The Best Books to Gift This Season

From The New York Times Games team comes a beautifully designed collection packed with new twists on favorites like Wordle, Connections, and Spelling Bee. Inside are exclusive challenges, a mega crossword with two sets of clues for easy and hard play, Joel Fagliano’s hand-picked Mini Crosswords, plus clever brain benders, logic puzzles, and trivia. Perfect for snow days, travel downtime, or family nights by the fire.

From the author of Between Two Kingdoms, this luminous guide gathers wisdom from one hundred thinkers and artists including Gloria Steinem, Salman Rushdie, George Saunders, and Hanif Abdurraqib. Part journaling companion and part meditation on living creatively, this meaningful gift invites readers to write, reflect, and rediscover their inner voice. Get it for that person in your life seeking clarity and inspiration in the new year.

Written by a bestselling French art historian, this international phenomenon tells the story of a young girl and her grandfather who visit a Paris museum every Wednesday to experience fifty-two masterpieces before she loses her sight. Spanning five centuries of art history, this moving, thought-provoking novel shows how art helps us see what truly matters, and even includes a fold-out of all fifty-two artworks - a lovely keepsake after you’ve devoured this global sensation.

Nineteen years after her Booker win, the bestselling author of The Inheritance of Loss returns with a sweeping story of modern love stretching from India to New York that was hailed as “better company than real-life people,” (The New York Times) and “philosophical, comic, earnest, emotional, and uncanny” by the Booker judges.

Edited by The New Yorker’s fiction editor, this centennial collection gathers one hundred years of the magazine’s finest stories—from Salinger’s “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” to Proulx’s “Brokeback Mountain.” Featuring masters like Alice Munro, Haruki Murakami, and George Saunders, it’s a dazzling time capsule of modern fiction and the perfect gift for anyone who reads the fiction issue cover to cover.

Nearly a decade after Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat transformed kitchens everywhere, the world renowned foodie returns with 125 deeply satisfying recipes, from ricotta custard pancakes and sky-high focaccia to saffron-roasted chicken and chocolate-frosted yellow cake. Along the way come lessons in olive oil, pressure cookers, and the alchemy of dulce de leche. Overflowing with joy, warmth, and kitchen wisdom, it’s a love letter to food and the people we share it with.

At 88, the master of American postmodernism returns with his first novel in more than a decade, a gloriously twisty detective tale that travels from Depression-era Milwaukee to prewar Europe through a tangle of spies, mystics, and double agents. Critics call it “a gloriously language-driven detective novel that waits for no one” (The Boston Globe) and “bonkers and brilliant fun” (The Washington Post).

The former US Poet Laureate turns his signature wit and warmth toward our four-legged companions in twenty-five poems paired with Pamela Sztybel’s graceful watercolors. From the lightness of watching a furry friend bound out the door to the absurd joy of holding a pup on the scale, the man the WSJ dubbed “America’s favorite poet” delivers a charming, heart-lifting gift for the canine lovers in your life.

From the Booker Prize–shortlisted author of A Whole Life comes a “quietly beguiling” novel set in 1960s Vienna, where a modest café becomes a haven for misfits, dreamers, and the lonely-hearted. Warm yet clear-eyed, it was hailed by the Wall Street Journal as the author’s “most uplifting work to date”—a perfect read for the holiday season.

The Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer delivers a revelatory, timely history of America's most sacred document. Published for the 250th anniversary of America’s founding, this compelling work traces the rarely told story of amendment attempts—almost all unsuccessful—and what that failure means for democracy today. "It is impossible to imagine a more instructive text on a more timely subject by a more accomplished historian," praised author Timothy Snyder.