For Your Reading List

I didn't realize, earlier this year, that what I was really craving was a bunch of short stories told from the perspective of crotchety WASP-y Mainers. But then I read Olive Kitteridge — the Pulitzer Prize-winning collection from Elizabeth Strout — and my journey began. I went forward in the Strout canon and read My Name is Lucy Barton, and the quasi-sequel, Anything is Possible; I went backwards and discovered Amy and Isabelle, the novel that first put Strout on the national radar, and The Burgess Boys, Strout's first attempt to address how those WASP-y curmudgeons of Maine have grappled, in both the present and the past, with the arrival of people who aren't exactly like them.

I love steady, no-nonsense women, in my own life and on the page; I also love writers who tell the same story over and over again, a "criticism" levied at both Strout and fellow Pulitzer Prize winner Alice Munro. Strout's most recent book, Olive, Again, is less a sequel than a continuance of the small-town Maine world of Shirley Falls that Strout has spent the last two decades constructing. Characters from the previous books (including Isabelle, from Amy and Isabelle, now in a nursing home, and both of the Burgess Boys) intersect with Olive's world; sometimes Olive shows up briefly, to insult a painting or huff around, a presence for people to react or rail against. You don't have to know any of these additional characters to appreciate or understand the world of Olive, Again. But knowing them feels incredibly gratifying: like running into friends you haven't seen since high school and actually want to see.

Why do people love Strout, and her Maine, and her Olive? None of it's particularly easy to be around. But that doesn't mean it's not comforting. One of the things I appreciate most about Strout is her willingness to allow the deep sadness of aging, of the fear of change that accompanies it, to infuse the golden, ocean-wind-brisk worlds she builds with each book. In every Strout book, there's a story that makes me feel a profound, echoing emptiness, like a long shadow that chills you to the core and leaves as quickly as it arrived. To be clear, that's a compliment. The stories of Shirley Falls, including those of Olive, Again, blend together in my mind. But that doesn't mean that I'll ever forget them.

Get your copy now. — Anne Helen Petersen (@annehelen)