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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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Fiction is a Power Trip: The Millions Interviews Eleanor Henderson
In June 2011 Stacy D’Erasmo wrote in the New York Times Book Review that Eleanor Henderson “writes the hell out of every moment, every scene, every perspective, every fleeting impression, every impulse and desire and bit of emotional detritus.” D’Erasmo was referring to Henderson’s much lauded debut novel, Ten Thousand Saints, but Henderson’s passion and skill are equally evident in her follow up novel, The Twelve-Mile Straight. In her latest, Henderson has taken a significant dogleg in subject, time, and locale, leaving behind the straight-edge movement of 1980s New York and delivering us with equal skill into Cotton County, Georgia in the acutely troubled era of the early 1930s. It is into this dusty, highly charged tableau that Elma Jesup, the teenage daughter of a white sharecropper, gives birth to an unusual set of twins—one light-skinned and the other dark—born of different patrimony and quickly coined the Gemini twins. In the rush of the book’s opening salvo, Elma’s father, Juke, accuses Genus Jackson, a black field hand, of Elma’s rape, and Juke, along with Elma’s fiancé, Freddie Wilson, lead the mob that lynch Genus from the gourd tree. Freddie, adding insult to murder, subsequently drags Genus’s body down the unnamed road known only as the Twelve-Mile Straight. It is on the other side of this tragedy that the novel slows and deepens, exploring the irreparable damage done by family secrets; secrets made all the more damning by the fact that family provided the only stability there was to be had.
I talked with Eleanor Henderson about her writing and research process, if the film adaptation of her debut altered the way she works, and the particular challenges of writing a novel of historical fiction that is perhaps unexpectedly relevant to our current cultural conversation.
The Millions: Let’s begin with how you began this book. I understand the seed of it actually grew from stories of your father’s childhood in Ben Hill County, Georgia.
Eleanor Henderson: I’d wanted to write a book set in Georgia for a long time. For all of my childhood I’d heard stories about my father growing up on the farm during the Depression, but I didn’t know what to do with them. Meanwhile, I was beginning to think about a novel about newborn twins with different paternity—I was amazed to know that such a phenomenon exists!—and I wasn’t getting anywhere with that book, either. It wasn’t until I married the two ideas together that I found that the Georgia story and the twins story were the same. What would it be like, I wondered, to share a childhood with someone who is supposed to be more like you than anyone else, and yet that person might look and be very different than you? When I imagined that situation in the context of the Jim Crow South—a place that would be very intolerant of those differences—I began to see the shape of the story. That’s pretty common for me—I work on two different ideas for a while, get nowhere, and then smash their atoms together. At that point I was ready to explore but also move past the stories about the farm, and to write a novel that confronted the horrifying injustices of that time and place--injustices that of course are still with us today.
TM: This is your second novel about a very specific time and place and I know a good deal of research went into getting 1930s Georgia accurately on the page. Do you enjoy the research process?
EH: It’s my favorite part! I think one of the most rewarding parts of writing historical fiction—I think of both of my books as historical fiction—is that I get to live in another world for a while. Research for me is an attempt to know a time and place with an authority that I can never achieve in my own world. Of course, it’s an impossible task, and so it’s endless. I spent about five years elbow-deep in archives and newspapers and books, immersing myself in the music and the photography and the language and the culture of the place. After a while I began to recognize the hubris in that kind of research, and I began to worry about appropriating history for my own design. It was something I had to accept in order for the project of the novel to work, and I had to acknowledge that I could never get to the bottom of the research well. In the end, the place I’m writing about is an invention—Cotton County doesn’t exist—but I hope that readers who are old enough to remember Georgia in the Depression would recognize some piece of their realities there.
One of those people is my dad. I’ve found that I’m drawn to the stories of people I’m close to—in my first novel, I wrote about the world my husband grew up in, and this one, I wrote about my dad’s. So I spent a lot of time talking to him about daily life on the farm and in town. For several years, I was waking up early to write before my young kids were awake, and my dad, always a child of the farm, was up early, too. So I’d send him emails about whatever scene I was stuck on. Did you have a sink? How did you wash your clothes? Did the country doctor visit you, or did you go to town? How did you get there? It was a great gift, getting this daily dose of insight into my father’s life, a life that had seemed distant until then.
My father was also my fact checker. I was greatly relieved when he gave most of the novel his approval, but he had some corrections. One detail that stands out is the way different crops were harvested. There was a sentence in the novel that read: “The peanuts wanted picking first, then the cotton.” My dad shook his head and said, “You don’t pick peanuts. You take them out of the ground.” Lesson learned.
TM: While researching, what did you find the most illuminating? What surprised you or stayed with you?
EH: A couple things come to mind. When I first started writing the book, I had a vague sense that it would take place during the Depression; my father was born in Georgia in 1932, so I thought it might begin there. Then, early on, I read a book called The Tragedy of Lynching by Arthur Raper, published in 1933, which looks closely at lynchings that took place in the South in 1930. Between 1927 and 1929, no recorded lynchings took place in the state. I came across a Georgia newspaper headline in the microfilm at the Georgia Historical Society, dated December 1929: “Lynching to Be a Lost Art.” Then, in January 1930, a horrific lynching took place in Irwin County, just ten miles from where my father was born, in which a thousand white people killed and dismembered a young black man who was accused of killing a white girl. Five more lynchings followed in Georgia that year. What the hell was happening? I wondered. What kinds of social forces had resurrected that kind of violence? It shook me up and gave the book a shape. I decided to open the book with another Georgia lynching, a fictional one that takes many of its characteristics from those real cases.
Then, when I was walking through the Georgia Museum of Agriculture in Tifton, I saw a gourd tree for the first time, looming over a cane field. I asked my friend and guide Brian Brown what it was, and he explained that the hollowed gourds were thought to keep the mosquitoes away. It was an alien sight to me, both beautiful and practical, and then chilling, when I imagined that, like the telephone poles of that era, it might also serve as an instrument of hate and terror.
TM: At what point in the process did the book take on a life of its own? In other words, when did it transcend the gathering of information and manifest the more specific voices of the ensemble cast—especially Nan and Elma?
EH: I struggled with early drafts of this book. I wrote about a hundred pages in Nan’s voice, imagining her as a kind of removed observer. She was, even in those early drafts, mute—her mother cut out her tongue when she was a baby—so I thought it would be clever to give Nan a voice in the narrating of the story. I sent the draft to a good friend, and she had the good sense to tell me that it wasn’t working. She felt toyed with as a reader, and Nan felt more like a device than a person. That wasn’t what I wanted. What the story needed was a truly omniscient narrator, someone who could access all of the characters, black and white, victim and villain, with empathy, and who could absorb their voices as well. So I had to abandon cleverness and reckon with Nan’s voice in a more direct way.
But I couldn’t imagine what her voice would sound like. Again, I worried about appropriating experience. Who was I to speak in the voice of this young black woman, whose worries I’d invented but couldn’t understand myself? It seemed a violence to deny her voice and a violence to assume it. So I wrote through that uncertainty, and tried to raise those questions in the book itself. I tried to transfer them to Elma, the young white woman in the book who feels she must speak for Nan, but who does so incompletely and sometimes inaccurately. What is the white woman’s role in speaking for black women? How are we complicit in injustice? How are we allies? What is our responsibility to other people’s stories?
TM: I’m sure you’re aware of Lionel Shriver’s much rebuked 2016 speech at the Brisbane Writers’ Conference in which she lamented the idea of appropriation, wishing the notion of it were a passing fad, and arguing that it threatened to be the end of fiction. In that speech she stated that fiction “is a disrespectful vocation by its nature – prying, voyeuristic, kleptomaniacal, and presumptuous. And that is fiction writing at its best.” Personally, this description of fiction “at its best” exemplified much of the problem with her assertions, believing as I do that a writer’s aim ought to be empathy over voyeurism, respect and research over presumption. Since you wrestled with embodying Nan’s experience and wrote through these anxieties, ultimately manifesting an interior voice for her, I am wondering if you might reflect on your own final question above: what is our responsibility to other people’s stories? And how does that responsibility manifest itself in terms of craft?
EH: This is a question I think about a lot, in my writing and in my teaching. While I object vigorously to the carelessness of Shriver’s position, I do recognize myself in her description of fiction as “prying, voyeuristic, kleptomaniacal, and presumptuous.” I think we have to acknowledge that fiction does have that dangerous allure. Is it presumptuous? Sure. It’s a sacred enterprise, it’s the best means of empathy and understanding we have, and it’s also presumptuous. It’s a power trip. And we have to check that power, just as we do every other day in the world.
Last spring I taught a graduate seminar at Syracuse University on narrative distance and point of view, and next spring I’ll teach a senior seminar at Ithaca College called Writing the Other. Both classes focus on how the writer’s subject position facilitates or inhibits our narrative access to characters and their worlds. In politics, we talk about privilege, and I think it’s a very apt term in fiction as well. Which characters do we have access to, and how, and why? As Claudia Rankine and Beth Loffreda write, we have to “change the terms of the conversation... So, not: can I write from another’s point of view? But instead: to ask why and what for, not just if and how.”
For me, those questions are best answered through narrative distance. (David Jauss’s essay "From Long Shots to X-Rays," which I read as a grad student, changed the way I thought about point of view.) Will the camera remain outside the character? Will it have interior access? How can I approach my subject with respect? How close do I want to bring my reader to the subject—and who is my reader, anyway? The analogy of the photographer is helpful but limited, because of course the fiction writer has the power to go inside, which is a presumptuous act. And honestly, after watching Get Out and reading Zadie Smith’s review in Harper’s, I won’t ever think of getting inside the “skin” of a black character in the same way. It’s perhaps the most presumptuous move a white writer can make.
Ultimately, I did make that move, and I have to own it. I tried to adopt a kind of mythic narrator who could access all of the characters’ interior lives, while also revealing the limitations of that narrator’s moral knowledge. I do have faith in what Toni Morrison calls “a shareable language.” That phrase gives me hope.
TM: Your reference to the camera perspective has me thinking about the cinematique quality of both your novels. You move so deftly from the panoramic to the close-up (and yes, the interior) in each book, but did seeing Ten Thousand Saints being made into a film have any effect or place any new burden on your process when you sat down to the blank page again?
EH: I was in the middle of writing The Twelve-Mile Straight when the movie came out, so it didn’t fundamentally change my thinking about the book. But when I was struggling with Nan as the narrator, it did occur to me that that conceit—a mute character telling the story—would not work on the screen. While it ultimately didn’t work in the novel, either, thinking about the power and limitations of both forms probably helped me to see the story more clearly.
TM: Since this particular story is so relevant to our current cultural conversation, illuminating racism, sexism, and the reverberations of poverty from generation to generation, I’m curious if at any point in the writing you were propelled more by obligation than curiosity? In other words, was the process of writing this book more emotionally complex than the first?
EH: Even though the material of the books is very different, the same kind of curiosity led me to both. In this novel, I was drawn to writing about the world my father grew up in, and in my first novel, I was drawn to writing about the world my husband grew up in—the straight edge hardcore scene in New York in the eighties. But when I finished writing Ten Thousand Saints, I wanted to move out of my comfort zone and explore more historically complicated material. It was a more emotionally taxing project, but mostly my anxiety was about not doing emotional harm to my readers (or my characters). I didn’t feel obligated to write either novel; on the contrary, I worried about whether readers would be interested. When I began writing The Twelve-Mile Straight in 2011, I was ignorant to just how relevant it would feel six years later. Do we need another novel about the Jim Crow South? I wondered. Now I think it’s clear that, sadly, we do.
TM: As a teacher, what piece of advice would you give to aspiring writers who are struggling with a larger manuscript?
EH: No matter how big it gets, find a way to see it all on one page. I’m a visual person, so I used whatever tools I could—a map, an outline, a family tree—to keep me focused and keep the moving parts clear. My father’s sketch of his family’s farm, as well as a sketch he did of a peanut plant on the back of a paper plate, hung above my desk as I wrote. (I really should have known that peanuts aren’t picked but taken out of the ground.) I also kept a Pinterest board with photographs, advertisements, and songs from the 1930s. (Thank you to the writer Katherine Howe for this idea!) That page helped me organize some of my research and also remain in that world. When I taught a workshop on historical fiction, I had my students create their own Pinterest boards and present them to the class, and the results were really fascinating.
TM: We’ve discussed Nan and Elma, but there are so many rich and fraught relationships in this novel. It is often Elma’s father, Juke Jesup, and the Wilson family who catalyze tragedy for others. If you could undo one situation for one of your characters, relieve them of one burden, what would it be?
EH: I’d have Elma take back her nod. It’s her silent consent that gives her father and Freddie Wilson permission to kill Genus in the first chapter. I’d undo it because it might save Genus’s life (perhaps not—they were bent on killing him anyway, she reasons), but of course, the story would be a different one. Instead Elma spends the novel trying to undo that action herself.
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