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Credit...LM Otero/Associated Press

By Sadie Stein

Dear readers,

We’re in the midst of a cold snap on the East Coast. I’m writing from under a stack of blankets, hot-water bottle at my twice-socked feet, wrapped in sweaters, a scarf and hat. Oh, well: As John Steinbeck wrote in “Travels With Charley,” “What good is the warmth of summer, without the cold of winter to give it sweetness?”

I’m sure there are people who retreat to sunnier literary places in the face of Arctic blasts and snow too icy to shape. But I double down.

—Sadie

“The Wolves of Willoughby Chase,”by Joan Aiken

Fiction, 1962

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“It was dusk — winter dusk. Snow lay white and shining over the pleated hills, and icicles hung from the forest trees. Snow lay piled on the dark road across Willoughby Wold, but from dawn men had been clearing it with brooms and shovels. There were hundreds of them at work, wrapped in sacking because of the bitter cold, and keeping together in groups for fear of the wolves, grown savage and reckless from hunger.”