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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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Trapped Between Two Worlds: The Life of John Morris
After his propulsive novels set in 1950s and 1960s Detroit and Vietnam, The Millions staff writer Bill Morris delivered a memoir about his cub reporter days in rural Pennsylvania, chronicling the “schizo ‘70s” and its “stylistic Sargasso.” In his latest nonfiction work, The Age of Astonishment: John Morris in the Miracle Century―From the Civil War to the Cold War, Morris expands the historical scope by painting a portrait of his grandfather John Morris, a man who led an ordinary life—he was a long-time professor at the University of Georgia—but witnessed extraordinary things: “He was born into a slave-owning Virginia family during the Civil War and died at the peak of the Cold War.” The sober philologist could hardly be called an early adopter, but the range of technological advances that occurred during his lifetime was staggering:
He was among the original users of window screens, the telephone, modern plumbing, electric lights, typewriters, radio, automobiles, phonographs, airplanes, elevators, movies, subways, safety razors, television, penicillin, pasteurized milk, refrigeration, antibiotics, and central heat and air conditioning.
Throughout this biography and cultural history, Morris tracks his grandfather’s conflicted relationship with the pace of change: “He must have felt trapped between two worlds, unwilling to go back to an imaginary past and equally unwilling to step into a mad mechanized future.” Whenever events were too overwhelming, though, he could find comfort in his recondite scholarly interests—the development of diphthongs in modern English, for instance—or work on a massive, destined-to-be unpublished German-English dictionary that occupied him for nearly 40 years.
I spoke with Bill Morris about bringing to life his grandfather and the “age of astonishment” in which he lived.
The Millions: In the book, you paraphrase Ralph Ellison, “Some people are your relatives but others are your ancestors, and you choose the ones you want to have as ancestors.” What made you “choose” this ancestor as a subject?
Bill Morris: There is a (now lost) picture of me as an infant in 1952 on my grandfather’s knee, when he was about to turn 90. Even as a teenager, I was thinking, wow, the life this guy lived. The things he lived through and witnessed, and the way his day-to-day life changed must have been a whiplash experience. And then back in 2016, this economist Robert Gordon published The Rise and Fall of American Growth. I read this book and I’m thinking, this guy wrote the blueprint of the things my grandfather lived through. It’s a fabulous book, and Gordon’s saying that the century from 1870 to1970 brought the most amazing changes in the history of humanity. And I thought, my grandfather’s dates were 1863-1955, almost a perfect match. And that finally got me going. I have to write this book. I’ve been thinking about this for 50 years. It’s time to sit down and write it.
TM: And the argument is that the speed and variety of technological advancements of this period dwarf those that any other generation has lived through?
BM: People say, “Oh, the world is changing faster than ever now.” Well, not really, because my life hasn’t changed all that much, except for laptop computers and all that. I grew up with the telephone and electric lights and flushing toilets and paved roads. It was all there when I was born. None of that was there when my grandfather was born.
TM: They didn’t even have the curveball! You mention how your grandfather’s brother is credited with inventing the pitch, called the “drop-shoot,” in the late 19th century.
BM: That’s right. John was the catcher on the first University of Georgia baseball team, and he kept getting his nose broken because his brother would throw these curveballs and they would hit the ground, bounce up and hit him in the face. They didn’t have masks or chest protectors.
TM: Perhaps that’s why he took refuge in the comparatively less bruising world of philology. You describe this as a “mongrel” book comprising various forms. What motivated this approach?
BM: I realized the book couldn’t be any single thing. It was not going to be a biography because the written record is sizable but not really great. It wasn’t like I had thousands of his letters. Late in the process, though, I did stumble on the manuscript of his English-German dictionary, which he spent 40 years working on. But I wanted it to be nonfiction. I wanted it to be factual. I knew there was going to be a lot of reporting involved—research in archives, letters from relatives, leads. A little bit of scholarship, little bit of reportage, and then, as I admit, when the record was thin, I had to imagine a bit, resort to fiction. All of the kinds of writing I’ve done in my life came into play. It’s a mongrel work.
TM: Your grandfather was born into a slave-owning Virginia family. Throughout the book, how do you wrestle with, and what did you uncover about, what you call this “original stain on the Morris family.”
BM: I unearthed a lot of letters that John’s father, Charles Morris, who was a quartermaster in the Confederacy, and his mother, Mary Minor Morris, wrote back and forth during the Civil War. That was the richest historical archive that I found. And from that I got a richer appreciation of what it was like day to day on a plantation where people owned human beings. I think slavery, American slavery in particular, was an abomination. John grew up believing that, too, even though his father owned slaves. Charles was not apparently a vicious slave owner, although he didn’t apologize for it or try to abolish it. It was the world he’d been born into, it was the world his family had been in for many generations, and it was like breathing to him. He was not a man to question it. Now, that doesn’t make him evil in my eyes. And it doesn’t excuse him. But like I said, in the beginning of the book, this project was about trying to find the richer truth about what it was like for people who were born into that world to suddenly have that world crumble.
And possibly more important, what about the people they owned who were suddenly free? And that’s where it got interesting to me. Because they did not take it rolling over. They did fight back. The house [Taylor’s Creek in Hanover County Virginia] burned one time, under suspicious circumstances. The former slaves melted away, many of them, as soon as they were free. But, Charles also donated the land that would become Bethany Baptist Church, a black church that is still in existence today. He helped his former slaves who wanted to stay around, gave them loans, pieces of land. I was hoping that by looking into the family’s participation in this horrible institution of slavery, I would get a deeper understanding of what the slave owners went through and what the slaves went through.
TM: And how did John Morris, a relative progressive living most of his life in Athens, Ga,, throughout Reconstruction and Jim Crow, respond to the racial violence surrounding him?
BM: I ask this question in my book: Why didn’t they get out? Lots of people, Black and white, were leaving the South, had given up on the South as hopeless. And I think the answer is that both John and Gretchen [his wife] had seen enough in the world—he had studied in Berlin, she had travelled widely as a musician—and they came to the conclusion that it’s not any better anywhere else. It might be really bad here, but when you get down to it, during the Red Summer of 1919, there were racial killings from California to Connecticut. I think that they thought that if we stay here and try to be decent to Black people and treat everyone with respect, maybe that’s better than leaving and letting the yahoos take over everything.
Athens and places like Charlottesville and Chapel Hill have always been these bastions of somewhat enlightened culture in not-so-enlightened parts of the South. Georgia in particular was real heavy-duty. Georgia was on a level with Mississippi back in the day. You have the Leo Frank lynching. The riots in Atlanta in 1906 were absolutely appalling. But there again, we see W.E.B. Du Bois and Walter White picking up guns and getting ready to defend their homes in Atlanta in 1906, which was the beginning of the Black resistance to this wave of horror that Jim Crow had brought to the South. John and Gretchen felt they could maybe do a little bit of good if they stayed. I don’t know if they succeeded or not.
TM: There’s one scene near the end of the book in which you recall your aunt showing you the spot outside of Athens where a lynching occurred.
BM: That’s one of those moments in life you never forget. I was visiting my father’s eldest sister in Athens as I was driving cross country. I was a college drop out. One day my aunt said, "We’re going on a drive." She drove me out to this lone pine tree outside of town and told me the story of a Black man who was lynched by that tree in 1921. And her father, John Morris, had driven her out there one day and pointed to the tree and told her the story of how they burned a man alive there, and that it was evil and that she was never to have anything to do with such things or such people. And that stayed with me ever since.
TM: Your grandfather taught for over half a century at the University of Georgia, devoted to teaching and to abstruse academic studies in which he found a “harbor and a fortress.” Throughout, you try to determine his ambitions and wrestle with how he might have defined success.
BM: I think he made his own little room and pumped in his own oxygen. He spent upwards of 40 years writing a German-English diction that was never published. He was also writing articles in obscure philological journals. He’s writing about where Shakespeare’s name comes from. He decided he was going to do his own thing, and to hell with everybody else. It wasn’t like he was sitting in a room by himself like Jack Nicholson in The Shining, writing the same thing over and over. But he was very much in his own bubble and yet yearning to connect with the world, which never really happened. And I don’t think that makes him a failure. I think that makes him an interesting case, actually, because he pursued a dream with tremendous focus and discipline. And it amounted to absolutely nothing, and I think he was perfectly at peace with that.
That’s my definition of heroic: someone who pursues what they want to do.
But it’s also not like he just retreated from all the horrors of this complicated, confusing world. He loved going to the movies. He loved the radio. He loved to drive. He loved to travel to Europe. He spoke many languages. He was a person who selectively embraced technology. He liked screened-in the windows, which was one of the first innovations he experienced at the family farm in Virginia. He liked not having mosquitoes bite him in the middle of the night. Technology wasn’t all bad to him, but then we get little problems like Hitler and the A-bomb. He was ambivalent about all the progress that was going on. He was an old-school Southern gentleman.
TM: Because you cover the half-century he spent teaching at the University of Georgia, we get a full portrait of that institution, warts and all.
BM: He went to law school there and then became a professor until the end of the Second World War. When he got there, it was really just a glorified academy, not a serious university like they had in the North. Mencken said the only true university in the South was the University Virginia. But as the 20th century rolled along, the University of Georgia did become more modern, more progressive, more seriously academic. But there was always this thing about sports—and the military. Those are big things in the South. So when Stanford Stadium was built in 1929—with convict labor, by the way, because they couldn’t afford to build it with “real” workers—they built this huge 30,000-seat stadium. And John hadn’t gotten a raise in 10 years. There was no pension. He had no health insurance. The football coaches made more than he did, and he’d been there for 35 years. So he wasn’t thrilled about these things. He thought making money through sports was the height of vulgarity. Big-time college sports made a deal with the devil, and he saw it in 1929, and I think that’s exactly how it played out. And it’s funny, because the week I finished writing the book, UGA won the national football championship. Of course, I thought, “Ah yes, if only John were still around to appreciate this moment!”
TM: He also distrusted what you call the “boosterism” of Henry Grady and the New South.
BM: Henry Grady was the big proponent of the New South. He was a newspaper editor in Atlanta. John certainly would have known him. And John was very put off by the New South, the notion that if we could just get a cotton mill in this town, everything would be great. And this created these sprawling ugly mill villages. It was supposedly salvation for the white man. They’d go to work at these mills at a young age, and this was the progress that Grady was preaching as the salvation of the South after Reconstruction. And John wanted no part of it. Grady’s vision did bring some progress and raise the standard of living, but it also brought a lot of misery. There was nothing romantic about it. It was an act of desperation.
TM: This book surveys a wide range of social, political, and cultural movements from the 1860s to the 1950s. American wars from the home soil to the Philippines to Europe. Electricity: efforts to install street lights, its use as a method of execution. The transcontinental railroad, the Panama Canal, and the interstate highway system. The rise of the KKK and Nazism. Given the breadth of the research involved, what were some of the more surprising discoveries you made?
BM: Well, during the 1918 so-called Spanish Flu pandemic, everybody in the Morris family but Gretchen got sick. When I was doing the research, I learned that the town fathers in Athens had very strict rules and mandates, quarantines, and everybody in town just obeyed. Atlanta got hammered by the flu, but Athens was barely touched because people cooperated with the local government. While out in San Francisco, they were practically having riots because they had an Anti-Mask League in California during the pandemic, and people didn’t want to be told to wear a mask. There’s one for you.
And then I was learning about things like the Chinese Exclusion Act and the immigration laws of the 1920s, and I started thinking, Trump’s wall is nothing new. Anti-vaxxers and people who don’t want to mask are nothing new. I started to realize that if you start to dig into the history, there’s truly nothing new under the sun. This has all happened before. And it’s happening again. And it’s almost comical that we keep doing the same things over and over again. Actually, it’s kind of tragic.
The great joy of writing this book was that every day, I learned something like that. It could be something like the Confederacy imposing a draft in 1862 after one year of fighting because everyone had signed up for one year. And Jefferson Davis passed what came to be known as the 20-Slave Law. If you had 20 or more slaves, you could get an exemption and stay home to take care of your farm, and your slaves and your family could grow food for the Confederacy. And it wasn’t until a year later that Lincoln imposed the draft of 1863, which caused riots in New York and elsewhere. Wow, the Confederacy had a draft before the U.S. Army? I learned something like that every day. It was really the joy putting this book together.
TM: Personally, I had no idea about Teddy Roosevelt wielding his bully stick to try to institute phonetic spelling, which your grandfather also endorsed.
BM: When I was growing up, my father told me that his father was a big proponent of phonetic spelling. And I have a cousin also named Jon Morris, but it’s spelled J-O-N in honor of my grandfather’s passion for phonetic spelling. So this was in the family lore. And then I found some letters, and my grandfather was writing in the phonetic, like “luv.”
And when Teddy Roosevelt became a proponent of this, he was ridiculed by the press. They suggested he spell his name “Butt-in-Sky.” Teddy Roosevelt? Who knew that he was briefly a proponent of phonetic spelling and then got mocked into submission. Andrew Carnegie also spent a lot of money on the movement, but gave up on it right before he died. Carnegie was hoping that English could become the global business language. But the big impediment was that English had words like “through,” “tough,” “thou,” and there are all these exceptions. With German, what you see is what you get. Every word is pronounced exactly as it’s written. Carnegie was thinking, if you could change “through” to “thru,” anybody in the world would know how to pronounce that word. For Carnegie, this was a business thing. For John, I think it was an intellectual exercise, because he had read all these philologists and linguists, and there were a lot of brilliant people—George Bernard Shaw among them—who wanted to make the written language follow the spoken language. And I agree with them. But it didn’t work out that way. People resisted. Once people learn to read and write a language, they are very resistant to change.
TM: As you write in response to one of your grandfather’s phonetically spelled letters to his sons: “Wize werds.”
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