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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
[millions_email]
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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American Witches: The Millions Interviews Alex Mar
Alex Mar is a non-fiction writer and film director based in New York City. Her documentary feature American Mystic premiered at the 2010 Tribeca Film Festival and inspired her first book Witches of America (FSG 2015). We spoke over the telephone about her foray into present day paganism and witchcraft in the United States, her evolving friendship with the priestess and diviner Morpheus Ravenna, and the challenges presented by writing nuanced non-fiction accounts of rituals where the unseen occurs.
The Millions: As fascinating as I found Morpheus and the other characters who populate Witches of America, I remained most fascinated by you and your unfolding process as a curious observer and, eventually, a participant subject to bouts of skepticism and wonder. Are you a reliable narrator?
Alex Mar: Oh, that’s a great question. Go right for the jugular! Well, I can start first by saying when I took on this project I had no intention of becoming such a huge part of the book. I have never been someone who identified as some sort of confessional writer. It had not been part of my work until then. The conversation I had with my publisher had been, “I will be this relatable framing device for this project so the reader can journey along with me and mostly the spotlight will be on everyone I am meeting with.” What I discovered really quickly is that approach rang hollow. It just seemed incredibly unfair to be asking so many people to share with me all the intimate details about their faith and for me to hang back. I realized that I had to be honest with the reader about my own doubts, about my own completely embarrassing existential questions, all of that. And as time went by and these relationships deepened for me, you know, my participation became inevitable as someone who is a persistent and curious person. I mean, you can’t really be surrounded by people who are claiming to practice magic and not push that further and not want to know what might be behind the next curtain. And there is curtain after curtain after curtain in this community.
The question of being a reliable narrator is an interesting one. There is a long-standing very American tradition of a certain kind of memoir where someone who has a lot of self-doubt immerses herself in a new world and comes out the other side with all kinds of answers having had a transformative experience. That is an all-American literary form that comes with its own problems and complexities. I never assumed this would be a neatly structured experience for me. I really tried to be as transparent as possible -- about the rituals that I was taking part in and the complicated friendships I was forming with some of the witches I met and my relationship with the occult society in New Orleans -- all of it felt incredibly complicated and confusing after a certain point. I tried to be really accurate about the real messy feelings that came with my level of involvement as opposed to something that would be more easily digestible.
TM: And that seems to me to be in keeping with the topic at hand: belief and the occult and the unseen. It’s not math, you know, 1+1…
AM: Religion in general, faith, belief, I think it’s got to be some of the most humiliating stuff to write about. I mean I think it’s something that smart, savvy people are wary of talking about unless they are in a very intimate circle of friends. It’s very vulnerable and it exposes you to questions like how do you calculate the value of your life on a daily basis and are you satisfied with who you are when you wake up in the morning. And so to explore that was inherently challenging. And with a real constant awareness that my average reader may be very skeptical and that I can relate to that and yet how can I somehow explain to that person that this is a terrain that I think is worth exploring and worth getting closer to. Any human being who has a pulse has an excited response, on kind of a childhood level, to the word “witchcraft” or the word “magic” -- and as an adult how do you give yourself permission to look at that and turn it over and try to figure out what this community might be about and what part of it might relatable and legitimate instead of easily dismissed.
TM: How many people in the United States consider themselves to be practitioners of witchcraft and has the number been growing?
AM: Yes, that’s something I include in the first chapter and it’s tricky because obviously you are accounting for a margin of error for people who are practicing in secret and who would not fill out a national survey about their religious preference. Based on the current research, you could responsibly get to between 850,000 and 1 million Americans who are practitioners.
TM: I have been thinking about what it means to practice in secret or not. I read an article in the Los Angeles Times that came out during Pope Francis’s visit to the United States and it talked about an increase in young people joining religious orders and wearing the traditional vestments and habits, and how that can create a lot of surprise among family and friends and the general public. And the sense of purpose and clarity this life choice, or calling, brings is expressed through the traditional dress…
AM: I wrote a piece for the Oxford American about a Dominican convent in Houston. I was really curious about why a woman around my age would decide to marry God. I also visited a cloistered community about two hours away. And they have a lot of young women in their 20s and 30s and that was so fascinating to me. And I completely agree that there is a through-line. The attraction very much seems to be discovering a belief system that comes with all these traditions and rituals that gives meaning to daily life. I think that people are, on the one hand, intimidated to have all these open-ended choices, and there is great comfort in being able to ascribe to a system. This is something I talk about in the book, that I have a genuine envy for people who are made of a constitution where this can bring them satisfaction. As much as I value my independence, fiercely so, at the same time the fact that I don’t subscribe to a particular religious system does not mean I have solved these questions about why I am alive and what purpose anything I do has in the world.
Meeting someone like Morpheus, who is one of the major characters in the book, and in the time that I knew her she really rose up as an important priestess on the West Coast, meeting her was really a turning point for me early on because here was someone who was hyper-smart and really articulate, very funny, who really took her practice seriously, but didn’t expect you to, and who when she wasn’t in the middle of a ritual was really a low-key, laid-back, normal person. And she was so highly relatable to me and we enjoyed each other’s company. There was a real surprise to that. At the same time, she had this spiritual double-life that was really fulfilling to her that seemed so foreign and alien to me.
TM: Can you say something about the individual versus the group in witchcraft practice?
AM: The thing about the witchcraft community that is so interesting is that witchcraft is a mystical tradition. There is no middleman. You don’t need to go to some priest to help you commune with your god. You can go direct to your source. I think that’s incredibly attractive to a lot of the younger generation. Some of the witches I met would argue that there shouldn’t be any congregants. You should either be a priest/ess or you are not serious enough about your practice. You can also decide which gods or goddesses you have more of a relationship with and that is dependent on the coven you train with or your personal exploration.
One of the reasons I called the book Witches of America is not only because it’s about witches in this country, but it’s also a uniquely all-American religious movement that just hasn’t been talked about in enough depth. It’s a new chapter in religious history in this country. Here is a religion that is all about self-realization, there is a kind of pioneer spirit to it, you can transform yourself to the high priestess of such-and-such. You don’t have to inherit the beliefs of your family.
A really big issue in this community is that there are so many people who are working class and lower-middle class who are mainly self-taught or who went to a community college and who have jobs where they work at the supermarket or as a receptionist at some office downtown -- they are not people of means. And yet, at the same time, on the weekends, their co-workers have no idea that they have this other dimension to their lives. And I was really impressed by that because it was a way for a number of people who I met to take control of their identity and to have a life that was, in their minds, a lot more enigmatic and in touch with the capital “M” mystery in the universe, while knowing you will probably never be able to afford to rent a bigger apartment or get a bigger car. And that seemed to me so American. To find a way to work around the system to create a new version of yourself and the path doesn’t have to matter and certain factors of your background and upbringing don’t have to matter. You can jump past that and choose to have another dimension to your life. And while it isn’t universal, it was definitely a huge trend within the community.
TM: Can you talk a little about witchcraft as a movement, and specifically as a political movement?
AM: There are definitely ways in which the pagan movement intersects with politics in this country. It goes back to the 1950s in the south of England and Gerald Gardner, the godfather of Wicca. There were a number of English Royal Air Force vets who were part of the first wave of American witches. There was a bridge between England and the U.S. in that way. But when it really took off was with the rise of counter-culture in the 1960s and second-wave feminism in the 1970s. That is a very clear way in which witchcraft and liberal politics have always had a relationship in this country.
As a smart and independent woman, it’s total common sense to me that I would have so many issues with mainstream religion. There really haven’t been many options presented to me where I feel like I’ve been treated as an equal within a religious context. But the witchcraft movement is a totally different scenario. Pagans believe that male and female forces have equal sway in the universe. There was a strong goddess movement that got going in the 1970s around feminism with the idea that a female force had created the universe and that was really essential as a way of correcting social injustice at the time.
And moving away from gender, the money question is interesting. You have these various pagan practices and local communities built up around witchcraft traditions and there is no meaningful fundraising because there are no synagogues, there are no brick-and-mortar churches, there is a very firm belief that you have a tree and dirt and a rock, that is all you need for a place of worship. You can build an altar in your home as a serious place of personal worship. Morpheus for a while had a property out in Santa Clara County, in California, where she and a number of pagan volunteers had actually erected a physical henge made out of massive stones they dragged from all around their property. Everyone would get together on the major holidays and they would have rituals outside under the moon surrounded by these huge rocks, but otherwise it was just dirt and people would camp out there. It’s interesting when you remove big money from how you define religious practice because I think in this country that’s really antithetical to a lot of people. It’s a real equalizer. It means that you can be a huge part of how your religious practice is being realized.
TM: Can you say something about your transition from outside observer and chronicler to a student of Feri? And specifically can you talk about your struggle with prayer?
AM: There naturally came a point at which I couldn’t really hold myself at arm's length anymore. I wasn’t going to get any closer to answering my own questions. There are rituals that people have in large groups and yet more intense intimate practice is saved for when people are within their own coven or within smaller groups in private. That’s a different kind of animal. And I wanted to understand better what was possible when people got together in these more intimate scenarios.
A big part of if was getting to know Morpheus so well. She’s a complicated witch. She’s a Feri initiate [and] over the course of me knowing her she started a brand new priesthood -- she had this pagan sanctuary where she held rituals for all the pagans around the Bay Area who were able to come. I wanted to get closer to whatever it was she was tapping into. After a certain point, I just went for it and reached out to her and asked her to recommend a teacher to me, who I could study Feri with. It felt a little scary to me. There is a big difference between exploring witchcraft in an intellectual way as a writer, thinking about it terms of these great portraits I am creating of these pagan priestesses…there is a huge gulf, it turns out, between that and saying in a sentence that you would like to study witchcraft, that you would like to train in witchcraft. I was surprised because I am an incredibly open-minded person and I am not necessarily that conventional or traditional. I realized that the word “witch” has a lot of power for me. It’s a scary word to apply to yourself. There was a little shock to me in the realization that I wanted to go that far.
In terms of the prayer thing, it turns out that when you train with a serious pagan priestess you are expected to develop a relationship with the gods. And this was such a foreign concept. I really had to grapple with the fact that I was entertaining becoming a devout person. I was drawn in, to a great degree, by the flashy rituals and the daggers and chalices and the chanting under the moon, but at the end of the day it’s also asking the question of whether or not you are capable of being a devout person who believes that there are forces out in the universe that you can work with. And that was a kind of big leap for me. There are parts of that that are attractive. And parts where the skeptical New Yorker in me had trouble and wrestled with that.
TM: Where are you presently in terms of your journey with the occult?
AM: I am still very open to possibilities. I would not label myself anything in particular.
TM: Do you still have your David Koresh novel in the wings or have you abandoned that child?
AM: I kind of taught myself how to write by drafting a novel, which is not that unique as a process. At this point, I very much identify as a non-fiction writer. I don’t really see much of a distinction between the level of artistry that you can bring to fiction versus non-fiction. I do feel much more grounded in my work when I can draw from the lives of people who are living and breathing right now. To me it gives a kind of purpose and drive to the work that I don’t find in experimenting with fiction. And it’s exciting to realize that about yourself. To say, “this is my zone.” There was something wildly ambitious about saying I am going to write this book about this entire community and I am presuming a level of intimacy that doesn’t really exist yet and how am I going to make this happen. For me personally, there is great satisfaction in this book because I believe it’s a very real, palpable slice of the witchcraft community right now in this country. You can read this book and really be immersed in that world in an accurate way. And I love the scope and ambition of that and it’s very much a non-fiction process.
TM: I really enjoyed the juxtapositions present in the slice of contemporary witchcraft that you offer -- the spare scene in nature where a ritual is about to unfold versus the big hotel where pagan practitioners gather for the annual PantheaCon conference.
AM: Writing about rituals in general I found to be one of the surprise, massive, mind-blowing, back-breaking challenges of writing this book. The onus is on you as the writer to put the reader in that space and that moment in time and give them the feeling of everything that was going on in that room in the dark with all those other people, and, at the same time, you can’t simply list everything that took place, every ritual gesture, every line that was chanted, what everyone was wearing. You really have to be incredibly selective. You kind of have to conjure up this event and truncate it and give the reader enough of a sense of why on earth this is happening, the fact that there is a logic to it, and also the ecstatic feeling of being in that room, that is sort of like the feeling of being at a concert or something -- how do you convey all of that.
And, of course, there are a number of different kinds of ritual scenarios in the book, and each one brings something different. It goes from the ritual of about 400 people in a double ballroom in a DoubleTree Hotel in San José, where the floor is carpeted in a room that is usually used for corporate events, and then there are the kinds of really intimate initiation-type ceremonies that Morpheus told me about that I wasn’t even allowed to be part of. With her in particular, our relationship ended up spanning five or six years and to see her supposedly channeling a goddess in a room with 400 people and then to have her show me the scar on her arm from where she makes a cut to make the blood offering when she is alone with her priesthood, getting a sense of her whole range of experience was amazing. I am pretty grateful that she has the patience to stick with me and a sense of humor to put up with these long invasive conversations and also welcoming me into these scenarios.
TM: I read your article “Sky Burial” that appeared in Oxford American last year. I found it so interesting and unexpected and bizarre. I was very moved by your discussion about death and excarnation. Is that article connected to Witches of America?
AM: Yes. Later on in the book, I mention this question in the pagan community: how do we want our bodies handled when we die. Because this is a community that doesn’t feel necessarily connected to Christian traditions, let’s say. And going back historically there are different pagan communities that had very different funereal rites than what goes on in funeral parlors in America. Morpheus one day shared with me that she has always had this fantasy that when she dies she wants to be excarnated or have a sky burial performed, which is something mostly associated with certain Tibetan monks, where your body is left exposed to the elements or to birds of prey. And your bones are collected and your skull is collected and used in rituals. So her fantasy was to have her body laid out that way and eaten by ravens and other corvids and have her bones made into a beautiful and decorated altar where all the witches she had worked with over the years and had been close with could visit and use her bones to perform ritual and consult her skull as a sort of oracle. I thought this image was so completely amazing. It’s such an exalted way to be preserved, on the one hand, and very macabre, on the other. That actually led me to the question: is sky burial actually technically possible under any imaginable circumstance in this country.
Maybe this is one of the ways in which certain elements of the pagan community are more universal than we realize. There is something there that isn’t just about calling yourself a “pagan” or a “witch.” It’s a desire for a different way of connecting to life and to death.
TM: Can we talk about your chapter “Sympathy for the Necromancer,” which strikes a different, darker tone. Were you scared by your conversation with “Jonathan” at any point?
AM: It was very disturbing to realize that this was the reality of his practice. It’s the closest I’ve ever come to being completely stunned by someone I have spent time with for my writing. The truth is that any religious community will have its extremists. I wanted to be able to address that in contrast to the majority of this community.
There is this larger existential questioning that all the people in this book are going through and I am going through and the dark side of that is that our fear of death can warp us. Part of what that chapter is about is a desire for control over life and death that isn’t human.
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