Shelf Life: Kevin Wilson

Welcome to Shelf Life, ELLE.com’s books column, in which authors share their most memorable reads. Whether you’re on the hunt for a book to console you, move you profoundly, or make you laugh, consider a recommendation from the writers in our series, who, like you (since you’re here), love books. Perhaps one of their favorite titles will become one of yours, too.

Kevin Wilson writes about people “surviving dark things.” Drafted in ten days, his third novel Nothing To See Here is about two kids who burst into flames when upset. (Growing up, Wilson was obsessed with spontaneous combustion.) He’s now publishing his fifth, Run for the Hills. Wilson describes the story as follows: “Madeline Hill meets her unknown half-brother, Rube, and learns that her absentee father, whom she has not seen in 20 years, kept starting new families and abandoning them. She heads west in a PT Cruiser on an unusual road trip to meet her other half-siblings and piece together the history of her father, who was seemingly a different person with each family.” He adds, “It’s a story about family, in all of its strange forms, and the places it can take us.”

His debut novel, The Family Fang, was adapted into a movie starring Nicole Kidman and directed by co-star Jason Bateman, and Nothing to See Here will also get the big-screen treatment (Wilson will executive produce.) A recipient of fellowships from MacDowell and Yaddo, Wilson has also written two short story collections.

The Tennessee-born and -raised bestselling author teaches English and creative writing at the University of the South; attended Vanderbilt; worked as an assistant in the gender studies program at Harvard; read Archie comic books at the dinner table growing up; uses a caricature drawn by a student as his faculty photo; has two sons with his poet wife (one child is named for his good friend Ann Patchett; the other’s middle name is Fodder-Wing after a character in The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings); and has a dog named Puck and a cat named Dolly.

Favorite food: bologna sandwiches.

Likes: Maine; the Memphis Grizzlies; rap music; Hospitality Shop in Sewanee, Tennessee; the Radioooo app; writing for long stretches of time; stress eating

Dislikes: books more than 400 pages; heights.

Top off your TBR pile with his recommendations below.

Charles Portis’s True Grit. People are usually familiar with either the Coen Brothers’ adaptation or the John Wayne film, but the book is so startling in its originality, and Mattie Ross, the young woman who sets off into the unknown territories to seek revenge on the scoundrel who murdered her father, is quite possibly the most enjoyable voice in American literature. Her singular focus on justice, combined with her lack of sentimentality, makes her such a funny and inspiring character. Open any page, and you’ll find an observation that feels perfect. If I could be any character in literature, I might choose Mattie.

Katie Kitamura’s The Longshot.

Kitamura is one of the most brilliant writers in the world, and her debut novel, The Longshot, is still my favorite. I was not prepared for a novel that, on the surface, is about fighting, to win me over so completely. The story takes place over three days, leading up to a mixed-martial arts fight where Cal, a fighter who has lost whatever promise he had and is grinding his way through life, and his trainer, Riley, come to terms with the possibility that this bout might be their last. It is precise and beautiful and one of the best meditations on masculinity that I have ever read. I remember sitting in a hotel room on book tour—where it’s honestly pretty hard to concentrate and not just panic constantly—and I could not put it down, staying up late into the night to make it to an ending that was both heartbreaking and life-affirming.

There is currently a poorly constructed tower of 17 books on my nightstand, but the one I’m going to pull out like a block from a Jenga game is Danzy Senna’s Colored Television, which I got back in September from Parnassus Books’s First Editions Club. I loved Senna’s collection You Are Free, and I’m always interested in novels that are preoccupied with the making of a thing—how art fits into the rhythm of our lives.

Rufi Thorpe’s Margo’s Got Money Troubles.

This novel is virtuosic in its ability to lean into its innate and wondrous weirdness and make you love it. It never strikes a false note or feels ironic or distanced, which makes the humor even more incredible. The story follows a young woman through so many rabbit holes and strange detours on her way toward finding a life that will sustain her, and it’s a testament to Thorpe that you can laugh so hard no matter how the tides shift.

Ann Patchett’s Tom Lake.

I never want to actually go anywhere. It is really quite scary to leave my house, because I never know how my brain and body will respond to the world, but I would follow Ann Patchett anywhere. She is my favorite writer of all time, an American treasure, and part of what I love is that Ann will take me to a presidential palace in South America, or some remote spot in the Amazon rainforest, or a home for unwed mothers run in Kentucky, and even if I didn’t think I’d ever want to be there, she makes me feel so firmly planted in those settings that I can return to them so easily in my mind. But to visit a real place, I would love to see a cherry farm in Michigan much like the one in her newest (and perhaps best) novel, Tom Lake.

Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad. I pretty much never re-read a book, because part of what I love about reading is the strange, ghostlike fragments of a book that you loved but haven’t read in years—the way your brain chooses to remember a story. And so this is really easy to answer because I have read Egan’s novel-in-stories more than 20 times. The main reason is that I teach this in pretty much any of my classes at the University of the South. I don’t know that I need to re-read it as closely each time, but I can’t help myself. This is what I consider to be the most perfect book I’ve ever read in terms of execution and emotion and wisdom. It reorganizes my brain and my heart each time, and there is always a moment, not always the same, that makes me cry.

Jen Fawkes’s Daughters of Chaos. This might be recency bias because it’s the last book I read, but the stunning cover of Daughters of Chaos fits the story inside: a red cover with claw marks opening up fragments of a hidden story that lies beneath. Fawkes’s novel, an utterly wild tale about Civil War “public women,” translation, mythology, submarines, all wrapped up in subversion and resistance, will make good on the promise of that cover.

Laurie Colwin’s Home Cooking: “How to Fry Chicken.” I am going to admit that I have never actually made this dish, and yet I don’t care because it is my favorite recipe. Colwin’s confident and hilarious essay, complete with a recipe that I truly believe would be transcendent if prepared, is so perfect that every time I read it, I feel as sated and as joyful as if I’d eaten it. Sometimes, my oldest son, Griff, and I will read it together if we’re feeling low, and it instantly cheers us up.

Lucy Knisley’s Relish. This is without a doubt the book that I gift the most, and I give it widely to any and all age groups, but I especially think it’s great for a kid. This unique graphic memoir is both a coming-of-age story and a meditation on food and experimentation, filled with recipes that are absolute winners. The images of food are beautiful, and Knisley’s story makes you feel emboldened to try anything that might come your way.

After my wife and I married, we went to St. John’s for our honeymoon, and I thought that I should bring a single book for the trip. So I took the Lydia Davis translation of Proust’s Swann’s Way, and instantly, within five minutes after the plane took off, I realized I’d made a terrible mistake. I am just not a person who has the presence of mind to appreciate Proust, even though I thought maybe my newly married life might make me into that person. On the island, I ended up reading the only work of fiction in the entire house where we stayed, which was E. M. Forster’s Maurice. If we go on a second honeymoon, maybe I’ll bring Proust again.

Victor LaValle’s Lone Women. All of LaValle’s work is so vivid and unique that his books instantly conjure pretty wild images as you read them, but his most recent, Lone Women, feels absolutely perfect for adaptation, as a young African-American woman sets her familial home on fire, with her dead parents inside, and sets off with a giant, heavy trunk, to start a new life in Montana, where she can own land—a rarity for 1915—if she can settle it. Every character is memorable and dangerous, and the terrifying wildness of the landscape feels perfect for a visual medium.

How can you not love and appreciate what Dolly Parton has done with Imagination Library, which provides books for any child from birth until they start school? It’s easy to donate to help her mission and to make sure that children have at least one book each month. I’d also recommend checking if your local bookstore has a program that provides books for people in need, or making a donation to your local library or the library of an elementary school in your area.