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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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Fourteen First and Last Sentence Novels
Everybody's aesthetic is set by the time you're eight years old. At its deepest level, the most intrinsic and elemental aspects of the self—within the basement of your soul—the stories you were told, the songs you heard, the pictures you looked at that are pressed into the service of constructing a person. My own aesthetic owes everything to the much beloved and much missed Pinocchio's Bookstore for children, run by Marilyn Hollinshead from 1985 to 2002, opening the year after I was born and closing the year that I moved away for college. Pinocchio's was located on Aiken at the terminus of narrow and dense shop-lined Walnut Street in the bougie Pittsburgh neighborhood of wood-paneled Victorians and brick Tudors known as Shadyside, uncharacteristically flat of terrain and gridded of street in the hilly city. Unassuming, the street-level entrance to the bookstore was at the end of a line of shops, the inventory only accessible through a staircase from the front door to the dimly lit treasures beneath, the entrance advertised with a vaguely unsettling drawing of the titular Italian puppet himself, all oak plank and joist with his nose not yet to prodigious growth. The subterranean locale meant that your descent smelled slightly of earth and rain, and the overall effect of entering the surprisingly large store was that you'd happened upon a magical cave that was filled top-to-bottom with books. Specializing in the gauntlet of children's literature from board-books for babies all the way to Young Adult novels for those in high school, and Pinocchio's made true for me Francis Spufford's beautiful recollection in The Child That Books Built about "readings that acted like transformations… when a particular book, like a seed crystal, dropped into our minds when they were exactly ready for it, like a supersaturated solution, and suddenly we changed."
Spending an hour on a rainy Saturday afternoon, in the dim lighting of Pinocchio's with its burgundy wall paper and its toy pit, it's racks of stuffed toy turtles and hedgehogs, its rows of paperbacks, and I came across many of Spufford's transformations. There was Klutz Publishing's Earthsearch: A Kid's Geography Museum in a Book by John Cassidy, which had an aluminum cover and a pith-helmeted explorer on the front; inside there was a bag of rice and an unmarked, stiff brown page that was supposedly a sheet of Bulgarian toilet paper. From that book I acquired a love of the odd and idiosyncratic. Then there's the classic World of the Unknown: Ghosts from Usborne Books, which terrified younger members of Generation X and older millennials, its violet cover showing a picture of an ethereal, monkish specter, while inside there were maps of hauntings in isolated Cotswold villages and accounts of a Manx poltergeist named Giff who took the form of a talking mongoose. That title is where my sense of the macabre comes from, which was strengthened when I discovered the gothic novels of the great John Bellairs, such as The House with a Clock in Its Walls with its classic cover by Edward Gorey. Finally, there was an anthology of Shakespeare's plays retold for children, as I recall a green-covered book illustrated with vines and roses, and haunting drawings of the witches from Macbeth and whimsical ones of Bottom from A Midsummer's Night's Dream, but I can't remember the title, and I may have imagined it (though if I haven't, please let me know). If in adulthood my aesthetic tends towards the eccentric, the twee, the idiosyncratic, an attraction toward fairy gardens and Medieval stone labyrinths covered in ivy, toward chill rain and overcast skies while listening to Arvo Pärt, then it's because of Pinocchio's. A title in that regard which stands out in my mind—a "seed crystal" as Spufford would call it—is the uncanny and beautiful picture book The Mysteries of Harris Burdick by Chris van Allsburg.
Far more famous for the slightly menacing quirkiness of Jumanji or The Polar Express, and The Mysteries of Harris Burdick is the Caldicott Medal winner's experimental title. Van Allsburg prefaces his book with a frame tale, recounting how a friend of his named Peter Wenders who worked as an editor had once met with a children's book author named Harris Burdick. At their meeting, Burdick presented Wenders with 14 images from 14 separate books, each picture including only the title of the volume which it was from, and the first line. Burdick promises that if Wenders is willing to issue a contract for all the titles, the author will return with the books in their entirety. The next day, Burdick misses their scheduled meeting. Wenders tries contacting him to no avail. He spends years attempting to discover Burdick's identity, but he is seemingly untraceable to both Wenders and van Allsburg. Consequently, van Allsburg assures us, he has reprinted the fragments in the hopes that Burdick may reveal himself. I was instantly struck. At the age of seven, when I first flipped through The Mysteries of Harris Burdick, I didn't understand that the preface was a conceit—I believed that the strange illustrator was real. And I was obsessed by the images and their captions, for they are rendered in an eerie chiaroscuro making them appear nothing so much like Renaissance engravings, like black and white mezzotint. One picture from a book supposedly entitled A Strange Day in July shows a girl and a boy, about my age at the time, by a sun dappled body of water skipping stones. The caption reads "He threw with all his might, but the third stone came skipping back." Another with the title The Harp had the first line of "So it's true he thought, it's really true," showing a harp on a rock overlooking a bubbling, wooded stream with light filtering through the branches overhead, a small figure with a walking stick standing opposing. Mr. Linden's Library depicted a girl who'd fallen asleep on a bed with crisp, white sheets, a volume opened in front of her with the tendrils of ivy growing out from it, the sentence reading "He had warned her about the book. Now it was too late." Seed crystals.
Van Allsburg writes that Burdick's "disappearance is not the only mystery he left behind. What were the stories that went with these drawings?" Seven-year-old-me was enraptured. Thirty-seven-year-old-me is still enraptured. My love of fragmentation, aphorism, mystery—all of it partially can be traced back to the van Allsburg book. If anyone is looking for a present, send me a framed copy of the 14 pictures in The Mysteries of Harris Burdick. Over the last 30 years, I've been fascinated by incomplete books, missing stories, lost volumes. The traces of literature that might have been is an obsession of mine. I'm often more moved by what the mind is able to imagine as concerns a largely absent book than I am by the real book right in front of me. Jorge Luis Borges, a fan of writing reviews of fake books (the subject of my own collection The Anthology of Babel) noted in the introduction to his Labyrinths that "To write vast books is a laborious nonsense, much better is to offer a summary as if those books actually existed." I'd go even a step further—better to write the barest traces of a novel, and to let the perfected form exist within the mind of your reader. That was the aspiration I had when I first conceived of something I call "First and Last Sentence Novels." The entire idea behind this form was that rather than writing an entire novel, the author would simply give readers the first and last sentence and the title of a hypothetical novel, an imaginary book. No other information is imparted, the only way for a reader to know anything about characters, plot, even genre, can only be implied by the clues that are the title, the first, and the last sentence. Perhaps it's a bit pompous, but I think of this as a new literary form, a type of novelistic prose poem, a hybrid, a chimera, whose main currency is delight, wonder, and mystery. Is that pompous? I don't care. The idea behind First and Last Sentence Novels is cool.
Several years ago, long before I began to write professionally, and I set up a little WordPress site, long-since expired, that was entitled First and Last Sentence Magazine, it's logo a Medieval engraving of a monk dutifully working in a scriptorium. I posted a CFP on social media with a Gmail account for people to respond to me, and as I recall I received a few dozen responses with examples from folks, some of them pretty good. Still, the whole operation was only me, I never got many hits, and the whole project just sort of died, as those things do. Latter on I thought that maybe I'd just do my own collection of a few hundred First and Last Sentence Novels. Maybe I still will one day. But a benefit of working at The Millions is that I often get to speak with some of my favorite writers, people whose work I read long before I was ever on the masthead. Brilliant, engaging, thoughtful, poignant, hilarious, and sometimes mysterious writers. So, I decided that I'd take the opportunity to resurrect this project, and query several women and men who wrote some of my favorite books that I read over the last few years and see if they'd be willing to contribute their own entries into the what I hope will be the growing canon of First and Last Sentence Novels. If I'm being totally honest, I contacted these authors because I'm greedy and I wanted to read more of their writing; I contacted them because I wanted to read their novels before you did. By the constraints of the form, I wanted to see how the brilliance of these women and men played out across two sentences that because they said almost nothing were forced to have to say everything. Now, with a bit of bragging, I'd like to present 14 new novels by some of the United States and Great Britain's most talented authors (plus my own, because I can, even though I don't deserve to be here). These are authors who have been published by The New Yorker and The Paris Review, McSweeney's and Harper's, who have taught and attended MFA programs at New York University and the Iowa Writers Workshop, and been finalists and winners for the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award. In their generous contributions to this project there is tragedy and redemption, terror and humor, introspection and elation, all in two sentences and a title. Most of all there is mystery. I hope that you find your own seed crystals here, your own transformations and that you're inspired to write your own contributions.
The Continental Marriage by Bethany Ball
First
Sentence – Her husband first told Irene he was cheating on her in a movie
theater waiting for the previews to begin.
Last Sentence – The movie lights dimmed and Sherman leaned over to Irene and
said, “Mistress light. That’s you. You are my Mistress light”
The Forty Story War by Matt Bell
First
Sentence – Later, after Brock was accused of his war crime but before his war,
he stood newly arrived in the vast processing lobby of the as-yet-unshelled
tower and reflected how he would once again have to learn to live without fresh
air, or else absentmindedly wander back outside to die.
Last Sentence
– Surprised, Brock fell, as from a great height, into his first general
sensation of love.
Bird by Ellie Eaton
First Sentence – There was a time in my life when I thought that everything I touched—career, relationships, friends, ambitions—went up in smoke; then, one day, it finally does.
Last Sentence – The roof sinks slowly in
on itself, a half-baked cake, and everything burns.
The Mess by Edan Lepucki
First
Sentence – The year my lover's wife died was also the year my mother
domesticated a coyote, and I, realizing I'd never have a child, bought a Tesla.
Last Sentence
– "Does this hurt?" I asked.
The Treeline by Isle McElroy
First
Sentence – Last summer the snow didn’t melt.
Last Sentence
– “Is that what you think this is for?”
Marfa by Emily Nemens
First Sentence – He saw the place first at seventeen, basic
training during the high heat of summer, the temperatures such that the
best—the only—relief he could find was the cement floor of the artillery shed,
the rare occasions he was alone long enough to put belly to cement (shirt
unbuttoned, loose from its belted tuck), cheek to floor, palms spread…it was
about surface area, about stillness, about imagining coolness, as much as
feeling it.
Last Sentence – Now, he’d not be able
to hear the explosion, the whoosh of flame and crumple of steel retracting, the
roof melting in on itself, falling as molten bricks—now, he’d only be able to
feel the change of pressure as oxygen rushed to the billowing action, he’d only
be able to sense the distant heat against his skin.
The Bastard Child by Deesha PhilyawFirst Sentence – Before the highway split their mecca, the residents of Hollybrook took pride in their lawns, their cars, and their children's light-bright complexions.
Last Sentence
– It was her mouth, he said, her absolutely sinful mouth, that made him come
back.
Esoterica by Kathleen Rooney
First
Sentence – Nobody likes to receive a chain letter--nobody, that is, except
Hannah V-----.
Last Sentence
– The future descends, a flock of black swans.
Certain of My Books by Martin Seay
First Sentence – He found it bothersome—and odd to
see—innkeeping with his stuffy nose.
Second Sentence – He founded both, or some: an odyssey in
keeping with this stuff he knows.
Columbus Circle by Ed Simon
First Sentence – Tzipi had always teased Samuel that his
was a superstition, if a sweet one, that when crossing a busy street he always
took care to first visualize her, his wife, and then G-d, in that order, so that
should a speeding car cut him down in between those thoughts he'd at least have
had time to consider the face of the most important thing in his life.
Last Sentence – And he never regrated the choices which
he'd made, no, never, never, no, never at all.
Heart of Stone by Rufi Thorpe
First Sentence – There were many artists who restored classical sculptures in the 17th century, but none as tacky or disinterested in historical accuracy as Theo's friend, Nicolas, who, with his fluffy hair and expensive clothes, would inevitably stand way too close to you and say things like, "But that what makes it art!" when you would point out, as Theo often did, that Nicolas had put the head of a Venus onto the body of what was meant to be a common woman, creating nonsensical chimeras that catered too boldly to the tastes of Cardinal Borghese, a known pervert, who was, incidentally, Nicolas's uncle, nepotism being the only sane explanation for how Nicolas had gotten into the business in the first place, or at least this was how Theo framed it to his wife at night in bed, describing to her in excruciating detail every annoying thing that Nicolas had done that day as though each one was a small splinter that telling her extracted from his inflamed skin.
Last Sentence – "This is unjust! Ask Nicolas! Go and
find him, he will save me! I know that Nicolas will save me!" Theo
shouted, looking frantically from man to man, his face contorted in such
outlandish terror that the effect was more comic than tragic, and those who
loaded Theo into the cart felt they were not so much loading a man, but a
thing, a doll of a man, an empty mask, and Nicolas, who was eating a most
satisfactory lunch of pheasant and pears, was not fetched or even notified, nor
did he hear Theo's cries in the courtyard, or perhaps he did register them, but
as background noise, like a dog barking in the distance.
Operation Roth: A Novel by Daniel Torday
First Sentence – “I learned about the other, other Philip Roth in January, 2021, a few years after the insurrection at the Capitol, when Roth's cousin Apter telephoned me in Philadelphia to say that Israeli websites had reported that, though he'd been dead for years, he was in Jerusalem."
Last Sentence – "Let Saul Bellow's Jewish conscience be your guide."
Styles for Special Occasions by Dawnie Walton
First
Sentence – Nobody else in the class was going to ask them, so the seven Black
girls of Briar Heights High made plans to go to the prom together.
Last Sentence
– If Shana had been there, they would have smiled and told her what she already
knew: how much the girl looked like her mother, with her face turned up to the
cool blue light.
Life, A by Teddy Wayne
First
Sentence – So this, he thought, is what it feels like to die.
Last Sentence
– At a quarter to seven on a gray December morning, after a seventeen-hour
labor for which a cesarean was nearly employed, Franklin Waters came squalling
into the world.
About the Contributors
Bethany Ball was born in Detroit and currently lives in New York. She has been published in The Common, BOMB, New York magazine, The American Literary Review, the Detroit MetroTimes, Electrical Literature, Zyzyvva, and Literary Hub. Her novel What to Do About the Solomons was published in 2017 by Grove Atlantic. It was shortlisted for the 2017 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and was a runner up in the Jewish Book Council’s debut fiction prize. Her second novel, The Pessimists, was published by Grove Atlantic this past October.
Matt Bell is the author most recently of the novel Appleseed (a New York Times Notable Book) and the craft book Refuse to Be Done, a guide to novel writing, rewriting, and revision. A native of Michigan, he teaches creative writing at Arizona State University.
Ellie Eaton’s debut novel, The Divines, was named a most anticipated book by Harper’s Bazaar, CNN, Entertainment Weekly, Bustle, Electric Literature, Lit Hub, Shondaland, Alma, Stylist, iNews, The Millions, and New York Magazine. Her second novel will be published by William Morrow in 2024.
Edan Lepucki is the author of the novels California and Woman No. 17. Her latest fiction is the short story “People in Hell Want Ice Water,” available as an Audible Original.
Isle McElroy is the author of The Atmospherians, a New York Times Editors' Choice. They currently live in New York.
Emily Nemens is the author of The Cactus League, which was a New York Times Editors’ Choice and was named one of the best books of 2020 by NPR. She is working on her second novel and serves as the sports/senior editor for Stranger's Guide.
Deesha Philyaw’s debut short story collection, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, won the 2021 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the 2020/2021 Story Prize, and the 2020 LA Times Book Prize: The Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction.
Kathleen Rooney is the author, most recently, of the novels Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk and Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey. Her poetry collection Where Are the Snows, winner of the X.J. Kennedy Prize, is forthcoming from Texas Review Press in Fall of 2022. She teaches at DePaul.
Martin Seay’s debut novel The Mirror Thief was published by Melville House in 2016. Originally from Texas, he lives in Chicago with his spouse, the writer Kathleen Rooney.
Ed Simon is a staff writer for The Millions and a contributing writer for Belt Magazine. He is the author of An Alternative History of Pittsburgh and Pandemonium: A Visual History of Demonology, among other books.
Rufi Thorpe is the author of three novels, most recently The Knockout Queen, which was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award.
Daniel Torday is the author of the novels, The Last Flight of Poxl West and Boomer1. His third novel, The 12th Commandment, will be published in January 2023. Torday is a professor of creative writing at Bryn Mawr College.
Dawnie Walton is the author of the novel The Final Revival of Opal & Nev, a finalist for the Aspen Words Literary Prize, longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction, and named one of the best books of 2021 by The Washington Post, NPR, Esquire, and President Barack Obama. A former editor for Entertainment Weekly and Essence, she has written fiction and essays for Oxford American, Bon Appetit, and Lithub.
Teddy Wayne is the author of Apartment, Loner, The Love Song of Jonny Valentine, and Kapitoil. He is the winner of a Whiting Writers’ Award and an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship as well as a finalist for the Young Lions Fiction Award, the PEN/Bingham Prize, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. A former columnist for The New York Times and McSweeney’s and a frequent contributor to The New Yorker, he has taught at Columbia University and Washington University in St. Louis. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, the writer Kate Greathead, and their children.
Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons
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