Sunday Paper PLUS Recommends—Week of July 26, 2026
At The Sunday Paper, we often discover books, podcasts, films, and other works that move the needle and spark inspiring change. This week, we are thrilled to hand the mic again to our Sunday Paper PLUS readers! Our thanks to Mary, Lisa, and Diana for their recommendations. We hope these suggestions open your heart and mind and encourage you to come together for meaningful conversations.
What Lisa Walters is Watching
When a washed-up tennis star gets a prescription for his injured wrist, it’s the thing he least expects and most hates—pickleball. Jake Johnson leads The Dink as Dusty Boyd, a former prodigy trading in his racket for a paddle against his own better judgment. Ed Harris plays his tennis-purist father with the kind of deadpan conviction that makes every anti-pickleball rant land, while Mary Steenburgen steals scenes as the club member who talks Dusty into giving the sport a real shot. Ben Stiller produces and makes a cameo in the film, and you’ll even spot some real-life tennis stars! It’s now streaming on Apple TV, and by the end, you’ll be googling where the nearest court is.
What Mary Runno is Reading
Artie Dam has built a good life: a marriage of three decades, a classroom full of teenagers he genuinely cares about, a sailboat and a bay to escape to on the weekends. But underneath it all, he’s haunted by a question most of us avoid asking: how much do we ever truly know the people we love? When a long-buried secret finally surfaces, Artie is forced to reckon with everything he thought he understood about his life. Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Strout returns with her signature tenderness for flawed, fully human characters in The Things We Never Say, proving once again why readers keep coming back to her fictional worlds. By the final page, Artie feels less like a character and more like someone you’ve known for years.
What Diana Daniele is Listening To
Brooke Warner and Grant Faulkner have been talking writers through the hard parts of memoir since 2018, first as Write-minded and now as Memoir Nation. Their weekly show blends real talk about the writing life with interviews from authors and publishing pros who’ve been in the trenches themselves. Past conversations have included Anne Lamott on writing that readers can’t put down and Lidia Yuknavitch on the art of shapeshifting on the page. Each episode closes with a segment pulled from the hosts’ own Substacks, a small window into the writing lives they’re asking their guests about. It’s part craft class, part pep talk, built for anyone who’s ever wondered if their story is worth the page.
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