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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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Mark O’Connell’s Intimate Portrait of a Murderer
There’s a moment midway through Mark O’Connell’s latest book, A Thread of Violence: A Story of Truth, Invention, and Murder, in which O’Connell is lounging on his young daughter’s bed shortly before her bedtime. He’s watching her thumb through her baby pictures on his phone when the phone begins vibrating. The pictures disappear and the name Macarthur appears onscreen. O’Connell takes the phone from his daughter and allows it to ring out before handing it back to her.
The caller was Malcolm Macarthur, a man who had spent three decades in jail for double murder, and whose life and likeness the Irish novelist John Banville had used as the basis for the protagonist of three of his novels. O’Connell knew these novels intimately—he had written his dissertation on Banville’s fiction. He’d quite literally spent thousands of hours thinking, reading, and writing about the fictionalized version of the man who was now calling him.
Macarthur was calling, as he occasionally did, for a chat, or to clarify a detail he had previously provided O’Connell, who was interviewing him for the book he was writing on Macarthur. O’Connell is unsettled, but his daughter is oblivious. The moment’s purity has been tainted by the intrusion.
“There was this strange sense of the subject seeping into my life,” O’Connell explained over Zoom, from his home in Dublin. O’Connell, 44, is thoughtful when he speaks, occasionally running a hand through his shock of greying hair. When we spoke, it was still several weeks away from publication day and he seemed calmly concerned about how his subject would interpret the book—itself an interpretation of Macarthur’s life and crimes—and how that might further complicate their already awkward relationship.
“If anything,” he says with a look of genuine surprise, “my relationship has become even stranger since I stopped interviewing him.” I get the distinct impression that O’Connell couldn’t have imagined, when he first began the book over three years ago, that he would still be speaking to Macarthur several months after he finished it. “It’s the most complicated relationship I’ve ever had.”
*
O’Connell was born in 1979 in Kilkenny, a small city in south-eastern Ireland, a hundred or so miles from Dublin. Born into a family of pharmacists (his brother runs the pharmacy founded by his grandfather), O’Connell jokingly calls himself as the black sheep of the family. He attended Kilkenny College and was a dedicated classical musician throughout his adolescence. As the lead pianist of the Kilkenny Youth Orchestra, many of his evenings and weekends were taken up with piano and violin practice. Kilkenny also had a lively punk scene, of which O’Connell was an enthusiastic follower: “I had this two-pronged thing going where I would go to orchestra practice with my violin, at 16 or 17, and be there all day, and then my friends with their mohawks would be waiting for me on the bench outside.”
After studying English at Trinity, O’Connell began writing for Mongrel, a magazine founded by two other Trinity graduates, which he calls “a real crucible for me and lots of other writers and photographers.” Before the magazine called it quits in 2008 (not before turning down a deal to be absorbed by a then-ascendant Vice), O’Connell toured with a rock band and was commissioned to travel to Arizona to write about Joe Arpaio, the notorious Sheriff and jail-owner who was later pardoned by Donald Trump. “It wasn’t like there was a lot of money,” O’Connell explains, “but there was enough money for me to get sent to Arizona to write a story, which The Irish Times never would have done.”
By 2006, O’Connell returned to Trinity for his masters, for which he wrote a comparative study of Flann O’Brien and Jorge Luis Borges. Both of these writers’ presences can be felt in O’Connell’s writing—the former, for his gleeful and wry humor; the latter for the analytical approach to the interpretation of stories. “I started writing and thinking through reading fiction and being interested in how it operates and that, I feel, may have seeped into my reading of the world,” he told me. O’Connell then spent several years writing a PhD on John Banville’s fiction. It’s worth pointing out here that anyone seeking a better appreciation of O’Connell’s style—its trenchantly observed ironies and exactingly austere prose—could find worse starting points than Banville’s writing. A wonderful account of O’Connell’s not infrequent encounters with the subject of his PhD was featured in this very publication in 2011. Here he is on encountering Banville at lunch:
When this happened, I would usually nod casually and discretely in his direction and say to my lunch companion something like “there goes the boss man,” or “there’s the gaffer now.” It amused me, for some reason, to think of myself as a low-level functionary, labouring away obscurely for years, scrutinizing texts and producing a complex 100,000 word response unlikely to be read by more than a tiny handful of specialists, as though this were a service for which I had been engaged by an eminent and enigmatic novelist.
A year after his doctorate, he was awarded a postdoctoral bursary—money, an office, and a year-long stipend—to help him turn his thesis into a book. He says he mostly used the year to do a lot of nothing, and quite a bit of his own writing: “I think even when I was safely ensconced within the School of English at Trinity, I was always distracted by the work of writing.” Examiners remarked that he seemed more interested in the business of style and sentences than with communicating his argument and ideas. “I was a frustrated writer as a PhD student.” The academic book was published a year later, by which point he had begun making a name for himself as a prolific writer of literary and cultural criticism for websites such as The Millions, Slate, and NewYorker.com.
In 2013, The Millions made a brief foray in the world of ebook publishing, and O’Connell was commissioned to write its first. Epic Fail: Bad Art, Viral Fame, and the History of the Worst Thing Ever examined the stories behind some of the most cringingly amusing things the internet has given us: Monkey Jesus, Rebecca Black—that sort of stuff. Epic Fail caught the attention of Molly Atlas, a literary agent. It was during one of his early conversations with Atlas about potentially writing a book that O’Connell mentioned an essay on transhumanism he’d written for Mongrel Magazine years earlier. That conversation led to his first book deal. “I had a really strong sense that she understood what I wanted to do as a writer in a way that I didn’t explicitly understand myself—and also what I could do that could be marketable,” he recalls. “I had all kinds of hair-brained schemes for books—unworkable—and she would politely say ‘Maybe your second or third book after you’ve established yourself.’”
O’Connell was publishing other pieces around this time which were much more directly personal in tone. It’s in these pieces you can begin to see emanations of the obsessions to which he would later return in his books—mortality, parenthood, technology. Among the most personal and beautiful is “Can Parenthood and Pessimism Live Side by Side?”, published in The New York Times in 2014, shortly after the birth of his first child. It begins by recounting how, as a 10-year-old, O’Connell accompanied his dad (a pharmacist) to visit one of his patients in hospital. While there, an old and possibly infirm woman showed O’Connell her vagina.
“I was in shock, I think, as much from the fleeting revelation of the old woman’s private misery as of her private anatomy, " he writes. “I think of the experience now as a strange intrusion into my happy innocence, a weird emissary of the suffering and senselessness of an adult world, a world of aging and grief, that lay beyond the little shelter of my childhood.” He blocked the event out until many years later, and mentions how, in college, reading Beckett’s abject characters reminded him of her. The image is the starting point for a sobering and meditative account of his attempt to reconcile the dour, pessimistic philosophers towards whom he feels drawn—E.M. Cioran, Schopenhauer, and the like—and the need, when his son was born, to be open to the possibility of optimism:
In those first days, when my wife and he were still in the hospital and I was spending a lot of time slumped in a rickety leatherette chair between bed and cot as they slept, I did a thing that you should probably never do when you have just become responsible for a new life in the world: I read the papers. As I sat there turning the pages of The Irish Times in quietly accumulating horror, my infant son sleeping beside me, I had never quite felt with such blunt and insistent force the truth of Schopenhauer’s view of life: massacres, rapes, recurrent outbursts of savage recreational violence, a world built on a seemingly unshakable foundation of economic cruelty and injustice, the continuing project of environmental destruction. The whole paper was a dispassionate catalog of brutality, perversity, stupidity and greed, capped off with a couple of pages of TV listings—and there was nothing much good there either. What a world. What a species. What a raw deal for the poor little guy.
This passage is representative of the best of O’Connell’s writing: the prose is lean; its exactness and choice of imagery deliver the reader right to heart of the matter; and the reference to TV listings brings a dash of levity. The primary concern invoked in that essay—namely, how to reconcile having and caring for a child on a cold, unfeeling planet whose inhabitants and ways of living seem ineluctably geared towards their mutual destruction—is the bedrock upon which O’Connell sets down his first two books, To Be A Machine and Notes from An Apocalypse. Though both books deal with different subjects, they are both filled with beautiful, deeply personal moments shared with his family as O’Connell comes to terms with his real subject: mortality.
2017’s To Be A Machine saw O’Connell travel across America meeting the transhumanists who believe, for a variety of reasons, that we should live forever. To do this, they argue, we should use everything at our disposal to fund any research or inventions that could make this happen. The result is part-gonzo journalism, part-meditation on the threat that artificial intelligence (and its zealots) pose to humanity, streaked with sharp observations about Silicon Valley’s role in our evolving and increasingly problematic relationship with technology. All of these thoughts swirl about in O’Connell’s mind as he and his wife go about the business of raising their first child together.
Then, in April 2020, O’Connell published Notes from An Apocalypse, a quest to understand those preparing for societal collapse and life post-civilization. He travels to: the Mars Conference in Los Angeles to listen to the specialists, lobbyists, and enthusiasts trying to make life of Mars a reality; Ukraine, where he spends time in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone; and he even visits New Zealand to explore why people like Peter Thiel (read: the ultra-rich) are preemptively buying citizenship and land in anticipation of some nearing doomsday scenario. O’Connell’s concern for (and obsession with) his subject permeates the narrative until the birth of his daughter, whose innocence and simple needs brings the book’s central concerns into sharp relief.
It was a strange time to publish a book about the world ending, just as the world began to shut down. Ireland had one of the strictest and longest lockdowns anywhere on the planet. I happened to live in Dublin during lockdown. Early on in the pandemic, the city was a ghost town; you could walk the entire length of a street without meeting a soul. It was around that time that O’Connell, who had had an interest in Macarthur’s case for decades, decided he would like to finally write about him. He began pacing the city in the hopes of seeing him. One afternoon while out walking the empty city, O’Connell spotted Macarthur, made his way towards him, and gave him his pitch.
*
A Thread of Violence is O’Connell’s most personal book yet. It begins with an explanation of the author’s own connection to a series of particularly grisly and senseless murders that took place in the summer of 1982. Though O’Connell was a toddler when the murders took place, the murderer, Malcolm Macarthur, had hidden out in the apartment next door to O’Connell’s grandmother in an affluent suburb of South Dublin. That the apartment belonged to Patrick Connolly, the Attorney General—then the most senior officer of the law of Taoiseach (prime minister) Charles Haughey’s already embattled government—is just one of the many bizarre and improbable details of the case. Though he had known the story since he was a child, O’Connell first wrote about this fascination in an essay for The Millions in 2012, after encountering Macarthur one evening shortly after his release.
Macarthur was born in 1945 on a sprawling estate in County Meath to a wealthy landowning family. His paternal grandfather had come from Scotland, and his maternal ancestors from England. Despite living a life that looked a lot like the Anglo-Irish (read: Protestant) lifestyle, Macarthur was Catholic. He attended UC Davis at the height of the sixties (wonderfully rendered by Banville in The Book of Evidence) before returning to Dublin where he socialized in the city’s bohemian bars and spent his time pursuing everything a man of leisure, learning, and means might. Though he came from money, Macarthur wasn’t good with it. He lent too widely and too deeply, and, more consequently, was pathologically averse to labor of any description. What was, for its time, a very considerable inheritance, had dwindled almost to nothing by his mid-30s.
Macarthur committed the crimes, in his own words, to be master of his own time. “No matter what frame he (or anyone else) might attempt to put on it,” O’Connell writes, “the fact is that he committed two murders because he wanted to protect his own free time.” That the crime Macarthur was locked up for would go on to cost him 30 years of freedom—during which he would have quite a bit of free time, though be master of none of it—was an irony that was likely not lost on him. Inspired by the spate of robberies that the IRA had been carrying out for much of the past decade, Macarthur—a ludicrously impractical man—decided he would rob a bank. He searched the national papers and found a gun for sale in a small town named Edenderry in rural Ireland.
To get there, he decided to steal a car in Phoenix Park, a large park at the edge of the city center. When a young woman sunbathing noticed a man trying to get into her car, she intervened, only to have a fake gun pointed at her, and was bundled into her car. “Is this for real?” she asked. Then, using a lump hammer, Macarthur proceeded to violently beat the young woman, before driving out of the park across town, and dumping the car, with her unconscious body inside, down a lane. Her name was Bridie Gargan. She was 27 and training to be a nurse at Richmond Hospital. She would die of her injuries at that same hospital several days later.
The allegedly unplanned murder set Macarthur’s plans back a day or two, but he managed to make his way to Offaly. Macarthur arranged to buy the gun from Donal Dunne, a 27-year-old farmer, at the edge of town. While examining the shotgun, Macarthur took a step back, and said “Sorry, old chap” before shooting him in the face. Macarthur dragged the body away and half-heartedly hid it in the bushes. After the murders, he sought refuge in his girlfriend’s friend’s home in South Dublin. Rather unfortunately, his girlfriend’s friend was Patrick Connolly, the Attorney General, under whose auspices the manhunt for a suspected serial killer was continuing. Caught within weeks, he pleaded guilty and received 30 years in prison. No evidence was heard in court. The double murder didn’t just rile the nation—the Attorney General’s seemingly inexplicable connection to the case almost brought down the government.
*
Not infrequently whilst reading this book I was reminded of the famous opening lines from Janet Malcolm’s masterful 1989 study on the ethics of journalism, The Journalist and the Murderer, in which she summarizes the journalist’s relationship to their subject: “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confident man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.” The subject, Malcolm writes, is forced to confront that the journalist, who appeared so understanding and willing to listen, “never had the slightest intention of collaborating with him on his story but always intended to write a story of his own.”
I am unsure what exactly Macarthur believed he would get out of having a writer of literary nonfiction writing about his life and crimes. Sympathy? Exoneration? A reexamination of his character? The resultant work is a masterpiece—a complex, compelling, and not exactly flattering account of the author’s attempt to understand the 77-year-old man who served three decades in jail for the cruel and senseless murder of two perfect strangers. Macarthur, who considers himself an intellectual and a “private scholar,” plays the role of reluctant but dutiful subject, telling O’Connell that if a writer is going to write about him, they may as well have the right facts at hand. It becomes quite apparent that Macarthur is intensely lonely and doesn’t often have people to speak to. He seems flattered that someone—particularly a writer—such as O’Connell took an interest in him.
“No one really realized how unlikely it was that he would agree to speak, least of all to me,” O’Connell tells me. “It was sheer dumb luck—a little bit of wiliness on my part, and a leap of faith on his.” When O’Connell decided to finally approach him that day on the street, he gave him a handwritten note, one of his books, and a copy of The New York Review of Books (containing a recent piece written by him)—in a direct appeal to Macarthur’s vanity. O’Connell’s position within the literary world was enough to set him apart from the other crime journalists and sensationalist TV people who had been chasing him down and offering him money. Macarthur agreed to speak to O’Connell about his life on the condition that the details of the crimes would be off limits. Discussing that would violate his parole and immediately result in his being sent back to jail. O’Connell spent close to two years interviewing him on and off, usually at Macarthur’s apartment, though sometimes on walks around the city.
“I prefer facts,” Macarthur told O’Connell during one of their first meetings, when asked if he read much fiction. He might prefer facts, but he certainly has a strange relationship to them. Early in the project, O’Connell realized that he would be on shifting ground with his subject’s mercurial approach to the truth. For example, O’Connell might bring up a detail that was mentioned in the press, only for Macarthur to insist that such a detail was in fact untrue and proceed to tell a different version of events. O’Connell would then check this against the police records—which included Macurthur’s deposition—and find a completely different version of events. When O’Connell would re-present this information to Macarthur during their next visit, Macarthur would contradict and maintain that his current version of the story was the truth. Macarthur’s fabulation is made even more complicated by the fact that he seems to believe his own distorted versions of certain events and details.
If this wasn’t labyrinthine enough, O’Connell had already spent years of life studying a fictionalized version of Macarthur—Freddie Montgomery—before he’d even met him. Details about Macarthur’s personality, as O’Connell points out in the book, had bled off the page, shaping O’Connell’s vision of Macarthur before they had ever met. “He was completely confused and enmeshed with this fictional character that I had spent a lot of time thinking and writing about,” he remembers. “There was something in that that provoked me into wanting to write about him as well.”
Macarthur has not yet read the book. “I’ve warned him numerous times—he knows exactly what he has said to me, and what of those things I have included in the book,” O’Connell explains. “That’s a different thing from his seeing the result of what you’ve spent, on and off, two years doing and thinking about.” A Thread of Violence is a book about stories—specifically, how we tell and interpret them, regardless of their relationship to the truth. “In a way, this subject felt perfect for me,” O’Connell explains. “Obviously, the story is pretty wild and compelling in itself, but there’s something about it that—at least in the way I felt compelled to approach it—is not just a compelling story but is also about stories themselves and about the relationship between reality and fiction.” There's a moment midway through where a friend of O’Connell’s, who knows about the book, reprimands him for talking about Macarthur as though he were a fictional character whose intentions could be parsed the way one might approach a literary text.
Reading A Thread of Violence is to watch Macarthur simultaneously develop and contradict his story in real time, and it reminded me of that Joan Didion quote, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” That much-abused quote is often used cheerily to get at the idea that storytelling is our way of interpreting our experiences and connecting with one another; read it another way, it seems to hint at the less life-affirming, but more interesting notion that there is no end to our capacity for self-delusion, for telling ourselves whatever we have to if it makes living that bit more bearable.
In one of the book’s most memorable scenes, Macarthur reveals to O’Connell that it is only if he views himself as a fictional character—and the event one singular, if life-changing, scene in the story of his life—that he can then begin to comprehend the motivations that led to the murders. Macarthur’s nebulous relationship to the truth aside, O’Connell’s connections to Macarthur and his likeness to Freddie Montgomery only deepen his “long-standing belief that reality itself was a niche subgenre of fiction.” What O’Connell is after—acknowledgment, emotion, contrition—remains elusive and out of reach until the end. Instead, we are left with an image of Macarthur sitting alone in a darkening room and the sense that if we now know everything, we also know nothing. I wonder what story Macarthur will be able to tell himself after he has read the book.
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