Curl Up With the Best Books We Read This Year
Mother Jones illustration
Nonfiction
All Things Are Too Small
Nonfiction “In a sense all stories are about the same thing, and that thing is thwarted desire,” the literary critic Becca Rothfeld writes at one point in All Things Are Too Small. The same could be said of this collection of essays, which offers a celebration of our unruly desires and an ode to the “enchantments of maximalism” in art, life, and love. Rothfeld is suspicious of the minimalist impulse in contemporary culture; in one essay, for instance, she critiques the proliferation of sparse, fragmentary novels like Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation, connecting them to the rise of the decluttering movement. The tendency of Marie Kondo, the queen of that movement, to cut out the most important pages of her favorite books and jettison the rest “inadvertently prophesied the future of the novel,” Rothfeld writes, paving the way for a parade of bland, unadorned “IKEA-prose.” In another chapter, excerpted in the New Yorker this year, Rothfeld looks at what the decadent body horror of David Cronenberg’s films has to tell us about the experience of finding yourself destroyed and transformed by romantic love. (“Why should we expect desire to leave us intact?” she writes. “Why wouldn’t it tear us apart with its talons?”) Some essays left me less than convinced, like a critique of the mindfulness industrial complex that is perhaps too dismissive of meditation’s real power to alleviate suffering. But if you, like me, can’t resist a big juicy swing of an argument, you will likely find something to love in Rothfeld’s book. Reading her feels like having an extended conversation with your smartest friend—you may disagree with her, but you will always find her interesting. —Sophie Murguia
The Chronicles of DOOM: Unraveling Rap’s Masked Iconoclast
Nonfiction Earlier this year, Rhymesayers released a 20th anniversary edition of rapper MF DOOM’s “MM..FOOD,” which brought me back to listening to the album as a teenager. I had consumed too many punk screams and pop-rap beats and, frankly, hadn’t realized music could be so refreshingly odd. DOOM is, at this point, well known: a mysterious, guarded, eccentric poet. He seemed to always be on another planet or plane of existence. His appeal was his intricacy and his immediacy. DOOM, né Daniel Dumile, combined the playful, even the childish, with the depth of life. As Paul Thompson wrote for Pitchfork, he had the ability to rap about an “escape plan and the threat of jail” yet would make it sound like it was written by “someone who had read every book ever published but never spoken out loud.” S.H. “Skiz” Fernando Jr.’s new book on DOOM, one of the first full works on the artist, delivers all the basics. We see the rapper as Zev Love X, a young rising star with the group KMD. Then comes the tragic death of his brother, Subroc. After this, a stranger tale—and artist—emerges. These aspects of DOOM’s story have been well covered, including by Ta-Nehisi Coates in the New Yorker. Yet Skiz’s chronicle of the famously secretive rapper offers something unexpected. He did not get full access, in part because Dumile died in 2020. Rather, the strength of this work is in the context. DOOM has often been presented as a kind of Shakespearean bard: above his era, outside chronology, and far away from the rest of rap. Skiz reaffixes him into a time and place, within the burgeoning hip-hop of late-1980s New York City and the underground scene of the 2000s. The DOOM stuff in here is great, but what I loved was all the rest. Learning that Tupac Shakur was a backup dancer on a tour that included DOOM; finding out about a collab between Jungle Brothers and avant-garde bassist Bill Laswell that the label scrapped as too experimental. There are hundreds of moments that prompted me to text a friend and ask: Wait, did you realize (for example) that Eazy-E gave $1,250 to Republicans and went to a high-end donor lunch as joke? Me either! And all those moments made DOOM make a bit more sense, too. —Jacob Rosenberg
Cuckooland: Where the Rich Own the Truth
Nonfiction Cuckoos famously lay their eggs in the nests of unsuspecting birds of other species; their offspring eventually take over and even kill their nestmates. While scientists are loathe to make value judgements about the practice, it’s the perfect metaphor for hijacking a well-intentioned effort for malicious purposes—which is exactly what Tom Burgis, an excellent and fearless global corruption reporter, describes in Cuckooland. In his previous books, The Looting Machine (2015) and Kleptopia (2020), Burgis has reported on how the wealthy and powerful are secretly siphoning money from the developing world and breaking global governmental systems. For his efforts, he has been the target of high-powered legal assaults in the UK—blatant attempts to use the legal system to silence his journalism—that he survived on the strength of his careful and truthful reporting. Here Burgis reports on the widespread attempt by the rich and powerful to buy a new truth and force us to accept it—like a cuckoo fooling an unsuspecting mama bird into adopting an egg that isn’t hers. He focuses on the story of Mohamed Amersi, a man made extraordinarily wealthy through international business dealings and his knack for tying household-name western businesses to unsavory and kleptocratic players in developing countries. Amersi, having made his fortune, wound up at the heart of a British campaign finance scandal that will sound extremely familiar to Americans—except that it involved members of the Royal Family—and then hired lawyers and lobbyists to beat back political foes and prying journalists. “Write your book and see what happens,” Amersi snarls at Burgis during a lengthy (and comically profane) face-to-face encounter. Well, he wrote it. Cuckooland is not merely a timely read as Elon Musk and his ilk cozy up to Donald Trump in a wedding of disinformation, money, and political power. It is also just a well-written book, utterly perfect in its factual reporting and as extremely funny as it is sinister. —Russ Choma
The Fall of Roe: The Rise of a New America
Nonfiction When the Supreme Court overruled the constitutional right to abortion established in Roe v. Wade, I, like millions of other Americans, wondered: How did this possibly happen? The Fall of Roe, by the New York Times’ national religion and political correspondents Elizabeth Dias and Lisa Lerer, deftly answers this question by charting how advocates—for and against abortion rights—spent the decade before the Dobbs decision. What they unearth is striking: In a span of only 10 years, the GOP went from considering abortion a fringe issue to engineering the overruling of Roe with the help of organizations like Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America and the Christian legal advocacy group Alliance Defending Freedom. The abortion rights movement was busy fighting off myriad threats—including rising state restrictions—while trying to warn a largely in denial electorate (and Democratic Party leadership) of the importance of abortion as a political issue. The book highlights the roles of key players, from the lesser-known—like Jameson Taylor, a Christian lobbyist who promoted Mississippi’s 15-week abortion ban that was the basis of Dobbs—to the better-known, such as Cecile Richards, former president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. Despite its focus on the political trenches, the book doesn’t lose sight of the people Dobbs affected most: Interspersed throughout are sketches of how people who needed abortions and doctors who provided them navigated the immediate aftermath of the ruling. Dias and Lerer incorporate an immense amount of research and reporting here (more than 350 interviews!) while maintaining a crisp, engaging narrative. —Julianne McShane
The Last Fire Season: A Personal and Pyronatural History
Nonfiction In the early morning hours of a fall day in 2020, a lightning storm flashed across the skies of Northern California. “My insides were set abuzz,” writes Martin. On alert, she “put on a sports bra, in case I had to run from something.” As she feared, the lightning charred the region’s dry grasses and overgrown forests, and a cluster of wildfires soon threatened to devour everything. But Martin’s escape from the conflagrations comprises only one thin layer of this intricate and uncategorizable narrative, which undulates between a zoomed-out study of the history and ecology of the area, a deeply personal exploration of living through both climate chaos and reproductive pain, a gardening memoir, and an inquiry into the psychology of coping with disaster. “Anything that ever happened to anyone had been unimaginable at one time, until it happened,” she writes. This book is so bursting with ideas—from Indigenous history to a list of famous women involved with fires—that I often had to set it down and recharge. It functions as both a balm and a wake-up call, urging us, at a time when blazes can spark any time of the year, to consider “fire season” a thing of the past. —Maddie Oatman
A Walk in the Park: The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon
Nonfiction Adventure tales by dudes out to conquer the wilderness are as old as the hills they climb. So I was a bit skeptical of Kevin Fedarko’s book about hiking the entire length of Grand Canyon, the nation’s most iconic natural landmark. While the canyon is less than 300 miles long by way of the Colorado River, hikers must trek more than three times that distance, often with no trail. Temperatures can soar above 130 degrees and the vertical drops can reach 6,000 feet, two reasons why so many people die there each year. Like so many hapless hikers before him, Fedarko failed to do his homework before setting off and had to be rescued after only five days. Humbled, he tries again and emerges wiser, filled with awe for the canyon’s natural splendor. The familiar boys-in-the-woods narrative is redeemed by Fedarko’s reporting. In one notable section, he describes waking up in his sleeping bag to the roar of helicopters—400 of which now swarm the canyon floor every day, one every 90 seconds, to expel rich tourists who sip champagne, snap selfies, and leave 15 minutes later. These air tours terrorize wildlife and have led to deadly crashes, but they’re also a major revenue stream for the Hualapai tribe, a conundrum Fedarko explores with sensitivity. He also (wisely) withholds certain details of his hike to deter idiots from ruining the canyon’s pristine wilderness and plunging off cliffs as they did on the Pacific Crest Trail after publication of Cheryl Strayed’s bestselling book Wild. Here’s hoping people just enjoy the reading and stay home. —Stephanie Mencimer
We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite
Nonfiction If you’re looking for a heavily end-noted, 432-page academic book that mixes critiques of the media elite and Democratic Party with occasionally dense sociological theory in a way that might just explain why Donald Trump won, well, you’ve come to the right place! Al-Gharbi’s tome isn’t a rant about “wokeness”; it’s a careful study of the highly educated, progressive-leaning world of what he calls “symbolic capitalists.” That is, it’s a study of us: me, my colleagues, our bosses, our entire industry, the public figures and academic experts we often write about, and countless others with expensive degrees—all trying to leverage our new Bluesky accounts into a permanent place in these collapsing job markets. If you are reading this, it’s likely about you, too, he notes. In al-Gharbi’s view, the culture wars and political upheavals of the last decade-plus are best explained by the efforts of these over-produced elites—think middle- and upper-middle-class professionals, not billionaire moguls—to accumulate status. “As symbolic capitalists have been consolidated into the Democratic Party, we have completely changed the party,” writes al-Gharbi, whose eye-opening book was prophetically published less than a month before Trump’s second victory. “Its messaging and priorities have shifted dramatically. The party’s base has evolved in turn. Growing numbers of poor, working-class, and nonwhite voters are growing alienated from the Democratic Party and have been migrating to the GOP.” Indeed. —Jeremy Schulman
When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s
Nonfiction I don’t read a lot of books about modern politics. I read enough about that for work. But Ganz’s debut, which traces the origins of Donald Trump’s movement to the political and cultural anxieties of the George H.W. Bush era, is a revelation. Ganz, who writes the Unpopular Front newsletter, captures the sunset of Cold War America through the lens of guys like Ross Perot, Pat Buchanan, David Duke, and Sam Francis. But the chapter that kept rattling around in my head over the summer was about the New York mafioso John Gotti, who became a national celebrity over the course of a series of legal battles over racketeering and murder. Gotti was a crook, and a brutal one at that. But the Teflon Don became a mascot for a kind of gangster populism. “He…represented a kind of rejection of an establishment that seemed to have failed people,” Ganz told Mother Jones earlier this year. “All of the kinds of myths about American society seemed to be bullshit. It was a meritocracy, there’s political equality—they all kind of seemed like nonsense to people, and this racketeer’s vision of things where you get yours and take care of your own seemed a lot more appealing to people and realistic.” Sound familiar?—Tim Murphy
The Work of Art: How Something Comes From Nothing
Nonfiction At a certain point, I felt as if my almost evangelical enthusiasm for The Work of Art made me solely responsible for its brief tenure on the bestseller list. Its author, Adam Moss, was close to what can be called an editorial prodigy, helping to transform both New York magazine and the New York Times Magazine. Upon his retirement, he decided to do the Bob Ross thing and, in his words, “try my hand as an artist.” He marked that moment as “the beginning of my torment: I just wasn’t very good.” But this personal failure, or maybe setback, led him to ponder the question of who are these people who call themselves artists and, as he put it, “[H]ow do artists think?” What inspired them, when did they realize this was their profession and identity? How did they know that a particular piece—something written, drawn, painted, designed, composed, constructed, performed, choreographed, or directed—was a work of art and not a worthy effort best left to Etsy? So off he went to talk to 43 different artists, and given his stature in the New York scene, they opened up to him. Rather than probe the mystery of creativity as others have done, he focused on only one of their works, and had them walk him through their creative process, from beginning to end. The resulting pieces are a few pages long and lavishly illustrated, reflecting as much the taste and interests of his subjects as of their interviewer. It’s a book you can dip into—let’s see what Stephen Sondheim was thinking when he wrote “Not Getting Married”! But more satisfying, at least for me, was to read one every day, like a breviary. For 43 days I spent time with artists I’ve admired—Kara Walker, choreographer Twyla Tharp, Wesley Morris—and others I had never heard of, like visual artist Simphiwe Ndzube or the amazing performance artist Taylor Mac. In hearing their voices, in watching their works progress, in understanding their false starts and aha moments, I felt an odd intimacy with them the next time I approached one of their pieces. Not to mention, a small rush of excitement at the realization that, at its core, “to create” is, in the end, nothing more than to work—really hard and really well. —Marianne Szegedy-Maszak
Beautyland
Fiction If you’ve ever seen the photograph “Pale Blue Dot,” you’ve seen the Earth from nearly 4 billion miles away, captured by the space probe Voyager 1 en route out of the solar system. Its 1977 launch is where Beautyland begins. At the same moment Bertino’s protagonist Adina is, in utero, “listening to the advancing yeses of her mother’s heart.” This is a bildungsroman, and a weird one. Like Voyager, Adina has a trajectory and mission, possibly interstellar too. Foundational to both is a fax machine that four-year-old Adina starts using to transmit her observations about humans to alien “superiors,” sometimes adding freight (“Humans beam their lights to me but I’m too far away to see”) and sometimes levity (enumerated opinions on television) to Adina’s perpetual loneliness. The readiness with which Bertino expresses humor—alternating between droll and daffy—or grief, or joy, makes this feel most like a story of a life. While I like any writing that amalgamates speculative and mainstream fiction, I love Bertino’s because these shifts in tone and genre feel essential to the story she wanted to tell. Next year, Voyager 1 will lose power to the last of its scientific instruments, but it will still have a payload: a phonograph record of Morse code, anatomical diagrams, crickets, and laughter, encompassing what Carl Sagan called “the human story.” Like Adina’s, it’s an ordinary story made extraordinary by “the opposite of homesickness, to return home to find it more beautiful, to return and still feel distance.” —Melissa Lewis
Colored Television
Fiction Open to any page of this book and the odds are high that something will make you laugh. The novel centers on Jane, a “mulatto” fiction writer and non-tenured professor in Los Angeles who wonders about the point of her vocation when “literary stardom” has become as much of an oxymoron as “poetry groupie.” With fiction and her husband’s visual art career unable to support the lifestyle she fantasizes about, she hopes a sabbatical will produce a tenure-ticket-punching second novel. (Her nightmare is ending up like a colleague who accidentally spent her time away recovering from a bunion procedure.) This is not to say that Jane always loves teaching Gen Z students who prefer novels with lots of “white space” that remind her of the food she once cut up for her toddlers to “guard against their choking.” Parenting, the perils of having “gauche caviar” taste without the means for caviar, and LA microsociology—rich divorced dads should drive Audis not Porsches to avoid seeming too cliché, Jane warns at one point—are often on Jane’s mind. But, as the novel’s title suggests, the major themes are race in an America where diversity is often deployed cynically by those already at the top, along with the tension between the written word and the visual mass entertainment that has largely replaced it. Without spoiling too much, the novel gets moving when Jane finds herself before a showrunner who wants to make the “Jackie Robinson of biracial comedies.” The jokes on their own make it better than many novels but underneath them is an affecting portrait of marriage and parenting in middle-age that makes me eager to read whatever Senna writes next. —Noah Lanard
Gabriel’s Moon
Fiction This comic novel features Gabriel Dax, a travel writer dispatched to the newly independent republic of Congo to write about the mighty river connecting Léopoldville and Brazzaville. While there, he is unexpectedly invited to interview Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba, who confides that western powers are planning to kill him. A few weeks later, Lumumba is indeed assassinated and Dax inadvertently becomes a spy. Using his journalist cover, he goes abroad to utter cryptic codewords to strangers in bars or drop secret messages into trash bins. Meanwhile, he senses he’s being pursued by the very people who may have killed Lumumba. The book is replete with double agents and defectors, and Dax executes his missions with the incompetence of a Slow Horses character. Yet Dax’s real progenitor is William Boot, the accidental African war correspondent from Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop. He also resembles another hapless Englishman abroad, Morgan Leafy, the protagonist of Boyd’s first book, A Good Man in Africa. Forty-three years after that award-winning debut, Boyd has been listed twice for a Booker prize and has written two other highbrow spy novels, including a James Bond. With Dax, he has deftly created a deeper, less slapstick version of Leafy by giving him a tragic origin story. Dax’s attempts to solve the mystery of his mother’s early death run parallel to the espionage, giving the story substance and humanity. It’s a satisfying read from one of the UK’s most gifted writers. —S.M.
Rainbow Black
Fiction There’s a small but respectable body of very good nonfiction books about the Satanic panic of the 1980s (and a much larger body of trashy pulp ones that are sometimes fun, but not worth recommending). Rainbow Black is a very different entry, a novel from the perspective of a young teenager whose eccentric parents are encircled by wild allegations of sexual abuse at the daycare they run on the family farm in New Hampshire. Thrash is probably best known for her graphic novel memoir, Honor Girl, about coming out at a conservative summer camp. In her latest, her debut adult novel, there are references to real Satanic panic cases, like the McMartin preschool trial, and a withering—and historically accurate—look at how therapists pressing the idea of “recovered” memories onto children helped to convict innocent people. But Rainbow Black quickly becomes something much more than a fictionalized account of the real tragedies that sent so many teachers and childcare workers to jail. It also contains an incredibly good and gripping plot, winding through weaponized paranoia and small-town hysteria before emerging as a surprisingly touching story of love, identity, and vigilante justice. —Anna Merlan
Nonfiction, Fiction, Poetry Published Before 2024
All This Could Be Different (2022)
Fiction Sneha is 22, a “teak switch of a girl” who lands a job in management consulting just out of college—with free housing and a salary high enough she can send regular checks home to her parents in South India. Sure, the job’s in Milwaukee, and okay, the work is grueling and the landlord blows up at her every time she so much as sneezes. But it’s only a few years after the 2008 recession, and compared to many of her fellow recent graduates she has it made. Right? Turns out, the very life Sneha thought she wanted might conflict with the one that will allow her to break free from past trauma, forge meaningful relationships, and shape a fulfilling existence in the frigid, “rusted” Midwestern city she now calls home. This astute and gorgeously written bildungsroman is a study in transformation, observing what it takes for a person to understand her true desires and reimagine not only her place in the world, but what the world could be. With vivid language, dry humor, and an unforgettable narrator, this book holds lessons on how to create community and sustain love in the capitalistic pressure cooker of our times. —M.O.
Birnam Wood (2023)
Fiction A group of guerrilla environmentalists, a technocrat and an old, boomer couple see their lives intertwined, dashed, and smashed in the name of capitalism and rebellion in this thriller novel. Mira and Shelley are two leaders of the well-intentioned guerrilla gardening group Birnam Wood, which fills fence lines and junkyards with illegally grown produce. Mira reads about a plot of land recently abandoned after a landslide and envisions it becoming the group’s next big farming project. While scouting the area, she meets the plot’s new owner—the tech billionaire Robert Lemoine, who plans to use it to build his bunker for the apocalypse. They take a liking to each other, and Lemoine offers to fund the organization’s venture. But, for him, it’s his “final piece of camouflage” for his activities on the land and nearby national park. From there, the story snowballs out of control in dark and hilarious ways that reflect the battles raging between the tech monsters of our time and the socially goody-two shoes trying to make the world a bit better. Catton spins wonderfully conflicted characters with a sharp sense of humor and irony. To top it off, she brings their storylines together for a crescendo of an ending that still makes my heart race. —Artis Curiskis
Free Speech: A History from Socrates to Social Media (2022)
Nonfiction The latest battle in the 2,500-year war over free speech came to a head during the vice presidential debate. “We actually do have a threat to democracy,” said JD Vance, as he accused Democrats of trampling the First Amendment. “It is the threat of censorship.” Tim Walz responded by defending efforts to restrict election-related misinformation and hate speech—and by blasting Republicans for banning books. None of these fights are new, as Mchangama’s fascinating history makes clear. Formal speech protections first appeared in Athens around 500 BCE; a century later, Socrates was executed because of how he exercised those rights. Beginning in 1275 CE, English authorities criminalized “false news” about the king. In 1798—less than two decades after overthrowing the British Crown and enshrining press freedom in the Constitution—some of America’s most revered Founders backed the infamous Sedition Act, under which journalists and politicians were prosecuted for criticizing the ruling Federalist Party. Mchangama expertly chronicles these struggles between rulers who sought to restrict speech and the dissidents who fought back—often at the cost of their freedom, livelihood, or lives. The culmination of these battles, it seemed, was the post–civil rights movement United States, which was almost certainly the most speech-protective society in history. But according to Mchangama, this hard-won American consensus around free speech “seemed to break down during the [first] presidency of Donald Trump.” Now, as Trump threatens to prosecute political foes, Mchangama’s most important history lesson is that we should never take our liberties for granted. —J.S.
It Gets Me Home, This Curving Track (2019)
Nonfiction I thought I knew why people loved Frank Sinatra. I thought, too, that I understood quite a lot about The Mods and even—especially—Elvis Presley. But no. Reading Penman’s essay collection, I found myself agreeing with John Jeremiah Sullivan: This book “consistently told me stuff I didn’t know about stuff I thought I knew.” In each of these knotty, compact essays, Penman details his relationship with a piece of culture, mostly music, wrestling with his emotions amid a torrent of facts. Each sentence delivers a freight of ideas—commas and parentheticals abound. What he reveals is idiosyncratic. Penman is not interested in who Elvis Presley was but what “Elvis,” as a figure, meant. “In the end, why deny it, he’s just plain gorgeous,” writes Penman of the King. “He’s rough trade for everyone, a true American democracy.” And Sinatra? The “final flicker of modernity’s embers”—the “last big mainstream entertainer to perform without carefully applied quotation marks.” In understanding Sinatra, Penman argues, you can see what it felt like to live within the beauty of the Cold War consensus, the certitude of mass culture. (After I read that, I found myself, strangely, crying. My grandfather played Sinatra constantly and had a midcentury American optimism I found hard to grasp. I finally hear what he found so moving in “The Best Is Yet to Come,” thanks to Penman.) I will be unnecessarily rabid now about this book: It is the best collection of music writing I’ve ever read. —J.R.
Junket Is Nice (1933)
Fiction When you have a kid you start reading children’s books again, and when you start reading children’s books again you come to realize that many of the books they’re churning out these days are simply not very good. It is not necessarily that they’re too political (although some of them are). It’s more that they’re a little too interested in making a point in ways that give away who they’re really for. Children’s books should be for children, and they should be strange, and Kunhardt’s first book—published seven years before her more popular and to my mind vastly inferior Pat the Bunny—is delightfully both of these things. “Junket,” as the back of the book explains, is a type of custard that was popular, somewhere, when this book was written. Is it any good? I don’t know. It’s not really important. Neither is the plot, in which an old man with a red beard and red slippers eats a frankly disgusting amount of junket out of a big red bowl while every person in the entire world takes turns guessing what he’s thinking about. I read it approximately 103 times this year. I’d happily do it all again. —T.M.
No-No Boy (1957)
Fiction In 1942, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, John Okada was forcibly removed from his home in Washington and incarcerated along with thousands of other Japanese Americans. Eventually, Okada was allowed to leave for college and then, like my own grandfather, he served as a Japanese translator in the armed forces. In 1957, Okada published a novel about a Japanese American boy, Ichiro, who makes very different choices, and spends two years in a federal prison for his refusal to serve in the army. No-No Boy is a novel simmering, and occasionally boiling over with rage. After the war, Ichiro returns home and struggles immensely with shame, regret, and coming to terms with what it means to truly be American. “I’m not an American or you wouldn’t have plucked me and mine from a life that was good and real and meaningful and fenced me in the desert,” he laments. I never got to speak to my grandfather about how he felt about his service or the incarceration of his family members. Reading No-No Boy, I was overcome with grief for my family, for Ichiro, for Okada, and for the millions of immigrants Trump has promised to remove from their communities and detain in camps when he reclaims the White House. —Ruth Murai
Parable of the Talents (1998)
Fiction The sequel to Butler’s award-winning Parable of the Sower, Talents is perhaps the furthest thing from an easygoing, light read. In fact, its heaviness is exactly what kept it sitting on my bookshelf, untouched, for two years after I plowed through Sower. But this spring, facing a reality that tracks just too closely to Butler’s visions of America’s future, I felt compelled—or obligated, really—to pick it up. And once I did, I couldn’t put it down. Set in the 2030s, Talents continues to follow the life of Sower’s protagonist, Lauren Oya Olamina, a young Black woman afflicted by “hyper-empathy”—a condition that causes her to feel what everyone around her feels, physically and emotionally. Amid the rise of an authoritarian president who vows to “Make America Great Again” and Christian nationalists searching the country for souls to save through enslavement, Lauren leads a small community of adherents to her newly formed religion, Earthseed, in northern California. The book combines Lauren’s journal entries, which chronicle her experiences of enslavement, sexual violence, homelessness, and the ravages of climate change, with the future journal entries of her daughter, Asha Vere, as she reads the words of the mother she hardly knew. As with Sower, Butler’s ability to weave the social issues of today with religious symbolism of the past offers an apocalyptic vision of the future that is nothing short of prophetic, even if Butler never intended it to be. Of Butler’s indictment of American society, perhaps her most profound point is that religious zealotry can overtake anyone, even her well-intentioned protagonist. —Sarah Szilagy
So to Speak (2023)
Poetry Mileage will vary with poetry. Still, this collection stunned me, a Luddite, know-nothing; unable to tell you the rules of a sonnet or sestina. Hayes is, if this is possible, a household poet: a MacArthur fellow and winner of the National Book Award. You can read the poems of So to Speak alongside an essay collection, Watch Your Language: Visual and Literary Reflections on a Century of American Poetry. In both, there is depth for those looking for it. But I read So to Speak with a lighter touch. I picked it up on a quick trip to Montreal and swallowed it in a single sitting. Throughout, Hayes has “DIY” experiments. You have to piece together poems from visual illustrations, placing words and phrases together as if crafting; there are maps and drawings throughout the book, too. The work felt alive, playful, and undecided. The odd nature of poetry came through to me: how freeing, silly, chaotic, funny, and rending words on a page can be when unloosed from the tightness of clear comprehension and prose. Hayes is interested throughout in being more than making sense. He often speaks of failure, of attempts, and of inabilities. It seemed as if he was sitting around, trying to make things, and kept finding the true amid the movement. There’s a particular poem in here, “Canto for Ghosts,” that hits on the deaths of David Berman and Frank Stanford. Both Southern idols, of a sort, and longtime objects of my obsession. Hayes writes of: “A kisser chock-full of liquors / & sundowns puked along the bars / & boulevards of every Memphis.” I can’t tell you why, but that got stuck in my head for a good month this year. Imagine sundowns puked in every Memphis. —J.R.
Wild Massive (2023)
Fiction Imagine an elevator that could drop you into a new world with every ding of an opening door. Welcome to Wild Massive, a sci-fi epic set in the Building, an infinitely tall structure where each floor holds a fantastical and unpredictable universe. Traversing through it is Carissa, the sole survivor of a genocide who lives in an elevator and is doing her best to stay hidden from the Association—a sprawling, authoritarian bureaucracy that’s consumed most of the Building’s worlds into its rigid control. When her routine of quiet survival is interrupted by a collision with a shape-shifting sorcerer, Carissa is offered a dangerous opportunity: revenge. Together, Carissa and the sorcerer embark on a perilous journey through wondrous and treacherous worlds, avoiding the Association’s iron grip at every turn. But their adventure doesn’t go unnoticed. A popular multiverse-wide reality show, centuries in the making, turns their attention to Carissa, aiming to turn her journey into the ultimate series finale. Balancing themes of power, bureaucracy, and the commodification of reality, Wild Massive delivers ambitious world-building with an unnerving closeness to our own world. While the story spans fantastical multiverses, its focus remains on the character’s emotions and humanity, and the relationships that bind people—even in the face of destruction. Moore’s writing is sharp, evocative, and daringly on the nose. This isn’t just a sci-fi adventure; it’s a bold exploration of the worlds we create and the ones we let consume us. —Sam Van Pykeren
If you buy a book using our Bookshop link, a small share of the proceeds supports our journalism.