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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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It’s All For Keeps: David Vann on Truth, Fiction, and How We Find Out Who We Are
For a writer whose own life has been so central to his work, David Vann is nothing like what you might expect from reading his books. His writing is thrillingly dark, haunted by personal trauma and utterly ruthless in its exposure of human perversity and frailty. In person, however, he is among the warmest, most open and good-humored people I have ever interviewed. He is quick to break into laughter even when discussing the blackest of topics.
And the blackest of topics cannot possibly be avoided when speaking about Vann’s work. Legend of a Suicide, the book for which he was made justly famous, is a sequence of five short stories and a novella, all of which approach, from a variety of fictional starting points, the central and very real fact of Vann’s father’s suicide. That novella, “Sukkwan Island,” is among the most stunning and compelling pieces of fiction I have read by a contemporary author in recent years. His first novel Caribou Island was published earlier this year, and it deals with topics of similar weight and consequence: broken marriages, failed lives, and suicides. He has also written a memoir, entitled A Mile Down: The True Story of A Disastrous Career at Sea, about his ruinous attempts to restore a ship and to start a charter tour company in Turkey. The cover of the book is a photograph of a mast disappearing beneath the surface of a turbulent sea. Once you know that the picture was taken by Vann’s wife from the deck of the lifeboat, you will have some idea of the accuracy of the book’s title and subtitle.
I met him at his hotel in Kilkenny, Ireland, where he was due to do a reading that evening at the Kilkenny Arts Festival with Tobias Wolff. The latter's iconically mustachioed presence, incidentally, briefly threw me off my interviewing game when he appeared behind Vann on his way from the bar and clapped him manfully on the shoulder before strolling off again.
The Millions: The first thing I wanted to talk about was the unusually long gestation of Legend of a Suicide. You started writing it when you were 19, right?
David Vann: Yeah, it had a gestation of ten years. I was writing it from when I was 19 until I was 29. And then it took another 12 years to find a publisher. It finally got published when I was 42. I did no work at all on it between the ages of 30 and 42.
TM: So why did it take so long to find a publisher?
DV: Well, it wasn’t publishers. It was agents. It didn’t even go to publishers. No agents would send it to publishers. They all liked it, but thought it couldn’t possibly sell. It wasn’t clearly either a non-fiction book or a novel. So I finally sent it to a contest where they just read it blind and don’t care whether it will sell copies. Because I realized no agent was ever going to send it out.
TM: And then the creative gestation itself spanned a decade.
DV: The reason it took so long to write is that I was trying to write about my Dad’s suicide, and that was a big mess for me emotionally and psychologically, and also for my family. Everyone in my family had a different version of what had happened, what it meant, and who he was. And none of those lined up, so there was no one clear story to tell. The format that Legend of a Suicide takes reflects the meaning of the word “legend” as a series of portraits, taken from Chaucer’s The Legend of Good Women, and from the hagiographic tradition. And I loved that form, the idea that you could do a series of portraits which could be conflicting, and that together they would provide a more complete picture. That’s what I came to late in the process. It was when I was writing the story “Legend of Good Men,” which is the third story. When I was writing that I sort of discovered the idea that I get this all to fit together that way. Because before that, the first three or four years, I just threw away everything because there was just too much emotion on the first page. It took ten years from 19 to 29 because I was learning to write. The novella within the book, “Sukkwan Island,” came at the very end, and that was a huge surprise for me. The event that happens half-way through was not where I thought I was going. I didn’t see it coming until I was half-way through the sentence. That was the first time I really understood that writing is unconscious, that it’s not about control or ideas or shaping it in some kind of conscious way, that when it takes off and does something more interesting is when there’s an unconscious pattern and cohesion. So to me in a way all those other stories that frame “Sukkwan Island” are in a sense failures. I like them, they’re all in a somewhat different style and form a kind of debate, but they’re all limited by being still conscious and the result of a controlled process.
TM: It’s really interesting to hear that it came as a surprise to you, because anyone I know who has read Legend of a Suicide, that’s the moment they talk about, where you invert the facts of your father’s suicide. And I think that’s because when you read it, the reader feels as though you’re breaking some kind of rule, which is a very rare thing now in literature. You feel that this isn’t supposed to happen, that this isn’t what the writer is supposed to be doing with this autobiographical material.
DV: In the UK and Ireland especially I think people thought that maybe I did something formally interesting. But it’s not like I had this idea of subverting a reader’s expectation of the form or anything like that. And I’m not a tricky writer at all. Really for me the thing about writing is that everything has to be true. It all has to be real. It was never meant to be tricky. That’s just what happened in the writing with Legend of a Suicide. It wasn’t faked. It was a real transformation.
TM: Well I think that’s exactly what’s so powerful about it — about that book and about that moment of rupture — is the fact that you’re not, you know, John Barth.
DV: I know. And it scared the shit out of me when I wrote it. The next day I planned to cut it and go back to my plan. But I read all the pages up to it, and I could see that there was all this pattern leading up to that moment, and it was the first time that I really understood what the book was about. And so now I really feel that that process was alive in Caribou Island too. And although there’s not some major rupture, I didn’t know what the characters would do or say each day, because since I’d had this experience with “Sukkwan Island” I went into it knowing it’s better not to know what’s going to happen. And so everything that happens — especially the interactions between the characters — that was all happening each day as it was going along. And for me the places of invention are mostly in the description of landscapes. It’s almost as if every paragraph of landscape has some kind of life for me in that way, where there’s some kind of shifting and transformation going on. The real stuff of my life has been reshaped and redeemed through the unconscious, and that’s really the whole point of writing.
TM: You mentioned that everything you write has to be true, or feel true. Do you feel that there’s a level of truth that you have access to in fiction that you don’t have access to when you’re writing in a traditional memoir form, like you were in A Mile Down?
DV: Yeah, I do. I also have a non-fiction book about a school shooting coming out in the Fall. That book is true in that I had access to a whole 1,500-page police file on the shooter, and I write about it like he’s a protagonist of a short story. It’s very close to him, and follows his experience. But every scene is built up through a mountain of facts that I have. And to me that’s incredibly constraining. The book doesn’t come alive in the way that fiction does. For me, fiction does have access to a higher sense of truth, an emotional and psychological truth, by being open-ended.
TM: Early in A Mile Down, there’s a line where you say, “I’ve come to realize that a life can be like a work of art, constantly melted away and reshaped.” I feel as though there’s an exploratory element to your work both thematically, in terms of what your characters are doing, and in terms of what you yourself are doing as a writer. There’s an attempt to find something real, something true in a new way.
DV: Yeah, absolutely. In A Mile Down you see both of those working. My real life was essentially an experiment. I was driving myself toward destruction, toward a repetition of my father’s life, getting closer to his disasters and his end, because really what I was testing was my own sense of doom that I had for 22 years after his death. That I’d be destined to repeat his suicide. That some day I’d get depressed and hit a low point and that suicide would be there waiting for me. That it would be inescapable, something that I couldn’t possibly outrun, like Oedipus. So in real life I was actually heading toward disaster at sea, just as my father did, and I think trying to hit a low point to find out what would be there. And I found out that suicide wasn’t waiting for me. It was a wonderful release to find out that, when I hit the low point and lost everything, I wasn’t thinking of suicide. That it wasn’t there. So it actually worked. It was a strange experiment that worked in real life, but it was done entirely unconsciously. I didn’t realize that I was experimenting with my life. And so now I do have the same sense about my real life that I have about my fiction, which is that I make all these decisions but I have no idea why I’m doing what I’m doing. That life is essentially shaped by the unconscious in the same way that fiction is.
TM: I think with your male characters particularly there’s this need to get to a place of simplicity and self-sufficiency which is, on the face of it, quite noble and in some ways quintessentially American. People tend to mention Thoreau a lot in talking about your work, for instance, and I think that’s not a bad point of reference. But the urge for self-sufficiency in your work is a self-defeating and also, I think, a self-destructive urge. Does that strike you as true?
DV: I’ve actually thought about this a lot, because I teach nature writing and I think that our ideas in contemporary American nature writing come from the British Romantics really, through the American Transcendentalists. I like Blake the best of those Romantics, and I think his idea of the corrosive process — where you burn away the veils of experience and reveal the infinite which was hidden, the mind of innocence — is really at the core of this idea of finding your goodness and your self-sufficiency out in nature, through being tested. What I don’t share is the faith that we find goodness. And so that’s where my writing ends up departing from it. I don’t believe I can return to Eden, or find any innate goodness or innocence. I think that happiness is more likely to be found in engagement. Which is not denying our bad sides, but just being engaged.
TM: I don’t know what you’ll make of this, but it struck me that there are strong elements in your work — more in Caribou Island and A Mile Down than in Legend of a Suicide — that are, purely in terms of the material rather than how you handle it, essentially comic.
DV: Oh yeah, definitely. In A Mile Down especially I think there are moments that are comedic even in my version. I don’t think I was very good at writing comedy, but it could have been much funnier.
TM: Well, perversely, it’s funnier by virtue of not being funny at all. Which I suppose is the way with a lot of things.
DV: Well, Toby Wolff told me that he and his brother read it and they called each other and just laughed about it for about an hour.
TM: Really? I’m in good company then. Because as horrible as all those experiences you describe in that memoir are, what you are laying out is basically a classically, straightforwardly comic situation. The guy in over his head, under unbelievable stress and headed for certain disaster with lots of DIY mishaps along the way.
DV: Yeah, absolutely. And it strikes me as comic now too. But when I was writing it, I was closer to it and I was trying to describe what happened, and trying to understand it, and I didn’t take full advantage of the comedic potential in it.
TM: You seem much less coy than most other fiction writers in talking about the relationship between your life and your fiction.
DV: Well, I’m still trying to understand it. To me, the work is more interesting if you understand more about that relationship. If you know the real story behind it and can see the way that it was changed — if you know for instance that my Dad asked me to come spend a year in Alaska with him, and that I said no, and that he killed himself soon after — you can understand that, in "Sukkwan Island" when the boy does go with his father, that’s a chance for me to go back and say yes to spending a year with my Dad. It’s not something I realized when I was writing it, but now in retrospect it seems obvious. So to me, a reader being able to know that changes the work for them. The more a reader can see what an author has experienced — where the transformations are, where the unconscious work is being done — the more they see what the work is. And also, the other reason why I feel as free as I do to talk about everything is that my family has had so much tragedy. My family has been so broken for so long that there’s no pretending anymore that things are fine. So I really feel like I’ve essentially lost shame. I had incredible shame for three years after my Dad’s suicide. From when I was 13 until when I was 16 I told everyone he died of cancer. And I just feel, like, never again, because that was so debilitating. And so to me there’s tremendous freedom in being able to talk freely with people and to not hold anything back. I don’t ever want it to be a canned thing. I never prepare for anything. When I teach, I go in and I know the works well, and we have a conversation about it. I want that conversation to be free to go anywhere. Not just to follow my lecture notes, or plan of what points we have to cover. To me that kills a class, and it would kill an interview, and it would kill a reading. And it would kill writing a book.
TM: That doesn’t surprise me. I would never have imagined you as the type of writer with the post-its on a corkboard over your desk and the character outlines and so on.
DV: No, no. I actually hate all other forms of writing. I find them to be garbage. I can’t stand the idea of writing a journal or writing a note. I fucking hate it. I hate writing a letter. I can do emails fine, because it’s very fast, but all other forms of writing I view as garbage. I especially don’t like obligatory forms. I never wrote letters to anyone, so email has saved a lot of friendships. I really think that all writing is for keeps. None of it is preparatory or an exercise or whatever. It’s all for keeps. Whenever I write I’m trying to engage in that process and discover something. That’s all I want.
TM: Right, because when I read your writing it feels in a lot of ways unworked-over, unsmoothed. It feels spontaneous and rough in a good way.
DV: Caribou Island was published in exactly the same version as my first draft. I worked on it every day, two or three hours each morning, for five and a half months. And every two weeks I’d read the whole thing. And each day I’d read through 20 or 30 pages before the point where I had to add new material. So I’ve read through it many, many times before I get to that first draft. And I made little adjustments here and there. But when I finish a book, that’s almost exactly what’s published. The only thing that I changed is I added the seven or eight paragraphs of background material on Irene that my editor requested. A little less than 1,000 words to an 80,000-word book. And that was it. There are a couple of reasons for that. One is that I can’t do anything else. The book just is what it is. I’d always been told that writing is mostly revision, and for me that is just not true. It’s either the first draft works or the whole thing has to be thrown away. Within a couple of weeks, even, it gets this hard shell on it that I can’t crack anymore. I can’t go in and add new stuff anymore. I’m not pretending that book is perfect or flawless, but one thing that it is, I think, is one piece. The goal is that, for a reader, it’s supposed to feel like it was written in one day, in one sitting. So to me, that’s the beauty of having what is essentially the first draft published. The reader gets to see the book in all its connections and its roughness and its suggestion, and it’s all one dream.
TM: So you’re not interested in trying to attain any kind of ideal of perfection?
DV: Fuck no! It takes me years to understand what the hell I was doing in a book so, really, how am I supposed to go in and make it perfect if I don’t even understand it? I’m 67 pages into writing a new novel now. I had to take a break from it to do the final revision of Dirt, the novel that’s being published next May. Today was my first day back after that break. So my fear is that there’ll be some lack of connection that’ll happen because of the break. But what I loved about re-reading it today is that it does have all this strange stuff in it that’s working but that I don’t fully understand yet, but I feel some weight or pressure from it. And that’s what I follow when I’m writing — something that’s freaky or strange about it that I want to get closer to.
TM: And that’s an instinct you’ve come to trust, obviously.
DV: Yeah, I trust it absolutely. Because what’s the worst that could happen? At the end I throw away the whole book. So who gives a shit? It’s the only thing I really enjoy doing in life, so it’s worth following. I wish my students would be less tripped up about perfection and writing something great and would just write what they’re going to write, because we don’t get to choose, really. Like this new novel Dirt, I planned to write something set in Anglo-Saxon England, and then one day I started writing this thing set in California in 1985. And that’s it. Five and a half months later there it was. I had no plan to write that book. It just happened. I don’t follow any plans. I get little premonitions of what something might lead to, but I’m still going to follow wherever any paragraph takes me.
TM: Is it the case that, because you feel like everything you write in fiction has to be in some sense true, you don’t then want to undermine or contradict that truth by changing something about it?
DV: Absolutely. The novel I’m working on now, I have no idea what it’s about, and I might have to throw away the whole thing. I have zero idea of what the hell this thing is about. To me it’s thrilling and fun to write, and there’s also anxiety every day. There’s a lot of insecurity. Each day when I read through the 20 or 30 pages and I’m about to start my new page or two for the day, I have this moment where I think I’ll never write again, I’ll never write anything. But I think that that moment is important. You have to have that void. Otherwise nothing real ends up happening. You have to spend a little time sitting in the moment where it might be all annihilation and nothing to find out if there’s going to be something. Because otherwise your conscious mind kicks in and you just do whatever the easiest, most available thing is. The first thing you grab. And that’s always going to suck.
TM: So something real has to happen in fiction for it to be worth imagining? Real in the sense of having some significant connection to an emotional reality.
DV: Finally what’s important is what has meaning. For instance I think the difference between tragedy in real life and tragedy in fiction is that tragedy in fiction is meaningful. In real life, what’s terrifying about it is that it doesn’t mean anything, it doesn’t connect. When my Dad died, he was just gone and it didn’t mean shit. And that was terrifying. That’s what makes the whole rest of your life feel meaningless when something like that happens. Because you realize, fuck, there’s no solid ground for anything. But in fiction, tragedy can be meaningful. It’s all connected and bound together and we can test and measure ourselves against it. To me it’s not depressing to read tragedy; it’s reassuring to read tragedy. And it drives me crazy to read stupid reviews in the U.S. where they say the book’s well written, they like the book, they recommend it, but where they are effectively telling their readers not to read it because they say that it’s dark or depressing or whatever. To me that’s idiotic, because for 2,500 years most of western literature has been tragedy. And the reason we like to read tragedy is because reading tragedy is how we find out who the fuck we are. We measure ourselves against it. Are we good? Are we bad? What about the shapes of our lives, the decisions we’ve made? That’s how we test all of it.
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