Stephen King
author, most recently, of “You Like It Darker”
I particularly enjoyed the warmth and hidden humor of ORYX AND CRAKE, by Margaret Atwood. It’s more science fiction-y than the better-known “Handmaid’s Tale,” but just as satirical, with its warning about multinational corporations and genetic engineering. It would have been the best movie Atwood’s fellow Canadian David Cronenberg never made.
Bonnie Garmus
author of “Lessons in Chemistry”
According to her older brother, Ashmol, Kellyanne Williamson is a fruit loop. She lives an impoverished life in Australia’s opal mining country with him, her depressed mother, her failure of a father — and her imaginary best friends, Pobby and Dingan. When Pobby and Dingan disappear thanks to her alcoholic father, it seems clear Kellyanne must finally grow up. Except she chooses a different path, and the result is not merely surprising, it’s extraordinary. POBBY AND DINGAN, Ben Rice’s short, tight treatise on love, sacrifice and grief is so flawlessly written, you’ll read it in two hours but remember it forever.
Michael Cunningham
author of “Day”
One of the many glories of MARTYR!, a first novel by the poet Kaveh Akbar, is its entirely original voice: half wised-up dude-speak, half soaring lyricism. This is a major novel that, like all major novels, doesn’t quite resemble anything else you’ve read.
Joe Hill
author of “NOS4A2” and “Full Throttle”
There are great historical novels, and then there is Francis Spufford’s GOLDEN HILL, which — for this reader anyway — is the closest any book has ever come to offering the experience of authentic time travel. Spufford’s New York City of 1746 is so vivid, so present, one can smell the wood smoke and wet wool and observe the sheen of light glancing off the “oozy cobbles.” The narrative offers electrifying romantic repartee, desperate chases and tragicomic duels, and a lead character who is playing a secret game all of his own. When the outcome of that game is finally revealed, the reader discovers the stakes were always much higher than one might’ve guessed; the horror and shame at the heart of “Golden Hill” haunt America to this day. Turns out the past is never quite as far off as you would’ve thought.
Sarah Bakewell
author of “At the Existentialist Cafe”
The books that most excite me are those that are meticulous in their research, yet radically change how I think about the world. Several of my 10 choices did this: Hallie Rubenhold’s THE FIVE drew my attention away from the tedious mystery of Jack the Ripper (who cares?), to explore the full, fascinating lives of five real women who became his victims. Timothy Snyder’s BLOODLANDS shifted my idea of 20th-century European history several countries eastward, altering the west-centric story I’d learned at school. Most radical of all was Ed Yong’s brilliant first book, I CONTAIN MULTITUDES. This undid my assumption that I was a single, definite “me.” I learned that I am a great swirling community of microbes, often changing places with those in other swirls of microbes around me. That’s not just a bird I see flying, but a feathery set of “trillions of microbes.” If I touch a pangolin (don’t ask), countless tiny beings move from a “human-shaped raft” to a “pangolin-shaped” one.After reading this gloriously witty and visionary book, I was never quite the same person — I mean raft of microbes — again.
Megan Abbott
author of “Beware the Woman”
Daniel Woodrell might be America’s greatest living writer, and WINTER’S BONE shows you why. The haunting tale of a young woman’s search through the poverty-riddled Ozarks for her father, the novel risks being weighed down by the sorrow and stunning violence of its world. But instead it’s luminous, every page shivering with feeling, mystery and a keenly rendered humanity. And no one writes a sentence like Woodrell — he can make you gasp, weep, ache. A true master still at the peak of his powers.
Rebecca Makkai
author of “The Great Believers”
I’ve been known to thrust Julie Otsuka’s THE BUDDHA IN THE ATTIC at smart friends and say, “This novel has no plot and no characters, and you’re absolutely going to love it.” That sells the book short, by a lot, but I don’t know what description would do it justice. I could say that it’s about Japanese “picture brides” in early 1900s California; I could say that it’s propulsive and sui generis and devastatingly lyrical; I could say that Otsuka writes like absolutely no one else. Or I could just thrust it at you, which seems to work fine.
Justin Torres
author of “Blackouts”
I first read Adania Shibli’s MINOR DETAIL during the pandemic, when I was living in England. For months after, I pressed it on everyone I knew. The combination of horror and restraint, the precision of the prose, the narrative indirection, the many misdirections, the dyadic structure — I thought it was perfectly executed novel, like nothing I’d read before. The book is haunted by violence, both a historic and acute violent act, as well as straightforward descriptions of the slow violence, the everyday details of life under occupation in Palestine. Then of course, in the fall of 2023, the cowardly decision was made to cancel a planned awards ceremony celebrating the book and the author at the Frankfurt Book Fair, prompting me to reread the novel. Many books attract controversy, and for various reasons, but rarely are the books themselves masterpieces. “Minor Detail” has attracted temporary controversy; it is also a lasting masterpiece.
Jean Hanff Korelitz
author of “The Plot”
Tom Perrotta and I share not only a birth year but an agnostic’s fascination with faith (he’s the true agnostic; I check the atheist box, myself). When I read his fiction I know I’m in the presence of someone with real questions, and the guts to ask them.
All of this reaches an astonishing apotheosis with THE LEFTOVERS, in which an unfathomable cosmic event called the “Sudden Departure” has caused 2 percent of the world’s population to disappear in an instant. Left reeling, the leftovers (that is: everyone else) respond with a dizzying array of psychic and religious compensations. Perrotta never resolves the mystery of what has happened, because he can’t, and ultimately neither can we. Instead he leaves his characters and readers, alike, spinning in the wake of the finally unfathomable. All we have is what we believe, whatever form that may take.
Sloane Crosley
author of “Grief Is for People”
Tom McCarthy’s REMAINDER is a wild conceit for a novel about a wild conceit. There has been an accident, a bad one, after which our narrator is paid a settlement over 8 million pounds, a sum he devotes to elaborate re-enactments of quotidian memories and visions. The story is ingenious, the writing elegant, the point philosophical. It’s a study in modern self-consciousness that spawned instant imitations (the irony). Plus, it’s fun. Imagine if “The Rehearsal” and “Memento” had a baby and that baby got mom’s wit and dad’s darkness.
Hua Hsu
author of “Stay True”
A fascinating, deeply original story of supply and demand — and a cult favorite among the fungi-friendly — Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s THE MUSHROOM AT THE END OF THE WORLD is an anthropological study of the matsutake mushroom that often reads like a cross-continental chase. Matsutakes are known for being fragrant, delicious and impossible to cultivate, which means they are also extremely expensive. They embody the spooky genius of the mycelial kingdom, having developed a symbiotic relationship with the pine trees they grow underneath. Tsing follows the matsutake from the gentle hands of forest foragers, to the noisy, global markets that assign a price point to imperiled organisms, to high-end restaurants around the world. The mushrooms have survived, and perhaps they’ll outlast us all.
Claudia Rankine
author of “Citizen”
The most influential cohering experience inside the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, or ACT UP, was civil disobedience training, and thousands of people experienced it together. Although Sarah Schulman’s LET THE RECORD SHOW is based in an applied practice with tips and guidelines, all of the instructions are rooted in a very articulate and deep, ethical belief system about community. This important cultural blueprint documents a time and movement in a manner that never loses sight of individual action. It is and will be an essential workbook going forward for those who believe in community action as new political and social formations come into being.
Michael Robbins
author of “Walkman” and “The Second Sex”
It’s correct but too abstract to say that global warming is caused by human activity. It’s caused, specifically, by capitalist production, mainly the burning of fossil fuels. In FOSSIL CAPITAL, Andreas Malm traces the origins of this process and shows that capital’s shift from hydropower to coal in production occurred not because the latter is more efficient — it’s not — but because it allowed greater control over workers. Malm’s conclusion foreshadows his later “How to Blow Up a Pipeline” by calling for a “truly revolutionary movement” to halt climate change. The most important book of the century.
Jami Attenberg
author of “The Middlesteins” and “1000 Words”
Ada Limón’s BRIGHT DEAD THINGS is a book I have insisted so many people in my life read because it is not only a successful piece of art worth admiring but also a source of strength and light. Ada is so commanding and confident in these poems even as she explores the challenges and vulnerabilities of being a woman, artist and human in the world today. I consider her poem “How to Triumph Like a Girl” my personal national anthem. I think this book will outlast us all.
Ilyon Woo
author of “Master Slave Husband Wife”
THE LOVE SONGS OF W.E.B. DU BOIS, by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, blew open everything I thought I knew about past and present, fact and fiction, poetry and prose, song and monument, book and body. It changed how I look at history, exposing the limits of any act of documentation or remembering, while performing narrative justice. Thanks to this book, I’ll never enter an archive in the same way again.
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