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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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Looking for Myself in the Stories of Sib Lit
1.
Recently I did something I’ve been avoiding for a long time: I read literature by people like me, about people like us.
We go by “Sibs,” short for “siblings of people with disabilities.” I don’t love this term. I’ve had it marketed to me my whole life: I went to Sibs Camp, joined Facebook’s SibNet group, my parents connected me to other Sibs so we could be friends in our bizarre isolation. I even represented Sibs for Parents as Leaders in Wisconsin, sitting three years in a row on a panel, where we answered questions from anxious parents whose lives had been recently upturned by a child’s diagnosis. “It will be all right,” I told them, at age 14. “Look at us, we’re fine,” we said.
My older brother, whose profound cerebral palsy defined my childhood—and who died several years ago of respiratory complications—marks me as a Sib. However, I’ve long mistrusted book recommendations that include, “It sounds like you.” My pride rankles: You don’t know me. Back off.
Still, when I began thinking about writing about my relationship with my older brother—our Wild-West alliance; my adoration of, and then distance from, him as we grew older—I wanted to know what else was out there and what others among us had said.
2.
I found just one relevant book in the barebones D.C. Public Library system, The Normal One by Jeanne Safer. It made me so irate I couldn’t read it with a clear head. It was everything I’d expected to resent in Sib Lit, absolutist, pessimistic and dramatic. I covered it in post-it notes with snide comments. Safer, who calls us the “intact” children and our siblings the “damaged” ones, writes:
Having a damaged sibling marks you. No matter what you achieve, where you go, or who you love, that other’s life remains your secret alternative template, the chasm into which you could plunge if you misstep. Whether you know it or not, his is the doom you dare not duplicate, the fate you contemplate …
Safer’s own family situation growing up was one I didn’t recognize. Her brother had undiagnosed behavioral issues, and as a response, her parents emotionally abused and neglected him. They housed him in a separate part of the building from the rest of the family, visibly favored Safer, and treated her brother as the family scapegoat. The sadness of her family’s circumstances undercut my anger a little bit. I don’t deny anyone self-inclusion in the Sib community, but of the dozens of families with kids with disabilities I knew growing up, none looked like Safer’s. It was difficult to stay livid with her for extrapolating her own life out onto ours; how could she know how far off she was?
It hit me somewhere between pages 110 and 116 that Safer hits upon multitude reasons why Sibs behave as they do: guilt, fear, resentment, neglect, loneliness. But not once in the book did she diagnose a Sib’s behavior as stemming from love for a disabled brother or sister. The shock of this—that she had no knowledge of love between siblings—softened me towards her. I couldn’t begrudge her what she hadn’t known.
After stripping Safer’s book of my post-it notes and returning it to the library, I bit the bullet and ordered used copies of every single other title on Sibs. For days, packages turned up on my doorstep, bulky envelopes and boxes and shrink-wrapped plastic. I put them on a shelf with other titles I found pertinent: Virginia Woolf’s On Being Ill, the children’s book The Brothers Lionheart, and Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slapstick. So far, Vonnegut’s deformed twins Eliza and Wilbur still felt like the best literary representation of my relationship with my brother.
3.
What is it about this relationship between a disabled body and a non-disabled body, bound as siblings, that is so impossible to define? From kindergarten through college, I was obsessed with trying to write about it, but I never hit the mark. My brother surfaced as the primary subject in short stories, composition essays, personal statements, poems, communications class speeches, and yet he didn’t. He was never there; neither was I; everything I wrote eclipsed us to become cliché and insipid. I had dozens of tacks to take, but I mostly stuck with the same one: the righteous warrior on my brother’s behalf. All of my efforts came out bland, weirdly ugly and hollow. Even in college, the words sounded childish. I became sick of myself. I decided to stop writing about him.
After Safer, reading through the rest of Sib Lit became a quest. I wanted to find something true, some Sib who had figured out how to transcend our particular brand of Hallmark prose. I read practical guides from Sibs-turned-professional-empaths, essay collections and memoirs. Almost all of the Sibs’ siblings in this genre had an intellectual disability, mostly autism. There were few to no books written by Sibs like me, whose sibling had a physical but not intellectual disability. Unlike my brother, most of the disabled siblings could speak. Most of the authors in this genre are women, this for reasons obvious as soon as I learned why: Research shows that as adults, sisters are more likely than brothers to become caretakers for their siblings with disabilities. In the face of a thankless task, women step up.
The clinically-focused literature, like Safer’s book, tended to diagnose Sibs’ ills, and then offer strategies to Sibs and practitioners for managing our specific brand of distress. Some of these I couldn’t take seriously; I’m still mulish on this subject, and chapter titles like “Your feelings and how to cope with them” elicit from me an arrogant laugh. Of this subset, I responded best to Being the Other One by Kate Strohm, who gently avoids generalizations about Sibs through phrases like “may be” and “some siblings.” In Strohm’s pages, I caught a few glimpses of myself and grudgingly tagged them. Yes, I worked hard to make my parents feel better. Yes, their marriage dissolved anyway. Yes, I can’t imagine ever having kids of my own. Yes, my closest friends all have chips on their shoulders to rival mine.
But as in any diagnostic, don’t I miss as many symptoms as I hit? Doesn’t everyone, inevitably? Experts can yammer on about us for centuries but all they’ll ever come up with is the clinical equivalent of a horoscope. I mean this with all due respect. When I read of a supposed Sib characteristic that, however fleetingly, matches my own, it feels like a revelation: I’ve got it! I try to hold on, to follow the author’s thinking, but we’ve only intersected in that instant. The rest of the diagnostic was about someone else; about the author herself; about a composite of mes around the world. It reminds me of sitting in church as a teenager, trying to follow the sermon. I’d surface from a daydream to catch a phrase that stuck to me, and then strain to focus, to follow the thought through its successive mutations. Before long it was lost again.
These books offer snippets, reflections but not the original image. Nadine Gordimer’s profile of a prodigal sister in Burger’s Daughter was sharper. Again the fiction seems more real.
Strohm quotes numerous Sibs throughout her book. One, whom she calls Nance, says that talking about her brother consistently “brings tears to [her] eyes,” that her emotions are triggered the moment she tries to articulate their relationship. The subject can’t breach her voice box. I don’t need to tell you that my throat has the same switch. There is so much contained there, contained in my body and heart that will never make it past my skin or out of my mouth. I think sometimes that it can’t be possible.
Books upon books are devoted to exploring grief and trying to describe its contours, and more still engage with the fascinating nature of siblinghood. The full spectrum of nonfiction books about Sibs, however, fit on one shelf in my office. There isn’t one about simply having a brother with cerebral palsy. And why would there be? Who the hell would want to deal with this material, this inexplicable bind? The pseudonymous Nance politely shrugs: “It just seems there are many feelings that I have never acknowledged, and unfortunately…speaking about [my brother] in an intimate sharing way almost always brings out the tears.”
I hear her. In all my stabs at writing, I mastered spins and platitudes. But watch me try to say one true thing about my brother and me, and I will fucking crumble.
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4.
Since a writing fellowship in Banff in 2017, I’ve adhered to the idea that the details of what happened are the best path to meaningful explanations. To glean truth from the facts, I turned to memoirs Sibs had written about their childhoods and siblings.
Even here, truth was hard to find. What I read felt like family stories, the kind told over and over again and that highlight family members’ quirks. Every family has these. They’re how we collaboratively define ourselves and what we use to describe our dynamic to others. (My family likes to rehash an incident involving chocolate chip cookies and the can-can.) These were the kinds of stories I told my whole life, trying to explain who we were: limitations explicated, plots tinged with slapstick humor, my sardonic tone as the punchline.
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If possible, I saw even less of myself in the Sib Lit memoirs I read. I should note: These memoirs were about Sibs whose brothers and sisters had primarily intellectual disabilities. Karl Taro Greenfeld, in Boy Alone, wrote about his brother with autism; Eileen Garbin, in How to be a Sister, wrote about her sister with autism; Rachel Simon, in Riding the Bus with my Sister—the most successful of the batch—wrote about her sister with what was once called mental retardation. I closed these books wondering what, if any, overlap these families had with mine. Many of these authors wrote of containment: containing their siblings’ outbursts, sounds, activity, mood swings. I remember my house as the opposite. We lifted, carried, pushed; I bent my energies to making my brother’s still mouth break into a wide grin. Do we actually belong in the same bubble, sharing life hacks on SibNet and bunk beds at Sibs Camp? Does our commonality come less from our experiences with our siblings, and more from our experiences with the outside world?
Greenfeld’s memoir, Boy Alone, is cuttingly sad. Spoiler alert—after describing his and his brother’s difficult childhood, Greenfeld spends 50 pages at the end of the book describing how, after years of stagnation, his brother slowly starts to make progress. He grasps rudimentary ASL, which helps bridge the gap to verbal language. He becomes more independent and gets a job as a copyeditor. He marries his childhood friend. Culminating this trajectory, he travels by himself to visit Hong Kong. Which is when the author fesses up: None of this happened. There was no progress, no happiness that his brother found in life. If anything, his situation deteriorated; he was institutionalized in various dirtholes and subject to systematic abuses including sexual assault. The twist is gutting.
I wonder which part of the book, truth or fiction, was easier for Greenfeld to write. I can’t imagine my brother’s life with speech or mobility. But, reading Boy Alone, it feels as though the fake story is Greenfeld’s sanctuary, as though this imagined life is somehow more tangible than reality. What does it say about a facet of someone’s life, if a seasoned journalist like Greenfeld would rather skim the facts and embellish the fantasy? Is it akin to my cynicism, to my dislike of self-help texts while identifying with Vonnegut’s enfants terribles?
In How to be a Sister, Garbin describes how, as an adult, she watched a documentary about autism, “my heart full of emotion. If it were a nice feeling, I’d say my heart swelled. But it was more like a bulging, like it might kill me. It was a terrible feeling. Part empathy, part schadenfreude.”
Why are there so few books about Sibs on my shelf? It’s like instead of brain drain we all have heart drain. As if, unable to bear the intensity of our most fundamental sense of home, we live in emotional exile.
Garbin writes,
When I say ‘autism,’ I feel the weight of the letters resonate beneath my collarbone as if the word is tattooed on my skin. When I hear the word in the mouths of strangers, the mouths of teachers, the mouths of celebrities, my heart constricts. I feel lonely and familiar at the same time, homesick, like someone is talking about a place I used to live.
Another possible reason for the dearth of Sib Lit, and for why so much of it feels trite and hollow, is because as Sibs we are usually only rewarded for bringing our archetypes to life. There is a market for stories about Sibs who are martyrs, Samaritans, self-destructive, game, empathetic, and resentful. This market has been around since I can remember, and the purveyors of these archetypes have been relatives, friends, teachers. Of course I learned how to be a cliché. Of course these books sound overly familiar to me.
Our siblings don’t fare much better. Garbin writes, “Whenever I mention that I have an autistic sister, people always ask me what Margaret is like. What they really mean, though, is what her autism is like.” Similarly, in an essay called “Riding to the Fountain with My Sister,” Simon writes that she remembers how “people asked me almost nothing about” her sister,
nor about our relationship. It seemed as if it was enough for them to know that I had a sister with a disability, the one then called mental retardation. [In adulthood] the lack of curiosity from others did not waver. It was those same shallow questions, over and over. Never anything about what TV shows Beth liked and I didn’t, or what names—nice and nasty—we called each other.
These days, the words I’m trying to put down about my brother are frightening. No one’s ever asked me about most parts of our relationship, and meanwhile I’ve become so good at saying what people expect me to say. It’s difficult sometimes to stray from those tried-and-true lines. I fear that in explaining my brother’s disability, I’ve erased him.
5.
The Sib Lit book that managed to transcend so many of these pitfalls was Simon’s Riding the Bus with my Sister. Part self-discovery memoir and part stunt journalism, the book centers mainly around Simon and her sister, Beth, as adults. Beth, who occupies her days riding public buses around the city, challenges Simon to join her for a year; this is the premise and structure of the book. It’s a bit like an urban Wild.
What works for Simon in Riding the Bus with my Sister is that she approaches the story both as a participant-observer and as a diarist. While parts of the book do sound like those “classic family stories,” most of it feels like two real adult women trying to renegotiate their relationship. Beth the person is more believable than Beth the disability.
I didn’t see myself in this book. I barely used any post-it notes while reading it. Simon and her sister were so obviously not me, so singularly themselves, that there was no point. It felt like an opening of space instead. Like I could breathe. I didn’t find a good reflection of my relationship with my brother, but I did find a way out from the funhouse mirror maze.
Perhaps like Simon, the trick to curing Sib Lit is to dissolve it, and with that, its strictures. To force our unrehearsed truths into the mainstream. To be plainer, less analytic, less charming.
In my case, it’s hard to tell whether this will be possible. Because he died when we were both in our 20s, my brother and I never really got the chance to figure out our adult relationship. We’re rooted in my memories, which I worry are prone to fogging and revision. And as Safer points out, that leaves me in a tough spot: Siblings are “the only surviving witnesses to your intimate history. Nobody else will remember your childhood.” I’m left to hope that, in spite of him being gone, I’ll be able to remember more than the stories I’ve rehearsed.
Image credit: Unsplash/Larm Rmah.
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