Oldster Bookshelf #1
The first in an occasional series, featuring books submitted by Oldsters.
Readers,
Wow—the response to my announcement of the Oldster Bookshelf has been utterly overwhelming. I get it. Publishing later in life is a triumph in an ageist culture, and as someone who debuted with my memoir at 56, I want to celebrate others like me, who’ve beat the odds and made their books a reality.
More than 50 of you have already emailed to tell me about your books, despite Gmail deciding I was an A.I. bot and briefly deactivating the email address I provided. That email address, oldsterbookshelf@gmail.com, is now working.
Please keep these caveats in mind:
I will likely not have read the books I feature in Oldster Bookshelf. I have only one brain, and it is very busy editing Oldster and Memoir Land. I will have read descriptions of the books, which have come to me via the authors or others recommending them.
I will not be able to feature everyone. I will feature only those books that sound like they’ll be of interest to Oldster readers. Please be understanding about this.
Also, please be patient, as I will only be able to feature a limited number of books per installment, and the series will be occasional. If your book isn’t in this edition, it’s possible it could show up later. But I can’t go back and forth about it over email. I am too busy with everything else I’m publishing. Thank you for understanding.
Alright, with no further ado, I give you the first edition of the Oldster Bookshelf. Under each cover image is the author’s preferred buy link.
How to Cook A Coyote: The Joy of Old Age by Betty Fussell
Published by Counterpoint in December, 2025
“From telling what it’s like to go blind to confronting the ongoing erosion of time and the mystery of what’s to come, How to Cook a Coyote recounts a decade of change as the celebrated food writer and critic Betty Fussell (now 98) moves from Manhattan to the Montecito retirement community where Julia Child once resided. Ultimately this exciting new work from an incomparable voice in American writing provides a recipe for how to enjoy each moment as if it were the last day of your life.” It got a positive review from Dwight Garner in The New York Times.
The Wisdom Whisperers: Golden Guides to a Long Life of Grit, Grace, and Laughter by Melinda Blau
Published by Morehouse Publishing in 2024
“In this personal and story-driven book, Melinda Blau recounts her decades-long friendships with a group of remarkable women in their 90s and 100s—whom she affectionately calls ‘my old ladies.’ Through each of these relationships, Blau explores how much-older friends can offer guidance, perspective, and inspiration for living a meaningful life…Ultimately, The Wisdom Whisperers is both a celebration of older adults and a call to cultivate intergenerational friendships.”
Says Blau, who in August, 2024 took The Oldster Magazine Questionnaire: “In 2023, long after publishing hundreds of magazine articles and fifteen books and shortly before I turned 80, I knew I had to write about the surprising benefits of having much-older friends. I had been cultivating these May/December relationships since age 46, and by the time I reached my seventies, I realized that watching these women go through their 90s and 100s, allowed me to embrace aging instead of dreading it.”
A Precise Chaos: Poems by Jo-Ann Mort
Published in May, 2025 by Arrowsmith Press
“A life-long commitment to social evolution — and, occasionally, revolution — animates the poems in Jo-Ann Mort’s debut collection, A Precise Chaos. Moving from Mostar to Oaxaca, Paris to Taormina, Mort’s peripatetic poems reflect her experiences as a trade union activist, a political organizer, and a peace activist in the Middle East. Refusing to evade the hard questions called for by a life honestly examined, she asks: ‘We, who are so righteous./Where does it lead us?’ By publishing her first collection in her 60s, Mort succeeds in distilling a wealth of experience into something like wisdom: ‘The men were larger than life/starting revolutions in their heads and in their classrooms...//The men were larger than life,/so life eluded them.’
The Stonewall Generation: LGBTQ Elders on Sex, Activism, and Aging by Jane Fleishman PhD
Published by Skinner House Books in 2020
From the book’s starred Kirkus review: ““It deserves prominent placement on LGBTQ history bookshelves. . . . An indelible collection of wise voices resonating with experience, pride, resilience, and revolution."
“Jane Fleishman, PhD, MEd, MS, CSE, is a writer, an award-winning educator, sexuality researcher, and podcaster. She earned her M.Ed. and Ph.D. at Widener University Center for Human Sexuality Studies at the age of 62 in 2016. After conducting her doctoral research with a quantitative study on sexual satisfaction in older adults in same-sex relationships, she longed for the stories behind the numbers. She is on a mission to promote sexual wellness in older adults and is particularly concerned about LGBTQ elders and elders of color. Her curious nature led to her latest accomplishment, a Nautilus Book Award winner, The Stonewall Generation: LGBTQ Elders on Sex, Activism, and Aging. She co-hosts a regular podcast on sex in the second half of life and completed a popular TEDx talk, ‘Is It OK for Grandma to Have Sex?’ She continues to work as an AASECT Certified Sexuality Educator and brings her research and passion to older adults all across the country. She is a proud mother of two really fabulous millennials and lives in Northampton, MA with her partner, Joan Tabachnick.”
Don’t Die: Poems 2013-2021 by Michael Blumenthal
Published in 2021 by Rabbit House Press
“Don't Die: Poems 2013-2021 is Michael Blumenthal's most insightful, raw and important work to date. ‘One of the natural poets of his generation,’ praised Seamus Heaney, Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. ‘The intellect of a scholar, the sensitivity of a poet, the objectivity of a professor of law: it hardly seems possible that so many virtues can be embodied in one,’ wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, critic and translator, C.K. Williams.”
Talking to the Wolf: A Novel by Rebecca Chace
To be published May 19th by Red Hen Press
“A failed rockstar, an awarded scientist, a work-obsessed misanthrope, and a ghost, whose untimely death ruptured the once-solid quartet, steel themselves for their thirty-fifth high school reunion dinner. Set during a surprise snowstorm in New York City the day of the reunion, Talking to the Wolf is a lyrical exploration of female friendship, friend breakups, and reconciliations across decades.”
This is Rebecca Chace’s fifth book and third novel, and her first that isn’t with a Big Five publisher. “At a time that is not easy for publishing literary fiction I am thrilled to be with my first indie press for this book. I have felt so much enthusiasm and support for this novel.”
Reflections on Migration and Friendship—An Epistolary Memoir by Ruth Zelig
To be published July 28, 2026 by She Writes Press
“When Ruth’s family migrates from Brazil to North America in 1964, she and her best friend, Elana, are forced to separate. They decide to keep in touch via written correspondence—an exchange that ultimately persists for twenty years. From São Paulo, Elana writes candidly with warmth, dedication, and support, easing Ruth’s assimilation to first Canada, then the United States. Lonely and uprooted, Ruth derives solace from the friendship and the correspondence. As both girls mature and embark on a life in different countries and cultures, their bonds transcend their differences. They remain friends for life.
”Fifty years after parting, Ruth and Elana re-read aloud the letters that they exchanged as young women. The experience of hearing their words written in letters and sent like a bridge across the continent and half a lifetime is a revelation that stuns the friends: the antecedent voice spoken in the concrete voice of the present.”
The Gray New Deal: A Novel by Miriam Kuznets
Published March 6th, 2026 by Flexible Press
“Five decades ago, Barry, Vihaan, Jane, Ellen, Tomás, Doris, and Pearl were college housemates sharing a co-op called West House on a cul-de-sac in Austin, Texas. After graduation, they ventured far and wide to build lives filled with successes and failures, loves and losses. Through it all, they stayed involved in each other’s lives, their friendships standing the test of time. Now Barry, who is by far the most economically successful, renovates the fire-damaged old co-op and invites his friends to live there together once again. Older, wiser, battle scars and all, West House members reunite.”
Says Kuznets: “I earned an MFA in fiction writing from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and published short pieces in a variety of magazines. I took a turn in my late 20s to focus on being a psychotherapist, a meaningful pursuit for the past 30-plus years. In my late 50s, I was less busy so I decided to return to writing. A former teacher of mine, a writer who was also working as a literary agent, accepted The Gray New Deal. He sold my book to Flexible Press, which will donate 10% of the proceeds to World Central Kitchen.”
The Expert of Subtle Revisions by Kirsten Menger-Anderson
Published by Crown in March, 2025
“An NPR Best Book of the Year • A thrilling historical mystery about a young woman searching for her father, a young man trying to solve an impossible problem, and the quest for the power to transcend time. Between the young woman, who lives off the grid in 2016 and spends her free time editing Wikipedia entries and picking fights with people online, and the circle of intellectuals debating space and time in 1933 Vienna on the eve of World War II, lie years of history that might easily be erased—unless old secrets are unraveled. Kirsten Menger-Anderson’s beautiful meditation on time, love, and obsession shows us how we never truly know what happened in the past, and often how the past eerily mirrors the future.”
Aging: An Apprenticeship edited by Nan Narboe
Published in 2017 by Red Notebook Press
“Nan Narboe’s 56 thoughtfully selected essays in Aging: An Apprenticeship offer an intimate and lyrical account of aging through the decades. Authors Judy Blume, Andrew McCarthy, Gloria Steinem, Donald Hall, David Shields, Ursula K. Le Guin and others draw from their own experiences, describing a specific decade’s losses and gains to form a complex and unflinching portrait of the years from nearing fifty to ninety and beyond. In six sections, these detail-rich essays paint an accessible picture of nearing 50, the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, the 90s and beyond with equal parts humor and insight.” Says Narboe: “My work as a psychotherapist led to me wanting to refer people to information about aging. (Now I direct people to Oldster.)”
You Could Be Happy Here: A Novel by Erin Van Rheenen
Published September 2025 by Sibylline Press
“Lucy—single, childless, in her thirties—studies insects and ecosystems, in part to make sense of human behavior. That hard-won insight is shattered when her mother dies prematurely, her sister claims the California family home, and Lucy learns that her biological father is apparently a Costa Rican man they knew when the family spent summers in the coastal village of Palmita. Reeling, Lucy heads south in search of this phantom father. But he is nowhere to be found, and none of the locals seem to remember her. The dreamy, off-grid paradise she recalls from childhood has become a hard-edged town leery of outsiders.” Per Van Rheenen: “The book launched just after I turned 65; I guess that makes me a geriatric debutante.”
How a Little Becomes a Lot: The Art of Small Changes for a More Meaningful Life
To be published March 31st by Harvest
“More than 30 years ago, Eric Zimmer [host of The One You Feed podcast] faced a life-altering battle with heroin addiction that left him homeless and facing prison—a turning point that sparked his search to understand how profound change happens, and how we can chart sustainable paths forward while honoring both who we are and who we hope to become.
“How a Little Becomes a Lot starts with a radical premise: your mind has a mind of its own. Each day, it pulls you in countless directions—toward what you value most, what you desire now, away from what you fear, and toward what feels comfortable. Real, lasting change happens when you stop trying to strong-arm this complexity and instead learn to work with it, one small choice at a time.
“Zimmer’s motto is simple: little by little, a little becomes a lot. Personal transformation isn’t about superhuman willpower or heroic feats of character. It’s not a watershed or an epiphany; it’s the result of the little decisions to do A instead of B, to say yes instead of no. These tiny shifts create powerful momentum.”
Blood Moon Aria by Wendy Kagan
Published by Red Bird Chapbooks in December, 2025.
“Part praise song, part heroine’s journey, Blood Moon Aria sings of mothers and daughters, eros and the changing body, birth and death, and the blood cycle and its passing. These are songs that need to be sung full-throated in a culture that invisibilizes women after the childbearing years. Aria means “lioness” in Greek, and the poems are by turns elegiac and fierce, tender and defiant, moving between realms from the domestic to the celestial and mythic.” Writes Kagan: “I felt an urge to write this book at what felt like a turning point in my life: My younger daughter entered puberty just as my own period began to wane. That transformation brings a feeling of loss yet also of freedom and power.”
Swollen Appetite: A Memoir by Sandra Austin Mello
Published by the author in June, 2025
“‘Legend had it that if you lived in San Francisco for too long, you’d lose your mind. I lived there from 1992 until 1997, and the legend came true. I found the right place at the right time to fall apart.’ In those five years, Mello both soars and circles the drain. An unflinching, irreverent, and at times hilarious portrait of the 1990s, crafted in part from detailed journals and drunken, late-night recordings, this exceptional memoir is a tribute to both the struggle itself and how grace emerges from the ashes.”
Time in a Bottle: A Novel by Marjorie Klein
Published in February, 2023 by Black Rose Writing
“Lorelei, a 60-year-old virgin, owns a Miami lingerie shop, eats organic food, and minds her own business. She never considers alternatives to this life until the day her well runs dry, when Juan the well-digger plunges its depths and taps into the flow of hidden water from an underground spring. She attributes her awakening sensuality and increasingly youthful appearance to her healthy lifestyle. Her business partner, Sharleen, suspects that the water has more to do with Lorelei’s changes than the ingestion of kale and quinoa, and embarks on a campaign to sell it from the shop.”
Says Klein: “My first book, Test Pattern, originated as my thesis when I went back to college at the age of 50 to get my MFA in creative writing. Test Pattern was published when I was 59.”
To be considered for a future edition of the Oldster Bookshelf, you can email me at oldsterbookshelf@gmail.com with the following:
A press release.
A brief synopsis of the book.
A brief bit on your background as an author and how you came to publish it.
A cover image.
Your preferred buy link.
You’ll be making my life easier if you keep it all short and sweet.
Fixed the error in the first listing. 🤦🏻♀️
An occasional Oldster Bookshelf will be a wonderful surprise gift whenever it may happen, Sari. Congratulations to all of the writers of the books highlighted. My reading list grows again. Thanks so much , Sari, you are appreciated.