Yaddo Gift Guide Books
Browse our curated collection of new books by Yaddo authors and friends in our circle
Knockout Non-Fiction
Baldwin: A Love Story by Nicholas Boggs focuses on James Baldwin and the romances that shadowed his work and exile, reframing the writer’s life through the lens of desire, attachment, and the costs of loving across race, nation, and power. The Insider: Malcolm Cowley and the Triumph of American Literature by Gerald Howard charts the outsized influence of critic, writer, and editor, Malcolm Cowley, who was a Yaddo Board member and artist in residence several times from 1931-1961. Degas at the Gas Station by Thomas Beller gathers electric essays in which art, memory, and street-level observation illuminate how beauty ambushes us in everyday life.
The Road Was Filled with Thorns: Running Toward Freedom in the American Civil War by Tom Zoellner follows the mass flight of enslaved people who seized the chaos of war to liberate themselves. With sharp intimacy, Alexis Okeowo maps how private lives and public histories converge in the Deep South in Blessings and Disasters: A Story of Alabama. Village by village, Neil Shea builds a human-scale portrait of life coming loose due to climate change in Frostlines: A Journey Through Entangled Lives and Landscapes in a Warming Arctic.
Fantastic Fiction
Happy Bad, Delaney Nolan’s novel, follows a fierce and funny young woman making bad choices with alarming clarity—an acid-bright study of survival and appetite. In A Different Kind of Tension, Jonathan Lethem delivers nervy stories where paranoia, love, and civic absurdity jostle in close quarters. The Four Spent the Day Together by Chris Kraus tracks a day in the life of four friends whose talk, schemes, and betrayals expose the architecture of intimacy and ambition.
Bad Bad Girl delivers an antic, disarming novel about agency, inheritance, and the price of refusing to behave by masterful writer Gish Jen. The Silver Book, Olivia Laing’s second novel, follows a chain of encounters across art, illness, protest, and longing, as archivists, lovers, and dissidents collide around a mysterious manuscript. Matt Bondurant’s North Country hurtles through the deep woods of the American borderlands, where a vanished hunter, a hard-bitten guide, and a tightening net of secrets turn a simple search into a cold, high stakes reckoning.
Shortlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai is a sharply observed, tender novel about longing, connection, and the quiet rebellions that shape a life. Josephine Rowe's Little World follows the journey of an unidentified girl’s body across continents and caregivers to explore how trauma, faith, and belonging shape the lives we lead. In Wolf Bells by Leni Zumas, ex-punk rocker Caz joins a fragile, radical community built on mutual care—only to have the arrival of two children test the limits of love, loyalty, and what it takes to belong.
For Young Readers
The celebrated children’s book maker and visual artist James E. Ransome has created dozens of picture books that honor everyday dignity, history, family, and the poetry of ordinary scenes. His latest, A Place for Us (ages 3-7), is a wordless, luminous portrait of a mother and child improvising safety and rest across a cityscape, a quiet invitation to see the lives of children facing housing insecurity with care and attention. Ransome has a parallel career as a painter, and his grown-up work is equally awesome: ransomeart.com.
Art Books
A deluxe new edition from Galpón Press, The Woodcutter’s Christmas pairs Brad Kessler’s quiet, classic holiday tale with Dona Ann McAdams’ evocative black-and-white photographs, yielding a book that feels both literary and archival — a keepsake calibrated for the season. Martin Puryear: Nexus gathers a five-decade practice into a single, sweeping volume that positions the sculptor’s work within a global history of making, from woodcarving and brickmaking to marble work and drawing. The companion exhibition, organized with Cleveland Museum of Art, is on view through Feb. 8, 2026, at Museum of Fine Arts Boston. Anya Liftig’s REJECTION/AMBITION turns 25 years of “no” into a conceptual performance of persistence, inviting readers to experience rejection and recognition—depending on which direction they choose to begin.
Coco Fusco: Tomorrow, I Will Become an Island: This illustrated volume surveys the performances, videos, installations, photographs, writings, and other works of the Cuban-American artist, whose internationally touring retrospective—now on view at El Museo del Barrio through Jan. 11, 2026—traces her incisive examinations of politics and power. Named one of “the most exciting U.S. art exhibitions in 2025” (The Guardian), Motherlode by Liz Collins is on view at RISD Museum through Jan. 11, 2026. The groundbreaking catalogue positions Collins as a singular figure who synthesizes fine art, craft, fashion, and textile design with queer and feminist activism. In Jordan Casteel, this new monograph highlights the artist’s luminous portraits and still lifes—works grounded in photography yet devoted to the expressive possibilities of paint, intimacy, and everyday life.
Poems, Please!
In The Seeds, Cecily Parks offers spare, resonant poems that contemplate nature, memory, and the quiet, unsettling ways the world remakes us. The poems in The Other Love: Poems by Henri Cole meditate on aging, time’s passing, the body, nature, sexuality, and the everyday political tensions of contemporary life. Winner of the 2025 National Book Award for Poetry, The Intentions of Thunder gathers new and selected poems by Patricia Smith—work that roars with history, music, memory, and the unstoppable force of her voice.
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