Welcome to Shelf Life, ELLE.com’s books column, in which authors share their most memorable reads. Whether you’re on the hunt for a book to console you, move you profoundly, or make you laugh, consider a recommendation from the writers in our series, who, like you (since you’re here), love books. Perhaps one of their favorite titles will become one of yours, too.
For her second book, Bear (Hogarth), set on San Juan Island, Julia Phillips stays stateside, not venturing as far as she did for her first book, Disappearing Earth. For that bestseller—a National Book Award finalist, one of the NYT 10 best books of the year, shortlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction & Nonfiction—she spent a year in Kamchatka Peninsula in Eastern Russia on the Bering Strait, a volcanic former military zone, thanks to a Fulbright. That visit included a month in the Valley of the Geysers, which features the second densest concentration of geysers on Earth, accessible only by helicopter.
During her year abroad, she did translation work for a tourism agency and national park; volunteered for the Beringia, a 685-mile dog sled mushing race; wrote a Moscow’s about the peninsula’s capital of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky; and rode horses on the tundra with reindeer herders.
The New York-born, New Jersey-raised, Brooklyn-based 2024 Guggenheim Fellow and 2020 Young Lions Award fiction finalist, is a Russophile who studied the Russian language and spent a semester in Moscow during Barnard. She teaches MFA courses at Randolph and Sarah Lawrence colleges; is on the board of the Crime Victims Treatment Center and a mentor at Onward Literary Mentoring. She had a pandemic baby in 2020 and a second child last year; is a runner; once spent Thanksgiving in Phuket, went to a pepper festival in Macedonia, and got scratched by a wallaby in Australia. She wore a snake on her wedding day; worked for a children’s comic book publisher; survived a near drowning as a baby; writes first drafts by hand; and follows advice from Will Ferrell that an arts career is more about luck, opportunity, and timing than talent.
Fan of: writing groups, crime novels, mysteries, Sherlock Holmes, and Agatha Christie; Louise Erdrich; Alice Munro; collages; gardens.
Little to no experience with: growing up with pets (now she has a cat); downhill skiing; weightlifting.
Lots of experience with: stories of lost girls and endangered children and women (Bear is a retelling of Grimms’ Snow White and Rose Red); watching Law and Order and SVU; going down Internet rabbit holes. Perhaps you’ll click with one of her book recs below.
The book that...
…helped me through a loss:
Thornton Wilder’s classic The Bridge of San Luis Rey. Oh, god, it’s beautiful. “There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love…”
…made me weep uncontrollably:
The climax of The Affairs of the Falcóns by Melissa Rivero was so tense and moving, I could barely breathe. At the end of the book, I did that kind of gasp-sob where you can’t help but make a weird loud noise before bursting into tears. The best!
...shaped my worldview:
Women Talking by Miriam Toews is not only a perfect novel but also a profoundly life-affirming work of art. Its ending makes me believe we can, and will, keep going. It gives me faith.
...I read in one sitting, it was that good:
Megan Giddings’s The Women Could Fly kept me up reading all night and left me stunned with its excellence by morning. Her writing is smart and funny and keenly observed and simply exquisite.
…currently sits on my nightstand:
Soldier Sailor by Claire Kilroy, a novel about the intensity of early motherhood. But my one-year-old keeps pulling herself up on the nightstand, yanking the book down, and trying to rip out its pages…how appropriate, huh?
…I’d pass on to my kid:
When the novelist Emma Straub’s father, Peter Straub (an accomplished author himself), was near the end of his life, Emma posted online about how meaningful it was to reread his books at that moment—that she could find his voice in them. A part of him was there. I find that notion unforgettable. So when I think now about this question, even considering all the varied, superb, life- and mind-changing literature there is in the world, I think: I want to pass on my own books, the ones I wrote and will write, to my kids, so I can always be with them in some form, even after I’m gone.
…I’d like turned into a TV show:
In Universes by Emet North, which is an extraordinary debut novel where we see the same key characters lead lives across the multiverse. A little bit WandaVision, a little bit Everything Everywhere All at Once, this is a story I’m dying to see dramatized.
...I last bought:
The stunning, heartbreaking The Stone Home by Crystal Hana Kim, which I was lucky enough to get at Crystal’s launch so she could sign it in person. It’s a treasure.
...has the best title:
My number one has got to be Alice Munro’s Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage: Stories. I don’t want to read about anything else but those!
…has a sex scene that will make you blush:
The Reluctant Royals series of romance novels by Alyssa Cole will make you flush from head to toe, which is an experience I highly recommend.
…I would have blurbed if asked:
I was terribly jealous of everyone who blurbed Kate Beaton’s Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands, because that meant they got to read the book before it came out. I’ve been a Beaton fan since way back, I love everything Drawn & Quarterly publishes, and I can’t get enough of any story about womanhood or isolation. What does a girl have to do to get her mitts on an early copy of a Canadian oil rush memoir?
...features the coolest book jacket:
The cover of Blackouts by Justin Torres is shockingly gorgeous. The black and gold! The matte and gloss! I want to see it behind my lids when I close my eyes.
...surprised me:
Even more than that, Liars by Sarah Manguso shocked me: I’ve never read a novel like that one before. Furious, relentless, and completely compelling.
...I’d want signed by the author:
Any Louise Erdrich book—I love them all, and I’m dying for the opportunity to stand in her signing line and tell her how much I adore her work.
Bonus question: If I could live in any library or bookstore in the world, it would be:
Definitely New York’s Housing Works Bookstore, which is full of weird and miraculous used books that would keep me entertained for the rest of my days. Plus, it has a wraparound balcony inside, so I could sit up on top, peer down on everyone, and reflect on how great my life is now that I live in a bookstore.
The literary organization/charity I support:
Read Phillips' Picks
The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder
