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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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Literary Deaths of 2022
In 2022, we mourned the deaths of many literary giants who remained under-celebrated in their lifetimes. These are some of them.
With his eye patch and no-bullshit demeanor, Andrew Vachss was a man on a mission. He was an author of hard-boiled fiction as well as poetry and comic books. He was also a lawyer, a supervisor of a juvenile prison, and an advocate for abused children, sitting near President Bill Clinton in 1993 when he signed the National Child Protection Act into law. It established a national registry of convicted child abusers and was widely known as “the Oprah Bill” because Vachss had advocated for it on Oprah Winfrey’s television show. She sat beside Vachss at the White House signing ceremony.
Vachss (pronounced “vax”), who lost the sight in his right eye from a childhood accident, died of coronary artery disease on Nov. 23, 2021 at 79, but his death was not widely reported until months later. He published 18 hard-boiled crime novels featuring an antihero named Burke, an ex-con and unlicensed private investigator who doesn’t always play nice as he pursues people who prey on children. Vachss, unlike Burke, was not a victim of sexual abuse as a child, but, like Burke, he had a black-and-white view of such predators, including Westley Allan Dodd, who was executed by hanging in 1993 after he was convicted of sexually assaulting and murdering three young boys. “Some predatory sociopaths can be deterred,” Vachss wrote at the time. “None can be rehabilitated…. What makes sexual predators so intractable and dangerous is that, as Mr. Dodd candidly acknowledged, they like what they do and intend to keep doing it.”
Burke had an equally uncompromising view of such monsters, and he treated them accordingly. Vachss explained his antihero’s unnerving rough edges this way: “I wanted to show people what hell looked like, and I didn’t think an angel would be the right guide.”
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Though never a household name, Bruce Duffy drew rapturous critical praise for his 1987 debut novel, The World as I Found It, a fictional biography of the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. Duffy was unfazed when the dense and challenging book failed to catch on with readers. “You know,” he said at the time, “you don’t always have a choice of what you’re going to write. You’re not like a cow that can give ice cream with one udder and milk with another. So I said, ‘Screw it!’ I don’t care what anybody thinks.”
Duffy, who died from complications of brain cancer on Feb. 10 at 70, produced just two more novels—an autobiographical tale about a 12-year-old boy who flees his home in the Maryland suburbs after his mother’s death, and a reimagining of the life of the scabrous French poet Arthur Rimbaud. All the while Duffy worked day jobs as a security guard, corporate consultant and speechwriter. Though The World as I Found It was reissued as a classic by NYRB in 2010, Duffy couldn’t find a literary agent willing to shop his fourth novel. Once again he said “Screw it!” and started writing a new book. He was working on it at the time of his death.
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Duvall Hecht never wrote a book. Yet Hecht, who died of heart failure on Feb. 10 at 91, brought books to untold millions of avid listeners. Bored with listening to the radio during his long commutes on L.A. freeways in the 1970s, Hecht and his first wife, Sigrid, started a business in their living room called Books on Tape, which gave birth to today’s $1.3 billion audiobooks industry. The Hechts’ formula was simple: pay unknown actors to read every single word of books in the public domain, then sell or rent the cassettes through the mail to individuals, schools and libraries.
It worked, but it wasn’t Hecht’s whole story. In his long and colorful life, he served in the Marines, won a gold medal as a member of the United States rowing team at the 1956 Olympics in Melbourne, coached college rowing teams, worked as a commercial pilot and in marketing for an investment banking firm. After the Books on Tape catalog reached 6,000 titles, Hecht sold the business to Random House for $20 million, then took one last career turn. He lived out a boyhood dream and spent seven years driving 18-wheelers. He loved the life of of a long-haul trucker: it was perfect for listening to audiobooks.
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Twenty years before he dragged the United States into the quagmire of the Vietnam War, Robert McNamara was crunching ordnance numbers for the U.S. military’s fire-bombing of Japanese cities, a campaign designed to break the nation’s spirit hasten the end of the Second World War. McNamara calculated the necessary number of planes for the bombing runs, the miles of flight, the gallons of fuel, the amount of jellied gasoline. When the campaign failed to accomplish its purpose, President Truman ordered the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Katsumoto Saotome, who died of pneumonia on May 10 at 90, was one of the survivors of the fire-bombing of Tokyo on March 10, 1945, which incinerated an estimated 100,000 people in a single day, most of them civilians. Saotome, a novelist, spent more than half a century amassing the memories of his fellow survivors, which eventually filled six volumes. The first, published in 1971, was modeled on John Hersey’s famous account of the aftermath of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.
The bombing of civilians has largely been a failure as war strategy. It failed during the Blitz in London, it failed during the bombing of German cities—the subject of Kurt Vonnegut’s blistering novel Slaughterhouse Five—and it appears to be failing today in Ukraine. After watching news footage of Ukrainian women and children trying to escape Russian artillery attacks, Saotome said he was reminded of scenes in Tokyo nearly 80 years earlier: “I feel like I am seeing scenes of many Japanese people wandering around trying to escape just in front of my eyes.”
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Nancy Milford was a two-hit wonder, the author of best-selling biographies of two of the most incandescent women of the Jazz Age: Zelda Fitzgerald and the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Edna St. Vincent Millay. While researching Zelda (1970) and Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay (2001), Milford’s dogged research was aided by strokes of dazzling good luck. Her research for Zelda included letters, albums, scrapbooks, interviews with friends of her subject and her subject’s husband, F. Scott Fitzgerald, as well as reports by psychiatrists who treated Zelda for schizophrenia. The luck came when Zelda’s daughter, Scottie, handed her mother’s papers to Milford in shopping bags—a trove no one else had seen. For Savage Beauty, the luck sprang from a visit to the upstate New York home of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s sister, Norma. The house was stuffed with thousands of Edna’s notebooks, letters and drafts of poems that no one else had seen, treasure the biographer pored over for four summers.
Milford, who died of an unspecified cause on March 29 at 84, spent more than three decades working on the second of her two hits. In those years she spent countless hours teaching, bombing around the Berkshire Mountains in an antique Morgan sports car, and helping found the Leon Levy Center for Biography in Manhattan. Milford made no apologies for the long lull between books. “Pish posh,” she told the Los Angeles Times. “It’s my life, and I can do with it what I want.”
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With his hyphenated name, Rolando Hinojosa-Smith staked a claim to the territory of the Rio Grande Valley, a slice of borderland between two cultures that he called Belken County. This imaginary county’s imaginary county seat was Klail City, which was surrounded by the towns of Flora, San Pedro, Ruffing and Jonesville-on-the-Rio. Readers and critics invariably linked this self-contained universe to the extraordinary Yoknapatawpha and Macondo, and even to above-average Lake Wobegone.
Hinojosa-Smith, who wrote in English and Spanish (and taught himself German), was best known for his 15-volume Klail City Death Trip series, but he also wrote short stories and essays, freely mixing in poetry, sketches, letters, police procedurals, autofiction, border noir, fragments of dialog and monolog. Time got chopped up. Narratives rarely moved straight ahead. They teemed with, as Hinojosa-Smith put it, “the fair and the mean, the fools and knaves, the heroes and cowards, those who are selfish, and those who are full of self-abnegation.” Like the people and the world it tries to capture, there is nothing conventional about the writing. And there was nothing conventional about the writer.
Hinojosa-Smith, who died from complications of dementia on April 19 at 93, served in the U.S. Army, worked in a chemical plant, taught high school and worked as a civil servant before turning to fiction. After he made his name as a writer, he taught literature at the University of Texas for 35 years. Writing in Texas Monthly, the novelist Richard Z. Santos summed up what Hinojosa-Smith did for the residents of Belken County and every other borderland in the world. “The people are no longer mutants or outcasts but hybrids and the future of both society and literature,” Santos wrote. They are also, he added, “something new and beautiful.”
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In 2018, Duncan Hannah published a first-person account of the 1970s downtown New York art and punk rock scene, 20th Century Boy: Notebooks on the Seventies. Partying at Max’s Kansas City and CBGB, hanging with the Warhol crowd, appearing in underground movies with Debbie Harry, drinking and drugging and fucking heroically, Hannah seemed to be everywhere and to know everybody. Few of them knew that the young man from Minneapolis had artistic dreams backed by a trust fund, and few would have predicted that he would sober up and have a respectable late career as a painter of realistic pictures that he described as “a love letter to art history.” My own review of 20th Century Boy ended with a premonition of this unlikely second act for Hannah, who died of heart attack on June 11 at 69. “(The book) ends almost sweetly,” I wrote, “with Hannah’s stubbornly conventional paintings winning him a solo gallery show, where he arrives sober, gets treated like a prince, and actually sells a bunch of pictures. Hannah has come to realize that the coolest thing of all is the courage to do what’s uncool. It’s a grace note of an ending to a long grubby harrowing wallow. Somehow, it feels perfect.”
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Melissa Bank was a textbook “overnight” success. She spent 12 years polishing her first batch for short stories, writing on weekends and at night after working a day job as a copywriter for an advertising agency. Then, when the collection’s title story was published in the literary magazine Zoetrope, the book world woke up. A bidding war ensued. When it was over, Bank was handed a $275,000 advance from Viking for her first book, The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing, which became a New York Times bestseller, got translated into dozens of languages, sold 1.5 million copies and, for better and mostly worse, got tarred with the brush of “chick lit.”
The book follows Jane Rosenal as she moves from her teen years to her mid-thirties, navigating the shoals of sex, love, money and death. The voice is controlled and knowing—“like John Cheever, only funnier,” in the opinion of one critic. There are grace notes sprinkled throughout the stories, as when Jane escorts her older brother’s older girlfriend into the bedroom they’ll be sharing at the family’s beach house. The room is furnished with a pair of bunk beds. The girlfriend, a Manhattan sophisticate named Julia Cathcart, surveys the setup: “A bunk,” she said, as though charmed. “Like camp.”
Bank followed her debut with a second collection of linked stories, The Wonder Spot, in 2005. Though it did not sell nearly as well as Girls’ Guide, critics were unanimous in declaring it the better book. Bank was at work on a third book when she died from lung cancer on Aug. 2 at 61, an overnight success gone too soon.
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The death of Barbara Ehrenreich, from breast cancer on Sept. 1 at 81, was a loss for every overworked, underpaid, unappreciated person struggling to survive in America—and for every clear-eyed person who sees through the rosy myths of the American dream. Ehrenreich eviscerated those myths most surgically in her 2001 best-seller, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. To research the book, Ehrenreich, who held a doctorate in cellular immunology, took on a string of minimum-wage jobs— waitress, hotel maid, cleaning woman, nursing home aide, Walmart associate—while living in trailer parks and cheap hotels. Though the book, like all of her writing, was fuelled by rage over the worsening inequality of life in America, her goal was less to vent than to give voice to the legions of invisible people working at the bottom of the ladder. In a career that produced more than 20 books, she also took on the pharmaceutical industry, the failure of America’s health care system, poverty, student protests, women’s rights, even the danger of the peculiarly American fixation with “positive thinking.” It was a career that pointed to a chilling conclusion. As Ehrenreich put it: “We turn out to be so vulnerable in the United States.”
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Mike Davis was a seer, a writer who explored the hollow heart of the American Dream, Southern-California style. In 1990, shortly after the publication of his best-known book, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles, Davis said: “What we’re going to find out in short order is that for tens of thousands of people, there’s only one rung of the ladder. There’s no place to climb up.” That year, as crack cocaine coursed through L.A., an average of three people died every day from gun violence.
Two years after the book’s publication, Los Angeles exploded with rioting in the wake of the acquittal of four white policemen who were captured on video beating a Black man named Rodney King. Davis was instantly anointed a prophet for his prescient insights into the city’s social fissures. In a 2006 reissue of the book, he dismissed such plaudits: “Every eleven-year-old in the city knew that an explosion of some kind was coming.” He added this dry assessment: “City of Quartz, in a nutshell, is about the contradictory impact of economic globalization upon different segments of Los Angeles society.” The city, he added a bit more poetically, “has come to play the double role of utopia and dystopia for advanced capitalism.”
He followed his breakout success with Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster in 1998, which excoriated the heedless, market-driven urbanization of the desert. “As a result,” Davis wrote, “Southern California has reaped flood, fire and earthquake tragedies that were as avoidable, as unnatural, as the beating of Rodney King and the ensuing explosion in the streets.” Disaster, as he predicted, is now at hand. Seven states, including California, are currently at war over rights to the Colorado River, which is at its lowest level ever thanks to climate change and the region’s insatiable thirst for water.
Davis, who died of esophageal cancer on Oct. 25 at 79, grew up in a blue-collar family and spent his early years protesting the Vietnam War and working as a meat cutter and a truck driver. The former job got him a union scholarship to the University of California, Los Angeles, which he entered at the age of 28, and the latter introduced him to off-the-radar pockets of Los Angeles County, which would provide the source material for his later writings. Despite all the dark foreboding in his books, Davis remained an optimist to the end. “Utopia is available to us,” he said in 2020. “You can never discard hope.”
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When they were in eighth grade, 14-year-old Lloyd Newman and his buddy LeAlan Jones tape-recorded 100 hours of interviews with friends, family and neighbors in the Ida B. Wells housing project in Chicago, an oral history they called “Ghetto Life 101.” It caught the ear of a National Public Radio producer named David Isay, who boiled it down into a 28-minute segment for NPR in 1993.
Three years later, the two friends produced an oral collage, “Remorse: The 14 Stories of Eric Morse,” that explored the horrific killing of a 5-year-old boy who was dropped from the window of a vacant fourteenth-floor apartment by two children, aged 10 and 11. Eric’s crime? He refused to steal candy for his killers. The collage made Newman and Jones the youngest winners in the history of the prestigious Peabody Award. A year later, the collage was adapted into a book, Our America: Life and Death on the South Side of Chicago, co-written with Isay. After the book appeared, Newman gave a succinct summery of death and life in an American ghetto: “People get thrown out of windows, drowned, stabbed, shot. But a lot of that killing would stop if the government would make it livable around here. We don’t have no parks. The swings are broken. There’s nothing for people to do. There’s no fun. Life isn’t worth living without some fun.”
Newman died on Dec. 7 from complications of sickle cell anemia. He was 43.
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And here, in alphabetical order, are a few of the more towering literary figures we lost this year:
Nelson W. Aldrich Jr. (86) was a product of generations of New England wealth. That wealth—its sources and manners, its mores and foibles—became the topic of his best-known work, Old Money: The Mythology of Wealth in America, a knowing, clear-eyed dissection of the upper classes that won deserved comparisons to The Education of Henry Adams.
Baseball was more than a game to Roger Angell (101). It was an obsession and a metaphor and a source of joy. He was both an elegant reporter and a shameless fan. In his 1977 book Five Seasons, he tried to explain what drives the sports fan: “It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitative as a professional sports team. What is left out of this calculation, it seems to me, is the business of caring—caring deeply and passionately, really caring—which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives.”
Jason Epstein (93) was an oxymoron—a hard-nosed businessman with a soft spot for fine literature. As an editor he helped shape the writings of a stable or thoroughbreds that included Gore Vidal, Jean Strouse, W.H. Auden, Philip Roth, E.L. Doctorow and Norman Mailer, among many others. As a businessman he saw the market for quality paperbacks, and he helped give birth to the New York Review of Books during a bruising newspaper strike in 1963. It’s still going strong today.
After it won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1982, A Soldier’s Play by Charles Fuller (83) caught Hollywood’s attention. The story about the murder of a Black Army sergeant and the search for his killer was a breakthrough because it moved beyond idealized or demonized types and served up flawed, three-dimensional characters, both Black and white. The movie version, retitled A Soldier’s Story, had a cast that included Denzel Washington from the original off-Broadway cast. It received three Oscar nominations, including one for best picture and one for Fuller’s adapted screenplay. Despite this pedigree, the play did not make it to Broadway until 2020, when it won the Tony Award for best revival. It’s too late to ask Fuller: Is vindication sweeter after such a long wait?
In addition to winning a Pulitzer Prize for his poetry, Richard Howard (92) translated the works of dozens of French writers into English, among them Charles Baudelaire, Roland Barthes and Alain Robbe-Grillet. On a different note, he also translated Charles de Gaulle’s war memoirs.
Herbert Janklow (91)and Sterling Lord (102) were two giants among literary agents. The former was known for his longevity and for making his clients rich, including Danielle Steel, Judith Krantz, Nancy Reagan and Pope John Paul II; the latter was known for his longevity and for making his clients famous, including Jack Kerouac, Ken Kesey, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Doris Kearns Goodwin and, counter-intuitively, Robert McNamara. “This is a business of self-fulfilling prophecies,” Janklow declared. “One of the reasons to drive for big advances is not to make authors and agents rich. It’s to make the publisher aware of what he’s bought.”
Her trilogy of novels about Thomas Cromwell—Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies, and The Mirror and the Light—won two Booker Prizes and an adoring worldwide readership for Hilary Mantel (70). She said she decided to reimagine the inner life of Cromwell, one of the most trusted aides of King Henry VIII, because everything she’d read made him out to be a stereotyped villain. “I realized,” she said two years before her death, “that some imaginative work was due on this man.”
It’s unthinkable that an American writer could inspire the critical acclaim and public adulation that were showered on the Spanish writer Javier Marías (70). His novels drew freely on spy thrillers and murder mysteries, and he turned this material into literature with intricate plots and a rambling, discursive style. He also wrote a popular newspaper column, translated the work of British and American writers into Spanish, and sold some eight million copies of his 14 novels, four books of short-stories and dozens of essay collections worldwide. In his decorated life, Marias was regularly mentioned as a favorite to win of the Nobel Prize in Literature. It was the one award that eluded him.
There didn’t seem to be a subject too big for the capacious talents of David McCullough (89). He wrote fluid best-sellers about disaster (the Johnstown flood), marvels of engineering and human will (the Brooklyn Bridge and the Panama Canal), presidents (John Adams, Theodore Roosevelt, Harry Truman), and about the momentous year of 1776. “I think of writing history as an art form,” McCullough said in an interview for an HBO documentary. “And I’m striving to write a book that might—might—qualify as literature. I don’t want it just to be readable. I don’t want it just to be interesting. I want it to be something that moves the reader. Moves me.”
As an art critic at The Village Voice and later The New Yorker, Peter Schjeldahl (80) wrote out of deep knowledge or art and an even deeper love for artists and their creations. His criticism could cut, but it always came out of that love. He was also a published poet, and he said that writing poetry taught him the art of “tracking truth by ear.” Late in life he became the subject of Also a Poet: Frank O’Hara, My Father, and Me, a memoir by his daughter, Ada Calhoun. “I compulsively reread it,” Schjeldahl wrote to Calhoun shortly before he died, “deeply joyful.”
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