Mentioned in:
A Year in Reading: 2024
Welcome to the 20th (!) installment of The Millions' annual Year in Reading series, which gathers together some of today's most exciting writers and thinkers to share the books that shaped their year. YIR is not a collection of yearend best-of lists; think of it, perhaps, as an assemblage of annotated bibliographies. We've invited contributors to reflect on the books they read this year—an intentionally vague prompt—and encouraged them to approach the assignment however they choose.
In writing about our reading lives, as YIR contributors are asked to do, we inevitably write about our personal lives, our inner lives. This year, a number of contributors read their way through profound grief and serious illness, through new parenthood and cross-country moves. Some found escape in frothy romances, mooring in works of theology, comfort in ancient epic poetry. More than one turned to the wisdom of Ursula K. Le Guin. Many describe a book finding them just when they needed it.
Interpretations of the assignment were wonderfully varied. One contributor, a music critic, considered the musical analogs to the books she read, while another mapped her reads from this year onto constellations. Most people's reading was guided purely by pleasure, or else a desire to better understand events unfolding in their lives or larger the world. Yet others centered their reading around a certain sense of duty: this year one contributor committed to finishing the six Philip Roth novels he had yet to read, an undertaking that he likens to “eating a six-pack of paper towels.” (Lucky for us, he included in his essay his final ranking of Roth's oeuvre.)
The books that populate these essays range widely, though the most commonly noted title this year was Tony Tulathimutte’s story collection Rejection. The work of newly minted National Book Award winner Percival Everett, particularly his acclaimed novel James, was also widely read and written about. And as the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza enters its second year, many contributors sought out Isabella Hammad’s searing, clear-eyed essay Recognizing the Stranger.
Like so many endeavors in our chronically under-resourced literary community, Year in Reading is a labor of love. The Millions is a one-person editorial operation (with an invaluable assist from SEO maven Dani Fishman), and producing YIR—and witnessing the joy it brings contributors and readers alike—has been the highlight of my tenure as editor. I’m profoundly grateful for the generosity of this year’s contributors, whose names and entries will be revealed below over the next three weeks, concluding on Wednesday, December 18. Be sure to subscribe to The Millions’ free newsletter to get the week’s entries sent straight to your inbox each Friday.
—Sophia Stewart, editor
Becca Rothfeld, author of All Things Are Too Small
Carvell Wallace, author of Another Word for Love
Charlotte Shane, author of An Honest Woman
Brianna Di Monda, writer and editor
Nell Irvin Painter, author of I Just Keep Talking
Carrie Courogen, author of Miss May Does Not Exist
Ayşegül Savaş, author of The Anthropologists
Zachary Issenberg, writer
Tony Tulathimutte, author of Rejection
Ann Powers, author of Traveling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell
Lidia Yuknavitch, author of Reading the Waves
Nicholas Russell, writer and critic
Daniel Saldaña París, author of Planes Flying Over a Monster
Lili Anolik, author of Didion and Babitz
Deborah Ghim, editor
Emily Witt, author of Health and Safety
Nathan Thrall, author of A Day in the Life of Abed Salama
Lena Moses-Schmitt, author of True Mistakes
Jeremy Gordon, author of See Friendship
John Lee Clark, author of Touch the Future
Ellen Wayland-Smith, author of The Science of Last Things
Edwin Frank, publisher and author of Stranger Than Fiction
Sophia Stewart, editor of The Millions
A Year in Reading Archives: 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005
The Great Fall 2024 Book Preview
With the arrival of autumn comes a deluge of great books. Here you'll find a sampling of new and forthcoming titles that caught our eye here at The Millions, and that we think might catch yours, too. Some we’ve already perused in galley form; others we’re eager to devour based on their authors, plots, or subject matters. We hope your next fall read is among them.
—Sophia Stewart, editor
October
Season of the Swamp by Yuri Herrera, tr. Lisa Dillman [F]
What it is: An epic, speculative account of the 18 months that Benito Juárez spent in New Orleans in 1853-54, years before he became the first and only Indigenous president of Mexico.
Who it's for: Fans of speculative history; readers who appreciate the magic that swirls around any novel set in New Orleans. —Claire Kirch
The Black Utopians by Aaron Robertson [NF]
What it is: An exploration of Black Americans' pursuit and visions of utopia—both ideological and physical—that spans the Reconstruction era to the present day and combines history, memoir, and reportage.
Who it's for: Fans of Saidiya Hartman's Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments and Kristen R. Ghodsee's Everyday Utopia. —Sophia M. Stewart
The Third Realm by Karl Ove Knausgaard, tr. Martin Aitken [F]
What it is: The third installment in Knausgaard's Morning Star series, centered on the appearance of a mysterious new star in the skies above Norway.
Who it's for: Real Knausgaard heads only—The Wolves of Eternity and Morning Star are required reading for this one. —SMS
Brown Women Have Everything by Sayantani Dasgupta [NF]
What it is: Essays on the contradictions and complexities of life as an Indian woman in America, probing everything from hair to family to the joys of travel.
Who it's for: Readers of Durga Chew-Bose, Erika L. Sánchez, and Tajja Isen. —SMS
The Plot Against Native America by Bill Vaughn [F]
What it is: The first narrative history of Native American boarding schools— which aimed "civilize" Indigenous children by violently severing them from their culture— and their enduring, horrifying legacy.
Who it's for: Readers of Ned Blackhawk and Kathleen DuVal. —SMS
The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich [F]
What it is: Erdrich's latest novel set in North Dakota's Red River Valley is a tale of the intertwined lives of ordinary people striving to survive and even thrive in their rural community, despite environmental upheavals, the 2008 financial crisis, and other obstacles.
Who it's for: Readers of cli-fi; fans of Linda LeGarde Grover and William Faulkner. —CK
The Position of Spoons by Deborah Levy [NF]
What it is: The second book from Levy in as many years, diverging from a recent streak of surrealist fiction with a collection of essays marked by exceptional observance and style.
Who it's for: Close lookers and the perennially curious. —John H. Maher
The Bog Wife by Kay Chronister [F]
What it's about: The Haddesley family has lived on the same West Virginia bog for centuries, making a supernatural bargain with the land—a generational blood sacrifice—in order to do so—until an uncovered secret changes everything.
Who it's for: Readers of Karen Russell and Jeff VanderMeer; anyone who has ever used the phrase "girl moss." —SMS
The Great When by Alan Moore [F]
What it's about: When an 18-year old book reseller comes across a copy of a book that shouldn’t exist, it threatens to upend not just an already post-war-torn London, but reality as we know it.
Who it's for: Anyone looking for a Sherlock Holmes-style mystery dipped in thaumaturgical psychedelia. —Daniella Fishman
The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates [NF]
What it's about: One of our sharpest critical thinkers on social justice returns to nonfiction, nearly a decade after Between the World and Me, visiting Dakar, to contemplate enslavement and the Middle Passage; Columbia, S.C., as a backdrop for his thoughts on Jim Crow and book bans; and the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where he sees contemporary segregation in the treatment of Palestinians.
Who it’s for: Fans of James Baldwin, George Orwell, and Angela Y. Davis; readers of Nikole Hannah-Jones’s The 1619 Project and Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste, to name just a few engagements with national and racial identity. —Nathalie op de Beeck
Abortion by Jessica Valenti [NF]
What it is: Columnist and memoirist Valenti, who tracks pro-choice advocacy and attacks on the right to choose in her Substack, channels feminist rage into a guide for freedom of choice advocacy.
Who it’s for: Readers of Robin Marty’s The New Handbook for a Post-Roe America, #ShoutYourAbortion proponents, and followers of Jennifer Baumgartner’s [I Had an Abortion] project. —NodB
Gifted by Suzuki Suzumi, tr. Allison Markin Powell [F]
What it's about: A young sex worker in Tokyo's red-light district muses on her life and recounts her abusive mother's final days, in what is Suzuki's first novel to be translated into English.
Who it's for: Readers of Susan Boyt and Mieko Kanai; fans of moody, introspective fiction; anyone with a fraught relationship to their mother. —SMS
Childish Literature by Alejandro Zambra, tr. Megan McDowell [F]
What it is: A wide-ranging collection of stories, essays, and poems that explore childhood, fatherhood, and family.
Who it's for: Fans of dad lit (see: Lucas Mann's Attachments, Keith Gessen's Raising Raffi, Karl Ove Knausgaard's seasons quartet, et al). —SMS
Books Are Made Out of Books ed. Michael Lynn Crews [NF]
What it is: A mining of the archives of the late Cormac McCarthy with a focus on the famously tight-lipped author's literary influences.
Who it's for: Anyone whose commonplace book contains the words "arquebus," "cordillera," or "vinegaroon." —JHM
Slaveroad by John Edgar Wideman [F]
What it is: A blend of memoir, fiction, and history that charts the "slaveroad" that runs through American history, spanning the Atlantic slave trade to the criminal justice system, from the celebrated author of Brothers and Keepers.
Who it's for: Fans of Clint Smith and Ta-Nehisi Coates. —SMS
Linguaphile by Julie Sedivy [NF]
What it's about: Linguist Sedivy reflects on a life spent loving language—its beauty, its mystery, and the essential role it plays in human existence.
Who it's for: Amateur (or professional) linguists; fans of the podcast A Way with Words (me). —SMS
An Image of My Name Enters America by Lucy Ives [NF]
What it is: A collection of interrelated essays that connect moments from Ives's life to larger questions of history, identity, and national fantasy,
Who it's for: Fans of Ives, one of our weirdest and most wondrous living writers—duh; anyone with a passing interest in My Little Pony, Cold War–era musicals, or The Three Body Problem, all of which are mined here for great effect. —SMS
Women's Hotel by Daniel Lavery [F]
What it is: A novel set in 1960s New York City, about the adventures of the residents of a hotel providing housing for young women that is very much evocative of the real-life legendary Barbizon Hotel.
Who it's for: Readers of Mary McCarthy's The Group and Rona Jaffe's The Best of Everything. —CK
The World in Books by Kenneth C. Davis [NF]
What it is: A guide to 52 of the most influential works of nonfiction ever published, spanning works from Plato to Ida B. Wells, bell hooks to Barbara Ehrenreich, and Sun Tzu to Joan Didion.
Who it's for: Lovers of nonfiction looking to cover their canonical bases. —SMS
Blue Light Hours by Bruna Dantas Lobato [F]
What it's about: Through the emanating blue-glow of their computer screens, a mother and daughter, four-thousand miles apart, find solace and loneliness in their nightly Skype chats in this heartstring-pulling debut.
Who it's for: Someone who needs to be reminded to CALL YOUR MOTHER! —DF
Riding Like the Wind by Iris Jamahl Dunkle [NF]
What it is: The biography of Sanora Babb, a contemporary of John Steinbeck's whose field notes and interviews with Dust Bowl migrants Steinbeck relied upon to write The Grapes of Wrath.
Who it's for: Steinbeck fans and haters alike; readers of Kristin Hannah's The Four Winds and the New York Times Overlooked column; anyone interested in learning more about the Dust Bowl migrants who fled to California hoping for a better life. —CK
Innie Shadows by Olivia M. Coetzee [F]
What it is: a work of crime fiction set on the outskirts of Cape Town, where a community marred by violence seeks justice and connection; also the first novel to be translated from Kaaps, a dialect of Afrikaans that was until recently only a spoken language.
Who it's for: fans of sprawling, socioeconomically-attuned crime dramas a la The Wire. —SMS
Dorothy Parker in Hollywood by Gail Crowther [NF]
What it is: A history of the famous wit—and famous New Yorker—in her L.A. era, post–Algonquin Round Table and mid–Red Scare.
Who it's for: Owners of a stack of hopelessly dog-eared Joan Didion paperbacks. —JHM
The Myth of American Idealism by Noam Chomsky and Nathan J. Robinson [NF]
What it is: A potent critique of the ideology behind America's foreign interventions and its status as a global power, and an treatise on how the nation's hubristic pursuit of "spreading democracy" threatens not only the delicate balance of global peace, but the already-declining health of our planet.
Who it's for: Chomskyites; policy wonks and casual critics of American recklessness alike. —DF
Mysticism by Simon Critchley [NF]
What it is: A study of mysticism—defined as an experience, rather than religious practice—by the great British philosopher Critchley, who mines music, poetry, and literature along the way.
Who it's for: Readers of John Gray, Jorge Luis Borges, and Simone Weil. —SMS
Q&A by Adrian Tomine [NF]
What it is: The Japanese American creator of the Optic Nerve comic book series for D&Q, and of many a New Yorker cover, shares his personal history and his creative process in this illustrated unburdening.
Who it’s for: Readers of Tomine’s melancholic, sometimes cringey, and occasionally brutal collections of comics short stories including Summer Blonde, Shortcomings, and Killing and Dying. —NodB
Sonny Boy by Al Pacino [NF]
What it is: Al Pacino's memoir—end of description.
Who it's for: Cinephiles; anyone curious how he's gonna spin fumbling Diane Keaton. —SMS
Seeing Baya by Alice Kaplan [NF]
What it is: The first biography of the enigmatic and largely-forgotten Algerian artist Baya Mahieddine, who first enchanted midcentury Paris as a teenager.
Who it's for: Admirers of Leonora Carrington, Hilma af Klint, Frida Kahlo, and other belatedly-celebrated women painters. —SMS
Absolution by Jeff VanderMeer [F]
What it is: A surprise return to the Area X, the stretch of unforbidding and uncanny coastline in the hit Southern Reach trilogy.
Who it's for: Anyone who's heard this song and got the reference without Googling it. —JHM
The Four Horsemen by Nick Curtola [NF]
What it is: The much-anticipated cookbook from the team behind Brooklyn's hottest restaurant (which also happens to be co-owned by James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem).
Who it's for: Oenophiles; thirty-somethings who live in north Williamsburg (derogatory). —SMS
Seeing Further by Esther Kinsky, tr. Caroline Schmidt [F]
What it's about: An unnamed German woman embarks on the colossal task of reviving a cinema in a small Hungarian village.
Who it's for: Fans of Jenny Erpenbeck; anyone charmed by Cinema Paradiso (not derogatory!). —SMS
Ripcord by Nate Lippens [NF]
What it's about: A novel of class, sex, friendship, and queer intimacy, written in delicious prose and narrated by a gay man adrift in Milwaukee.
Who it's for: Fans of Brontez Purnell, Garth Greenwell, Alexander Chee, and Wayne Koestenbaum. —SMS
The Use of Photography by Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie, tr. Alison L. Strayer [NF]
What it's about: Ernaux's love affair with Marie, a journalist, while she was undergoing treatment for cancer, and their joint project to document their romance.
Who it's for: The Ernaux hive, obviously; readers of Sontag's On Photography and Janet Malcolm's Still Pictures. —SMS
Nora Ephron at the Movies by Ilana Kaplan [NF]
What it is: Kaplan revisits Nora Ephron's cinematic watersheds—Silkwood, Heartburn, When Harry Met Sally, You've Got Mail, and Sleepless in Seattle—in this illustrated book. Have these iconic stories, and Ephron’s humor, weathered more than 40 years?
Who it’s for: Film history buffs who don’t mind a heteronormative HEA; listeners of the Hot and Bothered podcast; your coastal grandma. —NodB
[millions_email]
The Philosophy of Translation by Damion Searls [NF]
What it is: A meditation on the act and art of translation by one of today's most acclaimed practitioners, best known for his translations of Fosse, Proust, et al.
Who it's for: Regular readers of Words Without Borders and Asymptote; professional and amateur literary translators alike. —SMS
Salvage by Dionne Brand
What it is: A penetrating reevaluation of the British literary canon and the tropes once shaped Brand's reading life and sense of self—and Brand’s first major work of nonfiction since her landmark A Map to the Door of No Return.
Who it's for: Readers of Christina Sharpe's Ordinary Notes and Elizabeth Hardwick's Seduction and Betrayal. —SMS
Masquerade by Mike Fu [F]
What it's about: Housesitting for an artist friend in present-day New York, Meadow Liu stumbles on a novel whose author shares his name—the first of many strange, haunting happenings that lead up to the mysterious disappearance of Meadow's friend.
Who it's for: fans of Ed Park and Alexander Chee. —SMS
November
The Beggar Student by Osamu Dazai, tr. Sam Bett [F]
What it is: A novella in the moody vein of Dazai’s acclaimed No Longer Human, following the 30-something “fictional” Dazai into another misadventure spawned from a hubristic spat with a high schooler.
Who it's for: Longtime readers of Dazai, or new fans who discovered the midcentury Japanese novelist via TikTok and the Bungo Stray Dogs anime. —DF
In Thrall by Jane DeLynn [F]
What it is: A landmark lesbian bildungsroman about 16-year-old Lynn's love affair with her English teacher, originally published in 1982.
Who it's for: Fans of Joanna Russ's On Strike Against God and Edmund White's A Boy's Own Story —SMS
Washita Love Child by Douglas Kent Miller [NF]
What it is: The story of Jesse Ed Davis, the Indigenous musician who became on of the most sought after guitarists of the late '60s and '70s, playing alongside B.B. King, Bob Dylan, John Lennon, and more.
Who it's for: readers of music history and/or Indigenous history; fans of Joy Harjo, who wrote the foreword. —SMS
Set My Heart on Fire by Izumi Suzuki, tr. Helen O'Horan [F]
What it is: Gritty, sexy, and wholly rock ’n’ roll, Suzuki’s first novel translated into English (following her story collection, Hit Parade of Tears) follows 20-year-old Izumi navigating life, love, and music in the underground scene in '70s Japan.
Who it's for: Fans of Meiko Kawakami, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Marlowe Granados's Happy Hour. —DF
Didion & Babitz by Lili Anolik [NF]
What it is: A dual portrait of Joan Didion and Eve Babitz, who are so often compared to—and pitted against—each other on the basis of their mutual Los Angeles milieu.
Who it's for: Fans or haters of either writer (the book is fairly pro-Babitz, often at Didion's expense); anyone who has the Lit Hub Didion tote bag. —SMS
The Endless Refrain by David Rowell [NF]
What it's about: How the rise of music streaming, demonitizing of artist revenue, and industry tendency toward nostalgia have laid waste to the musical landscape, and the future of music culture.
Who it's for: Fans of Kyle Chayka, Spence Kornhaber, and Lindsay Zoladz. —SMS
Every Arc Bends Its Radian by Sergio De La Pava [F]
What it is: A mind- and genre-bending detective story set in Cali, Colombia, that blends high-stakes suspense with rigorous philosophy.
Who it's for: Readers of Raymond Chandler, Thomas Pynchon, and Jules Verne. —SMS
Something Close to Nothing by Tom Pyun [F]
What it’s about: At the airport with his white husband Jared, awaiting a flight to Cambodia to meet the surrogate mother carrying their adoptive child-to-be, Korean American Wynn decides parenthood isn't for him, and bad behavior ensues.
Who it’s for: Pyun’s debut is calculated to cut through saccharine depictions of queer parenthood—could pair well with Torrey Peters’s Detransition, Baby. —NodB
Rosenfeld by Maya Kessler [F]
What it is: Kessler's debut—rated R for Rosenfeld—follows one Noa Simmons through the tumultuous and ultimately profound power play that is courting (and having a lot of sex with) the titular older man who soon becomes her boss.
Who it's for: Fans of Sex and the City, Raven Leilani’s Luster, and Coco Mellor’s Cleopatra and Frankenstein. —DF
Lazarus Man by Richard Price [F]
What it is: The former The Wire writer offers yet another astute chronicle of urban life, this time of an ever-changing Harlem.
Who it's for: Fans of Colson Whitehead's Crook Manifesto and Paul Murray's The Bee Sting—and, of course, The Wire. —SMS
Stranger Than Fiction by Edwin Frank [NF]
What it is: An astute curveball of a read on the development and many manifestations of the novel throughout the tumultuous 20th century.
Who it's for: Readers who look at a book's colophon before its title. —JHM
Letters to His Neighbor by Marcel Proust, tr. Lydia Davis
What it is: A collection of Proust’s tormented—and frequently hilarious—letters to his noisy neighbor which, in a diligent translation from Davis, stand the test of time.
Who it's for: Proust lovers; people who live below heavy-steppers. —DF
Context Collapse by Ryan Ruby [NF]
What it is: A self-proclaimed "poem containing a history of poetry," from ancient Greece to the Iowa Workshop, from your favorite literary critic's favorite literary critic.
Who it's for: Anyone who read and admired Ruby's titanic 2022 essay on The Waste Land; lovers of poetry looking for a challenge. —SMS
How Sondheim Can Change Your Life by Richard Schoch [NF]
What it's about: Drama professor Schoch's tribute to Stephen Sondheim and the life lessons to be gleaned from his music.
Who it's for: Sondheim heads, former theater kids, end of list. —SMS
The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer [NF]
What it is: 2022 MacArthur fellow and botanist Kimmerer, an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, (re)introduces audiences to a flowering, fruiting native plant beloved of foragers and gardeners.
Who it’s for: The restoration ecologist in your life, along with anyone who loved Braiding Sweetgrass and needs a nature-themed holiday gift. —NodB
My Heart Belongs in an Empty Big Mac Container Buried Beneath the Ocean Floor by Homeless [F]
What it is: A pseudonymous, tenderly comic novel of blue whales and Golden Arches, mental illness and recovery.
Who it's for: Anyone who finds Thomas Pynchon a bit too staid. —JHM
Yoke and Feather by Jessie van Eerden [NF]
What it's about: Van Eerden's braided essays explore the "everyday sacred" to tease out connections between ancient myth and contemporary life.
Who it's for: Readers of Courtney Zoffness's Spilt Milk and Jeanna Kadlec's Heretic. —SMS
Camp Jeff by Tova Reich [F]
What it's about: A "reeducation" center for sex pests in the Catskills, founded by one Jeffery Epstein (no, not that one), where the dual phenomena of #MeToo and therapyspeak collide.
Who it's for: Fans of Philip Roth and Nathan Englander; cancel culture skeptics. —SMS
Selected Amazon Reviews by Kevin Killian [NF]
What it is: A collection of 16 years of Killian’s funniest, wittiest, and most poetic Amazon reviews, the sheer number of which helped him earn the rarefied “Top 100” and “Hall of Fame” status on the site.
Who it's for: Fans of Wayne Koestenbaum and Dodie Bellamy, who wrote introduction and afterword, respectively; people who actually leave Amazon reviews. —DF
Cher by Cher [NF]
What it is: The first in a two-volume memoir, telling the story of Cher's early life and ascendent career as only she can tell it.
Who it's for: Anyone looking to fill the My Name Is Barbra–sized hole in their heart, or looking for something to tide them over until the Liza memoir drops. —SMS
The City and Its Uncertain Walls by Haruki Murakami, tr. Philip Gabriel [F]
What it is: Murakami’s first novel in over six years returns to the high-walled city from his 1985 story "Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World" with one man's search for his lost love—and, simultaneously, an ode to libraries and literature itself.
Who it's for: Murakami fans who have long awaited his return to fiction. —DF
American Bulk by Emily Mester [NF]
What it's about: Reflecting on what it means to "live life to the fullest," Mester explores the cultural and personal impacts of America’s culture of overconsumption, from Costco hauls to hoarding to diet culture—oh my!
Who it's for: Lovers of sustainability; haters of excess; skeptics of the title essay of Becca Rothfeld's All Things Are Too Small. —DF
The Icon and the Idealist by Stephanie Gorton [NF]
What it is: A compelling look at the rivalry between Margaret Sanger, of Planned Parenthood fame, and Mary Ware Dennett, who each held radically different visions for the future of birth control.
Who it's for: Readers of Amy Sohn's The Man Who Hated Women and Katherine Turk's The Women of NOW; anyone interested in the history of reproductive rights. —SMS
December
Rental House by Weike Wang [F]
What it's about: Married college sweethearts invite their drastically different families on a Cape Code vacation, raising questions about marriage, intimacy, and kinship.
Who it's for: Fans of Wang's trademark wit and sly humor (see: Joan Is Okay and Chemistry); anyone with an in-law problem.
Woo Woo by Ella Baxter [F]
What it's about: A neurotic conceptual artist loses her shit in the months leading up to an exhibition that she hopes will be her big breakout, poking fun at the tropes of the "art monster" and the "woman of the verge" in one fell, stylish swoop.
Who it's for: Readers of Sheena Patel's I'm a Fan and Chris Kraus's I Love Dick; any woman who is grateful to but now also sort of begrudges Jenny Offil for introducing "art monster" into the lexicon (me). —SMS
Berlin Atomized by Julia Kornberg, tr. Jack Rockwell and Julia Kornberg [F]
What it's about: Spanning 2001 to 2034, three Jewish and downwardly mobile siblings come of age in various corners of the world against the backdrop of global crisis.
Who it's for: Fans of Catherine Lacey's Biography of X and Joshua Cohen's The Netanyahus. —SMS
Sand-Catcher by Omar Khalifah, tr. Barbara Romaine [F]
What it is: A suspenseful, dark satire of memory and nation, in which four young Palestinian journalists at a Jordanian newspaper are assigned to interview an elderly witness to the Nakba, the violent 1948 expulsion of native Palestinians from Israel—but to their surprise, the survivor doesn’t want to rehash his trauma for the media.
Who it’s for: Anyone looking insight—tinged with grim humor—into the years leading up to the present political crisis in the Middle East and the decades-long goal of Palestinian autonomy. —NodB
The Shutouts by Gabrielle Korn [F]
What it's about: In the dystopian future, mysteriously connected women fight to survive on the margins of society amid worsening climate collapse.
Who it's for: Fans of Korn's Yours for the Taking, which takes place in the same universe; readers of Becky Chambers and queer-inflected sci-fi. —SMS
What in Me Is Dark by Orlando Reade [NF]
What it's about: The enduring, evolving influence of Milton's Paradise Lost on political history—and particularly on the work of 12 revolutionary readers, including Malcom X and Hannah Arendt.
Who it's for: English majors and fans of Ryan Ruby and Sarah Bakewell—but I repeat myself. —SMS
The Afterlife Is Letting Go by Brandon Shimoda [NF]
What it's about: Shimoda researches the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during WWII, and speaks with descendants of those imprisoned, for this essay collection about the “afterlife” of cruelty and xenophobia in the U.S.
Who it’s for: Anyone to ever visit a monument, museum, or designated site of hallowed ground where traumatic events have taken place. —NodB
No Place to Bury the Dead by Karina Sainz Borgo, tr. Elizabeth Bryer [F]
What it's about: When Angustias Romero loses both her children while fleeing a mysterious disease in her unnamed Latin American country, she finds herself in a surreal, purgatorial borderland where she's soon caught in a power struggle.
Who it's for: Fans of Maríana Enriquez and Mohsin Hamid. —SMS
The Rest Is Silence by Augusto Monterroso, tr. Aaron Kerner [F]
What it is: The author of some of the shortest, and tightest, stories in Latin American literature goes long with a metafictional skewering of literary criticism in his only novel.
Who it's for: Anyone who prefers the term "palm-of-the-hand stories" to "flash fiction." —JHM
Tali Girls by Siamak Herawi, tr. Sara Khalili [F]
What it is: An intimate, harrowing, and vital look at the lives of girls and women in an Afghan mountain village under Taliban rule, based on true stories.
Who it's for: Readers of Nadia Hashimi, Akwaeke Emezi, and Maria Stepanova. —SMS
Sun City by Tove Jansson, tr. Thomas Teal [F]
What it's about: During her travels through the U.S. in the 1970s, Jansson became interested in the retirement home as a peculiarly American institution—here, she imagines the tightly knit community within one of them.
Who it's for: Fans of Jansson's other fiction for adults, much of which explores the lives of elderly folks; anyone who watched that documentary about The Villages in Florida. —SMS
Editor's note: We're always looking to make our seasonal book previews more useful to the readers, writers, and critics they're meant to serve. Got an idea for how we can improve our coverage? Tell me about it at sophia@themillions.com.
[millions_email]
Plundered: An Introductory Excerpt from McSweeney’s #65
America has endured five hundred years of plundering. Exactly five hundred years ago, after almost two years of relentless warfare, the largest city in America fell to European dominion. The great Tenochtitlán—now the historic center of Mexico City—was seized in 1521 by Hernán Cortés and his men, who had disembarked on Mexican shores following a rumor, spread by Christopher Columbus almost three decades earlier, of abundant stores of gold in the “new” continent. Before the Spaniards attacked Tenochtitlán, the Mexica emperor Moctezuma had given Cortés a map drawn on a piece of nequen, detailing all the rivers running north of the city where gold dust was regularly collected. Once he was sure there was gold in the region, Cortés proceeded to invade Tenochtitlán, imprison Moctezuma, and sack the Mexica treasury.
Similarly, in 1532, Francisco Pizarro and his men ambushed and held for ransom the Inca ruler Atahualpa, who controlled modern-day Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, and parts of Chile, Colombia, and Argentina. To buy his freedom, Atahualpa filled one large room with golden artifacts and two with silver. Metals had been crafted in the region for at least three thousand years prior to the arrival of the Europeans, so by the time Pizarro arrived, the Incas were making highly complex artwork with gold, such as miniature gardens that simulated earth with gold granules, gold figures of men, llamas, and corn stalks. Oblivious to their craftsmanship, Pizarro’s men melted the artifacts that Atahualpa surrendered, cast them into neat rectangular bars, and sent them back to Spain. Atahualpa, in return, was not granted his freedom. He was tortured, forcibly converted to Catholicism, baptized “Francisco” after the conqueror, and publicly strangled.
The stories continue. There is Francisco Vásquez de Coronado, who in 1540 led an expedition to modern-day Arizona, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Kansas, feverishly looking for the (non-existent) “Seven Cities of Gold.” There is Nuño de Guzmán and his nephew Diego de Guzmán, voracious slave raiders, who instituted a system of slave trade across Mexico in the 1520s. Nuño de Guzmán later tortured the Tarascan leader Tangaxuan II to get him to reveal the supposed secret locations of stores of gold in what is now Michoacán. There was no gold, and Tangaxuan II was dragged by a horse through the streets and burned alive in 1530. He also was baptized “Francisco” before being killed
Always gold, always what they wanted back in Spain was gold. And if not gold, then silver. Between 1500 and 1650, the Spaniards extracted 181 tons of gold and 16,000 tons of silver from America. In return, they brought a mixed bag: smallpox, horses, the Spanish language, Catholicism, Cervantes, guns. They brought a new economy too: one based on mining, indentured servitude, and slavery on a scale never before seen on the continent. Between 1525 and the late 1800s, more than 5 million Indigenous Americans and more than 12.5 million Africans were enslaved—in mines and, later, in agriculture.
When it was no longer silver or gold, it was sugar. Columbus had brought sugar to the Caribbean, to what is today Haiti and the Dominican Republic, and the plant, a grass, grew quick and bountifully. Sugar—or “white gold,” as it was called—was highly coveted in Europe, and the increasing demand led to a rapid mass systematization of indentured servitude and to the consolidation of slavery across the continent. This system expanded in successive waves as new crops joined the market, and schooners, galleys, and naval ships triangled across the Atlantic—between Africa and America, and from America to Europe. After sugar came tobacco, coffee, cacao, and cotton. As Eduardo Galeano writes in Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent, a book that is fifty years old yet still entirely current: “The more coveted by the global market, the larger the misfortune that a product brings to the Latin American people who, with their sacrifice, have to produce it.” Indeed, now that avocados have become the “green gold” Mexico exports to the United States, generating nearly three billion dollars in revenue per year, farmers in the state of Michoacán are being murdered, extorted, or displaced by drug cartels, often in concert with government officials and international captains of industry, secure in their impunity.
Across America, from the northern prairies to the southern pampas, land was grabbed, claimed, and partitioned into brutal ways of producing: latifundios, ingenios, haciendas, plantations. And later partitioned, also, into ruthless ways of belonging and excluding: settlements, reservations, and later, in the cities, favelas, solares, tugurios, projects. During the colonial period in America, the particular ways in which European powers usurped land, settled it (such a dainty word for such a violent act), and managed it differed in detail but not in essence. The Portuguese, Dutch, French, British, and Spanish all enslaved and exploited in order to extract whatever the land yielded.
As European power began to wane and the former colonies gained independence, a new power took hold, reproducing many of the old mechanisms and systems. As early as 1891, in his seminal essay “Our América,” José Martí heralded the arrival of the United States as the new colonizing force that would take the seat left empty by the European powers. Referring to “our América,” or the Latin portion of the continent, he writes: “The hour is near when she will be approached by an enterprising and forceful nation that will demand intimate relations with her, though it does not know her and disdains her.” And, of course, he was right. In 1898, the United States took over Cuba; the following year it took over Puerto Rico and still has not let go; 1899 also marked the founding of the United Fruit Company, the still-existing corporation (now Chiquita) through which the category of the “banana republic” came into being. (To the Latin American ear, the liberality with which the term banana republic is still dispensed by news anchors, politicians, and journalists in the United States is, to say the least, ironic: they seem to disdain the mess they themselves created.)
The United Fruit Company monopolized not only the fruit trade in Central America but also the management of basic services in the region: the electricity, post office, telegraph, telephone, railroads, and maritime routes. It took control, as well, of the political administration of the countries themselves, meddling in all domestic affairs. Neruda writes in Canto General (as translated by Jack Schmitt): “When the trumpet sounded / everything was prepared on earth, / and Jehovah gave the world / to Coca-Cola Inc., Anaconda, / Ford Motors, and other corporations. / The United Fruit Company / reserved for itself the most juicy piece, / the central coast of my world.” Meanwhile, the plundering continued north of the Rio Bravo as well: treaties regarding Indigenous lands were routinely ignored; residential schools stole children from their families as part of a “civilizing” project. And then there was the concatenation of horrors known as the Jim Crow laws (and their less codified afterlives).
The US stronghold in Central America continued through the twentieth century, with administrations successively funding military dictatorships and civil wars. There was, for example, the 1954 coup d’état against Jacobo Árbenz in Guatemala—backed by the CIA at the urging of the United Fruit Company—which destabilized democracy in the country and led to thirty-six years of civil war and genocide that took more than two hundred thousand lives, predominantly of Mayan peoples. In this same period, from 1979 to 1992, the Carter and Reagan administrations funded a long and ruthless civil war in El Salvador, during which the military-led government relentlessly massacred left-wing opposition groups and civilians alike. Around one-fifth of the population of El Salvador had to flee the country. The aftershocks of these interventions come, still today, in waves of displaced adults and children who now seek asylum in the United States, and upon arrival are locked up in camps, shelters, detention centers, and cages.
US interventions did not stop at the Panama Canal but extended into the Southern Cone. One of the most well-known instances is the US-backed Chilean coup d’état against Salvador Allende, who had nationalized US-owned copper mines in Chile. Aided by the CIA, on September 11, 1973, Chilean troops seized the seat of government, Allende took his own life as the soldiers stormed his office, and Augusto Pinochet began a vicious dictatorship that would loom over Chile for the next seventeen years. The coup was part of a broader series of military interventions in the region known as Operation Condor, which, under cover of Cold War scare tactics, sought to eliminate those leaders who were not inclined to offer favorable terms for US trade with their nations, or who, heaven forbid, resisted the privatization of their natural resources.
This issue features works that explore these forms of past and present colonial violence and that look at the effects of this violence on both the land and bodies across America. At the same time, they reveal diverse forms of resistance. They dig below the surface of deserts and decadent nightclubs, explore the questionable cultural politics of museums and theme parks, and take us into prisons of both body and mind. After Karen Tei Yamashita and Ronaldo Lopes de Oliveira’s bracing reboot of the Brazilian modernist Oswald de Andrade’s 1928 “Cannibalist Manifesto” (which gleefully gnawed on the bones of the European canon), we’re transported to the Musée du Quai Branly, where we find Gabriela Wiener (translated by Gabriela Jauregui) examining her reflection in a glass case that houses the cultural patrimony stolen from her native Peru by her own great-grandfather. The institutional space of the museum is also central to Laia Jufresa’s short story “Colorscape,” which drops the reader into the middle of a performance art piece about state violence and forced disappearance in Latin America. Carlos Manuel Álvarez (translated by Julia Sanches) writes a firsthand account of a recent hunger strike in Cuba, addressing the government’s marginalization and persecution of Black and Brown bodies, while Sophie Braxton, in “Flat Earth Society,” explores the psychology of alienation as it relates to both labor and human connections in the southern United States.
Shifting gears, we get a dizzying dog’s-eye view of the historical layers of Mexico City/Tenochtitlán in Gabriela Jauregui’s “The Island,” and then follow the Pan-American Highway through the bone-riddled sands of the Peruvian desert in Julia Wong Kcomt’s “Chimbote Highway” (translated by Jennifer Shyue), before watching the Mexican countryside quake and split open in Brenda Lozano’s “A Volcano Is Born” (translated by Heather Cleary). In each of these texts—as in Mahogany L. Browne’s incandescent “Reft of a Nation,” the poem at both the sequential and the ethical center of the collection—the fires of the earth and the injustices it has witnessed refuse to be contained.
Next, Samanta Schweblin’s “An Unlucky Man” (translated by Megan McDowell) and Sabrina Helen Li’s “Worldly Wonders” explore different forms of strength under conditions of vulnerability; in the first, a little girl navigates both a family crisis and an intimate crisis of her own; in the second, a young woman’s body is exoticized and infantilized for public consumption at a nationality-themed amusement park. The next pair of stories introduces us to two men displaced by very different circumstances, trying to rebuild their lives: the narrator of Edmundo Paz Soldán’s “El Señor de La Palma” (translated by Jenna Tang) finds himself embroiled in a cult (or is it just a pyramid scheme?) as he flees the dubious legalities of his own past, while the protagonist of Nimmi Gowrinathan’s “One Man and His Island” is a refugee trying to cultivate Sri Lanka in a tiny corner of Los Angeles.
And then there are the bodies bound: MJ Bond draws a bright, pain-streaked line between the body in transition and the molecular structures of glass and obsidian; in “Ain’t Them Bodies Saints,” C. T. Mexica takes us inside prison walls that cannot keep the mind from soaring, while a letter from Claudina Domingo reminds us that the mind itself can also be a prison. Also in the issue’s letters, Yásnaya Elena Aguilar Gil reminds us of the importance of recognizing non-Western conceptions of the natural world and our relationship with it; Karla Cornejo Villavicencio asserts her right not to reproduce; and Lia García (La Novia Sirena) shares a lyrical reflection on bodies labeled and persecuted as monstrous, and why we should consider the cockroach.
The pieces selected for this issue draw on diverse traditions and aesthetics, and more than half are translations. By placing these authors from different latitudes within the same pages, it becomes obvious that neatly defining American identities is an impossible and absurd task. As Natalie Díaz said in an interview for The Rumpus in 2020, identity is often weaponized, particularly in the United States, “as a thing to pin us down and hold us still... I am imagining ways to become unpinnable.” The unpinnable cannot be extracted; it cannot be plundered, swallowed, homogenized, commodified.
Among the many questions we discussed as we worked with these texts, one kept coming up: What to do with the accent in América? Such an apparently trivial thing—a small typographical mark—but one that carries so much political weight. Should we keep the diacritic as it appears in Spanish, offering a visual reminder to the reader that America is not a country but a continent1? Or should we “translate” América by removing the accent, and in doing so challenge the Anglophone reader in the United States to pause and look at this familiar word anew?
We went back and forth with the translators. We went back and forth among ourselves. We turned once again to Martí’s “Our América” and to its translator, Esther Allen. When we asked her to share the thought process behind her choice to keep the diacritic, she responded:
In the Penguin Classics anthology I did of Martí’s selected writings, there’s a version of “Our America” without the accent mark; at that point I didn’t think one was needed. The essay itself makes it pretty damn clear what he’s talking about, even specifying the region’s geo- graphic boundaries in the final paragraph: “del Bravo a Magallanes.” When I redid the translation for the website of the Centro de Estudios Martianos in Havana a few years ago, though, I really felt it was necessary to include the accent because I’ve seen all too often how the word America leads to misreadings—many deliberate—as monolingual Anglophones assume it is synonymous with the United States and can only mean the United States.
In other words: América is not America is not the Americas. Sometimes an accent can be a geopolitical statement. There isn’t one right way to approach this question of the accent, and there shouldn’t be, just as there should be no pinnable, all-encompassing approach to what America is, no trans-historical shortcut for addressing cultural specificity. While the diacritic was essential to translating Martí’s text at a certain moment and continues to generate important conversations, at this moment and in this context, we chose the more naked America. Our goal in selecting texts from across this vast expanse and uniting them under this rubric is to reclaim and redistribute the name America, fraught provenance and all, and to assert the plurality contained within its singular as a constellation rather than a consolidation.
An excerpt from McSweeney's Issue #65 by Valeria Luiselli and Heather Cleary, reprinted with permission from McSweeney's Books.
[millions_email]
Related Books:
