Some of us measure years in days; others of us, in books.
You know by now which sort I am.
With the year winding to a close, it seemed worth pausing to thank the authors and texts that shaped my year. Some have already been praised in this or other spaces, but all are worth as much attention as one can give.
Several treasured authors and meaningful books sit just outside this list, only because I had to stop somewhere. But I know their words and, more important, their words know me.
With that said, here are just a few of my favorite reads of 2024. Books are listed alphabetical by their author.
Kaveh Akbar, “Martyr!” (fiction) No book rocked my world in 2024 like the poet Akbar’s debut novel; before coming to one of the most stirring and transcendent codas in memory, the story twines art and addiction, living and living to grieve, in a braid that makes one want to inhabit this world a few days more.
Jessica Anthony, “The Most” (fiction) What could have been a narrative gimmick—put-upon 1950s American housewife enters her apartment pool and will not leave for anyone—leads readers into an oft-surprising tale of marriage, sex, familial pressure and the ways men and women both suffer at the hand of the patriarchy. Anthony’s work here is perfectly paced and balanced.
Taffy Brodesser-Akner, “Long Island Compromise” (fiction) Among the funniest, most strangely affecting novels of the year, “Long Island Compromise” satirizes the capital, relational and otherwise, held by a prominent Jewish family. Brodesser-Akner is never content just to poke, but crafts one of the most moving passages about absolution I’ve ever read.
Scott Cairns, “Correspondence with My Greeks” (poetry) Cairns’ latest chases his favorite muses—the streets and the storytellers of ancient and modern Greece—but with an eye toward understanding his place among them and the mortality which binds us all.
Kelly Caldwell, “Letters to Forget” and Cass Donish, “Your Dazzling Death” (poetry) These books deserve to stand on their own merit yet crave being read together. Donish, Caldwell’s former partner, writes a book-length elegy for their dearly departed while also seeing Caldwell’s work through to publication. Both texts are distinctly gorgeous and devastating.
Anne Carson, “Wrong Norma” (lyric essays) It’s almost a fool’s errand to try and capture the spirit of any Carson work in a sentence or two. Just know that these essays dig and delight and seem to flip the entire planetary axis.
Louise Erdrich, “The Mighty Red” (fiction) Erdrich remains at the plow, doing the work of unveiling America. Here, in both quietly desperate and comic tones, she reveals the ways small-town relationships bind and free us.
Percival Everett, “Sonnets for a Missing Key and Some Others” (poetry) The great contemporary fiction master offers a gorgeous set of small, musical poems that hum around the elemental aspects of our lives and connections.
Elisa Gabbert, “Any Person is the Only Self” (essays) Among our preeminent essayists, Gabbert offers perhaps her finest collection, a remarkable contemplation of memory and literature and how each moors or unmoors us in seasons of isolation and distress.
Garth Greenwell, “Small Rain” (fiction) Greenwell’s novel of minor gestures amid major crisis casts a needed glance into the American healthcare system, the true turmoil of early COVID days, and the way our human connections buoy us amid suffering.
Bruna Dantas Lobato, “Blue Light Hours” (fiction) In spare and soulful fashion, Lobato refreshes the campus novel, centering a Brazilian student who is both finding and losing parts of herself while pursuing an American education. The stakes are high yet clearly stated.
Paul Luikart, “The Realm of the Dog” (fiction) On story after story, page after page, Paul Luikart’s punch-packing prose astounds; with his remarkable economy of language and finely-tuned perception into the unseen places inside desperate people, he shows us ourselves—and others like us—in stark focus.
Jennifer Maritza McCauley, “Kinds of Grace” (poetry) My friend Jennifer Maritza McCauley can’t help but create modern tapestries, poems in conversation with one another and with forces as wild and shaping as mental health, romance, family and identity. These poems sing and they dance, but always in the service of a rare music.
Lydia Millet, “We Loved It All” (memoir) How bold and how completely natural to write one’s memoir in context of the entire, changing planet. How bold and natural for Lydia Millet, that is—no one writes like her and this book is a true, humane tour de force.
Tommy Orange, “Wandering Stars” (fiction) Following his breakthrough “There There,” Orange extends his consideration of indigenous American identity and the ways in which shared history can break us down and rebuild us.
Javier Peñalosa M (translated by Robin Myers), “What Comes Back” (poetry) Poet and translator hold hands, racing into the fraught unknown together to study rivers and people, to understand how and why they migrate, how wildness is in service of hope for a better, truer life.
Carl Phillips, “Scattered Snows, to the North” (poetry) Another Carl Phillips collection, another quiet masterpiece that makes the world seem a little deeper and more dimensional.
Diane Seuss, “Modern Poetry” (poetry) Seuss is one of our very best, refreshing and agitating what the poetic form can be in ways that tickle the ribs and steal more than a couple breaths.
Willy Vlautin, “The Horse” (fiction) Perhaps my favorite maker of modern sad-eyed novels, Vlautin once again pairs beauty and tragedy in this tale of a hard-luck musician whose surprise encounter with a horse prompts a trip through the songbook of memory.