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A Year in Reading: 2024
Welcome to the 20th (!) installment of The Millions' annual Year in Reading series, which gathers together some of today's most exciting writers and thinkers to share the books that shaped their year. YIR is not a collection of yearend best-of lists; think of it, perhaps, as an assemblage of annotated bibliographies. We've invited contributors to reflect on the books they read this year—an intentionally vague prompt—and encouraged them to approach the assignment however they choose.
In writing about our reading lives, as YIR contributors are asked to do, we inevitably write about our personal lives, our inner lives. This year, a number of contributors read their way through profound grief and serious illness, through new parenthood and cross-country moves. Some found escape in frothy romances, mooring in works of theology, comfort in ancient epic poetry. More than one turned to the wisdom of Ursula K. Le Guin. Many describe a book finding them just when they needed it.
Interpretations of the assignment were wonderfully varied. One contributor, a music critic, considered the musical analogs to the books she read, while another mapped her reads from this year onto constellations. Most people's reading was guided purely by pleasure, or else a desire to better understand events unfolding in their lives or larger the world. Yet others centered their reading around a certain sense of duty: this year one contributor committed to finishing the six Philip Roth novels he had yet to read, an undertaking that he likens to “eating a six-pack of paper towels.” (Lucky for us, he included in his essay his final ranking of Roth's oeuvre.)
The books that populate these essays range widely, though the most commonly noted title this year was Tony Tulathimutte’s story collection Rejection. The work of newly minted National Book Award winner Percival Everett, particularly his acclaimed novel James, was also widely read and written about. And as the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza enters its second year, many contributors sought out Isabella Hammad’s searing, clear-eyed essay Recognizing the Stranger.
Like so many endeavors in our chronically under-resourced literary community, Year in Reading is a labor of love. The Millions is a one-person editorial operation (with an invaluable assist from SEO maven Dani Fishman), and producing YIR—and witnessing the joy it brings contributors and readers alike—has been the highlight of my tenure as editor. I’m profoundly grateful for the generosity of this year’s contributors, whose names and entries will be revealed below over the next three weeks, concluding on Wednesday, December 18. Be sure to subscribe to The Millions’ free newsletter to get the week’s entries sent straight to your inbox each Friday.
—Sophia Stewart, editor
Becca Rothfeld, author of All Things Are Too Small
Carvell Wallace, author of Another Word for Love
Charlotte Shane, author of An Honest Woman
Brianna Di Monda, writer and editor
Nell Irvin Painter, author of I Just Keep Talking
Carrie Courogen, author of Miss May Does Not Exist
Ayşegül Savaş, author of The Anthropologists
Zachary Issenberg, writer
Tony Tulathimutte, author of Rejection
Ann Powers, author of Traveling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell
Lidia Yuknavitch, author of Reading the Waves
Nicholas Russell, writer and critic
Daniel Saldaña París, author of Planes Flying Over a Monster
Lili Anolik, author of Didion and Babitz
Deborah Ghim, editor
Emily Witt, author of Health and Safety
Nathan Thrall, author of A Day in the Life of Abed Salama
Lena Moses-Schmitt, author of True Mistakes
Jeremy Gordon, author of See Friendship
John Lee Clark, author of Touch the Future
Ellen Wayland-Smith, author of The Science of Last Things
Edwin Frank, publisher and author of Stranger Than Fiction
Sophia Stewart, editor of The Millions
A Year in Reading Archives: 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005
The Great Fall 2024 Book Preview
With the arrival of autumn comes a deluge of great books. Here you'll find a sampling of new and forthcoming titles that caught our eye here at The Millions, and that we think might catch yours, too. Some we’ve already perused in galley form; others we’re eager to devour based on their authors, plots, or subject matters. We hope your next fall read is among them.
—Sophia Stewart, editor
October
Season of the Swamp by Yuri Herrera, tr. Lisa Dillman [F]
What it is: An epic, speculative account of the 18 months that Benito Juárez spent in New Orleans in 1853-54, years before he became the first and only Indigenous president of Mexico.
Who it's for: Fans of speculative history; readers who appreciate the magic that swirls around any novel set in New Orleans. —Claire Kirch
The Black Utopians by Aaron Robertson [NF]
What it is: An exploration of Black Americans' pursuit and visions of utopia—both ideological and physical—that spans the Reconstruction era to the present day and combines history, memoir, and reportage.
Who it's for: Fans of Saidiya Hartman's Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments and Kristen R. Ghodsee's Everyday Utopia. —Sophia M. Stewart
The Third Realm by Karl Ove Knausgaard, tr. Martin Aitken [F]
What it is: The third installment in Knausgaard's Morning Star series, centered on the appearance of a mysterious new star in the skies above Norway.
Who it's for: Real Knausgaard heads only—The Wolves of Eternity and Morning Star are required reading for this one. —SMS
Brown Women Have Everything by Sayantani Dasgupta [NF]
What it is: Essays on the contradictions and complexities of life as an Indian woman in America, probing everything from hair to family to the joys of travel.
Who it's for: Readers of Durga Chew-Bose, Erika L. Sánchez, and Tajja Isen. —SMS
The Plot Against Native America by Bill Vaughn [F]
What it is: The first narrative history of Native American boarding schools— which aimed "civilize" Indigenous children by violently severing them from their culture— and their enduring, horrifying legacy.
Who it's for: Readers of Ned Blackhawk and Kathleen DuVal. —SMS
The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich [F]
What it is: Erdrich's latest novel set in North Dakota's Red River Valley is a tale of the intertwined lives of ordinary people striving to survive and even thrive in their rural community, despite environmental upheavals, the 2008 financial crisis, and other obstacles.
Who it's for: Readers of cli-fi; fans of Linda LeGarde Grover and William Faulkner. —CK
The Position of Spoons by Deborah Levy [NF]
What it is: The second book from Levy in as many years, diverging from a recent streak of surrealist fiction with a collection of essays marked by exceptional observance and style.
Who it's for: Close lookers and the perennially curious. —John H. Maher
The Bog Wife by Kay Chronister [F]
What it's about: The Haddesley family has lived on the same West Virginia bog for centuries, making a supernatural bargain with the land—a generational blood sacrifice—in order to do so—until an uncovered secret changes everything.
Who it's for: Readers of Karen Russell and Jeff VanderMeer; anyone who has ever used the phrase "girl moss." —SMS
The Great When by Alan Moore [F]
What it's about: When an 18-year old book reseller comes across a copy of a book that shouldn’t exist, it threatens to upend not just an already post-war-torn London, but reality as we know it.
Who it's for: Anyone looking for a Sherlock Holmes-style mystery dipped in thaumaturgical psychedelia. —Daniella Fishman
The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates [NF]
What it's about: One of our sharpest critical thinkers on social justice returns to nonfiction, nearly a decade after Between the World and Me, visiting Dakar, to contemplate enslavement and the Middle Passage; Columbia, S.C., as a backdrop for his thoughts on Jim Crow and book bans; and the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where he sees contemporary segregation in the treatment of Palestinians.
Who it’s for: Fans of James Baldwin, George Orwell, and Angela Y. Davis; readers of Nikole Hannah-Jones’s The 1619 Project and Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste, to name just a few engagements with national and racial identity. —Nathalie op de Beeck
Abortion by Jessica Valenti [NF]
What it is: Columnist and memoirist Valenti, who tracks pro-choice advocacy and attacks on the right to choose in her Substack, channels feminist rage into a guide for freedom of choice advocacy.
Who it’s for: Readers of Robin Marty’s The New Handbook for a Post-Roe America, #ShoutYourAbortion proponents, and followers of Jennifer Baumgartner’s [I Had an Abortion] project. —NodB
Gifted by Suzuki Suzumi, tr. Allison Markin Powell [F]
What it's about: A young sex worker in Tokyo's red-light district muses on her life and recounts her abusive mother's final days, in what is Suzuki's first novel to be translated into English.
Who it's for: Readers of Susan Boyt and Mieko Kanai; fans of moody, introspective fiction; anyone with a fraught relationship to their mother. —SMS
Childish Literature by Alejandro Zambra, tr. Megan McDowell [F]
What it is: A wide-ranging collection of stories, essays, and poems that explore childhood, fatherhood, and family.
Who it's for: Fans of dad lit (see: Lucas Mann's Attachments, Keith Gessen's Raising Raffi, Karl Ove Knausgaard's seasons quartet, et al). —SMS
Books Are Made Out of Books ed. Michael Lynn Crews [NF]
What it is: A mining of the archives of the late Cormac McCarthy with a focus on the famously tight-lipped author's literary influences.
Who it's for: Anyone whose commonplace book contains the words "arquebus," "cordillera," or "vinegaroon." —JHM
Slaveroad by John Edgar Wideman [F]
What it is: A blend of memoir, fiction, and history that charts the "slaveroad" that runs through American history, spanning the Atlantic slave trade to the criminal justice system, from the celebrated author of Brothers and Keepers.
Who it's for: Fans of Clint Smith and Ta-Nehisi Coates. —SMS
Linguaphile by Julie Sedivy [NF]
What it's about: Linguist Sedivy reflects on a life spent loving language—its beauty, its mystery, and the essential role it plays in human existence.
Who it's for: Amateur (or professional) linguists; fans of the podcast A Way with Words (me). —SMS
An Image of My Name Enters America by Lucy Ives [NF]
What it is: A collection of interrelated essays that connect moments from Ives's life to larger questions of history, identity, and national fantasy,
Who it's for: Fans of Ives, one of our weirdest and most wondrous living writers—duh; anyone with a passing interest in My Little Pony, Cold War–era musicals, or The Three Body Problem, all of which are mined here for great effect. —SMS
Women's Hotel by Daniel Lavery [F]
What it is: A novel set in 1960s New York City, about the adventures of the residents of a hotel providing housing for young women that is very much evocative of the real-life legendary Barbizon Hotel.
Who it's for: Readers of Mary McCarthy's The Group and Rona Jaffe's The Best of Everything. —CK
The World in Books by Kenneth C. Davis [NF]
What it is: A guide to 52 of the most influential works of nonfiction ever published, spanning works from Plato to Ida B. Wells, bell hooks to Barbara Ehrenreich, and Sun Tzu to Joan Didion.
Who it's for: Lovers of nonfiction looking to cover their canonical bases. —SMS
Blue Light Hours by Bruna Dantas Lobato [F]
What it's about: Through the emanating blue-glow of their computer screens, a mother and daughter, four-thousand miles apart, find solace and loneliness in their nightly Skype chats in this heartstring-pulling debut.
Who it's for: Someone who needs to be reminded to CALL YOUR MOTHER! —DF
Riding Like the Wind by Iris Jamahl Dunkle [NF]
What it is: The biography of Sanora Babb, a contemporary of John Steinbeck's whose field notes and interviews with Dust Bowl migrants Steinbeck relied upon to write The Grapes of Wrath.
Who it's for: Steinbeck fans and haters alike; readers of Kristin Hannah's The Four Winds and the New York Times Overlooked column; anyone interested in learning more about the Dust Bowl migrants who fled to California hoping for a better life. —CK
Innie Shadows by Olivia M. Coetzee [F]
What it is: a work of crime fiction set on the outskirts of Cape Town, where a community marred by violence seeks justice and connection; also the first novel to be translated from Kaaps, a dialect of Afrikaans that was until recently only a spoken language.
Who it's for: fans of sprawling, socioeconomically-attuned crime dramas a la The Wire. —SMS
Dorothy Parker in Hollywood by Gail Crowther [NF]
What it is: A history of the famous wit—and famous New Yorker—in her L.A. era, post–Algonquin Round Table and mid–Red Scare.
Who it's for: Owners of a stack of hopelessly dog-eared Joan Didion paperbacks. —JHM
The Myth of American Idealism by Noam Chomsky and Nathan J. Robinson [NF]
What it is: A potent critique of the ideology behind America's foreign interventions and its status as a global power, and an treatise on how the nation's hubristic pursuit of "spreading democracy" threatens not only the delicate balance of global peace, but the already-declining health of our planet.
Who it's for: Chomskyites; policy wonks and casual critics of American recklessness alike. —DF
Mysticism by Simon Critchley [NF]
What it is: A study of mysticism—defined as an experience, rather than religious practice—by the great British philosopher Critchley, who mines music, poetry, and literature along the way.
Who it's for: Readers of John Gray, Jorge Luis Borges, and Simone Weil. —SMS
Q&A by Adrian Tomine [NF]
What it is: The Japanese American creator of the Optic Nerve comic book series for D&Q, and of many a New Yorker cover, shares his personal history and his creative process in this illustrated unburdening.
Who it’s for: Readers of Tomine’s melancholic, sometimes cringey, and occasionally brutal collections of comics short stories including Summer Blonde, Shortcomings, and Killing and Dying. —NodB
Sonny Boy by Al Pacino [NF]
What it is: Al Pacino's memoir—end of description.
Who it's for: Cinephiles; anyone curious how he's gonna spin fumbling Diane Keaton. —SMS
Seeing Baya by Alice Kaplan [NF]
What it is: The first biography of the enigmatic and largely-forgotten Algerian artist Baya Mahieddine, who first enchanted midcentury Paris as a teenager.
Who it's for: Admirers of Leonora Carrington, Hilma af Klint, Frida Kahlo, and other belatedly-celebrated women painters. —SMS
Absolution by Jeff VanderMeer [F]
What it is: A surprise return to the Area X, the stretch of unforbidding and uncanny coastline in the hit Southern Reach trilogy.
Who it's for: Anyone who's heard this song and got the reference without Googling it. —JHM
The Four Horsemen by Nick Curtola [NF]
What it is: The much-anticipated cookbook from the team behind Brooklyn's hottest restaurant (which also happens to be co-owned by James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem).
Who it's for: Oenophiles; thirty-somethings who live in north Williamsburg (derogatory). —SMS
Seeing Further by Esther Kinsky, tr. Caroline Schmidt [F]
What it's about: An unnamed German woman embarks on the colossal task of reviving a cinema in a small Hungarian village.
Who it's for: Fans of Jenny Erpenbeck; anyone charmed by Cinema Paradiso (not derogatory!). —SMS
Ripcord by Nate Lippens [NF]
What it's about: A novel of class, sex, friendship, and queer intimacy, written in delicious prose and narrated by a gay man adrift in Milwaukee.
Who it's for: Fans of Brontez Purnell, Garth Greenwell, Alexander Chee, and Wayne Koestenbaum. —SMS
The Use of Photography by Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie, tr. Alison L. Strayer [NF]
What it's about: Ernaux's love affair with Marie, a journalist, while she was undergoing treatment for cancer, and their joint project to document their romance.
Who it's for: The Ernaux hive, obviously; readers of Sontag's On Photography and Janet Malcolm's Still Pictures. —SMS
Nora Ephron at the Movies by Ilana Kaplan [NF]
What it is: Kaplan revisits Nora Ephron's cinematic watersheds—Silkwood, Heartburn, When Harry Met Sally, You've Got Mail, and Sleepless in Seattle—in this illustrated book. Have these iconic stories, and Ephron’s humor, weathered more than 40 years?
Who it’s for: Film history buffs who don’t mind a heteronormative HEA; listeners of the Hot and Bothered podcast; your coastal grandma. —NodB
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The Philosophy of Translation by Damion Searls [NF]
What it is: A meditation on the act and art of translation by one of today's most acclaimed practitioners, best known for his translations of Fosse, Proust, et al.
Who it's for: Regular readers of Words Without Borders and Asymptote; professional and amateur literary translators alike. —SMS
Salvage by Dionne Brand
What it is: A penetrating reevaluation of the British literary canon and the tropes once shaped Brand's reading life and sense of self—and Brand’s first major work of nonfiction since her landmark A Map to the Door of No Return.
Who it's for: Readers of Christina Sharpe's Ordinary Notes and Elizabeth Hardwick's Seduction and Betrayal. —SMS
Masquerade by Mike Fu [F]
What it's about: Housesitting for an artist friend in present-day New York, Meadow Liu stumbles on a novel whose author shares his name—the first of many strange, haunting happenings that lead up to the mysterious disappearance of Meadow's friend.
Who it's for: fans of Ed Park and Alexander Chee. —SMS
November
The Beggar Student by Osamu Dazai, tr. Sam Bett [F]
What it is: A novella in the moody vein of Dazai’s acclaimed No Longer Human, following the 30-something “fictional” Dazai into another misadventure spawned from a hubristic spat with a high schooler.
Who it's for: Longtime readers of Dazai, or new fans who discovered the midcentury Japanese novelist via TikTok and the Bungo Stray Dogs anime. —DF
In Thrall by Jane DeLynn [F]
What it is: A landmark lesbian bildungsroman about 16-year-old Lynn's love affair with her English teacher, originally published in 1982.
Who it's for: Fans of Joanna Russ's On Strike Against God and Edmund White's A Boy's Own Story —SMS
Washita Love Child by Douglas Kent Miller [NF]
What it is: The story of Jesse Ed Davis, the Indigenous musician who became on of the most sought after guitarists of the late '60s and '70s, playing alongside B.B. King, Bob Dylan, John Lennon, and more.
Who it's for: readers of music history and/or Indigenous history; fans of Joy Harjo, who wrote the foreword. —SMS
Set My Heart on Fire by Izumi Suzuki, tr. Helen O'Horan [F]
What it is: Gritty, sexy, and wholly rock ’n’ roll, Suzuki’s first novel translated into English (following her story collection, Hit Parade of Tears) follows 20-year-old Izumi navigating life, love, and music in the underground scene in '70s Japan.
Who it's for: Fans of Meiko Kawakami, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Marlowe Granados's Happy Hour. —DF
Didion & Babitz by Lili Anolik [NF]
What it is: A dual portrait of Joan Didion and Eve Babitz, who are so often compared to—and pitted against—each other on the basis of their mutual Los Angeles milieu.
Who it's for: Fans or haters of either writer (the book is fairly pro-Babitz, often at Didion's expense); anyone who has the Lit Hub Didion tote bag. —SMS
The Endless Refrain by David Rowell [NF]
What it's about: How the rise of music streaming, demonitizing of artist revenue, and industry tendency toward nostalgia have laid waste to the musical landscape, and the future of music culture.
Who it's for: Fans of Kyle Chayka, Spence Kornhaber, and Lindsay Zoladz. —SMS
Every Arc Bends Its Radian by Sergio De La Pava [F]
What it is: A mind- and genre-bending detective story set in Cali, Colombia, that blends high-stakes suspense with rigorous philosophy.
Who it's for: Readers of Raymond Chandler, Thomas Pynchon, and Jules Verne. —SMS
Something Close to Nothing by Tom Pyun [F]
What it’s about: At the airport with his white husband Jared, awaiting a flight to Cambodia to meet the surrogate mother carrying their adoptive child-to-be, Korean American Wynn decides parenthood isn't for him, and bad behavior ensues.
Who it’s for: Pyun’s debut is calculated to cut through saccharine depictions of queer parenthood—could pair well with Torrey Peters’s Detransition, Baby. —NodB
Rosenfeld by Maya Kessler [F]
What it is: Kessler's debut—rated R for Rosenfeld—follows one Noa Simmons through the tumultuous and ultimately profound power play that is courting (and having a lot of sex with) the titular older man who soon becomes her boss.
Who it's for: Fans of Sex and the City, Raven Leilani’s Luster, and Coco Mellor’s Cleopatra and Frankenstein. —DF
Lazarus Man by Richard Price [F]
What it is: The former The Wire writer offers yet another astute chronicle of urban life, this time of an ever-changing Harlem.
Who it's for: Fans of Colson Whitehead's Crook Manifesto and Paul Murray's The Bee Sting—and, of course, The Wire. —SMS
Stranger Than Fiction by Edwin Frank [NF]
What it is: An astute curveball of a read on the development and many manifestations of the novel throughout the tumultuous 20th century.
Who it's for: Readers who look at a book's colophon before its title. —JHM
Letters to His Neighbor by Marcel Proust, tr. Lydia Davis
What it is: A collection of Proust’s tormented—and frequently hilarious—letters to his noisy neighbor which, in a diligent translation from Davis, stand the test of time.
Who it's for: Proust lovers; people who live below heavy-steppers. —DF
Context Collapse by Ryan Ruby [NF]
What it is: A self-proclaimed "poem containing a history of poetry," from ancient Greece to the Iowa Workshop, from your favorite literary critic's favorite literary critic.
Who it's for: Anyone who read and admired Ruby's titanic 2022 essay on The Waste Land; lovers of poetry looking for a challenge. —SMS
How Sondheim Can Change Your Life by Richard Schoch [NF]
What it's about: Drama professor Schoch's tribute to Stephen Sondheim and the life lessons to be gleaned from his music.
Who it's for: Sondheim heads, former theater kids, end of list. —SMS
The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer [NF]
What it is: 2022 MacArthur fellow and botanist Kimmerer, an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, (re)introduces audiences to a flowering, fruiting native plant beloved of foragers and gardeners.
Who it’s for: The restoration ecologist in your life, along with anyone who loved Braiding Sweetgrass and needs a nature-themed holiday gift. —NodB
My Heart Belongs in an Empty Big Mac Container Buried Beneath the Ocean Floor by Homeless [F]
What it is: A pseudonymous, tenderly comic novel of blue whales and Golden Arches, mental illness and recovery.
Who it's for: Anyone who finds Thomas Pynchon a bit too staid. —JHM
Yoke and Feather by Jessie van Eerden [NF]
What it's about: Van Eerden's braided essays explore the "everyday sacred" to tease out connections between ancient myth and contemporary life.
Who it's for: Readers of Courtney Zoffness's Spilt Milk and Jeanna Kadlec's Heretic. —SMS
Camp Jeff by Tova Reich [F]
What it's about: A "reeducation" center for sex pests in the Catskills, founded by one Jeffery Epstein (no, not that one), where the dual phenomena of #MeToo and therapyspeak collide.
Who it's for: Fans of Philip Roth and Nathan Englander; cancel culture skeptics. —SMS
Selected Amazon Reviews by Kevin Killian [NF]
What it is: A collection of 16 years of Killian’s funniest, wittiest, and most poetic Amazon reviews, the sheer number of which helped him earn the rarefied “Top 100” and “Hall of Fame” status on the site.
Who it's for: Fans of Wayne Koestenbaum and Dodie Bellamy, who wrote introduction and afterword, respectively; people who actually leave Amazon reviews. —DF
Cher by Cher [NF]
What it is: The first in a two-volume memoir, telling the story of Cher's early life and ascendent career as only she can tell it.
Who it's for: Anyone looking to fill the My Name Is Barbra–sized hole in their heart, or looking for something to tide them over until the Liza memoir drops. —SMS
The City and Its Uncertain Walls by Haruki Murakami, tr. Philip Gabriel [F]
What it is: Murakami’s first novel in over six years returns to the high-walled city from his 1985 story "Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World" with one man's search for his lost love—and, simultaneously, an ode to libraries and literature itself.
Who it's for: Murakami fans who have long awaited his return to fiction. —DF
American Bulk by Emily Mester [NF]
What it's about: Reflecting on what it means to "live life to the fullest," Mester explores the cultural and personal impacts of America’s culture of overconsumption, from Costco hauls to hoarding to diet culture—oh my!
Who it's for: Lovers of sustainability; haters of excess; skeptics of the title essay of Becca Rothfeld's All Things Are Too Small. —DF
The Icon and the Idealist by Stephanie Gorton [NF]
What it is: A compelling look at the rivalry between Margaret Sanger, of Planned Parenthood fame, and Mary Ware Dennett, who each held radically different visions for the future of birth control.
Who it's for: Readers of Amy Sohn's The Man Who Hated Women and Katherine Turk's The Women of NOW; anyone interested in the history of reproductive rights. —SMS
December
Rental House by Weike Wang [F]
What it's about: Married college sweethearts invite their drastically different families on a Cape Code vacation, raising questions about marriage, intimacy, and kinship.
Who it's for: Fans of Wang's trademark wit and sly humor (see: Joan Is Okay and Chemistry); anyone with an in-law problem.
Woo Woo by Ella Baxter [F]
What it's about: A neurotic conceptual artist loses her shit in the months leading up to an exhibition that she hopes will be her big breakout, poking fun at the tropes of the "art monster" and the "woman of the verge" in one fell, stylish swoop.
Who it's for: Readers of Sheena Patel's I'm a Fan and Chris Kraus's I Love Dick; any woman who is grateful to but now also sort of begrudges Jenny Offil for introducing "art monster" into the lexicon (me). —SMS
Berlin Atomized by Julia Kornberg, tr. Jack Rockwell and Julia Kornberg [F]
What it's about: Spanning 2001 to 2034, three Jewish and downwardly mobile siblings come of age in various corners of the world against the backdrop of global crisis.
Who it's for: Fans of Catherine Lacey's Biography of X and Joshua Cohen's The Netanyahus. —SMS
Sand-Catcher by Omar Khalifah, tr. Barbara Romaine [F]
What it is: A suspenseful, dark satire of memory and nation, in which four young Palestinian journalists at a Jordanian newspaper are assigned to interview an elderly witness to the Nakba, the violent 1948 expulsion of native Palestinians from Israel—but to their surprise, the survivor doesn’t want to rehash his trauma for the media.
Who it’s for: Anyone looking insight—tinged with grim humor—into the years leading up to the present political crisis in the Middle East and the decades-long goal of Palestinian autonomy. —NodB
The Shutouts by Gabrielle Korn [F]
What it's about: In the dystopian future, mysteriously connected women fight to survive on the margins of society amid worsening climate collapse.
Who it's for: Fans of Korn's Yours for the Taking, which takes place in the same universe; readers of Becky Chambers and queer-inflected sci-fi. —SMS
What in Me Is Dark by Orlando Reade [NF]
What it's about: The enduring, evolving influence of Milton's Paradise Lost on political history—and particularly on the work of 12 revolutionary readers, including Malcom X and Hannah Arendt.
Who it's for: English majors and fans of Ryan Ruby and Sarah Bakewell—but I repeat myself. —SMS
The Afterlife Is Letting Go by Brandon Shimoda [NF]
What it's about: Shimoda researches the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during WWII, and speaks with descendants of those imprisoned, for this essay collection about the “afterlife” of cruelty and xenophobia in the U.S.
Who it’s for: Anyone to ever visit a monument, museum, or designated site of hallowed ground where traumatic events have taken place. —NodB
No Place to Bury the Dead by Karina Sainz Borgo, tr. Elizabeth Bryer [F]
What it's about: When Angustias Romero loses both her children while fleeing a mysterious disease in her unnamed Latin American country, she finds herself in a surreal, purgatorial borderland where she's soon caught in a power struggle.
Who it's for: Fans of Maríana Enriquez and Mohsin Hamid. —SMS
The Rest Is Silence by Augusto Monterroso, tr. Aaron Kerner [F]
What it is: The author of some of the shortest, and tightest, stories in Latin American literature goes long with a metafictional skewering of literary criticism in his only novel.
Who it's for: Anyone who prefers the term "palm-of-the-hand stories" to "flash fiction." —JHM
Tali Girls by Siamak Herawi, tr. Sara Khalili [F]
What it is: An intimate, harrowing, and vital look at the lives of girls and women in an Afghan mountain village under Taliban rule, based on true stories.
Who it's for: Readers of Nadia Hashimi, Akwaeke Emezi, and Maria Stepanova. —SMS
Sun City by Tove Jansson, tr. Thomas Teal [F]
What it's about: During her travels through the U.S. in the 1970s, Jansson became interested in the retirement home as a peculiarly American institution—here, she imagines the tightly knit community within one of them.
Who it's for: Fans of Jansson's other fiction for adults, much of which explores the lives of elderly folks; anyone who watched that documentary about The Villages in Florida. —SMS
Editor's note: We're always looking to make our seasonal book previews more useful to the readers, writers, and critics they're meant to serve. Got an idea for how we can improve our coverage? Tell me about it at sophia@themillions.com.
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A Little in Love with Everyone: On Alison Bechdel
This is an excerpt from A Little in Love with Everyone: Alison Bechdel's Fun Home by Genevieve Hudson, part of the ...AFTERWORDS series from Fiction Advocate.
1.
Before Alison Bechdel became an award-winning cartoonist, she was a tomboyish girl in a small Pennsylvania town with parents who had once hoped to be artists but had settled instead for jobs as high school English teachers. Her father also worked a part-time undertaker, running the family funeral business. Bechdel’s bestselling graphic memoir Fun Home (think funeral home, think carnival) is described as a “family tragicomic” on the front cover, but there is more tragedy than comedy at play. The memoir is an excavation of Bechdel’s childhood and adolescence as she comes out as a lesbian only to be told that her father is secretly gay. Just months after Bechdel reveals her orientation to her family, her father Bruce commits suicide—or rather, he is hit by a Sunbeam Bread truck in an incident that Bechdel believes he architected. Fun Home tells the tale of two different kinds of queer lives—the liberated, lesbian daughter and the closeted, bisexual father—as they orbit each other in the same domestic universe and become confronted with the secret they share. She is coming out; he is made to face, by his daughter’s coming out, an identity he’s kept sealed off from the world.
One of the things that draws me to Fun Home is its obsession with secrets. It is about the secrets we tell and the secrets we keep. From the outside, the Bechdels might have seemed regular enough—maybe a tad gothic, given their gig as funeral home directors— but Fun Home shows us that nothing in their family was as it seemed. Bruce’s violent outbursts, his dalliances with male high school students, and his bisexuality are hidden beneath a performance of domesticity that he acts out with theatrical precision until the day he dies.
In the first chapter, aptly titled “Old Father, Old Artificer,” Bechdel uses descriptions of the family’s restored Gothic Revival house and its flamboyant, Victorian decor as a metaphor for her father’s love of illusion. Bruce spent years toiling over the family home, using the renovations as a kind of artistic expression: getting the drapes just right, installing porch supports, ensuring every inch appeared just the way he wanted. She tells us renovations were his “passion,” “in every sense of the word.” He was a stickler for presentation. Panels portray him shirtless, perched on a ladder, securing gables to the house’s exterior or about to affix reams of floral wallpaper to Bechdel’s room. It was the staging, the veneer of flawlessness, that Bruce pursued. He was an “alchemist of appearance,” more consumed with how things seemed than how things might actually be. The Bechdel family home was literally a house of mirrors. In one panel, Bechdel draws an elderly woman, who is lost upstairs, touching a mirror placed against a wall that projects a false image of an ascending staircase: “Gracious,” says the woman. “I almost walked right into this.”
At her father’s funeral, Bechdel wonders: “What would happen if we spoke the truth?” This question rings out across the pages of the memoir. The truth, according to Bechdel, is not just that her father committed suicide but that his death is somehow connected to his hidden bisexuality. Or perhaps, even more tragically, his death is somehow connected to her coming out as a lesbian. As a memoirist, Bechdel’s job is to tell the truth about herself, and her father’s suicide and sexuality are intrinsically bound up in her own story. To read Fun Home is to see Bechdel wrestle with the question of the truth—how well her father hid his, and what it means for her tell to tell her own.
At her father’s funeral, Bechdel imagines herself yelling at a man who tries to comfort her by telling her that God works in “mysterious ways.” She daydreams that she shouts: “There’s no mystery! He killed himself because he was a manic depressive, closeted fag and he couldn’t face living in this small-minded small town one second more.” But this response is just a fantasy. Bechdel doesn’t actually have it in her to say that—yet. It will take years before she tells her father’s story, before she can reveal who he really was and who she became in light of him. The bond between her father’s death and her life, his lie and her truth, is a tenuous one, but Bechdel is eager to tighten the knot that holds them together.
Through Fun Home, Bechdel becomes the architect of these overlapping stories. She draws back the curtain on her father’s secrets. As I read the book, I was struck by the way her illustrations, with their graphic cues and visual descriptions, deepen her storytelling powers. She controls her father’s expressions, his gestures, his speech. She chooses, panel by panel, how to literally frame their lives.
2.
When the reader first meets Bechdel’s character in Fun Home, she is indistinguishable from a boy. We see her young, maybe six or seven. Her hair is cropped short, mussed and tussled. This is her default mode. When she’s not being put in dresses by her parents, the young Bechdel chooses slacks and striped shirts for her lanky frame. She is already in awe of boyish aesthetics, and as she gets older she becomes taken with men’s fashion magazines.
Bruce expects his daughter to act like a conventional girl. She is failing. He tries to get her to dress in frilly outfits and embrace a femininity that she doesn’t have and doesn’t want. Fun Home shows Bruce wondering after her absent barrettes and then exploding in anger as he tries to wrestle one back into his daughter’s scraggly hair. When she refuses to wear his pearls, Bruce asks her, cruelly, if she is afraid to be beautiful. Bechdel retrospectively muses at the irony: that while she was “attempting to compensate for something unmanly in him,” he was trying “to express something feminine” about himself through her. Bechdel wanted “muscles and tweed” just as Bruce wanted “velvet and pearls.”
Bechdel shows us the many ways that she and her father are reversal of each other. She is, as Bechdel says, “Spartan to my father’s Athenian. Modern to his Victorian. Butch to his Nelly. Utilitarian to his Aesthete.” But they have one critical thing in common: their “shared reference for masculine beauty.”
In an article about mourning and melancholia in Fun Home, the scholar Rachel Dean-Ruzicka points to a scene where Bruce and Bechdel are clearly gripped by the same projection of masculinity. Young Bechdel is kicking back, admiring a magazine spread where a male model is shown lying on his side. Bechdel is struck by the picture and calls her father over to look. She tells him he should get a vest like the one the man is wearing.
“Nice,” he says. “I should.”
The same masculinity, the same “object,” compels both Bechdel and Bruce, but it compels them in vastly different ways. Bechdel desires the smart vest that makes the man look so suave; her father desires the man himself with his hard abs that the vest is opened to reveal.
3.
Bechdel comes out to her parents in a letter she writes while attending Oberlin College. Although she has not acted on her lesbian hypothesis, Bechdel is convinced she is queer and feels compelled to share this with her parents. She licks the seal on the envelope, deposits it in the mail, and returns to her treasure trove of lesbian literature to read and wait for their response. Soon she receives a charged letter from her mother, who is anything but pleased.
“Your father has had affairs with other men,” her mother tells Bechdel later on the phone. This is the first time Bechdel has heard anything about her father’s bisexuality. In this series of panels, Bechdel’s character is first shown sitting on the floor with the phone pressed to her ear. Her eyes are wide with shock. She moves into what looks like a fetal position. In the corner of one panel, Bechdel has drawn the book Sappho Was a Right-On Woman, filling in the small queer details that had begun to infuse her life. Her mother’s disclosure sheds some light on why it might have been difficult, perhaps even painful, for her to hear that her daughter was a lesbian. Her mother’s relationship with Bruce, the other queer person in her life, had been associated with secrets, lies, and even cruelty. It was not a good precedent for what a queer life could be. When Bechdel asks her mother why her father isn’t the one telling her this stunning information, her mother responds: “Your father tell the truth? Please!”
And with that, the spotlight turns from Bechdel and angles back to her parents. Bechdel is trying to tell her family her own story, her own truth, but suddenly she becomes a “footnote in her parent’s failed marriage.” Her father’s lie overshadows her truth, while simultaneously linking her coming out and his dark secret together. Bechdel does not have much time to process the new information—months after this phone conversation, her father dies. Bechdel is tragically freed from his expectations about what a queer life should look like.
“And in a way, you could say that my father’s end was my beginning,” writes Bechdel. “Or more precisely that the end of his lie coincided with the beginning of my truth.”
4.
As she contrasts her burgeoning lesbian life to that of her closeted father, Bechdel is aware of the different historical contexts that shaped their respective realities. She wonders what it would have been like if she had come of age in another time. After her post-college move to New York, Bechdel writes that she “became fascinated with lesbian pulp fiction from the fifties—the bar raids and illegal cross dressing.” On the subway she reads a book written about dykes in the ’50s and how they could be subjected to body searches by the police to confirm that they were wearing at least three articles of women’s clothing.
In another scene, Bechdel draws her parents, younger, childless, during a stint in New York in the ’50s, and imagines her father glimpses a butch lesbian on the street as he holds open a door for his wife. The woman she imagines her father seeing is dressed as a man: short combed-back hair, tailored button down, slacks, lit cigarette. Her father is peering into his sister life, the life he could have chosen, but didn’t. Bechdel writes: “would I have had the guts to be one of those Eisenhower-era butches?.” The undertone is clear: though she isn’t sure if she would have had the courage to live an openly gay life at that time, she knows her father didn’t.
There was a world of difference between being out in the 1980s and being out in the 1950s. Stonewall, in 1969, was a tipping point. It signaled the beginning of a consolidated, organized, and visible political movement for gay rights in America. Bechdel and her father were born on opposite sides of this landmark event. Bruce was born in 1936, when having a consensual sexual relationship with someone of the same sex was illegal. In fact, many states considered it a felony. Medical professionals viewed homosexuality as an illness. Gay people could be subjected to “treatments” that included lobotomies, shock therapy, and sometimes even castration. If you were queer, you were deemed sick by the society you lived in. In order to avoid these consequences, people with queer inclinations protected themselves in a variety of ways. Bruce, like many other queer men and women of his generation, chose to repress–or hide—his identity. He kept his desire a secret.
After his daughter came out, Bruce wrote her a letter that gave her a glimpse into his life as a questioning, queer boy in rural America before Stonewall. Or at least the closest thing to a glimpse he was capable of giving.
Taking sides is heroic, and I am not a hero. What is really worth it? ... There’ve been a few times I think I might have preferred to take a stand. But I never really considered it when I was young…Let’s face it things do look different then. At forty-three I find it hard to see advantages even if I had done so when I was young ... I’ll admit that I have been somewhat envious of the “new” freedom (?) that appears on campuses today. In the fifties, it was not even considered an option.
According to Bruce, being out during his adolescence required a heroism he did not have. It would have taken courage to live an openly gay life in spite of the legal and physical threats that were common to queer people during that time. There was virtually no literature or music or film that articulated the queer experience or served as a form of representation, which must have felt even more isolating. In his letter, Bruce acknowledged the difference in the time periods by admitting he was “envious” of the “new freedom” on college campuses. But he was unwilling, or unable, to use the label gay or bisexual to talk about his desire. He didn’t even explain what it was that he is envious of.
Bechdel was born in 1960. By the time she came out, in college in the early ’80s, gay rights protests had spread throughout the country. She entered into an established lesbian subculture at Oberlin College and in New York City. There was a vibrant, yet still underground, lesbian feminist revolution taking place on the margins of America. While lesbianism was being celebrated on the fringe in communities of like-minded people, queer people were still reviled, ridiculed, and ostracized by the greater society. But in those edges, things were happening.
When she portrays her new lesbian life in Fun Home, she allows this subculture to animate the background. In the bedroom of her first lover, she draws lesbian relics of the time: a “lesbian terrorist” t-shirt is pinned to the wall next to a “keep your God off my body” sign.
“The notion that my sordid personal life had some sort of larger import was strange but seductive,” Bechdel writes above a panel where her character is at a party, sipping something from a cup, overhearing one girl say to another: “Feminism is the theory. Lesbianism is the practice.” There was the feeling of something underway. JEB’s photography book of lesbian portraits had recently been published. There were queer writers to read and Michigan Womyn’s Festivals to attend. It was the time of the original The Future Is Female Shirt, lesbian separatism, women’s rights. The personal had become political. Queer people had begun documenting their stories and building up a library of their experiences, because it seemed important to create images of people like them. Gay and lesbian people were refusing to stay hidden, asserting themselves into the cultural consciousness. In 1983, only a few years after she came out, Bechdel began drawing her “Dykes to Watch Out For” comic strip, which documented the daily lives of lesbians and ran for 25 years. Perhaps this visibility and solidarity are what Bruce spoke to when he said he was envious.
But when Bechdel daydreams about what kind of life her father would have lived if he had decided to come out in his youth, another theme from the ’80s emerges—the AIDS epidemic. In a contemplative scene, when Bechdel is fresh out of college and living in the city, she unlocks her bike next to a poster for an AIDS fundraiser. She rides out to the New York Harbor, which was, as a newspaper article she includes in one panel suggests, ground zero of the world AIDS epidemic. As she stares out into the water, Bechdel considers, almost wistfully, how some lives are considered expendable. If her father had chosen to live as an open gay man, would she have lost him anyway? In her imaginings, either her father’s body is destroyed by the virus, or she ceases to exist in the first place. After all, if Bruce had come out in his youth, Bechdel might never have been born.
5.
“I do feel like in many ways, my life, my professional career has been a reaction to my father's life—his life of secrecy,” Bechdel tells Terry Gross during an interview on Fresh Air. “I've been all about being out and open about being a lesbian since I came out in 1980,” says Bechdel. “It's been my career.”
Bechdel’s artistic expression centers on exposure, confession, and documentation, just as her father’s renovations where all about artifice and obfuscation. Her lived experience is the material for her work, just as her father’s artfulness obscured the realities of his life. In a public conversation with Bechdel, the writer and biographer Judith Thurman asks if the raw and explicit scenes Bechdel culls from her life are a kind of writerly “strategy.” Bechdel responds: “I want you to trust me. And how can you trust me if I’m not showing you everything?” In her work, Bechdel does the opposite of lying. She excavates the real. She dredges up the stuff of her life, embarrassing parts and all. She draws herself rocking against a desk chair at sixteen until she gives herself an orgasm, stuffing wads of toilet paper into her underwear so she doesn’t have to tell her mother she started her period, and in bed naked and having sex with her girlfriend. Bechdel reveals herself to her readership in blindingly intimate detail, as if to say: you can trust me, I’m baring it all. Her father, on the other hand, is shown covering the skin on his cheeks with a bronzing stick and dashing upstairs to change a tie after Bechdel pokes fun at it. Although her acts of exhibitionism are diametrically opposed to her father’s life of hiddenness and shame, the two modes appear fundamentally connected.
Bruce becomes a kind of a cautionary tale about what can happen if you stay hidden, or perhaps of the tragic effects of growing up gay during a certain moment in American culture. Bechdel, with her celebrated creative career, is example of what can happen if you speak your truth, or perhaps what can happen when you come out in an age of increased visibility. Throughout Fun Home, Bechdel demonstrates the complexity of her connection to Bruce, as if to show that their relationship transcends truth and secret, the hidden and the revealed, the living and the dead.
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