Xochitl Gonzalez’s 6 favorite books that shaped her storytelling

Xochitl Gonzalez is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the best-selling author of the novel Olga Dies Dreaming. Below, she recommends six books that influenced her latest novel, Anita de Monte Laughs Last, which is now out in paperback.

‘When I Sing, Mountains Dance’ by Irene Solà (2019)

This slim, gorgeous novel is ostensibly about a valley in the Pyrenees, but really it’s about the vitality of the world around us. Solà tells the generations-long story in the round, the perspectives ranging from that of a farmer to chanterelles that grow in the forest to the mountains themselves. The story is sweet but the prose electric—the kind of stuff that makes you fall in love with language and being alive. Buy it here.

‘Essential Labor’ by Angela Garbes (2022)

This compulsively readable book dives into the ways that parenting is a critical and yet undervalued form of labor. Though its primary lens is mothering, Garbes offers a poignant examination of womanhood writ large and how perceptions of mothering inform women’s perceptions of self. Buy it here.

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‘The Shining’ by Stephen King (1977)

Beneath the horror, King’s classic novel offers a surprisingly deep inquiry into a marriage. The Overlook Hotel in winter serves as a Gothic symbol of the confines of domesticity and the dangers of male insecurity and thwarted ambitions. Buy it here.

‘Widow Basquiat’ by Jennifer Clement (2000)

Clement’s memoir powerfully explores the chaotic domestic life of the painter Jean-Michel Basquiat and his on-and-off muse and lover, Clement’s friend Suzanne Mallouk. With sparse prose, the book beautifully examines the tumult, violence, and creative breakthroughs that can arise when two artists come together. Buy it here.

‘The Altar of My Soul’ by Marta Moreno Vega (2000)

Santería, a faith followed by millions around the world, has long been cloaked in secrecy and stigma. In this heartfelt memoir, Moreno Vega recounts her journey around and into the faith, offering up a story of personal growth and spiritual homecoming. Buy it here.

‘The Sense of an Ending’ by Julian Barnes (2011)

I loved this wrenching, sophisticated campus novel, which is as much about memory as it is about the specifics of things remembered. Barnes plays with his own recollections of being a college student in a love affair while unspooling the ramifications that a similar experience has on his narrator’s present. Buy it here.