new york times book review october 3 2021

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What the New York Times Missed: 71 More of the Best Books of the 21st Century

A non-boring list.

Last week,  The New York Times Book Review published a list of the “ 100 Best Books of the 21st Century .” (Well,  so far , obviously. Why not just call it the best books of the last 25 years? Do they know something we don’t? Oh well.) To put it together, the Book Review surveyed “hundreds of novelists, nonfiction writers, academics, book editors, journalists, critics, publishers, poets, translators, booksellers, librarians and other literary luminaries,” asking them to pick ten favorite books published in the US since 2000. Then, “respondents were given the option to answer a series of prompts where they chose their preferred book between two randomly selected titles.” (Unclear what, exactly, this means, but it’s giving Hot or Not.)

Anyway, the result is a big list that includes a lot of great books, and also, necessarily, leaves a large number out. (Every book of poetry published in the last 25 years other than Citizen , for instance.) Since no one asked us (rude), despite the Lit Hub staff being entirely made up of novelists, nonfiction writers, academics, book editors, journalists, critics, publishers, poets, translators, booksellers, and other literary luminaries (no librarians, alas), we decided to make our own list of books the Times  list missed. (Some of these omissions could be considered shocking, but that’s what happens when you trust such a thing to the power of consensus.) No doubt many wonderful books have been left off both lists, however, such is the nature, etc. etc., so please do feel welcome to add your own favorites in the comments. In the meantime:

Emma Donoghue, Slammerkin (2000)

It is no exaggeration to say this book is seared more vividly into my imagination than any actual experiences (those who read are not always those who do). Donoghue’s frank, bawdy, and brutal tale of prostitution in 18th century England begins with the calendar riots as London’s denizens react to calendar reform with righteous fury. Her father dead in the riots, and her mother pushing her to become a seamstress, a teenaged girl instead trades her virginity for a hair ribbon and soon becomes one of the most celebrated courtesans of Covington Garden, at a time when London’s population was heavily employed in sex work. Emma Donoghue understands how to capture both the humorous and grotesque, for a book which wouldn’t have seemed out of place next to the original eviscerators of the 18th century. I guess what I’m saying is, Jonathan Swift would have totally loved this book. –Molly Odintz, CrimeReads Managing Editor

Ted Chiang,  Stories of Your Life and Others  (2002)

Chiang’s monumental second collection of stories,  Exhalation  (2019), is every bit as impressive as his first, and could easily be the Chosen Chiang on this list, but for its seismic impact on the landscape of contemporary science fiction (as well as the awesome profundity of its contents), I’m going to give the edge to  Stories of Your Life . “Hell is the Absence of God” (set in a world where the existence of Heaven, Hell, and God have been proven, and where miracles and angelic visitations are commonplace, if not always pleasant) and “Story of Your Life” (a time-warping tale about a linguist attempting to decipher the language of some newly arrived aliens) are the collection’s showpieces, and deservedly so, but each of the eight high-concept, philosophical thought experiments that make up  Stories of Your Life is a gorgeous, humane, and mind-expanding work of art. –Dan Sheehan, Book Marks Editor in Chief

John McGahern,  By the Lake (originally published as That They May Face the Rising Sun ) (2002)

Not to generalize—or make wild, baseless assumptions about any of you—but if you’re scanning this list on the American internet here in the  annus horribilis of 2024, there’s a solid chance John McGahern is the greatest Irish writer you’ve never read (though contemporary Hiberno-Titans like Colm Tóibín and Claire Keegan would not exist as we know them without his influence). If that is indeed the case, I would urge you to change your errant ways. His fictions—stark, existential examinations of the repressed mindscape of mid-century rural Ireland—are extraordinary. McGahern’s elegiac final novel is something of a tonal departure from the five that preceded it, but it may well be his masterpiece. A delicate, largely plotless sketch of a lakeside community in County Leitrim in the early 1990s—when Ireland was emerging from its long, theocratic night— That They May Face the Rising Sun is the story of a couple who leave their professional lives in London behind to return to Ireland to live and work on a small farm. There, through intimate (but never sentimental, never pat) exchanges between neighbors, and exquisite observations about the natural world, McGahern conjures the dawn. –DS

ZZ Packer,  Drinking Coffee Elsewhere (2003)

I met this collection on a fiction class syllabus, where it was placed among rightful peers like Edward P. Jones and George Saunders. (Brief digression: Look, I love George, but did he really need  three  sets of laurels on The List? But there I go, giving in to the the scarcity model. Playing right into the overlords’ hands…) Chronicling young Black women and girls as they step in and out of self-awareness, these stories formed a much-needed well of psychological recognition for This Reader. But they linger as much for their style as their content. Packer’s voice is blazingly confident. Brazen, electric, alive, inimitable.

It’s a book with no skips. But “Brownies,” haunts as a master class in compression and unsettled interiority. This story finds a troop of Girl Scouts discovering social difference on an ill-fated camping trip. –Brittany Allen, Staff Writer

Jonathan Lethem, The Fortress of Solitude (2003)

There have been many books that attempt to tackle Brooklyn, but Jonathan Lethem’s bildungsroman of race, music, gentrification, superheroes, and friendship might be my favorite. Brooklyn was already a stomping ground for Lethem’s fiction, but here, he delivers a personal look at a place and a time refracted through the lens of comic books and bass drum. You’ll believe a boy could fly. (Also: the 2014 musical adaptation is sorely under-appreciated.) –Drew Broussard, Podcasts Editor

Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake (2003)

Lahiri’s debut novel is a quiet but towering epic. In closely observed, un-flashy prose we trace two generations of the Ganguli family through their early days of alienation and yearning in an adopted home. There are love stories in consecution: lovers fall, then parents and children, then lovers again. This book is sometimes held up as a paragon of the “immigrant narrative “(whatever that even means) and has inspired antecedents. That’s all well and good, but I worry genre-fication has siloed Lahiri’s narrative feat. (How else to explain the novel’s absence from The List?!) This novel is the best of the 21st century: elegantly structured, poignant, wise, lush, and breathtakingly compact.  –BA

Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell (2004)

I should not have been surprised that the NYT list skewed heavily away from genre fiction—but missing Susanna Clarke’s world-changing doorstopper of a debut is a particular head-scratcher. On paper, the book still seems daunting in an almost comical way: a Regency-era epic (with footnotes and extensive digressions on philosophy, magic, politics) about the discovery of two ‘practical’ English magicians during the Napoleonic Wars, whose abilities challenge each other and the global balance of power while tapping into some still-unsettled cultural notions of English mythology and myth-making. It’s the rare fantasy novel that seemed to break into popular consciousness after its release, and that despite its heft! Many people have leapt into the historical fantasy space since Clarke, but no one has ever written anything quite like this—I’m not sure anyone ever will. –DB

Tom McCarthy,  Remainder   (2005)

The more time I spend alive on this planet, the more sense Tom McCarthy’s first novel makes. In it, an unnamed London man struggles to re-enter the world after a horrific accident, his memories scrambled, his trust in the fabric of reality thin at best. On the other hand, he’s been awarded some £8.5 million in a settlement, and he proceeds to use that money to seek an elusive sense of authenticity—by (paradoxically) hiring a rapidly expanding team of actors and extras to re-enact scenes and sequences from some of the memories—minor but “fluent and unforced” he does retain. The result is a funny and deranged philosophical novel that I still think about some 20 years on. –Emily Temple, Managing Editor

David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster (2005)

There’s been a lot of DFW ~discourse~ since the author’s death. As these things go, some of it has been very worthwhile. But some of it is dumb. Namely, the memeification of the author’s entire canon as not so much a set as books as signifying red flags to beware of, when swiping to glory on the apps.

It’s true that obnoxious hipsters like DFW. It is  also  true that he was a brilliant writer.  Consider the Lobster,  which blew my entire mind when I found it at 22, is a stylish symphony. Wallace applies his dazzling brain to philosophical questions about modern life. (Should we eat animals? Should our dictionaries prescribe or describe language?) That intellectual wrestling is sincere and rigorous. The language dazzles, even as it invites your conspiracy.

In concert with the nonfiction of Zadie Smith and Joan Didion, DFW taught me what an essay could do. I think this book is one of his best.  –BA

Curtis Sittenfeld,  Prep   (2005)

I can’t think of a novel that more poignantly—and accurately—captures deep alienation and cringiness of adolescence. Lee Fiora, an unhappy scholarship student at an august prep school whose desire to fit in is bone-deep, is an all-time great protagonist. She is her own worst enemy, and you want so much for her to do right by herself that her moments of grace and joy are all the more triumphant. –Jessie Gaynor, Senior Editor

Haruki Murakami, tr. Philip Gabriel,  Kafka on the Shore (2005)

Murakami is a heavy-hitter with surprisingly wide appeal, considering the oddness of his work. Everyone has their own personal   ranking system for Murakami’s works, but for me, this is one of the best, second only to  A Wind-Up Bird Chronicle . ( Norwegian Wood  is patently bad, in case you were wondering.)

“When the English translation of Haruki Murakami’s bestselling  A Wind-Up Bird Chronicle  transformed one of Japan’s best-kept literary secrets into the world’s best-known living Japanese novelist, this reviewer’s acquaintances neatly subdivided themselves into three groups: besotted devotees (one British friend went so far as to name his newborn son “Haruki”); critical admirers; and people who came out in a nasty rash,” David Mitchell wrote in  The  Guardian . He too correctly prefers A Wind-Up Bird Chronicle , but revels in Murakami’s seductive prose and “trademark kookinesses” here, and notes that “Murakami’s protagonists radiate a likeable humanity at odds with many of the “Asia Extreme” Japanese writers currently being translated into English, including Ryu (no relative) Murakami, Natsuo Kirino and Ring-master Koji Suzuki. Murakami writes Cert 18 scenes with aplomb when his plot demands it, but these never feel gratuitous or onanistic.” ( One of our 10 Books that Defined the 2000s ) –ET

Amy Hempel, Collected Stories (2006)

If we are recognizing masters of the short short, I believe it’s a sin to omit Amy Hempel. Her voice-driven reflections capture split-seconds (“Memoir”) as breezily as they do eras (“In The Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried”), and always in glittery, sage containers. We may not be giving her enough credit for making the mordant aphorism a feature of contemporary fiction.

Deborah Eisenberg, Twilight of the Superheroes (2006)

Help, I’ve fallen down the short story well and now have a trillion collections to sell you!

This one is from Deborah Eisenberg, who was introduced to me as a “writer’s writer”—which as we know is often code for tricky, stylish, or deep. These stories  are  all those things. They’re also witty, surprising, slightly askew studies of people metabolizing profound disruption. In  Twilight , unsettled characters pilot six perfect stories around a post-9/11 American metropole. (My favorite fellow? The acerbic crank in “Some Other, Better Otto.”)

Kelly Link,  Magic for Beginners   (2006)

Link is contemporary literature’s master magician—not because there’s sometimes magic in her stories (though, duh), but because of how deftly she shifts between genres and styles, blending horror, fantasy, and literary fiction with a winking-but-largehearted sensibility all her own. Some writers are genre-defining, but Link is un-genre-defining—her work is proof, in these dark political days and sometimes stodgy literary ones, that anything is possible. Any of her books could really do here, and I’m sure some will have other favorites, but Magic for Beginners  was her breakthrough collection, and contains possibly my favorite short story of hers, “Stone Animals,” in which several things are haunted, not least of all our ideas about ourselves. –ET

Roberto Saviano, tr. Virginia Jewiss,   Gomorrah  (2006)

Combining journalism, memoir, and literature, Saviano’s book is an intimate portrait of Naples, a city held in the thrall of corruption, violence, and illicit power. Saviano’s writing reveals and illuminates like a novel, taking us to the hidden workshops where couture destined for Hollywood award shows is sewn in appalling conditions, to the quarries that once supplied marble to Renaissance masters and are now filled with toxic waste, and to the homes of the crimes bosses built to mimic the opulence they’ve seen on film. Saviano was born in Naples, and his relationship with the city makes every story and revelation feel personal, sometimes like a betrayal.  Gomorrah ’s moments of near-fictional description are beautiful, but never distract from the depth of his research. His investigations brought him arguably too close to his subjects, and the book earned him multiple death threats from the Camorra, the powerful Neapolitan crime syndicate and business empire—in response, the Italian government gave the author a permanent police escort.  –James Folta, Staff Writer

Tana French, In the Woods (2007)

Every Tana French fan has a personal favorite from her Dublin Murder Squad series—my own is probably The Likeness , a masterful Gothic crime thriller as indebted to The Secret History and Rebecca as it is to police procedurals—but for sheer impact, In the Woods can’t be beat. On the surface, it looks like nothing so much as a great detective novel—but French upends convention by never quite delivering the resolution that the reader is looking for. The fact that she then spent five more books jumping around different characters on the Murder Squad instead of picking up Rob Ryan’s story just cemented her reputation as a writer willing to take big genre risks while still delivering big genre satisfactions. –DB

Steven Millhauser,  Dangerous Laughter   (2008)

Millhauser is a writer’s writer of the highest order—also, he has a Pulitzer, but whatever. We could argue all day about which collection is best, and each one has individual stories to write home about; this is the one whose tales of obsession, surrealist suburbia, and “impossible architectures” stick most clearly in my head. Deadpan, sly, mesmerizing, and assured, each one is a knockout. –ET

Rick Perlstein,  Nixonland   (2008) 

Rick Perlstein is quite possibly the smartest person I’ve ever read. If you want an understanding of American conservatism, politics, and how we got here, his work over the last 20 years is essential reading. Out of his quartet of books on American conservatism since the 1960s,  Nixonland  is my favorite. Starting in the tumult of the 1960s, Perlstein traces Nixon’s resurgence and rise to the presidency in the aftermath of LBJ’s shellacking of Barry Goldwater. Perlstein has a novelist’s eye for detail, and writes with a captivating, sentence-level crackle that few political historians are capable of. His view of America moves between the halls of power to the street, making his case for America’s crack-up with not just candidates and campaigns, but protests and pop culture too. Most importantly, Perlstein has a crystal clear sense of the stakes and of right and wrong. This is not a historian interested in politics as a parlor game, or as a realm that floats about the material conditions of our lives. Perlstein takes his work and his thinking seriously, and his ability to illuminate what is rotten in our politics is harrowing and enthralling.  –JF

Maggie Nelson, Bluets (2009)

Nelson did make it onto the NYT list for The Argonauts —and rightly so, that book is one of the best of the century so far—but she’s also one of the few writers I can reasonably argue ought to have been represented more than once, unlike some who shall remain unnamed. The immediately iconic opening line of the collection (“Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color…”) sets up a book that is not quite poetry, not quite essay, not quite memoir, and yet all of those and more. It is, a la Derek Jarman’s Chroma , a book about a color but it is also a book about depression, about love, about obsession. It is also continually evolving, different every time I return to it, like something out of a fairy tale. Odds are, several of your favorite writers have this book close to their hearts. –DB

China Miéville,  The City & the City  (2009) 

The best speculative work allows us to step far enough away from our own condition to see ourselves with fresh eyes. Miéville’s most well-known book is many, many things: a procedural, a fantasy, an allegory for colonialism, and for Palestine and Israel. The central conceit of two cities uneasily sharing one geographic space under the eye and thumb of a foreign power with an unquestioned right to violence, and the process of “unseeing” after any breaches between the two cities, all make for an uncanny and hallucinatory setting for the novel’s crime plot line. It’s a whodunit and whereisit.  –JF

Jenny Erpenbeck, tr. Susan Bernofsky,  Visitation   (2010)

At the center of this extraordinary novel is a house on a lake, surrounded by woods. The house and the lake and the woods are in Brandenburg, outside of Berlin. People move in, through, and around the house, and time moves in these ways too—the novel is set during the second World War, and before, and after. The realities and their attendant characters—the gardener, the architect, the cloth manufacturer, the red army officer, the girl—are layered elegantly on top of one another, creating a sense of pattern, of fugue, more than of traditional narrative.

As in Woolf’s  To the Lighthouse , the house itself becomes the central, if mute, figure of the novel, and time itself its essential subject: what it does to us and to the world, how we remember, and how we don’t. And also like  To the Lighthouse , there are little human dramas within this grander and colder scheme, ones that secretly hook us in, however minor they seem, so that we are devastated when time passes, so that we mourn the ones we barely knew, for their fixations, their tragedies, their trying. Elegiac, often astoundingly gorgeous, sometimes strikingly brutal, this is one of the most wonderful novels of any sort that you could hope to read. P.S. this novel edged out Erpenbeck’s more recent novel,  Go, Went, Gone , also translated by Susan Bernofsky, for this list, but we also very much recommend that one. Really you can’t go wrong by immersing yourself in the work of these two masterful artists. ( One of our Best Translated Novels of the Decade, 2010-2019 ) –ET

C.D. Wright,  One With Others   (2010)

C.D. Wright could be on this list for any number of books she wrote in the last 15 years—which is saying a lot, considering she died far too early, in 2016. Even her posthumous meditation on the beech tree, Casting Deep Shade , could probably survive aggressive cross-genre shoehorning from lyric nonfiction to poetry. So with that sort of inter-disciplinary invention in mind, I offer you Wright’s 2011 National Book Award finalist, One With Others , a book-length poem that could also be described as… lyric documentary?

On its surface, poetry seems the least ready form for rendering  things as they happened,  as far from the dispassionate camera—its guileless capture of this moment or that—as one might imagine. But in  One With Others , based around Margaret Kaelin McHugh, a small-town Arkansas woman (and mentor to the poet), Wright undertakes a kind of journalism of poetics, conveying the full breadth of a historical moment during the tail-end of the Civil Rights era with all the fragmentary detail of an inexhaustible documentarian. Transcribed speech, catalogues of objects, idiosyncratic lists, all of it refracted through the life of a white woman who decided to join a Black march and was ostracized for it. In retrospect, it is easy to question the project of a white poet using a white character to capture a significant moment in Black history, but with that same ease we can say that Wright pulled it off, and for that reason—among countless others—we are forever lucky to have had her as poet and witness both . ( One of our Best Poetry Collections of the Decade, 2010-2019 ) – Jonny Diamond, Editor in Chief

Timothy Snyder,  Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (2010)

Timothy Snyder’s brilliant  Bloodlands  has changed World War II scholarship more, perhaps, than any work since Hannah Arendt’s  Eichmann in Jerusalem,  an apt comparison given that  Bloodlands  includes within it a response to Arendt’s theory of the banality of evil (Snyder doesn’t buy it, and provides convincing proof that Eichmann was more of a run-of-the-mill hateful Nazi and less a colorless bureaucrat simply doing his job). Snyder reads in 10 languages, which is key to his ability to synthesize international scholarship and present new theories in an accessible way. But before I continue praising this book, I should probably let y’all know what it’s about— Bloodlands  is a history of mass killings in the Double-Occupied Zone of Eastern Europe, where the Soviets showed up, killed everyone they wanted to, and then the Nazis showed up and killed everyone else. By focusing on mass killings, rather than genocide, Snyder is able to draw connections between totalitarian regimes and examine the mechanisms by which small nations can suddenly and horrifyingly become much smaller. ( One of our Best Works of Nonfiction of the Decade, 2010-2019 ) –MO

Téa Obreht,  The Tiger’s Wife   (2011)

It’s easy to forget, reading  The Tiger’s Wife , that Obreht was only 25 when it was published in 2011 (that year, she became the youngest-ever winner of the UK’s Orange Prize—and did you know it was the  first book ever sold by her agent , and the second book ever acquired by her editor? Yes, I feel bad too.). I say “easy to forget,” but it might be more accurate to say “hard to believe,” because this debut is so ambitious, so assured, and so richly textured that it feels like something that could only come from decades of toil.

It is an astonishing book for a writer of any age, half fable, half gritty portrait of an unnamed Balkan country recovering from civil war. It is a novel about story, and about family, two things that inform and describe one another. “Everything necessary to understand my grandfather lies between two stories,” our narrator Natalia tells us, “the story of the tiger’s wife, and the story of the deathless man. These stories run like secret rivers through all the other stories of his life.” Part of the magic of Obreht’s writing (it’s also true in her latest two novels, Inland and The Morningside , either of which could be on this list) is how secure you feel in the worlds she creates—the feeling is akin to stepping into a photograph, or a documentary: you look around and clock every detail; you never doubt. You can feel reality hovering underneath the sentences, even when they’re describing something patently impossible. And yet in this novel, she’s always reminding you how these worlds can change, and how we can change them in the telling. ( One of our Best Debut Novels of the Decade, 2010-2019 ) –ET

Natalie Diaz,  When My Brother Was an Aztec   (2012)

Mojave American poet and language activist Natalie Diaz (a 2018 MacArthur Genius Grant recipient) is one of those rare and exceptional writers who can seamlessly blend the personal, the political, and the mythic to create shimmering gems that are both joyous and horrifying, tender and brutal, intimate and sweeping. In her debut collection, Diaz, who is an enrolled member of the Gila Indian Tribe, reflects with visceral imagery and sensuous language on her brother’s methadone addiction, her childhood experiences of reservation life, the continued oppression and fetishization of Native Americans in contemporary US society, and the nature of romantic, erotic, and familial love within indigenous communities.

In the title poem, Diaz draws from Christian, Mojave and ancient Greek mythic traditions conjure a version of her brother both awesome and terrifying, a godlike figure who destroys and remakes both himself and his family as his addictions overwhelm him (“My parents gathered what was left of their bodies, trying to stand without legs, / trying to defend his blows with missing arms, searching for their fingers / to pray, to climb out of whatever dark belly my brother, the Aztec, / their son, had fed them to). In “Hand-Me-Down Halloween,” the girl child speaker, already worn down by neighborhood prejudice and the sneers of her mother’s boyfriend, explodes with rage at a white boy who taunts her for wearing his cast-off costume (“He was / the skeleton walking past my house / a glowing skull and ribs / I ran & tackled his / white / bones / in the street / His candy spilled out / like a million pinto beans”). Truly the most brilliant and affecting poetry collection I’ve read in an age. ( One of our Best Poetry Collections of the Decade, 2010-2019 ) –DS

Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl (2012)

The book that launched a thousand comp titles, and not a single one of them has done it better. Flynn’s high-wire-act storytelling was breathtaking when I first read it (the mid-book POV change is still one of the most thrilling moments of my reading life, and why the book remains so frequently aspired-to) and that alone is enough to ensure its immortality, but I find that her precision-rendered main characters have lingered with me for years now. Nick and Amy are unreliable, unlikeable, utterly compelling—and the voice that both of them give to the dark roiling heart of white America in the mid-Obama years now looks something like a warning. –DB

Karl Ove Knausgaard, tr. Don Bartlett,  My Struggle: Book 1   (2012)

In retrospect, Karl Ove Knausgaard’s  My Struggle saga is perhaps best understood as a literary phenomenon of the internet age. The sense of selfhood that obsesses it is so monomaniacally focused, so deeply confessional, premised on a disclosure so radical (the author’s father’s abuse, alcoholism, death; his wife’s nervous breakdown) it infamously cost Knausgaard some of his closest personal relationships even as it won him international acclaim. Added to that, the suspense and anticipation on which the series’ rising acclaim in the English-speaking world depended was a pleasure its readership had almost forgotten it could feel. Somewhere, out there, were very large books—very large caches if information, of personal data—bound and in physical form but inaccessible to you, the next volume unavailable for another year!

And when the work did become available, there was the sheer superabundance if it, the excruciating detail its author expected you to be interested in—or maybe what he expected you to be was bored. And why would someone want to bore you like that; who was this guy? And what was with the title? What kind of “novel” was My Struggle—or what could it be, a book that so undid the notions of the form (plot, characters, development) as to seem at once to portend the total destruction of the novel and the next stage in its next evolution. In the end, twelve years, five more volumes, and one 400-page not-okay digression on Hitler (Book Six) later, the sum of Knausgard’s achievement feels less than what this first volume promised it could be. But what a promise it was.  ( One of our Best Translated Novels of the Decade, 2010-2019 ) –Emily Firetog, Deputy Editor

Louise Erdrich,  The Round House   (2012)

Robin Wall Kimmerer,  Braiding Sweetgrass   (2013)

Of every essay in my relentlessly earmarked copy of  Braiding Sweetgrass , Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer’s gorgeously rendered argument for why and how we should keep going, there’s one that especially hits home: her account of professor-turned-forester Franz Dolp. When Dolp, several decades ago, revisited the farm that he had once shared with his ex-wife, he found a scene of destruction: The farm’s new owners had razed the land where he had tried to build a life. “I sat among the stumps and the swirling red dust and I cried,” he wrote in his journal.

So many in my generation (and younger) feel this kind of helplessness–and considerable rage–at finding ourselves newly adult in a world where those in power seem determined to abandon or destroy everything that human bodies have always needed to survive: air, water, land. Asking any single book to speak to this helplessness feels unfair, somehow; yet,  Braiding Sweetgrass does, by weaving descriptions of indigenous tradition with the environmental sciences in order to show what survival has looked like over the course of many millennia. Kimmerer’s essays describe her personal experience as a Potawotami woman, plant ecologist, and teacher alongside stories of the many ways that humans have lived in relationship to other species.

Whether describing Dolp’s work–he left the stumps for a life of forest restoration on the Oregon coast–or the work of others in maple sugar harvesting, creating black ash baskets, or planting a Three Sisters garden of corn, beans, and squash, she brings hope. “In ripe ears and swelling fruit, they counsel us that all gifts are multiplied in relationship,” she writes of the Three Sisters, which all sustain one another as they grow. “This is how the world keeps going.” ( One of our Best Essay Collections of the Decade, 2010-2019 ) –Corinne Segal, Editor Emeritus

Juan Gabriel Vásquez, tr. Anne McLean,  The Sound of Things Falling   (2013)

Gabriel Vásquez has long since established himself as one of the leading voices in Latin American fiction, with a career now spanning two decades and including the 2004 breakout  Los informantes , but it was the release of  El ruido de las cosas al caer  in 2011, brought out two years later in the US as  The Sound of Things Falling , that cemented his reputation as a giant of international letters. The novel’s aims were at once ambitious in scope and intensely particular, even intimate. Gabriel Vásquez summarized the project in The Guardian after winning the International Impac Dublin award: “We had all grown up used to the public side of the drug wars, to the images and killings … but there wasn’t a place to go to think about the private side … How did it change the way we behaved as fathers and sons and friends and lovers, how did it change our private behavior?”

The narrator and ostensible protagonist of  The Sound of Things Falling is Antonio Yammara, a Bogotá law professor whose proclivities make a mess of his current circumstances and drive him to look back on his own and Colombia’s recent past. It’s a life whose texture is often distorted by the effects of narco-trafficking and an increasingly chaotic and violent culture. The story splits out through several time strands, conundrums, and characters, including most notably an ex-con in a pool hall who leads Yammara down a mysterious path and sees both men gunned down on the city streets. The nature of memory, identity, and time become Yamarra’s obsessions, but in classic noir fashion he only seems to wade deeper and deeper into the abyss. Obsession takes over life, as Gabriel Vásquez subtly brings out the devastating effects of a society under the extreme tension of decades of corruption. ( One of our Best Translated Novels of the Decade, 2010-2019 )   –Dwyer Murphy, CrimeReads Editor in Chief

Aleksandar Hemon,  The Book of My Lives   (2013)

Such is the sentence-level virtuosity of Aleksandar Hemon—the Bosnian-American writer, essayist, and critic—that throughout his career he has frequently been compared to the granddaddy of borrowed language prose stylists: Vladimir Nabokov. While it is, of course, objectively remarkable that anyone could write so beautifully in a language they learned in their twenties, what I admire most about Hemon’s work is the way in which he infuses every essay and story and novel with both a deep humanity and a controlled (but never subdued) fury. He can also be damn funny. Hemon grew up in Sarajevo and left in 1992 to study in Chicago, where he almost immediately found himself stranded, forced to watch from afar as his beloved home city was subjected to a relentless four-year bombardment, the longest siege of a capital in the history of modern warfare.

This extraordinary memoir-in-essays is many things: it’s a love letter to both the family that raised him and the family he built in exile; it’s a rich, joyous, and complex portrait of a place the 90s made synonymous with war and devastation; and it’s an elegy for the wrenching loss of precious things. There’s an essay about coming of age in Sarajevo and another about why he can’t bring himself to leave Chicago. There are stories about relationships forged and maintained on the soccer pitch or over the chessboard, and stories about neighbors and mentors turned monstrous by ethnic prejudice. As a chorus they sing with insight, wry humor, and unimaginable sorrow. I am not exaggerating when I say that the collection’s devastating final piece, “The Aquarium”—which details his infant daughter’s brain tumor and the agonizing months which led up to her death—remains the most painful essay I have ever read. ( One of our Best Essay Collections of the Decade, 2010-2019 ) –DS

Karen Russell,  Vampires in the Lemon Grove   (2013)

The title short story of Karen Russell’s  Vampires in the Lemon Grove  is my favorite short story of all time, but the collection itself is mesmerizing. A friend, a fellow English teacher at the high school where I used to teach, first shared a copy with me when I had my seniors read  Dracula , and I read it at my desk, towards the end of the day. I discovered that it’s a book that doesn’t so much draw you in as creep up on you. You don’t glide through it, you’ll burrow into it; you’ll start reading it, and by the time you’re finished, the lights in the department office will be out, dusk will have fallen outside, and all your colleagues and some passing students will have stood in front of you trying to get your attention and wave goodbye before giving up and walking out. You don’t simply finish this book, you are released from it. Materially speaking, anyway. It’ll still haunt you after you’re done. This might be because its stories are so tender, so perfectly painful—another reason might be because that they can be so genuinely creepy, so softly scary that you’ll find yourself rereading parts over and over, trying to experience the section more deeply to make sure that what you think is happening is really happening. And then, when it is finally done with you, you’ll walk yourself home in the dark, and it’s a good thing you’ll know the route by heart, because you won’t be able to think about where you’re going. ( One of our Best Short Story Collections of the Decade, 2010-2019 ) –Olivia Rutigliano, Editor

Miriam Toews,  All My Puny Sorrows (2014)

Other good eggs have noted  this masterpiece’s conspicuous absence from The List. I’m hard-pressed to name a novel that so perfectly calibrates humor and heartbreak. It’s a cliche, but—I laughed, I cried. It is exhilaratingly fun to read, yet there is deep, meaningful consolation in its pages.

The book depicts a fierce tie between two sisters, Yolanda and Elfriede. Elf has long been suicidal. Through Yolanda’s bright, bracing voice, we witness the ongoing crises of living with extraordinary depression and loving a person in constant pain. Toews’ wit is razor-sharp, but never glib. And we never succumb to the maudlin, which allows for all the more emotion.

I press this one into people’s hands. I give it as gifts. I am a road zealot for this book, preaching its gospel far and wide. –BA

Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation (2014)

I can’t think of a weirder novel that more people have read from this century so far. ( 2666 might come closest, but even that is more structurally weird than actually Weird.) VanderMeer’s literal fever dream (the idea for the novel and much of the strangest text— “Where lies the strangling fruit that came from the hand of the sinner I shall bring forth the seeds of the dead to share with the worms that gather in the darkness…” IYKYK—came to the author while he was ill) is an absolutely ripping thriller, a sneaky work of environmental activism, and shot through on a mycelial level with the uncanny. It not only introduced VanderMeer, one of the great speculative writers of our time, to a much wider audience but it pushed a lot of that same audience to seek out other strange tomes. Some books alter you at a fundamental level when you read them, like an infection, and everyone who ventures into Area X comes away changed. –DB

Kerry Howley,  Thrown (2014)

Thrown —Kerry Howley’s 2014 hybrid work of immersion fight journalism, philosophical inquiry, and partially fictionalized memoir—is comfortably the most interesting sports book I have ever read, and I say that as someone who loves sports writing but (criminally-underrated 2011 movie  Warrior  aside) has no real time for MMA. Wandering away from an arid academic conference in Des Moines, the narrator (an unapologetically cerebral, hyper-ruminative version of Howley named “Kit”) finds herself in the crowd at a cage match, utterly entranced by “the honest kind of butchery in which the theory-mangling, logic-maiming academics I had just abandoned would never partake.”

From there she insinuates herself into the lives of two fighters on the fringes of success in the then-marginal sport—one a battered veteran journeyman, the other a cocky up-and-comer—as they destroy and remake themselves every day in the training gym and the octagon. Portraitist and parasite, confidant and disciple, gimlet-eyed anthropologist and die-hard fan, Howley’s Kit captures the balletic savagery of fight sports, and our search for moments of transcendence within their brutal carnality, like nothing I’ve encountered before or since. ( One of our list of great books you probably haven’t read but should ) –DS

Merritt Tierce, Love Me Back   (2014)

By the time Merritt Tierce’s debut novel came out in the fall of 2014, the book had already earned her a nod as one of the National Book Foundation’s “5 Under 35” 2013 class (thanks to early readers) and she had a Rona Jaffe award to boot. It was an auspicious start, one that came with great promise but a good amount of pressure, too.  Love Me Back more than delivered on both counts. One of the decade’s most visceral reads, it charts the life of a young waitress working in a Dallas steakhouse, the kind of place where diners pay top-dollar, abuse their privileges, and the staff works toward a nightly oblivion through a mixture of drugs, drink, sex, and hard labor. The pain that comes along with that labor—a life of service and excess—is chronicled in startling detail.

A strange kind of beauty is found there, too. Tierce charts every long night, every sordid encounter, and the harsh mornings after. Self-destructive behavior abounds, especially for her protagonist, who is reckoning with the decision to abandon a young daughter after a surprise pregnancy. Drugs and strangers become her tools. “It wasn’t about pleasure,” Tierce writes, “it was about how some kinds of pain make fine antidotes to others.” Work is this author’s big theme—the labor, the pride, the indignity, the tolls physical, spiritual, and otherwise. We all interact with the service industry on a daily basis; many of us have worked in it, at some point. Few writers have ever taken it on so directly or with such profound results. ( One of our Best Debut Novels of the Decade, 2010-2019 ) –DM

Yuri Herrera, tr. Lisa Dillman, Signs Preceding the End of the World   (2015)

Signs Preceding the End of the World is barely over 100 pages, and it is almost fable-like, both in length and tone: when you begin reading it, you’re not sure (or at least I wasn’t) whether you’re in our world or another—it begins with a sinkhole, a curse, and a quest. Soon it becomes clear that this  is  our world, or almost, sliced by the border between Mexico and the United States. Borders in this novel—between worlds, between words, between people—are both dangerous and porous, messages meaningless and profound in equal measure. It is an intense, indelible book, an instant myth of love and violence.

Most of the time, when reading books in translation, I do not stop to wonder what the text was like in its original form; I simply accept the book whole, as it is, while knowing it is in some sense inexact. With this novel, however, I found myself pausing, turning sentences over, wondering how their texture had possibly been transposed from the Spanish, wondering what had been lost, what gained. This should not be taken as a slight against the translator, Lisa Dillman, but rather a compliment: the language is so beautiful and strange and precise, such a perfect balance of high and low, that it seems absolutely native to the book, which is of course about translation in some essential sense itself. I suppose I simply need to learn Spanish, so I can read it anew again. ( One of our Best Translated Novels of the Decade, 2010-2019 )   –ET

Fiston Mwanza Mujila, tr. Roland Glasser,  Tram 83 (2015)

I would love to have an en face version of this book, to figure out how, exactly, translator Roland Glasser managed to transpose Fiston Mwanza Mujila’s profane and teeming portrait of a semi-fictional Congolese mining town into the roiling, musical English of  Tram 83 . The novel takes its name from the café-bar-club-brothel at its center, a true demi-monde populated by miners, musicians, malcontents, pimps, gamblers, adventurers, freedom fighters… and, in but a fraction of Mujila’s accounting:

…organized fraudsters and archeologists and would-be bounty hunters and… human organ dealers and farmyard philosophers and hawkers of fresh water and hairdressers and shoeshine boys and repairers of spare parts and…

Bearing witness to this endless stream of characters is Lucien, a writer not infrequently found adrift at the corner table, and the closest thing the novel has to a moral compass. As civil war rages at the indistinct edges of the map, Lucien reenters the atmosphere of his old friend Requiem, a lapsed communist turned black market realist who plays foil to Lucien’s delusions of conscience. It is hard to say who has the clearer picture of the fallen world within which they dwell, the storyteller or the smuggler, but conjured as it is in Glasser’s translation, Mujila’s world will stay with me for years to come. ( One of our Best Translated Novels of the Decade, 2010-2019 ) –JD

William Finnegan,  Barbarian Days   (2015)

Finnegan’s Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir is the new gold standard for surf literature; its stories have already entered the culture’s lore: “Doc” Renneker and San Francisco’s underground scene; camping for months on an uninhabited island in Fiji and being among the first to ride the now famous Cloudbreak; Honolua Bay on acid; defying death on the giant Madeira waves. Finnegan’s prose is meticulous and elegant. He’s been a reporter for most of his life (on staff at the New Yorker , writing about world politics since the 1980s), so you can be sure that he had a notebook along for the adventures relayed in  Barbarian Days . The details shine through: the smell of the sea at an obscure break, the morning wind in Ocean Beach, the inside of a barrel surfed thirty years before.  Barbarian Days has to be approached with some caution, though. It’s not a book to read if you’re feeling unsettled or dissatisfied with the state of your life, because inevitably you’ll hold yours up against Finnegan’s and feel a little inadequate. But if you’re in the mood for the memoir of a life well lived, and well considered, you won’t find a more insightful recollection anywhere. ( One of our favorite surf lit books ) –DM

Margo Jefferson,  Negroland   (2015)

The title of Margo Jefferson’s  Negroland , her memoir of growing up in Chicago in the 1950s and 60s, is her nickname for the space in which she grew up: not just a physical location, but a state of mind. “Negroland” is, in Jefferson’s words, her “name for a small region of Negro America where residents were sheltered by a certain amount of privilege and plenty.” Jefferson’s father was a prominent physician, and her mother was a socialite. She grew up as a member of the black upper-middle-class—experiencing greater wealth and better education, and living a life of greater refinement than most of the white people she encountered while also immersed in a culture that insisted on exceptionalism among the national black community. “Children in Negroland,” she writes, “were warned that few Negroes enjoyed privilege or plenty and that most whites would be glad to see them returned to indigence, deference and subservience. Children there were taught that most other Negroes ought to be emulating us when too many of them (out of envy or ignorance) went on behaving in ways that encouraged racial prejudice.”

Jefferson’s mission, in this magnificent account, is to unfurl all the different, painful, awkward, damaging, and sometimes quasi-empowering components of this highly complicated mass mindset, as well unpack the cultural forces that begat this specific crystallization. Besides that Jefferson’s reflections are so movingly written, her book clearly fulfills a critical need: so rarely do scholars approach issues of race and class simultaneously to such productive ends. Jefferson’s memoir is useful in expressing that the black experience in America is not unilaterally one of inequality and persecution—but that these are components of a larger, varied, more nuanced national identity which also incorporates excellence, achievement, and status.

Negroland additionally offers essential considerations about how oppression manifests within specific groups and grows as forms of self-love and hate. It is also about identification and alienation: who do you identify with, Jefferson asks herself, and why? ( One of our Best Memoirs of the Decade, 2010-2019 ) –OR

Hanya Yanagihara,  A Little Life   (2015)

A Little Life  is a polarizing book. There are those who love it, who hate it, and who spend their entire reading experience vacillating between these extremes. As one of the book’s advocates, even I experienced moments when I felt like throwing the book across the room. But the brilliance of this book is in the unbearable suffering it causes its characters; if the Bible was about how to survive the arbitrary punishments of angry Lord to such figures as Job, then  A Little Life  is about how to stay friends with Job, without forcing Job to, well, get better.

A Little Life  follows four college friends through the ups and downs of their lives in any-time New York City, but is primarily focused on Jude, the survivor of an unimaginable childhood, grimly detailed in the most horrifying sections of the book. (While many would find the depth of suffering in  A Little Life  to be implausible in its extremes, Hanya Yanagihara, at a bookseller meet and greet I attended, said she’d received plenty of mail since publication that would suggest otherwise.) All this suffering sets Jude up for a central conflict between his friends, who want him to be happy, and his own understanding that the best he can aim is not to be happy but instead to just…be.

To me, the plausibility of the text was neither here nor there. My respect for the novel is more grounded in the book’s return to 19 th  century style emotional narratives, as opposed to the hyper-masculine modernity of mid-century America that insisted on short sentences from the perspectives of nascent psychopaths (yes, that was a jibe at Hemingway). It’s also a turn away from the usual misery memoir’s happy healing, in favor of a grimly realistic portrayal of the long shadow of trauma.  A Little Life  gives me all the feels, and yet provides no easy answers, and to me, that’s what makes for good literature. ( One of our Best Novels of the Decade, 2010-2019 ) –MO

Mike McCormack,  Solar Bones   (2016)

The flap copy on my edition of  Solar Bones  gives away the ending, or at least the kicker. I’m going to give it away again, now, so look away if you’re one of those people who clutches their pearls at “spoilers,” as if one could spoil great literature by detailing any point of its plot. So: Marcus Conway is dead. And in this exceptional, strange novel, whose present action is no more than a few hours on All Souls’ Day, Marcus sits at his kitchen table and recounts the day of his death—and much of the life that came before it—in one book-length sentence, an incantatory ode to small town life in western Ireland. But the experimental formatting isn’t even the most impressive feature of the novel—I mean, before this I never would have imagined that I could be so enchanted by a book largely about the daily habits and various relationships and minor work dramas of a middle-aged civil engineer. What magic is that?

And ultimately, that’s what is so profound about this novel: it takes something quite straightforward—a regular person’s life—and presents it so carefully, so lyrically and specifically, that it can’t help but become cosmic, philosophical, a whole world to wonder at. This is why the ending—whether you know it’s coming or not—is so gutting. It’s an apocalypse, a small one, and you feel it, even as the cars continue to stream by outside your bedroom window. ( One of our Best Novels of the Decade, 2010-2019 ) –ET

Danielle Dutton,  Margaret the First   (2016)

I have been recommending this slim, glinting dagger of novel since it came out in 2016, to anyone who will listen, and I’m not going to stop now. Look, “best of” lists like this one should be messy and idiosyncratic and unexpected, reflections of long and heated arguments by people who care a lot about books and are always reading—what they shouldn’t be is calibrated to please everyone. Having said that—and aside from my love of Danielle Dutton’s miraculous first-person inhabitation of 17th-century Renaissance woman Margaret Cavendish—I would like this book to serve as representative evidence of all the short novels that might not be epic in length, but are so in scope, that are too often left off lists like this one because they don’t immediately register as monumental. But back to the book.

Of noble station, Margaret Cavendish—aka “Mad Madge—was a real person, a writer of plays, poetry, philosophical treatises, scientific theories, and more. The first woman ever invited to the Royal Society in London, Cavendish did, indeed, achieve the intellectual fame she’d long sought; unsurprisingly, her accomplishments were diminished at every turn, as many claimed her books must have been written by her husband. Dutton (who founded Dorothy: A Publishing Project) realizes the outsize ambitions of this remarkable book with virtuosic efficiency, braiding first- and third-person perspectives with passages from Cavendish’s original writing. I will be recommending this book for the next decade. ( One of our Best Novels of the Decade, 2010-2019 ) –JD

Garth Greenwell,  What Belongs to You   (2016)

The first section of Garth Greenwell’s debut is almost a love story: a young man teaching English in Sofia, Bulgaria meets a hustler named Mitko while cruising in a public bathroom. But as their relationship unfolds, it becomes not quite a romance, though not  not  a romance: something stickier and stranger and more real than you typically encounter in novels.

The first section is wonderful: beautifully written and intriguing. But it’s the second section that made me lose my breath a little: it’s mostly a single, unbroken paragraph, which is the kind of stylistic choice that would normally make me roll my eyes, or at least skip ahead in the book, one finger on the page at hand, to see where I could expect the next visual and mental break. But in this novel, I did not want a visual or mental break—I only wanted more of this. “A Grave” is a series of memories about the narrator’s childhood in rural Kentucky, and about his relationship with his father—it is the heart of the book, a stylistic and emotional lynchpin, but it’s also simply so astute, so expertly drawn, so mesmerizing. Writing in The Guardian , Andrew Solomon called it “the best first novel I’ve read in a generation” I have to say I agree. ( One of our Best Debut Novels of the Decade, 2010-2019 ) –ET

Elif Batuman,  The Idiot   (2017)

The Idiot  is one of those books that expanded my understanding of what a novel could look like. It is meandering, but it meanders with such gusto that I never doubted that Elif Batuman knew exactly where she was leading me.  The Idiot  is a campus novel, telling the story of its protagonist’s first year at Harvard. She—Selin—has a romantic interest (their relationship is sort of one-and-a-half-sided—their courtship mostly takes place in the then-nascent medium of email), but mostly she bobs along. That’s part of it, the bobbing. Selin is something of a buoy in a world of torpedoes. If this sounds tiresome, consider the profound power of the incredibly funny, linguistically virtuosic narrator.  The Idiot  is occasionally baggy, but its voice is so thoroughly charming that I could have read volumes of it. Selin is, if occasionally bewildered, also full of wonder, without any of the tweeness with which that word is sometimes unfairly burdened.  The Idiot  is a novel of ideas, a novel of fascination. And it’s just so damn funny. Of the novel’s humor,  Cathleen Schine writes , “Language is the medium and language is the comedian, language is the star and the prop, Chaplin and the globe he balances, the hungry fellow and the shoe he dines on.”  The Idiot  is, for all its shaggy bits, a perfectly self-contained world. ( One of our Best Novels of the Decade, 2010-2019 )   –JG

Ottessa Moshfegh,  Homesick for Another World   (2017)

My Year of Rest and Relaxation  may have launched a thousand novels about affectless women, and  Eileen  may have been the best cash grab ever, but it’s the stories that have the most staying power, even after what might be described as a communal cultural cooling on Moshfegh, after several years of high fever.

Most of the stories in  Homesick for Another World  were originally published in  The Paris Review , including the wonderful (and frequently horrifying, in the best way) “ Bettering Myself ,” the opening story of  Homesick for Another World , which won the Plimpton Prize in 2013. A couple are from The New Yorker  and  Vice , one each from  Granta  and  The Baffler , one original. They are all basically realist, if dark, psychological portraits, but there’s something fabulistic about them—Moshfegh pushes humanity to its logical extension, and the results are grotesque and poignant. It’s not quite surrealism—maybe I would call it slime-coated realism. She has a sharp, ironic eye, and a flat affect, which contributes to the sense of irreality, but she’s doing more than just rolling her eyes at her—often horrible—characters; she’s getting into the muck with them, and pulling us along for the ride.

It may not be my actual favorite, but the story I think about most often from this collection is “ The Beach Boy ”—which may be because, as a committed hypochondriac, I am in constant fear of dying the way Marcia does in this story, but also because of the expert unspooling of her husband once she’s gone. ( One of our Best Short Story Collections of the Decade, 2010-2019 ) –ET

Carmen Maria Machado,  Her Body and Other Parties   (2017)

“[P]erhaps you’re thinking,” the narrator of “Resident,” a short story by Carmen Maria Machado in  Her Body and Other Parties , muses, “that I’m a cliché—a weak, trembling thing with a silly root of adolescent trauma, straight out of a gothic novel.” The reference to being in a gothic story is intriguingly apt. On the one hand, “Resident” deliberately conjures up a gothic atmosphere of dread that feels like it could have been taken from many other stories in the genre; on the other, though, it says something about Machado’s haunting collection as a whole. Many of the stories in  Her Bodies and Other Parties  contain echoes of the images and themes that so often constellate gothic literature and “the gothic” as a mode or atmosphere of writing: ghosts, beheadings, violence, trauma, claustrophobic environments, a pervading sense of unease or uncertainty.

But while many classic tales of gothic literature—with a few exceptions—have portrayed women as tropes at best and monsters at worst, Machado’s stories beautifully and poignantly focus on what it means to be a woman, to inhabit a woman’s body, in a gothic landscape that, for all its ghosts and mysterious plagues, feels all too terrifyingly, traumatically like the world we live in. Women are harassed in the stories, as much by people as by the unsettling atmospheres around them. From the title itself, Machado makes it clear that collection will focus on women’s bodies–and her deployment of the dispassionate-sounding “parties” as the title’s second half suggests the cool detachment with which male harassment, for instance, so often involves equating women’s worth to their bodies. Yet “parties” can also suggest festivity, and her women, for all the horror around them, have moments of happiness and release, too.  Her Body and Other Parties is a masterful reimagining of what the gothic can do and be, creating a world in which the tremendous weight of being a woman is chillingly palpable throughout nearly all of the stories. It’s a powerful collection that surprised me in the best of ways, and I think it will continue to for a long time to come. ( One of our Best Short Story Collections of the Decade, 2010-2019 ) –Gabrielle Bellot, Contributing Wtier

Layli Long Soldier, WHEREAS (2017)

When considering “work that will last” as a benchmark for inclusion on a list like this, I keep coming back to Layli Long Soldier’s collection specifically because of how it simultaneously acknowledges, engages/struggles with, and then works to dismantle the violence (both literal and linguistic) perpetrated by the United States government against the indigenous population of North America. The title poem came about as a response to the 2009 Congressional Resolution of Apology to Native Peoples of the United States, which President Obama signed without a public reading or any representatives from any Native American tribes present—and while Long Soldier rightly turns a furious eye to the continued historical erasure of an entire population, she also presents a formally playful and brightly hopeful collection that reminds us of the power of language to write (and re-write) history. –DB

Adania Shibli, tr. Elisabeth Jaquette,  Minor Detail   (2017)

No book in recent memory has stuck with me more than this sparse, haunting novel by the acclaimed Palestinian author. Told in two parts, the book follows the 1949 violation and murder of a young Bedouin-Palestinian girl in 1949 by Israeli soldiers, and then a contemporary woman from Ramallah who learns about the incident and is driven to discover more. Shibli’s writing is gorgeous, and her unnamed characters, moving in locations that shift between Israeli and Palestinian names, penetrate our empathies and memories, hinging on the desire to recover silenced voices and correct the wrongs of history. She brings us close to a world defined by expropriation, violence, and casual brutality.  –JF

adrienne maree brown, emergent strategy (2017)

I’d be willing to bet that if you talked to anybody who participated heavily in the waves of progressive organizing and collective action over the last eight years, you’ll find this book in their libraries. For all that, it also still feels like a secret text, like the kind of thing you pass along to a friend hand-to-hand with a knowing smile. It is a guidebook and toolkit for hope, for how to make a more expansive future and how to survive these revanchist times. And all the self-care girlies out there might not know it, but they owe a debt to amb and this book. –DB

Olga Tokarczuk, tr. Jennifer Croft,  Flights   (2018)

The book that established Olga Tokarczuk’s name in the Anglophone world could’ve easily been structured and marketed as a book of short stories, perhaps some of them interconnected. But the fact that  Flights  is a novel seems somehow more true-to-life in the way that our lives, yours and mine, are discontinuous, fragmented, full of returns and departures, progress and regression. When your eulogy is read, who will describe your singular life in terms of chapter breaks and clean divisions?  Flights , an apt title wonderfully rendered by translator Jennifer Croft, felt almost like it was eschewing novelty for novelty’s sake. Rather, it pushed against the edges of the novel’s form to make us second-guess whether the form was somehow actually “exhausted.”

Tokarczuk’s stories encompass different epochs, locations, lengths, perspectives and tonal registers: a Polish man on vacation searches for his missing wife and kid; a classics professor experiences a fatal fall aboard a boat heading to Athens; a nameless narrator marvels at the potential of a floating plastic bag; a German doctor obsesses over body parts and their preservation. Tokarczuk is working in a similar vein as Italo Calvino in  If on a winter’s night a traveler , Georges Perec in  Life: A User’s Manual ,and Jorge Luis Borges in his short story, “The Library of Babel.” That is, she has an eye for the paradox of the encyclopedic project, which seeks at once to encompass a significant range of information and possibilities while also leaving room for expansion. As James Wood wrote in his  New Yorker  review,  Flights  is “a work both modish and antique, apparently postmodern in emphasis but fed by the exploratory energies of the Renaissance.” ( One of our Best Translated Novels of the Decade, 2010-2019 )   –Aaron Robertson, Editor Emeritus

Sally Rooney,  Normal People   (2018)

It’s tempting, when something becomes popular, to begin to feel a little embarrassed about it. Especially in the literary world (unless your publishing job depends on it, of course). Millions of readers can’t be right , can they? What if those readers are—gasp— Millennials ? Even worse—what if they’re women? Anyway, it’s not just Millennials or women or Millennial women who like Sally Rooney, whose novels are wildly compelling, seductive, and very, very smart about the ways people interact with, misunderstand, and love each other. This one was once described elsewhere on this site as “George Eliot’s  Middlemarch for the modern age,” which feel strong but also possibly true. (Her latest, Intermezzo , might be even better.) –ET

Richard Wagamese, Indian Horse   (2018)

Most of us (I hope) are at least intellectually aware of the centuries of colonial violence meted out by European settlers upon the Indigenous nations of North America, and though we don’t need to  feel  something to grasp its injustice, art is here to remind us of the specific human cost of systematized theft and racism.

The late Richard Wagamese’s  Indian Horse (first published in Canada in 2012, but released in the US by Milkweed in 2018) recounts the all too familiar story of Indigenous children stolen from their parents to be (re)educated in the ways of Christian empire. In this case, that story happens in one of Canada’s notorious “residential schools,” church-run boarding schools that were effectively prisons, in which all traces of First Nations’ culture were forbidden (language, first and foremost), and where neglect, abuse, and even murder, were tragically commonplace. Though the material is necessarily grim, Wagamese doesn’t fetishize despair, and allows his main character, Saul, the chance to feel something like joy as he discovers a preternatural talent for hockey. And though the sport might only represent a brief respite for Saul, from a lifetime of pain and loss, these sections contain the best writing about a sport I have ever read. ( One of our Best Novels of the Decade, 2010-2019 )   –JD

Ling Ma,  Severance   (2018)

Do you remember being nine and staying up all night, reading with a flashlight under the covers because you simply could not wait until morning to know what happens next? Reading Ling Ma’s  Severance  gave me that need-to-know feeling. The bare-bones premise alone is fascinating: something calls Shen Fever strikes New York City. It spreads like wild fire, turning the afflicted into a kind of zombie–not so much dangerous as they are really banal. The “fevered” are stuck mindlessly in their everyday routines (one particularly haunting scene includes watching a fevered family set the table, go through the motions of eating, clear the dishes, rinse, and repeat), which they perform until their bodies rot.

Our heroine Candace Chen is a twenty-something-year-old working in Bible production. She’s a hard worker, a creature of habit, and pretty much the only one who stays in Manhattan through the horrors of Shen Fever.  Severance  jumps back and forth between her normal days to her suffocating stint with a band of survivors after leaving the city. Ling Ma is a master at cutting through time, and leaving us in moments where, much like everyone else in the story, we’re wondering how did we even get here?

While other families flee, Candace moves into her office, continues to work, and starts an anonymous photography blog of the decimated city. (In a lot of ways, this is a story about being disillusioned by New York.) (And also a pretty funny and creepy critique of capitalism and the workplace.) Honestly, Candace’s matter-of-fact, unsentimental tone makes her the perfect person to be with during what feels like the end of the world.

We also learn that Candace has no family in America. Both of her parents are dead. About halfway through, we get to what I think is kind of the heart of the thing: Ling Ma pulls us even further back into the past, showing us a bit of Candace’s childhood and her family’s immigration to America.  Severance  is a brilliantly-told story that uses the zombie apocalypse trope to reveal the sometimes-hollowness of things like nostalgia, religion, and the things we do to assimilate to a new culture.  ( One of our Best Debut Novels of the Decade, 2010-2019 ) –Katie Yee, Editor Emeritus

Ahmed Saadawi, tr. Jonathan Wright,  Frankenstein in Baghdad   (2018)

Full, potentially compromising disclosure: I’m here for most, if not all,  Frankenstein  adaptations and/or reimaginings, from the highs of Danny Boyle’s  theatrical production  to the alleged lows of the 2014 Aaron Eckhart-fronted sci-fi action horror flick  I, Frankenstein . Shelly’s novel is, for me, the greatest horror tale in literary history, and I welcome all acolytes, regardless of how clumsy their tributes may be. Saadawi’s unabashedly political, blackly funny contemporary take on the mythos (superb translated by Jonathan Wright, who captures the wry humor and brooding, ominous rhythms of Saadawi’s dark tale) is, however, a true standout in a very crowded field. Set within the tumult and devastation of U.S.-occupied Baghdad, it’s the tale of Hadi—a scavenger and local eccentric—who collects human body parts, stumbled upon or sought out in the wake of suicide bombings, and stitches them together to create a corpse.

When his creation disappears, and a wave of gruesome murders sweeps the Iraqi capital, Hadi realizes that he has, ahem, created a monster. What’s so fascinating about  Frankenstein in Baghdad —an ingenious tonal blending of conflict reportage, mordent satire, gruesome horror, and tender travelogue—is that, like its malevolent star, the book’s effectiveness lies in its patchwork nature. There’s something awesome and terrifying about watching this abomination’s unlikely rise from the operating table, its ability to wreak havoc with a conjured power far greater than the sum of its disparate parts. As Dwight Garner wrote in his  New York Times review of the book: “What happened in Iraq was a spiritual disaster, and this brave and ingenious novel takes that idea and uncorks all its possible meanings.” ( One of our Best Translated Novels of the Decade, 2010-2019 ) –DS

Tommy Orange,  There There   (2018)

Tommy Orange’s kaleidoscopic novel about 12 different Native Americans living in and around Oakland won pretty much all the most coveted prizes for debut novels in the year it came out: the National Book Critic Circle’s John Leonard Prize, the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, the Center for Fiction’s first novel prize. It was also a bestseller, a feat for such a complex literary novel; it was, for a while there, the book everyone was telling everyone to read.

It was so hyped that the editors of  The New York Times  felt they had to title Colm Tóibín’s (glowing) review “ Yes, Tommy Orange’s New Novel Really Is That Good .” And, well, it is—gripping, tense, and weighty, and stylistically light on its feet if unrelentingly bleak in its conclusions. It looks directly at something most (white) Americans would like to ignore: our systematic subjugation of Indigenous people and, more pointedly, the continuing repercussions of that subjugation. ( One of our Best Debut Novels of the Decade, 2010-2019 ) –ET

Deborah Levy, The Man Who Saw Everything  (2019)

NYT, I knock credibility points for not having enough international entries, and not having enough entries that celebrate strange, ecstatic, nonlinear forms. This novel checks both boxes. Nominally following an academic named Saul Adler in and around his adolescence in east Germany, this book is in practice a prismatic fever dream. Events radiate out from a brush with death on Abbey Road in 1988, and from there we learn Adler’s life in fragments, hopping through time to a near-present day. Narrative sands shift constantly underfoot, but the ride is majestic.

Levy’s a terrific stylist But this novel’s nuanced and appropriately absurd engagements with meaty themes (fascism, complicity, masculinity) make it a modern masterwork. –BA

Jake Skeets, Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers (2019)

Jake Skeets’s poems are tender and brutal and hard to turn away from; it’s like someone has spilled an old shoebox of overexposed Polaroids onto the kitchen table and you can’t go to bed, can’t stop drinking, until you’ve fully taken each one in. And as you do, you’ll find “Drunktown”—aka Skeets’s hometown of Gallup, New Mexico—slowly revealed: its violence, its beat-up beauty, its queerness, its indifference to Indigenous bodies as broken by capitalism (mining) as they are by racism (police). It’s all here in the opening poem, “Drunktown”:

Men around here only touch when they fuck in a backseat go for the foul with thirty seconds left hug their sons after high school graduation open a keg stab my uncle forty-seven times behind a liquor store.

Why is this one of the best books of the 21st-century? Because with this collection Skeets (re)claimed that very American down-and-out register so beloved of all the great, white, hard-luck poets (think Bob Dylan, Frank Stanford, Denis Johnson, Tom Waits) and made it something richer, truer, at once sadder and more beautiful, yet somehow funny (see above, the last line like a Mitch Hedberg aside). An important book.

Susan Choi,  Trust Exercise   (2019)

Susan Choi’s fifth novel  Trust Exercise  is a novel in three parts. There’s a lot of concern over not ruining the twist that comes in part two (and to a lesser extent, part three), but it’s impossible to describe quite why this is one of the best novels of the decade without giving it away. So if you haven’t read it yet, stop reading this and just trust that the central hinge is perfect, and that you should go read it. Now, the spoilers. The first section of the novel begins at a performing arts school in the 1980s, a love story between Sarah and David, friends from opposite sides of the tracks, that suffer through their teenage years, their drama amplified by being sensitive, ambitious theater kids. The shift in part two is that this first story is, in fact, the story within the story, a book written by an adult Sarah (who is not actually called Sarah), being read now by a secondary character from the first story, someone named Karen (who is likewise not actually called Karen).

It is an incredibly bold, somewhat shocking twist, resulting in an unraveling that’s pure craft. In  The New York Times Book Review , it was labeled unlovingly a “bait and switch,” while Dwight Garner (in the same paper) wrote that it made the book “burn more brightly than anything [Choi’s] yet written.” The second part of the novel is a revenge story too, with carefully built suspense (and a theatrical play with an actual gun), while the third dovetails perfectly, if a bit expectedly, into the future of not-Karen’s life. The premise of  Trust Exercise is that teenagers are real people, not just unformed adults, with real concerns and emotional intelligence; they, too, are worthy of great literature. ( One of our Best Novels of the Decade, 2010-2019 ) –EF

Anna Burns,  Milkman   (2019)

Anna Burns’s  Milkman  requires a little commitment. I don’t particularly hold to the idea that some books are “easy” while some are “hard” (or that there is particular virtue in either case) but Burns’s unspooling story of a young woman in Belfast during The Troubles asks of its readers that they be good listeners, that they might have the patience to let the novel’s speech-driven rhythms carry them along, its endless clause-laden sentences tugging like a current toward some unknown destination.

The novel doesn’t specifically locate us in Belfast, nor does it give us an exact era; in fact, the only character that’s ever granted a name is the “Milkman,” an IRA higher-up who may or may not be courting the main character, who’s something close to 18. Already deemed odd for her habit of walking the (dangerous) streets with her nose in a book, the attentions of the older man—he shows up at random in his white van—has people talking (but always just out of earshot, the curtains quickly drawn).  Milkman is all menace and mood, its ambiguities like dark corners, places of concealment, its violence latent throughout, ready to explode. ( One of our Best Novels of the Decade, 2010-2019 )   –JD

Sarah M. Broom,  The Yellow House   (2019)

Before I picked it up, Sarah Broom’s  The Yellow House  was intriguing to me precisely because it blends memoir with so many other forms. In her review of the books,  Angela Flournoy describes  it as “part oral history, part urban history, part celebration of a bygone way of life.”

The oral history component is drawn from Broom’s interviews with her mother and her 12 siblings about their lives in New Orleans East, an area of the city once vaunted as “a ‘new frontier,’ ripe for development,” which by the time Broom was coming of age there had been largely abandoned by the city. Her brothers and mother tell their stories of Katrina, “the Water,” which Broom experienced from New York, in one of the most wrenching sections of the book. The hurricane destroys the titular Yellow House and scatters the Broom family across the country. Broom herself lives for some months in Burundi before returning to New Orleans to work as a speechwriter for the mayor, then back to New York, then to New Orleans once more.

Broom is a master of sentences, but she also knows precisely when to hand over the floor. The result is a gorgeous pastiche of histories that is at once deeply personal and incredibly wide-ranging. Home—both the physical and the intangible sorts—are at the center of the story. The question of who gets to have a home in America, in the face of vast income inequality, institutional racism, and climate change, is ever-present. In his review,  Dwight Garner predicts  that  The Yellow House “will come to be considered among the essential memoirs of this vexing decade.” I couldn’t agree more. ( One of our Best Memoirs of the Decade, 2010-2019 ) –JG

Agustín Fernández Mallo, tr. Thomas Bunstead, Nocilla Dream (2019)

A quilt of fiction and non-fiction, the first book in Spanish author Agustín Fernández Mallo’s Nocilla Trilogy—originally published in Spain in 2006—is masterful, and remains my favorite of the three. The cycle has a sense of experimentation and conceptual journeying, indebted both to his training as a physicist and to his love of artists like Robert Smithson. Something is wagered, or guessed, and Mallo’s writing seeks to test and explore the imagined and hypothesized reality. Will it knit together? Fittingly, these books came out of Mallo’s confinement to a hotel bed, after a motorcycle accident in Thailand left him with a broken hip. As he told  The Paris Review , “I started making notes in a very intuitive way, on pieces of paper I found around the room, and at the end I saw that I had these novels.” Mallo’s work is poetic and challenging, and not to be missed. –JF

Robert Macfarlane,  Underland   (2019)

One hesitates to label any book by a living writer his “magnum opus” but Macfarlane’s  Underland —a deeply ambitious work that somehow exceeds the boundaries it sets for itself—reads as offertory and elegy both, finding wonder in the world even as we mourn its destruction by our own hand. If you’re unfamiliar with its project, as the name would suggest,  Underland  is an exploration of the world beneath our feet, from the legendary catacombs of Paris to the ancient caveways of Somerset, from the hyperborean coasts of far Norway to the mephitic karst of the Slovenian-Italian borderlands.

Macfarlane has always been a generous guide in his wanderings, the glint of his erudition softened as if through the welcoming haze of a fireside yarn down the pub. Even as he considers all we have wrought upon the earth, squeezing himself into the darker chambers of human creation—our mass graves, our toxic tombs—Macfarlane never succumbs to pessimism, finding instead in the contemplation of deep time a path to humility. This is an epochal work, as deep and resonant as its subject matter, and would represent for any writer the achievement of a lifetime. ( One of our Best Works of Nonfiction of the Decade, 2010-2019 ) –JD

Eric Vuillard, tr. Mark Polizzotti, The Order Of The Day  (2020)

Slim and lyrical, Vuillard’s history of institutional ineptitudes and personal cowardices as the Nazis pushed their way across Germany and then Europe is shocking and affecting. The opening chapter places us at the table alongside Germany’s most powerful businessmen in February 1933—many of whose firms still live on today as BASF, Bayer, Agfa, Opel, IG Farben, Siemens, Allianz, and Telefunken—as they meet with the ascendent fascists, and cement the elite and moneyed support for the regime, sealing a nation’s fate. Vuillard hardly has to belabor the connections between his history and the contemporary. The book—a long essay, really—details the small, sad heroics, galling abdications, and infuriating allowances that unmade Europe. Vuillard’s writing is arresting in its beauty and care, and reading it is swift and memorable, like having the wind knocked out of you. –JF

Jessamine Chan, The School for Good Mothers (2021)

Frida Liu made a mistake—she left her daughter Harriet alone in the house one afternoon. And because of this one moment of poor judgement, the government must determine if Frida is “good” enough to keep her daughter or if she must be sent to a “school” where she will parent a robot child in order to prove that she is redeemable. A School for Good Mothers explores the violence enacted upon women by the state and by society (husbands, mistresses, and other mothers). It is a page-turner of a novel set in a near-future where the government’s power to separate families is unlimited, where motherhood is a test, and where women are set up to fail. Chilling, prescient, the sort of novel that will stick with readers a century from now. – EF

Sarah Schulman, Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT Up New York 1987-1993 (2021)

We might debate the wisdom of pitting essays, journalism, stories, and novels all against one another for a “best of” list. But so long as we’re all doing filigree with a fan brush, Sarah Schulman’s oral history of ACT-UP more than deserves inclusion. If I were in charge of stocking the next Voyager-style time capsule to commemorate our culture for alien civilizations, I might put this book in…first?

On the one hand, it’s a feat of historical correction. Schulman’s document of the AIDS crisis is everything the epidemic’s early media coverage was not: human, precise, personal, and full of righteous fury. This book will agonize with its intimate accounts of death by government. But—and to botch  a Flo Kennedy slogan —in its pages, Schulman also shows us how to  organize . By   chronicling a coalition’s early, sticky efforts to make change,  Let the Record Show  models how  anyone c an join a movement. Given our present organizing conditions, I can’t think of anything better for a book to do.  –BA

Patricia Lockwood, No One is Talking About This (2021)

A list of the best novels of the century should of course include a novel that perfectly mimics Twitter, the social media de rigueur of the first quarter of the century. Lockwood’s novel begins with the fragmentary reflections of a woman deep inside “the portal,” mimicking the “post-sense, post-irony, post-everything” of social media. “Are we all just going to keep doing this until we die?” In the second half of the novel, the protagonist has to cope with real life—a sister, a pregnancy, a death, grief and love. It is a novel about what it means to be a person today. –EF

Harald Voetmann, tr. Johanne Sorgenfri Ottosen, Sublunar  (2023)

The second in a trilogy of short, historical novels,  Sublunar  is an absurd, visceral, and profound portrait of some very nasty astronomers. Set in 16th-century Denmark, the book follows astronomer Tycho Brahe and his dirty, slovenly assistants, who are as dedicated to measuring and cataloging the heavens as they are to sloshing around in the pleasures and miseries of their very earthy lives. Their attempts to make sense of the universe, their earnest amazement at its marvels, and their unrelenting corporal drive make for surprising moments of introspection and revelation. These are people who are all too captive to their bodies, but can’t help but gaze up and wonder. –JF

Paul Murray, The Bee Sting (2023)

At the risk of recency bias, I’m throwing in for Paul Murray’s sweeping, funny, and completely devastating family saga. It’s a page turner in that it’s impossible to put down, but the plotting never feels like a trick—to be honest, I’m still at a loss to describe Murray’s mastery of suspense and pacing. I haven’t stopped thinking about the lives of the four members of Barnes family since this one knocked the wind out of me. –JG

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The Complete List of New York Times Nonfiction Best Sellers

Go beyond just the current list of New York Times Nonfiction Best Sellers 2024 to discover every bestselling book listed on the NYT Bestseller List in 2024.

Since 1931, The New York Times has been publishing a weekly list of bestselling books. Since then, becoming a New York Times bestseller has become a dream for virtually every writer.

When I first started reading adult books, one of the first places I went for book recommendations was the New York Times Nonfiction Nonfiction Best Sellers. I wanted to know what books were the most widely read, and start with those.

However, scrolling through the list week by week on The New York Times website is rather annoying. I just wanted all the bestselling nonfiction books gathered together in one place.

When I couldn’t find it, I decided to create it.

Here are all the New York Times nonfiction bestsellers from this year. I’ve got the current #1 and this week’s bestselling list, both of which you can find all over the place.

This list also compiles every book that appears on the New York Times Nonfiction Best Sellers list in 2024 for Hardcover Nonfiction. Every week I update it so you can get the most accurate view of the year in one place.

Since this is a bit of a sprawling post, feel free to jump to the section that most interests you or take your time scrolling through the complete list of New York Times nonfiction best sellers.

Quick Links

• Current #1 NYT Bestseller
• Current New York Times Nonfiction Best Seller List
• Previous #1 Fiction Best Sellers
• Heavyweights (10+ Weeks)
• Fan Favorites (5+ Weeks)
• Honorable Mention (2+ Weeks)
• One Hit Wonders

Don’t Miss a Thing

Current #1 New York Times Best Seller

Melania Trump

( 4 Weeks ) Former First Lady Melania Trump shares an intimate look at her life. Trump details her childhood in Slovenia and her rise in the high fashion industry in Europe and New York. A chance encounter led her to meet Donald Trump, never realizing she would become the first lady of the United States. Trump expounds on her advocacy work and the causes closest to her.

Publication Date: 8 October 2024 Amazon | Goodreads | StoryGraph

Current List of New York Times Best Sellers

The former first lady describes her work as a fashion model, marriage to Donald Trump and time in the White House.

Our criminal justice system viewed through the struggles of 10 wrongfully convicted people to achieve exoneration.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist looks at our contentious time through battles in Ukraine and the Middle East and for the American presidency.

A memoir by the cookbook author and Food Network host known as the Barefoot Contessa.

Through a series of stories, Gladwell explicates the causes of various kinds of epidemics.

Presley’s memoir, completed by her daughter, explores her relationships and challenges.

The author of “Between the World and Me” travels to three locations to uncover the dissonance between the realities on the ground and the narratives shaped about them.

A co-author of “The Coddling of the American Mind” looks at the mental health impacts that a phone-based life has on children.

The conservative commentator evaluates the legacies of American presidents.

A posthumously published memoir by the late Russian political opposition leader and political prisoner who began writing this after his near-fatal poisoning in 2020.

A collection of stories of soldiers who served in conflicts overseas.

The drummer of the iconic rock band Van Halen shares stories about his partnership in life and music with his late brother Edward.

The multiple award-winning actor traces his steps from the South Bronx to avant-garde theater in New York to the creation of his iconic roles.

The actor and author of “Taste” documents meals he had in a variety of settings and contexts.

The actress, known for her role on “One Tree Hill,” describes her time in a cult and how she stepped away from it.

See what Upcoming Releases are coming out soon!

Previous #1 New York Times Nonfiction Best Sellers

Greenlights

Matthew mcconaughey.

(99 Weeks) Academy Award-winning actor Matthew McConaughey offers a memoir on his approach to getting the most satisfaction out of life. McConaughey poured over decades of his diaries to share the highs and lows of his life and the funny stories that shaped him along the way.

Publication Date: 20 October 2020 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

I’m Glad My Mom Died

Jennette mccurdy.

(88 Weeks) Both vulnerable and hilarious, Jennette McCurdy’s tell-all memoir sends a poignant message of the dangers of child acting. McCurdy brilliantly embraces her inner child by describing how desperately she wanted to please her mom by acting, even if it lead to an eating disordered and a chaotic relationship with her family that she didn’t full understand until attending therapy after her mother’s death. 

Publication Date: 9 August 2022 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

Peter Attia

(79 Weeks) Who doesn’t want to live longer? Peter Atria has all the strategies that will help you live longer … and better. Using the latest science, Atria explains how to improve your physical, cognitive, and emotional health so that you can help prevent chronic disease and extend your lifespan.

Publication Date: 28 March 2023 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

Hillbilly Elegy

J. d. vance.

( 77 Weeks ) J. D. Vance’s grandparents were part of a large migration from rural Kentucky to the growing industrial areas of Southwest Ohio after WWII. Yet in their new middle-class life, Vance’s grandparents and his mother and her siblings all struggled to break the cycle of violence, abuse, alcoholism, and poverty. Joining the military and eventually attending Law School at Yale, Vance can still feel the trauma of his chaotic family history and forces readers to ponder how culture affects us and what heritage you will pass down to your children.

Publication Date: 28 June 2016 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

David Grann

( 67 Weeks ) In 1742, a patched-together vessel washed up on the shores of Brazil with thirty emaciated men. They told an astounding tale of surviving after the HMS Wager was shipwrecked chasing a Spanish treasure galleon. After cobbling together a raft, they floated for 100 days and traveled 3,000 miles. The sailors were lauded as heroes until six months later when three more castaways washed ashore accusing the first men of mutiny. With accusations of treachery and murder, a court-martial is convened to find the truth, with the guilty party likely to be hung.

Publication Date: 18 April 2023 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

What Happened to You?

Bruce d. perry and oprah winfrey.

(58 Weeks) Instead of asking What’s wrong with you? , we should be asking What happened to you ? Oprah Winfrey teams up with neuroscientist Bruce D. Perry to discuss how understanding the trauma we faced at a young age can impact our behaviors now. By understanding our past, we can shift our viewpoint and see a clear path to healing.

Publication Date: 27 April 2021 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing

Matthew perry.

(34 Weeks) Known for his role as Chandler Bing on Friends , Matthew Perry gives a behind-the-scenes look at the hit sitcom. Yet, while his career was hitting a high, Perry struggled through some of his darkest days. In this candid memoir, Perry discusses his lifelong battle with addiction and the persistence, hope, and friends who helped him along the way.

Publication Date: 1 November 2022 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

The Anxious Generation

Jonathan haidt.

( 32 Weeks ) The author goes into why moving from a play-based childhood to a screen-based childhood has changed the neurological development children, making them more anxious, along with other mental health problems.  He shows why this causes them to withdraw further into a digital world, and then proposes a solution that he says will reduce the incidence of mental illness in the rising generations.

Publication Date: 26 March 2024 Amazon | Goodreads

Walter Isaacson

(28 Weeks ) From the author of  Steve Jobs  and other bestselling biographies, this is the astonishingly intimate story of the most fascinating and controversial innovator of our era—a rule-breaking visionary who helped to lead the world into the era of electric vehicles, private space exploration, and artificial intelligence. Oh, and took over Twitter.

Publication Date: 14 March 2023 Amazon | Goodreads I More Info

The Demon of Unrest

Erik larson.

( 21 Weeks ) Erik Larson delves into the five months between Abraham Lincoln’s election and the first shots fired on Fort Sumter that started the Civil War. In a period of betrayal, error, and miscommunication, Larson focuses on the stories of four individuals: Sumter’s commander caught between sympathy to the South and loyalty to the Union; a bloodthirsty radical promoting secession at every turn; the wife of a local planter who is conflicted about marriage and slavery; and in the thick of it all, is Abraham Lincoln, desperately trying to avert a war.

Publication Date: 30 April 2024 Learn More: Goodreads | StoryGraph |  More Info Buy Now: Amazon | Apple Books

The Woman in Me

Britney spears.

( 20 Weeks ) In the 1990s, Britney Spears burst onto the scene and became a cultural pop icon and leading the way for the teen pop revival of the 90s and 00s. Yet fame brought personal struggles and a shocking conservatorship that trapped her for decades. In her new memoir, Britney Spears discusses her journey and the power of telling your own story. Though not the best-written memoir of the year, The Woman in Me shocks with details about Spears’s life and contemplates the private pain of a public figure.

Publication Date: 24 October 2023 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

Poverty, by America

Matthew desmond.

( 18 Weeks ) The United States of America is one of the wealthiest nations in the world, yet has more poverty than any other advanced democracy. Sociologist Matthew Desmond explores the root of poverty in America. From concentrating wealth (and poverty) to subsidizing those already financially secure, Desmond gives a searing look into how America keeps the rich rich and the poor poor.

Publication Date: 21 March 2023 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

Rachel Maddow

(17 Weeks ) Rachel Maddow traces the fight to preserve American democracy back to World War II, when a handful of committed public servants and brave private citizens thwarted far-right plotters trying to steer our nation toward an alliance with the Nazis.

Publication Date: 17 October 2023 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

Oath and Honor

( 17 Weeks ) The former congresswoman from Wyoming recounts how she helped lead the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th attack on the United States Capitol. In relating her experiences during the attack, and everything that came after, she tells the story of this perilous moment in our history, those she believes helped Trump spread the stolen election lie, those whose actions preserved our constitutional framework, and the risks she believes we still face.

Publication Date: 5 December 2023 Amazon | Goodreads  

An Unfinished Love Story

Doris kearns goodwin.

( 16 Weeks ) Having worked closely with John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson and Robert Kennedy, historian Doris Kearns Goodwin and her husband Dick had a front-row seat to the 1960s. Digging through a treasure trove of documents, diaries, and memorabilia from that decade, the Goodwins spent Dick’s last days reflecting on the achievements and failures of those great leaders. Weaving together American history and her personal life, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Doris Kearns Goodwin gives an intimate look at a tumultuous decade.

Publication Date: 16 April 2024 Learn More: Goodreads | StoryGraph | More Info Buy Now: Amazon | Apple Books

What This Comedian Said Will Shock You

( 10 Weeks ) The book was inspired by the “editorial” Bill delivers at the end of each episode of  Real Time . These editorials are direct-to-camera sermons about culture, politics, and what’s happening in the world. To put this book together, Maher reviewed more than a decade of his editorials, rewriting, reimagining, and updating them, and adding new material to speak exactly to the moment we’re in.

Publication Date: 14 May 2024 Amazon | Goodreads

The War on Warriors

Pete hegseth.

( 9 Weeks ) Political commentator Pete Hegseth shares his experiences serving in the United States Army and his views on the current state of the military. Hegseth criticizes the military, claiming they have abandoned the meritocracy that made it great and have instead fallen victim to cultural wars.

Publication Date: 4 June 2024 Learn More: Goodreads | StoryGraph Buy Now: Amazon | Apple Books

Confronting the Presidents

Bill o’reilly and martin dugard.

( 8 Weeks ) Authors of the popular Killing series, Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugard examine the first 45 Presidents of the United States. From their foibles to their achievements, O’Reilly and Dugard describe each president’s term in office and the lasting impacts they have had on American society.

Publication Date: 10 September 2024 Amazon | Goodreads

The Situation Room

George stephanopoulos.

( 8 Weeks ) Created under President Kennedy, the White House Situation Room has been the epicenter of crisis management in the United States for the last six decades. A former presidential advisor and well-known political commentator and tv host, George Stephanopoulos describes twelve high-pressure situations that were dramatic turning points in American history: including the moments after Kennedy’s assassination, the hours after planes struck the Twin Towers, the raid on Osama bin Laden, and the staff watching the unfolding events on January 6th.

Publication Date: 14 May 2024 Learn More: Goodreads | StoryGraph |  More Info Buy Now: Amazon | Apple Books

Blood Money

Peter schweizer.

( 7 Weeks ) Investigative reporter Peter Schweizer presents a plan by the Chinese Communist Party to covertly manipulate America. Looking at Chinese military documents and American financial records, Schweizer claims the Chinese Communist Party has covert operations linked to the American drug trade, the social justice movement and the medical establishment.

Publication Date: 27 February 2024 Amazon | Goodreads

Anthony Fauci

( 7 Weeks ) Anthony Fauci was thrust into the national spotlight during the Covid-19 Pandemic. In his new memoir, Fauci details his life from his childhood in Brooklyn to his desire to become a doctor. Over the last six decades, Fauci has become a leading scientist and public health specialist. Fauci has advised every U.S. President since Ronald Reagan and made significant contributions to the global HIV/AIDS relief efforts as well as the fight against Ebola, SARS, and the anthrax crises.

Publication Date: 18 June 2024 Amazon | Goodreads

The Art of Power

Nancy pelosi.

( 6 Weeks ) Nancy Pelosi, a Democratic Representative from California, describes her transformation from a housewife to the first woman Speaker of the House. Pelosi recalls the awe of being a lawmaker who shapes the country for the better, the courage to stand up to sitting president on January 6, 2021, and the horror of having her husband attacked in their own home.

Publication Date: 6 August 2024 Amazon | Goodreads

Anne Lamott

( 5 Weeks ) Bestselling author Anne Lamott shares her thoughts on love and how necessary in our lives. In each chapter, Lamott shows the transformative power of love, from the aching love for a child who disappoints to love of a community in transition. Lamott shares her own personal experiences and states that love helps us think that tomorrow will be better than today.

Publication Date: 9 April 2024 Amazon | Goodreads

Be Ready When the Luck Happens

( 5 Weeks ) Known as the Barefoot Contessa, Ina Garten is the bestselling author of thirteen cookbooks and a Food Network personality. In her first memoir, Garten shares the challenges and misadventures she had to overcome to build the unexpected career that has turned her into a cultural icon.

Publication Date: 1 October 2024 Amazon | Goodreads | StoryGraph

Ketanji Brown Jackson

( 4 Weeks ) The first Black woman on the United States Supreme Court, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson shares an account of her life and how, in one generation, her family went from living in segregation to sitting on America’s highest court. Jackson recalls how the stories her parents tell of battling segregation in the South inspired her to push boundaries throughout her life. She also speaks on the path to becoming a Supreme Court Justice when no one looks like you and the difficulties and joys of marriage and motherhood.

Publication Date: 3 September 2024 Amazon | Goodreads

Luis Elizondo

( 4 Weeks ) Luis Elizondo, the former head of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, discusses his career investigating unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) – former called UFOs. Elizondo discusses the highly classified mission and the prominence of unidentified objects that defy our understanding of physics and how they will change our understanding of our universe.

Publication Date: 20 August 2024 Amazon | Goodreads

The House of Hidden Meanings

( 4 Weeks ) Legendary icon RuPaul reveals a portrait of his life in brutal honesty. From growing up a poor queer Black kid in San Diego to becoming a drag queen and then building one of world’s largest television franchise, RuPaul shares a look at his life and reflects on performance, found-family, self-acceptance and identity.

Publication Date: 5 March 2024 Amazon | Goodreads

Get It Together

Jesse watters.

( 4 Weeks ) Fox New host Jesse Watters interviews radical Liberal activists hoping to understand where their views come from. Watters believes that most activists don’t actually need to change the world but change themselves; a lack of introspection about their own experiences lead them to extreme views that the general American public then buys into.

Publication Date: 19 March 2024 Amazon | Goodreads

Something Lost, Something Gained

Hillary rodham clinton.

( 4 Weeks ) Taking a look back at her life, Hillary Rodham Clinton shares her thoughts on life, love, family, politics, and democracy. Clinton gives insights into her days as a college professor, the bond between the former First Ladies, the pain of moving past the dream of being president and the power of finding new hope in activism for women and democracy.

Publication Date: 17 September 2024 Learn More: Goodreads | StoryGraph | More Info Buy Now: Amazon | Apple Books

John Grisham and Jim McCloskey

( 3 Weeks ) Best known for his legal thrillers, John Grisham tackles nonfiction with the help of Jim McCloskey who works on exonerating innocent individuals who have been wrongly convicted. Together, they portray ten true stories of wrongful convictions. Looking at what leads to wrongful convictions and the hard process to get an innocent person exonerated, Grisham and McCloskey show the harrowing journey of people who have had everything taken from them.

Publication Date: 15 October 2024 Learn More: Goodreads | StoryGraph | More Info Buy Now: Amazon | Apple Books

Brian Tyler Cohen

( 3 Weeks ) YouTube host and podacaster Brian Tyler Cohen gives his thoughts on the state of the modern Republican Party. Cohen shares how he believes the Republicans have used their historical branding as a cover to now commit actions against their principles, creating a gulf between what they say and what they do.

Publication Date: 13 August 2024 Amazon | Goodreads

Medgar & Myrlie

Joy-ann reid.

( 3 Weeks ) In this groundbreaking and thrilling account of two heroes of the civil rights movement, Joy-Ann Reid uses Medgar and Myrlie’s relationship as a lens through which to explore the on-the-ground work that went into winning basic rights for Black Americans, and the repercussions that still resonate today.

Publication Date: 6 February 2024 Amazon | Goodreads  

The Small and the Mighty

Sharon mcmahon.

( 3 Weeks ) Sharon McMahon shares twelve stories of everyday Americans who are unknown heroes displaying the courage that makes America great. From a telephone operator to a schoolteacher to a formerly enslaved person, McMahon details the lives and accomplishments of unsung American heroes in her signature style of storytelling.

Publication Date: 24 September 2024 Goodreads | StoryGraph |   Amazon

Bob Woodward

( 3 Weeks ) Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Bob Woodward takes you behind-the-scenes of recent American politics. Woodward showcases Joe Biden’s presidency as he tries to stop the world from sliding into nuclear war during the War in Ukraine and the current conflict in the Middle East. But the brewing war in American politics – the 2024 race between Donald Trump v Kamala Harris – might be the most dangerous of them all.

Publication Date: 15 October 2024 Amazon | Goodreads | StoryGraph

Save for Later

Heavyweights (10+ Weeks on the NYT Bestseller List)

The In-Between

Hadley vlahos.

( 17 Weeks ) Hospice nurse Hadley Vlahos shows palliative care teaches as much about how to live your life as how to die. Vlahos recounts the most memorable patients she’s worked with: a woman who never questioned her faith until death, a man seeing visions of his late daughter, and a young patient regretting how much she cared about others’ opinions.

Publication Date: 10 January 2023 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

Nuclear War

Annie jacobsen.

( 15 Weeks ) Journalist Annie Jacobsen considers the few minutes after a nuclear weapon is launched and the quick decisions that need to be made to save lives. With the power to destroy the world, nuclear weapons come with safeguards, risks, and emergency scenarios. Through dozens of interviews with military and civilian professionals, Jacobsen paints a terrifying picture of the worse-case scenario.

Killing the Witches

( 13 Weeks ) The 13th book in the Killing series takes on the Salem Witch Trials and the mass hysterical that gripped the town in the 1690s. When young girls began having violent fits, three young women were arrested, accused of being witches. Soon the mania swept the entire New England town, with hundreds accused and almost two dozen executed.

Publication Date: 26 September 2023 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

The Kingdom, The Power, and The Glory

Tim alberta.

( 11 Weeks ) Journalist Tim Alberta, a practicing Christian and son of an evangelical pastor, looks at the divisions in evangelical Christianity. For many conservative Christians, love of America has become a strong focus of their religion, leading to right wing Christian nationalism. Alberta examines the ways conservative Christians have pursued, used, and abused power in their quest and the growing disconnect with scripture.

Publication Date: 5 December 2023 Amazon | Goodreads

Being Henry

Henry winkler.

( 11 Weeks ) Henry Winkler rose to stardom starring as the iconic “Fonz” in Happy Days . With poignant humor, Winkler’s memoir tells of his troubled childhood, his struggles with severe dyslexia, and his rise to fame. Yet what do your greatest days seem to be behind you? Winkler writes of the challenge to escape typecasting and his eventual star in other roles, all while staying one of the nicest men in Hollywood.

Publication Date: 31 October 2023 Amazon | Goodreads | More Info

Behind the Seams

Dolly parton.

( 11 Weeks ) Iconic singer-songwriter Dolly Parton shares the story of her lifelong love with fashion and how she developed her own distinctive style. With gorgeous photographs of her costume archive, Parton discusses her boldest dresses and hairstyles, telling never before heard stories that span her illustrious career.

Publication Date: 17 October 2023 Amazon | Goodreads

Democracy Awakening

Heather cox richardson.

( 10 Weeks ) During the impeachment crisis of 2019, historian Heather Cox Richardson started a daily newsletter explaining the historical context of current events. Richardson argues that a small group of wealthy citizens have fought to distort history to lead American into authoritarianism. Explaining several decades of American politics, Richardson suggests a way forward to America’s future.

Publication Date: 26 September 2023 Amazon | Goodreads

My Name is Barbra

Barbra streisand.

( 10 Weeks ) Iconic entertainer Barbra Streisand has dominated the entertainment business throughout her career, winning Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony awards for her various performances. In a frank and funny memoir, Streisand takes readers through her life – growing up in Brooklyn, her breakout performance in Funny Girl, her career success, her advocacy, and all her opinions along the way.

Publication Date: 7 November 2023 Amazon | Goodreads

Fan Favorites (5+ Weeks on the New York Times Bestseller List)

My Effin’ Life by Geddy Lee

Amazon | Goodreads (9 Weeks) The musician known for his work with the band Rush chronicles his life as the child of Holocaust survivors and his time in the limelight.  

Ghosts of Honolulu by Mark Harmon and Leon Carroll Jr.

Amazon | Goodreads (8 Weeks) The story of a Japanese American naval intelligence agent, a Japanese spy and events in Hawaii before the start of World War II.  

The Wide Wide Sea by Hampton Sides

Amazon | Goodreads (6 Weeks) The author of “On Desperate Ground” depicts Captain James Cook’s final voyage and the controversies surrounding its legacy.  

The End of Everything by Victor Davis Hanson

Amazon | Goodreads (6 Weeks) The author of “The Dying Citizen” and “The Case for Trump” looks at how some societies obliterate their foes.  

Teddy and Booker T. by Brian Kilmeade

Amazon | Goodreads (6 Weeks) The Fox News host gives an account of the relationship between President Theodore Roosevelt and Booker T. Washington.  

Burn Book by Kara Swisher

Amazon | Goodreads (6 Weeks) The tech journalist and podcast host gives an overview of the tech industry and the foibles of its founders.

King by Jonathan Eig

Amazon | Goodreads (5 Weeks) A biography of the civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr., which includes new archival material and reflections from some who worked, lived and fought with him.  

You Never Know by Tom Selleck

Amazon | Goodreads (5 Weeks) The actor charts his journey from his California childhood to success in Hollywood.  

The Friday Afternoon Club by Griffin Dunne

Amazon | Goodreads (5 Weeks) The actor and director mixes stories from his family with tales of celebrities.  

A Walk in the Park by Kevin Fedarko

Amazon | Goodreads (5 Weeks) The author of “The Emerald Mile” goes with a friend on a journey to hike the Grand Canyon from end to end.  

Love & Whiskey by Fawn Weaver

Amazon | Goodreads (5 Weeks) A portrayal of the bond between Jack Daniel and the African American distiller Nearest Green.  

Nexus by Yuval Noah Harari

Amazon | Goodreads | More Info (5 Weeks) The author of “Sapiens” delves into how societies and political systems have used information and gives a warning about artificial intelligence.

Blind Spots by Marty Makary

Amazon | Goodreads (5 Weeks) The author of “The Price We Pay” examines the ways modern medicine might cause harm.

Revenge of the Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell

Amazon | Goodreads | More Info (5 Weeks) Through a series of stories, Gladwell explicates the causes of various kinds of epidemics.

The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Amazon | Goodreads | More Info (5 Weeks) The author of “Between the World and Me” travels to three locations to uncover the dissonance between the realities on the ground and the narratives shaped about them.

Honorable Mention (2-4 Weeks on the New York Times Bestseller List)

One Hit Wonders (1 Week on the New York Times Best Seller List)

Do You Agree with The New York Times Nonfiction Best Sellers?

What books do you think are the best of the year? Do you think The New York Times Nonfiction Best Sellers deserve the hype? As always, let me know in the comments!

More New Book Releases:

• The New York Times Fiction Bestseller List
• The Most-Anticipated Upcoming Releases of 2024
• The 2023 New York Times Nonfiction Bestsellers
• The Current Celebrity Book Club Picks
• The Top 50 Books of the Last Decade

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