Indie Press Books to Add to Your Winter Reading List

This radiant New Directions edition, with a brilliant introduction by author Rachel Kushner, gathers the Brazilian literary icon’s most beloved stories, including “The Smallest Woman in the World,” “Love,” and “The Egg and the Chicken.” Lispector’s luminous ability to capture life’s small, revelatory moments is unparalleled, and this fizzing, portable volume distills her genius into a collection that’s as transformative as it is timeless.

Featured in Vogue’s best books of 2025, this “moving depiction of the impressionistic emotional lessons of childhood” from the Lost actor and host of the Bookish podcast follows a daughter in Los Angeles reflecting on a tumultuous childhood and her larger-than-life father, a polo-playing Argentine bon vivant whose highs and lows left an indelible mark on her life.

The acclaimed Famished Road author’s latest follows a group of lovelorn British couples at a masked ball in the south of France, where a fortune teller forces them to confront their pasts and reconsider their futures in this highly-anticipated novel that’s filled with “delightfully theatrical twists and a satisfying resolution,” according to Publishers Weekly.

Published in Australia in 2009, this “unique, timeless, and utterly satisfying work” marked the return of a writer after fourteen years of silence. Beginning with the question, "Must I write?," the novel weaves together vivid, unforgettable images—from a childhood trauma to racehorses running forever—in “a readily accessible test of the mind's elasticity,” according to author and activist James Rose in The New York Journal of Books.