Mentioned in:
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.
[millions_email]
The Mystery of James Purdy
“Get them by heart, and then between you and me we’ll put them all in apple-pie order.”
— James Purdy, Jeremy’s Version (1970)
In October 1956, poet Dame Edith Sitwell sat in Montegufoni, the Sitwell family’s Tuscan castle, transfixed by the stories of an unknown American writer. On a hunch, James Purdy had sent her his privately published collection. He had been struggling to get published, and earlier that year, a wealthy friend generously financed the printing of Don’t Call Me By My Right Name. Purdy sent the slim volume, adorned with his Cocteauesque line drawings, to writers and critics with whom he thought his work would resonate.
Purdy mailed the book from New York, where he was visiting his older brother, Richard. He noticed a little post office near Richard’s hotel. He rapped on the door but a man said, “We’re closed!” Purdy looked so forlorn that the clerk let him in and examined his package to Italy. “What an address!” Purdy realized the clerk was Italian and seemed to know something of its destination. “This isn’t tied properly,” he remarked, and proceeded to retie it “beautifully.” “Then he gave me a long look, said ‘okay. Good luck.’ Good luck, he said. He never knew how wonderful that was; I often wondered if that Post Office existed. Maybe it just appeared for that one day. Well, that changed everything” because, had Edith Sitwell not liked the book, “I would have given up and never become a real writer.”
Though Purdy received responses to his collection replete with praise from legends such as Langston Hughes, Tennessee Williams, Elizabeth Bishop, and Thornton Wilder, the grandest of all to reply was Sitwell. Many revered Dame Edith as a magnificent poet and tastemaker—a visionary in the tradition of great English eccentrics. She was a stern critic but also a strong champion of her brother, Osbert Sitwell, and Denton Welch. After finishing Purdy’s collection, Sitwell felt compelled to write. Several stories were “superb; nothing short of masterpieces,” possessing a “terrible, heartbreaking quality.” She was so “deeply impressed by this book that, on the chance” Purdy had no British publisher, she had already written her London friend and publisher Victor Gollancz, advising him to acquire Purdy’s book. She hoped Purdy would soon “have another work ready.”
Stunned, James was prompted to send Sitwell his novella 63: Dream Palace, which another friend had paid to have privately published. In November, she responded that he was “really a great writer” and she was “quite overcome. What anguish, what heart-breaking truth! And what utter simplicity. The knife is turned and turned in one’s heart. From the terrible first pages—(the first sentence is, in itself, a masterpiece) to the heart-rending last pages, there isn’t a single false note.” Sitwell judged 63: Dream Palace equal to or perhaps “even greater” than the short stories and noted that her appreciation of the stories had only deepened since her first letter. She hoped they could meet when she would be in New York in early 1957. “You are truly a writer of genius,” she declared.
Through Sitwell’s intervention, Victor Gollancz published 63: Dream Palace: A Novella and Nine Stories in Great Britain in summer 1957, which led to New Directions publishing an expanded collection, Color of Darkness, in the United States late in the year. This in turn led to Farrar, Straus and Cudahy (later Farrar, Straus and Giroux) publishing four novels that established his reputation, beginning with Malcolm in 1959 and concluding with Eustace Chisholm and the Works in 1967. Sitwell reviewed his first British book in the Times Literary Supplement, again providing him with an invaluable introduction to the literary world. “Mr. Purdy is a superb writer, using all the fires of the heart and the crystallising powers of the brain.” He was in the “very highest rank of contemporary American writers” and 63: Dream Palace was “a masterpiece.” Within two years, she was convinced that “in the future he will be regarded as the greatest American prose writer of our time.” Going even further, Sitwell proclaimed: “I am convinced that in the future he will be known as one of the greatest writers produced in America during the last hundred years.”
Dame Edith’s prediction never came to pass. Although Purdy’s critical reputation quickly grew, it peaked in the 1960s, and he never enjoyed a bestseller. Among mainstream readers his name remains obscure. Nevertheless, his work has influenced a host of major writers and accrued a diverse cult following that includes many gay or queer readers. This influence has been both direct and indirect. For example, the minimalist aesthetic of Gordon Lish, an influential editor, writer, and teacher, was largely guided by Purdy’s early stories. With Purdy in mind, Lish radically cut down Raymond Carver’s early manuscripts, cocreating the neo-minimalist Carver style that became famous. To Lish and several major figures like Jonathan Franzen, James Purdy was a visionary and an “authentic American genius,” as Gore Vidal declared. Since Purdy’s best work is on par with that of Melville and Faulkner, it is not surprising he was praised by the likes of Tennessee Williams, William Carlos Williams, and Joan Didion. Purdy’s literary significance has long been much greater than his sales and public recognition suggest.
As is the case with many novelists, Purdy’s work was personal, reflecting his own life experience. Through a unique alchemy, he transformed those raw life materials into powerful, symbolic works that critique American history, society, and culture—and especially, the family. To some degree, as scholar and critic Frank Baldanza wrote in 1974, Purdy’s vision touches the “experience of every American family.” Many critics failed to discern his work’s social and political edge, but Purdy insisted: “All of my work is a criticism of the United States, implicit not explicit.” His dogged investigation of American origins, ancestry, and identity constitutes a larger project—an “exploration of the American soul,” as he put it. English critic Stephen D. Adams described his works as a “cumulative endeavor to chart the ancestry of the national psyche.” Gordon Lish said Purdy’s work was regarded “as a sort of aberration, and reviewers attempt to account for him as such. But he is not an aberration at all. His work issues from the central American myths.” Alluding to William Carlos Williams’s book title, he added: “It is solidly in the American grain.” In Purdy’s only television appearance, he told a Dutch audience: “You see, people say I don’t like the United States. But I am the United States. You can only hate what you love, what you are a part of.” His work, Purdy wrote, was likened to an underground river “flowing undetected through the American landscape.” Archetypally, Purdy dramatizes crises of fate, identity, desire, and human nature, conveying a tragic sense of life couched in dark laughter.
In the 1960s, Purdy was familiar to aficionados of contemporary fiction, and his stories and novels were taught in colleges and even high schools. Purdy was praised by seminal critics including Brooks Atkinson, Ihab Hassan, Donald Pease, and R. W. B. Lewis, who rated Purdy alongside Ralph Ellison and Saul Bellow. In 1964, Susan Sontag declared “anything Purdy writes is a literary event of importance,” and he was “indisputably one of the half dozen or so living American writers most worth taking seriously.” Although Purdy’s name has since slipped under the radar of many critics and professors, Sontag underscored the “deservedly high place” he held “in contemporary letters.” Philosopher of language and novelist George Steiner said Purdy is “a writer of remarkable talent” whose books “take one by the throat and shake one’s bones loose.” His work embodies the “American language at its best.” Experiencing its “honesty and sensual immediacy,” its “power to make nerve and bone speak,” its “sharpness, integrity,” and “life-giving energy,” the reader’s “imagination emerges somehow dignified.” By 1990, however, readership, reviews, and academic attention had waned. Overseas, scholars Richard Canning in England and Marie-Claude Profit in France rated him a major figure, and he had a cult readership in Italy, but at home, he was either unknown or his reputation was overshadowed by controversy. The question of what caused this falling off has been repeatedly asked, but never quite satisfactorily answered. Why did Purdy’s works not become more popular during his lifetime? Why did he not become canonical instead of remaining a cult figure? Some have pointed to the diversity and uncategorizable nature of his work and the commensurate challenge of locating an apt critical approach to it; others point to the homophobia of many Cold War–era critics and publishers. In early stories like “Man and Wife,” Purdy bravely represented homosexuality with sympathy. Opening doors for later writers, Purdy boldly pushed the envelope in subject matter and literary strategy, following the frankly homoerotic early stories of Tennessee Williams. He was the first literary writer to publish the word motherfucker—which was bowdlerized in his first book by its English publisher. Cambridge literary scholar Tony Tanner contended that Purdy had never been done justice by many leading contemporary critics, who “simply don’t know how to read his work properly.” Six years after Purdy died, Jon Michaud assessed his oeuvre in the New Yorker: “Unsparing, ambiguous, violent, and largely indifferent to the reader’s needs, Purdy’s fiction seems likely to remain an acquired taste. But it is a taste worth acquiring.”
Part of the answer to Purdy’s never receiving mainstream recognition lies not in the work, but in the man. Over several decades, upset with publishers, editors, reviewers, and sometimes friends and partisans, he made reckless remarks and took actions that ill-served him. Looking back on Purdy’s career, composer Gerald Busby underscored a “big, important streak of selfdestructiveness.” He rarely agreed to sit for interviews and would not appear on American television. “He was precisely not playing the game. That delighted him.” He knew his worth: he was a major writer and “they had to play his game.” In the interviews he did give, he castigated major periodicals and critics of the East Coast publishing apparatus. Purdy would walk into “publishers’ offices and go on tirades.” Signed to numerous major houses, he would “alienate himself from each one.” He could “push anyone’s buttons, to get their attention,” Busby said. Jorma Sjoblom, Purdy’s lover and lifelong friend, said “he could be sharp in his criticism” and “alienated some people.” Running through publishers like fashion trends, Purdy vocalized his dissatisfaction with the recognition or promotion he received, which, at the best of times, was weighty. Over the decades, therefore, a growing list of editors and publishers crossed Purdy off their lists. A lot of people got back at him, Busby said. “He made enemies. They buried his books.” James Purdy was a staunch individualist, not a team player. He would “not play ball with the team” of the establishment, his friend James Link wrote, refusing to review their books, swap blurbs, or join official guilds. Instead, he identified with the individual fighter, attracted to images of bullfighters and boxers. In the 1940s he collected bullfight posters, and on his mantle and on the walls of his studio apartment on 236 Henry Street in Brooklyn Heights, he displayed several framed antique lithographs of boxers ready for fisticuffs. For a time, Purdy hung out in a New York gym where fighters trained, to listen to their talk. As a writer struggling to publish, battling baffled editors, homophobic reviewers, and stingy publishers, Purdy was a fighter. “Writing is like being a boxer,” he said in late career. “If you don’t want to get knocked down, you shouldn’t be in the game.” In Out with the Stars (1993), Abner Blossom, based on composer Virgil Thomson, tells his protégé: “I am above else a soldier and a fighter. For an artist never surrenders, never has in his possession the white flag.” He is the “fighting man forever. Battles are his lifeblood and energy. Fight! Struggle! Engage in mortal hand-to-hand combat. And then soar upward!” Or, as Ishmael Reed following Muhammed Ali put it: “writin’ is fightin’.” This was Purdy’s credo as he put up his dukes to agents, publishers, reviewers, and eventually, the entire Eastern literary establishment.
Thus, in one vein, his story is that of an uncompromising artist’s quixotic battle with the publishing establishment, taking them on, on his own. Pyrrhic victories, among others, were won along the way. Numerous friends uttered these six words: “He was his own worst enemy.” But from an alternate perspective, the fact that Purdy’s works of integrity and vision failed to reach a sizable audience is a condemnation not of a temperamental artist, but of a conservative, cliquey New York publishing world and book review system that failed to take risks to promote his eccentric genius. From the start, Purdy’s queer and transgressive content repelled and embarrassed some critics, and even some of his own publishers. Roger Straus, for example, refused to defend Eustace Chisholm and the Works after it was attacked in a homophobic hatchet job by another FSG author, Wilfrid Sheed. Nonetheless, Purdy’s loyal friends and admirers continued to spread the word, and interest in his writing and reissues of his books intermittently appeared. In 2005, Jonathan Franzen, celebrated author of The Corrections, nominated Eustace Chisholm and the Works for the Clifton Fadiman Award for Excellence in Fiction, bestowed upon an overlooked novel. In his award speech, Franzen declared: “Mr. Purdy’s novel is so good that almost any novel you read immediately after it will seem at least a little bit posturing, or dishonest, or self-admiring, in comparison.” For Franzen and many other readers, it was this dark, witty, and insightful novel about Daniel Haws—who ignores his Native ancestry and denies his love for another man—that hooked them. To Franzen, Purdy “has been and continues to be one of the most undervalued and underread writers in America.”
*
Writing a biography of James Purdy presents special challenges. He took pains to conceal his background throughout his career, tossing out red herrings about his past. He was reticent, even deceptive, in presenting basic facts, such as his birthdate. Even Jorma Sjoblom believed Purdy to have been nine years younger than he actually was. Purdy often claimed he was from Fremont, Ohio, but he was born in Hicksville and grew up in Findlay—forty miles from Fremont. His false claim was also a nod to Sherwood Anderson, whose Winesburg, Ohio was set nearby. Like Anderson, Purdy writes with compassion about the alienation and despair suffered by people in small communities who feel different, queer. Purdy’s evasiveness about these facts, his resistance to giving a chronology, and his rejection of past attempted biographers have thwarted a full-length biography until now.
Purdy’s friend Tom Zulick remarked: “As much as he was a radical in some ways creatively, he was also a classical Midwestern man with classical ideas and mores, but informed by his intellect and his experiences as a gay man.” One pronounced theme running through Purdy’s life is instability and isolation at different periods, including his upbringing; another is his position as an outsider. As a gay man from the Midwest born in the early twentieth century, he identified with marginalized peoples: Natives (he claimed faint Ojibwe/Anishinaabe ancestry), black people, and the poor. To African American critic Joseph T. Skerrett Jr., Purdy’s work evidences his “emotional identification with the powerless, the stigmatized, and the frustrated.” Purdy was “suspicious of power,” and always responded to “the outsiders.” In the 1990s, Purdy was vexed by gay activists who asked, “When did you come out?” He rejoined, “I was born out.”
Delving into Purdy’s contrarianism, this biography seeks to understand why he was rarely content with the treatment he received from agents, editors, publishers, and critics. Regardless of how much praise he received, it never sufficed. This led contemporaries and friends, such as writers Joyce Carol Oates and Paul Bowles respectively, to wonder what it was Purdy wanted. As he sought recognition and promoted his books, his efforts often seemed to squander the goodwill extended to him. “James Purdy didn’t play the game of being a writer well,” said editor Don Weise, and he gained a reputation as difficult, even irrational. Purdy’s laments always center on a figure who had betrayed or neglected him, who was supposed to love and support him. These feelings perhaps have deep roots in Purdy’s early, troubled family dynamic—his oft-absent father, his parents’ divorce, and his mother who turned the family home into a rooming house.
Even visionaries are shaped by their times. This biography considers his life and works over his long career in their Great Depression, World War II, Cold War, late modernist, and postmodern contexts. Purdy insisted on radical artistic freedom, and with his liberal-anticommunist political stance, he was able, even as a gay and challenging writer, to easily benefit from American cultural capital and the support of the US government. He was part of a network of writers, scholars, critics, and publishers who had been in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), and/or affiliated with its successor, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) that was secretly financed by the CIA, or other agencies promoting the image of the United States abroad, such as the United States Information Agency. Circa 1960, even a writer critical of the nation, provided he was not “red” or too “pink,” could be embraced by these bureaus as exemplifying American freedom of expression.
Purdy spent much time alone chasing his vision, but to meet him is to encounter his fascinating friends, who inspired him and became material for his narratives. Among them were Gertrude Abercrombie, a Chicago surrealist artist; Sam Steward, a Midwestern English professor and aspiring literary writer turned tattooist and pornographer; Chicago writer Wendell Wilcox, who, like Steward, was a friend and correspondent of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas; and two gifted musicians, singer and composer Richard Hundley and pianist and composer Robert Helps, who was Purdy’s neighbor in Brooklyn Heights. Celebrity friends included Tennessee Williams, Virgil Thomson, Gloria Vanderbilt, and Ned Rorem; Edward Albee was a lifelong frenemy. At one party Albee invited him to at his large loft, after James arrived, Edward just stared at him. “I’m not sure Edward ever talked to him” that night, said John Uecker, actor, director, and Purdy’s longtime friend and assistant.
From the 1970s through his last years, Purdy attracted circles of younger friends and companions, and he exerted an enduring influence on a constellation of writers, composers, directors, actors, and artists. Some of them, like writer John Stewart Wynne, wrote well-received fan letters. Others, like John Uecker, met Purdy through mutual friends such as Virgil Thomson. Still others, like novelist Matthew Stadler, were enchanted after being assigned to review his work. These were mostly younger gay men, actors or writers who became intense admirers, often originally from the Midwest. Between Purdy and various combinations of acolytes was friendship, mentorship, brotherhood, and love; but also envy, rivalry, confusion, and, sometimes, hurt feelings. Some acolytes were excommunicated, some friends left of their own accord, but most who came into contact with James Purdy kept him in their minds and hearts for the rest of their lives.
James Purdy: Life of a Contrarian Writer both penetrates and celebrates mysteries of this enigmatic writer, while offering the first complete biography of him. In many cases, however, trying to solve a mystery just expands the scope of the mystery, or leads to more enigma. With so many participants gone, several puzzles of Purdy’s life may never be solved—and probably ought not to be.
From James Purdy: Life of a Contrarian Writer by Michael Snyder. Copyright © 2022 by Michael Snyder and published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
Related Books:
