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Most Anticipated: The Great Winter 2024 Preview

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January Pure Wit by Francesca Peacock [NF] I first learned about the life and work of seventeenth-century writer and philosopher Margaret Cavendish in Regan Penaluna's stellar study of women thinkers, and I've been dying to read a biography of Cavendish ever since. And I'm in luck (all of us are) thanks to biographer Peacock. A proto-feminist, science-fiction pioneer, and divisive public figure, Cavendish is endlessly fascinating, and Peacock's debut gives her the rigorous, in-depth treatment that she deserves. —Sophia M. Stewart Nonfiction by Julie Myerson [F] A blurb from Rachel Cusk is just about all it takes to get me excited about a book, so when I saw that Cusk called Myerson's latest novel "glitteringly painful," "steady and clear," and "the book [Myerson] was intended to write," I was sold. A tale of art, addiction, and the ties that bind mothers and daughters, Nonfiction promises to devastate. —SMS Immediacy by Anna Kornbluh [NF] Did the pandemic kill postmodernism? And what comes after the end of history? University of Illinois–Chicago professor Kornbluh dubs our contemporary style “immediacy,” characterized by same-day delivery, bingeable multimedia, and real-time news updates that spin the economic flywheel ever faster. Kornbluh names this state of emergence and emergency, and suggests potential off-ramps in the direction of calm reflection, measured art-making, and, just maybe, collective wisdom. —Nathalie op de Beeck Slow Down by Kōhei Saitō, tr. Brian Bergstrom [NF] In this internationally-bestselling treatise, Japanese philosopher Saitō argues against "sustainable growth" in favor of degrowth—the slowing of economic activity—which he sees at the only way to address the twinned crises of inequality and climate change. Saitō's proposal is simple, salient, and adapts Marx for the modern day. —SMS Relic by Ed Simon [NF] From Millions alum Simon comes a slim study of the objects we imbue with religious (or quasi-religious) meaning, from the bone of a Catholic martyr to Jimi Hendrix's guitar pick. Bloomsbury's Object Lessons series never misses, and Relic is one of the series' most unconventional—and compelling—entries yet. —SMS Filterworld by Kyle Chayka [NF] The outline of reality has become increasingly blurry as the real world melds with the digital one, becoming what Chayka, staff writer at the New Yorker, calls “Filterworld,” a society built on a foundation of ever-evolving algorithms. In his book of the same name, Chayka calls out the all-powerful algorithm, which he argues is the driving force behind current and accelerating trends in art, consumption, and ethics. —Daniella Fishman Portrait of a Body by Julie Delporte, tr. Helge Dascher and Karen Houle [NF] A gripping narrative of coming to terms with her queer identity, Canadian cartoonist Delporte's latest graphic memoir—praised by Eileen Myles and Fariha Róisín—sees Delporte learning to embrace herself in both physical and metaphysical ways. Dreamy colored pencil illustrations and gently flowing storytelling capture the beauty, trauma, and ultimate tranquility that comes with learning to exist on your own terms. —DF Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino [F] In Bertino’s latest novel, following 2020's Parakeet, the launch of Voyager 1 into space coincides with the birth of Adina Giorno, who, much like the solitary satellite, is in search of something she can't yet see. As a child, she senses that she is not of this world and struggles to make a life for herself amid the drudgery of human existence. Playing on Adina's alienness as both a metaphor and a reality, Bertino asks, “Are we really alone?” —DF The Last Fire Season by Manjula Martin [NF] Martin returns ablaze in her latest memoir, pitched as "H Is for Hawk meets Joan Didion in the Pyrocene." Following an anguishing chronic pain diagnosis, Martin attempts to reconnect with her beloved Northern California wilderness in order to escape not only her deteriorating health but a deteriorating world, which has ignited around her in the worst fire season California has ever seen. Devastating and ambivalent, The Last Fire Season tries to sift through the ashes of climate change. —DF The Furies by Elizabeth Flock [NF] Violence by women—its role, its potential righteousness—is the focus of Flock's latest. Following the real-life cases of a young rape survivor in Alabama, a predator-punishing gang leader in India, and an anti-ISIS militia fighter in Syria, Flock considers how women have used lethal force as a means to power, safety, and freedom amid misogynistic threats and oppression. Is violence ever the answer? Flock looks to three parallel lives for guidance. —SMS Imagining the Method by Justin Owen Rawlins [NF] University of Tulsa professor Rawlins demystifies that most celebrated (and controversial) acting school, challenging our contemporary conceptions of screen performance. I was sold the moment I saw Rawlins received the ultimate stamp of approval from Isaac Butler, author of the definitive account of method acting: "If you care about the evolution of twentieth-century screen performance, you should read this book." —SMS We Are Free to Change the World by Lyndsey Stonebridge [NF] Famed twentieth-century philosopher and political theorist Hannah Arendt wrote passionately about power, freedom, and inequality against the backdrop of fascism—a project as relevant today as it ever was. Stonebridge, a professor of humanities and human rights, revisits the lessons of Arendt's writings and applies them to the twenty-first century, creating a dialogue between past, present, and future. —DF Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea by C.D. Rose [F] In these 19 short stories, Rose meditates on philosophy, photography, and literature. Blending erudition and entertainment, Rose's fables follow writers, teachers, and artists through various situations—and in a standout story, imagines how St. Augustine would fare on Twitter. —DF Black Women Taught Us by Jenn M. Jackson [NF] Jackson's debut book foregrounds the work of Black feminist writers and leaders—from Ida B. Wells and Harriet Jacobs to Shirley Chisholm and bell hooks—throughout American history, revealing the centuries-long role that Black women have played in imagining and fighting for a more just society. Imani Perry calls Jackson "a beautiful writer and excellent scholar." —SMS The Bullet Swallower by Elizabeth Gonzalez James [F] Pitched as Cormac McCarthy meets Gabriel García Márquez (yeesh!), The Bullet Swallower is the second novel (after Mona at Sea) from Elizabeth Gonzalez James, who also wrote the weird and wonderful essay/play Five Conversations About Peter Sellers. Infusing the spaghetti western with magical realism, the novel follows a Mexican bandito on a cosmic journey generations in the making. —SMS Last Acts by Alexander Sammartino [F] In Sammartino's debut novel, the owner of a gun store hatches a plan to resurrect his struggling business following his son's near-death experience. George Saunders, Mary Karr, and Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah have all heaped on praise, and Jenny Offill finds it "hard to believe Last Acts is a first novel." —SMS I Sing to Use the Waiting by Zachary Pace [NF] Pace fuses memoir and criticism (my favorite combination) to explore the emotional and cultural impacts of women singers across time, from Cat Power and Rihanna to Kim Gordon and Whitney Houston. A queer coming-of-age story that centers the power of music and the legacies of women artists. —SMS Dead in Long Beach, California by Venita Blackburn [F] Blackburn, the author of the stellar story collections Black Jesus and Other Superheroes and How to Wrestle a Girl, delivers a debut novel about storytelling and unreality, centering on a successful novelist who gets hold of her dead brother's phone—and starts answering texts as him. Kristen Arnett calls this one "a bonafide knockout" that "rewired my brain." —SMS Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here by Jonathan Blitzer [N] New Yorker staff writer Blitzer traces the harrowing history of the humanitarian crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border, foregrounding the stories of Central American migrants whose lives have been threatened and upended by political tumult. A nuanced, layered, and rigorously reported portrait that Patrick Radden Keefe hails as "extraordinary." —SMS The Survivors of the Clotilda by Hannah Durkin [NF] Durkin, a British historian, explores the lives of 103 Africans who were kidnapped and transported on the last slave ship to dock in the U.S., shortly before the Civil War began in 1861. Many of these captives were children, and thus lived their lives against a dramatic backdrop, from the Civil War all the way up to the dawn of the Civil Rights movement. What these people experienced and how they prevailed should intrigue anybody interested in learning more about our nation’s darkest chapter. —Claire Kirch Your Utopia by Bora Chung, tr. Anton Hur [F] Following her acclaimed sophomore novel The Cursed Bunny, Chung returns with more tales from the realm of the uncanny. Covering everything from unruly AI to the quest for immortality to the environmental destruction caused by capitalism, Chung’s story collection promises more of the mystifying, horror-filled goodness that has become her calling card. —DF The Rebel's Clinic by Adam Shatz [NF] Frantz Fanon—political philosopher, psychiatrist, and author of the trailblazing Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth—is one of the most important writers and thinkers of the postcolonial era, and his work continues to inform contemporary thinking on race, capitalism, and power. In this sprawling biography, Shatz affirms Fanon's place as a towering intellect and groundbreaking activist. —SMS You Dreamed of Empires by Álvaro Enrigue, tr. Natasha Wimmer [F] Enrigue's latest novel, following Sudden Death, reimagines the fateful 1519 invasion of Tenochtitlan (now Mexico City) by Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés. With exuberant style, and in a lively translation by Wimmer, Enrigue brings the Aztec capital and the emperor Moctezuma to vibrant life—and rewrites their destinies. —SMS February Love Novel by Ivana Sajko, tr. by Mima Simić [F] Croatian literature may lag behind its Russian, Hungarian, Polish, and Ukrainian counterparts—roughly in that order—as far as stateside recognition goes, but we all make mistakes. Just like couples do in love and under capitalism. “A war between kitchen and bedroom,” as the liner notes read, would have been enough to sell me, but that war’s combatants, “an unemployed Dante scholar” and “a passable actress,” really sealed the deal. —John H. Maher The Unforgivable by Cristina Campo, tr. Alex Andriesse [NF] This new NYRB edition, introduced by Kathryn Davis, brings together all of the essays Campo published in her lifetime, plus a selection of additional essays and autofiction. The result is a robust introduction to a stylish—but largely forgotten—Italian writer whose "creativity was a vocation in the truest sense," per Jhumpa Lahiri. —SMS Alphabetical Diaries by Sheila Heti [NF] Last year, I was enraptured by Heti's limited-run New York Times newsletter in which she alphabetized sentences from 10 years' worth of her diary entries—and this year, we can finally enjoy the sublime results of that experiment in book form. This is my favorite work of Heti's, full stop. —SMS Dinner on Monster Island by Tania De Rozario [NF] Blending film criticism, social commentary, and personal narrative, De Rozario (most recently the author of the Lambda Literary Award–nominated And the Walls Came Crumbling Down) explores her experience growing up queer, brown, and fat in Singapore, from suffering through a "gay-exorcism" to finding solace in horror films like Carrie. —SMS Wrong Norma by Anne Carson [NF] Everyone shut up—Anne Carson is speaking! This glistening new collection of drawings and musings from Carson is her first original work since the 2016 poetry collection Float. In Carson's own words, the collection touches on such disparate topics (she stresses they are "not linked") as Joseph Conrad, Roget's Thesaurus, snow, Guantánamo, and "my Dad." —DF Self-Portraits: Stories by Osamu Dazai, tr. Ralph McCarthy [F] Japanese writer Dazai had quite the moment in 2023, and that moment looks likely to continue into the new year. Self-Portraits is a collection of short autofiction in the signature melancholic cadence which so many Anglophone readers have come to love. Meditating on themes of hypocrisy, irony, nihilism—all with a touch of self-deprecating humor—Dazai’s work will either pull you out of a deep depression or crack your rose-colored glasses; there is no in-between. —DF Imagination by Ruha Benjamin [NF] Visionary imagination is essential for justice and a sustainable future, argues Benjamin, a Princeton professor of African American studies and founder of the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab. In her treatise, she reminds readers of the human capacity for creativity, and she believes failures of imagination that lead to inequity can be remedied. In place of quasi-utopian gambles that widen wealth gaps and prop up the surveillance state, Benjamin recommends dreaming collective and anti-racist social arrangements into being—a message to galvanize readers of adrienne marie brown and Alexis Pauline Gumbs. —SMS Literary Theory for Robots by Dennis Yi Tenen [NF] Artificial intelligence and machine-generated writing are nothing new, and perhaps nothing to fear, argues Tenen, a Columbia English professor and former software engineer. Traveling through time and across the world, Tenen reveals the labor and collaboration behind AI, complicating the knee-jerk (and, frankly, well-founded!) reactions many of us have to programs like ChatGPT. —SMS A Sign of Her Own by Sarah Marsh [F] Alexander Graham Bell is best known as the inventor of the telephone, but what he considered his life's work was the education of deaf children—specifically, the harmful practice of oralism, or the suppression of sign language. Marsh's wonderful debut novel unearths this little-known history and follows a deaf pupil of Bell's as she questions his teachings and reclaims her voice. —SMS Get the Picture by Bianca Bosker [NF] Journalist Bosker, who took readers behind the scenes with oenophiles in her 2017 Cork Dork, turns to avid artists, collectors, and curators for this sensory deep dive. Bosker relies on experiential reporting, and her quest to understand the human passion for visual art finds her apprenticing with creators, schmoozing with galleristas, and minding canonical pieces as a museum guard. —NodB Columbo by Amelie Hastie [NF] Columbo experienced something of a renaissance during the pandemic, with a new generation falling for the rugged, irresistible charms of Peter Falk. Hastie revisits the series, a staple of 70s-era TV, with refreshing rigor and appreciation, tackling questions of stardom, authorship, and the role of television in the process. —SMS Acts of Forgiveness by Maura Cheeks [F] Cheeks's debut novel sounds amazing and so au courant. A woman is elected U.S. president and promises Black Americans that they will receive reparations if they can prove they are descended from slaves. You’d think people would jump on achieving some social justice in the form of cold cash, right? Not Willie Revel’s family, who’d rather she not delve into the family history. This promises to be a provocative read on how the past really isn’t past, no matter how much you run from it. —CK The Sentence by Matthew Baker [F] I minored in Spanish linguistics in college and, as a result, came to love that most useless and rewarding of syntactic exercises, diagramming sentences. So I'm very excited to read Baker's The Sentence, a graphic novel set in an alternate America and comprising single, 6,732-word sentence, diagrammed in full. Syntax wonks, assemble! —SMS Neighbors by Diane Oliver [F] Before her untimely death in 1966 at the age of 22, Oliver wrote stories of race and racism in Jim Crow America characterized by what Dawnie Walton calls "audacity, wit, and wisdom beyond her years." Only four of the 14 stories in Neighbors were published in Oliver's lifetime, and Jamel Brinkley calls the publication of her posthumous debut collection "an important event in African American and American letters." —SMS The Weird Sister Collection by Marisa Crawford [NF] Essayist, poet, and All Our Pretty Songs podcaster Crawford founded the Weird Sister blog in 2014, covering books and pop culture from contemporary young feminists’ and queer perspectives. The now-defunct blog offered literary reviews, Q&As with indie authors, and think pieces on film and music. For this collection, whose foreword comes from Michelle Tea, Crawford gathers favorite pieces from contributors, plus original work with a Weird Sister edge. —NodB Smoke and Ashes by Amitav Ghosh [NF] As research for his Ibis trilogy, Ghosh mapped the opium trade around the world and across centuries. This global and personal history revisits the British Empire’s dependence on Indian opium as a trade good, and how the cultivation of and profits from opium shaped today’s global economy. In his nonfiction The Great Derangement, Ghosh employs personal anecdotes to make sense of larger-scale developments, and Smoke and Ashes promises to connect his own family and identity to today’s corporate, institutional, and environmental realities. —NodB Private Equity by Carrie Sun [NF] In her debut memoir, Sun recounts her time on Wall Street, where she worked as an assistant to a billionaire hedge-fund founder and was forced to rethink everything she thought she knew about work, money, sacrifice, and living a meaningful life. This one sounds like a great read for fans of Anna Wiener's Uncanny Valley (e.g. me). —SMS I Love You So Much It's Killing Us Both by Mariah Stovall [F] When Khaki Oliver receives a letter from her estranged former best friend, she isn’t ready for the onslaught of memories that soon cause her to unravel. A Black Bildungsroman about friendship, fandom, and sanity, I Love You So Much It's Killing Us Both is an unflinching look at "what it means to be young in a hard, and nonetheless beautiful, world," per Vauhini Vara. —Liv Albright Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit by Aisha Sabatini Sloan [NF] I know from personal experience that anything published by Graywolf Press is going to open my eyes and make me look at the world in a completely different way, so I have high expectations for Sloan’s essays. In this clever collection, a Black creative reflects upon race, art, and pedagogy, and how they relate to one’s life in this crazy country of ours during the time period between the 2016 election and the onset of the pandemic. —CK Language City by Ross Perlin [NF] Perlin travels throughout the most linguistically diverse city on the planet—New York—to chronicle the sounds and speakers of six endangered languages before they die out. A linguist and co-director of the Endangered Language Alliance, Perlin argues for the importance of little-known languages and celebrates the panoply of languages that exists in New York City. —SMS Monkey Grip by Helen Garner [F] A tale as old as time and/or patriarchal sociocultural constructs: a debut novel by a woman is published and the critics don't appreciate it—until later, at least. This proto-autofictional 1977 novel is now considered a classic of Australian "grunge lit," but at the time, it divided critics, probably because it had depictions of drug addiction and sex in it. But Lauren Groff liked it enough to write a foreword, so perhaps the second time really is the charm. —JHM Ours by Phillip B. Williams [F] A conjuror wreaks magical havoc across plantations in antebellum Arkansas and sets up a Brigadoon for the enslaved people she frees before finding that even a mystic haven isn't truly safe from the horrors of the world. What a concept! And a flexible one to boot: if this isn't adapted as a TV series, it would work just as well as an RPG. —JHM Violent Faculties by Charlotte Elsby [F] A philosophy professor influenced by the Marquis de Sade designs a series of experiments to prove its relevance as a discipline, specifically with regard to life and death, a.k.a. Philip Zimbardo (Chopped and Screwed Remix): The Novel. If you ever trusted a philosophy professor with your inner self before—and you probably shouldn't have?—you probably won't after reading this. —JHM American Abductions by Mauro Javier Cárdenas [F] Plagued by data harvesting, constant surveillance, mass deportation, and incarceration, the society at the heart of Cárdenas's new novel is less speculative dystopia than realist reflection. Channeling Philp K. Dick and Samuel Delaney, Cárdenas imagines a society where Latin Americans are systematically expunged. Following the lives of two Columbian-American sisters, one who was deported and one who stayed in the U.S., American Abduction tells a new kind of immigrant story, suffused with mysticism and philosophical rigor. —DF Closures: Heterosexuality and the American Sitcom by Grace Lavery [NF] I took Lavery's class on heterosexuality and sitcoms as an undergrad, and I'm thrilled to see the course's teachings collected in book form. Lavery argues that since its inception the sitcom has depicted heterosexuality as constantly on the verge of collapse, only to be reconstituted at the end of each half-hour episode. A fascinating argument about the cultural project of straightness. —SMS Whiskey Tender by Deborah Taffa [NF] Almost a decade in the making, this memoir from Taffa details generations of Southwest Native history and the legacies of assimilationist efforts. Taffa—a citizen of the Quechan Nation and Laguna Pueblo tribe, and director of the MFA in Creative Writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts—was born on the California Yuma reservation and grew up in Navajo territory in New Mexico in the 1970s and 1980s. She reflects on tribal identity and attitudes toward off-reservation education she learned from her parents’ and grandparents’ fraught formative experiences. —NodB Normal Women by Philippa Gregory [NF] This is exciting news for Anglophiles and history nerds like me: Philippa Gregory is moving from historical fiction (my guilty pleasure) about royal women and aristocrats in medieval and early modern England to focus on the lives of common women during that same time period, as gleaned from the scraps of information on them she has unearthed in various archives. I love history “from the bottom up” that puts women at the center, and Gregory is a compelling storyteller, so my expectations are high. —CK Blue Lard by Vladimir Sorokin, tr. Max Lawton [F] Upon its publication in 1999, Sorokin's sci-fi satire Blue Lard sparked protests across Russia. One aspect of it particularly rankled: the torrid, sexual affair it depicts between Stalin and Khruschev. All to say, the novel is bizarre, biting, and utterly irreverent. Translated into English for the first time by Lawton, Sorokin's masterwork is a must-read for anyone with an iconoclastic streak. —SMS Piglet by Lottie Hazell [F] Hazell's debut novel follows the eponymous Piglet, a successful cookbook editor identified only by her unfortunate childhood nickname, as she rethinks questions of ambition and appetite following her fiancé's betrayal. Per Marlowe Granados, Hazell writes the kind of "prose Nora Ephron would be proud of." —SMS Grief is for People by Sloane Crosley [NF] Crosley enlivens the grief memoir genre with the signature sense of humor that helped put her on the literary map. In Grief Is for People, she eulogizes the quirks and complexities of her friendship with Russell Perreault, former publicity director at Vintage Books, who died by suicide in 2019. Dani Shapiro hails Crosley’s memoir—her first full-length book of nonfiction—as “both a provocation and a balm to the soul.” —LA The Freaks Came Out to Write by Tricia Romano [NF] The freaks came out to write, and you better believe the freaks will come out in droves to read! In this history of the legendary alt-weekly the Village Voice, Romano (a former writer for the Voice) interviews some 200 members the paper’s most esteemed staff and subjects. A sweeping chronicle of the most exciting era in New York City journalism promises to galvanize burgeoning writers in the deflating age of digital media. —DF Burn Book by Kara Swisher [NF] Swisher has been reporting on the tech industry for 30 years, tracing its explosive growth from the dawn of the internet to the advent of AI. She's interviewed every tech titan alive and has chronicled their foibles and failures in excruciating detail. Her new book combines memoir and reportage to tell a comprehensive history of a troubled industry and its shortsighted leaders. —SMS Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange [F] Orange returns with a poignant multi-generational tale that follows the Bear Shield-Red Feather family as they struggle to combat racist violence. Picking up where Orange's hit debut novel, There There, left off, Wandering Stars explores memory, inheritance, and identity through the lens of Native American life and history. Per Louise Erdrich, “No one knows how to express tenderness and yearning like Tommy Orange." —LA March The Hearing Test by Eliza Barry Callahan [F] Callahan's debut novel follows a young artist as she faces sudden hearing loss, forcing to reevaluate her orientation to her senses, her art, and the world around her. Amina Cain, Moyra Davey, and Kate Zambreno are all fans (also a dream blunt rotation), with the latter recommending this one be "read alongside the novels of W.G. Sebald, Rachel Cusk, and Maria Gainza." —SMS The Extinction of Irena Rey by Jennifer Croft [F] When a group of translators arrive at the home of renowned novelist Irena Rey, they expect to get to work translating her latest book—instead, they get caught up in an all-consuming mystery. Irena vanishes shortly after the translators arrive, and as they search for clues to the author's disappearance, the group is swept up by isolation-fueled psychosis and obsession. A “mischievous and intellectually provocative” debut novel, per Megha Majumdar. —LA Thirst by Marina Yuszczuk, tr. Heather Cleary [F] This isn’t your typical meet-cute. When two women—one grieving, the other a vampire, both of them alienated and yearning for more—cross paths in a Buenos Aires cemetery, romance blooms. Channelling Carmen Maria Machado and Anne Rice, Yuszczuk reimagines the vampire novel, with a distinctly Latin American feminist Gothic twist. —LA The Great Divide by Cristina Henríquez [F] I'm a sucker for meticulously researched and well-written historical fiction, and this one—a sweeping story about the interconnected lives of the unsung people who lived and labored at the site of the Panama Canal—fits the bill. I heard Henríquez speak about this novel and her writing processes at a booksellers conference, and, like the 300 booksellers present, was impressed by her presentation and fascinated at the idea of such a sweeping tale set against a backdrop so larger-than-life and dramatic as the construction of the Panama Canal. —CK Bite Your Friends by Fernanda Eberstadt [NF] Melding memoir and history, Eberstadt's Bite Your Friends looks at the lives of saints, philosophers, and artists—including the author and her mother—whose abberant bodies became sites of subversion and rebellion. From Diogenes to Pussy Riot, Eberstadt asks what it means to put our bodies on the line, and how our bodies can liberate us. —SMS Anita de Monte Laughs Last by Xochitl Gonzalez [F] When Raquel Toro, an art history student, stumbles on the story of Anita de Monte, a once prominent artist from the '80s whose mysterious death cut short her meteoric rise, her world is turned upside down. Gonzalez's sophomore novel (after her hit debut Olga Dies Dreaming) toggles between the perspectives of Raquel and Anita (who is based on the late Ana Mendieta) to explore questions of power, justice, race, beauty, and art. Robert Jones, Jr. calls this one "rollicking, melodic, tender, and true—and oh so very wise." —LA My Heavenly Favorite by Lucas Rijneveld, tr. Michele Hutchison [F] Rijneveld, author of the International Booker Prize-winning novel The Discomfort of Evening, returns with a new take on the Lolita story, transpiring between a veterinarian and a farmer's daughter on the verge of adolescence. "This book unsettled me even as it made me laugh and gasp," gushes Brandon Taylor. "I'm in awe." Radiant by Brad Gooch [NF] Lauded biographer Gooch propels us through Keith Haring’s early days as an anonymous sidewalk chalk artist to his ascent as a vigilante muralist, pop-art savant, AIDS activist, and pop-culture icon. Fans of Haring's will not want to miss this definitive account of the artist's life, which Pulitzer-winner biographer Stacy Schiff calls "a keen-eyed, beautifully written biography, atmospheric, exuberant, and as radiant as they come." —DF The Riddles of the Sphinx by Anna Shechtman [NF] Sometimes you encounter a book that seems to have been written specifically for you; this was the feeling I had when I first saw the deal announcement for Shechtman's debut book back in January 2022. A feminist history of the crossword puzzle? Are you kidding me? I'm as passionate a cruciverbalist as I am a feminist, so you can imagine how ravenously I read this book. The Riddles of the Sphinx is one of the best books of 2024, hands down, and I can't wait for everyone else—puzzlers and laymen alike—to fall in love with it too. —SMS The Silver Bone by Andrey Kurkov, tr. Boris Drayluk [F] Kurkov is one of Ukraine's most celebrated novelists, and his latest book is a murder mystery set against the backdrop of WWI-era Kyiv. I'll admit what particularly excites me about The Silver Bone, though, is that it is translated by Dralyuk, who's one of the best literary translators working today (not to mention a superb writer, editor, and poet). In Drayluk's hands, Kurkov's signature humor and sparkling style come alive. —SMS Feeding Ghosts by Tessa Hulls [NF] This multigenerational graphic memoir follows Hull, alongside her mother and grandmother, both of whom hail from China, across time and space as the delicate line between nature and nurture is strained by the forces of trauma, duty, and mental illness. Manjula Martin calls Feeding Ghosts “one of the best stories I’ve read about the tension between family, history, and self.” —DF It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over by Anne de Marcken [F] Haunting prose and a pithy crow guide readers through Marcken's novel of life after death. In a realm between reality and eternity, the undead traverse westward through their end-of-life highlight reel, dissecting memories, feelings, and devotions while slowly coming to terms with what it means to have lived once all that remains is love. Alexandra Kleeman admits that she "was absolute putty in this book's hands." —DF Parasol Against the Axe by Helen Oyeyemi [F] When I visited Prague, a year after the 1989 Velvet Revolution, the Czech capital struck me as a magical place, where anything is possible, and Oyeyemi captures the essence of Prague in Parasol Against the Axe, the story of a woman who attends her estranged friend's bachelorette weekend in the city. A tale in which reality constantly shifts for the characters and there is a thin line between the factual and the imagined in their relationships, this is definitely my kind of a read. —CK Say Hello to My Little Friend by Jennine Capó Crucet [F] Crucet's latest novel centers on a failed Pitbull impersonator who embarks on a quest to turn himself into a modern-day Tony Montana—a quest that leads him to cross paths with Lolita, a captive orca at the Miami Seaquariam. Winking at both Scarface and Moby-Dick, Say Hello to My Little Friend is "a masterclass in pace and precision," per Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. —SMS But the Girl by Jessica Zhan Mei Yu [F] Girl, a Malaysian-Australian who leaves home for the U.K. to study Sylvia Plath and write a postcolonial novel, finds herself unable to shake home—or to figure out what a "postcolonial novel" even is. Blurbs are untrustworthy, but anything blurbed by Brandon Taylor is almost certainly worth checking out. —JHM Wrong Is Not My Name by Erica N. Cardwell [NF] Cardwell blends memoir, criticism, and theory to place her own Künstlerroman in conversation with the work of Black visual artists like Lorna Simpson, Lorraine O'Grady, and Kara Walker. In interconnected essays, Cardwell celebrates the brilliant Black women who use art and storytelling to claim their place in the world. —SMS Great Expectations by Vinson Cunningham [F] A theater critic at the New Yorker, Cunningham is one of my favorite writers working today, so I was thrilled to learn of his debut novel, which cheekily steals its title from the Dickens classic. Following a young Black man as he works on a historic presidential campaign, Great Expectations tackles questions of politics, race, religion, and family with Cunningham's characteristic poise and insight. —SMS The Future of Songwriting by Kristin Hersh [NF] In this slim volume, Throwing Muses frontwoman and singer-songwriter Hersh considers the future of her craft. Talking to friends and colleagues, visiting museums and acupuncturists, Hersh threads together eclectic perspectives on how songs get made and how the music industry can (and should) change. —SMS You Get What You Pay For by Morgan Parker [NF] Parker, a brilliant poet and author of the stellar There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyonce, debuts as an essayist with this candid, keen-eyed collection about life as a Black woman in America. Casting her gaze both inward and onto popular culture, Parker sees everything and holds back nothing. —SMS Mother Doll by Katya Apekina [F] Following up her debut novel, The Deeper the Water, the Uglier the Fish, Apekina's Mother Doll follows Zhenia, an expectant mother adrift in Los Angeles whose world is rocked by a strange call from a psychic medium with a message from Zhenia's Russian Revolutionary great-grandmother. Elif Batuman calls this one "a rare achivement." —SMS Solidarity by Astra Taylor and Leah Hunt-Hendrix [NF] What does "solidarity" mean in a stratified society and fractured world? Organizers and activists Hunt-Hendrix and Taylor look at the history of the concept—from its origins in Ancient Rome to its invocation during the Black Live Matter movement—to envision a future in which calls for solidarity can produce tangible political change. —SMS The Manicurist's Daughter by Susan Lieu [NF] After her mother, a refugee of the Vietnam war and the owner of two nail salons, dies from a botched cosmetic surgery, Lieu goes looking for answers about her mother's mysterious life and untimely death. Springing from her hit one-woman show 140 LBS: How Beauty Killed My Mother, Lieu's debut memoir explores immigration, beauty, and the American Dream. —SMS Through the Night Like a Snake ed. Sarah Coolidge [F] There's no horror quite like Latin American horror, as any revering reader of Cristina Rivera Garza—is there any other kind?—could tell you. Two Lines Press consistently puts out some of the best literature in translation that one can come by in the U.S., and this story collection looks like another banger. —JHM Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel [F] Bullwinkel's debut collection, Belly Up, was a canful of the uncanny. Her debut novel, on the other hand, sounds gritty and grounded, following the stories of eight teenage girls boxing in a tournament in Reno. Boxing stories often manage to punch above their weight (sorry) in pretty much any medium, even if you're not versed enough in the sport to know how hackneyed and clichéd that previous clause's idiomatic usage was. —JHM Choose This Now by Nicole Haroutunian [F] Haroutunian's novel-in-stories, part of Noemi Press's Prose Series, follows a pair of inseparable friends over the years as they embark on careers, make art, fall in and out of love, and become mothers. Lydia Kiesling calls this one "a sparkling, intimate look at women's lives" that makes "for a lovely reading experience." —SMS Death by Laughter by Maggie Hennefeld [NF] Hennefeld's scholarly study explores the forgotten history and politics of women's "hysterical laughter," drawing on silent films, affect theory, feminist film theory, and more. Hennefeld, a professor of cultural studies and comparative literature, offers a unique take on women's pleasure and repression—and how the advent of cinema allowed women to laugh as never before. —SMS James by Percival Everett [F] In James, the once-secondary character of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn narrates his version of life on the Mississippi. Jim, who escapes enslavement only to end up in adventures with white runaway Huck, gives his account of well-known events from Mark Twain’s 1880s novel (and departs from the record to say what happened next). Everett makes readers hyperaware of code-switching—his 2001 novel Erasure was about a Black novelist whose career skyrockets when he doubles down on cynical stereotypes of Blackness—and Jim, in James, will have readers talking about written vernacular, self-awareness, and autonomy. —NodB A Chance Meeting by Rachel Cohen [NF] Chronicling 36 fateful encounters among 30 writers and artists—from Henry James to Gertrude Stein, Mark Twain to Zora Neal Hurston—Cohen paints a vast and sparkling portrait of a century's worth of American culture. First published in 2004, and reissued by NYRB, A Chance Meeting captures the spark of artistic serendipity, and the revived edition features a new afterword by the author. —SMS Who's Afraid of Gender? by Judith Butler [NF] Butler has had an outsized impact on how we think and talk about gender and sexuality ever since the 1990 publication of Gender Trouble, which theorized the way gender is performed and constructed. Butler's latest is a polemic that takes on the advent of "anti-gender ideology movements," arguing that "gender" has become a bogeyman for authoritarian regimes. —SMS Green Frog by Gina Chung [F] Chung, author of the acclaimed debut novel Sea Change, returns with a story collection about daughters and ghosts, divorcees and demons, praying mantises and the titular verdant amphibians. Morgan Talty calls these 15 stories "remarkable." —SMS No Judgment by Lauren Oyler [NF] Oyler is one of our sharpest and most fearless cultural critics, and No Judgement is her first essay collection, following up her debut novel Fake Accounts. Opining on gossip and anxiety, autofiction and vulnerability, and much, much more, Oyler's caustic wit and penetrating voice shine through every essay. —SMS Memory Piece by Lisa Ko [F] Following up her National Book Award–nominated debut novel The Leavers, Ko's latest follows three lifelong friends from the 1990s to the 2040s. A meditation on the meaning of a "meaningful life" and how to adapt to an increasingly inhospitable world, Memory Piece has earned praise from Jacqueline Woodson and C Pam Zhang, who calls the novel "bright with defiance, intelligence, and stubborn love." —SMS On Giving Up by Adam Phillips [NF] Psychoanalyst Phillips—whose previous subjects include getting better, wanting to change, and missing out—takes a swing at what feels like a particularly timely impulse: giving up. Questioning our notions of sacrifice and agency, Phillips asks when giving up might be beneficial to us, and which parts of our lives might actually be worth giving up. —SMS There's Always This Year by Hanif Abdurraqib [NF] Abdurraqib returns (how lucky are we!) with a reflection on his lifelong love of basketball and how it's shaped him. While reconsidering his childhood, his relationship with his father, and the meaning of "making it," Abdurraqib delivers what Shea Serrano calls "the sharpest, most insightful, most poignant writing of his career." —SMS The Angel of Indian Lake by Stephen Graham Jones [F] The final installment of Jones's trilogy picks up four years after Don't Fear the Reaper. Jade Daniels is back from prison, and upon her release, she encounters serial killer-worshipping cults, the devastating effects of gentrification, and—worst of all—the curse of the Lake Witch. Horror maestro Brian Keene calls Jones's grand finale "an easy contender for Best of the Year." —LA Worry by Alexandra Tanner [F] This deadpan debut novel from Tanner follows two sisters on the cusp of adulthood as they struggle to figure out what the hell to do with their lives. Heads butt, tempers flare, and existential dread creeps in as their paths diverge amid the backdrop of Brooklyn in 2019. Limning the absurdity of our internet-addled, dread-filled moment, Tanner establishes herself as a formidable novelist, with Kiley Reid calling Worry "the best thing I've read in a very long time." —DF [millions_email]

A Year in Reading: Ed Simon

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Three years ago, the Bundeswehr initiated an unlikely experimental program at the University of Tübingen. "Project Cassandra," which was exactly the codename you would want a secretive military program to be named, was led by an enigmatic professor named Jürgen Wertheimer, which is exactly what you would want his name to be. They developed a program capable of sifting through metadata and applying an algorithm to ascertain where future conflict would occur. They were unusually successful, foreseeing turmoil in Algeria, Kosovo, and Nigeria that political scientists had missed, all the more impressive because Wertheimer is a literature professor. Philip Oltermann explained in The Guardian that the Bundeswehr believes writers possess a "sensory talent" in identifying "social trends, moods and especially conflicts that politicians prefer to remain undiscussed until they break out into the open." If writers hear subsonic vibrations just below the crust, then by reading an aggregate of them there might be a way to predict the future. "Writers represent reality in such a way that their readers can instantly visualize a world and recognize themselves inside it," Wertheimer told Oltermann, after the former had traded in tweed for cammo. Well, that's one alt-ac career path. Ignoring the rumors that the CIA and the NSA have long recruited translators at those dreary annual meetings of the MLA held in frigid Boston or Chicago, there is an enigmatic, furtive allure to Project Cassandra, not to mention a practicality, because Wertheimer's central conceit is obviously correct. George Orwell predicted telescreens in Nineteen Eighty-Four, and now we willingly give our privacy away in the blackness of our Androids. Aldous Huxley claimed in Brave New World that our future would be anesthetized bliss, and now our dopamine rushes are supplied by pawing at the screens of those same Androids. Margaret Atwood wrote The Handmaid's Tale, and now Texas. Oltermann mentions John Brunner’s 1968 Hugo Award-winning science fiction novel, Stand on Zanzibar, which envisions the 2010 ascendancy of the Chinese economy and the United State's response as led by "President Obomi." I've long suspected that literature provides intimations of where we're headed, and though that wasn't my purpose when I set out digesting novels this year (my purpose was just to read) by this November I felt like I had been listening to a chorus of Sibyls. Syllabi remain my operative mode for comprehending reality. Making lists, dividing the year into units, divining some overall theme to things, whether teaching or planning my weekend, is how I exist. Just like an engineer looks at the universe and sees a computer, I examine my own life and I see a college class. So, in January, when setting out to decide what I'd read this year, I made a syllabus of sorts, though I wouldn't know the title of the class until the end of the term. Rather than just perusing my local library stacks, the unvaccinated version of me from last New Year used The Millions' "Most Anticipated" lists for 2020 and 2021 and compiled a few dozen titles that sounded interesting. I'd inadvertently gathered what Wertheimer would consider a statistical sample set. Everything in this essay came from that initial list; I don't include any books that I already reviewed for sites, nor titles I consulted in my writing, or the hundredth time I flipped through Paradise Lost. By the nature of this list, all of these books were newly published, though presumably most of them  were written before the pandemic. Much to my own embarrassment none of these titles was in translation, and the majority were by Americans with a few Brits thrown in. Because of my parochialism, and 12 months later I feel as if I've divined the unforged smithy of our national soul, for each of the novels provided a glimpse of living in the last days of empire, like the parable of the blind men describing an elephant, if this pachyderm was instead our rapidly fraying social contract. Our age is one of pandemic, supply chain breakdowns, economic collapse, and nascent fascism, and our writers have responded by crafting subverted Great American Novels, writing tomes of collapse, be it national, spiritual, personal. Each book taxonomizes the passing of anything that even remotely looked like it could be described naively as the "American Dream." The title of Ayad Akhtar's Homeland Elegies announces itself as being concerned exactly with the themes that the traditional Great American Novel dabbles with. "Homeland" with its connotations of the vaguely-totalitarian federal agency that emerged in the wake of 9/11 and which often targeted Muslims, and "Elegies" with all of the grandiose and mournful implications of recognizing something that has passed. Narratively ambitious and sprawling, Homeland Elegies concerns a narrator named "Ayad Akhtar," a Pakistani-American raised in Wisconsin and living in New York who bares more than a passing resemblance to the author whose name is on the cover. An acclaimed playwright before he was a novelist, Akhtar is often positioned as the Philip Roth of Islam, a fearless Muslim-American willing to portray his community in all of its complexities without desire to placate or whitewash, such as in his controversial Tony Award winning Disgraced. Homeland Elegies follows his not-quite-identical roman a clef backwards and forwards from the present day of his professional success (around 2018) to Akhtar's Midwestern childhood, while dropping in on events like 9/11, the 2008 economic collapse, and the election of Donald Trump as 45th president of these disunited states (indeed Trump is a character in Homeland Elegies, by connection to the author's cardiologist father). Hyphenated Americans have historically been slurred as somehow "less than" the nationality than appears on the right side of that dash, but Akhtar is an American prophet who understands that the nation is in free-fall. Neither memoir nor autofiction, Homeland Elegies is best described by its author as a curated social media feed, a place where truth and fiction mingle in that ever-chimerical invention of the self. At the core is the complicated relationship of father and son, and the book is both about immigration and assimilation, but more than that, it's a condemnation of American materialism, excess, and the illusory promises of the city on a hill. "America had begun as a colony and that a colony it remained," writes Akhtar, "a place still defined by its plunder, where enrichment was paramount and civil order always an afterthought." Andrea Lee imagines a luscious estate among the detritus of past empires in Red Island House, her sumptuous novel published after a 15-year hiatus. Philadelphia-born Lee has spent the bulk of her adult life in Italy, and that worldly cosmopolitanism is evident in these interconnected short stories that chattily explores the family and staff who live in the titular mansion. A massive rose-hued house in Madagascar overlooking the Indian Ocean that is built by a Falstaffian Italian industrialist for his younger African American wife, Red Island House upturns expectations. In her author's note, Lee writes that this is a "novel about foreigners in Madagascar; its viewpoints and its 'voice' are those of an outsider looking in," and with shades of V.S. Naipaul and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o she proves as adept at describing the haunted beauty of Madagascar as she was describing the Tuscan countryside in earlier works, a master stylist reinventing the post-colonial novel.      Shay Gilliam is an Oakland-born, upper-class Black professor of African-American literature at an Italian university who spends her off season on the windy, mango-grove shores of her husband's pastoral idyll, a woman for whom Africa was a "near-mythical motherland" who discovers that the complexities of colonialism are often individual and that as a result our identities are always relative. Gilliam's sometimes boorish husband, a working-class street kid made good, is "dizzied by the infinite possibilities offered by using first world money in a third world country, one of the poorest on earth." A novel of current breezes and expats in white suits plying local girls with rum, of grilled fish on the beach and tourists on mopeds speeding past unimaginable poverty. Across 10 chapters and two decades, Red Island House shows the cankers in both paradise and marriage. Characters shift in and out, people are introduced only to disappear, and Gilliam's perceptions always dance about true self-insight, even as it becomes clear that a similar complexion is all that unites her to this island's inhabitants. History similarly haunts Danielle Evans’s excellent short story collection The Office of Historical Corrections. The Office of Historical Corrections seamlessly moves from humor to poignancy. "Boys Go to Jupiter" details the social media fallout after a coed who posts a picture on Instagram of herself in a Confederate flag bikini, a story that says more about so-called "cancel culture" than 100 editorials, while "Why Won't Women Just Say What They Want" acts as both parody of pretentious art culture and meditation on the #MeToo movement and the ways that powerful men still escape culpability. It's the titular novella that's the true standout however, "The Office of Historical Corrections" following a mystery as investigated by Cassie and Genevieve, two often antagonistic childhood friends turned grad school adversaries turned agents in an invented federal agency named the Office of Public History. To call Evans's story Kafkaesque is to ignore just how singular her style is, though she has a sense of the absurdity of bureaucracy, and is also aware of how history is defined by ghosts upon ghosts. Evans is also adept in sarcasm, and the title story with its federal agents printing out corrections to inaccurate historical markers is as strange and funny as anything written about the traumas of racism. "Besides the tablecloths, the décor is all old photographs and postcards that they scrounged up from wherever," Cassie notes of a Midwestern hipster restaurant, "because you know how white people love their history right up until it's true." The Office of Historical Corrections is a parable for the era of Black Lives Matter and the rightful pulling down of Confederate statues, of Critical Race Theory hysteria and white grievance, a novella about passing and self-hatred, survival and violence, and how the American story can be funny except when it isn't.   Christopher Beha’s The Index of Self-Destructive Acts is a doorstopper that like many recent titles (Homeland Elegies, Dario Diofebi’s Paradise, Nevada) is fundamentally a historical novel about the very recent past, in this case the year immediately following the election of Barack Obama. And like those other novels, The Index of Self-Destructive Acts combines a dizzying era of contemporary concerns—in this case punditry, finance, the publishing industry, the collapse of journalism, predictive algorithms, the Iraq War, and baseball—crafting an allegory of our present. In this case the allegory concerns Sam Waxworth, a statistical wunderkind in the mold of Nate Silver who correctly predicts every single federal race in 2008 and Frank Doyle, a columnist for a newspaper clearly based on The New York Times who'd once been a Great Society-supporting liberal lion working in the John Lindsey administration but had since transmogrified into a reactionary ogre, scotch pickling him into a George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld acolyte. Sam has been hired to write copy for Interviewer, a publication that used to be The Atlantic but after it was purchased by a tech-bro was turned into Buzzfeed, and the young prodigy is tasked by his editor to interview Frank. The older columnist was a onetime childhood hero of Sam because of his baseball writings, but the statistician rejects Frank because of his overly romanticizing the game. Baseball is a field of battle between Sam's sabermetrics and Frank's poetry, as the young upstart crow from flyover country "tried to attend to the facticity of things," while his older sparing partner understands that "polls couldn't capture a mood. For that you needed to look around a bit." Like all true systems novels, from Charles Dickens’s Bleak House to David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, there are a panoply of characters, namely Frank's entire immediate family (Sam starts an affair with the columnist's daughter), and a multitude of themes are explored, none so much as what it means to choose if everything can be reduced to mathematics. When an allegory refuses didacticism for negative capability, that's when we call it a novel, and the strength of Beha's endeavor is that it's not clear who exactly is sympathetic or not in the contest between Sam's unfeeling, analytical technocracy and Frank's painfully wrong though still fundamentally emotional perspective on life. An English sonnet has never been as sublime as the orange sun melting into the horizon over a minor league ballpark, faint chill of desert air rustling through the stands in the seventh inning before the final beer rush, odor of sodium-nitrate saturated hot dogs and smoky peanuts hanging heavy in the air. If baseball is an undercurrent in The Index of Self-Destructive Acts, then it's everything in Emily Nemens’s The Cactus League; interconnected short stories that are as charming as Bull Durham and as heartbreaking as Denis Johnson. A former editor for The Paris Review, Nemens follows the path of Bernard Malamud’s The Natural and Roth's self-aware The Great American Novel, using baseball as the major metaphor of American life. Our national pastime, it has been supposed, brings the poet out in the accountant and the accountant out in the poet, but as anyone who is a fan knows, the calling of strikes and outs has nothing really to do with a game and actually everything to do with anything else. The Cactus League gives kaleidoscopic perspective to the fictitious Los Angeles Lions' preseason and their star outfielder John Goodyear who appears to be in the midst of a crackup, of sorts. Nemens's novel is set in greater Scottsdale, the Arizona desert a fading pink and the entire city a massive suburb of itself, all gated communities, preposterous grass lawns, the big box sprawl of Phoenix, and above it all Frank Lloyd Wright’s ethereal Taliesin West. In nine interlocking stories (get it?) Nemens follows a host of characters from agent Herb Allison, to local baseball groupie (and architecture enthusiast) Tamara Rowland, the aging batting coach Michael Taylor, and Goodyear himself. The effect is sublimely dizzying as the narrative moves from one character to another, using a collage effect to underscore the consequence of baseball by bringing the players, the coaches, the wives, the reporters, and the fans to bear. Nemens's chapters are stunningly rendered character portraits of figures who face increasingly dwindling days, like their sport and nation. "Here's the thing about baseball, and all else: everything changes. Whether it's the slow creep of glaciers dripping toward the sea, or the steady piling up of cut stones, rock upon rock until the wall reaches the chest high, nothing is still." The southwest is mythic in a manner that's unlike the overdetermined east. Puritan Yankees and Cavalier Southerners are forged into something new in the unforgiving environs of the desert, and in that way, it becomes the most American of places. Paradise, Nev., is an unincorporated town whose enigmatic name aside, most people have never heard of, though it contains some of the most iconic buildings in the United States, a neighborhood better known as the Las Vegas Strip. Paradise, Nevada is the title of the Italian novelist and former professional poker player Dario Diofebi's massive consideration of that mirage and late capitalist America. The Bellagio, Caesar's Palace, The Venetian, the Positano—a city of excess and neon, decadence and luck (as well as its opposite). If you don't recognize the last casino that's because it's the invention of Diofebi, an exact replica of the Amalfi Coast built by the reclusive billionaire Al Wiles, who constructs a kingdom of sand and water pipes AND fake Adriatic breezes and the smell of Mediterranean lemons, all to impress his wife, a Swiss model who eventually leaves him. Diofebi uses the 600-some pages of Paradise, Nevada to portray Las Vegas in 2014 and 2015 as a microcosm of America, presenting the interlocking and eventually intersecting stories of Ray, an online poker player who absconds to Sin City to make a living, a man with too much faith in statistics and game theory; Tom, an illegal Italian immigrant who got lucky at the tables and ends up becoming embroiled with a shady vlogger and pickup artist; Mary Ann, the Mississippi raised former New York model who works as a cocktail waitress; and Lindsay, a Mormon journalist with literary ambitions confronted with whether it's possible to serve both Mammon and Moroni. Fundamentally a novel not just about class consciousness, but more simply money—who has it and who doesn't—Paradise, Nevada gets to the nihilistic core of American consumerism while never losing sight of the fact that all of those neon lights are gorgeous. "It's a beautiful town to just watch," says Wiles, "So many stories, so many myths, so many struggles. Stare at it long enough and you'll… slowly convince yourself that all those stories amount to some kind of meaning." Diofebi's attempt at the great Las Vegas novel ends up being the great novel of predatory neoliberalism, though perhaps that's the same thing. "The Great Flu had come to America on ships along with spices and sugar," writes Anna North in Outlawed, "then spread from husband to wife and mother to child and trader to trader by kisses and handshakes, cups of beer shared among friends and strangers, and the coughs and sneezes of men and women who didn't know how sick." I can guarantee that North's Outlawed is the best alternative history feminist Western that you will read this year. A cross between Atwood and Cormac McCarthy, Outlawed imagines a turn-of-the-century Dakota several decades after a mass pandemic, and the survivors' grandchildren live in a version of America that's as Medieval as it is Wild West. A syncretic faith worships the baby Jesus since so much is now invested restoring the population, but women who are unable to conceive (or whose husbands are infertile) are punished as witches, the fate of Ada who is adopted by the Hole in the Wall Gang, an all-woman outlaw group whose leader is an enigmatic, androgynous and messianic figure known only as the Kid. All great science fiction should ultimately be judged by the veracity of its world building, and in this regard North's novel is a triumph, a fully-fledged reality that's a mirror of our own twilight civilization. As depressing as the plague ravaged misogynistic West of Outlawed may be, North's is no dystopia, for as in the work of Ursula K. Le Guin or Octavia Butler, the novel gestures towards genuine redemptive possibility, even in the ugliness of life. Convents are emphatically different from outlaw gangs, and yet both exist outside of normal culture. Claire Luchette’s subtle, sad, and beautiful Agatha of Little Neon follows four nuns from the Diocese of Buffalo reassigned to gritty, post-industrial Warwick, R.I., where they're to administer a half-way house for addicts and ex-convicts. Agatha is the most intellectually independent, though her religious doubts are kept to herself, even as she develops a life independent of Little Neon (the name of the house, given because of its garish green paint job) as a math teacher at a local Catholic high school. In their role as caretakers for these women and men—Tim Gary who is missing half of his face following cancer surgery; Lawnmower Jill, a drunk and junky whose nickname is derived from her favored form of transportation—the nuns often fumble in their unworldliness. Multiple themes are explored—secularism and faith, abuse and trauma, addiction and recovery. In a nation where 100,000 people died of opioid overdose this year, Luchette's novel sings of American brokenness. Agatha of Little Neon is not a book about affordable redemption; in the tradition of the greatest Catholic novels salvation is not guaranteed nor is it cheap. This is a story about broken lives, and is all the more arresting because of it. More meditation than story, prayer than novel, Luchette's book is the sort that in crystalline minimalist prose with nary a comma out of order, evokes midcentury existentialist classics. "We didn't know much about addiction, about homelessness, but we know how it could look." Sometimes that's enough. Sometimes it isn't. This is the most moving book about grace and what it means to whisper a silent prayer to nobody that I read this year.    "I felt pride, of course, but something more, something better: freedom," says Opal Jewel in Dawnie Walton’s much lauded and thoroughly brilliant The Final Revival of Opal & Nev. The titular rock star is self-assurance incarnate, a blustery, bluesy genius who emerges ex nihilo (or at least from Detroit). The Final Revival of Opal & Nev is the great rock music novel of the year, if not the decade. Walton explores the fraught dynamics between her invented duo, a folky proto-punk outfit from the early '70s composed of Neville Charles, a sensitive Englishmen enraptured by all things American, and Opal, a young Black singer and songwriter in possession of abundant talent and style. The Final Revival of Opal & Nev follows an upcoming reunion, decades after their falling out, their own solo careers, and Altamont-style violence that marked their earliest success. Composed of interviews between figures associated with the act as conducted by Sunny Shelton, a music journalist who is the daughter of the band's studio musician drummer whom Opal had had an affair with, the novel inevitably drew comparisons to Taylor Jenkins Reid’s Daisy Jones & the Six. I enjoyed both books, but the strength of Walton's novel is that Opal and Nev are so different from anything in our actual world, like an outfit composed of Nick Drake and Nina Simone, with Patti Smith on backup for good measure. Walton uses this imagined alternative musical history to explore not just the difficulties in creative partnership, but also questions of appropriation, race, and what music says that words can't. As David Mitchell writes in his similarly brilliant rock novel Utopia Avenue, "If a song plants an idea or a feeling in the mind, it has already changed the world."   Rock music might be the critic's approved version of popular culture—all of those Lester Bangs and Greil Marcus essays—but in The Gimmicks, Chris McCormick explores an influential but disdained art form in professional wrestling. To say that The Gimmicks is "about" professional wrestling, the sweaty, campy, grappling of pituitary cases wearing ethnically offensive costumes in a bit of scripted drama—the purview of the Iron Sheik and Rowdy Roddy Piper—is a misnomer. The action of The Gimmicks swirls around wrestling in the same way that The Cactus League is "about" baseball, but McCormick uses Avo Greogoryan, an immigrant from Soviet Armenia who performs under the name of the Browbeater, to explore questions about family, trauma, betrayal, diaspora, political violence, the Turkish genocide of the Armenians, and competitive chess strategy. Evocative of both Michael Chabon and Jonathan Safran Foer, McCormick's trio of friends and family—Avo; his cousin, zealous Ruben Petrosian; and the woman they both love, bookish Mina Boghossian—are refugees from a collapsing empire. "It's a marvel how memory works," says Tony "Angel" Krill, the Browbeater's pony-tailed manager, after he's been noirishly recruited to find Avo following the wrestler's disappearance, "how it holds its shape like smoke in the cold…most of my best forgetting is done on purpose." Epic in range, McCormick's novel depicts concrete Kirovakan in the U.S.S.R., the sun-bleached streets of Los Angeles' Little Armenia, the arrondissements of Paris, the blindingly white homes of the Grecian shore, and the crowded alleyways of Istanbul, not to mention a thousand sad, sweat-filled, crowded, and hot gymnasiums in North Carolina, or Kentucky, or Nevada. Throughout McCormick asks what it means to be a genuine human being when kayfabe becomes your reality. Physical power in its undiluted form is also a theme in Rufi Thorpe’s astounding The Knockout Queen. Set among the chlorinated paradise of suburban Orange County in the mid aughts, high school volleyball star Bunny Lampton, who is blonde, beautiful and 6'3'', forges an unlikely friendship with her next-door neighbor Michael, the narrator of the book, a closeted goth classmate living with his aunt in one of the lower middle-class homes of this neighborhood that's seen a sprouting of McMansions. Bunny's father is an alcoholic widower, a charming and deeply corrupt real estate developer who harbors Olympic dreams for his daughter, and is largely tolerant of her friendship with the haunted boy next door, whose mother is in jail for the attempted murder of her husband. The Knockout Queen deftly recreates adolescence during the first decade of this millennium, that era of low-rise jeans and autotune, but more than that it's a brutal meditation on power in its rawest form, because "it's different when it's the woman who's violent. It strikes people as abnormal. Like, it's natural for a guy to just 'lose his temper,' but if a woman does the same thing, then it's a sign of something deeper wrong, like psychologically or almost metaphysically." From the turn of our century until today, Thorpe charts the diverging fortunes of the North Shore Princess and the boy from the other side of the tracks (or fence as it were), with The Knockout Queen marked by loyalty, dispossession, the ravages of time, and the often-startling brutality of what it means to be a human being with a human body.         In her disquieting The Divines, Ellie Eaton conveys the pain that teenagers inflict on one another. Moving with perfect narrative pacing between the late '90s United Kingdom and contemporary Chicago and Los Angeles, The Divines is narrated by Josephine, the wealthy daughter of British expats in Hong Kong who once attended the ultra-exclusive girl's boarding school St. John the Divine in the English countryside. Students at an institution that is far more expensive than it is good, the Divines are known for their hair flip, their cruel pranks, and their abysmal town-gown relationship with the working-class denizens of this depressing hamlet. Much more than a coming of age story—Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt posters on walls, filched cigarettes, and sweaty school dances—The Divines is about class, trauma, and violence. "Divines could be cruel, conceited, arcane, but we were faithful to the end." High school can fuck you up, and Josephine still ruminates on her relationship with popular Skipper, her illicit friendship with the townie Lauren, her traumatic infatuation with a maintenance man, and most of all the bullying of a diminutive but shrill classmate who was marked to become a world-class figure skater. Josephine is an unreliable narrator who seems estimably reasonable, a villain lacking self-awareness who befuddles the reader, with Eaton having written a galling account of how trauma mutates, until it's not even recognizable to the past itself. The Divines isn't a horror novel, but it has the feel of one—the gothic campus, the insular community, the provincial townies, and the implied murder on the first page. Horror increasingly bleeds into literary fiction. Perhaps it's this moment, simultaneously apocalyptic and boring, dulled by social media clicks and 24-hour news, the jittery anxiety of now. No contemporary writer is as adept at malignant narrators as Ottessa Moshfegh, whose characters are worthy of Poe or Dostoevsky. Moshfegh's latest, Death in Her Hands, is a worthy addition to her oeuvre. Narrated by Vesta Gull, an elderly widow who relocates to a small town that seems like New England, discovers a note in the woods that reads "Her name was Magda. Nobody will ever know who killed her. It wasn't me. Here is her dead body," though sans an actual corpse. Vesta becomes obsessed, spinning intricate plots. Death in Her Hands is not quite a murder mystery and not quite gothic, but something far darker. Teddy Wayne also penned a not-quite-horror-novel in his disturbing Apartment, where rather than a cursed manse the story is placed in Columbia's MFA program, haunted by an awkward, obsessive, slightly creepy nameless narrator who finds it natural to "alter our retrospection in subtle ways, to airbrush our unpalatable blemishes here and there." Apartment explores the poisons of envy and resentment, class and money, and the risks of self-delusion, concluding that "Sometimes the only way to start over in life is to burn down the house." Julie Fine offers an actual (maybe) supernatural tale in The Upstairs House, where English graduate student, ABD, and new mother Megan Weiler begins to believe that beloved children's author Margaret Wise Brown is haunting her Chicago apartment building. "Memory… is a wild and private place to which we only return by accident, as in a dream or song," reflects Megan in this upsetting story of postpartum depression and scholarly dissatisfaction. No novel I read this year was quite so viscerally pertinent as Hari Kunzru's wicked Red Pill. As he did for America's conflicted history in White Tears, so Kunzru provides diagnosis of European sicknesses rooted deep within its poisoned blood and soil. Drawing his title from the Internet vernacular that refers to those who've been initiated into far-right politics, Red Pill recounts the unhinged experiences of its mild-mannered American narrator, a nameless academic who has stumbled into a year-long fellowship at a German research institute in Wannsee, the Berlin suburb where the Reich outlined the "final solution," back when the Bundeswehr enacted a policy far more evil than just reading a lot of books. The narrator is a good liberal wearily watching the ongoing 2016 presidential election from across the Atlantic while ostensibly writing a monograph about the Romantic poet Heinrich von Kleist, though he actually spends his days walking around Wannsee's pristine environs and becoming obsessed with an ultra-violent American copaganda show called Blue Lives, which reads like a cross between Blue Bloods and The Shield, with script rewrites from Friedrich Nietzsche. The narrator becomes convinced that dangerous alt-right talking points have been encoded into Blue Lives, as he scours message boards and charts the nihilistic references that the show's creator Anton has written into the scripts. By fortuitous coincidence, the narrator and Anton meet. "Everything he said sounded like a dare," the narrator writes of Anton, "an outrage that was taken back as soon as it came out of his mouth. I meant it, I didn't mean it. Sorry, not sorry." Understanding that trolls can end up being camp guards, that transgression can slide into genocide, the narrator tries to unmask Anton, but there's only so much he can do in a world laughingly careening towards Armageddon. American literature is always about America itself, just as English literature is about class or German literature is about death. Though Kunzru is British, there is something integral about our psychic life displayed in Red Pill, a novel about Europe's past and America's future. On the evening that I finalized my reading list—including adding Red Pill to my queue—I was largely optimistic. Six weeks before, and the presidential election had delivered a result that made me hopeful. The polls in Georgia looked surprisingly good. For a bit of time, after four years of nascent authoritarianism, alt-right provocation, and dystopian machination, there were reasons to be happy. That night, I went to sleep expecting that the moral arc of the universe does tend towards justice. We should always listen to Cassandra, though. When I turned in, it was already early morning on January 6.   More from A Year in Reading 2021 (opens in a new tab) Do you love Year in Reading and the amazing books and arts content that The Millions produces year round? We are asking readers for support to ensure that The Millions can stay vibrant for years to come. Please click here to learn about several simple ways you can support The Millions now. 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