Wilhelm Amberg, Reading from Goethe’s Werther (1870), via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.
Colored Television by Danzy Senna: among its subjects (not in order of importance) are LA, the vagaries of a writer’s life, and race—often in terms of a word that, coming from New Orleans, I am deeply familiar with, but which I thought I was not allowed to use. Until Danzy Senna said it was OK. More than OK. She prefers it to any less specific word. What is this word? Mulatto. The book’s heroine is writing a gigantic historical novel on this topic, which her husband describes as the “mulatto War and Peace,” and which is destined for failure—a failure resonant with universal poignance. Danzy Senna’s novel is deeply hilarious, though the passages I highlighted are not: “She’d never understood so profoundly how much being a novelist was at odds with domestic life, with sanity. … That kind of writing had no beginning and no end. It just crept around the house, infecting every element of family life.”
The new (posthumous) Gabriel García Márquez novel, Until August (translated by Anne McLean), which he did not think was good enough to publish, is so good that its essential García Márquez qualities put one to shame—the quality of his vision, the quality of his prose, of his emotional capacity, and basically of his entire life. No, it isn’t his best, but I reveled in the memory of a master whose mere scraps I scarfed up adoringly, such as: “torrential geniuses with short and troubled lives,” as he remarks of Mozart and Schubert.
—Nancy Lemann, author of “The Oyster Diaries”
Damir Karakaš’s Celebration, translated by Ellen Elias-Bursać, begins at the end of World War II. Its four sections—“House,” “Dogs,” “Celebration,” and “Father”—move from 1945 to 1935, then 1941 to 1928, and follow Mijo, a man whose yellow-brown uniform marks him as a member of the recently fallen Croatian fascist organization of the Ustaše. Exiled to the forest overlooking his home, a small Croatian village, Mijo awaits the moment when he can rejoin his family. It’s a novel that kept its hold over me long after I put it down.
—Ena Selimović, translator of Abdulah Sidran’s “Scraps”
Tara Selter, the protagonist of Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume (translated by Barbara J. Haveland), is stuck on the day of November 18, which she repeats endlessly. Trapped in time, she makes an official project of it. Looking becomes ritualistic. The day’s relentless sameness is double-checked, until she can predict the movement of birds. Wonderfully, this is the first book in a series of seven.
—K Patrick, author of “Blue”
Jamie Quatro’s Two-Step Devil is the rare contemporary work of fiction that takes the Deep South, with its essentially biblical figures of thought and speech, as seriously as the region should be taken. Set in 2014, the novel combines the lessons of literary Modernism with a kind of tricky gritty realism to produce a fable about sex trafficking in rural Alabama, one which, by its end, becomes a plaintive, painful, and surprising defense of the right to abortion. It is a prophetic book about the recent past and I have not read anything like it for a long time.
—Alec Niedenthal, author of “Schändung (Desecration)”
Mourning a Breast, the Chinese writer Xi Xi’s account of breast cancer, is perhaps the only illness memoir to address head-on how difficult it is to choose books to read in the hospital. (“Perhaps Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment? But that was too heavy to hold. What about Donald Barthelme’s City Life? But Barthelme had passed away from blood cancer; I didn’t want to read him just now.”) The book, translated by Jennifer Feeley and first published in China in 1992, switches from short essays to stretches of dialogue, sometimes addressing the reader directly, like the narrator of a guidebook, sometimes following Xi Xi’s thoughts so closely it’s as though she isn’t worrying about the reader at all. Intimate, charming, and open, it is a book to be enjoyed in sickness and in health.
—Madeleine Schwartz, advisory editor
Morgan Võ’s debut poetry collection, The Selkie, is a wonderful, sometimes very funny book about the proximity of ordinary life to the production of mass death. It stars “the monger.” He sells fish. Are his wares alive? Not exactly, he explains, they just “keep / eating and shitting.” The monger mistakes a fish for a dollar bill and so it goes into circulation, gets worn thin, torn in two, then taped back together. Together, the fish and the monger do durational performance art, à la Tehching Hsieh and Linda Montano in Rope Piece. The monger shows the fish a DaBaby meme. In 2024, I read Võ’s poems again and again. I’m obsessed with the way they seem to search, as we all do, for words for extreme violence. In one, the monger goes to see Anthony Bourdain speak at a local library. “what do i have left / to say?” Bourdain-in-the-poem asks. “what do i do now?” In another, a fish corpse is found to contain a delicate scroll that reads “after // all // you // know // and // tibet // is // still // not // free?”
—Silas Jones, author of “Regular Decision”
Mariana Enríquez’s new story collection, A Sunny Place for Shady People, seethes and roils with a body horror that evokes the films of Richard Kern and David Cronenberg. Her monsters are real: misogynists, corrupt dictators. There is a surreal and visceral magic to these stories of cruelty, sexual violence, and poverty, brilliantly captured in Megan McDowell’s translations.
—Frank Wynne, advisory editor
La llamada by Leila Guerriero: I wasn’t expecting my favorite book of the year to be a crónica. I didn’t think it possible for a story so contemporary, so political, and so steeped in reality to be infused with the intensity of a thriller and with such poetic force. La llamada (forthcoming in English translation from Pushkin in spring 2025) is a master class in writing an impossible book. In our world of radicalisms today, few dare to explore with such tenacity the gray areas and contradictions that make up who we are. A hundred years from now, we’ll still be talking about this tour de force of Leila Guerreiro’s.
—Samanta Schweblin (trans. Alejandra Quintana Arocho), author of “An Eye in the Throat”
One of my favorite books this year is the late Dubravka Ugrešić’s A Muzzle for Witches, translated from the Croatian by Ellen Elias-Bursać and published by Open Letter Books. Ugrešić—the Neustadt International Prize for Literature–winning author of seven books of fiction and six essay collections to appear in English—was born in the former Yugoslavia, but when her homeland was riven by war in the nineties and she was forced into exile for her antinationalist views, she became a renowned if reluctant icon of resistance. Structured as an interview with the Bosnian-Herzegovinian theorist Merima Omeragić, this slim volume allows Ugrešić to expound on themes that have animated her work throughout her career—of exile and belonging, of nationalism and misogyny, of history, literary culture, and technology. She decries the scourge of autofiction that has writers “writing their own hagiographies,” comparing this self-aggrandizing and attention-seeking impulse to that of influencers and serial killers. “If literature is to survive,” she says, “it must move into a zone of invisibility and go underground.” But the book is not lacking in hope: Ugrešić sees literature as fundamentally about and fundamental to human connection. “One real reader,” she writes, “is enough to persuade me of the meaningfulness of my work.” Ugrešić is a brilliant thinker, a consummate stylist and literary trickster, and I can think of no better writer to read and recommend in these frightening and uncertain times.
—Will Vanderhyden, translator of Rodolfo Enrique Fogwill’s “Passengers on the Night Train”
Sandhya Mary’s Maria, Just Maria, translated from the Malayalam by Jayasree Kalathil, is about a “mad” little girl who is baffled by the world’s compulsive need to divide everything and everyone into normal and abnormal. Maria’s world is inhabited by a philosophizing dog; a grandfather who takes her along on his toddy-shop rounds; dead, “mad” ancestors; a jealous patron saint who gives his followers strange dreams; and other such audacious characters. She critiques, with great humor, joy, and innocence, a range of society’s absurdities, including competitive exams in schools, elections, and the hypocrisy of liberal politics. The novel is a call for a more inclusive, kinder world, yes. But it’s also a reminder that perhaps an appropriate response to reality is to go insane.
—Deepa Bhasthi, translator of Banu Mushtaq’s “Red Lungi”
This year, I often joked to myself that I was “off books.” Nothing, from Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death to a rereading of Brideshead Revisited, was cutting it. Maybe it was my ambient anxiety about the state of the world, an imminent breakup, or the seventy-five-degree fall days, but all I could take in were science podcasts about lucid dreaming and white noise tracks on loop. Into this fog slipped Halle Butler’s Banal Nightmare. The novel, Butler’s third, is the story of Moddie, an overeducated and underachieving thirtysomething who, following a seismic breakup, abandons Chicago for her Midwestern hometown, where she tries to get a grip on her life. It’s a sharp book, with painfully real characters and perfectly pitched sentences. It’s also cruel, comically so. At first, it left me feeling more depressed, and then (somehow) happy. Happy that I wasn’t as constitutionally fucked-up as Butler’s gang of misanthropes, and happy to be reminded that fiction like this—so funny and smart—is there to pull me out of a state, make me feel less alone.
—Camille Jacobson, engagement editor
In the spring, before I began teaching and lost the capacity to read anything more robust than a play (no offense to plays), I read Isabel Waidner’s second novel, Corey Fah Does Social Mobility, whose eponymous protagonist has just won a prestigious literary prize for the Fictionalization of Social Evils. And yet the trophy itself eludes him: neon beige and UFO-like, it appears in his peripheral vision, always just out of reach. The novel’s narrative engine is fueled by the conceit of mythmaking. Everything, in Waidner’s treatment, is topsy-turvy. Corey Fah finds an unlikely companion in Bambi Pavok, who, like the Disney character, emerges from a forest, but with a very unorthodox background (and anatomy): she is the child of a wasteman and an alcoholic, with eight spider legs where we might expect four dainty hooves. The novel is wild, smart, and very fun.
—Maya Binyam, advisory editor
