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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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What Kind of Angel: On Percy Shelley
Two hundred years ago this summer, the maddeningly reckless poet Percy Bysshe Shelley rode a double masted sailboat straight into the maw of a storm off the coast of Italy. He drowned, as did the two other men on board when the ship went down 10 miles from shore in the Gulf of La Spezia. This was the definitive end to Percy’s life, but, as often happens in literature, only the beginning of his story.
For days after he disappeared, Percy’s family and friends held out hope that perhaps he was alive and convalescing somewhere along the coastline. Eventually, his body washed ashore near the town of Viareggio, dashing all hopes. According to one account, he was only identifiable because of a book of Keats poems in his jacket. Percy had wanted to be buried in Rome, but the manner of his death made this wish difficult to fulfill. Italian law dictated that anything washed ashore by the sea must be burned to prevent the spread of plague. Percy’s body was buried in the sand for weeks until a small group could perform a beachside cremation. The party entrusted to this gruesome duty included Lord Byron, Europe’s most famous poet and one of Percy’s closest friends. Byron later wrote of Percy, “He was the best and least selfish man I knew.”
In his 29 years, Percy published a smattering of poems, a play, and a pair of pretty bad novels; gentlefolk and members of the establishment knew him in life more for his godless behavior than the lilting cadence of his lines. From the vantage of the gatekeepers of literature, on the day his ashes were interred in a cemetery in Rome, Percy Bysshe Shelley seemed destined to be forgotten. Lucky for us, they were very wrong.
In the decades after his death, Percy gained a literary reputation as “a sweet angel,” beautiful in art if ineffectual in life. This view is a misreading on two fronts, of the nature of angels (who are bearers of havoc) and of the particular man in question.
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Percy Shelley was born into a family with a hereditary title that was destined to be his as firstborn son; this, plus the wealth of his paternal grandfather, should have guaranteed him an easy stride through life. But young Percy didn’t make anything easy on himself. He was 18 when he got himself kicked out of Oxford for being an atheist and an anarchist. He was hardly the only unbeliever on campus, but he was the kind that went so far as to write and distribute a hard-to-ignore pamphlet entitled “The Necessity of Atheism.”
After Oxford, he married a tavern owner’s daughter and together they traveled to Dublin. Percy wanted to find a printer to distribute a tract that he wrote urging the Irish to agitate for better rights. He paid for the printing of 1,500 copies of a diatribe that urged a nonviolent rebellion (but rebellion nonetheless) against British rule. Distribution of his seditious tract proved a challenge so he tied copies to balloons and tucked them into toy boats and sent them down the Liffey. His words failed to stir Irish hearts, which was perhaps to his advantage as it meant he escaped the rebuke of the crown, and after two months he pulled up stakes and returned to England.
As the son of a baronet, Percy had none of the bourgeoisie’s how-will-I-pay-my-bills motivation to curtail his provocative behavior—that is, until his father Sir Timothy cut him off in 1814. His father had put up with all manner of antics but he could no longer look the other way after Percy abandoned his wife and children and ran away to France with 16-year-old Mary Godwin, the daughter of one of Percy’s nonconformist heroes. (Let the record show, this wasn’t the first time that Percy had run away with a 16-year-old, as he’d eloped with his first wife Harriet when she was the same age. He’d been 18 then; he was 22 now—old enough to know better and to realize he was breaking a vow, albeit one he’d never really believed in.)
In his letters Percy often sounds quite mystified by Harriet’s sustained shock at his desertion. From Percy’s point of view, the question was not whether he was loyal to a father or a wife or fellow subjects of the crown. He had to follow the starry commands of Love, Justice, Truth. Marriage was a mere human invention, and his allegiance was to a higher power. His love for Mary Godwin was furious, primal, transcendent; he did not, would not resist. None of this was proper behavior then—and, to be fair, it would be considered poor form now. You can make excuses because of his genius—and he was a lyrical genius—but Percy the truthsayer was likely rather hard to bear as a person.
In all areas of life, large and small, petty and consequential, profane and sacred, Percy was annoyingly insistent on acting in opposition to what was expected or accepted. He would not adhere to rules if he believed the rules were wrong. He repeatedly elevated ideas over emotions. He saw himself as a conduit for the electricity of the universe. On subjects that mattered he could brook no compromise. Allegedly he was gentle and shy in person, but in correspondence he sounds like someone dangerously convinced of the total redeeming power of his own good intentions. I don’t think he thought himself as a man out of step with the world—he saw the world as out of step with its own ideal self.
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Unmarried but inseparable, Percy and Mary lived in open defiance of social propriety for more than a year in London. Percy never divorced Harriet, but he also almost never visited her, barely acknowledged her in writing, and likely rarely thought of her. Before long Mary became pregnant with his child. A girl was born early and lived only long enough to leave them both stricken with grief when she died. Within months, Mary was pregnant again. A boy, this time. She would have four children with Percy over the course of their life together; all but one of them died before Percy did.
In addition to his insistence on living with a woman who was not his wife, Percy harbored many scandalous ideals for the time: freethinking, polyamory, women’s suffrage, vegetarianism. He remained politically motivated but he was no longer sending tracts aloft on hot air balloons. Activism was one more thing that he had tried and failed, along with being a novelist. He labored over a long, nameless poem about the dark, relentless forces of creativity, a poem that eventually found publication as “Alastor,” which showed some promise as a poem but failed to strike fire with readers. He was a particular kind of failure: the wow-you-are-so-talented-it-hurts-to-say-no, the oh-this-would-be-great-from-someone-else kind of failed writer. Talent isn’t the sine non qua of success in publishing.
Sometime near the start of 1816, Percy became convinced that he was dying of tuberculosis. He is often characterized in Mary’s journals as “unwell” or “very unwell,” “feverish and fatigued” or taking to bed. He had always presented a fragile constitution, but he seemed worse than usual that spring. The decision to flee England with Mary and their baby boy William was in part a gamble to see if fairer climates would reinvigorate his health. It also, rather obviously, got them away from the judging eyes of almost everyone they knew.
Once again with Percy, a step forward occurs only in response to some adversity; he cannot go out into the world unless his house has burst into flames, or he has become certain that some pox is upon it. Convinced he was dying, pledged into deep debts, shunned by proper society, and now in foreign exile—not the moment, by most lights, to produce a life altering masterpiece. But that’s what happened in the weeks and months Percy spent abroad. All the adversity of his life to date had led to this.
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In Geneva, Percy’s and Mary’s daily routine narrowed to their books, their child, and each other. They even found a partial relief from Mary’s stepsister, Claire Clairmont, who relied on them emotionally and financially. Claire was obsessed with Lord Byron, who was also renting (far more palatial) rooms on the lake, too. She was the one to introduce Percy to Lord Byron, in fact, and therefore deserves at least some of the credit for the deeply consequential friendship that formed between the two poets.
All through their stay in Geneva, they wrote—all of them, not just Percy but also Mary, Lord Byron, even Lord Byron’s personal physician. They wrote letters, diary entries, short stories, poems, novel drafts. And Percy wrote his first real masterpiece. “Mont Blanc” is, of all Percy’s poems, the one that best balances tone and topic, concrete images and abstract ideas, universal setting and personal import, and it sticks the landing with beautiful turns of phrase. Straight out of the opening gate the poem thunders with words as forceful in their flow as the Alpine mountain they evoke:
The everlasting universe of things
Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves,
Now dark—now glittering—now reflecting gloom—
Percy had written lovely lines before, and wrote lovely lines many times over in the years after he wrote “Mont Blanc.” But I am given pause when reading this poem because in addition to sibilance and beauty it also offers a dialogue between views, like separate factions of a single, fascinating mind.
In the third section of the poem, Percy offers lyrical awe about the steeps and caverns of Mont Blanc and then with little more than a literal dash he vaults into a new, equally dramatic dialogue about himself and the nature of reality, the truth or untruth of all he sees:
Some say that gleams of a remoter world
Visit the soul in sleep, that death is slumber,
And that its shapes the busy thoughts outnumber
Of those who wake and live.—I look on high;
Has some unknown omnipotence unfurl’d
The veil of life and death? or do I lie
In dream, and does the mightier world of sleep
Spread far around and inaccessibly
Its circles?
In the span of a few dozen lines of blank verse, the voice of the poet traverses from “Look at this amazing mountain!” to “Is this mountain even real?” to “Am I real?” and “Are any of us really real?” For the reader, all this fancy footwork can be hard to see at first. It’s even harder to point out as an essayist sampling a few lines. This is because “Mont Blanc” accumulates more than it presents at any moment. I can pick and choose from the stanzas and offer great lines, but the real force is one that you get by ascending from start to finish, like, well, a mountain climber.
In the calm darkness of the moonless nights,
In the lone glare of day, the snows descend
Upon that Mountain; none beholds them there,
Nor when the flakes burn in the sinking sun,
Or the star-beams dart through them.
Where does it all come from? How did Percy pour out this new work over the course of a few weeks in and around Geneva? Such heady writing is only possible for a person who has developed a practiced ease with abstractions, who sees the real world and the world of forms as interchangeable. For Percy, this deliberative skill took shape over all his adult life, but it advanced in an important, dramatic way during the time he spent that summer in constant dialogue with his new friend, Lord Byron.
Byron had a quickening effect on Percy’s imagination. Years before the two men met in person, Percy noted in a journal: “Mary read to me some passages from Lord Byron’s poems. I was not before so clearly aware how much of the colouring our own feelings throw upon the liveliest delineations of other minds; our own perceptions are the world to us.” Now, in Geneva, the pair traded back and forth ideas on galvanism, animal spirits, witchcraft, the cult of Bonaparte, if ghosts are real, alchemy, the divine right of kings, the keep of dreams: Percy and Lord Byron were opposites in temperament but they shared a relentless interest in the fringe of the ordinary world.
Each day they talked and talked till late into the night, pickaxing at the hill of human interests. If weather permitted, they spent their days sailing on the lake. Indeed, for a man who could not swim, Percy Shelley spent a remarkable amount of time on boats. During a three week period, Mary notes nine separate times that Shelley (as she calls him in her diary) “goes out on the boat” on Lake Geneva, usually with Lord Byron. Eventually, the poets circumnavigated the lake on a long trip. They spent much of the time rereading Rousseau’s novel Julie. They were morbidly elated by the parallels to art when they almost drowned in a gale in the same waters where Rousseau’s characters had brushes with death. According to Byron’s letters and journals, in the course of the trip, he drafted a new canto for “Childe Harold,” the poem that made him world-famous, and Percy sketched out material that he would later turn into another long poem, “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty.”
This idyllic Geneven interlude lasted only four months. But it altered Percy’s life, and as a result his poetry and English poetry as a whole. The friendship with Lord Byron would last for years, although it would never thrive as it did this summer, and never elicit this kind of compact, concise mastery (although, to be sure, there were many more great poems to flow from Percy’s pen).
Byron, Percy, and Mary spent time together again in Italy a few years later, but much had changed by then. In his letters at the time Percy spoke with far more apprehension about his more famous friend. Percy sometimes made mention of what he saw as Lord Byron’s wasted potential. Byron in his poetry did not engage with grand ideals as Percy did. To be fair, not many people anywhere did or could engage with their ideals like Percy did. Byron mostly wanted to have fun.
In the end, after Percy drowned, it was Lord Byron who led the party to cremate his old friend’s body. Although even in that Lord Byron was never quite as dedicated as one might have wished. The funeral pyre on the beach that burned Percy’s body took hours to do its work, likely due to the saturation by seawater, and Byron became more and more agitated as they waited. He was acutely bothered by the spectators who gathered nearby on the beach to watch him. Byron was a celebrity in a very modern sense, and like many modern celebrities, he was agitated by the constant surveillance. Eventually he walked into the sea and swam away, paddling far out to where his valet waited in a boat. The rest of Percy’s small group of friends would finish the job without him.
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In a Google contest, Mary Shelley beats Percy Shelley by a country mile: a search query for her right now produces 12 million results; Percy gets around 2.5 million. It wasn’t always this way. For over more than a century, the results were even more lopsided but in the other direction: if there were a steam-powered Google in the Victorian era, its results pages would favor Percy by perhaps 100 to one. But seeing these two as either a winner or a runner-up is to miss the truth of their entangled lives.
In the daily journal that she kept while they lodged at Lake Geneva, Mary writes about sharing a story she has written with Percy. It’s a short thing, only a few pages; from our vantage we know it is the first glimmerings of what will eventually become Frankenstein. But she had no idea at the time. Later, she will admit that she might have given up on this strange little idea except for Percy’s reaction: Keep writing, he told her. She continued, writing her own words but with his steady encouragement.
Two years later, Frankenstein was published anonymously with a foreword by Percy. As word spread that its author was Percy’s companion, his not-actually-wife-but-she-acts-like-it, a mere girl of 18 (Byron’s words), let’s just say there were skeptics. Percy must have actually written it, some people theorized. That would explain the godlessness behind the book’s central idea: mortal men playing God, making life. Percy’s denials of authorship weren’t very helpful. He had already played peekaboo with the reading public more than once: his 1810 gothic novel St. Irvyne was published anonymously, and that same year he also published a poetry collection that he claimed came from the pen of a woman who attempted to assassinate George III.
His and Mary’s decision to keep coy about her authorship of Frankenstein was also in keeping with literary tradition. Daniel DeFoe a century earlier had claimed Moll Flanders and Robinson Crusoe were real figures, and another 100 years before that, Jonathan Swift published the travels of one Lemuel Gulliver as if they were true. In each case, the authors were attempting to give their fictions the respectability of the truth. Were they lying? Sort of. But also sort of no. In this earlier era before photographs, recorded audio, or captured video, you were what you claimed you were; you were what you presented yourself as, unless someone objected; and if someone claimed you were someone different, well, what proof could they have other than their own word or someone else’s?
Four years after the publication of Frankenstein’s first edition, Percy’s sailboat went under the waves off the coast of Italy. Mary spent the rest of her life extolling him as a sweet and gentle soul. In a letter written just months after his drowning she casts him in the metaphor that would define him for ages: “an angel whom imprisoned in flesh could not adapt himself to his clay shrine.” Much if not all of the rehabilitation of his image and his poetry is due to her tireless craftwork and her decision to continue to publish posthumous poems and prose from his papers for years. Their life together lasted 2,903 days. Mary would live another 10,435, until 1851.
About his writing, she was right to insist that scholars take a closer look. But what about his life, his nature, which she claims was so sensitive, so gentle? Is she to be believed? Taken from the vantage of modernity: Is Percy the man the equal of Percy the writer? Or do the flaws of the latter strike out the contribution of the former? Are these questions even worth asking? To understand Percy, you have to understand this as the context for his life and his art. Percy and Mary made Mary and Percy by fiat: their personas, their literary ghosts only exist because they struggled against all adversity to make them so with their lives and even their deaths.
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So, what do we do with Percy? We’ve got his poems, and if you care to read them, you should.; But mostly, he’s forgotten now except as an inside joke. His name comes up mostly in connection with his famous broken sonnet, “Ozymandias.” The poem serves as the title for an episode of one of the greatest TV shows of our time (see Breaking Bad) and as the name of a key character in one of the greatest graphic novels of our time (Watchmen). Ironically, Percy published “Ozymandias” under a pseudonym. Think of it: a poem about how even mighty names lose their power over time is the best remembered poem by a poet who is mostly forgotten and who wrote the poem using a name other than his real name.
Even among poets I find that I get some blank looks whenever I bring up his name. Then again, I had almost no interest in Percy Shelley’s life back when I was a 19-year old poet-in-training, too. Everything that I learned about Percy’s life in my survey class on English Poetry could be summed up in five words: He’s the Romantic that drowned. But then at the end of college, I read his play, The Cenci. Believe it or not I really liked it, I wrote in an email to a friend. Around the same time, I read Frankenstein for a class and learned more about Mary Shelley and her life and her doomed beloved. Suddenly, Percy and his poems got more interesting. Or maybe I got a little older, encountered my own adversities in life, and found something relatable in him. He never got more likable. He still struck me as unreasonable, even a bit galling. He was privileged in a way that is grotesque by modern standards. But in his best work he sank a hook into something that still has pull to it.
Earlier this year, I visited the Butler library at Columbia University while on a mission to gather material for an essay on Mary Shelley. Alone in a long row of books I found myself confronted with the fact that critical writing about her and her famous novel is dwarfed by analysis devoted to Percy. A complete copy of all 19 volumes of Shelley and His Circle alone takes up significant space. Yet in the world of modern readers the exact opposite is true: it’s all Mary, almost no Percy. I pulled down books and tried to understand once and for all the appeal of the man. I read some of the letters from Percy during their famous stay at Geneva and my first thought was, My God, they were just kids, all of them, no older than I was when I moved to New York City after college. Younger, in Mary’s case.
In his lifetime, Percy never had the fame that Lord Byron had, although he was no less good-looking, no less erudite, and far more formally innovative. (And Lord Byron was no moral beacon, either: divorced, famously unfaithful, and suspected of sleeping with his half sister.) Yet Byron was still so swarmed with admirers when he arrived in Geneva that he had to abandon his hotel rooms and rent a house outside of town. Meanwhile, Percy sat in his rooms downhill working on his great poem—perhaps the greatest poem of his era—in uninterrupted obscurity. Why? Why not him? Why not me?
Percy’s failures, his fears and his foibles add depth and meaning to his poems, to his otherwise dated lyrical accomplishments. The fact that not too many people really read or cared for his writing while he was alive makes his life all the more compelling to me despite the distance of two centuries, as I am a writer who also sometimes feels like he’s writing into a void, too. There is in Percy’s voice a familiar melancholy, sometimes elusive, sometimes explicit, as when he wrote without self-pity near the end of his life in a short poem: “for I am one / whom men love not.”
Laboring alone in a small rented house at the bottom of the hill on Lake Geneva is where I need him. Or in the boat beside the famous Lord Byron, lost in thoughts that almost no one in his lifetime will care about. Gathered around the fire listening to German ghost stories being read aloud. Percy is a great poet whose life might be more useful than his work is now: because there is in everything about him this desire to rise, and not because he likes the sound of his voice but because he longs to tell everyone what he sees from his vantage.
The fact of his persistence—no, not just his persistence, his amplification in the face of adversity, it is a reminder that there is no obligation to quit, to give up, to be polite; you do not owe the world acquiescence, or acceptance, or allegiance; you owe it nothing but the singing of the song that you find in your own head. Percy’s life taught me that, teaches me that still now as his lantern fades into the night. Was he disruptive, profoundly flawed as a man, limited by shortcomings both conscious and unconscious? Yes, and probably more. But what kind of angel brings news only of the status quo? What kind of poet speaks only the words you want to hear?
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