The Best Gifts for Readers

Nonfiction

Fiction

Poems and More

All Lit Up

For the reader for whom books are life, literary paraphernalia is a boon.

Books: Courtesy of the publishers. Paper dolls: Courtesy of Cecilia Lanahan Ross. All others: Courtesy of the brands.

GOOD MAIL

Send the gift of brilliantly curated books, plus a bookish gift, courtesy of Boxwalla’s partnership with the author Alexander Chee; this round’s selections comprise Jonathan Escoffery’s If I Survive You, Jean Chen Ho’s Fiona and Jane, and a deck of tarot cards. “Escoffery’s and Ho’s books both make use of the interconnected short story collection masterfully to explore the lives of friends (Ho) and family (Escoffery) in ways a more linear novel won’t,” Chee tells VF. The story collection, he says, is a form “increasingly inspiring a new generation of American writers who see in it the opportunity for extended meditations on a subject or a community, liberated from the idea of subjugating everything inside of a book to a single climactic story. I think of the way a lifelong friendship likely has no plot in telling the story of it, but a net of interludes could describe it. Or the way the life of a family, with many stories, cannot be described by just one.” The addition of the Star Spinner Tarot will come as no surprise to readers of Chee, who has written about the nuance and lure of the cards. He chose this deck in particular, he says, “because the artist, Trung Le Nguyen, is a favorite, and his deck has a delightful mix of references for me, ranging from Sailor Moon to Victorian fairy tales to erotic comics, and together the effect of these references is an uncanny pastiche of something I haven’t seen before and something I know. Which is, for me, just like a tarot reading. If you are using the cards to learn archetypes, and you can, then what archetypes are you learning from? I like how he spins that around.” The American Fiction Series from Boxwalla, curated by Alexander Chee, $39.95/every two months. (theboxwalla.com)

HEAD TO TOE

Made-to-order slippers, cut from velvet and leather, in which to pace the stacks. Bookshop x Stubbs & Wootton Library Slippers, $575. (shopbookshop.com)

MUSE AS MAKER

Zelda Fitzgerald’s watercolor figures are peak whimsy: a cherubic F. Scott ready to don a winged pink button-down alongside fairy-tale heroines and a topless Louis XIV. The Paper Dolls of Zelda Fitzgerald by Eleanor Lanahan, $26. (simonandschuster.com)

WELL WRIT

Jot down to-do lists, novel notes, cinema critiques, and everyday hopes and dreams. Aspinal 2023 Slim Pocket Leather Diary, $65. (aspinaloflondon.com)

LIT ART

How better to decorate the walls of a literary-loving home than with framed caricatures of a favorite author (head suitably oversized, the better to indicate a hefty brain)? Since 1963, David Levine has illustrated more than 3,500 portraits for articles published in The New York Review of Books, including Salman Rushdie, Herman Melville, Joan Didion, W.E.B. Du Bois, Vladimir Nabokov (the latter three pictured here), and more. The New York Review of Books Caricature Prints, $195. (shop.nybooks.com)