by: The Refresh Editors

It’s that time of year when you might be looking for gifts for your literary friends or excellent material to read or watch in front of a real or imagined fireplace. Well, reader (or listener or viewer), our community of talented writers are here with suggestions for you. We asked the authors who participated in our Author to Author interview series to give us a recommendation for someone else’s book that they love and a recommendation for one other thing in a category of their choosing.

Here’s what they are enjoying:

Melissa Duclos, author of Besotted

Book: Daughters of the Air by Anca Szilgayi, published by Lanternfish Press.
Non-book: The audiobook subscription service Libro.fm, which allows you to choose an independent bookstore to link to your account, so all your purchases benefit a local store rather than Amazon.

Peg Alford Pursell, author of Show Her a Flower, A Bird, A Shadow

Book: What Love Comes To by Ruth Stone. This book of poems is one I return to again and again. I keep it in my stack by the bed, as I have for at least 5 years now.
Website: The Creative Independent, a resource of emotional and practical guidance for creative people.
Bonus: Podcast: OtherPPL (http://otherppl.com/) features in-depth interviews with today’s leading authors and poets.

Michelle Bailat-Jones, author of Unfurled

Two very different books – one short and intense, the other marvelously sprawling. One will take you around the world, the other will take you deep within yourself.

Fox by Dubravka Ugresic, translated by Ellen Elias-Bursac and David Williams (Open Letter Books)
Hunting Party by Agnès Desarthe, translated by Christiana Hills (Unnamed Press)

Lisa Romeo, author of Starting With Goodbye: A Daughter’s Memoir of Love after Loss

Book: From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death by Caitlin Doughty
I’m interested in how other cultures and countries deal with the subject of our inevitable demise. This book takes you to some of those, plus a few pockets of the U.S. where the subject is not verboten. I also recommend her previous book, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, on working in a crematorium.

Documentaries: All of them, any of them! I’ve fallen far down into the documentary hole on Netflix and I simply can’t get out. I don’t want to. There’s so much to learn about storytelling, how to select and feature details, what to leave out, focusing the viewer’s attention in a very specific way. And the lives you get to learn about. Simply stunning. Two I loved: Packed in a Trunk: The Lost Art of Edith Lake Wilkinson and Bill Cunningham New York.

Marissa Price, author of the Into the Abyss series

Books: I absolutely love Anne O’Brien’s books, especially The Shadow Queen. The way that she writes is so poignant and really brings the Tudor era to life. It’s one of my favorite genres to read, and O’Brien painstakingly researches her topics to provide an engaging and interesting reading experience, even if history isn’t your thing. I’m also really looking forward to seeing Hayley Nolan‘s new book come out in 2019—bring on the real story of Anne Boleyn!

I had the privilege recently of attending Potted Potter, which I can’t recommend enough for lovers of the Potter-verse. I really wasn’t sure what to expect – 7 books in 70 minutes? Was it even possible? Daniel Clarkson and Jeff Turner certainly delivered. I haven’t laughed that hard in a long time. From the hilariously unscripted moments (Turner dressed as the golden snitch getting body slammed by a six-year-old girl on stage) to a real-life game of Quidditch, I really don’t think it gets much better. Except for perhaps the Hogwarts dinner in Brisbane next year (but don’t steal all the seats on me)!

Rosalyn Rossignol, author of My Ghost Has a Name: A Memoir of Murder

Book: Archetypes make for powerful stories, and the hero journey is perhaps the most pervasive and powerful archetype that exists in literature. Alexandra Fuller’s Scribbling the Cat, a book about Fuller’s post-civil war travels through Zimbabwe and Mozambique with a former soldier of the Rhodesian army, is such a story, beautifully told. Fuller’s voice is so honest and uniquely her own, here and in all of her memoirs; I chose to recommend this particular book because the ending both surprised me and changed the way I think, not only about war, but about how I, as a woman and a memoirist, conduct my own life. Fuller is the bravest, toughest woman whose work I have ever read. Because she grew up in Africa, during the Rhodesian Civil War, she knows the place as a native daughter; because she is white, and African, she occupies a curious liminal space that opens up fascinating questions of politics, identity, race, and culture. Scribbling the Cat is dark in places, darkly hilarious by turns, and consistently amazing, just like all of Fuller’s memoirs of her life in Africa. “Scribbling,” by the way, is one of many slang words used by those who fought in this war, to mean “killing.” When Fuller told her father about her intention to get to know “K,” the man who accompanies her on her travels, his response was “Curiosity scribbled the cat, you know.” And it very nearly did.

Incense: When I sit down for my daily meditation, I invariably light a stick of incense. A brand of incense I discovered several years ago, Nippon Kodo, is now the only kind I use. Nippon Kodo offers very high-quality incense at reasonable prices. The Mainichikoh Sandalwood is a standard in some Buddhist temples I have visited; in fact, it was in a temple gift shop that I purchased my first roll.