This year’s favorite books by Hudson Valley–based authors reveal a literary ecosystem that is as varied as it is deeply rooted in place. Spanning memoir, fiction, cultural history, biography, photography, humor, and literary journalism, these works share a commitment to close observation—of people, landscapes, language, and the forces that shape everyday life. In Feast on Your Life, Tamar Adler finds meaning in the friction of daily cooking, while Brian Hollander’s Nothing of Insignificance makes a quiet case for small-town reporting as a moral act. Novels like Brian Schaefer’s Town & Country and Adam Snyder’s Kingston 76 explore the tensions of belonging and change through distinctly Hudson Valley settings, even as their questions feel broadly American. Elsewhere, books on Richard Manuel, Gray Barker, and the unruly logic of English spelling trace cultural histories that extend far beyond the region. Taken together, these titles demonstrate how local writing can engage national conversations without losing its sense of place.
—Brian K. Mahoney
Feast on Your Life: Kitchen Meditations for Every Day by Tamar Adler
In Feast on Your Life, James Beard and IACP Award-winning author Tamar Adler turns the kitchen into a philosophical terrain where the quotidian becomes revelatory. Eschewing the slick perfection of food influencer imagery, Adler celebrates the “friction” of daily cooking: accidental spills, half-formed meals, the simple act of sharing food with loved ones. Born from a year of mindfulness-rooted journaling after a bout of depression, this 365-entry “almanac of delights” finds meaning in picking sun-warmed cherries, the smell of garlic sizzling in fat, and the imperfect dinners we eat with our children. Adler’s lyrical prose honors both the tenderness and the tedium of feeding ourselves and others, reminding us that joy often resides not in flawless execution, but in presence and acceptance. Feast on Your Life is both a love letter to everyday meals and a gentle manifesto for living well through food.
Town & Country by Brian Schaefer
In Town & Country, Brian Schaefer’s intelligent debut novel, the Hudson Valley becomes more than a setting—it’s the crucible in which contemporary American anxieties about belonging, change, and community are vividly explored. Set in Griffin, a fictional “swanky rural” town modeled on Hudson, the narrative spans six months leading up to a contentious congressional race that serves as scaffolding for deeper human stories. Schaefer resists easy satire, instead plumbing the emotional terrain of six converging lives: lifelong locals, urbane newcomers, bar owners, realtors, and family members wrestling with grief, identity, and the uneasy intimacy of small-town life.
What emerges is a novel that is both keenly attuned to regional specificity and surprisingly universal in scope. Schaefer writes with empathy and nuance, capturing the Hudson Valley’s renaissance tensions without caricature, and reminding us that politics—like home—is most vividly lived in the ordinary, messy negotiations of daily life.
The Saucerian: UFOs, Men in Black, and the Unbelievable Life of Gray Barker
by Gabriel Mckee
With The Saucerian, Gabriel Mckee turns the strange and often silly world of mid-century UFO lore into a nuanced cultural biography of one of its most enigmatic figures. Gray Barker—the West Virginia writer and publisher behind The Saucerian zine and They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers—didn’t so much pursue extraterrestrial truth as he did the art of the tale, blending folklore, hoax, spectacle, and self-publication into a career that helped codify conspiratorial staples like the Men in Black. Mckee’s book, drawing on meticulous archival research, situates Barker at the nexus of DIY print culture and American myth-making, showing how a rural storyteller with a flair for the uncanny shaped an enduring imaginal landscape well beyond ufology. More than a quirky personality study, The Saucerian is a thoughtful meditation on belief, performance, and the porous boundary between fact and fiction in popular culture.
Kingston 76 by Adam Snyder
In Kingston 76, Adam Snyder channels the heady uncertainty of childhood against the richly textured backdrop of mid-1970s Kingston in a lightly fictionalized novel. Ten-year-old Timothy Miller is on the verge of puberty and full of contradictions—simultaneously curious about the adult world and disoriented by it. When a creek’s strange green foam and the suspicious death of a neighbor thrust him into amateur sleuthing, Timothy’s investigations become a rite of passage that is as much about self-discovery as uncovering local secrets.
Snyder deftly evokes a pre-digital age when kids roamed free, pursued mystery with equal parts earnestness and imagination, and tested the boundaries of adult authority. His prose vividly evokes the smell of bluestone sidewalks and the social divisions of a city on the cusp of its bicentennial, while the organically drawn friendship between Timothy and Charles anchors the novel’s emotional core. Kingston 76 is a nostalgic, nuanced coming-of-age tale that captures both the sweetness and the sting of growing up.
The Parts of Him I Kept: The Gifts of My Father’s Madness by Natasha Williams
Natasha Williams’s The Parts of Him I Kept is a wrenching, deeply humane memoir that turns the raw material of family history into something precise and unforgettable. Chronicling her coming of age in the shadow of her father’s paranoid schizophrenia, Williams confronts recklessness, love, loss, and the impossible work of caring for someone who alternates between brilliance and destabilization. What could have been a tale of victimhood instead becomes a searing act of clarity: Williams navigates chaotic domestic landscapes, institutional failures, and personal grief with unsparing honesty and a prose that is as forthright as it is tender.
The narrative’s force lies not just in the extremity of events—a childhood marked by trauma and near-tragedy—but in Williams’s ability to render her father’s flaws and charms without reducing him to stereotype. The Parts of Him I Kept is a story about how we inherit both the gifts and the burdens of those we love, and how resilience looks when it’s forged in the crucible of real life.
Exit Zero: Stories by Marie-Helene Bertino
In Exit Zero, acclaimed novelist and short-story craftsman Marie-Helene Bertino delivers a dozen tales that blend the mundane and the magical with a deft, whimsical touch. Across stories featuring unicorns, balloons bearing cryptic messages, ghostly peaches, and rain-falling ex-lovers, Bertino situates everyday characters in surreal, uncanny circumstances that illuminate rather than obscure the human heart.
The title story finds an estranged daughter inheriting her father’s ramshackle belongings—and a balky unicorn—while other narratives explore love, loss, aging, and disconnection through absurd, uncanny prisms. Bertino’s voice is at once slyly comic and sensitive, grounding her flights of imagination in precise emotional truth. Exit Zero confirms her singular talent for transforming the surreal into something vividly real, offering stories that are surprising, funny, melancholic, and quietly profound all at once.
Richard Manuel: His Life and Music by Stephen T. Lewis
In Richard Manuel: His Life and Music, Stephen T. Lewis brings overdue depth and empathy to the life of one of rock’s most haunting voices, the pianist-vocalist at the heart of The Band. Blessed with a rare, gospel-inflected soul and the ability to pivot from tender balladry to gritty R&B, Richard Manuel helped define an era of roots-infused rock—from backing Bob Dylan’s controversial electric turn to the rustic genius of Music From Big Pink—yet his story has too often been overshadowed by myth. Lewis’s meticulously researched biography, produced with the cooperation of Manuel’s family and peers, rescues him from obscurity without romanticizing his demons, tracing a trajectory of brilliance, self-doubt, addiction, and artistic fragility with reverence and narrative fluency. What emerges is both portrait and elegy: an intimate account of a gifted musician whose voice was equal parts beauty and sorrow, and whose music continues to resonate.
Nothing of Insignificance: Adventures in Journalism by Brian Hollander
In Nothing of Insignificance, Brian Hollander turns a career spent in small-town reporting into something expansive, humane, and resonant. A former Woodstock Times editor and two-term Woodstock town supervisor, Hollander brings a reporter’s eye and a neighbor’s heart to essays that weave together local politics, music, ordinary work, and the odd thrill of climbing a bridge for the view. Whether he’s interviewing jazz titan Sonny Rollins or sketching the life of a lingerie-shop owner-turned-baseball umpire, Hollander proves that the texture of everyday life—its quirks, tensions, and quiet triumphs—is rich with narrative power. His voice is warm without sentimentality, probing without condescension, and ever deferential to the people and places of the Hudson Valley. Nothing of Insignificance is a testament to journalism’s capacity to honor the ordinary, reminding us that no life or story is too small to matter.
Enough Is Enuf: Our Failed Attempts to Make English Easier to Spell by Gabe Henry
In Enough Is Enuf, Gabe Henry—poet, humorist, Beacon resident, and self-described language nerd—mounts a wildly entertaining history of the centuries-long quest to tame English spelling. With wit and curiosity, Henry traces the “Simplified Spelling Movement” from its earliest advocates like Ben Franklin and Noah Webster through the oddball crusades of Mark Twain and Teddy Roosevelt, right up to the age of texting and Twitter.
What could have been merely a catalogue of linguistic eccentricities instead becomes a lively cultural inquiry: why do we spell “enough” the way we do, and what do our repeated attempts to fix it say about education, identity, and the messy evolution of language itself?
Henry’s tone is smart and playful, his research thorough but never dry. Enough Is Enuf is as much a corrective to language anxiety as it is an affectionate homage to English’s glorious absurdity—a book that will amuse anyone who’s ever stumbled over “colonel” or longed to write “tho” without ridicule.
The Band Photographs: 1968–1969
by Elliott Landy
In The Band Photographs: 1968–1969, legendary photographer Elliott Landy opens a window onto one of the most fertile creative periods in American music through an intimate, nearly visceral portrait of The Band as they shaped what would become Americana. A two-volume set drawn largely from previously unseen negatives, the book assembles nearly 400 images from 1968–69 that capture Robbie Robertson, Levon Helm, Rick Danko, Richard Manuel, and Garth Hudson in rehearsal, in the studio, and in the informal spaces around Woodstock that fed their collective genius. Much of this material has never been published before, making the collection feel both revelatory and necessary for anyone familiar with the era’s sound but not its faces.
Landy’s approach is unobtrusive and deeply present: rather than staging moments, he waits for them—the look between bandmates, the quiet focus before a take, the laughter in the room when something clicks. The result is as much a visual anatomy of a band at its peak as it is a testament to the photographer’s gift for capturing the unguarded pulse of music history.
