FROM THE MAGAZINE
OCTOBER 2024 Issue

8 Great Books Paired With 8 Chic Bags

Sally Rooney, Tony Tulathimutte, and more of the season’s best fiction, paired with Chanel, Khaite, The Row, and more.
Image may contain Accessories Bag Handbag and Purse
STYLING BY KRIS JENSEN. PHOTOGRAPH BY JOSEPHINE SCHIELE.

All featured products are independently selected by our editors. However, when you buy something through our retail links, Vanity Fair may earn an affiliate commission.

Style and substance abound in this selection of smart bags and great fiction. Befitting the season, some are scary—but all are scary good.

‘Model Home’ by Rivers Solomon paired with Bottega Veneta’s Liberta bag

$28

BOOK

$4,200

BAG

In Rivers Solomon’s haunting drama, Ezri and their sisters return to their parents’ house in the gated Dallas community where they were the only Black family and where an agonizing truth about the past awaits. (MCD)

‘A Reason to See You Again’ by Jami Attenberg paired with The Row’s mini Devon bag

$28

BOOK

$3,900

BAG

From Jami Attenberg, doyen of absorbing family excavations, 37 years in the life of the Cohens: a closeted patriarch, his foundering widow, their daughters, poles apart. (Ecco)

‘Rejection’ by Tony Tulathimutte paired with Khaite’s Cate handbag

$28 $22

BOOK

$4,800

BAG

Obsessively readable, acerbic, Foster Wallace–inflected: In seven linked stories, Tony Tulathimutte’s characters—feminist incel, zealous start-up guy, spurned woman, rejected author—fail to connect. (William Morrow)

‘Intermezzo’ by Sally Rooney paired with Chanel’s vanity case

$29

BOOK

$5,500

BAG

A chess prodigy in his early 20s and his brother, a 30-something lawyer, navigate various relationships (their own thorny one, plus complicated romances) in Sally Rooney’s compelling latest. (FSG) Case available at select CHANEL Boutiques Nationwide. For more information, please call (800) 550-0005.

‘The Mighty Red’ by Louise Erdrich paired with Ferragamo’s Fiamma crossbody bag

$32 $26

BOOK

$2,500

BAG

Louise Erdrich sets her rich saga against the backdrop of the 2008 economic crash in North Dakota, where the teenage daughter of a woman trucker is set to marry a farming heir while wooed by another man. (Harper)

‘In the Distance’ by Hernan Diaz paired with Fendi’s Peekaboo soft handbag

$30

BOOK

$6,100

BAG

Published in paperback by the indie Coffee House Press in 2017, Hernan Diaz’s best in show of an underdog debut—a surreal Western about a Swede’s adventures—appears in hardcover for the first time. (Riverhead)

‘Blood Test’ by Charles Baxter paired with Miu Miu’s Arcadie bag

$38

BOOK

$3,050

BAG

In an Ohio town beset by opioids, an insurance salesman learns that he’s genetically predisposed
to violent crime—and, to hilarious effect, finds himself barreling down a deadly path in Charles Baxter’s tender tale. (Pantheon)

‘The Empusium’ by Olga Tokarczuk paired with Chloé’s Bracelet bag

$30

BOOK

$2,850

BAG

Olga Tokarczuk’s “Health Resort Horror Story” finds a young tuberculosis sufferer seeking treatment in the Silesian mountains, where questions of gender, class, and mysterious murders arise. (Riverhead)

Bags selected by Daisy Shaw-Ellis.

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