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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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For the Love of the Game: Poker in Nonfiction
The watershed moment for Texas hold’em and its oldest and most prestigious tournament, the World Series of Poker, can be traced back to 2003, when online qualifier and self-described poker amateur Chris Moneymaker – his real name – became World Champion. Moneymaker inspired a legion of online amateurs with his Cinderella story. Since then, hold’em – as played virtually – has transformed into a cultural and commercial phenomenon. Poker websites are veritable training grounds for the World Series of Poker, as well as other less high-profile tournaments, whose number of contestants and purse money continue to rise in tandem.
Proof of the game’s current popularity is the marketability of hold’em strategy books, as any google search for related titles will confirm. Decidedly less marketable, but also part of hold’em’s history, is the World Series of Poker as covered by a novelist turned sportswriter. In this canon there are but few titles, the most notable of which are The Biggest Game in Town by A. Alvarez and Positively Fifth Street: Murderers, Cheetahs, and Binion’s World Series of Poker by James McManus. Colson Whitehead has now added his own contribution to this sparse and rather obscure list with his new book, The Noble Hustle: Poker, Beef Jerky, and Death.
Back in the spring of 1981, when the World Series of Poker was in its twelfth year, English writer A. Alvarez flew from London to Las Vegas to cover the Main Event for The New Yorker. For the next twenty-seven nights, he took up residence in the Golden Nugget hotel on Fremont Street in the downtown section of Vegas known as Glitter Gulch. Today, as was the case in 1981, the neon lights of Glitter Gulch are eclipsed by those of the Strip. Ask any recent Vegas visitor if they happened to check out downtown Fremont during their trip and they will likely look at you mysteriously, as if you asked them whether or not they checked out a bunch of shrubs nearby the Grand Canyon. When Alvarez was interned there, however, Glitter Gulch was home to what he called “the real action.” By action he meant gambling, of course, and by real he meant absolute, or not diluted by additional entertainments famously offered by the Strip.
More to the point, Glitter Gulch in 1981 was also home to the World Series of Poker, then called Binion’s World Series Championship of Poker, trademarked by its founder, Benny Binion, a Vegas pioneer from the Lone Star State, at whose relatively humble Horseshoe Casino the tournament took place. That year, seventy-five contestants competed in the No Limit Texas hold’em Main Event, the winner of which is crowned World Champion of Poker. It was Stu Unger who won the title along with less than half a million dollars. Last year, at the not-so humble Rio Hotel and Casino on the Strip, the tournament venue since 2005 after its purchase by Caesars, the number of Main Event contestants exceeded six thousand; the winner claimed over eight million dollars.
The story Alvarez filed for The New Yorker he expanded into a book sharing the same title, The Biggest Game in Town, itself a golden nugget about Vegas and American ingenuity. But mostly it’s about poker and the people who at that time earned a living playing it for high-stakes. Many of them, like Doyle Brunson, Jack Straus, Johnny Moss, Amarillo Slim Preston, and Crandell Addington, all inductees in the Poker Hall of Fame and some still active even today, are or were quintessential Texans. Alvarez’s portraits of these cowboys are carefully drawn, reverent, and unobtrusive. His reverence for them comes from his understanding that these men, who live by their wits and ride out their losses almost as casually as they do their victories, are simply cut from a different cloth. He lets them speak for themselves in their identical drawls, which is smart, since each is well-supplied with hard-earned, no-nonsense insights into their profession, and some, notably Jack Straus, are consummate raconteurs.
Alvarez’s unobtrusiveness is part of his provenance, I’d wager. Our reporter at large is as English as Amarillo Slim Preston is southern. The unrelenting heat of Nevada affects Alvarez acutely. When I wrote that he was interned in Glitter Gulch, I did so because Alvarez himself likens his stay to a sentence in a penitentiary. After only a week, he claims to “exhibit symptoms of physical deprivation – nervous tension, disorientation, insomnia, loss of appetite.” A morning stroll leaves him feeling faint. He is clearly not a cowboy. Which is what makes The Biggest Game in Town so powerfully observed – Alvarez’s status as stranger or foreigner, not only to Vegas but to America as well. It affords him a critical distance. During the taxi ride from the airport to his hotel, for example, he’s struck by what he deems a uniquely American phenomenon, “the utter lack of continuity between large towns and their surrounding countryside.” For Alvarez, Vegas is an example of this discontinuity par excellence: the city pops up in the desert like a mirage, as redundant a simile as that is.
Alvarez is also a stranger to high-stakes poker. The first game he observes, he overhears the players betting two dollars, a nickel, and five dollars, which confuses him into thinking he’s watching a small-stakes game until he peers at the numerical values on the chips. As he is informed later, “serious gamblers always leave off the zeroes when they announce their bets.” It must say something about Alvarez’s journalistic approach that he won the confidences of so many of these serious players over the course of his stay in spite of his relative greenness; that he was welcomed into their fold must also say something about the magnanimous personalities of the players themselves.
The contradiction between their big-heartedness away from the table and their aggressive, cutthroat tactics at the table is never lost on Alvarez, either. They’re made up of other contradictions too, these poker professionals or “mental athletes”: they compete tirelessly for big-money prizes and yet are willing to gamble away their winnings almost immediately; they harbor lofty notions of personal liberty that a life outside the system – and inside the gambling hall – services and yet some of them remain slightly wounded by the stigma attached to their vocation by those in the system. By the tournament’s end, Alvarez is as in awe of his subjects as he was when he first arrived.
In 2000, James McManus found himself in circumstances similar to A. Alvarez in 1981 when McManus was sent to Vegas on assignment from Harper’s to cover the Main Event. The story he filed he really expanded into the memoir Positively Fifth Street: Murderers, Cheetahs, and Binion’s World Series of Poker. Like Alvarez, McManus was a poker player by hobby, uninitiated to the world of high-stakes competition. This did not stop him from spending a quarter of his expenses and advance money from Harper’s on the buy-in to a satellite table in an attempt to play his way into the tournament. The format of the Main Event of the World Series of Poker has not changed since 1972. A player can either pay the steep ten thousand dollar buy-in, thereby paying his or her way into the tournament, or compete at the variously priced satellite tables beforehand in the hopes of clinching a berth. “Satellites,” McManus writes, “are...thought by many players to be the most legitimate route to the final, since they reward poker skill instead of deep pockets.”
McManus’ shallow pockets went a long way in 2000 and at 385 pages, with a glossary, bibliography and an index, Positively Fifth Street is a comprehensive account of his improbable run. Whereas Alvarez remained a railbird or poker spectator throughout his twenty-seven nights in Glitter Gulch, McManus became an unwitting contender for the title in the very tournament he was being paid to report on. His use of the present tense to describe key hands makes it feel as if the action is unfolding as we read it, and his shock and exhilaration after each favorable turn of the card is registered at the same time as ours. We are with McManus as he advances. His total recall for bets, hole cards, and flop cards made me wonder if he was relying on memory alone or if the tournament organizers keep records of every hand played. Either way, the very entertaining play-by-play passages in the book may explain why poker has turned into such a stalwart ratings performer for sports broadcasters these days.
From 1981 to 2000, the number of Main Event contestants rose steadily from seventy-five to 512. During McManus’s run, the tournament was held at Binion’s Horseshoe and still very much a family affair, as it was during Alvarez’s stay. Alvarez distinguishes Binion’s from other Strip casinos not just geographically but also on the basis of it being a family-run operation, uncorrupted by corporate bureaucracy. In 1981, Binion’s did not put a limit on the size of a gambler’s bet, making it the single exception to all other Vegas casinos. This laxity with respect to a prevalent rule that the corporate casinos impose on high-rollers in order to protect themselves against big losses epitomized, for Alvarez, the more exceptional experience a gambler had at Binion’s back then. Alvarez is charmed by its “down-home” atmosphere, as are the serious players who win and lose there, many of whom, according to Alvarez, are friends of the Binion clan.
Reading Positively Fifth Street today, one can sense the imminent corporatization of the World Series of Poker. McManus mentions how the playing field is populated by younger players schooled on computer programs; some wear hats – baseball hats, not Stetsons – emblazoned with the names of corporate sponsors. With its patriarch dead for over a decade, the Binion empire appears to be crumbling too. McManus uses the trial of the murder of Ted Binion, the family’s youngest and wildest, as a backdrop. One of the accused, his live-in girlfriend, claims in court that Ted had once put a hit out on his sister Becky, then president of the Horseshoe. It is a claim Becky does not dispute.
Recent telecasts of the World Series of Poker reveal players who are mostly young and sartorially-challenged. The proven ones are almost as covered in corporate logos as NASCAR drivers. So it’s hard not to feel nostalgic for the humble beginnings of the World Series of Poker while reading The Biggest Game in Town, when hold’em was not well-known and thus the Main Event retained a certain exclusive air despite its rising popularity. Positively Fifth Street represents a transitional period in the tournament’s and hold’em’s corresponding histories. It would be just three years before Chris Moneymaker claimed the title, effectively breaking the tournament and the game wide open. The following year, the World Series of Poker had a new home and sponsor, and the number of Main Event contestants tripled. Hold’em is now ubiquitous and the World Series of Poker continues to determine its best player.
It makes perfect sense, then, that in 2011 the sports and entertainment website Grantland felt the time was ripe to send a reporter of its own to cover the tournament as it exists today, thereby adding its name to the short list of estimable publications who also recognized the literary merit of the assignment. The result is Colson Whitehead’s The Noble Hustle: Poker, Beef Jerky, and Death. Minus a flashback about the author’s first trip to Vegas, originally published in Harper’s, the book more or less exists online in the Grantland archives under the non-self-explanatory title of Occasional Dispatches from the Republic of Anhedonia. The Republic of Anhedonia is our reporter’s imaginary nationality, which suggests he may suffer from depression. Whether or not it’s clinical, and therefore deadly serious, he does not say; in fact, anhedonia’s relevance to The Noble Hustle remains frustratingly unclear in spite of how often Whitehead brings it up.
Grantland didn’t just send Whitehead to cover the event, they paid his ten-thousand dollar buy-in to compete in the tournament, which does not get him very far. In this sense, The Noble Hustle is like Positively Fifth Street without the improbable and exhilarating run by its author. If Whitehead didn’t spend so much time warming us up to his tournament appearance, perhaps his early exit would have felt less anticlimactic, even if he coyly prepares us for what happens to him. For a memoir, The Noble Hustle is remarkably aloof as well. Whitehead doesn’t tell us the name of his daughter, instead referring to her as “the kid” throughout. In contrast, McManus’s 385 page poker memoir includes a disquisition on his family tree and ends with his cringe-worthy confession to his wife that he received a lap dance during his Vegas stay.
There are several missed opportunities in The Noble Hustle. In 2011, the Feds shut down the major American online poker sites; known as Black Friday among poker insiders, the shutdown had major financial implications on the game and its players. Whitehead refers to Black Friday only offhandedly and fails to explore its impact on the 2011 tournament. We also don’t get any real insight into the type of people who make a living off poker, as we do in McManus’s and Alvarez’s books.
As a breezy and sarcasm-soaked account of one man’s very unsuccessful attempt to repeat what McManus accomplished in 2000, The Noble Hustle does not earn a rightful place in a tradition begun by Alvarez and continued by McManus. Whitehead is as capable a writer as they are. But his forerunners had a more probing and contagious interest in the game and the people who play it.
Image credit: Joo0ey/Flickr
Ask a Book Question: The Eighteenth in a Series (Showing Your Cards)
My good and old friend Hot Face, I mean, "Larry 'Boom Boom' Delvechhio" writes in with this question about going for broke and laying it all out on the line.Howyadoin'. I was recently in beyootyful Atlantic City--business trip--and I'm thinkin', geez, this crap is fascinatin'. Is there any, like, books on the subject of gambling/casinos/slots/A.C./Vegas youse might know about? I'm thinkin' like a New Yorkery piece of joinalism with an eye for the math and the drama of the whole thing.Mr. Delvechhio, fresh off celebrating his swiftly disappearing bachelorhood, must have caught the gambling bug in Atlantic City last weekend. I know because I had a similar experience during my celebrations in Vegas about a month ago. Remember? At the time I discussed a number of books that are related to Sin City in one way or another, but I left out books about gambling. Nonetheless, I can recommend three that might serve Mr. Delvechhio's purposes, though I'm sure there are countless others. The first is one that I have read, or rather listened to as an audiobook. In 2000 James McManus arrived in Las Vegas to cover the World Series of Poker for Harper's. He would leave a lot richer and with a seed for book to be called Positively Fifth Street planted in his brain. A poker player his whole life, McManus couldn't resist jumping into the fray. He used his advance to pay the entrance fee for the tournament. Remarkably, McManus, an unassuming family man, makes it to the final table of the tournament, and in the process is able to give a great insider's view of a grueling tournament that features bizarre personalities and incredibly high stakes. He also weaves into the narrative the intrigue and murder surrounding the Binions, the family whose casino hosts the tournament. It's a fantastic, quick read that will get you hooked on poker if you aren't already. Another poker book is called The Biggest Game in Town by the mysterious A. Alvarez. This book also focuses on the World Series of Poker, though it hails from an earlier era. Though I haven't read it, I've had this book recommended to me dozens of times since I started working at the book store. By all accounts it is a very quality book; in fact, large portions of it originally appeared in the New Yorker in 1981 or so. And finally, a blackjack book: Ben Mezrich uncovered a pretty remarkable story last year when he wrote about the M.I.T. blackjack team in his book Bringing Down the House. I haven't read this one either, but I heard Mizrach several times on the radio last year. The revelation: apparently, for years, there has been a highly secretive blackjack team at M.I.T. Created, recruited, and originally bankrolled by a professor, the team used their considerable math skills to make a killing counting cards in Vegas. Before the operation was permanently blackballed from the casinos, they racked up millions. It got to the point where they were traveling with suitcases full of cash and sitting next to NBA stars at the blackjack table. If you see yourself as a money-making, mathematical genius, this might be the book for you. Oh, and, Delvechhio, I'm looking forward to the nuptuals.The Hype ContinuesMore news in a story that is sure to dominate the book-related headlines for months to come: it has been announced that former prez Bill Clinton has completed his a 900-page manuscript for his memoir due out this June, putting an end to fears that he wouldn't finish on time. They have also released the cover photo, which is just a standard portrait. The remaining intrigue surrounds how revelatory this memoir will be and the timing of the memoir's release, with some conspiracy theorists claiming that Clinton's stealing of the spotlight is meant to sabotage John Kerry in an attempt to clear the way for Hillary in 2008.
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