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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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The Madness of Venice
1.
I lived in Venice for two years, and I hated it. In conversations I used euphemisms and turns of phrase (among my favorite either you love it or hate it! and it's a... difficult city), but I was lying through my teeth. I fucking hated it.
I came there from Milano to get my Master's at Ca' Foscari University. I consider it part of my cultural heritage that I look at Life in all its forms with the deepest skepticism and contempt. It is a marvelous thing and a disgusting horror how Milanese my age–think the cultural region rather than the municipality–feel the need to question everything, cannot physically accept a statement without looking for a fight, usually through that ready verbal sword: yeah, but.
There's the small things you don't quite expect. Garbage collection will have you get up at seven to take down your trash, with little care for your sleep habits. You'll be going to bed early anyway: everything tends to close down early around town. Getting to classes or work in the morning sometimes feels like playing hopscotch, as you avoid both trash bags and the killer seagulls feasting on them. The seagulls are vicious; they will attack you. I have seen them steal sandwiches and do all sorts of perverted things.
There's absolutely no traffic, so that yeah, there's no smog and little noise, but the pizza guy can't get to you, and you'll have to go and collect your pizza yourself—an outrage.
Venetian cuisine is delicious, alternating luscious aristocratic treats with genuine popular dishes, soups and stews that will make your forearms grow hairy. It is also a well kept secret. Very common in its place are those checkered-tablecloth tourist traps where you'll get microwaved pasta someone scribbled with a pen and called spaghetti al nero di seppia.
Historically, Venetians have had to exploit every useful inch of land. Their houses tend to be very close to one another. I have spent weeks stuck in a timeless limbo, unaware of weather conditions, every hour of the day turned into a perennial dusk by the building in front of my windows, until the need for pizza drove me outside and straight into Venice's number one major no-joke problem.
All those hordes of tourists, turning into sheer madness a place that already, by its very nature, sounds like a pretty whacko idea.
The most perceivable sign of the locals' growing lack of patience with tourists is the No Grandi Navi movement, its banners ubiquitous around town. They oppose cruise ships gliding by the town, a literal stone's throw away from St Mark's, the Doge's palace, the houses and shops of 50,000 people.
Top all of this off with the threat of global warming, and its implication of rising sea levels. There have been attempts at building dams, barriers, other high wizardry from Northern Europe. Corruption has eroded all of that faster than any killer algae.
All of this mess is not theoretical: it is never in the back on your head. You have it forcefully-injected in your system when you get stuck on a congested tourist route. You feel it pierce your insides when you look for an apartment in Venice's saturated, tourist-oriented market. You have it spread over your body when you are pressed, car wash style, between enraged locals and oblivious tourists, you innocent soul, just out looking for a pizza.
How peculiar that Venice, so proud of its independent heritage and never too far from dreams of secession, is enshrouded in a quintessentially Italian air: that of an immense beauty cursed by an impending doom, marred by a lethal combination of incompetence, carelessness, and somebody else's fault, which will one day soon lead to the inevitable total collapse.
2.
I first heard of Ascension at a presentation in a fancy Venetian hotel. Golden stucco in every corner, frescoed ceilings, people everywhere with one surname too many. Gregory Dowling introduced his 18th-century adventure by commenting on how happy he was to be living in what was, after all, the most beautiful city in the world.
YEAH BUT what do you know. You're from Bristol.
He proceeded to illustrate the reasons why he had written the novel. Established Venetians complimented him for his historical accuracy. The sexual habits of the Venetian nobility was discussed. I decided to read the book.
Venetian fiction abounds. Not even Yours Truly at the nadir of his relationship with Venice (the day that gondolier almost beat me) could deny that Venice is the perfect setting for pretty much any story, from romance to comedy, from the high-octane thriller to the horror tale. I myself wrote, and buried, a half dozen Lovecraftian stories set in Venice, turning the city's climate of secrecy, pride, and hostility toward foreigners into a curse originating in underground fungi, in covenants with fish people.
Literature has given us so many brilliant Venice books. I know people who make a living studying Henry James’s Venetian fiction. Yet it seems to me that so many Venice stories do not do justice to the marvelous mess they exploit. Mann's Death in Venice, if you allow me the blasphemy, could have been Death in Gatteo a Mare without changing much of its marrow. Donna Leon’s highly popular Venice stories undoubtedly make for excellent page turning, but I have it from native sources that their murdery, incestuous Veneto shares little with the one you and I can get a flight to.
Dowling's Venice is the real deal.
You can't portray a mess such as Venice through a single perspective, except when you pull it off. It helps that Ascension’s first-person narrator, just like its creator, is at once a Venetian and an outsider. The son of an Venetian actress, raised and educated in England, our hero Alvise has come back to Venice to work as a cicerone, a guide for wealthy tourists on their obligatory Venetian leg of their Grand Tour around Europe.
Alvise's love of Venice is not the visceral love of a patriot or proto-nationalist, the type the pressure cooker of history is very good at making fester. It is the nuanced, contradictory, slow-cooked passion of someone who can remember the first time they saw St Mark's square, and Venice beckoning like an impossibility from the mainland. It is the type of lucid love that allows you to lose yourself into your adored while aware of their manias and horrible flaws.
Alvise's status as a foresto, a perennial stranger to Venetian eyes, allows Ascension—and even more its sequel, The Four Horsemen—to play with topics and social dynamics that will be familiar to anyone inhabiting this constellation of messes called Europe. Alvise's Venice is a city whose squares and salotti allow for the intermingling of people from all over the 18th-century world, each one convinced to be carrying the torch of civilization. Dowling's British noblemen look upon Venice as a place of intrigue and mystery, one best experienced without wandering far from a gondola and a guide. Venetians see these wealthy visitors as opulent, uncivilized barbarians. Wandering poets from the eastern Mediterranean look at the "civilized" Venetians as nothing but thieves and raiders, a pirate empire now facing a well-deserved decadence.
Whenever Dowling stages such a two-paragraph clash of cultures, one is reminded of coffee room discussions about the backstabbing extravaganza of a morning spent in line at an Italian post office; of philosophical tirades against any people barbarous enough to reject the bidet.
This intermingling of people, giving them the chance to bitch about each other, may very well be what made Venice great. It definitely is where the genius of Dowling's novels lies: in the way they portray, without renouncing the clarity and immediacy of immersive fiction, an almost Cubistic overlap of perspectives on Venice. There are people in Ascension who love the city; there are people in it that hate it. A young Englishman just arrived into town cannot wait to find a casino, maybe a brothel too. He finds the palaces impressive, totally worth casting a glance at, as long as they're on the way to a place where you can gamble, hopefully fornicate. He is your classmate's cousin from suburban Massachusetts, ready to swear that seeing Venice has always been his supreme dream in life. He will be turbo-ejecting his kebab+spritz combination from on top of the Rialto Bridge by nine o'clock at the latest, hopefully not on anyone's gondola. (You do not fuck with gondoliers).
You get the snotty foreigner enjoying the salotti and palaces of the city while carefully maintaining the contemptuous air of someone who'd rather be in a more civilized place.
You get eastern Venetians mistrusting western Venetians, living up to the fullest the animosity between the town's sestieri, its districts. These people built their bridges keeping clan wars in mind, and to this day you can perceive some of the internal rivalries one finds in any big city. If the Brooklyn-Queens feud seems somewhat pointless today, imagine it translated to a place where you can stroll from one end of town to the next in less than an hour. No one ever said Venice made much sense.
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So far I have avoided talking about the plot of Dowling's novels. That is part of the fun I'll let you have by yourself. Suffice it to say that some of their charm lies in their generic contamination. They are thrillers alright, but not the type that feels the need to close every chapter with a cliffhanger. Dowling can rely on characterization, humor, sometimes on sheer lyrical prose to carry you from one page to the next. While fast-flowing and action-packed, these books leave enough space for reflection, romance, and for the vicarious satisfaction of the senses. Every fan of Andrea Camilleri or George R.R. Martin knows that part of the fun of it all lies in gormandizing the verbal banquets these masters set up for you, in rustic Sicilian restaurants or toasty wilderness outposts. So one reads Dowling to take in the palaces and monuments, to talk crap about the last failure or success in Venetian theater, to take in the smell of a cheese shop in Dorsoduro, taste the coffee and discuss poetry in a noblewoman's salotto.
One can use Ascension and The Four Horsemen as a sort of guide to Venice, I imagine, either to prepare for a vacation or to whet the appetite before the next visit. Indeed, one can cook and enjoy an outlandish, opulent fantasy feast: I hear they offer this type of thing these days. It would be a mistake, though, to believe that such literary pleasures exhaust themselves as props for the real thing. Dowling's Venetian novels are not to be mistaken for guidebooks any more than Camilleri’s Montalbano series is a recipe book in disguise. Their beauties and flavors are there to be enjoyed, first and foremost, for their own sake: they are there to lull you into a stupor and get your feet up on the ottoman, so that when you put them down again they'll be touching 1749 Venice, rather than your ugly carpet.
Again I have dodged the question of the plot, so here it is—very simply put, after a series of fateful encounters our hero, Alvise, is vividly encouraged to work for the Venetian government in order to collect information about those who would put the safety of the Most Serene Republic in jeopardy.
With its thick web of spies and summary justice, 18th-century Venice is paralleled in The Four Horsemen to Stasi-ruled East Germany. Indeed, never at any moment do either Alvise or Dowling try to disguise the ugliness of the city they're so in love with. All successful urban fiction—all honest urban fiction at least—has to find a way to tackle the contradiction at the heart of New York, Vigata, and everything in between: the fact that any city worth talking about is going to be an example of the best and the worst its people are capable of.
Dreamy as it is—I'll get to the dreamy part soon enough—Venice has a messed-up history of segregation, injustice, terror. Think of the Jewish ghetto. Think of the opulence of its palaces and upper classes, side by side with cramped houses packed with people who'd spend their lives confined to their fraction of an already tiny kingdom: a square, a church, a few canals to draw the boundaries of your universe. One cannot fully love a town without facing all this madness. Alvise faces the madness of Venice time and again in Ascension, time and again in The Four Horsemen.
It makes all the more sense that the people he works against are often Venetian patriots whose love has grown cancerous. There are traces of the occult in Dowling's novels, bizarre acquatic contraptions, half-assed plans to take Venice back to its past glory or avenge some long-forgotten crime. Hidden behind all this like a barge behind a bush is the sneaky suspicion—which titillates my Milanese smartassery most pleasantly—that people are just full of shit, and use patriotism and history as tools to get what they want, which generally is “more.”
If you think all this talk of weird contraptions does not become a Venetian historical novel, then you have obviously not heard of those people who were arrested in 2014 for planning to invade St Mark's Square with a tank (!) and proclaim Venice's independence.
3.
During my last evening in Venice, I took a walk by the Zattere, my favorite place in town and—damn you, you cursed city, you—why couldn't you just suck.
There was a pink sunset instead. You can see the mainland from the Zattere, the steel arches and chimneys of Marghera. Europe's largest chemical plant is somewhere over there, both close and worlds away from your dreamy floating city.
The feeling I got that night, and on many others during my time in Venice—when the light is right and there's people around you, but not too many, speaking all sorts of languages and dialects—is the same feeling I got while lost in Dowling's novels. The pleasure of inhabiting a dreamy reality, away from the world and its pollution. There is a danger in there, in forgetting how your island of bliss is part of the larger world, with its doom and failures. Dowling's novels, not even at their most thrilling, allow you to forget for more than a few pages that the issues faced by their characters, while making for excellent entertainment, are the same ones waiting outside your door. The tide keeps rising. The ships keep coming. Those whose love of Venice has grown deformed threaten all sorts of measures to hold the city in their suffocating embrace.
The characters in Dowling's Venice talk of the city as doomed, a once-great Empire turned into a pleasure house for foreigners. More than two and a half centuries later, Venice has survived much grimmer times than any of them could imagine. The talk around town has not gotten any less bleak. Seeing how the city has come so far, it would be easy to dismiss its problems as the hysteria of any one party. The locals are just crazy, them and their hate of ships; the masses just need to leave, and everything would be fine again.
This seems doubtful. One will have to confide in Venetians—in the wise gondoliers, enlightened storekeepers, down-to-earth noblewomen Dowling sketches and animates. You can be a pessimist all you want, but if you can convince someone from Castello that Western Venetians are people too—and I have seen it happen, in Dowling's fiction and in real life—than there is hope for the human race.
I am in England at the moment, not too far from Dowling's Bristol—definitely a place you either love or hate. There's a canal not far from here that people come from all around the place to see, photograph, take strolls by. They claim it is very pretty.
And I miss Venice, miss its dark silent calli and the quiet you get in November and January, when tourists leave the town be for a while and you can take in its foggy air, saturated with centuries of messy history. This is the real curse: to know that I hated Venice when I was there, and now have to hate myself for the time I spent complaining about pizza. To know that I will keep missing it.
I feel it calling me, like the ancestral urges of a Lovecraftian character waking up one morning and finding gills on his neck. I was in Milano the other day, cycling through the five p.m. traffic and cursing at people who learned to drive on YouTube. Someone honked at me and questioned my grasp of road rules, and my mother's.
And I found myself thinking, in the most spontaneous of ways: ghe sboro.
The curse is in me alright.
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Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons.
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