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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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Ruthless, Beautiful, Dangerous, Comforting: How It Is in the World of Tove Jansson
This post was produced in partnership with Bloom, a literary site that features authors whose first books were published when they were 40 or older.
1.
I am sometimes tempted to create and claim an alternate childhood: sepia memories featuring fantastical lands, imaginary friends and foes, brilliant DIY costumes and dwellings; and, of course, books upon books from which such storytelling genius sprung. I am a writer, after all, and what is a writer if not a card-carrying lonely bookworm from birth?
But in my real childhood, we didn’t have books; my parents weren’t readers. In any case they would not have read to us, because English was not their first language, and, looking back, I recognize that they were too troubled and exhausted for bedtime rituals like storytime. My sad childhood story, then, is that, without the solace of books, I was simply lonely. In pre-adolescence I became a romantic with low self-esteem, fixating on boys to sweeten the bitter sadness. Then, as a teenager, I stumbled from depression into organized religion: God would fill all that loneliness with his unconditional and all-powerful love. It was an irresistible idea at the time; it was what there was.
Books didn’t save me until I was an adult. They are still saving me. Another way of saying this is that, literarily, I am about 11 years old -- falling in love over and again with that secret understanding, the deep solace that odd, lonely children typically find in books about odd, lonely children. I am consoled by beautiful, strange, truthful books quite as if I were still that achey-hearted, depressed young girl: I prefer these books to humans as true friends, and even seem to believe that they were written for me.
This is my best explanation for why the adult stories and novels of Tove Jansson (pronounced TOO-vuh YAHN-sun) have captivated me so fully. For some 25 years, Jansson wrote and illustrated the beloved Moomintroll books for children -- 15 books that made her Finland’s best-known author abroad. In 1968, at age 54, she published Sculptor's Daughter, a collection of short childhood memoirs, and from then on wrote almost exclusively adult fiction -- 11 books over the next 30 years. But the Moomin books, and the years she spent writing them, evidently stayed with her; the result was a stirring art, both light and dark, consoling and disturbing, spare and intricate. A simplicity of expression belies the mystery of Jansson’s art -- ostensibly plain, teeming with profound delights and worries -- all of which this reader’s stunted, sad-girl soul is grateful to have discovered.
Hopefully many more will soon share in the bounty: in honor of Jansson’s centenary (she died at 86), New York Review Books is releasing this fall an extensive collection of Jansson’s stories, The Woman Who Borrowed Memories. Drawing from five previously translated collections, the new book will join three of Jansson’s adult novels -- The Summer Book, The True Deceiver, and Fair Play -- in the NYRB Classics series.
2.
Jansson’s transition from writing for children to writing for adults strikes one as rather seamless; as if, like the boats and icebergs that populate her Nordic setting, she floated slowly but fatefully, propelled by gentle undercurrents and the occasional potent storm -- from dawn, to dusk, to dark and starry night.
Earlier this year at The Millions, Alix Ohlin wrote:
Childhood, as I knew it, was rife with secrecy and weirdness, with actions that made sense to you but not anybody else. It’s no wonder that I fell in love with Moomin...Tove Jansson understood that secrecy and strangeness are endemic to childhood.
What Jansson understood too was that the same secrecy and strangeness permeate all human experience; and that much of what we fear, want, and love remains unchanged, from beginning to end.
Sculptor's Daughter is the book that straddled Jansson’s two literary careers, both temporally and substantively: the vignettes written in present tense, especially, read like a child speaking to another child, even as the insights and observations resonate hauntingly for the adult reader. In “Parties,” for example, Jansson invites us into the raucous evenings hosted by her artist parents, and we understand that we are encountering both the child in real time and the author in retrospect:
I love Daddy’s parties. They could go on for many nights of waking up and going to sleep again and being rocked by smoke and the music and then suddenly a bellow would strike a chill right down to my toes...
The table is the most beautiful thing. Sometimes I sit up and look over the railing and screw up my eyes and then the glasses and the candles and all the things on the table shimmer and make a whole as they do in a painting. Making a whole is very important. Some people just paint things and forget the whole. I know. I know a lot that I don’t talk about.
All men have parties and are pals who never let each other down. A pal can say terrible things which are forgotten the next day. A pal never forgives, he just forgets and a woman forgives but never forgets. That’s how it is. That’s why women aren’t allowed to have parties. Being forgiven is very unpleasant.
Family photographs are interspersed with text, as if a book without visuals was not yet conceivable for Jansson; and the images, like the memoirs themselves, evoke the range of emotions -- from silliness (her father’s pet monkey Poppolino) to melancholy (a lone boat, the endless horizon) to danger (white water crashing beneath a black sky) to perfect safety (smiling, towheaded Tove at Christmastime).
The Summer Book (1972), Jansson’s first adult novel, features a six-year-old girl and an octogenarian grandmother as co-protagonists. “That The Summer Book feels simultaneously idyllic and sad,” Ohlin wrote, observing too the seamlessness in Jansson’s oeuvre, “—that it has moments of earthy humor...renders it very much a piece with the Moomin books.” Sophia and her ailing but plucky grandmother (both wonderfully complex characters) spend the summer on a tiny island-among-islands in the Gulf of Finland in the wake of Sophia’s mother’s death. The mother is barely mentioned, the father distracted and solitary; their absence is an absolute tragic presence at the same time it is irrelevant to the games, explorations, and battles between Sophia and Grandmother -- rendered in Janssonian prose that is at once austere and rich, and in vignettes with titles like “The Cat,” “The Cave,” “The Neighbor,” and “The Enormous Plastic Sausage.”
Along with idyll, sadness, and humor, there is fury, terror, art, philosophy, religion, science, and -- perhaps most importantly in the universe that is Jansson’s child-adult continuum -- play. For Jansson, play is all, and eternal -- it is work, love, conflict, and art. In “The Magic Forest,” Grandmother sits on the forest floor and whittles “outlandish animals” from “wood that had already found its form...that expressed what she wanted to say,” and she collects bones. Sophia asks what she is doing, and she says, “I’m playing.” Sophia joins in the game, and when she finds “a perfect skull of some large animal” to add to the collection, they bring it to the magic forest, where it “gleamed with all its teeth.” Suddenly, Sophia screams, “Take it away! Take it away!” There is little narration accompanying this moment, but the reader recognizes the raw panic of a six year old whose mother has abruptly disappeared from her life. Death has entered the game, has overwhelmed both art and play, and Jansson’s restraint is powerful: henceforth, “Grandmother often went to the magic forest when the sun went down,” that is, without Sophia, on her own.
Sophia and Grandmother are playmates, partners in crime, and arch nemeses: together they create adventures, console each other, and argue. Their companionship is as genuine and complex as any between adult peers, perhaps more so. A testament to the fineness of the novel’s art -- its authentic gaze into life’s beauty and pain -- is that, when we discuss the book as a text in one of my undergraduate classes, I can choose -- depending on the arc of the discussion and my sense of the students’ emotional maturity -- whether or not to bring out the implication, in the final moments of the final vignette (“August,” the end of summer), of Grandmother’s impending death; and thus Sophia’s double abandonment at such a young age. The complexity of the relationship stands on its own, and the students have generally not seen that sorrowful ending without prompting; perhaps they can’t bear to.
3.
The responsibility of that decision is one that I believe Jansson herself would appreciate. A theme that tracks from The Summer Book into Jansson’s stories, and most notably into The True Deceiver, is that of “pure” honesty. It seems clear that during her many years as a famous children’s book author, Jansson struggled with the question of whether children need protecting from the hard truths of life, or if, like the child of “Parties” -- little Tove herself -- it was better to understand, from an early age, “That’s how it is.” In The Summer Book, when Sophia and Grandmother find a dead sea bird, Sophia becomes angry and insists on a good story to explain it; despite herself, Grandmother concedes and tells her that he died when he was singing, “right when he was happier than he’d ever been before.” Later, when Sophia prays to God to “make something happen” because she is bored, a great storm comes, and she is frightened for having caused it; Grandmother again calms her by telling her that she herself prayed for the storm first.
But in a story called “The Cartoonist,” and then later in The True Deceiver, Jansson -- through the characters Samuel Stein, an upstart cartoonist, and the helplessly kind children’s book author Anna Amelein -- takes up this question directly, vis-a-vis the letters that illustrators receive from children. Stein is learning the ropes of the cartoon business, and to his elder colleague Carter, who never opens the letters he receives, he says, “You can’t do that. You’re famous, they admire you. Those letters are from children, and they need to be answered.” To which Carter replies: “You’re too young. It’s better for them to get used to it right from the start, you know, used to the fact that things don’t turn out the way you imagined and that it doesn’t matter that much.”
Similarly, Anna’s newly arrived roommate and nemesis Katri Kling, an orphaned outcast in a small Finnish village defined by her cold rationalism and terrible honesty, says, “suddenly vehement” --
“But how long can they rely on what’s not reliable? For how many years do we fool these children into believing in something they shouldn’t believe in? They have to learn early, or they’ll never manage on their own.”
Jansson renders a worthy battle between the always-nice, mushy-minded Anna and the ruthlessly effectual Katri, challenging the reader to see just what’s at stake on both sides of the argument.
“And what about this one?” Anna went on. “Where’s the chitchat? He’s tried to draw a rabbit -- obviously no talent at all -- so here you could write something like ‘I’ve hung your picture above my desk’...You can fill nearly a whole page with the skating and the cat if you write big enough.”
“Miss Amelin,” said Katri, “you’re actually quite cynical. How have you managed to hide that?”…
“That doesn’t matter. The whole point is to give them a nice letter. You have to learn how it’s done. But I wonder if you can. I almost think you don’t like them.”
Katri shrugged her shoulders and smiled her quick wolfish smile. “Neither do you,” she said.
Time and again, Jansson took up this question, pitting blunt frankness against hand-wringing nicety. Mari and Jonna, the two women artists who live and work together in Jansson’s final, autobiographical novel Fair Play, embody yet more shades of this conflict. Jonna is matter-of-fact and unsentimental; Mari is more self-doubting and emotional. One day, Jonna shoots a seagull that has been devouring eider chicks; Mari gets upset: “You just love guns! You just can’t stop!” When she calms down, she begins to philosophize, passive-aggressively, about the temperament of the natural hunter: “He’s considered to be bold and a little dangerous. You know, a person who plays for high stakes, who can be ruthless and take chances that other people don’t dare take.” Jonna reminds Mari of a wounded gull that Mari once tried to nurse back to health, but it was “full of worms. You can’t mend what’s totally broken,” and so Jonna killed it with a hammer.
“There are times,” Jonna went on without listening, “there are times when a healthy ruthlessness is the right thing.”
A near-exact episode, between young Tove and her friend Albert, occurs in Sculptor’s Daughter, after which Tove thinks, “[I]t was lovely to be able to cry. Everything was over and everything was all right. Albert always put things right.”
4.
The ongoing, necessary struggle between compassion and candidness -- the need for “healthy ruthlessness” in the midst of conventional politesse -- permeates all of Jansson’s work and seems to me central to her sense of what it meant to be a “woman artist.” It’s women -- weak and pathetic women -- who are dogged by what her characters often refer to as a “bad conscience.” There seems always to be one such troublesome (female) soul in Jansson’s fiction: in Sun City, her dark comedy about a retirement community in St. Petersburg, Florida, it’s Evelyn Peabody, about whom the more sensible and aesthetically-minded Mrs. Morris observes:
[T]he woman stood there and rambled on about how of course he was an unpleasant old man but she had to do her best to comfort him because after all there was some good in every human being...she thought fleetingly of how often it seems to be the case that compassion derives from guilt and gives rise to contempt. Ready-made virtues struck her as being common, and she didn’t like Miss Peabody.
Nobody at the Berkeley Arms home really does; even the “unpleasant old man” Mr. Thompson rejects her so-called compassion. At the annual spring ball, the mayor drops dead in the middle of the dance floor, and Miss Peabody promptly goes to pieces:
Peabody just went on crying, from tension and exhaustion, for all the people who died from dancing and for all the people who never got to dance...
“Peabody,” said Thompson sternly, “now that’s enough. Did you really care about the Mayor?”
“No! Not about him, not about anybody! But people’s lives are so sad!”...
“Bullshit,” said Thompson. “Peabody, there’s something wrong with you. If you’ll stop and think about it you’ll discover you don’t feel sorry for anyone in the whole world, but you don’t dare stop and think.”
But as clear as Jansson is about the follies of guilt and abstract compassion, she never holds her characters in contempt. She gives Peabody her due, which is to say she allows her as much of an interior life as every other character (the novel employs roving narrative omniscience with great skill). In a deft shift from third person to first person, a fascinating and somewhat frequent feature in Jansson’s fiction, we get this insight into Peabody's emotional backstory:
The smell of wet grass and the sigh of the rain carried her far back in time and she could remember without pain. As always, she thought about her father. She loved him. He took them on a picnic every Sunday...There were too many of us, Peabody thought, and we were too little, and Mama worried all the time—there might be snakes and ticks and it might rain. Papa would run around setting things up. One time when it was cold and windy, he found us a barn. And one time he tried to build us a hut out of pine boughs. But it was too much for him...And then it started to rain, and he gathered us under a huge tree and Mama said if there was lightning, a big tree was the most dangerous place to be. And once I tried to tell her that we liked danger, but I don’t think she heard what I said.
Jansson shifts not only into subjective first-person consciousness, but into the territory of -- what else -- childhood. When Peabody remembers her parents, she remembers their anxiety and over-protectiveness, and at the same time, as an old woman, she misses being taken care of by them. She has become helpless and pitiable without them. “She should have remembered that it was always better to leave decisions to other people and not let yourself be misled by compassion. Once again, Peabody had made herself miserable, and there was no one to talk her out of it.” Contrast with Jansson, whose father was a confident, free-spirited sculptor: he kept a pet monkey and all manner of animals in the house, and in the story “The Monkey” (clearly based on her father, for the character is a sculptor), he watches his monkey dash out from under the warmth of his coat and up into a tree in the freezing cold: “[H]e thought, you poor little bastard. You’re freezing, but you’ve got to climb.” Danger, cold, what have you: you've got to climb.
5.
“We say the phrase ‘a happy childhood’ as if it’s a given,” Ohlin wrote, “as if we understand it to be the most desirable thing. But the richly varied experiences of childhood, even at their most positive, must be more complicated than happiness.” In her memoir, Jansson never says, outright, “My childhood was very happy,” or perfect, or ideal, and I wouldn’t guess she thought that. But what we feel, in her descriptions of what it was to be a child, is a stunning directness: unmediated, unprotected, unadulterated by “bad conscience” or anything other than pure life itself. It’s that full range of experience that brings comfort and safety, not being shielded from darkness or ugliness.
Jansson respected the fine tuning of a child’s sensibilities: children know better than anyone -- better than they do as adults -- that the world is a dangerous, beautiful, terribly alive place. And a place -- as in stories like “The Storm” and “The Squirrel,” featuring female characters whose conflicts are waged within their own minds -- where one must work things out for oneself, often in pained solitude. I knew all this as a lonely child, and when I finally found literature, those truths were reflected back to me, and I found comfort. Am still finding it. And very much so in Jansson. Thankfully, art may be slow, but never too late.
In a rare moment of lyricism, Jansson wrote of storytime with her mother:
Through endless forest dark and drear no comfort near a little girl alone did roam so far from home the way was long the night was cold the thunder rolled the girl did weep no more I’ll find my mother kind for in this lonely haunted spot my awful lot will be beneath this tree to lie and slowly die.
Very satisfying. That’s how it was when we shut the danger out.
That’s how it was.
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