The power of a great story can never be overrated.
Escape. Catharsis. Empathy. Reflection. These virtues—and many more—ran through the great novels and short stories of the past year, allowing me to better navigate my world and imagine other, not-all-that-distant ones.
Continuing a look at my favorite reads published in 2021, here are my favorite fiction titles, alphabetical by author. (Read Part One, covering nonfiction, here.)
Matt Bell, Appleseed
Both as intimate and sweeping as an epic novel can be, Bell cuts across time and place—grounding the reader in three distinct yet tethered narratives—to consider how often we repay the Earth’s benevolence by taking even more dominion. Appleseed succeeds on so many levels, not least of which as an assemblage of expertly-drawn characters and landscapes—and as a work of activism that never grows preachy or pedantic.
Craig Davidson, Cascade
This short-story set regularly unsettles, but not in the manner of fantasy or horror. Davidson’s prose assumes the shape of beautiful unease, precisely because he provokes you to imagine yourself in his characters’ shoes. Particularly well-crafted and moving are stories that trudge alongside a young mother pushing through a winter storm and enter the mind of an adolescent boy who both adores and fears his twin.
Louise Erdrich, The Sentence
What I’m coming to understand about Erdrich’s novels—at least the most recent ones—is that while she masterfully moves a narrative along, plot is nearly irrelevant. Each story she tells is a chance to inhabit a world of wonderfully winsome, idiosyncratic characters who keep reaching for the stuff of life, even when it’s placed on a high shelf. Here, a ghost story becomes a deep dive into native identity, family ties, George Floyd and COVID, and the wonderful consolation of books—all in the company of characters I hated to leave.
Charlotte McConaghy, Once There Were Wolves
McConaghy follows her superb Migrations with this near-perfect novel about a scientist who confronts the wildness without and within while reintroducing wolves to a particular piece of the Scottish landscape. So many writers hope to tackle ideas of commitment and covenant, our human animal instincts and the places they cross ways; McConaghy actually creates soulful prose here, asking important questions while foregoing the easy answers.
Jon McGregor, Lean Fall Stand
McGregor’s latest opens with a storm of inner monologue and intermittent detail that mimics the whiteout conditions which turn a research mission into an Antarctic disaster. The book becomes a tighter, more painstaking treatise on caregiving in the accident’s aftermath. Lean Fall Stand miraculously coheres, as we feel our way alongside the characters in each section, proving that McGregor is truly one of our modern masters.
Anna North, Outlawed
North’s delightfully subversive Western revolves around characters often forsaken by the genre: women and non-binary wranglers aiming to right social and economic wrongs with “Young Guns” fervor. North’s writing engrosses the reader as it reminds us to look for the very real presences that our narratives too often excise or erase.
Todd Robert Petersen, Picnic in the Ruins
Is it possible to balance nuanced consideration of cultural appropriation, the tense thrills of a heist narrative and the earthy. scene-setting necessary to ground a wide-open desert adventure? It is if you’re Todd Robert Petersen, who owns and applies his Coen Brothers-esque touch here. Petersen’s fiction manages to be wry and humane, uptempo yet rooted—and that wonderful confluence makes Picnic in the Ruins sing.
Shawn Smucker, The Weight of Memory
Smucker writes some of the most empathetic fiction on contemporary shelves; he continues his graceful work here with the story of a dying grandfather hoping that you can go home again—as he combs his hometown for a suitable caretaker for his precocious granddaughter. Upon their arrival, the supernatural and hyperrealistic collide, leading to a story that lingers even as you can’t find the next page fast enough.
Willy Vlautin, The Night Always Comes
Vlautin regularly supplies a Pacific Northwesterner’s take on the gritty, askew fiction we’ve come to expect from the American South. The gray areas of the region come through in this one, which revolves around Lynette, a character who will piss you off, stress you out and make you fall in love. Trying to right an almost innumerable number of wrongs in a couple days’ time, Lynette butts against gentrification, family dysfunction, mental illness and her own sins in a way that feels bleak yet remarkably familiar.
Colson Whitehead, Harlem Shuffle
What’s left to say about Colson Whitehead’s greatness? Here, he handles elements so many authors have touched—organized crime, the pressures of family and upward mobility, the architecture of mid-century American history—and writes them in a way no other writer could. Harlem Shuffle feels like a great Marvin Gaye or Sam Cooke album: breezy along the surface, currents of tension beneath. And it lands on an absolutely perfect final sentence, one worth reading the whole book to savor.