Lit Hub’s 38 Favorite Books of 2024
It’s been another hard year, but at least the reading was good. Here are the best (new) books the Literary Hub staff read in 2024.Article continues after advertisementRemove Ads
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Marie-Helene Bertino, BeautylandFSG, January 16
It is a funny side-effect of working in books that I often end up reading new fiction months before the rest of the world. As such, I read Beautyland for the first time nearly eighteen months ago—I begged for an early galley and dove right in when it arrived, because Marie-Helene Bertino is one of my favorite writers. I have not stopped thinking about it since. Every single thing Bertino writes contains a glimmering magic and a spritely playfulness, but Beautyland is something special even by her own high bar. The story is simple enough: a young girl growing up in Philadelphia with her single mother believes that she is an alien, here to report back on what it means to be human. But what could’ve been mawkish or silly in other hands is instead the single most heartwarming thing you’ll read this (or maybe any) year. It is a big hug of a book, a warm blanket, a friend’s laughter across a bar, the way the moon makes icy branches bend in circles, the feeling of sitting down after a long day… I could go on. It is a book that will make you have hope, not just for humanity but for the very personal act of being a human being. If you are struggling right now to see the beauty of this life, Beautyland holds the key. –Drew Broussard, Podcasts Editor
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Percival Everett, James Doubleday, March 19
The second I finished Percival Everett’s James, I said it would win the National Book Award. (I actually wrote this blurb before the NBA ceremony, swear to god). It is the perfect contemporary American novel, a retelling of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the point of view of enslaved Jim. Any retelling would strive to give a more complete voice to Jim, but Everett has given him several—the novel is rife with linguistic dexterity and constant code-switching that’s a marvel to see on the page. And while it’s profoundly clever, this cleverness never gets in the way of what is essentially a tender story about a man’s love for his wife and children in the face of the world’s greatest evil. –Emily Firetog, Deputy Editor
Izumi Suzuki, tr. Helen O’Horan, Set My Heart on FireVerso, November 12
I’ve been recommending this sad and vibrant rock and roll novel to anyone who has spent time around a creative scene. The give and take in a life defined by art is kaleidoscopic, defined by a love for art, and a confusion about the people and systems around it. Izumi Suzuki’s novel is about that passionate tension, and how it bends and breaks: “Me, I decided once that I’d dedicate my life to rock music. But you don’t get much in return for doing that, so I gave it up.”
Set My Heart on Fire follows Izumi, a cool and aloof woman with magnetic charisma, who never seems to get things quite how she wants them. She grows up, sort of, in this engrossing and slim novel of drifting and settling. “Some people are beautiful inside no matter how dirty they act,” Izumi thinks, “Just a sliver of purity is fine.” Rock and roll offers a lot, but takes as much in return — maybe that sliver really is enough. —James Folta, Staff Writer
Colin Barrett, Wild HousesGrove Press, March 12
Barrett’s debut novel is a taut, atmospheric masterpiece: a meditation on small-town life and stuckness and the sudden moments of violence and danger that pierce the whole thing straight through. Barrett’s short stories have taken on similar material, but here, with the breadth of a novel, his writing has a new openness and as much style as ever. The story follows Dev, a young man in a small town in Ireland, leading a rather organized and quiet life, until one night that quiet is shattered by the arrival of a man who’s been badly beaten by a pair of local goons. The violence and the dread soon permeate the town. All that quiet desperation and melancholy becomes tinged with a new danger. Barrett’s prose, controlled but still electric, lights up page after page in this propulsive, emotionally powerful novel. –Dwyer Murphy, CrimeReads Editor-in-ChiefArticle continues after advertisementRemove Ads
Ganz is a regular feature on the left-bro podcast circuit, and this twisty history of American conservatism was as pleasant as any of his appearances on–say–Know Your Enemy. This book traces a strain of black hat conservatism from David Duke through to Pat Buchanan, building out a theory of the right that’s as readable as it is compelling. There’s harrowing stuff in this history, to be sure–yet I found this book made good company during election week. It helped my brain to situate reactionary forces in a lineage.
If you too fell hard out of the coconut tree, I recommend this contextualizing read. And you could also do worse for a holiday present! For contrarian older relatives, especially. –Brittany K. Allen, Staff Writer
Park Seolyeon, tr. Anton Hur, A Magical Girl RetiresHarperVia, April 30
If novellas have zero fans, I’m dead. I loved this fun, campy book about a depressed millennial woman who finds out she might be The Chosen One. It’s sweet and smart and funny and knows exactly what it’s doing. Usually high concept books like this get a little lost in their own sauce, but Seolyeon keeps her focus tight and gets in and out quickly. It’s also a very grounded book in a lot of ways. Even though the world of the book bears more resemblance to Sailor Moon than the real world, the protagonist is mostly struggling with issues that any former-gifted-kid-turned-gay-adult can relate to: what’s her place in the world? Has she let her past self down? Does she have a crush on her high femme best friend? A Magical Girl Retires is as much fun as you’d expect it to be (read: extremely). –McKayla Coyle, Publishing CoordinatorArticle continues after advertisementRemove Ads
Rita Bullwinkel, HeadshotViking, March 12
The most electrifying piece of sports fiction I’ve read in quite some time, Rita Bullwinkel’s brief, exhilarating debut novel takes place over two days—and almost entirely between the ropes—at Bob’s Boxing Palace in Reno, Nevada, where eight teenage fighters are duking it out to see who will take home the (plastic) 12th Annual Daughters of America Cup. Bullwinkel captures the cerebral ferocity of this crucible, elegantly leaping back and forth from one distinct young consciousness to another, and freezing time to transport us years and decades into the future. I devoured this knockout (sorry) of a novel in a weekend, but it left a mark that will take a lot longer to fade. –Dan Sheehan, Book Marks Editor-in-Chief
Miranda July, All Fours Riverhead, May 14
This is the book I’ve been pressing into people’s hands all year. Friends, colleagues, cousins, you name it, I couldn’t rest until everyone I knew got to experience it. My aunt texted to say that she was staying up too late reading it under the covers and laughing, like a little kid. I gladly skipped social engagements to stay home and read it alone on my couch all evening. It’s a rare thing, a special, amazing thing, to be able to have made reading so companionable, so affirming, and so fun. All Fours joins a lineage of blazingly honest depictions of being a woman, as July (or her narrator) attempts to fit herself into the boxes that have been expected of her, and yet finds herself constantly spilling out of said box, pushing wildly against the constraints of the domestic self she thought she had to be. It’s both shocking and deeply exhilarating, to realize that even for July, it is taking time to figure out who she is, what life is. All Fours is daring and vulnerable, interrogating and invigorating, and without a doubt the funniest book I’ve read in a long time. Every sentence is a surprise, startling and hilarious, and manages to be full of both pathos and humor about marriage, sex, friendship, parenthood and the burning core of the self. With it, July has opened up the possibilities of life, and widened the aperture of how to be a woman in the world. –Julia Hass, Book Marks Assistant Editor
Tony Tulathimutte, RejectionWilliam Morrow, September 17
Few things are more fun to read than pessimism done right, and no one does pessimism as brilliantly as Tony Tulathimutte This linked collection about loosely connected—and, of course, extremely online—losers (my favorite: the odd woman out in a group chat who adopts an aggressive corvid) is the best kind of bleak. It’s dark and hilarious and so sharply observed that reading it felt, at times, like handling a spiny sea creature. It is to Tulathimutte’s great credit that reading it made me feel more optimistic about the possibilities of fiction than desolate about the future of humanity. That said, if you’re already tending toward hopelessness, handle with care. –Jessie Gaynor, Senior EditorArticle continues after advertisementRemove Ads
Kelly Link, The Book of LoveRandom House, February 13
Kelly Link speaks to my inner child. This is not to say that her books are childish, only that they are full of open doors. Many of the doors in this novel lead to places I recognize, as someone who grew up with Princess Cimorene (IYKYK): the generic touchstones, the tone of her humor—half eye-roll, half wink—the abundance, the play. The joy! Of course, some of the doors lead to new places, and this is the magic of Kelly Link. There’s no point in explaining the plot, which doesn’t have anything to do with why it’s so good (this is something I could write about every book I love). Suffice it to say that The Book of Love is bursting with doors, with ideas, with relationships, with myth, it’s big and satisfying and escapist (in places) and difficult (in places) and wonderful. –Emily Temple, Managing Editor
Renee Gladman, My Lesbian NovelDorothy, September 17
Okay but why is romance, as a genre, having such a moment? I’ve been asking the question a lot over the last couple years (alongside my own headlong plunge into reading romance) and I was excited—and maybe confused??—to hear that none other than Renee Gladman, one of the coolest and most experimental writers working, was also asking the same question. At first, the idea of a Gladman-penned romance novel seems almost contradictory, some unstable alloy that should explode on contact—but this is no ordinary romance novel, even if it does contain excerpts of one. Instead, it is a conversation between a Paris Review-style unnamed interlocutor and a writer-character named Renee Gladman who is finding comfort in reading romance and who begins working on a lesbian romance novel. What unfolds is a delicious examination of why we write, why we read, what it means to empower the impulses we think we’re supposed to sublimate, and the enduring power of creative conversation. It is a total joy to see a writer openly grappling with so many issues that all of us in the creative fields encounter, and doing so with joyful honesty. Write what you want to read, write it how you want! Read whatever you want and don’t let anybody shame your choices! But also: talk about it. Talk with friends, with strangers, with yourself. You’ll be fascinated what you might uncover. –DB
Jill Ciment, Consent Pantheon, June 11
When Ciment was seventeen, she had an affair with her art teacher, who was a married man in his forties. Ciment eventually married the art teacher, and they remained (mostly) happily married for over four decades until his death at age ninety-three. In Consent, Ciment reexamines their relationship in a way she could only after Arnold’s death. In revisiting passages of her 1993 memoir, Half a Life, Ciment reconsiders how she wrote about the beginnings of their courtship. Who had actually kissed whom first? Who pursued whom? “Was my marriage—the half-century of intimacy, the shifting power, the artistic collaborations, the sex, the shared meals, the friends, the travels, the illnesses, the money worries, the houses, the dogs—fruit from the poisonous tree?” In doing so, Ciment asks larger questions about how we write, and how we read, memoir. “The writer must trick the reader (and herself) into believing that she actually remembers how she felt decades ago. A memoir is closer to historical fiction than it is to biography.” Consent is also a love story and, ultimately, a story about grief. It is a book I have not stopped thinking about. –EF
Dash Shaw, BlurryNew York Review Comics, August 6
Dash Shaw is a modern master of comics, and his latest book Blurry is one of his best. It’s an anthology of sorts, following multiple characters as they struggle with doubt and indecision. Shaw’s art is confidently spare, with strong lines set off with washes, but the writing is what really drew me into this book. We meet characters one by one, and their stories are spare and gently told, building before the narrative is passed to another character. A larger form begins to appear, and Shaw carefully arranges themes and patterns like layers of watercolor. The stories seem to end abruptly, as if in a question, but begin to feel more real as they bleed into one another, both narratively and through tonal echos and rhyme of detail. The form might seem a bit over-prescribed at first, but once you slow your reading to Shaw’s tempo, the book becomes symphonic as it builds to a satisfying crescendo. —JF
Rachel Kushner, Creation LakeScribner, September 3
Kushner’s Creation Lake is a kind of espionage novel and in some respects a thriller, but since this is Rachel Kushenr it’s also a prolonged meditation on alienation and language and the history of humankind. In Creation Lake, a young woman, an American, heads to a rundown manoir in a rural town in France with somewhat vague motives and intentions. We soon learn she’s an operative, hired by a somewhat shadowy cabal and charged with infiltrating a supposedly radical group that may be threatening aquifers and agriculture projects in the region. We take a few detours through Paris and Marseille along the way, but the liveliest action in this book isn’t really action at all, it’s a series of correspondence that lays out an idiosyncratic view of the development of homo sapiens vis-a-vis Neanderthals and other rivals along the way. Kushner has a way of turning every idea around in the light and offering some new perspective to marvel at. Creation Lake is a stirring, startling investigation into the follies of humanity. –DM
I can’t fathom why the dark academia girlies haven’t been going crazy over this book. It’s a lush, sexy, vibey novel about a group of translators working together in a literal primeval forest! It’s a book about a bunch of horny nerds trying to find a missing person! This book is so clever and cool and honestly really funny. If you want a book that will inspire you to redecorate your house and become a park ranger and also learn Polish, Irena Rey is the book for you. I’m a sucker for weird books set in the woods so this novel really knocked it out of the park for me. –MC
Jessica Anthony, The MostLittle Brown, July 30
I have particular affection for short novels, which I think are harder to write than long ones—and this is a great one. A Cheeveresque story of a marriage, told in captivating back-and-forth omniscient narration. Does anything happen in it? Not really, but as is the case with any set of lives, a lot has happened, and Anthony deftly teases out the years and lies between the two stymied spouses. More than anything, the novel creates an indelible mood that lingers long after one gets out of the pool, as it were. –ET
A literary thriller is something that feels as elusive as a mirage: can it truly be well written and also relentlessly plotty? Can it be full of cliffhangers and also demonstrate nuanced character portraits? Liz Moore did the impossible, and for that alone this book shot to the top of my favorites this year. Absorbing and page-turning, The God of the Woods spins a yarn into both the future and the past: it’s an addicting who-dunnit about a young girl, Barbara, who goes missing at camp, while revealing that the exact thing happened fifteen years previously to another missing child, Barbara’s brother. The chilling details of the past are woven through the building narrative, the characters and their complexities as absorbing as the eventual, heart-pounding reveal. Nail-biting and poignant, this is a true success of the genre. –JH
International Dublin Literary Award winner Barry’s first America-set novel is a rip-roaring, linguistically ecstatic (of course), achingly romantic piece of historical fiction set in the Irish-infested mining town of Butte, Montana, in 1891. It’s there that degenerate balladeer and photographer’s assistant Tom Rourke falls head over heels in love with Polly Gillespie, the mail-order bride of a pious mining captain. When the two burn down a boarding house and light out for California, a posse of deranged bounty hunters are sent to bring them to “justice.” Nobody writes a sentence like Kevin Barry, and it’s a pure joy to be swept away on the lusty, lyrical tide of this doomed coupling. –DS
Lucas Mann, AttachmentsUniversity of Iowa Press, May 6
I’ve never been a huge reader of the literature of parenthood, neither the endlessly proscriptive how-to manuals nor the heartrending memoirs (not to disparage either of those genres, but they are truly not for me). However, when one of your favorite living essayists decides to gather his thoughts on fatherhood in a book, you read it.
Lucas Mann’s engrossing essay collection, Attachments, is one of my favorite books of the last few years. As with everything he writes, Mann achieves the perfect balance between brutal honesty, journalistic erudition, and, most importantly, good jokes (none of which are of the dad variety). Perhaps one of the main reasons I love Attachments is that it isn’t really a parenting book at all—if anything, it is most simply a book about being alive, observing the world, and noting how it observes you back. Sure, having a child can often serve to intensify the experience of moving through your one wild and precious life but the dull biological fact of fatherhood is incidental to Mann’s broader project: seeing things as they are, for all their ugliness, absurdity, beauty, and joy. –Jonny Diamond, Editor in Chief
The thing about stories is that they don’t end, not really. Arthur falls to Mordred and his body is taken to Avalon—but that is not the end. What happened to the Round Table, the knights who survived that final campaign? And what does it say about English (or, even more broadly, Western) culture that there still lingers some sense that perhaps Arthur waits yet on the fair isle, to someday return when he is needed most? What does that tell us about ourselves, that we hang onto these stories and still manage to see ourselves inside of them?
Lev Grossman’s ambitious novel does not provide a definitive answer to any of these questions, but neither do other modern interrogations of what was lost when Arthur died like Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant or Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem—and yet, perhaps by virtue of his being an American, Grossman dispenses with fidelity to the Englishness of it all and instead sets out to tell a cracking good story. It is, at its most simple, the story of a young knight who arrives at Camelot to prove himself and join the Round Table, only to find that he’s missed the good stuff. Arthur is dead, and the few knights who remain are washed up, strange, and rudderless. But the story isn’t over and Grossman’s doorstopper absolutely zips by with magic, monsters, swordplay, and a stirringly inclusive reimagining of the Round Table. All the names you’re hoping make an appearance do—but it isn’t fan service. Rather, Grossman is using the joys of these elements to interrogate (as one character ponders) “why, when we are made for a bright world, we must live in a dark one.” At the time of this writing, I confess that this question is more pressing than I would’ve imagined when I read Grossman’s book this spring. If you are pondering it too, perhaps venturing into this epic of knights, monsters, legends, and self-discovery will help keep your candle burning against the dark times to come. –DB
Sarah Manguso, Liars Hogarth, July 23
When Jane meets John, they are young artists waiting to become great. When John leaves Jane, she is a mother, a housekeeper, a wife, and a woman seething with rage. Liars is a brutal unraveling of the story of an uneven marriage, filled with lies that Jane has told herself to keep going, and perhaps lies she tells in the retelling of their relationship’s rise and fall. John, a filmmaker, has dragged Jane, their cat, and their baby, back and forth across the country as he follows his ambitions, whims, and ego. Jane, a writer, has put her career on hold to care of the house, their child, and John. Liars radiates with anger, and the reader can’t help but sympathize with Jane and her plight (and want to reach through the book and strangle John). I read the book on what felt like the hottest days of summer, sweating with anger, absolutely obsessed with Manguso’s perfect book. –EF
Téa Obreht, The MorningsideRandom House, March 19
So much so-called “climate fiction” feels oddly detached from history, as if we’re actually reading about a different reality, rather than a version of our own future. But Obreht never really writes a book without incorporating the magic and baggage of her characters’ own complex histories—or maybe it’s better to say their own myths—both political and personal, and this is part of what makes her latest novel so compelling: the reader is discovering the future and the past at the same time, through the particular lens of a young girl, far from home. Not to mention the joyful world-building, the perfectly calibrated language, and how (at the risk of saying a dirty word about literary fiction) entertaining it is. This is another classic Obrehtian yarn, and it’s a damn good one. –ET
Oğuz Atay, tr. Ralph Hubbell, Waiting for the FearNew York Review Books, October 22
This collection of eight funny, odd, and inventive stories by the famous Turkish writer were originally published in 1975, but are appearing in English for the first time. Oğuz Atay is known for his longer novels, but these stories are fascinating and idiosyncratic: a letter from a cult in an unknown language unravels a man, an advice columnist is pilloried, a woman discovers the body of her ex. Atay’s set-ups are vivid, absurd at times, and his characters often don’t have all the information, or skill, or confidence they might need. In their bumbling and making-do, Atay finds moments of searing reality and observation, most often around his fixation with language and expression. What can we trust when communication is so slippery? —JF
Andrew Boryga, VictimDoubleday, March 12
In Boryga’s Victim, a young man from the Bronx learns to use identity and his community as tools for the advancement of a burgeoning media career, but the lies and distortions soon mount until the weight is unbearable. Boryga’s satire is as cutting as any I’ve come across in contemporary fiction in a long while, and Victim has the distinction of not only being a thoughtful and provocative novel of ideas, but also a compulsively readable one, too. The story of Javi’s life, relayed with style and insight, makes for a worthy modern-day epic, without ever sacrificing the small intimacies of everyday life for a young man growing up in the city and trying to make his way to what he imagines is the top. Boryga is an author on the rise, and Victim is a major announcement of talent. –DM
Rothfeld is one of my favorite critics working right now. She’s always thorough, humane, and curious. This debut essay collection contains a few bangers fans may recognize from her regular book column at The Washington Post, but there’s also enough new writing to warrant a purchase. Every piece sits comfortably under her umbrella thesis—a case for maximalism. Rothfeld isn’t talking about blind consumerism, but an ethical orientation. In sharp, sometimes ecstatic prose, she praises the luxurious sentence, the messy home, and the consuming lust. –BA
Casey McQuiston, The PairingSt Martin’s, August 6
Sometimes it’s August and the only thing that will fix you is a book about being Sexy In Europe. The Pairing is that very book! It follows two exes who end up on the same food and wine tour through Europe. While the things you’d expect to happen do happen, there’s also a lot of very fun (and slutty) twists and turns along the way. I firmly believe that romance is a difficult genre to do well, and this book does it extremely well. It’s swoony and sexy and has so many lovely descriptions of food and the sea… literally what’s more romantic than that. I really loved the time I spent with this book and it definitely made me send a lot of “food tours of Italy” links in the group chat. –MC
Rosalind Brown, PracticeFSG, June 25
In Practice, Rosalind Brown dunks us deeply into the consciousness of an obsessive Shakespeare scholar on a deadline, who putters around her dorm room, warily experiences the other humans in the vicinity, begrudgingly attends to her body, and without quite meaning to, indulges in a series of ever more fascinating fantasies. In a way this is a quiet book—internal, closed, limited to the span of a single day—but if you’ve ever been a literature student in a small room trying to figure out how exactly to become a floating brain instead of this messing, wanting thing (and if you’re reading this, there is a fair chance of it), it will speak very loudly. –ET
This novel inspired some of my favorite book conversations this year. Senna just so brilliantly nails a certain creative class anxiety, and I can think of no other writer who is charting the overlapping fault lines of race, wealth, and color quite the way she is. If you are an ambitious but broke writer of color, this book may also read you for filth. But that read will be (mostly) pleasant. This one’s an unsparing, well-paced, closely observed portrait of one woman’s move to monetize identity and evade appropriation. –BA
Kelan Nee, FellingUniversity of North Texas Press, May 13
I’ve been a fan of Kelan Nee’s for a while now, and his debut book of poetry, Felling, finally arrived this year. Nee has a specific grasp of what it is to work with one’s hands: what it is to write, to hold someone you love, to build a house, to birth a calf. The author sits in the aftermath of his father’s suicide, sits in the long shadow of his father’s addictions and pains, looks at his hands, and wonders what to do next. In dealing with this inheritance of pain, Nee utilizes the gift he’s been given: a deep, pure understanding of language, of love, the ability to turn something dark into something beautiful. Rugged, piercing, and precise, Felling astounds and awes throughout its pages. –JH
CJ Leede, American RaptureTor Nightfire, October 15
Maeve Fly, CJ Leede’s Splatterpunk-winning debut, was a real bolt from the blue: nasty, funny, thrilling, and a read that took me by complete surprise. But if that book set Leede’s marker as a writer to watch, American Rapture establishes that she, as the saying goes, definitely has the range—and the rage. American Rapture is at once a furious howl at American puritanism and religious oppression, a joyful cry of the power of found family and self-honesty, and a thrill-ride through maybe the best American outbreak-story since The Stand. It follows Sophie, a good Catholic teen, as she undergoes a confusing sexual awakening at the same moment as a virus turns most of the American population into slavering lust-zombies. The book is unflinching in its depictions of violence both spiritual and physical (animal lovers should be aware/forewarned: there is one of the best dogs in all of modern fiction in this book, a good and ultimately very brave boy) and I was a sobbing mess for the last fifty pages, which is all to Leede’s credit: the experience of reading this book is that of catharsis by cleansing fire. It is an incredible example of what not just good horror novels but good novels period can do. –DB
Chris Knapp, States of EmergencyUnnamed Press, September 17
In his debut novel, Knapp balances the intensely personal and the global, reminding us there is no difference between the two (until there is). The narrator is an American, who at the beginning of the book is sweltering in 2015 Paris with his French wife, both of them mired in anxiety about her most recent fertility treatment. But like many prospective parents, he is also worrying about the state of the world, a world, both present and past, that Knapp lets into the book in heady streams; this creates an unusual and often quite moving tension between the sections of extreme intimacy—the scenes between the narrator and his wife, and particularly the scenes in the hospital, are so moving as to be difficult to describe—and geopolitical complexities, all of it mediated by the book’s knowledge of itself. It is a thoroughly modern book that feels old, the kind of thing we need more of. –ET
Fady Joudah, […]Milkweed Editions, March 5
“[T]here will be Gaza after the dark times.” This searing, essential new collection by Joudah—the 2024 Jackson Poetry Prize-winning Palestinian American poet and physician—was a finalist for this year’s National Book Award, and deservedly so. […] is both a painfully beautiful, destabilizing evocation of the horrors that have been visited and revisited upon the Palestinian people over generations, and an intimate rendering of a humanity borne out of indestructible hope, out of a dogged refusal to be erased. As Mandana Chaffa wrote of the collection in her Chicago Review of Books review: “It’s indicative of Joudah’s poetic prowess that these poems are as immediate as the destruction still facing Palestinians as I write this, and also have a timeless nature.” Joudah’s exquisite rendering of a consciousness processing the incomprehensible is a sublime work of art, as well as an essential, defiant act of witness. –DS
Dolly Alderton, Good MaterialKnopf, January 30
It’s difficult to write about heartbreak in a way that mimics the experience of being heartbroken—the acute pain is easier to render than the slog of continuing to live, perhaps because writing about a slog doesn’t always make for the zippiest prose. But Dolly Alderton’s latest novel is as zippy as a great rom-com, without any treacle. It tells the story of a recently dumped 35-year-old stand-up comedian, Andy, who is broke, uninspired, and wallowing. Andy’s narration is funny enough to justify his profession (a feat), and generous enough to keep you rooting for him (an even greater feat). Next time you’re lamenting the dismal state of Netflix rom-coms, stop scrolling and pick this one up. –JG
Lisa Ko, Memory PiecePenguin, March 19
Memory Piece belongs to one of my favorite sub-genres: the friends-in-the-city book, which traces a cohort over years spent in tandem and apart. This novel enlivens that old (if perfectly pleasant) formula by pulling in a dystopian element. We follow three friends—Giselle Chin, a performance artist, Jackie Ong, a high-minded developer, and Ellen Ng, an anarchist organizer—from their internet-pilled 90s childhoods in and around the tri-state area to a dark near future, where New York has become a militarized panopticon for the ultra-wealthy. (Can you imagine?) Ambitious, provocative, and unsettling, Memory Piece ultimately hit me as a meditation on belonging. What does it mean to forge solidarity? And if we can build it, how might we maintain it in a hostile world? –BA
There’s something inconceivable about the immensity of nuclear weapons’ destructive power. Despite Annie Jacobsen’s haunting and visceral writing, the true scope is never something I could get my arms all the way around. Reading Jacobsen’s book reminded me of how a college geology professor attempted to render the vast scale of geological time as something understandable: How long does a million years feel? Jacobsen asks us to try to comprehend similar questions: How hot does one hundred and eighty million degrees feel? How intense does a blast of wind at several hundred miles per hour feel? How horrible does an asphalt road melted into liquid feel? There’s only so much our brain and body is capable of really understanding about what these bombs can do.
Jacobsen’s book narrates a fictional nuclear war, describing events in a timeline of events after the moment of initial launch: “Four-Tenths Of A Second After Launch,” “4 Minutes, 30 Seconds After Launch,” etc. She breaks out of the fiction into history and explanation, and this factual detail is impressive and convincing, backed up by dozens of interviews, years of expert research, and newly declassified information. But what has stuck with me is Jacobsen’s rigorously grounded fiction, rendering the decisions, destruction, and fallout in searing and immediate detail. It leads to novelistic moments of speculation: flames as tall as skyscrapers, a blinded Secretary of Defense trying to reach foreign leaders from a Doomsday Plane, the President lying mortally wounded in a lonely forest in Maryland, crumpled on top of an elite commando’s corpse, surrounded by the parachute that failed to land him safely. —JF
One of the best works of literary fiction I’ve read not just this year but in the last several, and it sucks that this didn’t get the critical appreciation or commercial attention it deserved—but so begin the lives of all burgeoning cult-classics. Some Strange Music Draws Me In functions like a memory play, anchored in 2019 when Max returns to his childhood home to clean house after his mother’s death but jumping back to 1984, when Max was named Mel and a brash trans woman came to her small Massachusetts town. Hansbury, also the author of Feral City and Vanishing New York, has a gift for powerful and gentle observation and he puts it to exceptional use here. His depiction of a high school summer is note-perfect, sticky and sweet and thrillingly full of potential—but the true gem in the novel is his careful and complicated consideration of not just transition but the way that the conversation about queerness and gender identity has both radically changed and stayed tragically the same over the last several decades. –DB
Mark Haber, Lesser RuinsCoffee House Press, October 8
If the only serious literary topic is obsession, Mark Haber is our most serious contemporary writer. Luckily for us, he is also one of our funniest. In this novel, an unnamed narrator attempts to write a book-length essay on Montaigne, and instead we are presented with a mire of distractions, switchbacks, and sidebars, the long, recursive sentences swirling around the center, where there is, needless to say, no book-length essay on Montaigne. There is only grief, and the distraction from grief, and life, and the distraction from life, and boredom, and the distraction from boredom, and the lines between these modes are irrelevant. But like I said, it’s really funny. –ET
Jessi Jesewska Stevens, Ghost PainsAnd Other Stories, March 5
Thank goodness for these odd, impeccable shorts. I can’t remember the last time I fell so quickly for a voice. Stevens’ constructions—generally, first person meditations from willfully lost women stumbling around ruined empires—are all a little affected. A little absurd. But there’s a charming, deadpan precision governing riffs like “Weimar Whore” and “Honeymoon.” Reading these stories felt like stumbling upon an eccentric antique store, where the tchotchkes may or may not be haunted and the door may or may not return you to the timeline whence you came. This one’s for people who love Cabaret, dust, Ottessa Moshfegh’s dry wit, and Marlowe Granados’ nostalgic glamour. –BA
