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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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Ain’t That Pretty at All; Or, Going to the Tigers-Robert Cohen
One day back in grad school my advisor, a savvy and successful novelist whose books meant a great deal to me, whom I had just gone five grand into debt and traveled three thousand miles to work with, called me into his office and sat me down to talk about the chapter I had submitted from my novel in progress. His expression was purposeful, intense; he seemed eager to get down to business. Clearly the work I’d submitted had impressed him in some particular way, elevated me a little from the other surly, miserable students in the workshop. I could all but feel him weighing the manuscript in his hand, as if deliberating how much postage to apply when he sent it to his agent.
“Look,” he said, and I did, at a piece of parchment bond paper so capillaried with red marks it might have been the face of a stroke victim, “cut the crap, okay? Enough with these F. Scott Fitzgerald sentences.”
This was, on one level, the nicest, most fulsome compliment the man would ever give me. After all it was my love for Fitzgerald and his sentences that had inspired me to write in the first place. If every writer, as Saul Bellow once claimed, is a reader moved to emulation (and my advisor wasn’t so hot on Bellow’s sentences either), then to be accused of writing the kinds of sentences that had made me want to write those kinds of sentences? On one level it was very nice to hear.
Unfortunately my advisor didn’t mean it on that level. He meant it on a different level, a lower level. He meant that being enthralled as I was to lovely, thrilling, Daisy Buchanan-ish prose was an infatuation I had to grow out of fast, lest my work wind up face-down in an abandoned pool. He himself was a rough-and-tumble realist, streety and sharp—a Redskin, in Philip Rahv’s famous phrase. Already he had me pegged as a member of that wan lesser tribe, the Palefaces, those cerebral, overly refined aesthetes who hung out in cafes, reading French poetry and doodling precious bon mots in overpriced notebooks. Moi! That this judgment was ludicrously unfair, presumptuous, and reductive did not make it, alas, any less true. I hurried out of his office that day like the kid in Joyce’s “Araby,” the soft underbelly of my assumptions exposed, my face burning, my hands clenched, shadow-boxing with shame.
All of which took place many years ago now. Just another once-humiliating, now-comic anecdote one shares with one’s peers over a shitload of drinks, the Paleface equivalent of a war story. In other words, though I often refer to it, I don’t often think about it.
But maybe I should. Because there arrives a point in every vocation where the efficacy of one’s long-distance path through the dark woods of Time comes into question, where it becomes necessary to consider the choices one has made—whether or not one is aware of having made them—along the way. An interlude of mid-career self-scrutiny, in which all the old, now-calcified assumptions are held up against the light and examined for flaws. What would we change, if we had the chance?
Like most people, I would often prefer to be someone else. Ideally, the prose this other self would write would not be like mine at all. This other self would not write lyrical and elongated sentences that unfurl like a garden hose, spritzing dewily over every bush, thorn, and flower. No, the prose of this other person would be coiled and sharp, deadly as a snake. But here’s the thing: you can’t just choose to be a snake. There are issues of temperament involved. Of culture and nurture. Arguably, to be Jewish, for example, is to incline, more or less from Eden onward, less toward snakes than snakevictims. With a few notable exceptions (Babel, Mailer, Mamet) Jewish writers tend towards the indoor, the psychological, the Paleface; they lack that mind of winter, that cold equipment, that steely, scrupulous will to violence we see in Flannery O’Connor, Robert Stone, Cormac McCarthy, and the other Catholic Redskins. Then too there are limits to our stylistic elasticity. The rubber band of sensibility can only stretch so far. Even the most strenuous reexamination of our own linguistic patterns is conducted within the confines of those patterns, the patterns of those patterns. You can wind up feeling encircled by funhouse mirrors, unable to see beyond the freakishly elongated reflections of your own head.
Nonetheless: it’s important to try to get past our own heads, which, however busy and capacious, can only take us so far. The same is true of literary style. “As you get older,” says Thomas McGuane, a recovering “word drunk” by his own admission,
you should get impatient with showing off in literature. It is easier to settle for blazing light than to find a language for the real. Whether you are a writer or a bird-dog trainer, life should winnow the superfluous language. The real thing should become plain. You should go straight to what you know best. . . .You want something that is drawn like a bow, and a bow is a simple instrument. A good writer should get a little bit cleaner and probably a little bit plainer as life and the oeuvre go on.
For all its plain good sense, this strikes me as a fairly radical take. Most young artists resist imperatives and prescriptions; they don’t like being told what’s real and true, let alone what they should or shouldn’t do about it. But McGuane’s “winnowing down” is the product of a longer view of time, a moral and aesthetic response to the realities of middle age, that war of attrition. The shadow of all those attended funerals may not change what he chooses to write about, but it changes how he sees, and how he writes too. There’s no equivocating here, no epistemological dithering about how terms like “truth” and “the real” are just silly premodern artifacts tarnished by years of rough treatment by lawyers, politicians, and humanities professors with French surnames. No, the writer’s outlook is stony and clear, absolute. If experience—or let’s just go ahead and say death—teaches us what’s real and what isn’t, then to pretend otherwise, whether in substance or style, is a cowardly evasion, a shirking of the writer’s fundamental responsibility to find words that distill conditions of being. The rest is just so much commentary scribbled in the margins.
“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities,” goes the Zen teaching, “in the expert’s few.”
Another expression of this can be seen in a late essay by Natalia Ginzburg, “My Vocation”:
We are adult because we have behind us the silent presence of the dead, whom we ask to judge our current actions and from whom we ask forgiveness for past offences . . . we are adult because of that brief moment when one day it fell to our lot to live when we had looked at the things of the world as if for the last time, when we had renounced our possession of them and returned them to the will of God: and suddenly the things of the world appeared to us in their just place beneath the sky, and the human beings too.
This same “language for the real,” this winnowing directness, underlies and often overlies the work of Chekhov. His lyric effects are dispensed sparely but tactically, like a Japanese meal. They hit a quick, distinct flavor note and then flit back to the kitchen with a pellucid lightness of manner that’s both an artistic and (if his letters are any indication) behavioral ideal. “You may weep and moan over your stories, you may suffer together with your heroes,” he tells one correspondent, “but I consider one must do this so that the reader does not notice it. The more objective, the stronger will be the effect.” That there’s no such thing as “objective” writing—that literary prose is always a manipulated impression, a trick of subjective light—is too obvious a point to bother over. It’s how to achieve that impression that obsesses Chekhov. His style is a kind of anti-style, its effects arising casually, indirectly, often prosaically. “He goes to parties,” observes Nabokov, “clad in his everyday suit . . . the juicy verb, the hothouse adjective, the crème de menthe epithet, these were foreign to him.” Chekhov’s scorn for the lyrical, like a former smoker’s scorn for a patch, is as knowing as it is severe. It’s as if lyricism is a bad habit he’s forever struggling to put behind him for good. The beauty arises not despite his lack of interest in mere beauty but because of it. Beautiful, not beautiful—in Chekhov these and all such binaries are exposed as facile and irrelevant, vaguely vulgar. Things are never either/or, but both/and. To discover that each moment, when it arrives, is no longer simply itself, solo and unencumbered, but comes freighted with cumbersome bags of memory, loss, and regret . . . this is the wisdom of maturity, a wisdom most of us would prefer to do without.
The conflict between lived facts and imposed lyricism can also be viewed in grammatical terms: as a tug-of-war between adjective and noun. The lyric writer’s affinity and/or weakness for the adjective is at once endearingly earnest and embarrassingly insistent. It represents a kind of religious faith—first in the power of the adjective to do right by a specific noun, and secondly in the ability of language to do right by its noun (reality, I mean) in all its latent and subordinate depths. (“The total and unique adjective,” Robbe-Grillet snorts, “which attempts to unite all the inner qualities, the entire hidden soul of things.”) Or maybe it’s a lack of faith, a frantic insecurity about language’s ability to adhere to the real, that inspires some writers to press too much of it upon the page, like a stoned teenager Scotch-taping the unruly corners of a Hendrix poster to his bedroom wall. Either way the stuff won’t quite stick. Even as we struggle to affix language to the world, we only manage to obscure it, fogging up the window with the huff and puff of our own breath.
Point being, a tendency to render something in a manner that foregrounds the rendering, not the something, can get old fast. Reading a novel that feels overly protracted and finessed makes us antsy, peevish. Enough with the light show, we think, enough with the incense, the dry ice, the elaborate riddles and evasions. No wonder people hate novels. They really are just words, aren’t they?
And so we turn with relief to the noun. Nouns are modest by nature; they make few claims on our emotions, request no special treatment or favors. Next to the noun’s rugged, Gary Cooper-ish laconicism, the adjective can look sweaty and undignified, like Peter Lorre in Casablanca, pleading for special favors it hasn’t earned. We’re tempted to step away, wipe the stain of its corruptions off our sleeve, and get on with our business. Clear this away, says the overseer of the hunger artist’s limp, useless corpse. Give us the real thing, the panther, vivid and unmediated. Show us his claws.
And yet even real-thingness, taken to its extreme—did someone say Robbe-Grillet?—can begin to seem a bit fussy and mannered in its own way. Which is only to say that whichever direction you take, you can wind up in the same place. You say tomato, I say red round seed-spilling fruit; what matters is the force and penetration of the perception, and the musical intensity of its expression. The concrete implies the abstract, the simple implies the complex. Even McGuane’s directness, his hostility to rhetorical posturing, is itself (he’d likely be first to concede) a kind of rhetorical posture, not plain at all.
If every style is an argument with its own opposite, its shadow, its fraternal twin, whether the terms of the argument should evolve over time is a question we’re all likely to answer, as McGuane does, in the affirmative. But how?
Edward Said, in his unfinished but influential On Late Style, finds in the late works of Beethoven, Strauss, Lampedusa, Visconti, and Thomas Mann not McGuane’s plainspoken, winnowed-down “real” thing but something like the opposite: a landscape of “intransigence, difficulty, and unresolved contradiction.” Said is out to interrogate, as they say, the whole notion of maturity, and not just in the arts. What if age doesn’t yield the serene perspective of “ripeness is all”? What if instead of harmony and resolution we find only “a sort of deliberately unproductive productiveness,” a “devotion to the truth of unreconciled relations”? What if our apprehension of the real is undermined by a growing awareness that reality itself—the self itself—is shot through with holes? If so, then perhaps some new, messier vocabulary is necessary. “A catching fire between extremes,” Adorno calls it, “which no longer allow for any secure middle ground. In the history of art,” he concludes, “late works are the catastrophes.”
Death in Venice, though hardly a late work for Mann, reads like a very late work for man. We all know the story: Aschenbach, a man given to fastidious brooding in expensive rooms, arrives in Venice at a creative impasse, his ends out of synch with his means. As the narrator coolly observes, “His work had ceased to be marked by that fiery play of fancy which is the product of joy.” And so to Venice, “that wild, presumably unrestrained region where desires are realized and fantasies fulfilled.” Aschenbach, like all imperialists, wants to gain something for nothing and then make good his escape. He craves the heat of the orgy, as Norman Mailer used to say, but not its murder. “He would go on a journey,” he tells himself, “Not far—not all the way to the tigers.”
But in the end the tigers get him anyway. The ever-receding ideal of beauty embodied by his homoerotic fixation, Tadzio, leads him deep into a darkness and disorder from which there is no possibility of return. Like Gurov, he’s so bored with his own detachment, his halfway measures and patterned, systemic ways, that he deliberately, miserably, ecstatically succumbs to something larger and more powerful, shedding all hard-won qualities of mind, will, discipline—all the tools of a culture fighting off its discontents—along the way. “The hostility to civilization,” Freud reminds us, “is produced by the pressure that civilization exercises, the renunciations of instinct which it demands.” And so with Aschenbach. In the end he blows his top—spewing the hot, spasmodic stream that is his genuine, if latent, self—and collapses in an ashen heap, truly spent.
If Venice seems an apt staging ground for this apocalyptic drama, that may be because it’s not ground per se at all, but a kind of swampy hybrid, a geographical and imaginative interzone. Land and water, east and west, north and south…in Venice, the beauties of Paradise and the corruptions of the Inferno are inextricably twined. With its bad smells, gorgeous art, and crumbling walls, over-ripeness is all. Solid things perch precariously above the sea, as if secretly longing to merge with it, to lose definition in the heat and then trickle away like so much runny hair dye. Prominent among these melting forms is Mann’s own shapely, cerebral style, which like a lot of modernist art seems to revel in the spectacle of its own destruction.
What if knowledge and form don’t play so well together after all? Say that artists’ obsession with beauty does not make them wiser and more dignified with age, but increasingly vulnerable to the intoxications of desire and despair, increasingly prone “not to excellence but to excess.” In the war between beauty and pride, beauty, that blue angel, always wins. What good is pride anyway? In the long run it’s a non-sustainable fuel; sooner or later the wells run dry. We may as well learn to do without it now, strip it away, expose ourselves to the murk below. As Aschenbach groans, with a certain helpless excitement, “We cannot pull ourselves together, we can only fall apart.” A point with which Fitzgerald would reluctantly agree.
John Cheever, who knew a thing or two about stripping down, has some penetrating passages about Fitzgerald in his journals, which double as reflections upon certain tendencies of his own:
The writer cultivates, extends, raises and inflates his imagination, sure that this is his destiny, his usefulness, his contribution to the understanding of good and evil. As he inflates his imagination, he inflates his capacity for anxiety, and inevitably becomes the victim of crushing phobias that can only be allayed by lethal doses of heroin or alcohol.
Anxiety for Cheever is yet another form of excessive beauty, another spark thrown off by the imagination’s lonely, maddening, ever-grinding wheel. To write, after all, one must sit alone in a room for many hours, mumbling to oneself and conjuring “plots.” How closely this practice resembles mental illness—or yields to it—is something we prefer not to think about.
But how can we help thinking about it, when we confront the late, deliriously involuted work of a Melville, a James, a Woolf, a Joyce? Here the trajectory over the years is not a paring down but a ramping up, a fidgety, groping prodigiousness, an ornate and often wildly arcane laughter in the dark. A friend likens the experience of listening to late Mahler to watching a man pour gravy not just over the meat but over the potatoes, the green beans, the salad, the cake, and the table and floor too. You’d think a man would get sick of all that gravy. But suppose the only way he has to express that sickness is by means of, well, gravy?
God knows maturity, in art as in life, is rarely in any conventional sense attractive. The saggy flesh, the wild eyebrows, those unruly ear and nose hairs and runaway moles . . . no, let’s face it, maturity ain’t that pretty at all. Shakespeare knows this: he and his characters grow increasingly less felicitous as his career goes on, their diction wilder, more concentrated, more obscure. “It is as if, having achieved age, they want none of its . . . amiability or official ingratiation,” Said writes. “…Late style is what happens if art does not abdicate its rights in favor of reality.”
And isn’t that the hope of us all, that as we go on living and working, the point of our departure and the point of our arrival might converge at last under the weight of the ultimate necessity, Truth? After all, the meter of mortality is ticking. Whither should we bend our steps? Who knows what work we might be capable of if, like the Grandmother in Flannery O’Connor’s story, there was someone there to shoot us every minute of our lives?
These are of course rhetorical questions. For a rhetorical answer, let’s turn to a writer whose own style—in its eerie plainness, its dogged devotion to paradox, its refusal of lyric consolation, its lack of interest in any unifying theory or stance or proclamation—seems so consistently and mysteriously “late” as to approach the posthumous.
"Every limb as tired as a person."
"Let the bad remain bad, otherwise it will grow worse."
"Does my larynx hurt so much because for many hours I have done nothing with it?"
"So the help goes away again without helping."
These are literally the last words Kafka ever wrote. They’re taken from the brief notes, or “conversation slips,” he’d jot down to his nurses, friends, and doctors in the Kierling sanatorium as he lay dying of tuberculosis. No other form of communication was possible; his larynx had shut like a door. Aptly enough, he was proofreading the galleys of “A Hunger Artist” at the time, that painstaking fable of a self closing down, doing without. And yet for all his suffering and deprivation there is no bitterness or rage to be found in these notes, only his usual modest and immaculate courtesy, and maybe a somewhat keener than usual observance of (and doting regard for) the struggles of the various life forms around him, increasingly precious as they recede from view. Is there a line in his stories more poignant than the note he writes, in his last days, after a glass he’s knocked over shatters on the floor: “You’ll have to warn the girl about the glass; she sometimes comes in barefoot?” Did he—did anyone—ever write anything more raw and more refined, more fancy and more plain, more simple and more complex, more true to the ecstasies of life in all its sentience, beauty, and appetite, than this glimpse at the flowers dying on the windowsill beside him:
“How wonderful that is, isn’t it? The lilac—dying, it drinks, goes on swilling.”
From Going to the Tigers: Essays and Exhortations by Robert Cohen. Used with permission of University of Michigan Press. Copyright © 2022 by Robert Cohen.
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