Read (and Give) Local This Season

For our second annual holiday book recommendation list, we reached out to key players in the D.C.-area literary community. We wanted to find out which books, written by local authors, they loved reading in 2022. We were delighted and grateful when so many people took time out of their busy days, to make this list a true community effort. Their generosity—and the variety of books they chose—reminded how special our local literary community is. We are a diverse group, and we’re good to each other. And that’s a true gift.

If you’re looking for a gift for a friend, family member, or just your next book to snuggle up with this winter, this list is for you!  We’ve got fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and young adult titles to peruse. Most were published in 2022, with a few from 2021.

Read on for recommendations from Washington Independent Review of Books; Politics and Prose Bookstore; Loyalty Bookstores; arts nonprofit Day Eight; Gwydion Suilebhan, Executive Director of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation; along with recommendations from DCTRENDING’s Local Authors Editor, Norah Vawter.

2022 Literary Community Favorite

This book came up independently on list after list. So we decided this very D.C. novel deserved its own category. It was recommended by Politics and Prose Bookstore, Loyalty Bookstores, Gwydion Suilebhan, Executive Director of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation, Washington Independent Review of Books, and the editors of DCTRENDING.

Susan Coll's novel Bookish People is a playful romp through the inner workings of an unnamed independent bookstore in the District. The cast of characters includes Mrs. Bernstein the exhausted owner, Clemi the events manager, and all their bookselling colleagues. Susan herself works at Politics and Prose, and while she swears Bookish People is not based on her real-life experiences, there are enough Easter eggs scattered through to make it feel like an inside job. (Anton Bogomazov, Politics and Prose Bookstore)

There are many charming bookstore themed books, but Bookish People is a comedy of missed manners, efforts gone awry, and the amount of sweat the world of books takes. Written with love but a wry eye, Susan Coll’s take on a muggy week at a D.C. bookstore will have you turning the pages to find out what happens next to this motley crew, their constantly breaking vacuum, and their potentially ruinous authors. (Hannah Oliver Depp, Loyalty Bookstores)

Gwydion Suilebhan

Executive Director of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation

Recommendation

In Zak Salih’s debut novel, Let’s Get Back to the Party, it is 2015, weeks after the Supreme Court marriage equality ruling, and all Sebastian Mote wants is to settle down. A high school art history teacher, newly single and desperately lonely, he envies his queer students their freedom to live openly the youth he lost to fear and shame. Kirkus Reviews calls it “an insightful examination of two of the many ways gay men present themselves in contemporary America.”

Washington Independent Review of Books 

Recommendations from Holly Smith, Editor-in-Chief

The intelligent, insightful essays collected in Hidden Maryland: In Search of America in Miniature were written by Eugene L. Meyer, a longtime Washington Post reporter. They originally appeared in Maryland Life magazine, where (full disclosure) I was an editor for many years. It's thrilling to see them updated and assembled for a new generation of readers. (Read Holly’s interview with the author.

Jackie & Me by Louis Bayard. Contributor Jennifer Bort Yacovissi writes in her profile of the author, “Jackie and Me is the story of Jacqueline Bouvier before she was that Jackie; the charming, elusive Jack Kennedy; and their indispensable mutual friend, Lem Billings. Reviews so far are unanimous in their praise, and I wholeheartedly agree: Bayard’s new novel is charming, compelling, and heartbreaking in equal measure.” (Read the full profile.)

 Politics and Prose Bookstore

Recommendations from Anton Bogomazov, Chief Adult Book Buyer

Take My Hand by DC resident Dolen Perkins-Valdez, haunts. Among Civil Townsend’s first nursing patients are India and Erica, pre-teen Black girls living in rural poverty with limited access to health care and every other service and resource. A biting commentary on racism, classism, and reproductive justice in the American south during the 1970s, the book is fiction but based on the court case challenging the federally funded campaign to sterilize primarily young women of color living in poverty. 

In his memoir, Bird Brother: A Falconer’s Journey and the Healing Power of Wildlife, Rodney talks about growing up in Anacostia dealing drugs and going to too many funerals. In order to get a legit pay stub, he took a side job on a river clean-up crew.  From there, the sky opened up—literally—to a world full of birds. The warm and insightful Bird Brother is a story about how D.C.'s eagles, hawks, owls, and other raptors led Rodney on flight of self-discovery and what these same birds can show us all about humanity.

Loyalty Bookstores

Recommended by Amani Jackson, Chardai Powell, and Amy Andrews

In The Monsters We Defy, Leslye Penelope takes us on a magical heist set in 1920s D.C. I can never resist black folk magic and have a strong nostalgia for old Black Hollywood glamour.  What I didn't expect was a wonderfully crafted world I recognized (who doesn't spend a night or two out on U Street) with a fantastical twist that makes you wonder if we are oblivious to the magic all around us. (Amani Jackson)

 Love Radio, by Ebony LaDelle, is the perfect YA Romance to add to your Holiday TBR! I finished it in 12 hours and was swooped into this beautiful love story dedicated to Prince and Dani. Music, art and love within a captivating YA love story. (Chardai Powell)

I’m contractually obligated to love a badass girl with a sword, and this gender-swapped Three Musketeers retelling has plenty of them! One for All by Lillie Lainoff is a gorgeously written, action-packed, emotional page-turner with all my favorite things: a feminist spin on a classic, a fierce and complicated disabled protagonist. (Amy Andrews)

Day Eight

Recommendations from Gregory Luce,

Lead Poetry Editor for Day Eight’s literary journal Bourgeon

In Seed Celestial, Sara Burnett weaves poems about motherhood, daughterhood, art, immigrant. For example, a past relationship is wryly recalled in a witty poem that combines ekphrasis with clear-eyed recollection. This collection is one of the most important—and best—of 2022.

In her new collection, Iron Into Flower, Yvette Neisser has achieved poetic alchemy, transmuting loss into wisdom, grief into joy—or at least acceptance, memory into living presence. In writing about themes such as grief, marriage and divorce, motherhood, and Jewishness, Neisser deals in striking imagery and moving language.

DCTRENDING

Recommendations from Norah Vawter, Local Authors Editor

Joyce Kornblatt’s gorgeously written novel Mother Tongue has a juicy premise. In her 40s, Nella discovers that her entire life is a lie. Her mother is not her mother, but a woman who kidnapped her as a newborn. But Kornblatt is not interested in big, splashy scenes. Instead she explores the psychological ramifications of this gutting betrayal. Read my review here.

In Ashes to Justice, debut author Shaquetta Nelson (a.ka. R.E.I.L.) doesn’t shy away from painful subject matter in her autobiographical collection. But it’s not a depressing or pessimistic read. Ashes to Justice is ultimately a story of survival. It’s a story about how words save us, define us, uplift us, and help us rise from the ashes. Read my conversation with the author.

Our contributor Thais Carrion reviewed Morowa Yejidè’s excellent novel Creatures of Passage, saying the book “pays tribute to an unseen Southeast D.C., a magical, dark, humid space where the dead walk amongst the living and intuition rules the land. Blending Egyptian mythology and the strong black history of Anacostia, Yejidè gives us a world where there are no states or counties, instead, kingdoms and fiefdoms.”

Norah joins Loyalty Bookstores in recommending Leslye Penelope’s novel Monsters We Defy. Her review of this compelling, idiosyncratic book will be published later this month.

To check out that book review when it’s posted, along with other new DCTRENDING content, and local arts scene happenings:

Follow the magazine on Twitter @dctrending and Instagram @dctrending1.

Follow our local authors editor on Twitter @NorahVawter.

Subscribe to our Substack newsletter.

And if you appreciate what we do at DCTRENDING and are able to give, you can support us on Patreon.