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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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What to Read When You’re Not Expecting
At the beginning of A Man in Love, Karl Ove Knausgaard is at a birthday party with his wife and three children. He eats cake, changes diapers, lets us know how bad he is at small talk and then proves it when he gives a woman his opinion on only children. “The single-child scenario seems a bit sad if you ask me,” he tells her before learning that she has one child, not by choice but because she can’t find a suitable mate for the second. “What the fuck does this have to do with me?” he wonders and is then saved from further awkward conversation by his oldest daughter. For all of Knausgaard’s struggles, procreation is not one of them.
He can even pinpoint the exact moment he and his wife conceive their second child. “When I came, I came inside her,” he writes. “That was all I wanted. Afterwards we lay close to each other for a long time without speaking. “Now we’ll have another child,” I said at length.” If I’d read this one year ago, two years ago, I would’ve rolled my eyes, maybe thrown the book across the room. Instead I was five months pregnant, and although I did think, Oh, come on, Karl Ove, I also thought: how sweet to have that certainty, how lucky to have a memory of that momentous occasion.
Knausgaard writes a lot about his wife’s pregnancies. I found myself studying the details with a strange kind of intensity before realizing that, oh god, I was using the book as a guide to pregnancy and childbirth. This had not been my intention. I thought that when I got a positive pregnancy test I would throw myself into the world of pregnancy literature, but I’d resisted. There was no excited trip to the bookstore to buy What to Expect When You’re Expecting. It was nerves at first, but even when I passed the first trimester mark, I only halfheartedly picked Ina May Gaskin’s guide to childbirth off the shelf. I flipped through it quickly and then squirreled it away in a drawer, out of sight along with other baby items that had accumulated over the past few weeks – some presents from friends, pamphlets from doctors, samples that had mysteriously found their way to our mailbox.
But maybe it wasn’t so surprising: I’d had the same attitude while trying to get pregnant. It started off fine – I dutifully read Taking Charge of Your Fertility, bought a basal body thermometer, became familiar with my cycle. Then my husband and I figured out that our bodies had different intentions. If we were going to have a baby, it would require more intervention than charting my temperature and monitoring cervical mucus. Everything I learned next came from doctors, nurses, and specific Internet searches. I sifted through pages of message boards, but even the most helpful information was coded in endless acronyms: DH, TTC, OPK, CM, BD, 2WW, HPT, POAS, BFP, BFN, IUI, IVF, DPO, AF. I craved books again, real words, but I was picky about the texts. I didn’t want guides; I just wanted to read what I normally read. I was, I suppose, trying to reassure myself that whatever was happening to me was common enough, normal enough, to easily crop up in my regular life reading.
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Only there wasn’t a lot to read. In Joan Didion’s Blue Nights, there were hints of things not going according to plan, brief enough to go unnoticed if you weren’t looking, but I was looking. In a tiny three-page chapter spaced between details of her daughter Quintana’s adoption and early childhood, Didion writes about her sudden desire to have children in her mid-twenties. One day she goes to her doctor because of a pregnancy scare, but he can’t definitively tell her if she’s pregnant or not. “A day later I started to bleed, and cried all night.” She realizes she was sad about not being pregnant. I reread those three pages a few times; the experience was similar to something I’d gone through. I wondered what happened in the gap between the crying and the adoption. Did she try to get pregnant on purpose afterwards? Did she decide she didn’t want to? I had no business knowing intimate details about her gynecological life and that this intrusive musing said more about me and how desperate I was to find someone I could relate to. Still, I couldn’t help but think how reassuring it would’ve been to read an essay on infertility written in that soothing Didion cadence. Imagine! John and I have decided we would like a baby. It is nine months later, and there is still no baby.
After awhile I remembered Amy Fusselman’s The Pharmacist’s Mate, which I’d read when it was published back in 2002, before the idea of having problems having children or even having children crossed my mind. It’s a slim, pitch perfect book about Fusselman’s father’s death and her fertility issues. I reread it and realized I’d already known how intrauterine insemination – IUI – worked before my doctor explained it because of her description of it. The book is funny and wistful and sad and captures the absurdity of the whole trying-to-conceive process. She calls the company that makes transvaginal ultrasound machines to ask how they work, she plays AC/DC songs on her acoustic guitar to pass the time. And then she gets pregnant and you’re so, so happy for her.
I found Molly Ringwald’s linked short story collection, When It Happens to You. In “The Harvest Moon”, Greta and Phillip try for their second child despite the quiet, slow dissolve of their relationship. Greta gives herself injections for an IVF cycle relying on a YouTube video for instructions. In “The Places You Don’t Walk Away From”, Greta and Phillip are back. They produced embryos, but didn’t use them. Instead they separated, put the embryos in storage and, a year later, have to document what to do with them in their divorce papers. It’s such a distinctly modern dilemma: who knew that you might have to one day decide whether to destroy, freeze or donate excess embryos, that these microscopic cellular bundles could even be preserved for later use?
And maybe because it’s a relatively new phenomenon that’s finally being discussed more openly, more and more books are being published that I would’ve loved to read then when I was looking. In Ben Lerner's 10:04, the main character acts as a sperm donor for his best friend's baby. He writes about the room where men do their thing – the porn, the television, the couch – and then spirals into an exaggerated neurosis of the instruction given to keep his hands clean so he won’t contaminate the sample. It reminded me of a picture my husband once texted me from a similar room: a pump bottle of soap with a label that said, HAND SOAP. DO NOT USE AS LUBRICANT.
There’s a fertility clinic in Emily Gould's Friendship too. Sally is close to 40 and wants children. In the waiting room she pages through Plum, “the magazine for mature mothers.” It’s a fact that fertility clinics have the most varied selection of magazines. At my clinic I would slip copies of the New Yorker in my bag if I didn’t finish an article before seeing the doctor; I was paying enough to be there, I figured, to keep it.
In both 10:04 and Friendship the cost associated with these kinds of treatments are openly discussed. Lerner uses an IUI as a unit of currency – the “strong, six figure advance” the main character gets for his book is broken down into fifty-four IUIs, and the fact that the money can be used to fund the insemination is one of the main reasons for writing the proposal in the first place. For Sally in Friendship it’s her wealth that allows for the possibility of fertility treatments to happen, and when Bev – younger, poorer – gets pregnant accidentally, the reason they first get involved in each other’s lives is because Sally has the money to afford a baby and compensate Bev, while Bev can barely afford her own lifestyle, let alone one that includes another human.
These distillations of the monetary anxiety, how surreal and uncomfortable it is to assign price tags to it, along with the general existential and physical anxiety that accompanies the problem of wanting a child and not having one were what I was looking for and what I’m still looking for even if I’m not necessarily in that stage anymore. It just took some time to cobble together a reading list to reflect it all.
During that waiting period, a friend who knows things about the Bible and can find comfort in it in a way that I’ve always had trouble with emailed me the story of Hannah and Elkanah from the Old Testament. Samuel 1:1 starts off like this, “Elkanah… had two wives; one was called Hannah and the other Peninnah. Peninnah had children, but Hannah had none.” They pray for a child, but Hannah’s fervent, passionate praying is mistaken for drunkenness. When it’s clarified that she wasn’t drunk (even though she should’ve had a few glasses of holy wine to take the edge off), her prayer is granted and she finally has a son, Samuel.
The treatments are modern, I suppose, but the narrative is ancient. As the main character in 10:04 says in an imagined conversation with his potential future progeny, “Everyone gets help making a baby, it's never just a mom and a dad, because everybody depends on everybody else.” Sometimes it’s your friends and family, sometimes it’s your doctors and drugs, but, I’ve learned, you need stories to depend on too.
Image credit: Unsplash/Bastien Jaillot.
Losing My Book Fair Virginity at the BEA Swag-A-Thon
Can't say they didn't try to warn me. When I told my agent I was planning to attend a book fair for the first time in my life, this year's Book Expo America in New York, she said, "I avoid it like the plague. It's basically a lot of people -- primarily made up of aspiring writers -- scrambling for free books. The London Book Fair is far more professional and focused. Everyone's there trying to conduct business, as opposed to trying to score a free carry-all from a publisher to fill with free books. BEA really is a madhouse."
Fellow writers sounded similar alarms. Don't go, several advised, because it will swallow you whole -- so many books, so many people, so many writers (more than 600 this year). You'll despair, these writers warned. You'll come away convinced that no book of yours could ever possibly cut through such a typhoon of clutter. One writer told me that going to BEA is an especially bad idea if you're in my current delicate condition: author of a novel that's making the rounds of publishers.
But I like to think that, even as the years pile up, I'm still willing to try anything once. Especially if I can score a free pass. Which I did. Which explains why I found myself elbowing my way through the mob at the Jacob Javits Center on Thursday morning, desperately seeking Snooki.
By the time I found her in the Perseus Books zone, the former star of Jersey Shore was well on her way to a major case of writer's cramp. Fans snaked the length of the display area, then around the corner and out of sight. They were waiting for Snooki, nee Nicole Polizzi, to autograph something that is not, technically, even a book. It's a pamphlet containing the table of contents and a five-page introduction to Baby Bumps: From Party Girl to Proud Mama, and All the Messy Milestones Along the Way, a book about Snooki's recent pregnancy that will be published next January. Dressed in a short short dress and high high heels, her arms draped with pearls, her skin as smooth and brown as warm caramel, Snooki signed as fast as she knew how, exchanging pleasantries and patiently posing for pictures with every fan. A real pro.
Standing nearby was a guy in a sportcoat who looked more Princeton than Jersey Shore. This was Scott Miller, Snooki's agent, who has sold all four of her books -- two novels and now two non-fiction books. He waved at the throng. "It's great to see so many people interested in books," Miller said. "This is crazy but it's not Comic Con, where people wear costumes. I haven't seen any Hemingways here. Yet."
"How's business?" I asked.
"Everyone says the book business is dying," Miller replied. "But books are still selling and there are new ways to sell them. Every business has challenges, but print books are stabilizing. I'm happy."
He has a point, I thought. This might be a madhouse, but would the alternative be better -- this vast airplane hangar of a building with nobody in it? Imagine if they threw a book fair and nobody came. Now that would get the doomsayers lathered up.
Her signing duties done, Snooki paused to reflect on the relative difficulty of writing fiction versus non-fiction. "Making up things in your head is hard," she said. "Writing Confessions of a Guidette was easy. But this book, Baby Bumps, was the easiest because I'm telling stories that actually happened. This is not a how-to book about pregnancy, like What To Expect When You're Expecting. That's a great book, but it has no humor. I need relatable stories with a sense of humor."
Point taken. What to Expect must be doing something right -- it has been on The New York Times bestseller list roughly since the invention of bread -- but it can't touch lines like this from Baby Bumps: "My pregnancy began with the thought, 'Holy shit! My egg hatched!'" Or: "Since my 'eggs hatched!' moment, my life has changed 180 degrees -- all for the better. I'm a different person now. I love who I've become...I'm sure people who think of me as a wasted smurf on Jersey Shore might find it hard to believe that, these days, the only bottles I care about are full of formula or milk. I'd rather go to the gym than a club. The only men who see my boobs are my fiance and my son."
Determined to shift gears, I made my way for the stage where Pulitzer Prize-winner A. Scott Berg was getting ready to speak about his forthcoming biography of Woodrow Wilson. On the way I spotted a bunch of brand-name authors signing their books, including Allan Gurganus, Jonathan Lethem, and Daniel Handler, d.b.a. Lemony Snicket. The major autograph area had dividers that funneled the fans to the long tables where authors autographed books by the metric ton. The vast autograph area brought to mind the cattle pens in a Midwestern feed lot. Indeed, many of the people waiting in line looked like beasts of burden, draped with bulging bags of swag and hankering for more. My agent wasn't lying.
The turnout for A. Scott Berg's talk was modest, more like a graduate seminar than a cattle roundup. "The real reason why I devoted 13 years of my life to Woodrow Wilson is that it's a story filled with tragedy, romance, and compassion -- unlike anyone else who has ever lived in the White House. A personal story is what I tried to capture -- Woodrow Wilson the man. I wanted to humanize this guy."
And I wanted to get out of there. It hadn't been the soul-crushing experience I'd been warned about, but enough is enough. Just before I reached the exit, I was stunned by the sight of four slabs of beefcake flexing their muscles as cameras clicked and book lovers gaped. Had I been teleported to a male stripper convention in Vegas? No, these guys were the frontmen for Ellora's Cave, publisher of "erotic romance" books that made $30,000 a dozen years ago and now grosses upwards of $15 million a year.
Why is the company so successful?
"Because sex sells," said Patty Marks, the CEO, as though I must be one dim bulb. "Another reason is technology. Traditional publishers said women wouldn't read this stuff. And let's face it, most women are less comfortable with going into a drugstore and buying a copy of Playgirl than men are with buying a copy of Playboy. But with e-books, no one knows what you're reading. And our books are not just erotica -- they're erotic romance. Sex has to be part of the plot, but so does romance. And just like romance novels, the books have to have a happily-ever-after or a happy-for-now ending."
Ellora's Cave is now paying royalties to more than 800 authors who have put out more than 5,000 books, with titles that pull no punches, including Nailed and Buck Naked and Top or Bottom? One of the company's most visible authors is Desiree Holt, a 76-year-old grandmother known as "the porn queen of Texas hill country."
So it turns out that Scott Miller, Snooki's agent, was right. The book business isn't dying. Books are still selling and people are finding new ways to sell them. I asked the four slabs of beefcake to flex for my camera. They happily complied. They understand that sex sells. Amen. I was out of there, a virgin no more.
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