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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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W.G. Sebald and the Malthusian Tragic
In 1798, an unknown curate named Robert Thomas Malthus published the essay that would give his name to a new breed of anxiety. He argued that the growth rate of the population would always exceed the growth rate of the food supply, inevitably reducing every country to the brink of starvation, and turning the world into a Hieronymus Bosch painting: crowded, chaotic and cruel.
It was a unique, and uniquely grim, theory. For centuries, apocalyptic scenarios had been the sole purview of God, the price he would exact in exchange for sorting out our souls. Malthus demonstrated that not only did humanity possess the divine's capacity for destruction, but also that the engine of this destruction could be as innocent an act as procreation. Friedrich Engels, joining a chorus of criticism, called it "the most barbarous theory that ever existed, a system of despair which struck down all those beautiful phrases about love thy neighbour and world citizenship."
I wonder if Malthus knew he had discovered a new species of despair, and if he himself was affected by it. If he was the neurotic type, he must have struggled to suppress an uneasy foreboding at the sight of a festive crowd, a teeming market, or his own grandchildren. If he sought comfort in rural solitude, I doubt he found it. I picture him struggling to wave away a dismal image that his imagination was superimposing over a bucolic field, the muddy slum that he predicted it would become.
Malthus might have recognized himself in the narrators of W.G. Sebald. On seemingly every page of Sebald's four novels, his narrators struggle to repress a feeling of horror at the most innocent scenes. For them, it's the past that is always superimposing itself. This depressing tendency is so pervasive as to become almost absurd: when the narrator of Vertigo wakes up in Venice the beautiful stillness of a peaceful morning only reminds him of other, unpeaceful mornings: "How often, I thought to myself, had I lain thus in a hotel room, in Vienna or Frankfurt or Brussels, with my hands clasped under my head, listening not to stillness, as in Venice, but to the roar of traffic, with a mounting sense of panic." He concludes with some choice words about humanity's penchant for annihilation.
Sebald might seem like an odd choice to associate with Malthus. He is typically described as pioneering a new literary approach to the Holocaust, a tragedy synonymous with active human cruelty, not deterministic growth rates. In fact, it's hard to associate any novelist with Malthus. Malthusian tragedies have not fared well in fiction. Global warming is the most empirically sound Malthusian threat that humanity has ever faced, but no good, let alone great, novel about global warming has yet been written. It's not hard to see why. Try to see the world through the lens of global warming, and you experience a kind of narrative inversion. On the one hand, the physical reality of a warming planet makes your personal stories, the ones books are written about, irrelevant; acts of charity, love, or adultery don't lower carbon emissions. On the other hand, the events that make up the forgotten background of your day-to-day—eating a meal, taking a plane, heating your home—take on a tragic significance. Look around and you will see a million tiny but irrevocable contributions toward an impending catastrophe.
A writer who succeeded in fictionalizing this unnatural dynamic without becoming unmarketably morose (already a tall order), would still struggle to avoid being misread. We don't like to think our favorite writers are forsaking us. We don't want the authors of beautiful phrases to be at the same time, as Engels said, striking down all those beautiful phrases. No matter how dark and depressing the prose, we like to claim it's "redeemed" by the author's "deep humanity," as if the act of writing at all implies that a William Faulkner or a Cormac McCarthy cares about our happiness.
This kind of false redemption has been the fate of W.G. Sebald. His novels create precisely the narrative inversion I described, but this achievement of his, which points the way for a literature of climate change, has been overlooked, in part because of Sebald's reputation as a Holocaust writer, but in larger part because we don't like to acknowledge the hopelessness of Sebald's vision, or to acknowledge it as the strength of his writing.
No one would say Sebald is an optimist, but many of his proponents have argued that a leavening agent exists in his prose, something that tempers the lugubriousness of his narrators, whether it be Sebald's genuine sympathy for suffering or the sheer beauty of his sentences. For James Wood, who helped popularize Sebald among English-speaking readers, this leavening agent is comedy. In his most recent appraisal of the German author, Wood argues that an undercurrent of playful humor can be found in Sebald's works, especially in moments when the repressed horror seems most exaggerated, like in this description of a defrosted fish the narrator is served in The Rings of Saturn:
The breadcrumb armour-plating of the fish had been partly singed by the grill, and the prongs of my fork bent on it. Indeed it was so difficult to penetrate what eventually proved to be nothing but an empty shell that my plate was a hideous mess once the operation was over.
Wood claims this passage, with its sense of disgust barely concealed behind pedantic language, is worthy of Evelyn Waugh.
The challenge of interpreting Sebald at the level of his sentences is that the meaning of each sentence is never entirely contained within the words that compose it. In this, his sentences mirror the effect of his novels, which, though we agree are broadly "about" the Holocaust, almost never mention it directly. Rather, they treat it as a kind of negative space, tracing its outline through a series of seemingly miscellaneous travel anecdotes, history lessons, and capsule biographies. The Rings of Saturn, which is framed as a walking tour around England, touches on topics as varied as the destruction of Beijing's Summer Palace, Rembrandt’s paintings, the decay of British holiday towns, and the melancholy of weavers. What keeps these vignettes meaningful is the way they are linked, not narratively, not even, in a narrow sense, thematically, but associatively, through the repetition of certain words, the symmetries between certain images, and even the way Sebald uses typesetting. All writers use associations, but the density of these links in Sebald's prose is genuinely astonishing. They create a halo around each sentence, which, though as weightless by comparison, is as essential to its effect as the rings that surround Saturn.
To accurately convey the real effect of the seemingly humorous fish dinner, I have to describe three other passages from the novel that deal with animals. In one, the narrator recounts the Biblical story of Jesus exorcising Legion. The demons he casts out enter the bodies of 2,000 pigs, who run into a lake to drown themselves. The narrator wonders if Jesus didn't commit a serious error: does "human reasoning, diseased as it is, [need] to seize on some other kind that it can take to be inferior and thus deserving of annihilation?"
In another, he describes how silkworms were distributed as educational materials to schools in the Third Reich because they "afforded an almost ideal object lesson for the classroom," on account of being "docile" and "suitable for a variety of experiments." The narrator watches an educational video on how the silkworms are raised and ultimately killed: "The cocoons, spread out on shallow baskets, have to be kept in the rising steam for upwards of three hours, and when a batch is done, it is the next one's turn, and so on until the entire killing business is done."
Finally, there is a vignette on the mutilating experiments done in the 18th century on live specimens of herring, to test certain absurd beliefs about their mortality: "This process, inspired by our thirst for knowledge, might be described as the most extreme sufferings undergone by a species always threatened with disaster." Two grainy photographs bookend this vignette. One is of fishermen standing over a pile of dead herring. The other is of piled corpses in the woods outside the liberated Bergen Belsen concentration camp.
This is how the novel’s associative web is threaded, tying together seemingly unconnected stories using language that we associate with genocide, like "inferior other kinds" or "the entire killing business," folding suggestions of suffering and forced experimentation into the mention of animals, creating a kind of associative hypersensitivity, the way a horror movie attunes you to the sound of a dripping faucet. So when I read about stabbing a fork into a burnt fish, about the "hideous mess," and especially the word "operation" (which Wood uses as an example of Sebald's comically "calm control of apparently ponderous diction"), I experience a hard-to-characterize feeling, like a movement or a crowding in the peripheral vision of my mind’s eye, and if I allow my inner gaze to follow it, I see a single name, unmentioned in the book: Josef Mengele.
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Of course, we have hotlines for people who intuit signs in their dinner. There is a paranoid quality to these endless associations and their constant foreboding, which even Wood deems at times excessive: "What the reader might take on faith if encountered in Büchner's Lenz [a 19th-century novella about the titular character's struggles with madness, and a favorite of Sebald's] is a little stagy when it concerns merely an academic who happens to be doing a bit of book research in Italy." In other words, unlike Lenz, Sebald's academics don't seem genuinely crazy, so why do they act as if they are?
Lenz's insanity offers an interesting comparison, because it actually differs in kind, not degree. There are, for one, examples of healthy minds in his world, if not the dissolute cosmopolitans that Lenz is fleeing, then at least the kind pastor Oberlin to whom he flees, and in whom Lenz believes lies "the way of God." On his so-called better days, Lenz is able to follow that way, to live in quiet appreciation of the world, but ultimately his disposition proves too extreme. He asks Oberlin to whip him, he obsesses over his sins, he demands of God to bring a dead child back to life. He is one of those people of whom we say, they were too much for this world.
Of Sebald's narrators, it would be more accurate to say the world is too much for them. The narrator of Rings of Saturn describes only one so-called better day, when he begins his walking tour, "carefree" as he's rarely felt before. But in the next sentence he admits he was soon overtaken by the "paralysing horror that had come over me at various times when confronted with the traces of destruction, reaching far back into the past, that were evident even in that remote place [East Anglia]." The walk, which triggers the cascading associations recorded in the novel, ultimately results in a nervous breakdown. To call this insanity is too simple. If the patterns of destruction the narrator is confronted by are real, his sensitivity to them puts him in a double bind, one that would be familiar to Malthus and climate pessimists: to ignore the reality of the world, to calmly go about your book research as if you're not walking atop a stratum of suffering, is delusional, but to look at that reality with any clarity for a sustained period of time is to be horrified to the point of mental collapse. This bind leaves no room for Oberlins. In Sebald's novels, there are only those who suffer the pain of reality and those who, oblivious to it, ensure its perpetuity.
Take another example of Sebald's alleged playfulness that Wood elaborates on. It comes from Sebald's second novel, The Emigrants, in which Wood claims the narrator "lovingly seizes on" British contraptions after emigrating to Manchester. One such contraption is a teas-maid, a kind of physical portmanteau of an alarm clock and a tea-making machine that starts boiling the water right before it wakes you. It is given to him by his hotel manager. The narrator says it looks like a "miniature power plant," a "weird and serviceable gadget," whose mere presence keeps him "holding on to life" in a time of deep isolation.
Reading Wood's essay, I felt a vague suspicion that Sebald would never compare anything good to a power plant. The Emigrants is the most narrative of Sebald's novels; the narrator investigates and retells the life stories of various emigrants who fled the turmoil of Europe. Among them, there is Paul Bereyter, the narrator's grade school teacher, who ends his life by laying his head on train tracks. The narrator learns that Bereyter had taken great solace in trains his whole life, had hung up train schedules all over his apartment, and had even given over a spare room to a miniature train set. Bereyter's friend describes this train set as "the very image and symbol of Paul's German tragedy." There is also Henry Selwyn, who shoots himself in the heart with a rifle he once brought to India to keep himself safe from wildlife. There is Dr. Abramsky, driven insane by his years of administering electroshock therapy, whose curative promise he clung to after losing his father. And there is Max Ferber, who becomes ill from the coal dust born of his obsessive artistic production.
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Trains, guns, shock therapy, and coal, all industrial symbols, like the “miniature power plant,” and all, like the teas-maid, offering pyrrhic comfort to solitary emigrants, whose troubles reflect another of Sebald's preoccupations, the unsuspecting support that many Jews offered to the project of German industrialization. When I reread the passage about the teas-maid, it began to seem like the image and symbol of some impending British tragedy. And, most uncannily, as the shadows of these other emigrants flickered behind his words, the narrator seemed to see the glimmer of that coming betrayal. But what could he do? Smash the teas-maid? His only choice is repression. Wood claims the narrator describes this incident with "mock-solemn gingerliness," but I see nothing mock about it. In the pedantic expressions and torturously construct sentences, I feel the strain of the narrator trying to repress that glimmer, to hide it beneath layers of abstracted, unfeeling prose.
Of course, like all repression, it's doomed to failure. Every path he follows, every story he collects, and every word he writes only retraces the indelible outline of the unmentionable. That's why you can take seemingly any sentence from a Sebald novel, no matter how innocent or playful, like (another of Wood's examples) the teapot in The Rings of Saturn that emits “the occasional puff of steam as from a toy engine” and offers the narrator a moment of distraction, and if you pull on the associative thread—which leads to the steam-powered toy train that the Empress Dowager used to distract her son while she starved her country, the same Empress who wished her subjects were docile like silkworms, the insects that schools in the Third Reich were so fond of—you will discover that even this stray sentence forms a part of that outline.
Sebald's obliqueness, the way he hides the worst of the Holocaust from view, is crucial to this effect. If he had, for example, in The Emigrants, described the amount of power needed to operate the gas chambers or the conditions of the cattle cars that took Jews to Auschwitz, it would perhaps be clearer that the teas-maid and the miniature train set represent echoes of these terrible events, but it would also allow us to maintain our sense of proportion, our ability to distinguish what is actually evil from what merely reminds us of evil. Instead, we hear only the echoes, which, without their source, grow louder and more disorienting. Everything in any way related to industry becomes equally suspect.
That would all too obviously be the goal of a novel about global warming. It's less obvious, however, why Sebald was bent on applying this technique to the Holocaust. The answers he offered are unsatisfying. In one interview, he said the Holocaust could be approached only "by reference rather than by direct confrontation...to write about concentration camps in my view is practically impossible." It makes a good quote, but it would be news to Elie Wiesel, Claude Lanzmann, and H.G. Adler. Many great works of art confront the Holocaust directly. Furthermore, many of Sebald's allusions, like the pile of shoes outside an Italian kindergarten, would be meaningless to someone who had never seen pictures of the camps. Sebald relies on readers having made a direct confrontation.
The real reason, I believe, is that Sebald actually saw the Holocaust as a Malthusian tragedy. This suspicion is raised by his fiction, and is confirmed by his academic writings. Before he wrote novels, Sebald was a professor of literature, and he produced a number of largely Marxist critical works that dealt with the history and literature of the Holocaust. These works have been ignored in discussions of his fiction, in part because they remain for the most part untranslated. English readers can sample them only through academic volumes like Jo Catling and Richard Hibbitt’s Saturn's Moons, or, more readily, through the excellent overview, titled "On Misunderstanding W.G. Sebald," published by James R. Martin in the Cambridge Literary Review.
At first, reading about his academic scholarship feels like seeing Sebald's other face. These works are highly polemic and strict in their judgments, tonally opposed to the later fiction. The central idea underpinning many of them seems to be that all of the so-called scientific, economic, and social progress that followed from the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution was nothing but a concealed effort by the ascendant bourgeoisie to purge the Other, and specifically the Jewish Other, from Western society. Even Enlightenment concepts of objectivity and human equality were only a way to disarm the Jews of their culture by encouraging assimilation into supposedly "universal" values. In this view, the Final Solution is not a historical anomaly realized by sheer Nazi will; it is the only possible endpoint to a long and violent process that started when humanity began burning coal and looking at things under a microscope. You can argue this is a Marxist take or a Malthusian one, both deal in historical inevitabilities, but it certainly sounds more like a system of despair.
Martin finds it curious that Sebald, given the faith he seems to have had in these theories, never provides, in his novels, "an account of why and how the Nazi genocide occurred." But all the signs are actually there: the stories of betrayed assimilations, the mistrust of industry, the skepticism toward science, the awareness of modernity's failures. And, of course, the all-encompassing sense of tragedy. If you believe the vision of history Sebald’s academic writings put forth, if you believe it so deeply that, as it does for Sebald's narrators, it literally becomes your vision, embedded in how your brain processes visual information, then an defrosted fish really can arouse genuine horror, because it's the product and continuation of scientific and commercial forces that have caused the most extreme sufferings in human experience.
Accounting for the influence of Sebald's historical theories on his fiction, apparent as it is, opens Sebald up to a glaring objection, namely that his theories are wrong. They were, for one, received very poorly by the academic community. They have the strange effect of diffusing responsibility for the Holocaust away from committed Nazis and toward modernity as a whole. Sebald's four novels were published between 1990 and 2001, a time when the reunited German state was peaceful, tolerant, and rich. The Nazis had long ago been vanquished, and not, after all, with scimitars and bows. Was it really fair of Sebald, as even some critics of his novels have wondered, to castigate modernity so thoroughly?
Purists might argue that if Sebald writes a private terror and writes it well then it makes no more sense to ask whether that terror is based in historical truth than it does to ask Franz Kafka whether people really turn into bugs. But the reason, I suspect, that Sebald has resonated with so many readers is not merely because he has captured the private terror of a narrator who sees suggestions of the Holocaust in fish and teas-maids, but because he has captured a precisely Malthusian terror, the terror that may define the 21st century. His narrators embody the submerged paranoia of living with the awareness of global warming. We know that our end is composed almost entirely of small contributions, that every flight, every cooked fish, and every humming appliance, even every day without war, during which we can produce goods more efficiently, all of these make that end infinitesimally less escapable. At the same time, we repress this knowledge, because to admit it would be to see the entire world as a coded message of its own destruction. Sebald's narrators exist on the cusp of that admission. The cause of their suffering is different from ours, but the mechanics of it are identical.
Aspiring Malthusian novelists should note that Sebald remains the genre's sole practitioner. While he has been hugely influential, his heirs have by and large applied his formal inventions to narratives that are more clearly individual in scale. Teju Cole’s Open City uses Sebald's technique of writing associatively around an unmentionable tragedy, but for Cole's narrator that tragedy is a rape he has possibly committed. In Rachel Cusk’s Outline, it is whatever caused the deterioration of her narrator's marriage. The personal lives of Sebald's narrators, by contrast, are insignificant. They are not complicit in the past that haunts them. And yet neither are they innocent. In Malthusian tragedies, individual innocence is an illusion. Like we in relation to the untenable heat of the future, Sebald's narrators feel implicated in the brutality of the past, not by any moral choices they've made, but simply by their membership in a shameful species.
This mirroring of Sebald's past and our future is not entirely fanciful. I draw it from the lone, oblique reference to global warming that I'm able to find in his novels. It appears in that peaceful morning the narrator describes in Venice, when he's assailed by memories of waking up in other cities to the sound of traffic. "For some time now," he says, "I have been convinced that it is out of this din that the life is being born which will come after us and will spell our gradual destruction, just as we have been gradually destroying what was there long before us." In looking to the past, it was not just the pain that we have inflicted that Sebald witnessed. It was also a reflection of the pain that will be inflicted upon us.
Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons.
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