cover reveal!

Bread Is Love is available for pre-order!

It’s here, it’s here! A story so close to my heart is now a book (!) and will be published on February 3, 2026 (!!).

Bread Is Love an ode to bread and the rhythms and repetitions of the kitchen, and a celebration of making and doing and being with your art — be it a loaf or poem or song or garden. The inimitable Lavanya Naidu is a sorceress and I can’t wait for you to see how warm and magical and delicious this book is.

You can pre-order Bread Is Love on all the usual channels, if you'd like. I'd especially appreciate it if you asked your public library system to place a pre-order. I ❤️ libraries; I visit at least three times a week!

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this and that

📚 From “Why Children’s Books?” by Katherine Rundell in the London Review of Books:

I do not find writing for children easy: I feel that I fail the vast majority of the time to pin down exactly what I wanted, in tone and pace and truth to the page, and, as I do not enjoy the experience of failing, the experience of writing is sharp-edged. But it is worth it, in part for the rare shock of joy when a joke or a plot line falls into place, like wooden hinges perfectly matched, and so I go on.

The other, larger reason I go on is that I believe in the necessity of offering children versions of wonder. I don’t mean the twee commodified vision of wonder we’re sold – the Instagram post of a mountain lake with an inspirational quote. I mean real wonder: the willed astonishment that the world, in all its dangers and clumsiness, in all its beauties and miracles, demands of us. Active, informed, iron-willed wonder is a skill, not a gift: you have to work at it. And you cannot remain in awe of that which is familiar, so the only way to maintain wonder is to learn: learn, and keep learning.

✏️ For the March 31, 2025 issue of Publishers Weekly, I wrote about forthcoming memoirs about the experience of mothering or being mothered; a trio of books — memoir, history, essay — about fatherhood; and books about self-care for caregivers that focus on setting boundaries, maintaining capacity, and avoiding burnout. My interview with Brazilian American journalist Marina Lopes, whose book Please Yell At My Kids (Balance, Apr.) demonstrates how policy failings and damaging cultural expectations have made raising a kid in the U.S. unnecessarily difficult and makes a persuasive case against American-style parenting while charting a better path forward is online.