I’ve mentioned before that I am a subscriber to The New Yorker magazine. They are the only magazine left in America that has an illustrated cover every week and they have a well-earned reputation spanning decades for featuring important literature.
Recently, The New Yorker wrote an article about Barbara Kingsolver, who happens to be one of my favorite authors. Her Book, Demon Copperhead, which was the story of a poverty-dwelling teenaged Appalachian boy orphaned by the opioid epidemic, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2023.
Her novels have evolved from topics that may or may not be political that come from her own life experiences. An analysis of a few of her book and the topics they explored looks something like this: her book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle purported to make her readers eat their vegetables; Pigs in Heaven examined tribal law in Oklahoma; The Lacuna made light of censorship and artistic freedom from the lives of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, contrasted with the House Un-American Activities Committee; Flight Behavior took on climate change and religious fundamentalism.
But, also in that article in The New Yorker, Kingsolver said something that I want to remember. She was talking about the power of the novel and its relevance particularly in this age of 30-second sound bites, media clicks, and Facebook scrolling. From the Sept. 28, 2026, issue:
“Novels draw you into human conflicts the way our brains are wired to experience them—as feelings, and there’s a big difference between information and feeling. We enter into the realities of other people through emotion, not information, and that’s what a great novel does.” The newspaper, the home page, the grid, the feed: “A novel isn’t a few seconds and then on to something else—the hodgepodge of randomness, equating things that are not equivalent. A novel brings you into the one-on-one, the intimacy of human relationships and human conflicts, for hours at a time.”
This is a quote I want to return to as an inspiration to keep writing.