Today's Barbara Kingsolver (4/10/2026)
What Barbara Kingsolver Believes the Novel Can Do (via Modern Mrs Darcy)
She delights in finding the right metaphor (relationships that “harden like arteries,” a pregnant woman who feels like “a universe with ankles”) and deploying aphorisms (“The wonder is that you could start life with nothing, end with nothing, and lose so much in between”) in just the appropriate tone and register for her wildly variable casts, which range from farmers, mechanics, and entomologists to fictional mid-century novelists. She has written in the first person, the third person, and an omniscient no person; she has written allegories, books within books, and collages of reportage real and imagined, plus epistolary novels, sestinas, and sonnets.
“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.
She doesn’t give a hoot about A.I., and she tells me that the same share of people read fiction today as they did in Cervantes’s time, so we should quit worrying about the end of reading. All she can do, she says, is what she’s always done: craft a novel, from page negative one hundred to page zero, then onward to the end.