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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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What I Saw When I Really Looked: My Late Brother, Heroin, and Grief
1.
When the tomatoes were ripe, when my closet was eager with crisp shirts and clean sneakers, when I had jumped off of a high swing and was lying in the grass listening to mourning doves and lawn mowers—that’s when the hot air balloons came.
One of the children on the cul-de-sac would spot it first. He’d point and run from yard to yard as the stripes of orange, yellow, purple, and red silently descended. Fathers turned off their mowers. Mothers snuffed their cooking flames and poured wine. The children sprinted while the grown ups walked through one another’s yards to the place where the wicker basket seemed to lean, and we waited, staring upward and waving.
The balloon dipped gently and clumsily. Sometimes it glided to another neighbor’s yard, and we followed its path—20 of us in cutoffs and summer dresses. Its burners coughed fire, and when the balloon got close, the fire was loud. When it touched down, the fathers ran to it, grabbing hold of the wicker and wires, their weight too light to keep the basket from skidding through the sweet grass.
The balloons came because we had big yards. They came because we were lucky. To the family who owned the yard, the pilot presented a bottle of champagne. Then he tipped the basket on its side, and we watched as the balloon billowed, breathing like a jellyfish, and swooned to the ground.
I like to think this happened often each summer—that there was a hot air balloon season, that they descended as assuredly as summer storms. Maybe it only happened three times in my life. My vision of the event—the abundance, the gauzy repose, the family intact, with mother and father performing their various duties and the children swinging safely in the yard—exposes the particular awe that leavens my memory of suburban childhood. As I remember it, we really were that lucky.
I don’t remember whether my big brother came running with the neighbor boys. Where was he then, and what did he see? Maybe Joe was at the stream behind the houses, studying the antennae of crayfish. Maybe he was melting slugs beneath salt. Maybe he was already 14, on the train tracks with Sam, whose thumb was torn from trying to open a beer bottle on a rock. Maybe he was laughing and scared as his friend bled onto the rails. Or was he looking up, following the bright descent through the evening light?
In literary study, we talk about vision. How does the narrator see the world? we ask. To what does she draw the reader’s eye? To evaluate a text, my professor used to ask, “Do you want to continue seeing the world with this person?”
Joe and I saw the world differently. We diverged in what we noticed, what we remembered, and how we interpreted the images in view. I suspect he wouldn’t have clung to the balloons lilting over the gardens the way I have, for they wouldn’t suit his vision. Conversely, I chose to look away from the images on which he focused—first, the withering slugs; later, the warehouse parties, the needles in his skin.
When he died, one humid afternoon in my mother’s living room, my vision of the world was altered.
2.
“Something is the matter with the sunsets.”
Mary Cabot writes this in her diary in the 1868 epistolary novel The Gates Ajar. One week has passed since she learned that her brother has died at war. “Something is the matter with the sunsets,” she laments; “they come and go and I do not notice them. Something ails the voices of children, snowballing down the street; all the music has gone out of them.”
I read The Gates Ajar after Joe had died, just 32 and overcome in his own quiet war. Written by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Gates was one of the two most widely sold religious novels of the 19th century. It’s the diary of a young woman bereaved three times over: Her mother died when she was a child, and her father died in her adolescence, leaving Mary and her brother Roy to care for one another. Mary is 24 when Roy is killed, and sorrow changes her vision of the world.
“The lazy winds are choking me,” she writes, “Their faint sweetness makes me sick.” “The great maple, just reaching up to tap at the window, blazes and bows under its weight of scarlet blossoms. I cannot bear their perfume.”
Like all of us, Mary possesses a particular vision of the world. She is a person who notices winds and scarlet blossoms. She notices sunsets. As a narrator, she turns our faces so that we see what she sees. She doesn’t point us to steel stacks, or bacon grease, or cadavers, because, though these things may cross her line of sight, they do not stay with her. They do not compose her vision of the world.
After Roy dies, Mary can’t bear the beauty that she once may have loved to behold. She thinks of an Elizabeth Barrett Browning poem and reflects, “It is easy to understand how Bianca heard ‘The nightingales sing through her head,’ how she could call them ‘Owl-like birds,’ who sang ‘for spite,’ who sang ‘for hate,’ who sang ‘for doom.’”
Browning and Phelps both use a literary device that, early in the next century, T.S. Eliot would popularize with the phrase objective correlative. This is Eliot’s name for the way that a writer can express a character’s emotional state by projecting that emotion onto objects in the character’s view. In the essay “Hamlet and His Problems,” Eliot writes, “The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an ‘objective correlative’; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.” Are the moonflowers spectral or lustrous? Is the wisteria weeping or in repose? Each tells you something different about the state of mind of the speaker.
Mary Cabot’s diary reads, “I hate the bluebirds flashing in and out of the carmine cloud that the maple makes, and singing, singing everywhere …Most of all I hate the maple.”
3.
In my 20s, my frame of vision held long dinner tables lined with lavender shoots, gifts wrapped in twine, and the glad faces of friends, which I studied as I flipped again and again through photos, reliving the weekend. My vision was filled with living rooms of people singing along to a folk song, and bars where my friends’ band played and the rest of us danced. In my range of view: Philadelphia cobblestone. Nasturtium spilling from window boxes. The glittering face of Lake George in summer. Sunflowers in wedding bouquets, and a dozen faces singing, “For he’s a jolly good fellow” at birthdays over wine-soaked dinners. My temple pressed against my husband’s cheek, my eyelashes tracing his skin like a moth’s wing.
If perception was a camera, I captured what I found beautiful, and shaped a moral understanding of the world based on these scenes. The world I saw was loving and abundant, and surprises were good, coming from the sky like hot air balloons.
Outside of the frame: Philly blocks laden with trash and cracked concrete. Films about drugs: Pulp Fiction and Blow. Dirty politics and foreign wars. I chose not to look at these, and the glimpses that I did see did not penetrate my expectation that overall, things were good, and getting better.
Also outside of the frame: My own brother’s work DJing late-night parties in North Philly warehouses—he invited me now and then and I didn’t go. The art Joe liked: Berlin producers and sinister cartoons. The drugs he used: meth, ecstasy, and the heroin that killed him.
Like most addicts, Joe didn’t want his drug use to be seen. He expertly kept it out of sight. I have come to understand that my seeing it likely wouldn’t have changed its impact. But I wonder: How would our relationship have been different if, while he lived, I had really seen my brother? What if I had welcomed his vision of the world into my own?
“While you were watching Seventh Heaven, Joe was watching the X-Files,” my mother remembers. He was drawn to the extraterrestrial, the apocalyptic, the digital. He loved the game Doom and the late-night History Channel feature Ancient Aliens. His vision was full of scenarios in which people had to protect themselves from impending harm. The moral implication of this vision was that self-preservation was more expedient than love—a conviction he’d insist upon as an adult, in the same breath with which he’d call me sentimental.
Joe’s vision was crowded with scenes like this:
In his early 20s, the yard of his row home backed up to the yard of a church. There was a big freezer in that yard full of frozen turkeys. More than once, he climbed the fence at night to steal those turkeys, rock hard and heavy. He and his roommate thawed the birds and basted their cold, pale skins with oil and Sriracha and threw a Friendsgiving.
With this roommate he spent hours in front of computer screens, his eyes pooling with purple light as he stared at the knobs and columns of production software, beats scattered across the screen like morse code. Then they were out performing the tracks they’d produced, watching the dance floor swell and sigh as the parties exhaled into the fog of morning.
Joe loved to watch the purity of expression on the dance floor. He made music because he was addicted to the technical precision required to make a complex track, but also because his music gave people the freedom to let loose, to move, to hide or to be seen, luminous and transfigured among the other swaying bodies.
The desire for a luminous body, a free body, must have coursed like a drug through his own body, bound and distressed as it was by its vices.
Years before, when we were teenagers in the same house, I noticed that the bathroom often smelled like vomit. I didn’t ask about this; already he’d begun using drugs, and my love was so tightly entwined with my disappointment that I knew my concern would be heard as critique. After he died, I read that most heroin users vomit almost immediately after the drug hits their system, sometimes repeatedly. Also after he died, I found a journal entry my father had written during Joe’s late teenaged years:
Again, I found a little pile of vomit in the basement office, in a Tupperware container in the closet. I’ve found these piles before, on the carpet, or crusted in the grass behind the shed.
What is wrong with my son? What failure along the way rendered him unable to care for himself? His failure? My own?
My father saw what I chose not to see: So often, Joe’s frame of vision was filled with little piles of his own food, eaten and expelled from his thin, pale frame.
When Joe looked in the mirror, he saw rotted teeth. For years, I thought this resulted from the cigarettes he smoked. After he died, I read about meth mouth, caused by the acidity of the drug and the dry mouth, teeth-grinding, and sugar cravings common among users. I winced as I scrolled through a hundred images to see if the mouths pictured looked like Joe’s. Most were more severe, blackened and corroded to nubs. But some looked just like his: yellowed and truncated, as if two millimeters had been razed off the bottoms.
Joe went to rehab when he was 22, and when he finished, he got beautiful new teeth. He had a job in marketing. He had dental insurance. He had a healthy, bright smile which he began to offer more generously, and which I liked to look at. From then on, I thought he was clean of hard drugs. When he relapsed, I didn’t allow his drug use to be part of my vision. When, in the nine years that followed, he presented signs of use—when he was groggy midday, and irritable; when his pupils eclipsed the blue in his eyes—I didn’t ask questions. I was afraid to seem accusing, and to rupture whatever rapport we were developing. I didn’t know enough about the habits of addicts to be sure I was seeing the signs. Perhaps I didn’t want my suspicions proved; what would I do with the truth in view?
The winter before he died, my mother sent me a photo of Joe’s heel. It was swollen up through the ankle, pale and bitten with tiny scabs. “Taking Joe to the ER to have his foot checked,” she wrote. I shuddered and wrote back, “Yikes.” The doctor diagnosed it as cellulitis, a common bacterial infection. After Joe died, my mother and I read that some heroin users shoot up into their feet to hide the marks. Cellulitis is common among addicts who use needles. “That’s when we really started to worry about him,” Joe’s friend told us that summer. “When he started using needles.” Meanwhile, I had been blind, and was blindsided.
4.
“It seems to me as if the world were spinning around in the light and wind and laughter,” writes Mary Cabot, “and God just stretched down His hand one morning and put it out.” Grief has a way of dimming the lights, and draining the sunrise of its color.
“The days usually look so long and blank at the beginning, that I can hardly make up my mind to step out into them,” writes Mary. She sees blank days; she hears “the dull music of the rain.” Where she might have seen abundance, she now sees violence: “a cold wind was bruising the apple-buds.”
According to the logic of the objective correlative, our emotions inform what we see and how we see it: “Something is the matter with the sunsets.” In bereavement, I learned that what I see also informs my emotions, shaping my expectations and my moral understanding of the world. This is vision’s feedback loop. Sometimes it needs to be interrupted.
The morning after Joe died, my cousins brought croissants from our family’s favorite bakery, a French-Vietnamese patisserie in South Philly. When I finally woke and descended the bewildering staircase, I reached into the paper bag and tore a quarter of an almond croissant. It was the perfect croissant—sweet, brittle at the corners and otherwise tender, buttered between layers so that each could be peeled and savored. I took one bite. I knew then that it would be a long time before I could eat food like this, its beauty incongruous with our stark and gruesome loss.
It didn’t make sense to eat croissants. It didn’t make sense to drink summer cocktails, or to wear lace sundresses, or to laugh. Croissants were brittle, cocktails bitter, and lace was full of holes. Laughter was an incision in my gut, foreign and cold. Holding a newborn, touching his puckered chin in the hospital the day after a friend’s labor, only reminded me of all that my mother had lost.
It made sense only to behold my brother. We gathered photographs for his funeral. We folded and unfolded his clothing, studying his style. We listened to his music. We spoke to his friends. They came to my mother’s house or met her downtown for coffee. They told her how they loved his big goofy grin; they told her what they knew about his drug use. We asked them questions, and we read and read and learned all that we could about how to buy heroin, how to use it, its impact on the body. It took 16 weeks for the Philadelphia Medical Examiner to report that heroin, fentanyl, and amphetamines had been in his system when he died. While we waited, Mom and I lined up each piece of evidence to make sense of his death—the vomit on the couch behind his slouched body, the phone log reporting a quick visit to a friend around noon, the empty baggies in his wallet. We watched videos of people using heroin. We read about the opioid crisis in Philly’s Kensington neighborhood, about the needles that littered the sidewalks and stoops. I scrolled four months back in the log of messages from my mother to find the image of Joe’s swollen heel. I winced, and fixed my gaze.
My husband wondered when I’d stop reading addiction memoirs, and when I’d stop the late-night phone calls with Joe’s friends. It was morose to dwell on these stories, he worried. But it was what I needed. To look upon my brother’s life, to see what he saw, was an impulse of love, come too late. It was all I could do to connect with Joe, to understand him, to say “I see you” now that he’d vanished. Looking upon his life and death, I came to see what he may have seen: That surprise can come not like a lit balloon but like a wildfire. That entropy, and not abundance, is physical law.
5.
The Gates Ajar is a book about the slow rise of hope on a bleak horizon. Mary is inconsolable after learning of her brother’s death. Soon, she receives a visit from her Aunt Winifred, a young widow, already gray, who has thought very much about death. At Winifred’s arrival, Mary remarks, “A little arrow of light has just cut the gray gloom of the West.” The women pass hours over a summer talking about Roy, wondering with increasing hope about life after death. As their conversation progresses, Mary is able again to bear the sight and sound and smell of beauty. She hears the chatter of children “chiming down the hall like bells.” The wind, which had choked her, now sweeps “like somebody’s strong arms over the flowers, and gathers up a crowd of perfumes that wander up and down” around her. Not only can she tolerate laughter, she can see it, as Winifred’s daughter laughs out “like the splash of a little wave.”
It is hope in the transfigured body that changes Mary’s vision. At first, she’s terrified that she’ll never see her brother again. But Winifred speaks of heaven in a way Mary’s never heard before. She quotes Saint Paul, saying that the human body, once dead, is “‘raised in incorruption.’ ‘It is raised in glory.’ ‘It is raised in power.’” Rather than picturing an afterlife in which people are unrecognizable wisps of spirit, these women imagine that the dead indwell the very bodies they bore in their lives, only luminous, healed, “free from all the distortion of guilt.” With this vision, Mary believes that one day she will embrace her brother again.
One mystery of transfiguration perplexes Mary: Even in their radiance, these bodies as Winifred imagines them do not lack the scars of their lifetime. Free of pain, their skin remembers pain.
“Why remember it?” Mary wonders.
“Save but to swell the sense of being blest,” Winifred answers. “Besides, forgetfulness of the disagreeable things of this life implies forgetfulness of the pleasant ones. They are all tangled together.”
Two years have passed since I held Joe’s cold hands in my mother’s living room. The dim days of grief have passed. Again, I can laugh. Again, I can peel the buttery layers of a pastry and savor each ribbon on my tongue. But croissants will always remind me of the morning after Joe died. A Negroni with peeled orange curling over the rim will take me to the summer that I couldn’t drink, when drinking was too celebratory a gesture for so solemn a season. I can bear to see beauty, to taste and to smell it, but it’s tangled now with a realistic burden of the pain that my brother bore—that many around me bear still. When Joe died, an old way of seeing needed to be put to death. In time, a new way of seeing would arise, transfigured. Joe’s vision carried within my own, I sense I am closer to the molten center of reality, and already I feel I am being transformed.
Image: Flickr/Rusty Clark
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