🧆🥘🍤🎄TAPAS FOR CHRISTMAS? TAPAS FOR CHRISTMAS.

Your turkey could never.

Dec 07, 2025

Your Inside Voice is a curated cultural newsletter brought to you by Pragmatic, the IP/literary scouting advisory that helps film & tv producers find, acquire, and develop material for the screen.

THE MAIN COURSE

Sometimes, here at the end of the year, the holidays roll around—Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hannukah, the season premiere of RHOBH—and thoughts of more turkey and stuffing, green beans and mashed potatoes are enough to make you set the Christmas tree on fire. 2025 is one of those firestarting years. What an exhausting twelve months. So, for this year’s holidays there’s no laboring over a hot stove at YIV HQ. We’re ordering in. Tapas, to be exact.

See the Cast of 'National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation' Then and Now

This month, instead of one solitary pick, we’re giving you a smattering of books that we loved during year but for one reason or another—that reason usually being the pile-up of books publishing in the spring and fall months—couldn’t manage to fit in as monthly picks.

Not a best-of list, this. It’s just a selection of books that we enjoyed for one reason or another and provided escape in a year that definitely called for heading for the exits. Some of these titles are sublime literary experiences, others are just a good time. And still others do something outside of themselves in the larger culture in a way that gives them staying power.

And besides, if there’s any time a list of books can be of service, it’s when you need a portal to another dimension to escape the family during the holiday season. Thanksgiving has the Cousin Walk. But Christmas? Christmas calls for something far stronger: a great, transportive story.

We’re taking our usual holiday break for January, but YIV will return to your inbox the first Sunday of February. We’ve got plenty of exciting new things planned for 2026 and we can’t wait to share them. In the meantime, here are a few reads to help you have the happiest of holidays!

BOOM TOWN by Nic Stone | Simon & Schuster | October 14, 2025

Nic Stone is the #1 New York Times–bestselling author of several YA novels, including the beloved Dear Martin series. Boom Town marks her adult debut—and it’s a delightfully surprising departure from YA. With some Gone Girl energy by way of P-Valley, this thriller follows the case of two missing erotic dancers from Atlanta’s most notorious gentlemen’s club and the woman determined to find them.

It’s the kind of fresh, culturally sharp take on the female-driven thriller we’d love to see more of on bookshelves.

TONI AT RANDOM by Dana Williams | Amistad | June 17, 2025

There’s so much talk in these Substack streets about what book editors are buying, how they’re buying it, and what they do once they’ve bought the things they buy, that it’s easy to forget the core of the job: shaping books—and the culture that arises from them—with care and intention. Dana Williams’ Toni at Random shines a new light on the work of the iconic Toni Morrison—not as a writer or novelist, but as an editor—in service of the culture at large and of other writers. It’s indispensable reading for anyone in or around the business or art of making books.

THE SLIP by Lucas Schaefer | Simon & Schuster | June 3, 2025

Finding novelty in the familiar is one of the best ways to capture—and keep—a reader’s attention. Lucas Schaefer’s The Slip does exactly that, turning the well-trodden road of the boxing novel on its head. The story is so expansive it nearly defies succinct description, but it’s set in the 1990s in and around an Austin boxing gym, following a fascinatingly diverse cast of characters all connected to a teenage boy’s mysterious disappearance.

The book takes some big narrative swings—and it’s a delight to watch those punches land.

I REGRET ALMOST EVERYTHING: A Memoir by Keith McNally | Gallery Books | May 6, 2025

Sweeping from his gritty London childhood to the iconic New York restaurants he founded—Balthazar, Pastis, Morandi, Minetta Tavern, and The Odeon, to name a few—Keith McNally’s memoir tells the story of a life fully lived, often to the amusement of those following along via his legendary Instagram account.

Every generation that lands in New York in search of its creative Shangri-La swears the city was better back in the day. But McNally’s life and restaurants have been fixtures for so long that they’re bound to be part of any conversation about New York’s good-old days for decades to come.

FLESH by David Szalay | Scribner | April 1, 2025

With any luck, we’re leaving the tired and didactic where-are-the-male-novelists discourse behind in 2025—but we’ll happily take this male novelist’s brilliant, Booker-winning novel into the new year. A sweeping coming-of-several-ages story set across the late 20th and early 21st centuries, Flesh follows István, a withdrawn Hungarian teenager whose secret relationship with an older neighbor leads to a violent accident—one that sets him on a meandering path from isolation in Hungary to quiet survival, success, and torment among London’s elite.

It’s hard to think of a recent novel that moves so quickly yet poignantly across such vast temporal, psychological, and cultural territory—but Szalay pulls it off. This is the kind of book you might not run to based on the pitch alone, but once you start turning pages just to see where it’s going, you won’t want the ride to end.

THE CHEESE COURSE

🟥🟦⬜️🟨🟧

DESSERT

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Pragmatic works with a select list of American and international film & television clients, helping them find, acquire, and develop books and other intellectual property—articles, life rights, podcasts, video games, theater…and so much more—for the screen. If you’re interested in working with us and being plugged into a global, curated IP platform, we’d love to hear from you! Send us an email.