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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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Mass Media as a Form of Mass: The Millions Interviews Nick Ripatrazone
I first took Marshall McLuhan seriously when I was trying to claim in my dissertation that John Milton’s Paradise Lost is, among other things, a network of media effects. McLuhan’s The Medium and the Light and Understanding Media: The Extension of Man gave me the language I needed to persuade that Milton’s media ecologies—his gardens, his use of the epic form—are more important than his content (I’ve never really been that interested in Milton’s theology). Though McLuhan was interested in television and nascent computing networks, his famous maxim—“The medium is the message”—offered me a way of grappling with form and its world-shaping force in our lives.
By the time I was integrating McLuhan into my writing, though, his star as a theorist had faded. McLuhan’s over-saturation within his own media environments in the mid-20th century—the magazine covers, the television appearances, and the debates with the likes of W.H. Auden and Norman Mailer—turned him into a caricature. Yet his theories and his non-linear approach to observing how media rich environments shape our thinking and way of being in the world paved the way for contemporary discussions of affordance within our digital modes of experience.
In his new book Digital Communion: Marshall McLuhan’s Spiritual Vision for a Digital Age (Fortress Press, 2022), Nick Ripatrazone puts McLuhan the media theorist, the glib performer, the Renaissance scholar, and the devout Roman Catholic on full display. And he makes compelling claims for revitalizing McLuhan’s ideas and his methods today, as we navigate the digital worlds McLuhan predicted. In Ripatrazone’s view, it is McLuhan’s Roman Catholic faith that has been underexplored and remains necessary for appraising his work and applying it within both sacred and secular environments today.
We talked over a week through both written correspondence and a Zoom conversation, a mix of media environments that Marshall McLuhan would surely have wondered at. The following has been edited for concision and clarity.
Elise Lonich Ryan: On one hand, turning to Marshall McLuhan in our media saturated world seems natural. On the other hand, McLuhan can sometimes smell a bit of mothballs, or sound like a voice coming to us over cassette tape. Why do you want to engage McLuhan? How do your intellectual and personal concerns converge on this mid-20th century media theorist?
Nick Ripatrazone: As Douglas Coupland—one of the most perceptive readers of McLuhan has said—we don’t get to choose our prophets. McLuhan was the first to admit that he was an unlikely visionary, yet he was a rather nimble and capable showman. Central to McLuhan’s appeal to me is his concept of obsolescence: we can’t form a dynamic vision of the future if we focus on what is already obsolete, but if we are able to find that which is on its way out—the current modes of communicating and being that are evolving into something else—then we might begin to decipher the unknown. I’m also drawn to McLuhan as a Catholic public intellectual; that he experienced his highest level of renown at the same time as another public Catholic—Andy Warhol—fascinates me.
ELR: You’re sensitive to the distinctions between the “medium of touch” that McLuhan associated with TV image-projection and the touch-world, the thing-rich world, that Catholics inhabit. You write, “For McLuhan, mass media was a form of Mass.” Do you think replication was central to his idea of sacramentality?
NR: Yeah. I think that there's an interesting overlap with McLuhan and Warhol, and they are coming to Catholicism from different experiences and certainly even different rites—the Byzantine Rite for Warhol—but there is something Warholian in McLuhan's appreciation for mass reproduced things. Certainly, Warhol thought that reproduction of something didn't neuter or lessen its sacramental possibilities. And I think McLuhan, although sometimes skeptical of what he would call “the electronic age,” had an appreciation for what it could do for the masses of believers. And he certainly appreciated the idea that a very working-class piety was central to Catholicism. That's something Warhol grew up on, and that's something McLuhan came to appreciate.
Whenever I see McLuhan speaking about mass culture in a skeptical way, I feel like his ultimate dream would be a mass-produced faith that didn't sanitize things, that didn't extract the sacramentality out of it that sustained it.
ELR: There is no way for me to have a conversation with you and not ask you to explain McLuhan’s most oft cited and likely least interrogated aphorism: “The medium is the message.” Or, as he put it in what is my favorite of McLuhan’s works: “The medium is the massage.” So, will you enlighten us once and for all on this?!
NR: McLuhan loved puns! He loved words; he loved jokes. His first book, The Mechanical Bride (1951), is a wonderfully strange exegesis of print advertising. Corporations and advertising firms of the day paid to pick his brain—we might call him, strangely enough, a certified influencer of his time. “The medium is the message” is most casually meant to describe how the media of our time (television, radio, the Internet, phones, etc.) themselves are important, or perhaps more important, than the minutiae of what is communicated through them. Basically, the content of the texts that we send to each other are less important than the fact that we are communicating via text. While it is a good starting point to engage McLuhan, it’s not the full story. McLuhan clarified his famous saying to mean: “a hidden environment of services created by an innovation, and the hidden environment of services is the thing that changes people. It is the environment that changes people, not the technology.” Twitter does not change us, but is the environment of Twitter, a way of being and performing in that space, that distorts us—we are massaged by that medium. McLuhan liked how “massage” could be split into mass age, Mass. The word itself, to borrow a locution of McLuhan, works us over completely.
ELR: I’m taken by your claim in part because I think performativity is an under-examined category of McLuhan’s self- and intellectual-presentations, and since we often dismiss any performativity as inauthentic and deceptive, we miss the opportunities afforded by performance. How did a performance of self shape McLuhan’s message?
NR: McLuhan’s mother Elsie Naomi Hall McLuhan was an accomplished elocutionist, and young Marshall would travel along to her shows. He learned that language was pliable. McLuhan was an extemporaneous speaker whose thoughts didn’t match the expectations of most readers. Scholars wanted him to argue; McLuhan merely wanted to see. I suggest that people first listen to him, and then read him. When he said, “I don’t explain, I explore,” he offered the best way to appreciate him: a poet whose associative way of describing the world was far more prescient than the linear thinkers of his time. His doctoral thesis was on the acerbic satirist Thomas Nashe; McLuhan loved writers for whom play was their central spirit. He traded Nashe for Joyce, and then pivoted from examining Joyce as a writer of literature to appreciating Joyce as a Catholic parodist, an artist on the precipice of technological change. Joyce’s oeuvre is a put-on; McLuhan was inspired, and performed accordingly.
ELR: Digital Communion is a book as much about McLuhan the literary scholar as it is about McLuhan the media theorist. You write that we need to view McLuhan as “a prose-poet, a writer of almost mystical visions…a poet of the media, an artist who realized that an extemporaneous mode of communication worked better to capture the realities of his changing world than traditional literary techniques.” I’ll admit to being persuaded by your reading. Why do you think keeping poetry in view when reading and applying McLuhan is critical?
NR: McLuhan was essentially formed by his Cambridge years, and poetry was central to that intellectual and personal education. McLuhan’s literary criticism of Gerard Manley Hopkins is deft, and he correctly reads James Joyce for the novelist’s near-prosody (in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, especially). McLuhan was also drawn to Yeats, among other mystic poets, and I think he recognized after The Mechanical Bride that he needed to get with the times (or the media of his times). I think McLuhan realized that his attraction to poetry was largely structural, as a vehicle (or medium) for language—once you accept that, the shift to other media happens quickly.
ELR: Do you think that writing this book changed you as a writer? As I read Digital Communion, I was struck by the coherent collage-like effect of your prose. You have strong claims, but this isn’t a book that drives toward a traditional argument. Instead, following McLuhan’s lead, it’s a book that pays attention to our shifting electronic and digital environments and reports back from there. Do you think your prose style has been influenced by McLuhan?
NR: Thank you for saying “it’s a book that pays attention”—that was really my goal, to inhabit McLuhan’s methods and perform him, so to speak. I wanted to “explore” McLuhan’s world, and the man himself, and think biography should be prose-poetic in nature and gesture. Like McLuhan, I’m a fan of Francis Bacon’s concept of the aphorism: “Aphorisms, representing a knowledge broken, do invite men to inquire farther; whereas Methods, carrying the show of a total, do secure men, as if they were at farthest.” People, including myself, bemoan the brevity of digital communication, but there’s a calisthenic quality to rendering our thoughts in tight spaces—to perhaps leaving certain things unsaid.
I think he gave me license to write in a mosaic style, coming to this as a fiction writer originally, before I started writing nonfiction. So, I think his model offered a kind of prose poetic way forward. And also his disruption of linearity was pleasant.
It would almost feel sacrilegious to lineate McLuhan, to clean his meandering messes. Don’t we want our prophets to be weird and uncanny?
ELR: Do you find yourself wanting to offer a different kind of written engagement with literary, media, and theological questions?
NR: I'm writing a book now on mid-century nun and sister poets, women who published widely in magazines, who won awards, who had books, who were just significant writers in the time where it was really surprising they had the time or support to break through. And I don't engage with McLuhan specifically in the book, but I do engage with that time.
There was something rather interesting happening in the Catholic intellectual world between the ‘40s and the ‘70s. It was a rich moment for a lot of people. How does that extend to the present? Does it? Because it’s easy to get nostalgic where you think the past was perfect. I am quite interested in that moment in Catholic intellectual history and how Catholics were, it seems, everywhere.
ELR: One of your foundational claims in Digital Communion is that there is no Marshall McLuhan as we know him without a consideration of his Catholic faith. Analogous to the forms of media he often described, McLuhan also saw Christ as the ultimate “extension” of humankind and the body upon which the space between the medium and the message collapsed. How does bringing McLuhan’s Catholicism into sharper focus give insight not only to his ideas but also to avenues of application that have been previously ignored?
NR: McLuhan is sometimes dismissed as a glib carnival barker; merely a product of his pop moment. His religious foundation reveals that his public pronouncements, including his aphorisms, were part of a greater project. For example: McLuhan’s essential medium was television. At the same time Pope Pius XII was pondering how the television viewer was “drawn on, as it were, to take an active part” in viewed events, McLuhan was positing that we should understand television as light through, rather than light on—the mode of film and photography. At first it seems like a strange claim, but when we recognize that McLuhan was relating television to stained glass, it begins to make sense. McLuhan was very much a Jesuit-influenced Catholic; a thinker in the Ignatian tradition, who saw God in all things. Paul Elie has said that being a Catholic means considering the border between the sacred and profane, and recognizing the tension there—it is a rather porous one, often, in the real world.
ELR: Throughout the book, you show rather clearly that the Roman Catholic Church attempted to address and to consider seriously technological advances. And yet, you also show how there have been a string of missed opportunities—McLuhan never received a full voice in Councils; McLuhan’s own reliance upon yet ambivalence toward Teilhard de Chardin prevented a powerful synthesis of worldviews; a persistent recalcitrance in prioritizing what is happening over how it happens within the Church. What is at stake for the Catholic Church today in its engagement (or lack thereof) with media rich environments?
NR: The Church, as both an abstract and material Body, needs to transcend the current moment, while also recognizing the needs of its people. I wish McLuhan had been offered a true voice in those committees; it is one of the tantalizing footnotes of history where things could have actually worked out, well, perfectly. Yet you can tell that McLuhan’s language, rhythms, and vision did find its way into elements of the Church writ large. His greatest cheerleader was a Jesuit priest, Father John Culkin. McLuhan’s student, another Jesuit named Walter Ong, was a brilliant thinker who carried and evolved McLuhan’s theories even beyond the scope of his mentor. It’s no wonder that I keep on using the word Jesuit: America: The Jesuit Review of Faith & Culture, is where I’ve most written about McLuhan over the years. Catholics fail to listen to McLuhan at their own peril.
And to not use him as a resource is a lost opportunity. And I guess the question is who will the church listen to now? Are they listening to people? If you ask the average priest or nun or sister, they might connect the dots, but if you ask a typical Catholic, first of all, they would have to have heard of McLuhan and then they'd have to understand his sometimes almost psychedelic theories. I would hope that at some point they’re going to break through.
ELR: You titled your book Digital Communion. How do you understand the connection between McLuhan’s sense of communication and Catholics’ understanding of communion/communication?
NR: I've been drawn again and again in the book, and kind of beyond, to the St. Clare story [of how she miraculously received the Eucharist on Christmas Eve while lying ill in bed] and how there's something there where you have an incredibly pious person who longed for the Eucharist so much that, at least in her vision, she felt as if she partook of the Eucharist in that moment. Certainly, saint stories are embellished all the time, but there's something powerful in just imagining her as someone who was incapable of being by the altar [who could] emote it and feel it. So, I keep on going back to her as this idea of extending the traditional concept of communion, while also feeling the significant, I would say rhetorical, push or narrative of tradition itself.
I think it's a healthy tension to be in as a person, as a writer, to ask yourself to what extent can communion be extended? We've had to extend it in the past two years, and I think it's been successful for a lot of people. But we are on the precipice now where if things do get back to some sort of a traditional normal, the Church and to certain extents parishes have to decide what are they getting to do with these extensions of mass, which are oddly McLuhanesque in the idea of the extension of the body.
But I do think, as you note in your question, that it seems like the right time to be having a conversation about the mystical elements of this. Because if we are going to name someone as a Saint in the church and valorize that miraculous moment, in what ways could we extend it to others who would benefit from them? The church has already in place a way to deliver communion and Eucharist to people who are not healthy in the moment or for whatever reason are unable to attend. There's something there that could happen, but we are in this oddly tense moment where [the Church and parishes] are going to have to make some decisions.
ELR: If you had to recommend one place to start with McLuhan, where would you suggest we go?
NR: I would say The Medium Is the Massage is the best way to understand the environment of McLuhan perhaps. And then once you recognize that itself is almost like a mix tape of sorts and then you can follow the trail to his other work. Once people read a lot of McLuhan, his literary reviews are really fascinating and his work with Kenyon Review and Sewanee Review was really fun to read for this book. And that's a part of McLuhan I think a lot of people don't see, but that's what he was trained to do. He was good at it. I use McLuhan with high school students, AP language students, and they enjoy it because he's kind of on their wavelength.
ELR: Why are we ready for McLuhan now?
NR: It’s been long enough. McLuhan went from being perceived as an obscure Canadian scholar of literature to a wildly popular media guru to a bombast to, hopefully, a minor prophet. The true McLuhan is the McLuhan charged by God. I think of great lines from “Pied Beauty,” a poem McLuhan returned to while traveling through England: “All things counter, original, spare, strange; / Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?).” That parenthetical move by Hopkins is McLuhan incarnate. Such a spirit of playful, curious, and sacred inquiry would serve us well in the digital age.
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