingenuity that crosses boundaries and melds cultures to create something new.
For those who need to be enchanted: Any Niall Williams novel is a pure delight, but this companion pair is my favorite. Set in 1960s rural Ireland, This Is Happiness and its sequel Time of the Child unfold with lyrical, intimate prose that feels akin to a prayer. Chronicling the arrival of electricity and an unexpected adoption at Christmastime, each story quietly reveals characters and a sense of home that feels deeply authentic and written from the soul of someone who knows how to pay exquisite attention. These books satisfied my craving to slow down and savor being enveloped in a different time and place, which, in an age of short-form media and doomscrolling, is a true gift.
For lovers of the natural world: I picked up The Quickening because it was a staff pick at an indie bookstore I love, and the subtitle endlessly intrigued me—Antarctica, Motherhood, and Cultivating Hope in a Warming World. Environmental writer Elizabeth Rush shares her story of sailing alongside scientists to study a place on earth rarely marked by the presence of humans: Antarctica’s Thwaites Glacier, otherwise known as the Doomsday Glacier because of its capacity to significantly contribute to rising sea levels. Rush attends to the histories, concerns, and unseen labor of people historically on the margins of exploratory voyages (namely, women and people of color), all the while giving a distinct voice to the icy waters that have defied our attempts to know them.
—Jasmin Pittman, assistant editor
