Friends, it’s true: the end of the decade approaches. It’s been a difficult, anxiety-provoking, morally compromised decade, but at least it’s been populated by some damn fine literature. We’ll take our silver linings where we can.

So, as is our hallowed duty as a literary and culture website—though with full awareness of the potentially fruitless and endlessly contestable nature of the task—in the coming weeks, we’ll be taking a look at the best and most important (these being not always the same) books of the decade that was. We will do this, of course, by means of a variety of lists. We began with the best debut novels, the best short story collections, the best poetry collections, the best memoirs, the best essay collections, the best (other) nonfiction, and the best translated novels of the decade. We have now reached the eighth and most difficult list in our series: the very best novels written and published in English between 2010 and 2019.

You may be shocked to learn that we had a hard time deciding on 10. So, being captains of our own destiny, we decided we were allowed to pick 20 . . . plus almost that many dissents. We did not allow reissues, otherwise you had better believe this list would include The Last Samurai, Speedboat, and Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead, among a robust host of others. We also, for this list, discounted novels in translation, as they got their very own list last week, and including them would have necessitated a list twice as long. (My beloved Sweet Days of Discipline, certainly in the top ten novels I personally read this decade, is doubly ineligible, but luckily I also write these introductions.)

Now, for the last time: the following books were chosen after much debate (and several rounds of voting) by the Literary Hub staff. Tears were spilled, feelings were hurt, books were re-read. As ever, free to add any of your own favorites that we’ve missed in the comments below.

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The Top Twenty

Jennifer Egan, A Visit From the Goon Squad (2010)

There are some moments from A Visit From the Goon Squad that I won’t forget. In one chapter, a former PR hotshot named Dolly is tasked with reviving the public image of an African dictator known as “The General” with the help of a B-list actress named Kitty Jackson. Kitty’s job is to stand next to The General in a photo, but she ends up asking too many questions about a genocide and gets thrown into prison. Months later, it turns out, The General’s government becomes a democracy, Kitty is freed, and Dolly opens a sandwich shop. This strand of Egan’s polyphonic, funny, and often poignant book encapsulates some of her satire’s recurring ideas. In Goon Squad, a book with a large cast of characters set in a period roughly spanning the late 1970s to the 2020s, shifts in time are always jarring—they can destroy the body, corrupt memory, and blur processes of change. Nominally centered on the American celebrity industrial complex (particularly rock’n’roll in the Bay Area), Goon Squad is also very much about media “spin,” fragmented perspectives, illusory identities, and aimless materialism in a capitalist society. Though the premise may seem to indicate otherwise, the book is decidedly skeptical of nostalgic impulses. “Time is a goon,” one of Egan’s characters says. The past is nothing if not the foundation of contemporary disillusionment with its promises—promises of beauty, fame, family, and the attainment of other icons. Goon Squad earned Egan well-deserved plaudits, including the 2011 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and cemented her status as one the 21st century’s most insightful (and formally experimental) American writers.  –Aaron Robertson, Assistant Editor

David Mitchell, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (2010)

It is easier to conjure the intellectual-literary atmosphere of an era when it is 30 years’ past than when it is a mere decade ago. It is hard to see 2010 right now, as we wait for time and the canon to true the lens, but I have a very clear sense-memory of revelation and exhilaration as I sped through David Mitchell’s epic-historical ghost story, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, wondering if the spirit of Robert Louis Stevenson had momentarily taken possession of Haruki Murakami. Here was a reminder that the world of a novel—in this case, a very detailed rendering of an 18th-century Dutch trading post in the port of Nagasaki—can be fuller, more vivid, than our own, that it can exist as a hothouse for the reader’s moral imagination.

It is difficult to say what another 25 years will make of The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. In the context of Mitchell’s more recent novels, and their space-operatic excesses, the plot of De Zoet seems worryingly baroque, show-offy, even. But it is clearly the work of the same writer who gave us the near-perfect coming-of-age novel, Black Swan Green, its language similarly precise and unexpected, all in aid of a story that seems somehow to tell itself, a true history that never quite happened.  –Jonny Diamond, Editor in Chief

Denis Johnson, Train Dreams (2011)

If I was tasked with proving that literary awards are a cruel joke and that life is nothing but a bleak and meaningless trudge toward the grave, Exhibit A would be what I have dubbed The Great Pulitzer Prize for Fiction Travesty of 2012. 2012 was, of course, the year the Pulitzer board (not the jury) decided that no book published in the previous twelve months merited the most prestigious honor in American letters, despite the fact that the trinity of finalists included Denis Johnson’s hallucinatory masterwork Train Dreams, as well as Karen Russell’s lushly brilliant debut novel Swamplandia! and David Foster Wallace’s unfinished opus The Pale King. (An explanation as to how this happened was proffered by novelist and 2012 jury member Michael Cunningham in a rather wonderful letter to the New Yorker in the wake of the non-decision). Train Dreams may well be the 21^st century’s most perfect novella (he said, having of course read them all…). It’s the incantatory story of a turn-of-the-century logger and railroad laborer, Robert Grainier, who loses his family to a wildfire and retreats deep into the woods of the Idaho panhandle as the country modernizes around him. Johnson’s spare, strange, elegiac prose conjures a world that feels both ancient and ephemeral, full of beauty and menace and deep sorrow. As Anthony Doerr wrote in his New York Times review: “His prose tiptoes a tightrope between peace and calamity, and beneath all of the novella’s best moments, Johnson runs twin strains of tenderness and the threat of violence.” An American epic in miniature, Train Dreams is a visionary portrait of soul untethered from civilization, a man stoically persevering on his own hermetic terms in the face of unimaginable tragedy. A haunted and haunting reverie.  –Dan Sheehan, Book Marks Editor

Julie Otsuka, The Buddha in the Attic (2011)

Julie Otsuka’s groundbreaking (and PEN/Faulkner Award-winning) Buddha In the Attic begins: “On the boat we were mostly virgins. We had long black hair and flat wide feet and we were not very tall. Some of us had eaten nothing but rice gruel as young girls and had slightly bowed legs, and some of us were fourteen years old and were still young girls ourselves.” This is how we are introduced to our narrators, a group of Japanese “picture brides.” We follow them as they immigrate to California. We watch helplessly as they meet the husbands they were promised to, as they attempt to assimilate to America and raise children across a cultural divide. The collective first person narration matches the subject matter beautifully; it mimics the immigrant experience, the way “others” are often seen as the same and the automatic camaraderie and safety we might find among those who share our stories. Slipping out of the shared “we” and “most of us” and “some of us,” Julie Otsuka creates a dizzying dislocation, a confusion of identity that serves the story well: “…unable to remember our own names, not to mention those of our new husbands. Remind me one more time, I’m Mrs. Who?” Her timing is impeccable. Just when you start to grow weary of the collective voice, for just a sentence or two, she’ll give us an intimate detail, an individual life, to hold onto, and it always catches you off guard when she does, like a rule broken: “The youngest of us was twelve, and from the eastern shore of Lake Biwa, and had not yet begun to bleed.” The specificity is heartbreaking. You can feel the intention behind every choice; so rarely does a book mesh style and subject so brilliantly. The most shattering bit comes at the end (SPOILER ALERT!)—when there is a sudden shift in the narrative. The “we” abruptly becomes the white Americans who are left to tell the story, after their Japanese neighbors are sent to internment camps. It’s chilling, and terribly accurate, the way their voices are literally taken from them in this story. I’ve re-read this novel many times, trying to understand how it can encompass such a wide scope of things. What Julie Otsuka has accomplished here is both an artful, intimate portrait of individual lives and a piercing indictment of history.  –Katie Yee, Book Marks Assistant Editor

Téa Obreht, The Tiger’s Wife (2011)

Although it came out in 2011, I read The Tiger’s Wife, the elegant first novel by Téa Obreht, only recently. I found it stunning, so perfectly moving on its many levels. Obreht’s protagonist and narrator, a young doctor named Natalia Stefanovic whose life is upended by the mysterious death of her beloved grandfather, is one of the most mellifluous, engrossing storytellers I’ve encountered in my life (she has learned well—her grandfather is one of the most mellifluous, engrossing storytellers she has encountered in hers). Her account remembers and aches for her loved one in a way that is both so poetic and relatable; she chiefly connects to his memory through a text, using his beloved copy of The Jungle Book to try to solve the puzzle around his last days, as well as his interior life. I also found The Tiger’s Wife to be very personal—Obreht was born in former Yugoslavia, and The Tiger’s Wife takes place in the Balkans, immediately after the war. My family, too, is from former Yugoslavia (where I spent much time, growing up), and though my life in America (and my age) has removed me from deeply experiencing the region’s turmoil firsthand, I marveled and cherished how Obreht’s book performs the acts of both collection and remembrance about the recent scarring and splintering of this region—this region which has historically been scarred and splintered so many times. (And it made me think of my own grandfather, another Yugoslavian storyteller, with whom I spent much of my childhood dreaming of animals.) “Collection and remembrance” are more than fluid themes of the novel, though—they comprise its methodology. Inspired by the format of The Jungle Book, perhaps, but also a culture that incorporates so many legends and beliefs (both Eastern and Western), Natalia begins interweaving fables and stories and flashbacks in her story—connecting an older, superstitious, and magical world and a bleak, modern, and disillusioned age. She does this as a device for the reader, but also because they keep unfurling in her own life as she learns her grandfather’s full story, and becomes, in a way, herself, inspired by the magic of it all.  –Olivia Rutigliano, CrimeReads Editorial Fellow

Jesmyn Ward, Salvage the Bones (2012)

Most of what remains with me years after reading Jesmyn Ward’s second novel is impressionistic. One of the final images in Salvage the Bones is of the 14-year-old protagonist Esche’s father roughing out the initial impact of Hurricane Katrina in the attic of their flooded house. They’ve been separated from the family dog, China, and her litter of puppies; Esche’s dad resolves to stay there until China returns. Ward’s story is largely about caretaking; the slimness of the book and the small-scale—a father and his children prepare for a hurricane that people are warning about—belie the immensity of what Ward set out to do with this National Book Award-winning novel. We all have at least some sense of the disastrous Katrina response and what it revealed about government infrastructure and shortsightedness concerning communities of color in particular. Katrina is the costliest natural disaster in US history, and by the time Salvage the Bones was published, the long-term mental and material costs of the hurricane were in some ways easier to see, though also largely lost in an over-saturated media market. China and the puppies are not just decorations Ward includes, but in fact central to the identity of a poor black family in the fictional Mississippi Gulf town of Bois Sauvage. China’s “motherhood” is a source of strength for Esche, who is quietly pregnant herself; Esche’s older brother, Skeetah, hopes to one day sell the puppies as fighting animals—a decision motivated by economic desperation rather than callous detachment. Ward explicitly sought to remind readers of the dignity, suffering, and hopefulness of families of color amid one of the largest-scale disasters of our times.  –Aaron Robertson, Assistant Editor

Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers (2013)

Rachel Kushner’s 2013 masterpiece has the advantage of being both epic in its historical sweep and highly, acutely specific in its characterization, observation, and ultimately, its aesthetic goals. The story is simultaneously too sprawling to do justice to in a few lines and disarmingly simple. A woman moves to New York City in the 1970s primed to create. She’s an artist. She’s swept up in the circles of other artists and finds herself perhaps too much under the sway or influence of an older man, a successful artist and the heir to an Italian tire/motorcycle fortune. The novel is a wash of conversations remembered, urges subsiding and returning, impressions. Reno, as the protagonist is nicknamed, travels to the western salt flats, crashes a motorcycle, challenges a speed record. Then she’s in Italy, adjacent to extreme luxury and wealth; next she’s in the streets, caught up in riots and a burgeoning activist culture on a collision course with her past. There is, throughout, an eerie sense of destiny, partly because we know she’s passing through important modern historical epics, but also because of the dreamlike grace of Kushner’s prose. “I was doing that thing the infatuated do,” Kushner writes through Reno, “stitching destiny onto the person we want stitched to us.” In other moments, the writing turns rock hard and visceral. A world spreads out before us, and before Reno, and we can’t help but follow the path ahead, knowing that it’s full of mistakes, cruelties small and large, and pain. But there’s also an electricity there. This is a book, ultimately, about art, that deeply human subject.  –Dwyer Murphy, CrimeReads Managing Editor

Miriam Toews, All My Puny Sorrows (2014)

How rare is it to come across a novel that elicits a physical reaction from its reader? All My Puny Sorrows runs the gamut of emotions. Miriam Toews will have you laughing out loud one minute and sobbing on the subway the next. Her novel tells the story of Elf and Yoli, two sisters with an incredible bond despite living very different lives. By all external trappings, Elf is the successful sister. She is a world-renowned virtuoso pianist. She’s wealthy and happily married. Yoli is not any of those things. Instead, she is struggling with how to love someone who no longer wants to live. And so here we find ourselves, in the room with these two inseparable sisters in the aftermath of Elf’s suicide attempt. The way Miriam Toews describes her sadness is haunting: “Then Elf tells me that she has a glass piano inside her. She’s terrified that it will break. She can’t let it break. She tells me that it’s squeezed right up against the lower right side of her stomach, that sometimes she can feel the hard edges of it pushing at her skin.” (I read this novel months ago, and I still think of the glass piano often. It’s so memorable in its specificity! It’s so weird and unique that it could only have come from the mouth of this wonderfully well-rounded, surprising character.) But it’s not all sorrow! It hits all the notes. Shown through some flashbacks to the sisters’ Mennonite upbringing and cutting to their cruel present, the intimacies of their relationship are a saving grace, a sigh of relief. Miriam Toews has an ear for dialogue. Elf and Yoli talk like flesh-and-blood sisters. The details are spot-on. At some point, they speak of their plans to “chop wood, pump water, fish, play the piano, sing together from the soundtracks of Jesus Christ Superstar and Les Miserables, re-imagine our pasts, and wait out the end of the world.” There’s a version of this story, painted with less carefully crafted strokes, that comes out cliche. But Miriam Toews is a pro at teasing out the details that make the story full and unexpected.  –Katie Yee, Book Marks Assistant Editor

Jenny Offill, Dept. of Speculation (2014)

It is possible to read Jenny Offill’s second novel, Dept. of Speculation, in a day. In fact, it is more difficult not to, as you will not want to stop reading once you’ve started. The first time I read it, I remember being dazzled by the form: a progression of short paragraphs, sometimes continuous with those around them, sometimes ostensibly standalone, each one a jolt of intelligence or feeling. Here is the one everyone quotes:

My plan was to never get married. I was going to be an art monster instead. Women almost never become art monsters because art monsters only concern themselves with art, never mundane things. Nabokov didn’t even fold his own umbrella. Vera licked his stamps for him.

The novel is filled with anecdotes like these, and also sayings, or literary quotes, like this one, which I have written down in my notebook every time I have read this book:

What Rilke said: I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone.

The second time I read it, I was heartbroken by the story, every bit of it: the writer who sacrifices (too much?) for her family, the wife whose husband has strayed, the woman rebuilding. It is the quality of mind Offill creates that makes this novel so extraordinary, that makes me want to live inside it.

The third time I read it, I realized that this is one of the few novels that I find both formally exciting and emotionally devastating—in a good way. Most writers can pull off one or the other, but Offill does it right: she uses the form to slay you good.

PS: For those, like me, who have read this book too many times already, I am pleased to inform you that Offill’s forthcoming Weather is just as brilliant and wonderful as Dept. of Speculation, but it swaps out marriage and swaps in climate change/existential malaise as its main concern, which makes it exactly the kind of book we need right now.  –Emily Temple, Senior Editor

Paul Beatty, The Sellout (2015)

It’s tough to sell me on a novel that’s not funny. To me, fiction without humor is missing an essential part of the human experience. Paul Beatty’s Booker Prize-winning masterpiece is one of the funniest—and most human—novels I’ve ever read. Not only that, it made me feel entirely vindicated for insisting upon comedy. The Sellout is so sharp you might not notice it’s cut you until you’ve already feeling faint. It’s a combination of laugh-out-loud comedy, precision social satire (rooted in a deep understanding of history), and literary tour de force. It’s so good it made me use the phrase “tour de force.” The mission of The Sellout’s narrator, a black man, is to reintroduce (official) segregation to his rural neighborhood within inner-city Los Angeles after it is mysteriously disappeared from the map. The novel fittingly begins with the narrator lighting a joint in the halls of the Supreme Court, where his re-segregation endeavor landed him. As Kevin Young wrote in his review, “Beatty takes the same delight in tearing down the sacred, not so much airing dirty laundry as soiling it in front of you.” But The Sellout celebrates as much as it torches. It is, in addition to being one of the great satirical novels of the decade, and maybe of all time, a celebration of blackness in an allegedly post-racial era (keep in mind, this was 2015).  –Jessie Gaynor, Social Media Editor

Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer (2015)

As a novel, The Sympathizer is a roiling, darkly comic, propulsive literary thriller set in the immediate aftermath of the Vietnam War, as a North Vietnamese mole keeps watch on the exiled South Vietnamese government in Southern California—it is compulsive reading, arresting in its language, unforgettable in its imagery. But it is more than that. By simply writing the words “Vietnam War” I am able to conjure an entire American mythology, the 40-year cultural byproduct of so much not-quite propaganda/not-quite art: long-haired protesters in the streets, Rustbelt grunts wading through steaming jungles, a flock of juddering choppers against an enormous foreign sun, broken men returning to a country that does not want them… This is the “American” version of the war, a story we’ve told “ourselves” that, while not particularly flattering, is as narrow and myopic as any campfire epic.

So let’s try this: The Sympathizer is an American novel about an American War, a devastating and needless conflict that created hundreds of thousands of refugees, new Americans (we were all new here, at some point) who found a home in the empire that displaced them, and who’ve made it better. Our cultural account of the American war in Vietnam has never been fully “ours” because it has neglected and actively excluded the perspectives of these refugees and their descendants. The Sympathizer is a vital work of art that begins to redress that imbalance.  –Jonny Diamond, Editor in Chief

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.  –Molly Odintz, CrimeReads Associate Editor

N. K. Jemisin, The Fifth Season (2015)

It’s not always possible to tell that a novel is great while you’re reading it. I mean, obviously you can usually tell if you like something, but to for me, you only know that a novel is capital-g Great when you find yourself, weeks or months or years after the first reading, still thinking about it. Most books, even delightful and brilliant ones, do not pass this test, at least for me. But I have thought about N. K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season (and its two sequels, The Obelisk Gate and The Stone Sky) at least weekly since I read it a few years ago.

Perhaps it’s unfair. The novel imagines an alternate Earth that is periodically torn apart by apocalyptic weather—like suffocating ash, acid clouds, fungal blooms, mineral-induced darkness, magnetic pole shifts—that lasts for decades at a time, often threatening to wipe out humanity entirely. So you can see how it might come to mind these days.

But I also think about it for its incredible world-building, its unfortunately relevant cultural critique (caste systems, power hierarchies, fear and oppression of the other or unknown, particularly when that unknown other has dreamed-of skills), and its unforgettable characters, particularly, of course, Essun, with all her anger and fear and strength and softness and power. I love her.

And hey, if you don’t want to take my word for it, consider that all three books in the Broken Earth series won Hugos. All three. –Emily Temple, Senior Editor

Rachel Cusk, Outline (2015)

There is something about the texture of Rachel Cusk’s prose in Outline (and in the novel’s two follow-ups, Transit and Kudos) that feels different from anything you’ve ever read before. It’s ostensibly a novel about a woman teaching creative writing in Athens, but it’s really just a series of conversations—importantly, conversations as she remembers them, filter after filter. There’s no real plot, and I’m at a loss to fully describe why the novel is so captivating. Probably, it’s because, as Heidi Julavits put it, it is “lethally intelligent . . . Spend much time with this novel and you’ll become convinced [Cusk] is one of the smartest writers alive. Her narrator’s mental clarity can seem so hazardously penetrating, a reader might fear the same risk of invasion and exposure.” That will do it.

Once, on the subway, I saw a young woman reading Transit and a young man reading Outline, both in the appealing Picador editions. They were standing very close, but they were facing away from one another, and didn’t seem to be together. It took all I had not to stand up and tug on their sleeves—not only because of the perfect meet-cute, but because these books feel like a kind of shibboleth, that rare bit of artistic consumption that might actually tell you something about a person, and how their mind works, and the ways to access their heart. I got off before either of them. I hope they turned around and found each other. –Emily Temple, Senior Editor

Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad (2016)

Colson Whitehead’s 2016 novel is, as they say in the business, a shoo-in for this list. It won the Pulitzer, the National Book Award, the Arthur C. Clark Award, and the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence. It was longlisted for the Booker Prize. It was also a huge bestseller, of course, and achieved near-unanimous praise from critics. Oprah picked it for her book club. Barry Jenkins is adapting it into a television show. It doesn’t get much better than that.

But, why, you might ask, if by some strange accident you have not already read it yourself? Well, it’s accessible, entertaining, and character-rich, and it also reminds us of some uncomfortable but necessary truths about America and its history. (Though not, mind you, that there was literally a coal-burning railroad underground during the 19^th century—I mean, first of all, where would the smoke go?) It has the intensity, immediacy, and high stakes of any escaped slave narrative—literally life or death—which makes it a captivating page turner, but it’s also written by the talented and adaptable Colson Whitehead, who seems to be able to tackle any genre and style, from historical fiction to bildungsroman to zombies, and make it look easy. All we can ask is that he keeps on doing it. –Emily Temple, Senior Editor

Adam Haslett, Imagine Me Gone (2016)

This was one of those novels I had to be told multiple times to read. I just didn’t want to read a sad book about depression! And to be fair . . . it is sad. But even so, I was wrong to resist, and so are you if you missed this one.

Adam Haslett’s second novel is a full and frank portrait of a family and the mental illness that besieges its members—some genetically, others merely experientially. It’s no more complicated than that—there’s no hook, no high concept twist, just the story of a family, told over the years and through the lens of each member: John, Margaret, and their (adult) children Michael, Celia, and Alec. Michael is the most intense narrator, and the one who has inherited his father’s “beast,” though in him it is changed into an obsessive, endlessly riffing master. In fact, Michael’s writing shows up quite a bit in the novel, and it’s one of the book’s best parts—a direct lens, as it were, into a highly unusual mind.

Throughout, the writing is perfectly calibrated, shifting in tenor between characters but always elevated, even lovely. But the most impressive feat is the empathy with which Haslett unravels this family, and the tenderness with which he writes about love in all of its forms. This is a striking novel, and one of the best examples in recent memory of a certain literary mode: quiet, moving, immersive, beautiful. –Emily Temple, Senior Editor

Richard Powers, The Overstory (2018)

Much has been made of Richard Powers evocation of arboreal deep time. As ecologists and botanists and field biologists having been trying to tell us for decades, trees are alive in ways far closer to what we think of as sentience than anyone thought.

And while they can certainly be characters in bestselling narrative nonfiction (Peter Wohlleben’s The Secret Life of Trees comes to mind), can they be characters in a novel? Yes and no. While Powers does introduce several recurring tree characters—a landlocked and lonely chestnut that measures the generations of a single family, a monumentally giant redwood that’s home to eco activists—the lasting importance of this elegiac epic of climate collapse will be the way it takes environmental activism seriously. Powers’ human characters are heartbroken about the destruction of the planet, and they act upon it in all the messy, complicated ways one might expect from non-trees; but they are taken seriously—they are not quirky Franzonian extras, sprinkled through the narrative for a little radical spice. Here is a novel that contains within it layers of sadness and quiet hope; its concerns are ours, its characters are us. Deep time for dark times.  –Jonny Diamond, Editor in Chief

Hernan Díaz, In the Distance (2018)

From the very beginning of Hernan Diaz’s slyly Western noir we are lashed to its main character, an adolescent Swedish immigrant named Hakan, as if to the mast of a doomed ship: we see what he sees, struggle through the same harsh weather; we drift through his grim Sargassos, desperate for that ribbon of land on the horizon that will grant reprieve. Diaz’s close third person shadowing of Hakan makes his felt dislocation ours: we know he has been separated from his brother on the way to New York, we know he has never seen a city (at one point he almost disembarks at Buenos Aires, thinking it his final destination), but we don’t really know where he is, or where he’ll end up, or why.

Though painstaking in its historical detail (without succumbing to the obsessive’s need to show off) In the Distance has the feel of a very contemporary story, capturing as it does the struggle and the will at the heart of migration, along with the cruelties that inevitably surround it. And though Diaz clearly has a copy of the Cormac McCarthy family bible, its brimstone and blood, there is tenderness buried at the borders of this novel, just waiting for a little rain to draw it to the surface.  –Jonny Diamond, Editor in Chief

Susan Choi, Trust Exercise (2019)

A finalist (and in my books, at least, the front runner) for this year’s National Book Award, 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.  –Emily Firetog, Deputy Editor

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.

***

Dissenting Opinions

The following books were just barely nudged out of the top twenty, but we (or at least one of us) couldn’t let them pass without comment.

Tom McCarthy, C (2010)

Listen, haters. I know it’s not as good—or at least as pure—as Remainder, which is a nearly perfect novel. But I loved this book for its sheer postmodern ambition, its obsessions—with hearing and mishearing, communication and miscommunication, associative thinking—and its arch coldness. It seems McCarthy, who let’s not forget is the general secretary of the “semi-fictitious” International Necronautical Society, which is “devoted to mind-bending projects that would do for death what the Surrealists had done for sex,” is playing some sort of trick, or set of tricks, on us, and maybe on literature itself, and well, unfortunately I am the sort of reader who appreciates that.

After all, the novel, which is ostensibly about a troubled and troublingly blank young man named Serge Carrefax, building radios and dropping bombs as the twentieth century begins, is so weird, and so much, and so clearly about language and what we make of it, and what it’s for. In her review of the novel for the New York Times, Jennifer Egan wrote that McCarthy “withstands the temptations of emotional plotting and holds out instead for something bigger, deeper, more universal and elemental.

C is a rigorous inquiry into the meaning of meaning: our need to find it in the world around us and communicate it to one another; our methods for doing so; the hubs and networks and skeins of interaction that result. Gone is the minimalist restraint he employed in Remainder; here, he fuses a Pynchonesque revelry in signs and codes with the lush psychedelics of William Burroughs to create an intellectually provocative novel that unfurls like a brooding, phosphorescent dream.

To be fair about the response of the critics, Michiko Kakutani hated it, calling it “disappointing and highly self-conscious” and finds his “carefully manufactured symbols and leitmotifs . . . to be more gratuitous than revealing.”

Which is perfectly reasonable. I, however, will continue to delight in its self-conscious, hyper-intellectual handwringing. I love that sort of thing. –Emily Temple, Senior Editor

Patrick DeWitt, The Sisters Brothers (2011)

Patrick DeWitt’s The Sisters Brothers is a perfect Western, which is why it’s so startling that it’s a comedy about a protracted existentialist crisis. The Gold Rush-era story of two bounty-hunters, the philosophical Eli and his rowdier, more impulsive brother Charlie, it unfolds slowly as they head from Oregon to California to kill a prospector-alchemist named Hermann Kermit Warm at the behest of a shady figure known as the Commodore. Eli doesn’t exactly love what they do for a living (he’d rather work in a shop, he thinks), while Charlie doesn’t question it. As they make their way south, in a picaresque-fashion they stumble from one (often gritty) misadventure to the next, and eventually wind up teaming up with Warm when they finally find him. The best part of the novel is the narration—Eli is the ambivalent moral compass normally absent from Westerns, a kind of extreme normalcy and humanity amidst a desolate and unforgiving landscape and livelihood. He is ever-loving towards his cruel and reckless brother, a little anxious about his weight, and gets extremely excited when he purchases a toothbrush for the first time. Charlie, on the other hand, is scary—and you’ll spend pages worrying that the complicated, loving bond between them will be Charlie’s to selfishly, stupidly break. Eli’s sincerity is what keeps everything afloat, as well as makes it all feel so precarious.

His considerate, soft-spoken-ness is jarringly interrupted by unsettling (usually gruesome, sometimes disgusting) moments of gore—sometimes violence, sometimes other nauseating things. The imagery is stunning—there are passages here and there, both horrifying and not, that have stuck with me since I read it. There is, I should warn you, some extremely tough, hard-to-read violence against horses (usually something that will compel me to burst into tears and stop reading/watching the thing at hand, but I was so interested in the story that still cried but plugged on). It’s elements like this that recall how, for all its creativity and charm, The Sisters Brothers is actually extremely sad: a wrenching evocation of a bitter moment in the history of mankind, as it tries and fails to make progress. On a different note, it also has the single best title of a fictional work, possibly ever. In my opinion. –Olivia Rutigliano, CrimeReads Editorial Fellow

Claire Messud, The Woman Upstairs (2013)

“How angry am I? You don’t want to know,” begins Claire Messud’s novel, in a sure hook if I’ve ever seen one. If I could, I would quote the entire first page because it establishes one of the most powerful and memorable feminist voices I have ever read in fiction: urgent and chillingly true. The quietly seething protagonist of The Woman Upstairs, Nora Eldridge, is a teacher who has sidelined her art, because she is a rule-follower who fears risk and uncertainty. She is unmarried, single, without kids; intelligent, experienced, and incisive enough to pierce societal facades and expose the enduring gender conventions, stereotypes, and pressures that imprison women. Thus, Messud’s titular allusion to Bertha Mason, the first “madwoman in the attic.” Nora’s predictable life is enlivened by the arrival of the worldly Shahids, a family of famous Italian artist Sirena, Lebanese academic and intellectual Skandar and young, well-mannered Reza. In each of the Shahids Nora glimpses the revival of a life she thought to be long lost. With their flattery and tacit permission she returns to her art, sharing a studio with Sirena who is preparing for an upcoming art show in Paris; she engages in intellectual discussion with Skandar (though he talks and she mostly listens); and as she gets to know Reza, finding him the perfect child, she wishes she were his mother. She is filled with promise, until they betray her. Messud yields Nora’s confessional, vehement voice from beginning to end, lending the novel the pacing and tension of a psychological thriller. In The Woman Upstairs Messud’s signature intellectual tone is invigorated by the unmoored passion of her protagonist, who grapples with the choices of her past and the promise of her future, burdened with the question of determinism as she is tormented by self-doubt and the sense of having no control to alter her fate. Messud has struck the finest balance between showing and telling: she has delivered one version of the tale of the modern woman that no one can ignore. –Eleni Theodoropoulos, Editorial Fellow

Kathryn Davis, Duplex (2013)

It’s difficult to explain the phenomenon of reading this novel for the first time, though Lynda Barry does it as well as anyone could in the opening of her review for The New York Times:

The chapter is called “Body-­without-Soul,” the book is called Duplex, and you’ve lived in a duplex so you think, “Oh, I know what this book is about.” . . . And then you read this: “The car was expensive and silver-gray and driven by the sorcerer Body-without-Soul.” And you find out not only does Miss Vicks know him, they are romantically involved, and he can make things vanish or “vibrate at unprecedented frequencies,” including her privates, he can sow fear inside anything, and then you read that he can fit his entire hand inside her. Time stutters. What? His entire hand what?

You read the phrase four times, trying to catch up, the way you tried to catch up when you were a kid and Henry, the teenager from next door, told a bunch of you a story about his finger and a girl. Finger? Girl? What? Then a flood of understanding horrified you, shamed and excited you, trailed you back into the house to the kitchen where dinner was ready, where your chicken potpie was waiting to be pierced with your fork and you stared at it.

Because the thing is, you don’t know what this book is about. I could not tell you what this book is about, because this book is an experience—closest to a dream, maybe, or a memory. An enchantment. Tom Bissell called it “a coming-of-age-meets-dystopian-fantasy-meets-alternate-reality novel, or maybe an Ionesco-meets-Beckett-meets-Oulipo novel.” It is deadpan, episodic, unrelentingly bizarre, continually surprising, and gorgeously written. It considers teenage girls deadly serious, and deadly seriously. It is a suburban American fantasy of the highest order—though Davis herself might balk at this description. “I hope that what I write is about as “realistic” as a piece of writing ever can be, though maybe “true to life” is more like what I want to say here,” she said in an interview. “I think The Metamorphosis is the most realistic autobiography ever written, and I hope Duplex aspires on some level to such lofty heights.” It does. –Emily Temple, Senior Editor

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah (2013)

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s third novel is many things at once: part social satire, part coming-of-age, part romantic comedy, part immigration story. It is expansive and engaging and deeply enjoyable. It insists on the multiplicity of immigrant experiences, including the idea that an immigrant who has found success in the US might return to her country of origin, as its female protagonist Ifemelu does. Born in Nigeria, Ifemelu comes to the US for college, and struggles to earn money, unhappily doing sex work at one point, but ultimately thrives as a writer, winning a fellowship at Princeton and writing a popular blog about her experience of race in the US as a black African. When the novel opens, she is preparing to return home. Ifemelu’s childhood friend and later boyfriend (then ex-boyfriend)—and the novel’s second narrator—Obinze, travels to England and similarly faces money struggles, though his result in deportation. Americanah does not shy away from either social critique or pure, satisfying romance. It is about identity, in both the capital and lowercase senses, and it succeeds in its precise drawing the humanity of its characters as well as the nuances of its cultures. –Jessie Gaynor, Social Media Editor

Ben Lerner, 10:04 (2014)

Considering his reputation, it’s actually a little jarring to remember that Ben Lerner has published all three of his novels (and one poetry collection) in the last decade. For those ready to jump down to the comments to tell me that actually, Lerner’s a poet—I know, dudes. Yes, he’d published two books of poetry before this decade (2006’s Angle of Yaw was a finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry), and he published another in 2010, but there’s really no denying that Lerner rose to general prominence with 2011’s slim, semi-autobiographical novel Leaving the Atocha Station, and that since then, he’s become a major name in the literary world primarily on the strength of his novels. Them’s the facts.

I reread both Leaving the Atocha Station and 10:04 recently, so as to better contextualize Lerner’s latest, The Topeka School, and found them both to still be pleasantly over-intellectual, funny, and flawed books—but 10:04 held up rather better, even with its “mild lacrimal events.” Yes, in 2019 the fact that he dropped a New Yorker story into his novel wholesale isn’t as charming as it was in 2014, but who cares? And sure, the novel is mostly just a series of Ben Lerner’s observations about art and people and the world, but who cares, and actually that’s exactly what I love about it, because Ben Lerner’s observations are better than most people’s, and because if a book makes me sit around and think deeply about the world I live in and the connections between phenomena, then I’m more than satisfied. Plus, it has a truly hilarious masturbation scene. Really, you can’t beat it. (No pun intended!!!!!!!) –Emily Temple, Senior Editor

Rabih Alameddine, An Unnecessary Woman (2014)

Of course I was going to love this book. This is a book about books. It has four (4) epigraphs. W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz is mentioned on page three. Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 is mentioned on page six. That’s only the tip of the iceberg. Plus, it’s about an introverted, deliciously sardonic, relentlessly stubborn woman who hates pretty much everyone, but loves literature, and spends all her time hiding in her Beirut apartment, secretly translating all her favorite novels into Arabic. She’s been doing this for 50 years. No one has ever read any of them. Honestly, I can’t think of a book better suited to my temperament.

And that’s just the flashy headline. This is also a novel about the Lebanese Civil War, and about how we treat people who live at the margins, particularly women, particularly older women. This is also a novel about loneliness, and about grief, and about how language can help us negotiate these, and the limits of that negotiation.

But probably the best argument for this book as one of the greatest of the decade is this: Aaliya’s is one of the best narratorial voices I have ever read. She is unusual, contemplative, critical, complex, candid, rude and tender. She’s absurdly compelling. If the truly great novels are those that invent and maintain a unique quality of mind (and for me, they are), this is one of the greatest. –Emily Temple, Senior Editor

Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies (2015)

Things were pretty good in 2015—Obama was president, the Paris Agreement was drafted, the Supreme Court affirmed same sex marriage (plus a little website called Lit Hub launched). And Lauren Groff’s third novel, Fates and Furies, was published. A finalist for the National Book Award, the book was a sensation, garnering positive reviews from everyone (including Obama, who said it was his favorite book of 2015). The novel begins on the day a young couple Lancelot (Lotto) Satterwhite and Mathilde Yoder marry, a mere two weeks after they meet. The way their love grows is told in the first half of the book, following Lotto’s mythic-hero story (born during a hurricane to a theme-park mermaid mother) he struggles as an actor before transforming into a brilliant playwright. He is a man touched by fate, who doesn’t question his successes. The second half of the novel turns the story on its head, Mathilde revealing herself as the catalyst for Lotto’s good fortune. As the story is retold and reshaped from her perspective, not only are gaps filled, but are secrets revealed. In an interview for Lit Hub, Groff said the novel is a “conversation about marriage, but also about privilege and background and our personality and how we deal with the world.” Fates and Furies takes a fairy tale marriage and probes its deepest darknesses and psychological depths with perfect, lyrical prose. If somehow you missed it when it was first published, this is your alarm to pick it up now. –Emily Firetog, Deputy Editor

Paulette Jiles, News of the World (2016)

A magnificently vivid and thoroughly heartwarming odd couple adventure tale set in the aftermath of the Civil War, in which Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd—an elderly (but still spry) widower and veteran of three wars who roams the towns of Northern Texas, spreading the good word that the 15th Amendment has just been ratified and reading newspaper stories from distant lands to town halls full of rapt locals—finds himself tasked with delivering a young orphan girl (the delightfully quarrelsome former Kiowa “captive” Johanna) across 400 miles of unsettled territory to her relatives in San Antonio. As I have detailed at excruciating length to anyone who’ll listen over the past three years, I love everything about this tender gem of a novel: the way Jiles textures her Old West landscape with Kidd’s tersely poetic observations and ironic musings, the old-fashioned getaway and gunsmoke thrills over which she allows her mismatched protagonists to bond, her masterful blending of humor and suspense, and the pleasure she takes in detailing a disappearing way of life. It’s an exquisite portrait of two wary, worn-out souls, starved of love and unmoored from the worlds they knew, finding unlikely solace in one another. What begins as a hilariously combative battle of wills between this unlikely pair of malcontents becomes, by the close, something altogether more poignant, more precious. If I’m making this sound treacly and sentimental, forgive me, for it is neither. There’s nothing cheap, nothing unearned about the warmth that radiates from its closing pages, the sweet sorrow we feel at their journey’s end. –Dan Sheehan, Book Marks Editor

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. –Emily Temple, Senior Editor

Samantha Hunt, Mr. Splitfoot (2016)

Mr. Splitfoot, Samantha Hunt’s third novel, is her creepiest, and maybe her saddest. It is about two preteens—orphans—Ruth and Nat, who live in desolate upstate New York at the Love of Christ! Foster Home, Farm, and Mission, a terrible place run by a greedy religious psychopath. Ruth is in love with Nat, while Nat is enamored of his own skills—somehow, he can speak to the dead. He can summon the deceased parents of the children who live in the home. It’s during one of his séances that they are interrupted by a new character—a charismatic charlatan named Mr. Bell who wants to help Nat profit financially from his talent. This interloper is obviously bad news—but the sense of foreboding around him and their whole enterprise is gravely augmented by the fact that every other chapter of the novel takes place many years later. Ruth, now an adult, is there, and Nat is nowhere to be found. This older Ruth also does not talk at all now, but she is determined to help a young woman, her niece Cora, escape something dangerous.

Hunt’s novels, in general, are tremendously atmospheric, but Mr. Splitfoot might take the cake—here, she is a veritable cinematographer. The ambiance she designs is exceptionally vivid: alternately shadowy and garish, extremely lonely and damp. It’s weird that the novel’s setting is so real and ordinary (just outside Troy, New York) because the story is so otherworldly, so metaphysical, so much a sinister fairy tale. The novel conjures its hair-raising, skin-crawling pulse from grotesque Christian iconography, dank forests, and smoky ghosts that might resemble what mothers look like (though, among the very motherless ensemble, no one knows for sure). Mr. Splitfoot is rich in symbolism, which might feel too-thickly applied for some readers, but I think it fits the overall generousness of her storytelling. Hunt doesn’t just write fiction; like the magical waifs at the center of her story, she truly brings things to life—though to put it this way might be laying things on a bit thick, as well. –Olivia Rutigliano, CrimeReads Editorial Fellow

Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing (2016)

Homegoing, Yaa Gyasi’s sweeping narrative of the slave trade’s toll on a family lineage across three centuries, begins with two half-sisters in 18th-century Ghana: Effia, whose marriage to the British governor of Cape Coast Castle furnishes her with security and wealth, and Esi, who is kidnapped and sold into bondage, waiting for passage to the Americas in the packed, rank dungeons under the fortress where Effia lives in luxury. Each chapter is told from the perspective of one of their descendants, unfolding the effects of slavery on both sides of the Atlantic: in West Africa, families and villages are torn apart by war and kidnappings; in America, the inhuman brutality of American slavery, rumors of which provoke horror among those who remain in Africa, leads into the era of Jim Crow apartheid and torture. In the book’s earlier scenes, some of its most vivid, Isabel Wilkerson wrote for The New York Times that Gyasi “walks assuredly through the terrain of Alex Haley, Solomon ­Northup and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in her intimate rendering of the human heart battered by the forces of conquest and history.” Some critics contended that the book’s later scenes, in the modern-day US, relied on stereotypes that were “sometimes unquestioningly imported, rather than combatted, subverted, and complicated,” Kate Osana Simonian wrote for The Kenyon Review. Regardless, this book is an astonishing testament to survival and a witness to the ancestral wisdom and ingenuity that made survival possible. –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

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.  –Jonny Diamond, Editor in Chief

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. –Jessie Gaynor, Social Media Editor

Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017)

Jesmyn Ward is a MacArthur genius grant recipient, a two-time National Book Award winner, and a former TIME 100 honoree, as well as the author of one of the most powerful and affecting memoirs of the last ten years, so why does it still feel like she’s under-read? Granted, Ward is not one of the book world’s Very Online Authors, nor does she qualify as a literary wunderkind (though I’d argue that winning two National Book Award by the still-young age of forty is pretty damn wunderful), and she and her work have never really been subjected to the kind of breathless op-ed assault that can, as a silver lining, serve to raise awareness of a title, but still… All that throat-clearing is to say that if you haven’t yet gotten around to reading Ward’s work, you really, really should. She is a truly magnificent writer and one of the most poetic and humane chroniclers of the trauma that generations of systemic racism has inflicted upon the contemporary black American family. Her finest (and most harrowing) work to date, Sing, Unburied, Sing is an intimate, mystical portrait of a fractured Mississippi Gulf Coast family and the painful histories and buried secrets that plague its members as they embark upon a journey to the State Penitentiary. As she does in 2011’s Salvage the Bones, Ward infuses this devastating Southern realist tale with a sort of mythic grandeur. Her language is lyrical, hypnotic, haunted by a deep and profound sorrow as her characters are haunted by the ghosts of young men brutally and prematurely wrenched out of the world. –Dan Sheehan, Book Marks Editor

Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

If I were to choose one word to describe my experience reading Ottessa Moshfegh’s latest novel, the word would be delight. It’s just so goddamn fun, and weird, and, well, mean in a way you’re not allowed to be, usually, either in literature or in life, which made me love it (look, she’s not hurting anybody, everyone is fictional, let me have this).

Like many readers (and writers) I know, I first fell for Moshfegh via her stories in the Paris Review, and 2017 her collection Homesick for Another World. My Year of Rest and Relaxation picks up some of her stories’ elements—horrible people, anger, dissociation between reality and interiority—while feeling like a much bigger, better, complex work. Well, it’s a novel, after all, and it’s a good one.

As you may know, the book centers on an unnamed narrator (rich, she tells us, and pretty) living in New York City, whose parents have recently died, and who would like to take a “year of rest and relaxation” via a drug stupor, waking only every three days to eat. She is sometimes stymied by Reva, her “best friend,” but eventually more or less succeeds, and wakes in the summer of 2001, slowly readjusting to her life before she’ll have to readjust all over again.

And not for nothing, the latter half of this decade has made me extremely sympathetic to the quest to spend a year asleep. As long as I’d still be able to vote (absentee ballot?), I would happily agree to be unconscious for 2020. Just think of all the bullshit I’d miss. –Emily Temple, Senior Editor

Sally Rooney, Normal People (2018)

Just popping in to introduce you to a book you’ve definitely never heard anything about, an underappreciated novel I like to call Normal People. Just kidding! I’m sure you know all about it. I’m sure it’s the first thing you see when you walk into your local indie. I’m sure you probably tried to go to the Books Are Magic event that so many people RSVP’d to that they had to move it to a local church (and it was still packed!). You are probably also pumped for the TV adaptation—right? There is good reason for the hype, friends. From Sally Rooney, celebrated author of Conversations With Friends and heralded as “the first great millennial writer” comes the story of Connell and Marianne. Connell is your quintessential cool kid (popular, star of the football team, etc.), while Marianne lives a more solitary and private high school existence. His mother works for her family. One day, when Connell comes to pick his mother up from Marianne’s house, an unlikely connection grows between the two teenagers. Through Sally Rooney’s masterfully controlled prose, we follow them through the halls of their high school, where they pretend not to know each other. We follow them as they outgrow the place, shed friendships, move away from home. We follow them to university. We see them thrive and wilt, ebb and flow. There is something about Sally Rooney’s writing that is so certain, that makes us trust the feelings of the characters. She cuts to the core of them. Normal People is a biting portrait of an intimate relationship as a living, breathing thing. But in the periphery, through some details of circumstance, it also examines socioeconomic class (Sally Rooney has said she wants to write “a Marxist novel”) in a way that reads like George Eliot’s Middlemarch for the modern age. –Katie Yee, Book Marks Assistant Editor

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.  –Jonny Diamond, Editor in Chief

Téa Obreht, Inland (2019)

You’d be forgiven, if you read Téa Obreht’s 2011 debut The Tiger’s Wife (ahem, see above), for having high expectations for her sophomore effort, especially considering it’s been 8 years in the making.

You’d be forgiven, and you wouldn’t be disappointed. This is a lush, wide-ranging, and fully American novel, a revisioning of a classic Western, imbued, as all the best revisionings are, with many of the satisfactions of the trope, but presented alongside a set of new and better ones.

For instance, for a Western, it’s not particularly violent—or not as violent as you’d expect, though what is there was so well-written as to make me gasp—and instead we get the aftermath: the ghosts. Ghosts are everywhere in this novel, reminding us that every place and time has its own history, its own victims, its own way of self-consideration. Both Nora and Lurie see them, though it’s not always clear that they both believe them. We believe them, though: such is the compelling texture of Obreht’s prose.

There are two stories at play here: as the novel opens, Nora, a frontierswoman in the Arizona Territory in the late 19^th century, waits more or less patiently for her husband and two eldest sons to return, as her water runs out and her youngest son begins to see monsters in the underbrush; then there’s Lurie, the outlaw and immigrant who joins the United States Camel Corps (yes, this is a thing) and begins a long trek.

These two stories eventually converge, in a way I didn’t see coming at all—though in retrospect it was perfectly orchestrated, inevitable, really. Maybe it was my level of immersion that kept me from noticing Obreht’s deft use of time and space between and within the two narratives. Suffice it to say, if this is a new American myth, I’ll take it. –Emily Temple, Senior Editor

***

Honorable Mentions

A selection of other books that we seriously considered for both lists—just to be extra about it (and because decisions are hard).

Emma Donoghue, Room (2010) · Jonathan Franzen, Freedom (2010) · Tana French, Faithful Place (2010) · Maaza Mengiste, Beneath the Lion’s Gaze (2010) · Aimee Bender, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake (2010) · Brady Udall, The Lonely Polygamist (2010) · Attica Locke, Black Water Rising (2010) · Jaimy Gordon, Lord of Misrule (2010) · Chang-rae Lee, The Surrendered (2010) · Paul Murray, Skippy Dies (2010) · Tom Rachman, The Imperfectionists (2010) · Nadifa Mohamed, Black Mamba Boy (2010) · Andrea Levy, The Long Song (2010) · Helen Oyeyemi, Mr. Fox (2011) · Nicholson Baker, House of Holes (2011) · Ann Patchett, State of Wonder (2011) · Alan Hollinghurst, The Stranger’s Child (2011) · Dana Spiotta, Stone Arabia (2011) · Justin Torres, We the Animals (2011) · Teju Cole, Open City (2011) · Donald Ray Pollock, The Devil All the Time (2011) · Eleanor Henderson, Ten Thousand Saints (2011) · Kevin Wilson, The Family Fang (2011) · Francisco Goldman, Say Her Name (2011) · Colson Whitehead, Zone One (2011) · Karen Russell, Swamplandia! (2011) · José Saramago, Cain (2011) · Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending (2011) · Ben Lerner, Leaving the Atocha Station (2011) · Adam Johnson, The Orphan Master’s Son (2012) · Edward St. Aubyn, At Last (2012) · Barbara Kingsolver, Flight Behavior (2012) · Sheila Heti, How Should a Person Be? (2012) · Karen Thompson Walker, The Age of Miracles (2012) · Louise Erdrich, The Round House (2012) · Kevin Powers, The Yellow Birds (2012) · Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl (2012) · G. Willow Wilson, Alif the Unseen (2012) · Amanda Coplin, The Orchardist (2012) · Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies (2012) · Zadie Smith, NW (2012) · Andrew Miller, Pure (2012) · Orhan Pamuk, Silent House (2012) · Jess Walter, Beautiful Ruins (2012) · Amelia Gray, Threats (2012) · Kevin Barry, City of Bohane (2012) · Jeet Thayil, Narcopolis (2012) · James Salter, All That Is (2013) · Edwidge Danticat, Claire of the Sea Light (2013) · James McBride, The Good Lord Bird (2013) · Mohsin Hamid, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (2013) · Jhumpa Lahiri, The Lowland (2013) · Philipp Meyer, The Son (2013) · J. M. Ledgard, Submergence (2013) · Anthony Marra, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena (2013) · Alissa Nutting, Tampa (2013) · Margaret Atwood, MaddAddam (2013) · Ayana Mathis, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie (2013) · Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch (2013) · William H. Gass, Middle C (2013) · Kate Atkinson, Life After Life (2013) · Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries (2013) · Jim Harrison, Brown Dog (2013) · NoViolet Bulawayo, We Need New Names (2013) · Laila Lalami, The Moor’s Account (2014) · Atticus Lish, Preparation for the Next Life (2014) · Eimear McBride, A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing (2014) · Lily King, Euphoria (2014) · Akhil Sharma, Family Life (2014) · Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven (2014) · Dinaw Mengestu, All Our Names (2014) · Marilynne Robinson, Lila (2014) · Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See (2014) · Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings (2014) · Nell Zink, The Wallcreeper (2014) · Catherine Lacey, Nobody is Ever Missing (2014) ·  Chang-Rae Lee, On Such a Full Sea (2014) · Jeffery Renard Allen, Song of the Shank (2014) · Nell Zink, The Wallcreeper (2014) · Celeste Ng, Everything I Never Told You (2014) · Merritt Tierce, Love Me Back (2014) · Siri Hustvedt, The Blazing World (2014) · Tom McCarthy, Satin Island (2015) · Angela Flournoy, The Turner House (2015) · Alexandra Kleeman, You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine (2015) · Ali Smith, How to Be Both (2015) · Sara Nović, Girl at War (2015) · Scarlett Thomas, The Seed Collectors (2015) · Nell Zink, Mislaid (2015) · James Hannaham, Delicious Foods (2015) · Claire-Louise Bennett, Pond (2016) · Jane Alison, Nine Island (2016) · Nicole Dennis-Benn, Here Comes the Sun (2016) · Max Porter, Grief is the Thing with Feathers (2016) · Imbolo Mbue, Behold the Dreamers (2016) · Tony Tulathimutte, Private Citizens (2016) · Emma Cline, The Girls (2016) · Deborah Levy, Hot Milk (2016) · Martin Seay, The Mirror Thief (2016) · Brit Bennett, The Mothers (2016) · Garth Greenwell, What Belongs to You (2016) · Jade Sharma, Problems (2016) · Adam Haslett, Imagine Me Gone (2016) · Esmé Weijun Wang, The Border of Paradise (2016) · Victor LaValle, The Changeling (2017) · Jon McGregor, Reservoir 13 (2017) · Andrew Sean Greer, Less (2017) · Katie Kitamura, A Separation (2017) · Scott McClanahan, The Sarah Book (2017) · Gabe Habash, Stephen Florida (2017) · George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo (2017) · Mohsin Hamid, Exit West (2017) · Hari Kunzru, White Tears (2017) · Omar El Akkad, American War (2017) · Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi, Kintu (2017) · Min Jin Lee, Pachinko (2017) · Sally Rooney, Conversations With Friends (2017) · Fiona Mozley, Elmet (2017) · Amelia Gray, Isadora (2017) · Julie Buntin, Marlena (2017) · Tayari Jones, An American Marriage (2018) · Sigrid Nunez, The Friend (2018) · Madeline Miller, Circe (2018) · Nico Walker, Cherry (2018) · R. O. Kwon, The Incendiaries (2018) · Tommy Orange, There There (2018) · Gina Apostol, Insurrecto (2018) · Daisy Johnson, Everything Under (2018) · Dan Sheehan, Restless Souls (2018) · Tara Isabella Burton, Social Creature (2018) · Chandler Klang Smith, The Sky is Yours (2018) · Rebecca Makkai, The Great Believers (2018) · Jamie Quatro, Fire Sermon (2018) · Chloe Benjamin, The Immortalists (2018) · Akwaeke Emezi, Freshwater (2018) · Ling Ma, Severance (2018) · Lisa Halliday, Asymmetry (2018) · Wayétu Moore, She Would Be King (2018) · Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019) · Helen Phillips, The Need (2019) · Maurice Carlos Ruffin, We Cast a Shadow (2019) · Sarah Moss, Ghost Wall (2019) · Sophie Mackintosh, The Water Cure (2019) · Jeanette Winterson, Frankissstein (2019) · Lucy Ellman, Ducks, Newburyport (2019) · De’Shawn Charles Winslow, In West Mills (2019) · Sandra Newman, The Heavens (2019) · Colson Whitehead, The Nickel Boys (2019) · Elizabeth McCracken, Bowlaway (2019) · Kathleen Alcott, America Was Hard to Find (2019).

Friends, it’s true: the end of the decade approaches. It’s been a difficult, anxiety-provoking, morally compromised decade, but at least it’s been populated by some damn fine literature. We’ll take our silver linings where we can.

So, as is our hallowed duty as a literary and culture website—though with full awareness of the potentially fruitless and endlessly contestable nature of the task—in the coming weeks, we’ll be taking a look at the best and most important (these being not always the same) books of the decade that was. We will do this, of course, by means of a variety of lists. We began with the best debut novels, the best short story collections, the best poetry collections, the best memoirs of the decade, and the best essay collections of the decade. But our sixth list was a little harder—we were looking at what we (perhaps foolishly) deemed “general” nonfiction: all the nonfiction excepting memoirs and essays (these being covered in their own lists) published in English between 2010 and 2019.

Reader, we cheated. We picked a top 20. It only made sense, with such a large field. And 20 isn’t even enough, really. But so it goes, in the world of lists.

The following books were finally chosen after much debate (and multiple meetings) by the Literary Hub staff. Tears were spilled, feelings were hurt, books were re-read. And as you’ll shortly see, we had a hard time choosing just ten—so we’ve also included a list of dissenting opinions, and an even longer list of also-rans. As ever, free to add any of your own favorites that we’ve missed in the comments below.

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The Top Twenty

Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow (2010)

I read Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow when it first came out, and I remember its colossal impact so clearly—not just on the academic world (it is, technically, an academic book, and Alexander is an academic) but everywhere. It was published during the Obama Administration, an interval which many (white people) thought signaled a new dawn of race relations in America—of a kind of fantastic post-racialism. Though it’s hard to look back on this particular zeitgeist now (when, and I still can’t believe I’m writing this, Donald Trump is president of the United States) without decrying the ignorance and naiveté of this mindset, Alexander’s book called out this the insistence on a phenomenon of “colorblindness” in 2012, as a veneer, as a sham, or as, simply, another form of ignorance. “We have not ended racial caste in America,” she declares, “we have merely redesigned it.” Alexander’s meticulous research concerns the mass incarceration of black men principally through the War on Drugs, Alexander explains how the United States government itself (the justice system) carries out a significant racist pattern of injustice—which not only literally subordinates black men by jailing them, but also then removes them of their rights and turns them into second class citizens after the fact. Former convicts, she learns through working with the ACLU, will face discrimination (discrimination that is supported and justified by society) which includes restrictions from voting rights, juries, food stamps, public housing, student loans—and job opportunities. “Unlike in Jim Crow days, there were no ‘Whites Only’ signs.” Alexander explains. “This system is out of sight, out of mind.” Her book, which exposes this subtler but still horrible new mode of social control, is an essential, groundbreaking achievement which does more than call out the hypocrisy of our infrastructure, but provide it with obvious steps to change.  –Olivia Rutigliano, CrimeReads Editorial Fellow

Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies (2010)

In this riveting (despite its near 600 pages) and highly influential book, Mukherjee traces the known history of our most feared ailment, from its earliest appearances over five thousand years ago to the wars still being waged by contemporary doctors, and all the confusion, success stories, and failures in between—hence the subtitle “a biography of cancer,” though of course it is also a biography of humanity and of human ingenuity (and lack thereof).

Mukherjee began to write the book after a striking interaction with a patient who had stomach cancer, he told The New York Times. “She said, ‘I’m willing to go on fighting, but I need to know what it is that I’m battling.’ It was an embarrassing moment. I couldn’t answer her, and I couldn’t point her to a book that would. Answering her question—that was the urgency that drove me, really. The book was written because it wasn’t there.”

His work was certainly appreciated. The Emperor of All Maladies won the 2011 Pulitzer in General Nonfiction (the jury called it “An elegant inquiry, at once clinical and personal, into the long history of an insidious disease that, despite treatment breakthroughs, still bedevils medical science.”), the Guardian first book award, and the inaugural PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award; it was a New York Times bestseller. But most importantly, it was the first book many laypeople (read: not scientists, doctors, or those whose lives had already been acutely affected by cancer) had read about the most dreaded of all diseases, and though the science marches on, it is still widely read and referenced today.  –Emily Temple, Senior Editor

Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (2010)

As a strongly humanities-focused person, it’s difficult for me to connect with books about science. What can I say besides that public education and I failed each other. When I read The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, I found myself thinking that if all scientific knowledge were part of this kind of incredibly compelling and human narrative, I would probably be a doctor by now. (I mean, it’s possible.) Rebecca Skloot tells the story of Henrietta Lacks, a black woman who died of cervical cancer in 1951, and her cells (dubbed HeLa cells) which were cultured without her permission, and which were the first human cells to reproduce in a lab—making them immensely valuable to scientists in research labs all over the world. HeLa cells have been used for the development of vaccines and treatments as well as in drug treatments, gene mapping, and many, many other scientific pursuits. They were even sent to space so scientists could study the effects of zero gravity on human cells.

Skloot set a wildly ambitious project for herself with this book. Not only does she write about the (immortal) life of the cells as well as the lives of Lacks and her (human, not just cellular) descendants, she also writes about the racism in the medical field and medical ethics as a whole. That the book feels cohesive as well as compelling is a great testament to Skloot’s skills as a writer. “Immortal Life reads like a novel,” writes Eric Roston in his Washington Post review. “The prose is unadorned, crisp and transparent.” For a book that encompasses so much, it never feels baggy. Nearly ten years later, it remains an urgent text, and one that is taught in high schools, universities, and medical schools across the country. It is both an incredible achievement and, simply, a really good read.  –Jessie Gaynor, Social Media Editor

Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands (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.  –Molly Odintz, CrimeReads Associate Editor

Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration (2010)

Wilkerson’s history of the Great Migration is a revelation. When we talk about migration in the context of American history, we tend to focus on triumphalist stories of immigrants coming to America, but what about the vast migrations that have happened internally? Between 1920 and 1970, millions of African-Americans migrated North from the prejudice-ridden South, lured by relatively high-paying jobs and relatively less racism. It takes a whole lot to make someone leave their home, and Wilkerson does an excellent job at reminding us how awful life in the South was for Black people (and still is, in many ways). The Warmth of Other Suns is not only fascinating—it’s also thrilling, taking us into the lives of hard-scrabble folk who were equal parts refugees and adventurers, and truly epic, telling a great story on a grand scale. Don’t think that means there aren’t small moments of humanity seeded throughout the book—for every sentence about the conduct of millions, there’s a detail that reminds us that we’re reading about individuals, with their own hopes, wishes, dreams, and struggles.  –Molly Odintz, CrimeReads Associate Editor

Robert A. Caro, The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson (2012)

While Robert Caro first came to prominence for The Powerbroker, his 1974 biography of divisive urban planner Robert Moses, it’s Caro’s ongoing multi-volume biography of LBJ, America’s most unjustly maligned president (fight me, Kennedy-heads!), that has cemented his legacy. It’s hard to pick one in particular to recommend, but The Passage of Power, which covers the years 1958-1964, captures the most tumultuous period of LBJ’s life in politics, as he went from feared senator, to side-lined VP, to suddenly becoming the post powerful figure in the world. There’s something profoundly moving about the vastness of these works—Caro is 83 now, and has dedicated an enormous part of his life to this singular project. His wife is his only approved research assistant, and together, they’ve upended half a century of LBJ criticism to reveal the complex, problematic, but always striving core of a sensitive soul.

I had a teacher in high school who spent 20 years working on her dissertation on LBJ. She’d spend each weekend at the LBJ Library at UT Austin, while working full time as a public school teacher, and kicked ass at both. There’s something about LBJ that inspires people to dedicate their entire lives to trying to figure him out, and in the process, trying to understand the world that made him, and that he made. Thanks to Caro, we can all understand LBJ a little bit better.  –Molly Odintz, CrimeReads Associate Editor

Tom Reiss, The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo (2012)

Tom Reiss opens his biography of Thomas Alexandre-Dumas, father of author Alexandre Dumas, with a scene that seems right out of an academic heist film. At a library in rural France, Reiss convinces a town official to blow open a safe whose combination was held only by the late librarian. What Reiss discovers are the rudiments of a grand and, until then, largely unknown story of the man who inspired some of his son’s most beloved tales. The Black Count is also a case study of complex racial politics during the age of revolutionary France. Dumas was born in 1762 in Saint-Domingue, the French Caribbean colony that would become Haiti. As the son of a French marquis and a freed black slave, Dumas was subject both to the privileges of the former and the kind of indignities suffered by the latter. His father, for instance, sells him into slavery when he is 12 only to purchase his freedom later and bring him to France, where the young man receives an aristocratic education. A final rift from his father prompts Dumas to join the military. Reiss creates a dynamic, if somewhat speculative portrait of Dumas based on letters, reports from battlefields, Dumas’ own writings, and more. By the time he is 30, Dumas has vaulted in the ranks from corporal to general and commands a division of more than 50,000 soldiers. It’s no accident that the thrilling militaristic feats Reiss describes sound like events out of The Count of Monte Cristo or The Three Musketeers. Though the general becomes a cavalry commander under Napoleon Bonaparte, Reiss suggests that it was Napoleon himself who ruined Dumas not only from a personal standpoint, but civilizational as well. Napoleon reintroduced slavery in Haiti, after all, in contradiction to the republican dreams of Dumas’ contemporary, Toussaint Louverture, another rare and successful 18th-century general of African descent. Reiss unearths the ultimately tragic story of a man who was infamous in his own time for enjoying social and professional advantages that would’ve been unheard of for a mixed-race man in the US, a nation which of course went through its own revolution one generation earlier.  –Aaron Robertson, Assistant Editor

Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction (2014)

The premise of Elizabeth Kolbert’s Pulitzer-prize-winning book is a simple scientific fact: there have been five mass extinctions in the history of the planet, and soon there will be six. The difference, Kolbert explains, is that this one is caused by humans, who have drastically altered the earth in a short time. She points out on the first page that humans (which is to say, homo sapiens, humans like us) have only been around for two hundred thousand or so years—an incredibly short amount of time to do damage enough to destroy most of earthly life. Kolbert’s book is so unique, though, because she combines research from across disciplines (scientific and social-scientific) to prepare an extremely comprehensive, sweeping argument about how our oceans, air, animal populations, bacterial ecosystems, and other natural elements are dangerously adapting to (or dying from) human impact, while also tracing the history of both the approaches to these things (theories of evolution, extinction, and other principles). It’s a depressing and horrifying argument on the face of it, but it’s made so delicately, even poetically—Kolbert’s concerned, occasional first-person narration, and her many interviews with professionals capable of the pithiest, most perfect quotes (not to mention that she interviews these experts, sometimes, over pizza) make this book a conversation, more than a treatise. Kolbert talks us through the headiest, most complicated science, breaking down this mass disaster morsel by morsel. This might be The Sixth Extinction’s greatest achievement—it is so smart while also being so quotidian, so urgent while also being so present. And this fits the tone of her argument: our current mass extinction doesn’t feel like an asteroid hitting the planet. It’s amassed by the small ways in which we live our lives. We are crawling, she illuminates, towards the end of the world.  –Olivia Rutigliano, CrimeReads Editorial Fellow

Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (2015)

Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me 1) won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2015, 2) was a #1 New York Times bestseller, and 3) was deemed “required reading” by Toni Morrison. What else is there to say? To call it “timely” or “urgent” or even “a prime example of how the personal is, in fact, political” (as I am tempted to do) does not quite capture the unique, grounding, heartbreaking experience of reading this book. Framed as a letter to his teenage son, Between the World and Me is both a biting interrogation of American history and today’s society and an intimate look at the concerns and hopes a father passes down to his son. In just 152 pages, this book touches on the creation of race (“But race is the child of racism, not the father”), the countless acts of violence enacted on black bodies, gun control, and anecdotes from the writer’s own life. Ta-Nehisi Coates, a correspondent for The Atlantic, exercises a journalist’s concision and clarity and fuses it with the flourish of a novelist and the caring instinct of a father. It is a wonderful hybrid. The way the topics, the tones, bleed into one another reads so naturally: “I write you in your fifteenth year. I am writing you because this was the year you saw Eric Garner choked to death for selling cigarettes; because you know now that Renisha McBride was shot for seeking help, and that John Crawford was shot down for browsing in a department store…” The list, of course, goes on. Between the World and Me brilliantly forces us to confront these tragedies again—to remember our own experiences watching the news coverage, to see them in the context of history filtered through Ta-Nehisi Coates’ unsurprised perspective, and to see them anew through the eyes of his disillusioned young son. There is an amazing generosity to these personal glimpses, the moments when the writer turns to his son (says “you”). They catch you off guard. (There are even photographs throughout, like a scrapbook you aren’t sure if you’re allowed to look through.) There have been many books about race, about violence and institutionalized injustice and identity, and there will be more, but none quite so beautifully shattering as this. –Katie Yee, Book Marks Assistant Editor

Andrea Wulf, The Invention of Nature (2015)

Andrea Wulf’s 2015 biography of 18th-century German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt—one of the most famous men of his time, for whom literally hundreds of towns, rivers, currents, glaciers, and more are named—is so much more than the story of a single life. Aside from chronicling a remarkably fertile moment in the history of European ideas (Von Humboldt was good buddies with his neighbor in Weimar, Goethe) Wulf reveals in Humboldt a true forebear of present-day ecology, a jack-of-all-trades scientist less concerned with the reduction of the natural world into its constituent specimens than with our place in a broader ecosystem.

And while it doesn’t seem particularly radical now, Humboldt’s proto-environmentalist ideas about the wider world, much of which he mapped and explored, stood in stark contrast to prevailing notions of Christian dominion, that dubious theological position conjured up in aid of empire. Insofar as Humboldt was among the first to understand and articulate the complex systems of a living forest, he was also the first to sound the alarm about the impacts of deforestation (much of which he encountered on his epic journey across the northern reaches of South America). Part adventure yarn, part intellectual history, part ecological meditation, The Invention of Nature restores to prominence an exemplary life, and reminds us of the tectonic force of ideas paired to action.  –Jonny Diamond, Editor in Chief

Stacy Schiff, The Witches (2015)

It’s surprising that with a topic as popular and recurring in American culture as the Salem witch trials there have not been more books of this kind. Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the bestselling Cleopatra, Stacy Schiff takes to the Salem witch trials with curiosity and a historian’s magnifying glass, setting out to uncover the mystery that has baffled, awed, and terrified generations since. She pokes at the spectacle that Salem has become in mainstream and artistic depictions—how it has blended with folklore and fiction and has hitherto become a sensationalized event in American history which nonetheless has never been fully understood. Schiff writes that despite the imagination surrounding the Salem witch trials, in reality, there is still a gap in their history of—to be exact—nine months; so the impetus of the book and the intent of Schiff is to penetrate the mass hysteria and panic that ripped through Salem at the time and led to the execution of fourteen women and five men. In her opening chapter, Schiff chillingly sets up the atmosphere of the book and asks key questions that will drive its ensuing narrative: “Who was conspiring against you? Might you be a witch and not know it? Can an innocent person be guilty? Could anyone, wondered a group of men late in the summer, consider themselves safe?” At the heart of Schiff’s historical investigation is the Puritan culture of New England—but part of her masterful synthesis is that she picks apart at each thread of Salem’s culture and evaluates the witch trials from every perspective. Praised for her research as well as her prose and narrative capabilities, Schiff’s The Witches has been described by The Times (London) as “An oppressive, forensic, psychological thriller”; Schiff herself, by the New York Review of Books as having “mastered the entire history of early New England.” A phrase that still haunts me for its resonance throughout human history, is: “Even at the time, it was clear to some that Salem was a story of one thing behind which was a story about something else altogether.” –Eleni Theodoropoulos, Editorial Fellow

Svetlana Alexievich, tr. Bela Shayevich, Secondhand Time (2016)

A landmark work of oral history, Svetlana Alexievich’s Second-hand Time chronicles the decline and fall of Soviet communism and the rise of oligarchic capitalism. Through a multitude of interviews conducted between 1991 and 2012 with ordinary citizens—doctors, soldiers, waitresses, Communist party secretaries, and writers—Alexievich’s account is as important to understanding the Soviet world as Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. Second-hand Time first appeared in Russia in 2013 and was translated into English in 2016 by Bella Shayevich. As David Remnick wrote in The New Yorker, “There are many worthwhile books on the post-Soviet period and Putin’s ascent…But the nonfiction volume that has done the most to deepen the emotional understanding of Russia during and after the collapse of the Soviet Union of late is Svetlana Alexievich’s oral history…” It is shockingly intimate, Alexievich’s interviewees sharing their darkest traumas and deepest regrets. In their kitchens, at gravesites, each character tells the story of a nation abandoned by the Kremlin. Like much of Alexievich’s work, it is radical in its composition, challenging with its polyphony of distinctive, human voices the “official history” of a society that presented itself as homogeneous and monolithic—an achievement the Nobel committee recognized when it cited the Belorussian journalist for developing “a new kind of literary genre…a history of the soul.” Like her more recent The Unwomanly Face of War and Last Witnesses: An Oral History of the Children of World War II, Alexievich’s project is one of the most important accounts being produced today.  –Emily Firetog, Deputy Editor

Jane Mayer, Dark Money (2016)

In addition to being an incredible work of reporting, Jane Mayer’s Dark Money is a historical document of what happened to America as a small group of plutocrats funded the rise of political candidates who espoused policies and beliefs that had been, until then, considered a part of the fringe right wing of the Republican Party. Mayer describes this group as “a small, rarefied group of hugely wealthy, archconservative families that for decades poured money, often with little public disclosure, into influencing how Americans thought and voted.” Mayer’s painstakingly reported work is a monumental achievement; she lays out, in as much detail as could possibly be available, the mechanisms that allowed this group to channel their wealth and power, with the help of federal law, to a set of institutions that aim to fight scientific advancement, justice-oriented movements, and climate change. In doing so, they have overhauled American politics. As Alan Ehrenhalt put it in a review of the book for The New York Times, she describes “a private political bank capable of bestowing unlimited amounts of money on favored candidates, and doing it with virtually no disclosure of its source.”

The stakes here extend beyond American politics; Mayer points out that Koch money upholds some of the institutions most vigorously fighting climate activism and defending the fossil fuel industry. In 2017, she told the Los Angeles Times, “There are many things you can fix and you can bring back, and there are sort of cycles in American history and the pendulum swings back and forth, but there are things you can damage irreparably, and that’s what I’m worried about right this moment … And that’s why this particular book—because it’s about the money that is stopping this country from doing something useful on climate change.”  –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

David France, How to Survive a Plague (2016)

To call How to Survive a Plague extensive would be an understatement; France’s account of the epidemic’s earliest days is overwhelmingly generous, letting the reader experience those days, and everything that followed, from within the community that faced it first. France recounts the ways in which scientists and doctors first responded to the virus, tracing the evolution of that understanding from within a small circle to a broad cry for awareness and resources; meanwhile, he shows how a community of people fighting for their lives mobilized alternative systems of communication, education, and support while facing an almost inconceivable wall of barriers to that work. The importance of language in this fight is at the forefront here, from the scientific question of what to call the virus, to its reputation in popular culture as “gay cancer,” to the disagreements within activist groups about how to tell their stories to an unsympathetic world.

This is an enraging history, one of various institutional failures, missed opportunities, hypocrisies, and acts of malice toward a community in crisis, motivated by hatred and horror of queer people and gay men in particular. But I felt equally enraged and in awe. This is a humbling history to read, especially if, like me, you come from a generation of queer people that has been accused of forgetting it. I’m grateful for France’s testimony; it won’t let any of us forget.  –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Andrés Reséndez, The Other Slavery (2016)

Reséndez’s The Other Slavery is nothing short of an epic recalibration of American history, one that’s long overdue and badly needed in the present moment. The story of the assault on indigenous peoples in the Americas is perhaps well-known, but what’s less known is how many of those people were enslaved by colonizers, how that enslavement led to mass death, and how complicit the American legal system was in bringing that oppression about and sustaining it for years beyond the supposed emancipation in regions in which indigenous peoples were enslaved. This was not an isolated phenomenon. It extended from Caribbean plantations to Western mining interests. It was part and parcel of the European effort to settle the “new world” and was one of the driving motivations behind the earliest expeditions and colonies. Reséndez puts the number of indigenous enslaved between Columbus’s arrival and 1900 at somewhere between 2.5 and 5 million people. The institution took many forms, but reading through the legal obfuscation and drilling down into the archival record and first-hand accounts of the eras, Reséndez shows how slavery permeated the continents. Native tribes were not simply wiped out by disease, war, and brutal segregation. They were also worked—against their will, without pay, in mass numbers—to death. It was a sustained and organized enslavement. The Other Slavery also tells the story of uprising—communities that resisted, individuals who fought. It’s a complex and tragic story that required a skilled historian to bring into the contemporary consciousness. In addition to his skills as a historian and an investigator, Resendez is a skilled storyteller with a truly remarkable subject. This is historical nonfiction at its most important and most necessary.  –Dwyer Murphy, CrimeReads Managing Editor

Rebecca Traister, All the Single Ladies (2016)

One night, facing a brief gap between plans with different people, I took Rebecca Traister’s All the Single Ladies to a bar. A few minutes after I ordered, deep in Traister’s incredible, extensive history of single women in America, a server came over to offer me another, more isolated seat at the end of the bar, “so you don’t feel embarrassed about being alone,” she said, quietly. I assured her I was okay, trying not to laugh. She was just so worried.

I turned back to my book to find Traister describing this kind of cultural distress—a woman, alone, in public?!—at a new generation of unmarried adult women, who are more autonomous and numerous today than ever before. Far from marking a crisis in the social order, Traister writes, this shift “was in fact a new order … women’s paths were increasingly marked with options, off-ramps, variations on what had historically been a very constrained theme.” She examines the history of unmarried women as a social and political force, including the activists who devoted their lives to establishing a greater range of educational, familial, and economic choices for women, with particular attention to the ways in which that history is also one of racial and economic justice in the US. Traister also highlights the networks of social support that women have created in order to survive patriarchy and establish lifestyles that did not depend on it; intimacy and communication among unmarried women, she shows, were the backbone of activist and reform movements that successfully challenged the dominant order.

The book draws on interviews from dozens of women of varying backgrounds, and their firsthand accounts are a portrait of life amid a historic shift toward female autonomy. Their stories, and Traister’s analysis, make it clear that even as options for many women are expanding, those options are not equally available or beneficial to all women. This is a stunning reckoning with the state of women’s independence and the policies that still seek to curtail it.  –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Caroline Fraser, Prairie Fires (2017)

Prairie Fires, Caroline Fraser’s Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Critics Circle Award-winning biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder is not just a painstakingly researched and lyrically realized account of how the Little House on the Prairie author decanted the poverty and precarity of her homesteader family’s existence into narratives of self-reliance and perseverance—although it is that—it is also a meditation on the human need “to transform the raw materials of the past into art.” Full disclosure, I did not read the Little House on the Prairie books as a child and have no sentimental attachment to Laura, Pa or Ma. But in looking at the life behind the books, Wilder emerges as a tenacious, sometimes fragile figure, and as a literary operator of uncommon nous and self-awareness. Drawing on unpublished manuscripts, letters, diaries, and land and financial records, Prairie Fires has all the essentials of a great history book. Most importantly, Fraser’s great skill is in pulling back the veils of mythology that have enshrouded her subject and the era her works helped to define, enabling us to see both the real people and the myths themselves with fresh, critical eyes. There is no romanticizing of the Frontier, and a very real understanding of the sentimentality and bias of an overtly racist understanding of “westward expansion.” It is a remarkable book.  –Emily Firetog, Deputy Editor

David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom (2018)

In 2017, monuments commemorating heroes of the Confederacy were being debated, defaced and toppled throughout the United States. That same year, months before President Trump signed a law creating a commission to plan for the bicentennial of Frederick Douglass’ birth, he infamously seemed to suggest that Douglass was still around, doing an “amazing job” and “getting recognized more and more.” The irony was hard to miss: it was easy to eulogize a past that was not comprehensively, nor even fundamentally understood. One achievement of historian David Blight’s monumental study of the former slave turned abolitionist is the thoroughness with which it examines the man’s development across three autobiographies he produced in the span of ten years. The popular image of Douglass has long been that of a bushy-haired man affixed to Abraham Lincoln’s side, delivering rousing speeches on abolition and the sins of slavery. And while there is basic truth to that, Blight sets out to fill the gaps in public understanding, guiding readers from the Maryland slave plantation where Douglass was born to the many stops along his European speech circuit, when he established himself as one of the world’s most recognizable opponents of slavery. The vague circumstances of Douglass’ birth (he was born to an enslaved woman and a white man who may also have been his owner) later compelled him to create his own life narratives, a task that he accomplished both in writing and oratory. Blight’s engagement with Douglass’ writing also marks the biography as a triumph of public-facing textual criticism. For decades before Prophet of Freedom astonished critics and general readers, Blight had been making his name as one of the leading Douglass scholars in the US. Blight’s work was not historical revisionism, but rather a considered analysis of a man who relied on actions as much as words. Many may be surprised to learn, for example, what a vocal supporter Douglass was of the Civil War and violence as a necessary means to dismantle the system that had nearly destroyed him. Prophet of Freedom feels as definitive as a Robert Fagles translation of Homer—we hope it’s not the final word, though it will take quite the successor to produce a worthwhile follow-up.  –Aaron Robertson, Assistant Editor

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.  –Jonny Diamond, Editor in Chief

Patrick Radden Keefe, Say Nothing: A True History of Memory and Murder in Northern Ireland (2019)

Attempting, in a single volume, to cover the scale and complexity of the Northern Ireland Troubles—a bloody and protracted political and ethno-nationalist conflict that came to dominate Anglo-Irish relations for over three decades—while also conveying a sense of the tortured humanity and mercurial motivations of some of its most influential and emblematic individual players and investigating one of the most notorious unsolved atrocities of the period, is, well, a herculean task that most writers would never consider attempting. Thankfully, investigative journalist Patrick Radden Keefe (whose 2015 New Yorker article on Gerry Adams, “Where the Bodies Are Buried”, is a searing precursor to Say Nothing) is not most writers. His mesmerizing account, both panoramically sweeping and achingly intimate, uses the disappearance and murder of widowed mother of ten Jean McConville in Belfast in 1972 as a fulcrum, around which the labyrinthine wider narrative of the Troubles can turn. The book, while meticulously researched and reported (Radden Keefe interviewed over one hundred different sources, painstakingly sorting through conflicting and corroborating accounts), also employs a novelistic structure and flair that in less skilled hands could feel exploitative, but here serves only to deepen our understanding of both the historical events and the complex personalities of ultimately tragic figures like Dolours Price, Brendan Hughes, and McConville herself—players in an attritional drama who have all too often been reduced to the status of monster or martyr. Once you’ve caught your breath, what you’ll be left with by the close of this revelatory hybrid work is a deep and abiding feeling of sorrow, which is exactly as it should be.  –Dan Sheehan, BookMarks Editor

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Dissenting Opinions

The following books were just barely nudged out of the top ten, but we (or at least one of us) couldn’t let them pass without comment.

Maggie Nelson, The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning (2011)

Maggie Nelson, if evaluated from a first glance at her authored works, may appear to be a paradox. That the author of Bluets, a moving lyric essay exploring personal suffering through the color blue, also wrote The Red Parts, an autobiographical account of the trial of her aunt’s murderer, may seem surprising. Not that any person cannot and does not contain multitudes but the two aesthetics may seem diametrically opposed until one looks at The Art of Cruelty and understands Nelson’s fascination with art on the one hand, and violence on the other. Nelson hashes out the intersection of the two across multiple essays. “One of this book’s charges,” she writes, “is to figure out how one might differentiate between works of art whose employment of cruelty seems to me worthwhile (for lack of a better word), and those that strike me as redundant, in bad faith, or simply despicable.” The Art of Cruelty is a self-proclaimed diagram of recent art and culture and does not promise to take sides, to deliver ethical or aesthetic claims masquerading as some declarative truth on the matter. So cruelty is very much approached from Nelson’s poetic sensibility, with a degree of nuance, and an attitude of reflection and curiosity but also one of a certain distance so that all the emotions—anger, disgust, discomfort, thrill etc.—can be viewed as part of a whole rather than in isolation. Cruelty, counterbalanced with compassion—especially with reference to Buddhism—is certainly not hailed by Nelson as a cause for celebration but worthy of rumination and analysis so that it is not employed tacitly and without recourse. No book could ever, I think, provide an exhaustive evaluation of this topic, nor is Nelson’s approach that of a philosopher or art-historian looking to propose a theory. Nevertheless, she dexterously, and creatively, manages to hold a mirror to our culture’s fascination with cruelty and invites us to reflect on our personal reasons for indulging it.  –Eleni Theodoropoulos, Editorial Fellow

Óscar Martinez, The Beast (2013)

For over a decade, Martinez has been a witness and a chronicler of the ground-level effects of the war on drugs, reporting from across Latin America with a special focus on Central America and his home country of El Salvador, where more recently he’s been writing about the bloody culture of MS-13 and other narco-cliques that have expanded their power. Before that, he was charting the plight of migrants running the terrible gauntlet across borders and through narco-controlled territories. Martinez rode the dreaded train known as “The Beast” and collected the stories of those traveling north on this perilous journey. While crime isn’t strictly the focus of the book, Martinez looks at the direct effects of mass crime at a regional/global level, as well as the outlaw communities springing up to prey on the vulnerable. The subject matter is dark, but Martinez writes with the terrible, piercing clarity of a Cormac McCarthy. The Beast is a dispatch from a nearly lawless land, where families struggle and suffer, narcos get richer, violence spreads, the drugs head north, the guns head south, and so it goes on. Forget the rhetoric, the politics, and the propaganda. The Beast is the real story of the drug war. “Where can you steer clear of bandits?” Martinez asks. “Where do the drugs go over? Where can you avoid getting kidnapped by the narcos? Where is there a spot left with no wall, no robbers, and no narcos? Nobody has been able to answer this last question.” To call this book prescient disregards how long our problems have persisted, and how long we’ve managed to ignore the chaos our country’s policies have created.  –Dwyer Murphy, CrimeReads Managing Editor

Matthew Desmond, Evicted (2016)

There are more evictions happening now, per capita, in the United States, than there were during the Great Depression. As it turns out, there’s a lot of money to be made from poverty—not, course, for those who need it, but for the landlords who orchestrate the kind of housing turnover that traps people in deeper and longer cycles of debt. Poverty in America has long been conflated with moral failure, but as Matthew Desmond’s Evicted illustrates in great detail, if there’s any moral failing happening, it’s with those who would take advantage of such systemic and generational iniquities.

Desmond, a Princeton-trained sociologist and MacArthur fellow, went to see for himself in 2008, at the height (depths?) of the housing crisis, undertaking a year-long study of eight Milwaukee-area families, spending six months in a mobile home and another six months in a rooming house, creating much more than a journalist’s snapshot of life as an American renter. With Evicted, Desmond has widened our perspective on cyclical hardship and its disproportionate impact on people of color, illustrating (with neither the leering nor the condescension of so much reporting on the poor) that eviction is more often a cause of poverty than a symptom.  –Jonny Diamond, Editor in Chief

Yuri Slezkine, The House of Government (2017)

I recommend this book to those who wish to demonstrate their physical strength in public and show off that they can read a giant Russian history book one-handed, but also I recommend this book to everyone, ever, in the world, because it’s so fantastic. At first glance, this is a lengthy tome inspired by a Tolstoyan approach to lyrical history, ostensibly concerned with the history of an apartment complex that was home to much of the early Soviet elite—and was subsequently depopulated by Stalinist purges. Within this apartment building, however, lay the central irony of the revolution—those who believed deeply enough in an idealistic system to embrace violent, repressive means of revolution, were soon enough subjected to those same mechanisms of repression. From this central irony, Slezkine, always concerned with how the micro fits into the macro, zooms out to look at the Soviets as just another bunch of millenarians (and to understand what an insult that is, you’ll have to pick up the book).  –Molly Odintz, CrimeReads Associate Editor

Richard Lloyd Parry, Ghosts of the Tsunami (2017)

Richard Lloyd Parry, Tokyo bureau chief for The Times of London, begins his book by describing the way his office building in Tokyo shook in March 2011 when an earthquake hit the city. He called his family and checked that they were OK and then walked through the streets to see the damage. Used to quakes, this one seemed bad, but not the worst he had lived through. Less than an hour after the earthquake, though, a tsunami killed an estimated 18,500 Japanese men, women and children. In Ghosts, Parry focuses his story on Okawa, a tiny costal village where an entire school and 74 children washed away. In somewhat fragmentary threads, Parry explores the families that survived, the ghosts that follow them, and the landscape of a place that will never be the same. In localizing the story in one community, Parry is able to clearly define the painfully individual fallout of a national tragedy. It is emotionally draining to read, which is a warning I give everyone when I recommend the book (which I do constantly). But it is one of my favorite books and I would be remiss not to include in our list for best nonfiction of the decade.  –Emily Firetog, Deputy Editor

Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing (2019)

I grew up in a town named after a body of water—Rye Brook—and went to a high school also named after that body of water—Blind Brook—but growing up, no one seemed to actually know where the brook was, at least none of the kids. We didn’t talk about it, except to note its hiddenness—it’s behind the school, someone once told me, while another person said it was behind that hotel, behind the park, behind the airport. Recently, I decided to find it on a map and noticed, for the first time, that the brook, far from being a hidden thing, defines the majority of Rye Brook’s borders. Recognizing this foundational feature of my hometown for the first time, more than a decade after I left it, was disorienting, completely re-rendering my perception of the place I thought I knew best.

My search that day came after I read Jenny Odell’s account of her similar awakening to the ecology of her hometown, Cupertino, and all the features in or around it: Calabazas Creek, nearby mountains, and the San Francisco Bay. “How could I have not noticed the shape of the place I lived?” she writes, and, later, describing her own disorientation in a way that resonates with my own, added, “Nothing is so simultaneously familiar and alien as that which has been present all along.”

One way of describing the premise of this book is to say “that which has been present all along” is reality itself: each of us, from day to day, living our physical lives in a physical place. But in 2019, life doesn’t usually feel like that; it feels like an onslaught of forces that aim to turn our attention away from this reality and monetize it in a shapeless virtual space. In that environment, Odell writes, doing “nothing,” or finding any way to disrupt the capitalistic drive to monetize, is an act of political resistance, even as she recognizes that not everyone has the economic security or social capital to opt out. “Just because this right is denied to many people doesn’t make it any less of a right or any less important,” she writes. This book also draws on philosophy, utopian movements, and labor organizing to describe how various people have attempted to “do nothing” in their own way throughout history, with an outlook that is grounded in ecology. (And bird watching!) Ultimately, Odell writes, the act of doing nothing creates space for the kind of contemplation and reflection that is essential to activism and to sustaining life. I experienced this book as a space of sanity and as a beginning; I hope you do, too.  –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

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Honorable Mentions

A selection of other books that we seriously considered for both lists—just to be extra about it (and because decisions are hard).

Peter Hessler, Country Driving (2010) · Ron Chernow, Washington: A Life (2010) · Barbara Demick, Nothing to Envy (2010) · Marina Warner, Stranger Magic (2012) · Jon Meacham, Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power (2012) · Oscar Martinez, The Beast (2013) · Katherine Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers (2013) · Mary Ruefle, Madness, Rack, and Honey (2013) · David Epstein, The Sports Gene (2013) · Sheri Fink, Five Days at Memorial (2013) · David Finkel, Thank You for Your Service (2013) · George Packer, The Unwinding (2013) · Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything (2013) · Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous People’s History of the United States (2014) · Sarah Ruhl, 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write (2014) · Olivia Laing, The Trip to Echo Spring (2014) · Hermione Lee, Penelope Fitzgerald (2014) · Mary Beard, SPQR (2015) · Sam Quinones, Dreamland (2015) · Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped From the Beginning (2016) · Ruth Franklin, Shirley Jackson (2016) · Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers In Their Own Land (2016) · Margot Lee Shetterly, Hidden Figures (2016) · Laura Dassow Walls, Henry David Thoreau: A Life (2017) · David Grann, Killers of the Flower Moon (2017) · Elizabeth McGuire, Red at Heart (2017) · Frances FitzGerald, The Evangelicals (2017) · Jeff Guinn, The Road to Jonestown (2017) · Michael Tisserand, Krazy (2017) · Lawrence Jackson, Chester Himes (2017) · Zora Neale Hurston, Barracoon (2018) · Beth Macy, Dopesick (2018) · Shane Bauer, American Prison (2018) · Eliza Griswold, Amity and Prosperity (2018) · David Quammen, The Tangled Tree (2018).

Friends, it’s true: the end of the decade approaches. It’s been a difficult, anxiety-provoking, morally compromised decade, but at least it’s been populated by some damn fine literature. We’ll take our silver linings where we can.

So, as is our hallowed duty as a literary and culture website—though with full awareness of the potentially fruitless and endlessly contestable nature of the task—in the coming weeks, we’ll be taking a look at the best and most important (these being not always the same) books of the decade that was. We will do this, of course, by means of a variety of lists. We began with the best debut novels, the best short story collections, the best poetry collections, and the best memoirs of the decade, and we have now reached the fifth list in our series: the best essay collections published in English between 2010 and 2019.

The following books were chosen after much debate (and several rounds of voting) by the Literary Hub staff. Tears were spilled, feelings were hurt, books were re-read. And as you’ll shortly see, we had a hard time choosing just ten—so we’ve also included a list of dissenting opinions, and an even longer list of also-rans. As ever, free to add any of your own favorites that we’ve missed in the comments below.

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The Top Ten

Oliver Sacks, The Mind’s Eye (2010)

Toward the end of his life, maybe suspecting or sensing that it was coming to a close, Dr. Oliver Sacks tended to focus his efforts on sweeping intellectual projects like On the Move (a memoir), The River of Consciousness (a hybrid intellectual history), and Hallucinations (a book-length meditation on, what else, hallucinations). But in 2010, he gave us one more classic in the style that first made him famous, a form he revolutionized and brought into the contemporary literary canon: the medical case study as essay. In The Mind’s Eye, Sacks focuses on vision, expanding the notion to embrace not only how we see the world, but also how we map that world onto our brains when our eyes are closed and we’re communing with the deeper recesses of consciousness. Relaying histories of patients and public figures, as well as his own history of ocular cancer (the condition that would eventually spread and contribute to his death), Sacks uses vision as a lens through which to see all of what makes us human, what binds us together, and what keeps us painfully apart. The essays that make up this collection are quintessential Sacks: sensitive, searching, with an expertise that conveys scientific information and experimentation in terms we can not only comprehend, but which also expand how we see life carrying on around us. The case studies of “Stereo Sue,” of the concert pianist Lillian Kalir, and of Howard, the mystery novelist who can no longer read, are highlights of the collection, but each essay is a kind of gem, mined and polished by one of the great storytellers of our era.  –Dwyer Murphy, CrimeReads Managing Editor

John Jeremiah Sullivan, Pulphead (2011)

The American essay was having a moment at the beginning of the decade, and Pulphead was smack in the middle. Without any hard data, I can tell you that this collection of John Jeremiah Sullivan’s magazine features—published primarily in GQ, but also in The Paris Review, and Harper’s—was the only full book of essays most of my literary friends had read since Slouching Towards Bethlehem, and probably one of the only full books of essays they had even heard of.

Well, we all picked a good one. Every essay in Pulphead is brilliant and entertaining, and illuminates some small corner of the American experience—even if it’s just one house, with Sullivan and an aging writer inside (“Mr. Lytle” is in fact a standout in a collection with no filler; fittingly, it won a National Magazine Award and a Pushcart Prize). But what are they about? Oh, Axl Rose, Christian Rock festivals, living around the filming of One Tree Hill, the Tea Party movement, Michael Jackson, Bunny Wailer, the influence of animals, and by god, the Miz (of Real World/Road Rules Challenge fame).

But as Dan Kois has pointed out, what connects these essays, apart from their general tone and excellence, is “their author’s essential curiosity about the world, his eye for the perfect detail, and his great good humor in revealing both his subjects’ and his own foibles.” They are also extremely well written, drawing much from fictional techniques and sentence craft, their literary pleasures so acute and remarkable that James Wood began his review of the collection in The New Yorker with a quiz: “Are the following sentences the beginnings of essays or of short stories?” (It was not a hard quiz, considering the context.)

It’s hard not to feel, reading this collection, like someone reached into your brain, took out the half-baked stuff you talk about with your friends, researched it, lived it, and represented it to you smarter and better and more thoroughly than you ever could. So read it in awe if you must, but read it.  –Emily Temple, Senior Editor

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.  –Dan Sheehan, Book Marks Editor

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.”  –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Hilton Als, White Girls (2013)

In a world where we are so often reduced to one essential self, Hilton Als’ breathtaking book of critical essays, White Girls, which meditates on the ways he and other subjects read, project and absorb parts of white femininity, is a radically liberating book. It’s one of the only works of critical thinking that doesn’t ask the reader, its author or anyone he writes about to stoop before the doorframe of complete legibility before entering. Something he also permitted the subjects and readers of his first book, the glorious book-length essay, The Women, a series of riffs and psychological portraits of Dorothy Dean, Owen Dodson, and the author’s own mother, among others. One of the shifts of that book, uncommon at the time, was how it acknowledges the way we inhabit bodies made up of variously gendered influences. To read White Girls now is to experience the utter freedom of this gift and to marvel at Als’ tremendous versatility and intelligence.

He is easily the most diversely talented American critic alive. He can write into genres like pop music and film where being part of an audience is a fantasy happening in the dark. He’s also wired enough to know how the art world builds reputations on the nod of rich white patrons, a significant collision in a time when Jean-Michel Basquiat is America’s most expensive modern artist. Als’ swerving and always moving grip on performance means he’s especially good on describing the effect of art which is volatile and unstable and built on the mingling of made-up concepts and the hard fact of their effect on behavior, such as race. Writing on Flannery O’Connor for instance he alone puts a finger on her “uneasy and unavoidable union between black and white, the sacred and the profane, the shit and the stars.” From Eminem to Richard Pryor, André Leon Talley to Michael Jackson, Als enters the life and work of numerous artists here who turn the fascinations of race and with whiteness into fury and song and describes the complexity of their beauty like his life depended upon it. There are also brief memoirs here that will stop your heart. This is an essential work to understanding American culture.  –John Freeman, Executive Editor

Eula Biss, On Immunity (2014)

We move through the world as if we can protect ourselves from its myriad dangers, exercising what little agency we have in an effort to keep at bay those fears that gather at the edges of any given life: of loss, illness, disaster, death. It is these fears—amplified by the birth of her first child—that Eula Biss confronts in her essential 2014 essay collection, On Immunity. As any great essayist does, Biss moves outward in concentric circles from her own very private view of the world to reveal wider truths, discovering as she does a culture consumed by anxiety at the pervasive toxicity of contemporary life. As Biss interrogates this culture—of privilege, of whiteness—she interrogates herself, questioning the flimsy ways in which we arm ourselves with science or superstition against the impurities of daily existence.

Five years on from its publication, it is dismaying that On Immunity feels as urgent (and necessary) a defense of basic science as ever. Vaccination, we learn, is derived from vacca—for cow—after the 17th-century discovery that a small application of cowpox was often enough to inoculate against the scourge of smallpox, an etymological digression that belies modern conspiratorial fears of Big Pharma and its vaccination agenda. But Biss never scolds or belittles the fears of others, and in her generosity and openness pulls off a neat (and important) trick: insofar as we are of the very world we fear, she seems to be suggesting, we ourselves are impure, have always been so, permeable, vulnerable, yet so much stronger than we think.  –Jonny Diamond, Editor-in-Chief 

Rebecca Solnit, The Mother of All Questions (2016)

When Rebecca Solnit’s essay, “Men Explain Things to Me,” was published in 2008, it quickly became a cultural phenomenon unlike almost any other in recent memory, assigning language to a behavior that almost every woman has witnessed—mansplaining—and, in the course of identifying that behavior, spurring a movement, online and offline, to share the ways in which patriarchal arrogance has intersected all our lives. (It would also come to be the titular essay in her collection published in 2014.) The Mother of All Questions follows up on that work and takes it further in order to examine the nature of self-expression—who is afforded it and denied it, what institutions have been put in place to limit it, and what happens when it is employed by women. Solnit has a singular gift for describing and decoding the misogynistic dynamics that govern the world so universally that they can seem invisible and the gendered violence that is so common as to seem unremarkable; this naming is powerful, and it opens space for sharing the stories that shape our lives.

The Mother of All Questions, comprised of essays written between 2014 and 2016, in many ways armed us with some of the tools necessary to survive the gaslighting of the Trump years, in which many of us—and especially women—have continued to hear from those in power that the things we see and hear do not exist and never existed. Solnit also acknowledges that labels like “woman,” and other gendered labels, are identities that are fluid in reality; in reviewing the book for The New Yorker, Moira Donegan suggested that, “One useful working definition of a woman might be ‘someone who experiences misogyny.'” Whichever words we use, Solnit writes in the introduction to the book that “when words break through unspeakability, what was tolerated by a society sometimes becomes intolerable.” This storytelling work has always been vital; it continues to be vital, and in this book, it is brilliantly done.  –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Valeria Luiselli, Tell Me How It Ends (2017)

The newly minted MacArthur fellow Valeria Luiselli’s four-part (but really six-part) essay Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions was inspired by her time spent volunteering at the federal immigration court in New York City, working as an interpreter for undocumented, unaccompanied migrant children who crossed the U.S.-Mexico border. Written concurrently with her novel Lost Children Archive (a fictional exploration of the same topic), Luiselli’s essay offers a fascinating conceit, the fashioning of an argument from the questions on the government intake form given to these children to process their arrivals. (Aside from the fact that this essay is a heartbreaking masterpiece, this is such a good conceit—transforming a cold, reproducible administrative document into highly personal literature.) Luiselli interweaves a grounded discussion of the questionnaire with a narrative of the road trip Luiselli takes with her husband and family, across America, while they (both Mexican citizens) wait for their own Green Card applications to be processed. It is on this trip when Luiselli reflects on the thousands of migrant children mysteriously traveling across the border by themselves. But the real point of the essay is to actually delve into the real stories of some of these children, which are agonizing, as well as to gravely, clearly expose what literally happens, procedural, when they do arrive—from forms to courts, as they’re swallowed by a bureaucratic vortex. Amid all of this, Luiselli also takes on more, exploring the larger contextual relationship between the United States of America and Mexico (as well as other countries in Central America, more broadly) as it has evolved to our current, adverse moment. Tell Me How It Ends is so small, but it is so passionate and vigorous: it desperately accomplishes in its less-than-100-pages-of-prose what centuries and miles and endless records of federal bureaucracy have never been able, and have never cared, to do: reverse the dehumanization of Latin American immigrants that occurs once they set foot in this country.  –Olivia Rutigliano, CrimeReads Editorial Fellow

Zadie Smith, Feel Free (2018)

In the essay “Meet Justin Bieber!” in Feel Free, Zadie Smith writes that her interest in Justin Bieber is not an interest in the interiority of the singer himself, but in “the idea of the love object”. This essay—in which Smith imagines a meeting between Bieber and the late philosopher Martin Buber (“Bieber and Buber are alternative spellings of the same German surname,” she explains in one of many winning footnotes. “Who am I to ignore these hints from the universe?”). Smith allows that this premise is a bit premise-y: “I know, I know.” Still, the resulting essay is a very funny, very smart, and un-tricky exploration of individuality and true “meeting,” with a dash of late capitalism thrown in for good measure. The melding of high and low culture is the bread and butter of pretty much every prestige publication on the internet these days (and certainly of the Twitter feeds of all “public intellectuals”), but the essays in Smith’s collection don’t feel familiar—perhaps because hers is, as we’ve long known, an uncommon skill. Though I believe Smith could probably write compellingly about anything, she chooses her subjects wisely. She writes with as much electricity about Brexit as the aforementioned Beliebers—and each essay is utterly engrossing. “She contains multitudes, but her point is we all do,” writes Hermione Hoby in her review of the collection in The New Republic. “At the same time, we are, in our endless difference, nobody but ourselves.”  –Jessie Gaynor, Social Media Editor

Tressie McMillan Cottom, Thick: And Other Essays (2019)

Tressie McMillan Cottom is an academic who has transcended the ivory tower to become the sort of public intellectual who can easily appear on radio or television talk shows to discuss race, gender, and capitalism. Her collection of essays reflects this duality, blending scholarly work with memoir to create a collection on the black female experience in postmodern America that’s “intersectional analysis with a side of pop culture.” The essays range from an analysis of sexual violence, to populist politics, to social media, but in centering her own experiences throughout, the collection becomes something unlike other pieces of criticism of contemporary culture. In explaining the title, she reflects on what an editor had said about her work: “I was too readable to be academic, too deep to be popular, too country black to be literary, and too naïve to show the rigor of my thinking in the complexity of my prose. I had wanted to create something meaningful that sounded not only like me, but like all of me. It was too thick.” One of the most powerful essays in the book is “Dying to be Competent” which begins with her unpacking the idiocy of LinkedIn (and the myth of meritocracy) and ends with a description of her miscarriage, the mishandling of black woman’s pain, and a condemnation of healthcare bureaucracy. A finalist for the 2019 National Book Award for Nonfiction, Thick confirms McMillan Cottom as one of our most fearless public intellectuals and one of the most vital.  –Emily Firetog, Deputy Editor

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Dissenting Opinions

The following books were just barely nudged out of the top ten, but we (or at least one of us) couldn’t let them pass without comment.

Elif Batuman, The Possessed (2010)

In The Possessed Elif Batuman indulges her love of Russian literature and the result is hilarious and remarkable. Each essay of the collection chronicles some adventure or other that she had while in graduate school for Comparative Literature and each is more unpredictable than the next. There’s the time a “well-known 20th-centuryist” gave a graduate student the finger; and the time when Batuman ended up living in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, for a summer; and the time that she convinced herself Tolstoy was murdered and spent the length of the Tolstoy Conference in Yasnaya Polyana considering clues and motives. Rich in historic detail about Russian authors and literature and thoughtfully constructed, each essay is an amalgam of critical analysis, cultural criticism, and serious contemplation of big ideas like that of identity, intellectual legacy, and authorship. With wit and a serpentine-like shape to her narratives, Batuman adopts a form reminiscent of a Socratic discourse, setting up questions at the beginning of her essays and then following digressions that more or less entreat the reader to synthesize the answer for herself. The digressions are always amusing and arguably the backbone of the collection, relaying absurd anecdotes with foreign scholars or awkward, surreal encounters with Eastern European strangers. Central also to the collection are Batuman’s intellectual asides where she entertains a theory—like the “problem of the person”: the inability to ever wholly capture one’s character—that ultimately layer the book’s themes. “You are certainly my most entertaining student,” a professor said to Batuman. But she is also curious and enthusiastic and reflective and so knowledgeable that she might even convince you (she has me!) that you too love Russian literature as much as she does. –Eleni Theodoropoulos, Editorial Fellow

Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist (2014)

Roxane Gay’s now-classic essay collection is a book that will make you laugh, think, cry, and then wonder, how can cultural criticism be this fun? My favorite essays in the book include Gay’s musings on competitive Scrabble, her stranded-in-academia dispatches, and her joyous film and television criticism, but given the breadth of topics Roxane Gay can discuss in an entertaining manner, there’s something for everyone in this one. This book is accessible because feminism itself should be accessible – Roxane Gay is as likely to draw inspiration from YA novels, or middle-brow shows about friendship, as she is to introduce concepts from the academic world, and if there’s anyone I trust to bridge the gap between high culture, low culture, and pop culture, it’s the Goddess of Twitter. I used to host a book club dedicated to radical reads, and this was one of the first picks for the club; a week after the book club met, I spied a few of the attendees meeting in the café of the bookstore, and found out that they had bonded so much over discussing Bad Feminist that they couldn’t wait for the next meeting of the book club to keep discussing politics and intersectionality, and that, in a nutshell, is the power of Roxane. –Molly Odintz, CrimeReads Associate Editor

Rivka Galchen, Little Labors (2016)

Generally, I find stories about the trials and tribulations of child-having to be of limited appeal—useful, maybe, insofar as they offer validation that other people have also endured the bizarre realities of living with a tiny human, but otherwise liable to drift into the musings of parents thrilled at the simple fact of their own fecundity, as if they were the first ones to figure the process out (or not). But Little Labors is not simply an essay collection about motherhood, perhaps because Galchen initially “didn’t want to write about” her new baby—mostly, she writes, “because I had never been interested in babies, or mothers; in fact, those subjects had seemed perfectly not interesting to me.” Like many new mothers, though, Galchen soon discovered her baby—which she refers to sometimes as “the puma”—to be a preoccupying thought, demanding to be written about. Galchen’s interest isn’t just in her own progeny, but in babies in literature (“Literature has more dogs than babies, and also more abortions”), The Pillow Book, the eleventh-century collection of musings by Sei Shōnagon, and writers who are mothers. There are sections that made me laugh out loud, like when Galchen continually finds herself in an elevator with a neighbor who never fails to remark on the puma’s size. There are also deeper, darker musings, like the realization that the baby means “that it’s not permissible to die. There are days when this does not feel good.” It is a slim collection that I happened to read at the perfect time, and it remains one of my favorites of the decade. –Emily Firetog, Deputy Editor

Charlie Fox, This Young Monster (2017)

On social media as in his writing, British art critic Charlie Fox rejects lucidity for allusion and doesn’t quite answer the Twitter textbox’s persistent question: “What’s happening?” These days, it’s hard to tell. This Young Monster (2017), Fox’s first book,was published a few months after Donald Trump’s election, and at one point Fox takes a swipe at a man he judges “direct from a nightmare and just a repulsive fucking goon.” Fox doesn’t linger on politics, though, since most of the monsters he looks at “embody otherness and make it into art, ripping any conventional idea of beauty to shreds and replacing it with something weird and troubling of their own invention.”

If clichés are loathed because they conform to what philosopher Georges Bataille called “the common measure,” then monsters are rebellious non-sequiturs, comedic or horrific derailments from a classical ideal. Perverts in the most literal sense, monsters have gone astray from some “proper” course. The book’s nine chapters, which are about a specific monster or type of monster, are full of callbacks to familiar and lesser-known media. Fox cites visual art, film, songs, and books with the screwy buoyancy of a savant. Take one of his essays, “Spook House,” framed as a stage play with two principal characters, Klaus (“an intoxicated young skinhead vampire”) and Hermione (“a teen sorceress with green skin and jet-black hair” who looks more like The Wicked Witch than her namesake). The chorus is a troupe of trick-or-treaters. Using the filmmaker Cameron Jamie as a starting point, the rest is free association on gothic decadence and Detroit and L.A. as cities of the dead. All the while, Klaus quotes from Artforum, Dazed & Confused, and Time Out.It’s a technical feat that makes fictionalized dialogue a conveyor belt for cultural criticism.

In Fox’s imagination, David Bowie and the Hydra coexist alongside Peter Pan, Dennis Hopper, and the maenads. Fox’s book reaches for the monster’s mask, not really to peel it off but to feel and smell the rubber schnoz, to know how it’s made before making sure it’s still snugly set. With a stylistic blend of arthouse suavity and B-movie chic, This Young Monster considers how monsters in culture are made. Aren’t the scariest things made in post-production? Isn’t the creature just duplicity, like a looping choir or a dubbed scream? –Aaron Robertson, Assistant Editor

Elena Passarello, Animals Strike Curious Poses (2017)

Elena Passarello’s collection of essays Animals Strike Curious Poses picks out infamous animals and grants them the voice, narrative, and history they deserve. Not only is a collection like this relevant during the sixth extinction but it is an ambitious historical and anthropological undertaking, which Passarello has tackled with thorough research and a playful tone that rather than compromise her subject, complicates and humanizes it. Passarello’s intention is to investigate the role of animals across the span of human civilization and in doing so, to construct a timeline of humanity as told through people’s interactions with said animals. “Of all the images that make our world, animal images are particularly buried inside us,” Passarello writes in her first essay, to introduce us to the object of the book and also to the oldest of her chosen characters: Yuka, a 39,000-year-old mummified woolly mammoth discovered in the Siberian permafrost in 2010. It was an occasion so remarkable and so unfathomable given the span of human civilization that Passarello says of Yuka: “Since language is epically younger than both thought and experience, ‘woolly mammoth’ means, to a human brain, something more like time.” The essay ends with a character placing a hand on a cave drawing of a woolly mammoth, accompanied by a phrase which encapsulates the author’s vision for the book: “And he becomes the mammoth so he can envision the mammoth.” In Passarello’s hands the imagined boundaries between the animal, natural, and human world disintegrate and what emerges is a cohesive if baffling integrated history of life. With the accuracy and tenacity of a journalist and the spirit of a storyteller, Elena Passarello has assembled a modern bestiary worthy of contemplation and awe. –Eleni Theodoropoulos, Editorial Fellow

Esmé Weijun Wang, The Collected Schizophrenias (2019)

Esmé Weijun Wang’s collection of essays is a kaleidoscopic look at mental health and the lives affected by the schizophrenias. Each essay takes on a different aspect of the topic, but you’ll want to read them together for a holistic perspective. Esmé Weijun Wang generously begins The Collected Schizophrenias by acknowledging the stereotype, “Schizophrenia terrifies. It is the archetypal disorder of lunacy.” From there, she walks us through the technical language, breaks down the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-5)’s clinical definition. And then she gets very personal, telling us about how she came to her own diagnosis and the way it’s touched her daily life (her relationships, her ideas about motherhood). Esmé Weijun Wang is uniquely situated to write about this topic. As a former lab researcher at Stanford, she turns a precise, analytical eye to her experience while simultaneously unfolding everything with great patience for her reader. Throughout, she brilliantly dissects the language around mental health. (On saying “a person living with bipolar disorder” instead of using “bipolar” as the sole subject: “…we are not our diseases. We are instead individuals with disorders and malfunctions. Our conditions lie over us like smallpox blankets; we are one thing and the illness is another.”) She pinpoints the ways she arms herself against anticipated reactions to the schizophrenias: high fashion, having attended an Ivy League institution. In a particularly piercing essay, she traces mental illness back through her family tree. She also places her story within more mainstream cultural contexts, calling on groundbreaking exposés about the dangerous of institutionalization and depictions of mental illness in television and film (like the infamous Slender Man case, in which two young girls stab their best friend because an invented Internet figure told them to). At once intimate and far-reaching, The Collected Schizophrenias is an informative and important (and let’s not forget artful) work. I’ve never read a collection quite so beautifully-written and laid-bare as this. –Katie Yee, Book Marks Assistant Editor

Ross Gay, The Book of Delights (2019)

When Ross Gay began writing what would become The Book of Delights, he envisioned it as a project of daily essays, each focused on a moment or point of delight in his day. This plan quickly disintegrated; on day four, he skipped his self-imposed assignment and decided to “in honor and love, delight in blowing it off.” (Clearly, “blowing it off” is a relative term here, as he still produced the book.) Ross Gay is a generous teacher of how to live, and this moment of reveling in self-compassion is one lesson among many in The Book of Delights, which wanders from moments of connection with strangers to a shade of “red I don’t think I actually have words for,” a text from a friend reading “I love you breadfruit,” and “the sun like a guiding hand on my back, saying everything is possible. Everything.”

Gay does not linger on any one subject for long, creating the sense that delight is a product not of extenuating circumstances, but of our attention; his attunement to the possibilities of a single day, and awareness of all the small moments that produce delight, are a model for life amid the warring factions of the attention economy. These small moments range from the physical–hugging a stranger, transplanting fig cuttings–to the spiritual and philosophical, giving the impression of sitting beside Gay in his garden as he thinks out loud in real time. It’s a privilege to listen. –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

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Honorable Mentions

A selection of other books that we seriously considered for both lists—just to be extra about it (and because decisions are hard).

Terry Castle, The Professor and Other Writings (2010) · Joyce Carol Oates, In Rough Country (2010) · Geoff Dyer, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition (2011) · Christopher Hitchens, Arguably (2011) · Roberto Bolaño, tr. Natasha Wimmer, Between Parentheses (2011) · Dubravka Ugresic, tr. David Williams, Karaoke Culture (2011) · Tom Bissell, Magic Hours (2012) · Kevin Young, The Grey Album (2012) · William H. Gass, Life Sentences: Literary Judgments and Accounts (2012) · Mary Ruefle, Madness, Rack, and Honey (2012) · Herta Müller, tr. Geoffrey Mulligan, Cristina and Her Double (2013) · Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams (2014) · Meghan Daum, The Unspeakable (2014) · Daphne Merkin, The Fame Lunches (2014) · Charles D’Ambrosio, Loitering (2015) · Wendy Walters, Multiply/Divide (2015) · Colm Tóibín, On Elizabeth Bishop (2015) · Renee Gladman, Calamities (2016) · Jesmyn Ward, ed. The Fire This Time (2016) · Lindy West, Shrill (2016) · Mary Oliver, Upstream (2016) · Emily Witt, Future Sex (2016) · Olivia Laing, The Lonely City (2016) · Mark Greif, Against Everything (2016) · Durga Chew-Bose, Too Much and Not the Mood (2017) · Sarah Gerard, Sunshine State (2017) · Jim Harrison, A Really Big Lunch (2017) · J.M. Coetzee, Late Essays: 2006-2017 (2017) · Melissa Febos, Abandon Me (2017) · Louise Glück, American Originality (2017) · Joan Didion, South and West (2017) · Tom McCarthy, Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish (2017) · Hanif Abdurraqib, They Can’t Kill Us Until they Kill Us (2017) · Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power (2017) · Samantha Irby, We Are Never Meeting in Real Life (2017) · Alexander Chee, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel (2018) · Alice Bolin, Dead Girls (2018) · Marilynne Robinson, What Are We Doing Here? (2018) · Lorrie Moore, See What Can Be Done (2018) · Maggie O’Farrell, I Am I Am I Am (2018) · Ijeoma Oluo, So You Want to Talk About Race (2018) · Rachel Cusk, Coventry (2019) · Jia Tolentino, Trick Mirror (2019) · Emily Bernard, Black is the Body (2019) · Toni Morrison, The Source of Self-Regard (2019) · Margaret Renkl, Late Migrations (2019) · Rachel Munroe, Savage Appetites (2019) · Robert A. Caro, Working (2019) · Arundhati Roy, My Seditious Heart (2019).

Friends, it’s true: the end of the decade approaches. It’s been a difficult, anxiety-provoking, morally compromised decade, but at least it’s been populated by some damn fine literature. We’ll take our silver linings where we can.

So, as is our hallowed duty as a literary and culture website—though with full awareness of the potentially fruitless and endlessly contestable nature of the task—in the coming weeks, we’ll be taking a look at the best and most important (these being not always the same) books of the decade that was. We will do this, of course, by means of a variety of lists. We began with the best debut novels, the best short story collections, and the best poetry collections of the decade, and we have now reached the fourth list in our series: the best memoirs published in English between 2010 and 2019 (not for nothing: 2015 was a very good year for memoirs).

The following books were chosen after much debate (and several rounds of voting) by the Literary Hub staff. Tears were spilled, feelings were hurt, books were re-read. And as you’ll shortly see, we had a hard time choosing just ten—so we’ve also included a list of dissenting opinions, and an even longer list of also-rans. As ever, free to add any of your own favorites that we’ve missed in the comments below.

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The Top Ten

Patti Smith, Just Kids (2010)

In 1967, 20-year old aspiring poet Patti Smith moved to New York City, where she expected to make ends meet by working as a waitress, got a job instead at a bookstore, met budding artist Robert Mapplethorpe, and embarked with him upon the kind of bohemian late-twentieth century life that defined downtown during the city’s last great period of artistic foment. More than fifty years later, with CBGBs now a shoe store and Velvet Underground t-shirts available in toddler sizes, the counter-culture has become the culture, and it’s near impossible to differentiate the baby-boom mythology from fact. Those wishing to know how it was, though—or at least how it felt—can do no better than turning to Smith’s 2010 National Book Award-winning memoir, Just Kids, a masterpiece of social observation and self-scrutiny, exhilaratingly alive with what it is to be young and to love someone and to want things. The book flows through the city in all its energy and squalor, from mornings at the Chelsea Hotel to nights at Max’s Kansas City, until, one by one, Smith and Mapplethorpe get famous. Throughout, she is good company, by turns shrewd chronicler of the hard work that goes into building an artist’s career and disbelieving observer of her own success. Plus she’s an excellent, often hilarious portraitist, with a seemingly endless supply of captivating subjects, from Burroughs to Warhol, to Mapplethorpe, whom she is endlessly tender about and loyal to and infatuated with, and whose passing elicits one of the most raw-nerve eulogies you’re ever likely to read. Most importantly, Smith is possessed of that quality that sets apart the truly great work of autobiography from the merely good: she knows herself. –Emily Firetog, Deputy Editor

Jesmyn Ward, Men We Reaped (2013)

Most readers of contemporary American fiction know Jesmyn Ward (the prodigiously talented McArthur Genius Fellowship-winning Mississippi writer who, at barely forty years old, became the first woman to win two National Book Awards for Fiction) for Salvage the Bones (2011) and Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017)—a pair of haunted, lyrical novels, subtly infused with the mythic, which examined southern black communities ravaged by unimaginable disaster and generational trauma. Her harrowing 2013 memoir, Men We Reaped—in which Ward considers the premature deaths, over just four years, of five men in her life (including her beloved brother), as well as the terrible risks inherent in just trying to simply live as a young black man in the rural south—deserves to stand right alongside these magnificent novels. Ward is drawing from a deep and shimmering well of sorrow here, describing with exquisite tenderness the lives these doomed men lived—who they were, the people they aspired to become, and what they meant to their families and friends—before poverty and the eroding nature of systemic racism wore away at their defenses and left them vulnerable. Having navigated a childhood of familial instability and extreme financial hardship, Ward became the first member of her family to attend college, leaving behind a community that was full of both nourishing love and wearying strife, and some of the most heartbreaking writing in Men We Reaped juxtaposes her warm memories of joyful Mississippi nights back home with the intense feeling of survivor’s guilt that washes over her in the wake of these terrible losses. –Dan Sheehan, Book Marks Editor

Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts (2015)

Creative nonfiction already redefines, for many readers and writers alike, what nonfiction can do; as nonfiction that uses the mechanical techniques of fiction, it allows us to create expansive, experimental writing that may look, at a glance, almost indistinguishable from a short story, novel, or lyrical prose poem. Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts takes this to heart. It is a beautiful, astonishing memoir—a piece of “autotheory,” really, meaning a work that applies literary and philosophical theory to the writer’s own life—that reimagines what a memoir can look like.

Told non-linearly in sharp fragments, it explores desire, what it means to be cis or trans, the limits of the gender binary itself for people who are non-binary, sexist and heteronormative expectations, and what it means to exist as a woman in the world broadly—and it does all this in one of the most devastatingly gorgeous bits of prose I’ve seen in a while. Its exploration of queer desire is poignant and powerful. The Argonauts pushes creative nonfiction to its limits, and I can’t recommend it enough as an example of how some memoirs—particularly ones like these—can only be written out of order, because that, in reality, is just the right order for it.  –Gabrielle Bellott, Lit Hub staff writer

Helen Macdonald, H is For Hawk (2015)

Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk was, to say the least, a surprise phenomenon in America. An erudite, lyric, very British memoir that describes the simultaneous grieving of a beloved parent, the mourning of a particular version of the English countryside, and the attempt to cohabitate with a ferocious raptor? Not what most publishers would consider a license to print money; add to that the embedded retelling of T.H. White’s own deeply troubled account of life with a fractious goshawk and “bestseller” seems unlikely at best. And though a book’s sales should factor fairly low (if at all) when considering its worthiness, one is tempted to make an exception for memoir, the genre that most wants to be read.

But it is neither the familiarity of the circumstances (they are decidedly not) nor the plainness of the language (this is the memoir of a poet!) that makes Macdonald’s memoir so universally accessible—it is the unrelenting honesty of a writer grappling on the page with the hard stuff most of us reserve for 4am: the finality of death, the paralysis of self-doubt, the loss of the natural world, and… the winged killing machine lurking in the other room. That Macdonald manages literary biography, pastoral meditation, grief diary, and falconry how-to all in one book is a true marvel, and will remain so as this nearly perfect memoir takes its rightful place in the canon.   –Jonny Diamond, Lit Hub Editor-in-Chief

William Finnegan, Barbarian Days (2015)

“They were silhouettes, backlit by low sun, and they danced silently through the glare, their boards like big dark blades, slashing and gliding, swift beneath their feet.” Not the type of language we’ve come to associate with sporting memoirs, but as anyone who has picked up this extraordinary work—which Alice Gregory, writing in the New York Review of Books, astutely described as “an utterly convincing study in the joy of treating seriously an unserious thing”—will attest, this is no ordinary sporting memoir. New Yorker staff writer William Finnegan has lived an impassioned and peripatetic life that would be the envy of even the most seasoned vagabond reporter. For over forty years he has been roaming the world’s outer reaches, chronicling everything from journalists in Apartheid South Africa to youth poverty in the United States, from drug cartels in Mexico to billionaire mining tycoons in Australia. Throughout it all, though, his great love, his obsession, his savior and muse, his sin and his soul and his North star, has been that most solitary and mystical of pastimes: surfing. Barbarian Days is Finnegan’s ode to a life spent slaying liquid dragons, meeting bodacious kindred spirits, and finding contentment inside the tubes of some of the most awesome waves on the face of the earth. Finnegan is a magnificent, humane writer, as adept at conjuring thirty-year-old swells and breaks from memory as he is at describing the unique, and often tender, bonds that are forged between dreamy acolytes of the ocean. With Barbarian Days, he has given us a genuinely moving and profound meditation on an elemental existence.  –Dan Sheehan, Book Marks Editor

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?  –Olivia Rutigliano, CrimeReads Editorial Fellow

Susan Faludi, In the Darkroom (2016)

I borrowed this one from work, and, afraid of doing damage to its white binding, I bought a cloth cover, originally no doubt intended for bibles, to protect the book from smudges or anything else untoward. That covering became symbolic as I dived into this memoir of hiding, transformation, and reversals. In the Darkroom follows feminist scholar Susan Faludi as she reunites with her estranged father, who is now living as a woman in the Budapest of her youth. Her father survived the Holocaust through disguises and subterfuge, then found refuge after the war in depictions of women on film; she is proud to show her daughter the life she has made in Budapest, even as right wing nationalism grows around her. Susan Faludi frankly discusses her struggle to accept her father, both in her estrangement and in her new life as woman, and reading the memoir of an old school feminist figure out how to be trans-inclusive is one of the most heartwarming things you’ll ever come across.

The book also serves as a snapshot of the entire Jewish century—Faludi’s father survived the Holocaust as a boy, then strived to be the most American of Americans after starting a family in the US; Susan Faludi came to an appreciation of her heritage more through history and her family’s lived experience rather than through religion, and the whole family embraced artistic expression of some kind or other.

In the Darkroom is brilliant, beautiful, and very difficult to describe, but I do hope you’ll read it.  –Molly Odintz, CrimeReads Associate Editor

Annie Ernaux, tr. Alison L. Strayer, The Years (2017)

There’s a revolution happening in life writing and the French novelist Annie Ernaux deserves far more credit than she’s received for showing how a depth of style and tone can situate a life within the larger rivers of time. Ernaux was born in 1940 in the heart of the France’s working class Normandy. Since that time period, up until 2006, when this book ends, France has lived through the war, the pill, the rise of consumer culture and a whole blizzard of idea-fads, which she threads her life through and around—a boat traveling down a current of past-ness. Along the way Ernaux became a public person, a famous person even, in small circles, and this book comes to grip with the loss of singularity that entails. Mostly, though, to read The Years is to re-experience, as if anew, what the past feels like. Not just what it is made of, what rocks around which a times flow, but how it feels to be traveling upon a before. In an era when nostalgia is so rapidly commodified—witness the 1970s—Ernaux’s attempt to forge a way of considering life as singular and collective is strangely moving, unfashionable, and dignified.   –John Freeman, Executive Editor, Lit Hub

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.   –Jessie Gaynor, Social Media Editor

Naja Marie Aidt, tr. Denise Newman, When Death Takes Something From You Give It Back (2019)

This remarkable memoir is easily one of the best of any kind published in the last decade. On a fundamental level, it paints a warm, vivid portrait of Danish writer Aidt’s son, a chef and searcher who died tragically in his early twenties when a home-made batch of hallucinogenics led to a terrible accident. Drawing on the author’s diaries in the aftermath, poets of lacunae like Anne Carson and Ingrid Christensen, and narrating the boy’s life and upbringing, it is also a powerful formal assertion of the heartbreaking illegibility of loss, even as all one wants to do with the missing is keep them alive, present, somehow. Watching Aidt pull it off is akin to watching Philippe Petit walk a tight-rope between the Twin Towers. There’s such dexterity and joy even line by line in her prose. Yet the gap over which Aidt strings her lines is terrifying. It’s not just a grief this book narrates, it’s how to rethread time’s projector when an accident has caused a sudden tear in the reel. In Denmark, Aidt has long been read as an essential poet, and her fiction, Baboon, is taught in high schools. This book secures her role in a very small collection of writers who have taken the form of a memoir and revealed how much thought and loss live in the same ventricle of the heart’s true accounts.   –John Freeman, Executive Editor, Lit Hub

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Dissenting Opinions

The following books were just barely nudged out of the top ten, but we (or at least one of us) couldn’t let them pass without comment.

Vivian Gornick, The Odd Woman and the City (2015)

In an essay for the Village Voice in 1973, Vivian Gornick described her engagement with contemporary feminist thought as a process of redefining what it meant to move through life as a woman. “It is a journey of unimaginable pain and loneliness, this journey, a battle all the way, one in which the same inch of emotional ground must be fought for over and over again, alone and without allies, the only soldier in the army the struggling self,” she wrote. “But on the other side lies freedom: self-possession.” The Odd Woman and the City, her memoir published in 2015, shows part of Gornick’s long road of self-examination and is filled with the sharply self-aware observations and insights that have marked her as one of our most important memoir writers. The book showcases Gornick as an incredible documentarian of the emotional worlds that collide throughout the course of a day in New York City; her book focuses in particular on her friendship with a man named Leonard, but also on all the other small interactions that fill city life and all the minuscule, passing ways in which humans seek connection with one another. Describing these with clarity and compassion is one of Gornick’s biggest strengths; this memoir is a model of self-reflection and a mirror for those of us that have not yet fully arrived in ourselves, but are on the way. –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Oliver Sacks, On the Move (2015)

There are many records of Oliver Sacks’s life and work, but none marries the two subjects quite so powerfully as his memoir, On the Move, a book published just a few short months before his death in 2015. Sacks was one of the century’s great intellects, a mind alive to experience, nuance, the unknown, experimentation, and, above all, communication. Few scientists have ever been so gifted in the art of storytelling. Over the years, Sacks expanded our notions of the world, our bodies, and our minds. Those were the stories of his professional work. But the story of his own life was just as compelling. In On the Move, he grapples with his past, his sexuality, his literary craft, his medical achievements, his failures, and his many, many experiments of all stripes and colors. We may come to a book like this one for the medicine tales, but we stay for the stories of cross-country motorcycle rides, self-administered experiments with powerful drugs, struggles with addiction, bodily transformations, and affairs of the heart. Throughout it all, Sacks maintains the intense, at times wrenching intimacy of his prose. In a perfect encapsulation of the storytelling approach that made him legendary, Sacks writes, “All sorts of generalizations are made possible by dealing with populations, but one needs the concrete, the particular, the personal too.” With those particulars, those personal items, Sacks made a kind of magic. On the Move is that rare memoir written by an author whose life experiences and ideas are the match for his literary talents. He was the consummate storyteller. His stories had rigor and power, and they served to make the world seem like larger place, and ever more curious. –Dwyer Murphy, CrimeReads Managing Editor

Sally Mann, Hold Still (2015)

I remember the first time I saw a Sally Mann portrait in real life—I nearly walked by, but something caught me and held me there, for much longer than I expected. The eyes, the pose, the exposure, the cobwebby Southern trees—I still can’t put my finger on it, can’t explain, a phenomenon that for me is the mark of artistic genius.

In this exquisite memoir, the widely lauded and highly controversial Mann unpacks her family’s history in her beloved Virginia, telling her own tales as well as shaking out old boxes of photographs and letters that point towards “deceit and scandal, alcohol, domestic abuse, car crashes, bogeymen, clandestine affairs, dearly loved and disputed family land . . . racial complications, vast sums of money made and lost, the return of the prodigal son, and maybe even bloody murder.”

All that is about as fun as it sounds, but Hold Still stands out most of all for being a true photographer’s memoir: in weaving her photographs throughout, Mann both showcases her art and uses it to illustrate her story—and sometimes her point. She responds to her critics with a sort of bemused tolerance, and shows shots taken fractions of seconds apart, in which her children’s faces break from hard-edged vamping into goofy smiles. But she also grapples with the fear that they might, in some sense, be right—that she has put her children in danger by making them her subjects. It’s complicated, and ultimately unresolved, which feels like truth. Read an excerpt here. –Emily Temple, Senior Editor

J. Drew Lanham, The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature (2017)

“I am, in the deepest sense, colored,” writes naturalist and wildlife biologist J. Drew Lanham, in a memoir whose masterful opening sections bring to mind Jean Toomer’s descriptions of Georgia in Cane (1923).The Home Place is on one level about lives not easily categorized, a man who watches the people and landscapes of his childhood shift and disappear as often as he watches the birds he so dearly prizes. Lanham is as much a poet as an academic. He writes not only in homage to the family that made him who he is, but also to decouple nature and environmental literature from academia, which he accuses of alienating readers who might otherwise find a way in. The “in-between place” that the title refers to is a 200-acre inholding in the tiny county of Edgefield, South Carolina, where Lanham grows up with his parents, siblings and grandmother. Lanham aptly writes with the precision of an agriculturalist; his prose is circuitous, humorous, and often understated: “There were three or four old crepe myrtles in the yard that erupted in purple and white blooms in April and May. Little copses of lemon-yellow daffodils and nodding snowdrops preceded the crepe myrtles in the new warmth of march.” Or: “[R]oving gangs of noisy blue jays conducted morning raids to gather a share of nuts.” Though lingering in this kind of descriptive prose is the book’s greatest pleasure, Lanham also speaks to the difficulties he’s encountered throughout his career. He’s aware that, unfortunately, a black man in his profession is relatively rare, and Lanham’s private experiences in and beyond the Home Place are always circumscribed by this knowledge. Coincidentally, The Home Place was published just months before the election of a president whose administration would roll back key legislation meant to protect endangered species. Lanham took a more placid approach than the post-2016 “doomsday” mode of ecological writing, though we must now wonder what Lanham might say in an introduction if the book ever gets another printing. –Aaron Robertson, Assistant Editor

Nora Krug, Belonging (2018)

Reading Nora Krug’s Belonging is like watching a mind unfold in front of you. It’s classified as a graphic memoir (and it won the 2019 National Book Critic Circle Award for Autobiography!), but it feels like a scrapbook. (You can see what I mean here, in this excerpt on homesickness and heimat, or “the place that a person is born into.”) Belonging is Nora Krug’s honest attempt to reckon with her German heritage. Born decades after the Holocaust but surrounded by a familial silence about it, she boldly interrogates her family’s role in this terrible history. Belonging doesn’t just tell Nora Krug’s story. Yes, there are plenty of her own handwritten notes and beautiful illustrations, but she also cobbles together family photographs and letters to tell this story through the generations. Belonging reads like a home video and a history textbook rolled into one. On one page, you’ll have an anecdote about mushroom-foraging with her family. On another, you’ll trace the history of a particular kind of German bandage, which her mother used to patch up her six-year-old knee after a skating accident. But on the next, she’ll include some of her uncle’s journal, complete with anti-Semitic rhetoric and his drawings of swastikas. (Random and hodge-podge as it may sound, trust me: the curation feels organic. These things are connected, is what Nora Krug seems to be saying.) There is something unbelievably generous about the way she offers these bits of history to us. The story isn’t brought to us as an olive branch or a request for forgiveness for her family. It’s an open-ended question. This is perhaps why the graphic memoir/collage medium is the perfect one in which to tell this story; there is no posturing or justification or attempt at explanation. She can leave us with an image and let us sit with the complicated discomfort. We join her in the midst of her reckoning.  –Katie Yee, Book Marks Assistant Editor

Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House (2019)

It feels appropriate that describing Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House—comprised of the tellings and retellings of Machado’s relationship with an abusive ex-girlfriend—falls to the three of us who loved this memoir so much that we all had to have a say. This is a story with many forms, all centered on the Dream House: a real place where Machado and her ex-girlfriend lived, but also a series of mental fortifications forged through emotional abuse, physical violence, gaslighting, and suspicion. Machado calls on a series of narrative traditions in recounting this story, one for which there is little to no existing narrative precedent, since abusive queer relationships have so rarely been addressed in popular culture; the result is a dizzying, monumental achievement. So many of us have our own versions of this story, and reading through hers feels intensely personal and powerfully affirmative, the equivalent of a friend looking you in the eye and saying, over and over, you’re not crazy. I needed this book; I think a lot of us do. –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

The dedication page to In the Dream House goes: “If you need this book, it is for you.” Carmen Maria Machado’s memoir does something I’ve never seen done before, which is to examine an abusive queer relationship from many different angles, to hold it in many different lights. She uses footnotes to call upon tropes in mythology and taboos in literature. She references queer theory. It’s all in an attempt to situate the story in a different context, to find a way to tell it that can help us make sense of what’s happening. In the Dream House is a dizzying, raw, and deeply personal story and with her experimental structure, she is casting lines out, trying to find (and helping others find) the structure that holds. –Katie Yee, Book Marks Assistant Editor

I have never before read a memoir that reads like a thriller. Machado deconstructs the memories of her abusive relationship and filters them through literary tropes in order to lay out the signs, interpret, organize and in doing so repeatedly, in what becomes a pattern that never satisfies, she and the reader come to the understanding that there will never be a unity of narrative, nor any traditional resolution to a tale of trauma. Machado’s course through the Dream House strikes me as the inverse of the madwoman narrative—rather than a downward spiral, the recognition of danger calls upon the protagonist’s inner strength, while the continual grappling with what is true and what isn’t only sharpens her resolve to save herself. In the Dream House is a Heroine’s Journey and it is stunning in both its invention of a new memoir form and its emotional resonance. To echo Corinne and Katie, this is a book you need to read.  –Eleni Theodoropoulos, Editorial Fellow

Kier-la Janisse, House of Psychotic Women: A Personal Topography of Female Neurosis in Horror and Exploitation Films (2012)

I’ve always been of the mind that the best way to get to know someone is not through their experience so much as their taste, a little-explored topic in the wide world of recorded lives—until now.

In her brilliant and bizarre memoir, Kier-la Janisse reinvents film criticism as memoir, and tells the story of her life through the horror and exploitation films she enjoyed growing up and which later became her life’s passion. Anecdotal musings and harrowing life accounts mix together with astute criticism incorporating a quarter-century of thought on horror cinema; the chapter on films of teenage rebellion goes together with Janisse’s account of her baby delinquency, while Janisse’s relationship with her father, always fraught, leads into discussions of family, gender and sexuality as represented by exploitation cinema. Janisse isn’t making the case that these films are valuable works of art, so much as windows into the modern psyche, and occasionally (as in the case of rape and revenge cinema) a narrative form to be reclaimed by feminists despite its original prurient intent. House of Psychotic Women is what I hope all works of pop culture criticism to be in the future— erudite, personal, intense, mind-bending, and refusing to draw a line between literary merit and personal taste. Plus, the design is awesome!  –Molly Odintz, CrimeReads Associate Editor

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Honorable Mentions

A selection of other books that we seriously considered for both lists—just to be extra about it (and because decisions are hard).

Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22 (2010) · Binyavanga Wainaina, One Day I Will Write About This Place (2011) · Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? (2011) · Emmanuel Carrère, tr. Linda Coverdale, Lives Other Than My Own (2011) · Gabrielle Hamilton, Blood, Bones and Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef (2011) · Meghan O’Rourke, The Long Goodbye (2011) · Tony Judt, The Memory Chalet (2011) · Lidia Yuknavitch, The Chronology of Water (2011) · Joan Didion, Blue Nights (2011) · Joshua Cody, [Sic]: A Memoir (2011) · Mira Bartók, The Memory Palace (2011) · Alison Bechdel, Are You My Mother? (2012) · Anthony Shadid, House of Stone (2012) · Héctor Abad, tr. Anne McLean and Rosalind Harvey, Oblivion (2012) · Leanne Shapton, Swimming Studies (2012) · Cheryl Strayed, Wild (2012) · Edna O’Brien, Country Girl (2013) · Malala Yousafzai and Christina Lamb, I Am Malala (2013) · Liao Yiwu, tr. Wenguang Huang, For a Song and a Hundred Songs (2013) · Sonali Deraniyagala, Wave (2013) · Amy Wilentz, Farewell, Fred Voodoo (2013) · Roz Chast, Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? (2014) · Viv Albertine, Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys. (2014) · Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy (2014) · Rebecca Mead, My Life in Middlemarch (2014) · Heidi Julavits, The Folded Clock (2015) · Tracy K. Smith, Ordinary Light (2015) · Patrick Modiano, tr. Mark Polizzotti, Pedigree (2015) · Lacey Johnson, The Other Side (2015) · Mohamedou Ould Slahi, ed. Larry Siems, Guantanamo Diary (2015) · Jenny Diski, In Gratitude (2016) · Scholastique Mukasonga, tr. Jordan Stump, Cockroaches (2016) · Hisham Matar, The Return (2016) · Hope Jahren, Lab Girl (2016) · Patricia Lockwood, Priestdaddy (2017) · Daniel Mendelsohn, An Odyssey (2017) · Xiaolu Guo, Nine Continents (2017) · Annie Ernaux, tr. Alison L. Strayer, The Years (2017) · Kiese Laymon, Heavy (2018) · Lisa Brennan-Jobs, Small Fry (2018) · Sarah Smarsh, Heartland (2018) · Francisco Cantú, The Line Becomes a River (2018) · Leslie Jamison, The Recovering (2018) · Terese Marie Mailhot, Heart Berries (2018) · T Kira Madden, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls (2019).

Friends, it’s true: the end of the decade approaches. It’s been a difficult, anxiety-provoking, morally compromised decade, but at least it’s been populated by some damn fine literature. We’ll take our silver linings where we can.

So, as is our hallowed duty as a literary and culture website—though with full awareness of the potentially fruitless and endlessly contestable nature of the task—in the coming weeks, we’ll be taking a look at the best and most important (these being not always the same) books of the decade that was. We will do this, of course, by means of a variety of lists. We began with the best debut novels of the decade, and now we’re back with the best short story collections of the decade—or to be precise, the best collections published in English between 2010 and 2019.

The following books were chosen after much debate (and several rounds of voting) by the Literary Hub staff. Tears were spilled, feelings were hurt, books were re-read. And as you’ll shortly see, we had a hard time choosing just ten—so we’ve also included a list of dissenting opinions, and an even longer list of also-rans. Feel free to add any favorites we’ve missed in the comments below.

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The Top Ten

Claire Vaye Watkins, Battleborn
2012

Claire Vaye Watkins’ searing, Nevada-set debut collection—which includes a sixty-page novella that takes place during the 1848 Gold Rush and a dazzling, devastating opening tale in which Watkins audaciously blends fiction, local history, and myth with the story of father’s involvement in the Manson Family during the late ’60s—is as starkly beautiful, as lonesome and sinister and death-haunted, as the desert frontier through which its stories roam. There’s an enviable fearlessness to Watkins’ writing, a refusal to look away from the despair that lies within the hearts of her lost and weary characters, to give them tidy trajectories or tidy resolutions. Her landscapes are exquisitely drawn, full of lush sensory detailing and characters stalked by the sorrows and violence of their pasts, the parched desperation of their presents. In one particularly aching story, a man finds a bundle of letters amid the strewn wreckage of a car crash, and proceeds to carry on a therapeutic, and increasingly revealing, one-sided correspondence with their owner, onto whom he superimposes the identity of a desperate neighbor he killed decades previous. In his reverie he remembers how nature marked the season it happened: “Late that Spring, a swarm of grasshoppers moved though Beatty on their way to the alfalfa fields down south. They were thick and fierce, rolling like a thunderstorm in your head.” It’s remarkable to come across a debut collection in which the voice, the vision, is so fully formed, so assured, but that’s what Watkins has achieved with this exceptional work. –Dan Sheehan, Book Marks Editor

Alice Munro, Dear Life
2012

Well, this one’s not really fair. I mean, any Alice Munro collection published in any given period of time has to automatically be on the list of best collections of said period. (I guess what I really mean is that it’s not really fair to other writers that Munro is such a goddamn genius.) Most of the stories in Dear Life were previously published in The New Yorker, Harper’s, and Granta; they all display Munro’s uncanny ability to take a lifetime—or even generations of a single family—and shrink it into a thirty-page text—not by spinning out event after event, but by delivering a character so textured, and a series of moments so precise, that we can’t help but feel we know all about them. These stories and characters are not flashy, there’s little in the way of high concept; it’s simply that Munro knows people, and represents them so accurately, so wisely, and so humanely, that you can’t help but be moved. This is despite the fact that, as Michiko Kakutani pointed out, with age, Munro has gotten a little bit sharper in her portrayals of the common man. “Though Ms. Munro has not become judgmental exactly, she seems more focused on the selfishness, irrationality and carelessness people are capable of.” The collection also includes a few semi-autobiographical sketches—“autobiographical in feeling, though not, sometimes, entirely so in fact”—we are told. She writes: “I believe they are the first and last—and the closest—things I have to say about my own life.” They too are wonderful.

Munro was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature the year after the publication of Dear Life, in 2013; the Swedish Academy called her a “master of the contemporary short story.” No shit. –Emily Temple, Senior Editor

George Saunders, Tenth of December
2013

It can be hard to tell what historical era you’re actually living through, as its happening. Is this the post-9/11 era or the Trump era? Or maybe we’re really in what will one day (I hope) be labeled the Misinformation Era. Honestly, though, this is probably the “we had a chance to save the planet but did nothing” era, in which case, there probably won’t be historians around in 200 years to call it anything… How ever you choose to see the last decade of life on Planet America, it is likely some version of it appears in George Saunders contemporary classic, Tenth of December.

This collection is as remarkable for its range of emotional registers as it is for its formal variety. From the aching, class-conscious pathos of “Puppy,” in which two families intersect around the possible purchase of a dog, to the grim, neo-futurist allegory of “Escape From Spiderhead,” in which clinical drug trials go way too far, Saunders sets his characters down in a series of bespoke narrative dioramas, a wry and loving god forever suspicious of the disappointments his creations engender, yet unable to resist setting little boobytraps to see how they’ll react. With a tenderness and generosity that catalyzes satirical clarity rather than the cloudiness of sentimentality, Saunders lets his characters puzzle their way through the confines of their own fictional lives, as wounded and joyous and magnificently broken as any among us, the living.

It is a dark timeline, in which reality has outpaced satire, but at least it is a world we have seen before, in the short stories of George Saunders.  –Jonny Diamond, Editor in Chief

Clarice Lispector, tr. Katrina Dodson, ed. Benjamin Moser, The Complete Stories
2015

It’s complicated to include a “complete stories” collection in our list for the best of the decade, not least because Clarice Lispector has been considered Brazil’s greatest writer more or less since 1943 when her revolutionary debut novel, Near to the Wild Heart, was first published (she was 23). But in 2012, publisher New Directions began releasing new translations, from four different translators, of Lispector’s novels, a concerted effort to bring her remarkable work to the attention of an English-speaking readership. In 2015, the novels were followed by these “Complete Stories”—86 in all, originally published between 1952 and 1979. Translated by Katrina Dodson, the collection received dazzling reviews, establishing Lispector firmly in America’s consciousness as one of the preeminent writers of the last century.

A Clarice Lispector story is not easy to describe; they are feminist and absurdist, charting familial drama, love affairs, and existential surrealism, wheeling through the preoccupations and modes of twentieth century literary experimentation with a disorientating facility—and disorientation is the point. “Coherence is mutilation,” a character reflects at one point, “I want disorder”—an urge that Lispector understands and brings to life with more power than almost any writer I can think of, and perhaps with more relevance and urgency in these times than in any other in the four decades since her death.  –Emily Firetog, Deputy Editor

Lucia Berlin, ed. Stephen Emerson, A Manual for Cleaning Women
2015

Is it all that remarkable that a short story collection by a writer who died in 2004 should, in fact, be one of the best collections of the decade that followed? Aside from the earthy brilliance of Berlin’s A Manual for Cleaning Women itself, the fact of its phenomenon—at least among those who consume multiple story collections a year—speaks to a great gap in our literary culture. It won’t ever be possible to fully account for the stories and novels that went unheralded and untaught in a literary culture geared toward canonizing the anxieties and insights of well-to-do white guys, but at least in Berlin’s posthumous collection—and its frank rendering of women’s lives—we have a small correction to the record.

When Berlin writes of last-chance bus depots or cheap borderland hotels or third-rate nursing homes she does so minus the literary tourist’s appropriative bravado, that triumphalist wild boy tick that seems to define so much of the fiction of her male contemporaries. For Berlin, these are not places we pass through, to mine for epiphany or authenticity, but rather the locations in which life happens: as one reviewer put it, the stories in this collection are “all beginnings and middles with no ends,” and one only wishes Berlin had lived long enough to see the beginning of her own renaissance.   –Jonny Diamond, Editor in Chief

Colin Barrett, Young Skins
2015

I first read Colin Barrett’s stories when I worked at The Stinging Fly magazine and press in Dublin. The editor had been working with Barrett for a couple of months on a few stories, and we were publishing one in an upcoming issue. I distinctly remember finishing the copy edit and turning to the editor and simply saying, “Holy shit.” When we put out Colin’s collection Young Skins in 2013, it wasn’t long before Grove Atlantic picked it up in the US, and it was published here in 2015. In the vein of William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, its seven stories all take place within the limits of the fictional town of Glanbeigh on the west coast of Ireland. Barrett’s characters live hard lives in the aftermath of Ireland’s Celtic Tiger years, an economic boom time that happened to other people but the effects of whose abrupt end are felt everywhere. There is drink and there are drugs and moments of shocking violence. There is the steady inescapability of failure and loss, and every so often there are moments of soaringly lyrical writing. Barrett’s mastery of the short story form won him the Guardian First Book Award, the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Prize, and a National Book Foundation 5 under 35 honor. It’s a collection that’s striking for its audacity to be a debut—completely assured of voice, of character, and of a setting that is utterly realized. Thus, we’re calling it one of the best short story collections of the decade. –Emily Firetog, Deputy Editor

Ken Liu, The Paper Menagerie
2016

“Whatever has been lost in translation in the long journey of my thoughts through the maze of civilization to your mind, I think you do understand me, and you think you do understand me,” Ken Liu writes in the preface to The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories, a collection in which metaphors are fully unwound into tangible corollaries. The Paper Menagerie gathers some of Liu’s most celebrated stories, summaries of which do little to convey the scope of his imagination. Take, for example, “State Change,” a bleak office rom-com set in a world where people’s souls are physical objects—an ice cube, a cigarette pack, a beech tree branch—that must be protected from mundane things like hot weather and nicotine addiction. “Good Hunting” begins as a folktale about a demon-hunting father-son duo in a small Chinese village and ends with a critique of British colonialism and modernity in Hong Kong, as well as a surprising reversal of misogynistic narrative tropes. The titular story, which won Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy Awards, shows Liu in top form. The protagonist, born of a Chinese immigrant mother and white father, grows up loving the origami animals that his mother brings to life with her breath, only to spurn his Chinese heritage as he grows older. Though not all the stories here are quite as moving as this one, The Paper Menagerie cemented Liu as one of the decade’s most inventive (and popular) short story writers, adept at infusing his shapeshifting work with a touch of Charlie Kaufman-esque hyperreality and Eastern Asian folklore. –Aaron Robertson, Assistant Editor

Lesley Nneka Arimah, What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky
2017

Lesley Nneka Arimah calls herself a pessimist. Thus unfolds her collection of short stories, What It Means When A Man Falls From The Sky, most of which are set in Nigeria and utilize dystopian themes to reveal the bleak consequences of humankind’s ruthlessness towards the natural world as well as fellow humans. The title story, for example, is about a world ravaged by climate change, where a group of scientists try, by the creation of a “formula,” to undo what has been done and make it so the human body can defy gravity. The flaws in this hubristic, quick-fix mindset are immediately revealed when the eponymous man falls from the sky. Another story in the collection “What Is A Volcano?” reflects a similar human urge to play god, drawing on myth and literally presenting feuding gods who argue over each other’s primacy. Arimah blends magical realism and fable into her narratives to illuminate as she says, the “baser instincts” of humankind, to watch humanity “turn grotesque.”

Arimah tackles the pressures of womanhood, familial relationships, and Nigerian culture, including its religious and social expectations. “Glory” is about a girl of the same name, bearing the pressure of her family to achieve greatly; “Who Will Greet You At Home” is about a woman so desperate for a child and her mother’s blessing that she risks weaving one out of hair: “Everybody knew how risky it was to make a child out of hair, infused with the identity of the person who had shed it. But a child of many hairs? Forbidden.” Despite the variety of its incarnations, this collection portrays a variety of hauntings, often literal in the form of ghosts or dolls coming to life, and others figurative, as in a father’s fear for his daughter out in the world. Underlying all of Arimah’s narratives ultimately though, is emotion: the ways in which we show or suppress love and affection and display vulnerability. Being as we are each an entire mind away from another, grief accompanies not only big events but even everyday instances of a missed chance at getting across to someone we care about what we really mean and want. –Eleni Theodoropoulos, Editorial Fellow

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. –Gabrielle Bellot, Staff Writer

Ottessa Moshfegh, Homesick for Another World
2017

Even before Ottessa Moshfegh had published her first book, people were calling her “the best writer of our generation.” I know this for a fact, because one of those people was me, and I was sure of it based on the short stories she’d been publishing 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.

Most of the stories in Homesick for Another World were originally published in The Paris Review—though 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. –Emily Temple, Senior Editor

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Dissenting Opinions

The following books were just barely nudged out of the top ten, but we (or at least one of us) couldn’t let them pass without comment.

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. –Olivia Rutigliano, CrimeReads Editorial Fellow

Diane Cook, Man V. Nature
2014

When I first read this collection, during graduate school, I remember having to stop in the middle and take a break. The collection was making me feel bad, and almost panicky. It was just too good. It was so good that I felt confident there was no reason for me to ever write another word; Diane Cook had already done everything I was trying to do and more. Eventually, I got over it (the writer’s ego being a slippery but unquenchable fiend) and finished this surreal and glorious book of stories.

I mean, what to say: in “The Way the End of Days Should Be” one of the last survivors of what is apparently a watery apocalypse tries to keep out invaders as the seas rise around their (Doric columned) home: “This man in the nice suit asked for food and water, then tried to strangle me, choked back tears, apologized, asked to be let in, and when I refused, tried to strangle me again. When I managed to close the door on him, he sat on my veranda and cried.” Did I mention Diane Cook is hilarious? Especially at her darkest, she is a comedic genius. The title story is equally funny and equally bleak; it also involves water as an adversary, and also the men who used to be your friends. At least one of them, anyway.

In closing: where is the next book from Diane Cook? I’ve been waiting for years; it’s starting to feel unfair. Who knows what a woman might do without one? –Emily Temple, Senior Editor

Hassan Blasim, tr. Jonathan Wright, The Corpse Exhibition
2014

It’s rare for a conflict to go on for so long that witnesses may begin to record its history before the conflict is over, and yet that is what has happened as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan continue, and publishing does its duty to bring suffering into print. Hassan Blasim was a vocal critic of Saddam Hussein’s government, in exile in Finland for much of his literary career, so it makes sense that his story collection would explore the Iraqi expat experience as well as crafting stories immersed in the war itself; several stories are stranded between judging and defending those who have gotten out and who then, refuse to return. Whether Blasim is writing about the war itself or its many rippling effects, he brings a sardonic sensibility to his stories, parodying the language of bureaucracy and always pointing to the violence common to both order and chaos. This is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand both the war and the ongoing attempts to process the conflict through literature, and a necessary complement to the wide array of fiction by American veterans released over the past few years. –Molly Odintz, CrimeReads Associate Editor

Dorthe Nors, Karate Chop
2014

Karate Chop was the first of Dorthe Nors’ books to be available to the English-speaking world (translated from the Danish). It was pressed into my hands by the amazing Julie Buntin (author of Marlena) when she was my internship supervisor, back in 2014. She told me it was a perfect gem of a collection, and that I was going to love it. Boy oh boy was she right! Karate Chop is a compact powerhouse, with fifteen pithy stories (no more than a few pages apiece!) that pull back the curtain on everyday life to reveal something much more odd and sinister. (A few notable examples: after his wife goes to bed, a man obsessively falls down the online rabbit hole of female serial killers; two hunters agree to kill each other’s dogs in an exploration of male friendship; a young woman leaps from thought to thought, trying very hard to avoid thinking about something traumatic that’s happened. I could go on!) Dorthe Nors writes with such a dry, biting specificity. Her matter-of-fact tone makes you trust her. And then she pulls the rug out from under you in the best way! The situations she throws her characters (and her readers) into could only be conjured up by her. (The story about the hunters that hatch a plan to kill their dogs? It’s also a story about a failing marriage. But in a Dorthe Nors story, it has to be tangled up in this amazing way. Just surrender to the logic.) In a lot of ways, this is a collection about the ways we fail to connect to one another, and the mental and emotional acrobatics we partake in to avoid hurt. –Katie Yee, Book Marks Assistant Editor

Phil Klay, Redeployment
2014

Redeployment is a classic exploration of the veteran’s experience, going back and forth between stories immersed in the moment of trauma and those exploring the dislocating experience of return to a peacetime world after the disruptions of war – my favorite story in the collection details a philosophical confrontation between a veteran at college on the GI Bill and a student activist who feels threatened by him (and whom he, in turn, feels threatened by). Their attempt to understand each other is one of the best dialogue sequences I’ve ever come across, and symbolic of the book’s larger message of humanism, although some stories embrace a bleaker message of the dark comedy of errors and bureaucracy that is war. I’m including this on the list as the first of many works to be written by returning veterans – the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts have had the dubious honor of being long enough for an entire generation to have returned home, enrolled in MFA programs, and published novels en masse as the war continues. If fiction is the first step in processing trauma, than perhaps this means we’re getting a head start—or perhaps, there’s just too much suffering in the world to wait for a thing to end before writing books about it. –Molly Odintz, CrimeReads Associate Editor

Amelia Gray, Gutshot
2015

In my former life as a bookseller, this one made its way around the story with hushed whispers and bated breath, furtively paged through and softly recommended in brief lulls between helping customers, perused at the registers as we yawned and waiting for the store to close, on the quiet second floor in the early hours of a Saturday morning, or in the deathly quiet of the children’s section in mid-week to a soundtrack of Muzac radio and the booms and thuds of near-by construction. You have to read this, we said to each other; start with the story in the middle, we commanded to friends and colleagues; don’t talk to me until after you finish reading it, we mock-warned to those who appeared on the fence about finishing.

What makes this one so special, in a sea of collections that each try their hardest to capture some kind of zeitgeist with sentences beautiful enough to guarantee that the era their contents define will be remembered? Amelia Grey is the grand-guignol heiress to Angela Carter, crafting grotesque body horror and immersed in the violence of everyday life, full of more blood, sugar, sex, and magic than a 90s-era record store. Although perhaps, given the matter-of-fact way her characters accept their bloody, inglorious fates, I should describe her as Angela Carter meets Etgar Keret, whose story collection The Bus Driver Who Wanted to be God ushered in a new era of magical realism grounded in the everyday, ordinary, and mundane. If art is meant to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable, then Amelia Grey’s Gutshot is very high art indeed. –Molly Odintz, CrimeReads Associate Editor

Kelly Link, Get In Trouble
2015

I am here for literally everything Kelly Link writes (have you heard she’s writing a novel?)—after all, she is an official genius whose work combines fairy tale archetypes, horror tropes, pop culture references, and surrealist play with some of the finest literary writing around. I know, this isn’t as uncommon as it once was, but Link is the OG short story irrealist, and she’s also the best. People who haven’t read Kelly Link can’t really understand that they need Kelly Link in their lives, but they do. This is part of why I always think of her work as being a secret, like something only my friends and I know about and reference and pass around to one another and try to copy, a kind of shibboleth for a certain type of writer.

However, when I think this, I am wrong: not only did Link win a MacArthur, but her most recent collection, Get In Trouble, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and widely and well reviewed. The secret’s out. And well, fine, because I want (most) people to be happy. Like every Link collection, Get In Trouble is full of classics: all killer, no filler, as the kids—maybe once, one time, used to—say. “The New Boyfriend” is like something out of Grimm’s My So Called Life, “The Summer People” is mysterious, atmospheric masterpiece, and “Valley of the Girls” is a story that I do not fully understand, and never will, but that I read again every year and think about all the time. –Emily Temple, Senior Editor

Kirstin Valdez Quade, Night at the Fiestas
2015

Kirstin Valdez Quade’s debut collection, Night at the Fiestas, came out almost five years ago now, in early 2015, and it’s not overstating to say that it managed on a first reading to expand my conception of American literary fiction, what it could do, what a story collection could do, and the kinds of stories that could and should be told. Returning to the stories in the time since—especially to the visceral, driving “Five Wounds” and the haunting “Nemecia”—has only confirmed that feeling, that Valdez Quade is one of the most talented storytellers at work today. New Mexico—its landscapes, its cultures, its families—is the setting for her work, and the majority of the stories center around people dealing with the weight of everyday life, spiritual striving, and the deep, complex connections that bind them. In “Five Wounds,” a man reenacts the Passion of the Christ; in “Nemecia,” two girls reckon with a dark family legacy. Throughout the collection, the strange textures of sin, blood, and relations arise again and again. The stories are intense, finely observed works of realism, but they pulsate with a special kind of energy that seems to allow for an enhanced reality, another plane of possibility. A religious feeling, in short. It’s rare to find that kind of power or preoccupation in contemporary fiction. When you do, it’s a reminder of why we tell stories in the first place, of the kind of communal reckoning we’re undertaking when we explain our stories, our families, our pasts. –Dwyer Murphy, CrimeReads Managing Editor

Adam Johnson, Fortune Smiles
(2015)

I’m a little perplexed as to why more people haven’t read this book. Or, if they have, why it seems to have all-but disappeared from the Best Books of the Twenty-First Century conversation (despite having won the National Book Award for Fiction less than five short years ago). Perhaps the rapturous reception that greeted The Orphan Master’s Son, the grimly absurdist novel for which Johnson won the Pulitzer Prize three years previous, served to drown out his quieter follow-up. Perhaps it’s the fault of the book’s cheery cast of characters, which includes an uncomfortably sympathetic child-porn addict, an unrepentant former Stasi prison guard, a young mother with cancer, a pair of North Korean defectors, a hologram of a recently-assassinated US president, and a woman with advanced Guillain-Barré syndrome. Or perhaps it’s that every one of these six lengthy tales—dark, disquieting, and all the more unsettling for their subtle infusions of tenderness—leaves an indelible, but rarely pleasant, mark on the reader’s consciousness. As Lauren Groff wrote in her New York Times review: “Each of these stories plants a small bomb in the reader’s head; life after reading Fortune Smiles is a series of small explosions in which the reader—perhaps unwillingly—recognizes Adam Johnson’s gleefully bleak world in her own.” This is not an uplifting collection. It will illicit chuckles only as a means to further devastate. It will not make you feel good about yourself, about technology, about our ability to successfully navigate life’s random cruelties. But it will exhilarate. It will suck the breath from your lungs. –Dan Sheehan, Book Marks Editor

Steven Millhauser, Voices in the Night
2015

I’ve never understood why Stephen Millhauser isn’t more widely read (at least in the United States—apparently he’s big in France, which makes sense, because the French tend to appreciate the finer things). Maybe it’s because his “most famous” book—Martin Dressler, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1997—is his least interesting. Listen, I love Millhauser, and I can easily imagine someone reading Martin Dressler, thinking “hmm, okay,” and then forgetting all about him forever. But no one should do this. Because Millhauser’s stories, on the other hand, are wonderful, weird things, steady and fantastical at once, as if Raymond Carver had developed a thing for ghosts and girls who die of laughter.

This latest collection contains some of my favorite stories from Millhauser’s long career, including the opener, “Miracle Polish,” which I won’t describe, but will tell you that I return to it regularly, and am moved every time. If you find that more frustrating than intriguing, I’ll tell you that at the beginning of We Others, Millhauser’s 2011 collection of new and selected stories (also considered for this list, naturally), he writes: “What makes a story bad, or good, or better than good, can be explained and understood up to a point, but only up to a point. What’s seductive is mysterious and can never be known. I prefer to leave it at that.”

So I’ll leave it at this: these stories are better than good. –Emily Temple, Senior Editor

Helen Oyeyemi, What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours
2016

Helen Oyeyemi’s writing is woven with imagination, complexity, and such fierce intelligence that I have always been thoroughly amused and fascinated with anything she writes. In her collection What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours, Oyeyemi showcases this talent by planting keys, hidden rooms, puppets, ghosts, magical libraries, and secret gardens which the reader follows, as if they were breadcrumbs, hoping they will lead to answers. Admirably, equal to Oyeyemi’s appetite for adventure is her commitment to attaining truth. In that way, she reminds me of storytellers like Angela Carter, Ursula Le Guin, and Jorge Luis Borges.

Embracing a voice uniquely her own, however, Oyeyemi toys with the reader with titles like “if a book is locked there’s probably a good reason for that don’t you think.” Then, she infuses that wryness with piercing emotion, as in the story “is your blood as red as this,” in which the narrator, uninhibited, observes a character at a party, “you had a string of fairy lights wrapped around your neck. I sort of understood how that would be comforting.” The narrator continues, “Sometimes I dream I’m falling, and it’s not so much frightening as it is tedious, just falling and falling until I’m sick of it, but then a noose stops me short and I think, well, at least I’m not falling anymore.” A signature of Oyeyemi’s creative talent is that she can begin a story from somewhere, drag the reader by the hand and then suddenly drop them into unknown territory.

What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours deserves a place on this list because each narrative is immersive, a complete universe onto itself. Each story flaunts a whole cast of diverse characters imitating life in the many comings-and-goings of people; it delves into historical moments, like the Spanish saint’s day, The Day of the Book and the Rose, just to tell the obscure story of some character affected by this moment in time. Though curiosity may launch an Oyeyemi story, the ultimate joy of it is that it’s all about connection, forged under unexpected circumstances by moments of pure synchronicity. –Eleni Theodoropoulos, Editorial Fellow

Samantha Hunt, The Dark Dark
2017

This is Samantha Hunt’s first short-story collection, though her fourth book. She’s an eccentric, imaginative creator and a candid storyteller, often presenting slightly fantastical, vaguely supernatural scenarios frankly and unblinkingly. She can make the most far-flung ideas seem very real. The Dark Dark dials this tendency back down. The most common site of magic in these stories is actually the female body, which, she points out, always transforms itself and has the power to make life and to kill parts of itself and can turn women into endless new versions of themselves. The Dark Dark is about women, mostly, and about fear, loneliness, being a parent, losing a parent, becoming someone else, realizing you’re losing yourself. Despite the lack of literal magic, these stories are still shivery, still eerie, and still, when they need to be, dreamy. –Olivia Rutigliano, CrimeReads Editorial Fellow

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Honorable Mentions

A selection of other books that we seriously considered for both lists—just to be extra about it (and because decisions are hard).

Danielle Evans, Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self (2010) · Brad Watson, Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives (2010) · Patricia Engel, Vida (2010) · Don DeLillo, The Angel Esmeralda (2011) · Charles Baxter, Gryphon (2011) · Colm Toíbín, The Empty Family (2011) · Can Xue, tr. Karen Gernant, Vertical Motion (2011) · Jamie Quatro, I Want to Show You More (2013) · Aimee Bender, The Color Master (2013) · Susan Steinberg, Spectacle (2013) · Rebecca Lee, Bobcat (2013) · Ramona Ausubel, A Guide to Being Born (2013) · Laura van den Berg, The Isle of Youth (2013) · Rivka Galchen, American Innovations (2014) · Naja Marie Aidt, tr. Denise Newman, Baboon (2014) · Lydia Davis, Can’t and Won’t (2014) · Stuart Dybek, Paper Lantern (2014) · Donald Antrim, The Emerald Light in the Air (2014) · Joy Williams, The Visiting Privilege (2015) · Thomas Pierce, Hall of Small Mammals (2015) · Jen George, The Babysitter at Rest (2016) · Rion Amilcar Scott, The Insurrections (2016) · Alexandra Kleeman, Intimations (2016) · James McBride, Five-Carat Soul (2017) · Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Refugees (2017) · Denis Johnson, The Largesse of the Sea Maiden (2018) · Jamel Brinkley, A Lucky Man (2018) · Lauren Groff, Florida (2018) · Xuan Juliana Wang, Home Remedies (2019) · Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Friday Black (2018) · Karen Russell, Orange World (2019), Edwidge Danticat, Everything Inside (2019).

Friends, it’s true: the end of the decade approaches. It’s been a difficult, anxiety-provoking, morally compromised decade, but at least it’s been populated by some fine literature. We’ll take our silver linings where we can.

So, as is our hallowed duty as a literary and culture website—though with full awareness of the potentially fruitless and endlessly contestable nature of the task—in the coming weeks, we’ll be taking a look at the best and most important (these being not always the same) books of the decade that was. We will do this, of course, by means of a variety of lists, and it’s only appropriate to begin our journey with the best debut novels published in English between 2010 and 2019.

The following books were chosen after much debate (and several rounds of voting) by the Literary Hub staff. Tears were spilled, feelings were hurt, books were re-read. And as you’ll shortly see, we had a hard time choosing just ten—so we’ve also included a list of dissenting opinions, and an even longer list of also-rans. Feel free to add any favorites we’ve missed in the comments below.

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The Top Ten

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 novel, Inland) 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.

In addition to winning the Orange Prize, the novel was a National Book Award finalist and a New York Times bestseller; it also secured Obreht’s (obviously well-deserved) spot on the New Yorker’s 20 under 40 list.  –Emily Temple, Senior Editor

Justin Torres, We the Animals
(2011)

Every time I write about Torres’s exquisite, intense debut, I find I have to quote the opening, which goes like this:

We wanted more. We knocked the butt ends of our forks against the table, tapped our spoons against our empty bowls; we were hungry. We wanted more volume, more riots. We turned up the knob on the TV until our ears ached with the shouts of angry men. We wanted more music on the radio; we wanted beats; we wanted rock. We wanted muscles on our skinny arms. We had bird bones, hollow and light, and we wanted more density, more weight. We were six snatching hands, six stomping feet; we were brothers, boys, three little kings locked in a feud for more.

It goes on like that. This is a slim novel—my copy has only 125 pages—which makes its intensity all the more impressive; not a word or moment wasted. When I say that it is poetic, I mean it in the most literal of ways: it relies on meter, on sound, on anaphora. You feel it as much as you understand it, like a chant. The story moves slowly from the plurality of childhood—the “we” of the opening—to the individuality of young adulthood, in this case, one boy realizing his in unlike his brothers in a fundamental way.

Improbably, the novel was made into a gorgeous film last year, which you should all find a way to see.  –Emily Temple, Senior Editor

NoViolet Bulawayo, We Need New Names
(2013)

The kids in NoViolet Bulawayo’s debut are the vibrant hearts of a book that at times reads like a fable. This is partly because of the names the title alludes to, those missing and misaligned and poorly understood. A young girl called Darling and her friends—with nicknames like Bastard and Godknows—wander through the surroundings of a Zimbabwean shantytown that the children call Paradise (“a place we will soon be leaving”). Bulawayo creates one of the indelible contemporary portraits of a child’s friend group, characterized by distillations of playfulness, contempt, solidarity—unadulterated emotions in the young, and yet, for Darling and company, unable to be identified or named in the adult world. This is a world that, Bulawayo suggests, misleads with false assurances: an abortion is best performed with a clothes hanger, only grandfathers can be president, the pastor at church is healing that demon-possessed woman by placing his hands on her and nothing more. The world beyond child’s play produces patronizing NGO workers, stupid tourists, and bulldozers that raze towns. Darling eventually leaves home to live with her aunt in “Destroyed, Michigan” (one of the granular delights of the novel is Bulawayo’s dexterous, often funny wordplay and onomatopoeic flair). Detroit, like Paradise, is a place of myth (“With the cold and dreariness, this place doesn’t look like my America, doesn’t even look real”), and Bulawayo is interested in how we get to places like these and why we leave. Throughout Darling’s acclimation period to life in America, memories of her childhood resurface and relationships with her old friends turn cold. Ultimately we understand that Paradise won’t be regained. We Need New Names brought us Bulawayo’s remarkably assured voice (the same year that another great sub-Saharan Africa-to-America immigrant epic, Americanah, was published). Bulawayo took the temperature, so to speak, on the eve of the Mediterranean migrant crisis, with an intimate story of a young woman always looking for home.  –Aaron Robertson, Assistant Editor

Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer
(2015)

“I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces.” From the very first line of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s brilliant debut, I could tell this book was going to make literary history. When The Sympathizer won both the Pulitzer Prize and the Edgar Award, I was glad to see the world agreed. The Sympathizer’s premise sets up its many complicated acts—a child born to a young Vietnamese mother and a dissolute French Catholic priest must flee to South Vietnam for the sins of his parentage; there, he is recruited as a secret agent to spy on his countrymen, and soon enough, turns double agent by the North to spy on his powerful patrons in the South, his position complicated by his refugee flight to California, where he falls in love with the rebellious daughter of a former general who once employed him.

Oh, sympathizer, how shall I count the ways in which I love thee? The Sympathizer‘s brilliance is manyfold: the perspective of a double agent makes us privy to secrets and allows us entrance to rationalizations on all sides of the Vietnam conflict; the nameless spy’s peregrinations follow an Odyssean route to exile and then home, culminating in a Lord of the Rings-esque return to the shire only to find it controlled by petty dictators; a parody of Apocalypse Now encapsulates everything that is wrong with both Hollywood and the American interpretation of authenticity. There are many reasons to sing the praise of this singular text. While frequently earning comparison to Graham Green and John le Carre, The Sympathizer is also a meditation on identity, exile, culture, history, and so much more. I can’t recommend this book enough.  –Molly Odintz, CrimeReads Associate Editor

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 (Greenwell is a poet) 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.

I know it’s a book blurbing cliché to use this term but I really can’t help it here: this novel is frankly luminous. I actually mean that my experience reading it was like holding something glowing in my hands. I may be mocked in the Literary Hub office for this flowery description. Sorry—not sorry. Writing in The Guardian, Andrew Solomon called it “the best first novel I’ve read in a generation” I have to say I agree.  –Emily Temple, Senior Editor

Nicole Dennis-Benn, Here Comes the Sun
(2016)

There’s no shortage of brilliant, hilarious, incisive Jamaican novels—to say nothing of the Caribbean as a whole. Caribbean literature is sometimes reduced by American critics and book blurbs to Jamaica—and this reflects, too, the way that many Americans tell me they’ve never heard of my island, Dominica, and if they know anywhere at all, it is probably Jamaica. (Ironically, it’s not Puerto Rico, which actually is an American territory.) Still, our literature would be very different without Jamaican fiction and poetry, and the Jamaican novel, in particular, like the Trinidadian novel, is critical to understanding our region’s artistic, social, and political conditions. Writing a memorable, meaningful novel is one thing; writing a memorable, meaningful debut is another, and Nicole Dennis-Benn managed to do both with her debut, Here Comes the Sun. Her novel is wide-ranging, telling a tale that examines colorism, homophobia, social mobility, women’s bodies, and the debilitating overreach of tourism, all while delivering a gripping story in softly luminous prose. I was excited to read it when I heard that it was coming out, particularly as Dennis-Benn has written movingly about many of these themes before in her essays, and her novel has stuck with me since then as a beautiful addition to the Jamaican canon of literature. In some ways, it’s conventional, particularly when set against the stylistic and representational subversiveness of Marlon James’ A Brief History of Seven Killings, published two years earlier, but Dennis-Benn’s novel is subversive in its own ways, joining a long history of talking about queerness in the Caribbean and its diaspora that includes Bernadine Evaristo’s Mr. Loverman, novels by Shani Mootoo, and more, and I especially appreciated that we have queer women here experiencing love and loss. And the setting of a Jamaica being overtaken by tourism is important; it echoes the warnings and plaints of Derek Walcott, Kamau Brathwaite, and the many writers who have reflected on the danger of the commercialization of the islands at the expense of their inhabitants. Here Comes the Sun is a debut that stuck with me, and will be with me, I suspect, for a long time.  –Gabrielle Bellot, Staff Writer

George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo
(2017)

It is strange to think of George Saunders as a debut novelist, but after four story collections—including contemporary classics like Pastoralia and Tenth of December—2017’s Lincoln in the Bardo represented a true departure. Saunders has always been one of our funniest writers, which engenders in some critics a suspicion that he is unserious, that he is but the master of a simple trick, repeated again and again with great skill (we should all be so talented). These critics, of course, are wrong. Saunders is a morally serious writer who wields humor like a razor blade, bleeding the cut as needed, getting the reader from one round to the next, story after relentless story. Death, love, loneliness, joy, grief—these are the concerns of great art, and they are the concerns of George Saunders.

Lincoln in the Bardo was published three weeks after the inauguration of Donald Trump; it was a particularly grim February for a large swathe of Americans, as November’s shock settled into numbness, each day’s news somehow darker, more absurd, than the last. It was in this context I encountered the sly grace of Saunders novel, a prismatic tale of a father’s near-debilitating grief—the father in question, of course, is Abraham Lincoln, who lost his son Willie in the middle of the Civil War, and was seen to visit the boy’s grave at Georgetown’s Oak Hill Cemetery. It is there we enter the Bardo, that grayed-out middle space of Tibetan Buddhism in which the dead await rebirth, biding time till the next life beckons; if they’re lucky, they’ll find themselves in a George Saunders novel, mustered into a loose chorus of voices, coarse and tender, bawdy and elegiac, puzzling over the curious fixations of the living as they figure out what it means to be dead.  –Jonny Diamond, Editor in Chief

Sally Rooney, Conversations With Friends
(2017)

There is very little that can be said about Sally Rooney that hasn’t been written already. Her second novel, Normal People, was published this past April to a deluge of reviews, think pieces, and pontifications on the role of Rooney as *the* millennial novelist. And her debut novel, Conversation with Friends, which came out in 2017, has been tallied by the Lit Hub staff as one of the best debuts of the decade. The novel follows twenty-one-year-old Trinity College student Frances and her best friend Bobbi, who she dated in high school and now remains her other, more charismatic and outgoing half. They do spoken-word poetry together, which Francis writes and Bobbi performs. At one such performance they meet Melissa, a writer in her thirties who invites the girls back to her home, ostensibly for a magazine profile. At dinners, parties, and book launches, the girls try to impress and decode Melissa. They also meet her husband Nick, a handsome actor, who eventually has an affair with Frances. The conversations between the four of them make up the backbone of the novel—they occur in Frances’s kitchen over endless cups of coffee, but also in text messages, emails, and instant messages. They are hyper-articulate, self-possessed, and intellectually curious, but emotionally confused, exploring what it means to be an independent person with ideas and ideals. As Frances navigates her splintering with Bobbi and her connection with Nick, we follow her development into the adult she will become. It is a novel with an exceptional amount of heart, and at its core a story about friendship and love couched in psycho-political “conversations” about contemporary life.  –Emily Firetog, Deputy Editor

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.

Or as Tóibín described it: “an ambitious meditation on identity and its broken alternatives, on myth filtered through the lens of time and poverty and urban life, on tradition all the more pressing because of its fragility, it is as if he seeks to reconfigure Oakland as a locus of desire and dreams, to remake the city in the likeness of his large and fascinating set of characters … the novel, then, is their picaresque journey, allowing for moments of pure soaring beauty to hit against the most mundane, for a sense of timelessness to be placed right beside a cleareyed version of the here and now, for a sense of vast dispossession to live beside day-to-day misery and poverty. Nothing in Orange’s world is simple, least of all his characters and his sense of the relationship between history and the present. Instead, a great deal is subtle and uncertain in this original and complex novel.”  –Emily Temple, Senior Editor

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.  –Katie Yee, Book Marks Assistant Editor

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Dissenting Opinions

The following books were just barely nudged out of the top ten, but we (or at least one of us) couldn’t let them pass without comment.

N. K. Jemisin, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms
(2010)

There is not one debut American novelist in the past decade who has had such a thrilling, historic, and consistent rise to critical and commercial success as N. K. Jemisin, the speculative fiction writer who always seems to be opening new doors and running through them. “It doesn’t make any sense to write a monochromatic or monocultural story, unless you’re doing something extremely small,” Jemisin told The Guardian in 2015. In such historically conservative genres like fantasy and science fiction, Jemisin has managed to win the Hugo Award for Best Novel three years in a row (2016-18), a Nebula, and a couple of Locus Awards to boot. Since her 2010 novel debut, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, Jemisin has amassed a dizzying number of Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy Award nominations. She has done for American speculative fiction what Morrison did for the American postmodern novel. In The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, Yeine Darr, a barbarian outcast (and daughter of an illicit mixed-race marriage) from the large ruling family of the city of Sky, is unexpectedly named as one of three heirs to the throne, which sends her unwillingly into a bloody civil war with two powerful cousins. We learn that Sky is essentially a city inhabited by one big, messed-up, hierarchical family, the Arameri. “Full Bloods” like Yeine intersect with a mysterious band of enslaved gods—many of whom have their own plans for Yeine—and the result is a sprawling book of political intrigue. If The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones met up and discussed the complicated dynamics of a racial caste system, they probably still wouldn’t come up with something as refreshingly inventive as the world that would become the foundation of Jemisin’s much-lauded Inheritance Trilogy.  –Aaron Robertson, Assistant Editor

Karen Russell, Swamplandia!
(2011)

I will drop everything/pass through fire/walk 5,000 miles to read a Karen Russell short story. From her peerless imagination spring sinister little wonders with disquieting, emotionally resonant cores—eerie, unmoored worlds, tinted by the supernatural and shot through with menace, humor, and grace. Whether following a down-on-his-luck tornado farmer, a pair of lonely vampires though the centuries, or a dreamy gondolier in a flooded Florida, the way her tales unfold is always surprising, always artful, always sneakily devastating. The same can, has, and by god should be said of Russell’s sole novel, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize back in 2012 (the year the board infamously failed to select a winner despite the fact that both Swamplandia! and Denis Johnson’s magnificent Train Dreams were in the running). Set on an island off the southwest coast of Russell’s native Florida, it’s the story of the Bigtrees, an eccentric family of alligator wrestlers who live on the titular Swamplandia!, a ramshackle alligator-wrestling theme park. Narrated by young Ava Bigtree as she processes the death of her mother and gamely tries to make sense of her bizarre, unstable, often fantastical world—which includes a sister who is in love with a ghost; a jaded brother who has absconded to a competing, hell-themed theme park; and a mysterious, feather-coated vagabond known as the Bird Man—the novel is a gorgeously lush swirl of humor, horror, and heartbreak with some of the most haunted and enchanting writing you are ever likely to read.  –Dan Sheehan, Book Marks Editor

Ben Lerner, Leaving the Atocha Station
(2011)

“Poetic,” as a description, is rarely intended to connote humor. This is a shame, because in my experience, poets write some of the most subtly hilarious novels around. Take Leaving the Atocha Station, a novel by and about a poet. The narrator and protagonist, Adam, is on a fellowship year in Madrid, trying and mostly failing to write a long poem about the Spanish Civil War. Instead, he reads and goes to parties and gets into romantic entanglements (some tanglier than others).

When I read this book, I was in the midst of my own period of trying and failing to write poetry around a lot of people who could speak of nothing but John Ashbery, and was perhaps particularly receptive to its charms. I can understand why a novel by and about a privileged, anxious, aimless, (at times comically) dishonest white dude might feel slightly less urgent now than when it came out, but I maintain that this is one hell of a debut.

In Leaving the Atocha Station, Lerner invites the reader to laugh with his protagonist as well as with him. The novel feels propulsive rather than meandering, as if the reader is the one whose fellowship is quickly running short. I suspect the political world of the novel (Adam is in Madrid during the train bombings of 2004, and feels at a distance from his Spanish friends’ high emotion around the terror) may feel dated now, but I still recommend reading Lerner’s debut for the joy of pitch-perfect poet comedy if nothing else.  –Jessie Gaynor, Social Media Editor

Kevin Barry, City of Bohane
(2012)

Irish author Kevin Barry is a dark wizard of language and City of Bohane is an unholy conjuring of the highest and most hypnotic order. A dystopian gangland tale set in 2053 in an anarchic west of Ireland town, it’s a story of tribal feuds and ancient grudges, power struggles and doomed loves, prodigal sons and lions in winter, all woven together with such unhinged linguistic flair that reading it you feel as if the book itself might burst its banks and flood the room with its salty, growling dialect. No one in the novel utilizes anything even resembling modern technology, all memory of which seems to have disappeared into the etheric time before an unspecified fall. In lieu of hi-tech world-building, though, Barry gleefully expounds on the steampunk street fashion, the wheezing locomotives, the weaponry and opiates and living quarters of his rogue’s gallery of ne’er-do-wells who hiss their hybrid colloquialisms though the alleys of Bohane’s Smoketown quarter. There’s Logan Hartnett, the lanky, ice-veined gang leader whose faction controls the city; Gant Broderick, the gargantuan, melancholic former Smoketown boss, returned to Bohane after twenty-five years in exile and still pining for the woman he lost to Logan; Jenni Ching, the fiercely intelligent young bodyguard with designs on the top job whose Chinese immigrant mother drowned herself in the Bohane river; and a dozen other incorrigible grotesques, each with their own particular arsenal of axes to grind. If you like a tidy, quiet, emotionally nuanced, domesticable debut, this feral creature will horrify and repel you; but if you’re on the hunt for a gloriously untamed beast of a novel, one which revels in its slobbering excesses and dazzles with its thousand phosphorescent tendrils, Barry’s sentient fallen kingdom will blow your mind.  –Dan Sheehan, Book Marks Editor

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.  –Dwyer Murphy, CrimeReads Managing Editor

Han Kang, tr. Deborah Smith, The Vegetarian
(2016)

The Vegetarian should, based on its length, be a simple tale. Narrated by the husband of the titular vegetarian, Han Kang’s tale begins with a description of a dutiful wife, unusual only in her refusal to wear a bra, whose sudden decision to stop eating meat sends her partner and family into a spiral of confusion, where forcible consumption of meat quickly becomes a metaphor for violation. The vegetarian begins a slow transformation into vegetable itself—first, she stops eating meat; gradually, she stops eating everything. Her withdrawal from culinary delights is mirrored by her withdrawal from the world. She basks in sunlight, is painted all over with flowers by her sister’s husband (a not-so-successful artist), and for all intents and purposes, attempts to become a plant. Is she onto something, or is she out of her mind? Is she denying the world, or is she fully embracing it? Han Kang leaves the answers to these questions deliberately vague, and the sign of a great work is its ability to be read by many people and interpreted differently by each one.

While many of my coworkers at the bookstore I used to work at appreciated this one from the get-go, it took me several years to prepare myself to read Han Kang’s The Vegetarian—I knew it was a book that should be as transformative to the reader as vegetarianism is to its main character. When I did finally read it, upon the recommendation of a friend (hi, Miriam!), I was surprised by its complexity, and by how much I sympathized with the vegetarian’s sister, tasked with keeping the family going, and in her own way, as addicted to aesthetic abasement as her sister. However you interpret this book, it’s haunting ending will linger longer after you read the last page.  –Molly Odintz, CrimeReads Associate Editor

Samanta Schweblin, tr. Megan McDowell,
Fever Dream
(2017)

In Spanish, the title of the book is “Distancia de rescate” (“rescue distance”)—a phrase whose weight one only grasps after reading the book. It refers to the bond‚ the “rope” that tethers mother and daughter. Meanwhile the meaning of the English title, Fever Dream, becomes obvious to anyone even skimming the book, who will quickly realize that the entire novel is told in a feverish dialogue between two voices equally desperate for answers about the poison that has plagued their village. One belongs to a boy named David, who speaks steadily if aggressively, while the other belongs to Amanda, who has a daughter named Nina, who seems disoriented and frightened. In Fever Dream tension is not folded gently into the plot—it kicks off the story and rides all the way to the end. Samanta Schweblin experiments masterfully with genre, infusing horror with the impressionist and the surreal, writing a slim novel best consumed in one sitting, which reads more like a play and therefore is an all-consuming experience.

It is engrossing. Detail is dramatized through dialogue, and Schweblin knows just what to pick and what to leave out so that characters and readers alike are obsessed with the story about the poison. Everyone is at the mercy of someone: David is at the mercy of Amanda, Amanda at the mercy of David, and the reader at the mercy of both of them. The only way to find out the truth in Fever Dream is by trusting someone else’s narrative. Even in being swept away in the horrific progression of the novel, and simultaneously, the disease, the reader identifies with Amanda, a mother who realizes she cannot protect her child. In just under 200 pages, Schweblin has delivered a poignant, tragic tale of a fear come true.  –Eleni Theodoropoulos, Editorial Fellow

Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
(2019)

Last fall, Ocean Vuong answered a fan on Instagram who asked if he had any advice for teenage poets by recommending, among other things, to “try and read everything. … ask, what is it doing? To me? Why is it doing this? A work of literature is not a code to be solved or a world to be pillage to ‘get the take away,’ it is weather. let yourself be in it fully, then decide if it’s a storm you can thrive in.”

Those words stayed with me while reading On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Vuong’s fiction debut, which followed his critically acclaimed 2016 poetry collection Night Sky With Exit Wounds. Told in the form of a letter from the protagonist, Little Dog, to his mother, who cannot read, the book is an act of witness to the experience of life as a queer Vietnamese refugee growing up in the U.S. and was hailed from all corners of the literary world this year. Describing it that way, though, does not do justice to the way this book shimmers. Its timeline flows between intergenerational history, memory, and the present, including a summer when Little Dog, working on a farm outside Hartford, begins a relationship with another boy, which forms one center of gravity for the novel’s exploration of masculinity and violence in America. Vuong has said in interviews that the book uses the technique of kishōtenketsu, a narrative structure that relies on proximity, not conflict, to build tension and advance the story. Within that structure, this book asks for a kind of quiet, lasting attention that feels like a deep breath; it’s a necessary counter-current to the increasingly relentless pace of life over the last decade. In the context of a brutal colonial history, the story’s tenderness and clear-eyed compassion assert complexity in a country that asks us, more and more, to categorize everything with binary-driven superlatives: good or bad, masculine or feminine, patriotic or unpatriotic. This story is one of the most important of the last decade, and we need to carry its lessons into the next.  –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Fleishman is in Trouble
(2019)

Fleishman is in Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner tells the story of a beleaguered, recently-divorced doctor whose dating-app-enabled deliverance is halted when his ex-wife drops off their kids with him and disappears to a meditative retreat. Rather obvious, early on, is that he (Toby Fleishman) embodies concerns, neuroses, and entitlements we have read about plenty of times before and don’t need to read about again. Keeping us going is the fact that Fleishman’s third-person-seeming story is tinged with playfulness, inflected with just enough wryness and sympathy that we understand him not to be written as a caricature but to be existing as one. The narrator cares about him, but doesn’t let his story veer from the comic into the tragicomic. Actually, the narrator is the best part about Fleishman. At just the right moment, the narrator is fully revealed not to be a third-person entity, but a first-person commentator. She is a woman. She is a writer. Her name is Libby. And she begins to take control of the story, after wondering why she (a former feature writer for a men’s magazine) has to keep making boring men sound interesting. She begins, then, to tell the story of Toby’s whole marriage, including a true account of his wife Rachel, one which incorporates a meaningful understanding of women’s experiences and therefore changes the chemistry of the book. It’s a jubilant turn of events. With its explicit takedown of the long-standing genre which celebrates boring or gross men, Fleishman is in Trouble might seem perfect to some, and a little too on-the-nose, for others. But it reworks a longstanding patriarchal framework that desperately needs to be taken apart so deftly. The novel is nothing if not a straight-shooter, and is so satisfying when it hits its target.  –Olivia Rutigliano, CrimeReads Editorial Fellow

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Honorable Mentions

A selection of other books that we seriously considered for both lists—just to be extra about it (and because decisions are hard).

Teju Cole, Open City (2011) · Amelia Gray, Threats (2012) · Robin Sloan, Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore (2012) · Eimear McBride, A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing (2014) · Catherine Lacey, Nobody is Ever Missing (2014) · Celeste Ng, Everything I Never Told You (2014) · Angela Flournoy, The Turner House (2015) · Ottessa Moshfegh, Eileen (2015) · Alexandra Kleeman, You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine (2015) · Claire-Louise Bennett, Pond (2016) · Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing (2016); Martin Seay, The Mirror Thief (2016) · Brit Bennett, The Mothers (2016) · Daniel Galera, tr. Alison Entrekin, Blood-Drenched Beard (2016) · Omar El Akkad, American War (2017) · Josephine Rowe, A Loving, Faithful Animal (2017) · Julie Buntin, Marlena (2017) · R. O. Kwon, The Incendiaries (2018) · Daisy Johnson, Everything Under (2018) · Akwaeke Emezi, Freshwater (2018) · Weike Wang, Chemistry (2018) · Andrew Martin, Early Work (2018) · Adam Ehrich Sachs, The Organs of Sense (2019) · Sophie Mackintosh, The Water Cure (2019) · Lauren Wilkinson, American Spy (2019) · Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Water Dancer (2019) · Chia-Chia Lin, The Unpassing (2019)

As you may have noticed, over the past few weeks, we’re been looking back at the best books from the decade, from novels to poetry to nonfiction. As a sort of coda to that project, I’ve also polled the staff about their favorite literary adaptations of the decade, on both the big and small screens. Earlier this week, we published our list of the best television adaptations of the decade, and now, as promised, I present our list of the decade’s best films adapted from books.

Take note that we attempted to judge the films in question on their own independent merits; while many of us have read the books these shows are based on, we didn’t base our decisions on fidelity to, or creativity of departure from, the original text. We just wanted to pick the best movies.

As with the previous lists, the top ten big screen adaptations were chosen after a lengthy debate among the Literary Hub staff. It got testy, but in the end, we agreed—though many of us had to include our dissenting opinions at the end of the list. If we’ve missed your favorite, tell us why we’re wrong in the comments.

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The Top Ten

Winter’s Bone (2010)
Based on: Winter’s Bone by Daniel Woodrell (2006)

Debra Granik’s Winter’s Bone (which she also co-wrote with producer Rosellini) is a beautiful, gritty, horrifying masterpiece. Based on the novel by Daniel Woodrell and released in 2010, it is the story of a teenage girl named Ree (Jennifer Lawrence, before her rise to fame and giving the best performance of her career) who lives in the Ozark Mountains with her mother and younger siblings. She serves as the primary caretaker for her whole family—her drug-dealing father has disappeared, and her mother suffers from mental illness. When her family is threatened with eviction, she decides to track down her father. But the neighbors are resistant to her attempts to pry into her father’s life—and she is emphatically discourages by her uncle, a conflicted meth addict named Teardrop (John Hawkes) from searching any further. It is a brutal, cutting film—its pacing is incredibly suspenseful and the acting (often stony), is pitch-perfect. It is a movie of silence, of snow—muted sounds and colors. Until it isn’t, and it transforms into a shocking, scarring, and vibrant spectacle of horror. Debra Granik should direct every movie.

–Olivia Rutigliano, CrimeReads Editorial Fellow

The Social Network (2010)
Based on: The Accidental Billionaires by Ben Mezrich (2009)

It’s not going to surprise anyone that David Fincher is has a prominent place on a list like this. His 2014 adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl claims one of the spots in the top 10. His 2011 The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo very easily could have made it, too—it was arguably one of the most anticipated adaptations in several decades, and despite a lukewarm critical reception at the time has been aging pretty well into something closer to wide acclaim. Mindhunter gets a nod in the TV department. But the real crowning achievement of Fincher’s impressive decade is the one with no killers, no gore, and no brooding violence at all, really, except the violence done to the American social fabric thanks to the rise of a new class of reckless tech billionaires. Somehow, with its dark campus landscapes, Trent Reznor score, and unabashed displays of ambition, The Social Network turns out to be one of Fincher’s most insidious, disturbing works. The adaptation, from Ben Mezrich’s 2009 book, The Accidental Billionaires, was done by none other than Aaron Sorkin, and like Mezrich’s book, the screenplay zeroes in on the lawsuits filed by the various founders and early developers of Facebook. Depositions have never been captured so perfectly on film, with Jesse Eisenberg as the seething anti-hero, Zuckerberg, facing off against rivals, enemies, and himself. Looking back almost ten years later, it’s incredible just how prescient The Social Network was about the principles and players behind social media. Fincher and Sorkin seemed to see clearly the insecurities and threats behind this strange force.

–Dwyer Murphy, CrimeReads Managing Editor

True Grit (2010)
Based on: True Grit by Charles Portis (1968)

True Grit, directed by Joel and Ethan Coen in 2010, is the second adaptation of Charles Portis’s 1968 novel of the same name. The first one, which was made in 1969 and starred John Wayne (in the November of his career), was a chipper, watered-down version of the original story, a vehicle for Wayne to pastiche his whole career as a crochety, no-nonsense cowboy. Wayne won an Oscar (kind of as a tribute) for his role as the crapulent, cantankerous, eye-patch-wearing U.S. Marshall Rooster Cogburn, forever associating himself and his legend with the film. The Coen Brothers’ retelling of the story fully (productively) ignores that the first True Grit even happened, drawing its script from Portis’s grim novel, to focus more on the protagonist that the first film dismissed: Mattie Ross, a formidable fourteen-year-old girl who arrives in a small town to retrieve the body of her murdered father. Played to poker-faced perfection by Hailee Steinfeld (and Elizabeth Marvel, later on), Mattie hires Rooster (Jeff Bridges, who has in the last two decades found his calling playing sloppy, insouciant older men) to hunt down and take into custody Tom Chaney (Josh Brolin), her father’s murderer. Also along for the ride is a patronizing Texas Ranger named LeBoeuf (Matt Damon, who pronounces it “luh beef”). While the film is structured around the hunt for the killer, it is more about the relationships between the three characters on the journey—or, really, the lack of relationships between them. The film eschews the traditional “it’s the journey, not the destination” cliché of so many expedition-focused stories—the yearning for a connection between them is there, but they are not able to bring it to fruition.

But this is a Western, which means that the relationships that form are not limited to humans. Mattie’s most loving connection will be to Little Blackie, the shiny horse she picks out for herself to ride on the trip. He will (spoiler) ultimately give up his life to save hers, carrying her to medical care after an accident. Horses in True Grit, seem to play a particularly large role in the film’s construction of a moral hierarchy and are represented as providing integrity to an otherwise cold and chaotic world. As emblematized most obviously by the strutting, gauche Rooster, the wild west of True Grit turns everything and everyone into animals. As Mattie (her family’s breadwinner, now) tries to avenge her father, she is truly on the hunt for humanity and support—someone who can help her carry her family through this hard time. But humans, with their nominal superiority of morality and thought, will almost always fail her. And the film beautifully, sadly, darkly, watches humanity leave her with nothing—like the horses who love her back, she too must live as a beast of burden. –Olivia Rutigliano, CrimeReads Editorial Fellow

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011)
Based on: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy by John le Carré (1974)

Swedish purveyor of moody, broody atmospherics Tomas Alfredson (Let the Right One In) conjures the beige-hued, ashen-faced world of jaded British spycraft so impeccably in his adaptation of John Le Carré’s seminal 1974 novel that you can almost smell the stale cigarette smoke and flop sweat, feel the scratchy suit fabric and stained shag carpeting. Gary Oldman plays the latest incarnation of Le Carré’s beleaguered-but-deceptively-cunning career intelligence officer George Smiley, here brought out of retirement and tasked with rooting out a Soviet mole in the upper echelons of the secret service. Alongside him is a rogue’s gallery of stony-faced British acting royalty: Colin Firth, Mark Strong, Benedict Cumberbatch, John Hurt, and Tom Hardy, to name but a few. These are men whose emotional lives have been slowly eroded by the grim rituals and moral compromises of service. The whole thing is just so damn bleak, but in a transfixing kind of way. I know that’s a strange argument to make for exalting a film to Best of the Decade status, but Alfredson’s remake is such a fully realized vision that every time I sit down to watch TTSS (usually in the dead of night) I am instantly transported, mesmerized. It’s paradoxical, but there’s something both deeply soothing and deeply unnerving about following Oldman’s stoic, melancholy Smiley through the ruins of this fallen kingdom—a post-Kim Philby landscape of stagnating enmities and vanished idealism.

–Dan Sheehan, Book Marks Editor

The Hunger Games (2012)
Based on: The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins (2008)

With all due respect to everyone who got really mad at Martin Scorcese for saying superhero movies weren’t art, I don’t think that The Hunger Games is great art—but I do think it’s a great adaptation. Not only does it capture the spirit of the book in all its distinctly YA-flavored but still genuinely frightening glory, but it’s also highly entertaining. This is the kind of movie that I’ll watch any time I see it on a screen—much like a character in The Hunger Games unable to look away from the Hunger Games. For one thing, the casting is impeccable: Stanley Tucci at his campy best as Caesar Flickerman! Woody Harrelson as loveable grump Haymitch Abernathy! Wes Bentley! Remember him from American Beauty? He became a director after all! The director of the Hunger Games! This movie’s montage game is also really strong. I think probably what happened was that the directors gave one overarching note on the screenplay, and that note was “Can this be a montage?” And the answer was often yes! As is the answer to “Should I watch The Hunger Games?” Jennifer Lawrence is also in it.

–Jessie Gaynor, Social Media Editor

Gone Girl (2014)
Based on: Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn (2012)

Although Gone Girl needs no introduction, here I go anyway. Gone Girl, the movie, was adapted from Gone Girl, the book, first published in 2012 by Gillian Flynn to immediately become a bestseller. Flynn’s Gone Girl went on to sell two million copies in its first year. The psychological thriller, directed by David Fincher—director of every film you’ve heard of, including The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Seven, Fight Club, Zodiac, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo—starred Rosamund Pike, Ben Affleck, Neil Patrick Harris, and Tyler Perry (among the producers is also Reese Witherspoon) with Gillian Flynn at the helm, writing the screenplay, and was released to wide critical acclaim in 2014, grossing to $369 million. Meanwhile, Rosamund Pike’s performance as Amy Dunne earned her nominations for an Academy Award, a BAFTA Award, a Golden Globe Award, and a Screen Actors Guild Award. With all the official praise out of the way, now I get to lapse into the story that became a phenomenon.

Gone Girl opens on the day of Amy Dunne’s disappearance, the same day that marks the beginning of the unravelling of her husband Nick Dunne, who is being accused of her murder. In due course, the narrative pulls out from the investigation into Nick Dunne’s culpability and Amy Dunne’s found diary entries, to switch over to Amy, who really, is alive and framing her husband for her murder to punish him for being a bad husband. He is no longer the man she married. The film opens the same way that it closes, with an intimate close up of Amy who is lying down, and staring back at the camera, in a look that should seem affectionate and flirty but instead is unnerving in how ruthless it is. The line Nick speaks over this scene—held too long for comfort—is, “What are you thinking? How are you feeling? What have we done to each other?” These words reverberate throughout the movie only to toll again at the finale.

The film is full of chilling contrasts that augment its tension and reinforce its suspense. Notable is Fincher’s excellent depiction of Gone Girl’s noir aesthetic: evident, for example, in the very dimly lit, empty (albeit in the morning) bar that Nick and Go own, where they play board games while drinking scotch and making light of crude jokes that make one squirm. They also complain about Amy. Excellent in the film is Detective Rhonda Boney: straight-faced, with a southern accent, and a wry humor that disarms New York-endorsed snob Nick just a few minutes into their meeting. A great scene: Nick has just called the police after seeing the living room furniture overturned and the front door ajar, and as procedure requires, Detective Boney evaluates the house; she steps into his bedroom and inquires, casually, about this profession. Nick says he’s a writer. He also owns a bar, named The Bar. “Oh, The Bar,” Boney says, “Love the name. Very meta.” Detective Boney is everything we’ve been taught the crime detective should be, only she is no fool, and she is not arrogant. That is more than we can say about her younger, male lieutenant who is blood-thirsty: he wants Dunne arrested, no matter the evidence. I could go on quite a while about the details of this movie, but the last and very important note I will end on is Amy’s chilling monologue that introduces her true persona to the audience.

Wearing sunglasses and driving with one arm out the window—the arm from which she drew blood to stage a convincing crime scene—Amy is cruising down a country road in the sunlight and we, at this point, know what she did. Here, she gives her iconic “cool girl speech,” the speech that makes a convincing case for the adage, “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.” The beauty of the speech is that it is dramatic, dripping with anger and, even though we know Amy is a psychopath, and we know we would never take things that far . . . . yet, there’s a flash of a second where we—the audience—nod along and say, yes. Yes. After praising it so highly, it would be cruel to leave you hanging, so here’s a piece of that monologue: “Men always say that as the defining compliment, don’t they? She’s a cool girl . . . . Hot and understanding. Cool girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind. I’m the Cool Girl. Men actually think this girl exists. Maybe they’re fooled because so many women are willing to pretend to be this girl.” It keeps going—the monologue, in the film, in the book, in your head. Thus is the effect, the phenomenon, of Gone Girl.

–Eleni Theodoropoulos, Editorial Fellow

Carol (2015)
Based on: The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith (1952)

In the dining room of a nondescript hotel by the side of the highway, Therese and Carol are sharing breakfast when a man can’t resist the chance to intrude. Sitting down at their table, he peppers them with questions, and they reply with brief, vague answers, as a parallel but much more interesting conversation plays out between their faces; the subtle raised eyebrow, the mocking nod, a world of communication in plain sight yet utterly hidden to the man in front of them. Based on Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt—a book that broke new ground when it was published in 1952 for portraying a lesbian relationship that does not end in despair or death—Carol communicates so much with this kind of unspoken connection and understanding, which made it possible for queer women to find and love each other in an era that would have preferred they remain invisible.

The love story between two women, which begins in the holiday season of 1952, is equally joyful and mindful of the many dangers posed by society’s resistance to queerness and queer sexuality. A.O. Scott wrote for The New York Times that viewers watch the two lovers “in public places, hidden in plain sight, cloaked in unspoken assumptions that are at once painful and protective.” Unlike so many other queer narratives, though, an awareness of that danger does not overshadow their intimacy; instead, it casts light on the tactics that queer women had to employ in order to survive, with incredible results.

–Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

The Handmaiden (2016)
Based on: Fingersmith by Sarah Waters (2002)

Park Chan-wook’s radical adaptation of Sarah Waters’s novel (by radical I mean he transmuted the action from Victorian-era Britain to 1930s colonial Korea, which was just as rigid and striated by class) was hands-down my favorite film of 2016, never mind my favorite adaptation of a novel. It starts slow, and quiet, which only makes what eventually unfurls—involving an elaborate, multi-faceted con, a torture chamber, a lesbian awakening, a library of porn, and an octopus—that much more striking. Every moment of this film, which is both a love story and a thriller, is gorgeous, and hypnotic, and sexy, and weird as hell. It is beyond good.

And though I know we’re not supposed to be considering the adaptation process, this one was remarkable: it improved upon a book that I already loved. As I wrote back in 2016, the film “excised everything I didn’t like about the book (an over-complicated, fairly slow third act, for one thing) and replaced it with what I really wished for—the collaboration between these two strange, powerful women. The experience of watching the film reminded me of reading contemporary retellings of fairy tales—it’s a deeply satisfying wish-fulfillment that takes something already good and vital and twists it until it’s unbearably delicious, until it’s exactly what you want. This felt like a feminist reimagining of an already feminist novel.”

–Emily Temple, Senior Editor

Arrival (2016)
Based on: “Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang (1998)

What if language was the key to knowledge, not only about your neighbor, but about strangers and yourself as well? By the end of Arrival, the Denis Villeneuve film based on Ted Chiang’s 1998 short story, “Story of Your Life,” the viewer understands this as the movie’s central question. Linguist Louise Banks (played by the ever-reliable Amy Adams) and physicist Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner) are called by the US Army to help study one of twelve extraterrestrial spacecrafts that have positioned themselves in scattered locations around the world. What Banks and Donnelly discover aboard the craft are two amorphous alien specimens, which they call “heptapods,” that communicate using a complicated system of logograms, or written characters that represent a word or phrase. This straightforward set-up lays the groundwork for a moving, and often anxiety-inducing, investigation of language, empathy, and miscommunication. Arrival’s surprising endgame cemented it as one of the most heartfelt movies of the last decade. The film’s meditative aesthetic is also boosted by a rather primal, ruminative score by the late, great Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson. –Aaron Robertson, Assistant Editor

Call Me By Your Name (2017)
Based on: Call Me By Your Name by André Aciman (2007)

André Aciman, author of Call Me By Your Name, initially thought he would dislike director Luca Guadagnino’s adaptation; from the moment he arrived on a visit to the set, he wrote for Vanity Fair, it was clear that Guadagnino’s vision for the film was significantly different from the one that had driven his own writing. But the final result, which he saw at the Berlin International Film Festival, and in particular the film’s infamous last shot, floored him. “The ending captured the very spirit of the novel I had written in ways that I could never have imagined or anticipated,” he wrote.

In Guadagnino’s hands, Aciman’s narration of the interior, obsessive Elio, a prodigious 17-year-old, becomes a series of languid Italian summer days over which a love story unfolds between him and Oliver, the older graduate student who comes to stay in their family’s house over the summer. Filmed in the Lombardy region of Italy, the film is so visually lush as to seem unreal, and the intensity of the connection it explores—and all the self-searching that follows it—is almost painful to watch, as Timothée Chalamet (Elio) and Armie Hammer (Oliver) bring a palpable chemistry and sense of constant, unresolved desire to their roles. Its setting, “Somewhere in Northern Italy,” is deliberately vague, Anthony Lane noted for The New Yorker—”the point of a paradise is that it could exist anywhere but that, once you reach the place, it brims with details so precise in their intensity that you never forget them,” he wrote. This film is a paradise worth your time and definitely one of the best adaptations of the last decade.

–Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

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Dissenting Opinions

The following adaptations were just barely nudged out of the top twenty, but we (or at least one of us) couldn’t let them pass without comment.

We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011)
Based on: We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver (2003)

What happens when someone you love turns out to be a monster? We Need to Talk About Kevin (WNTTAK) understands the complexities of love, grief, anger, and mourning intimately. Based on Lionel Shriver’s 2005 novel of the same name, the film has quickly surpassed its source material in both reach and reputation. Told from the perspective of Kevin’s mother, played to intense perfection by Tilda Swinton, WNTTAK begins with a lonesome Tilda, living in a rundown house and visiting her teenage son in prison. He’s done something terrible, something so terrible that Swinton’s neighbors no longer talk to her, but what? A gradual series of flashback sequences reveals Kevin’s difficult upbringing, his mother’s growing suspicion of his psychopathy, and finally, the explosive violence that lands him in prison in the first place.

If you prefer to end every film with the sensation that everything is pointless and we might just as well curl up in the fetal position and die (but also love exists and is very creepy), then this film is for you! It’s also part of a continuum of complex attitudes towards motherhood stretching back to Doris Lessing’s The Fifth Child and beyond. Motherhood is ambiguous. So is love. And so is that ending. . .

–Molly Odintz, CrimeReads Associate Editor

Cloud Atlas . . . but only the trailer (2012)
Based on: Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell (2004)

The trailer for the film Cloud Atlas, directed by the Wachowski sisters, is the single most moving work of cinema ever made. It is basically as long as a real movie (a 5 minute and 42 second-long movie trailer!) and it is more enjoyable than watching the actual whole film of Cloud Atlas, an extremely ambitious and staggering epic that tells a giant six-generation, cross-continental, time-jumping narrative packed with very famous movie stars (though are they performing as people of other races, at times? Yes. Yes they are.) The novel on which the film is based, which was written by David Mitchell, is a beautiful, complicated tale of different individuals at different moments in time, from an 19th-century voyager in the Pacific, to an impoverished family in a futuristic primitive world. Mitchell’s book is subtle and the connections between the six different stories within are more like soft threads. The film on the whole transforms the book in a somewhat awkward literalization of many of its smaller details (the movie becomes all about reincarnation in a way the book only touches upon it)… but this movie trailer, which can’t tell the full story of the movie (though it kind of tries, with its expanse), is a collection of stunning notes, coming together much more smoothly and (helpfully) vaguely than in its full iteration. You go watch this trailer, with its perfect deployment of that one M83 song and snare drums and lonely piano themes and stunning colors and heartbeat-matching montage cut points and slow motion and Jim Broadbent and gravelly voiceovers like “I believe there is another world out there, a better world—and I’ll be waiting for you there” and you TELL me that it does not deserve to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. You look me eye and tell me.

–Olivia Rutigliano, CrimeReads Editorial Fellow

The Great Gatsby (2013)
Based on: The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925)

Here are just a few of the (myriad) reasons why Baz Luhrmann’s 2013 lush-as-fuck and much-maligned adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s magnum opus is actually one of the great cinematic achievements of the 21st century: (i) The trailer. Remember how excited we all were when this dope trailer dropped? Remember how alive it made us feel? (ii) The soundtrack: Beyoncé and André 3000 covering Back to Black, Jack White covering Love is Blindnessand, most especially, that young and beautiful Lana del Rey song (which I still listen to on the regular on my runs) Luhrmann pipes in over this glorious montage of Nick and Daisy hitting golf balls into the ocean and flinging beautiful silk shirts around the room. (iii) The party scenes. Just look at them all there, having a grand old time with their money and their sparkly clothes. (iv) The casting of Jason Clarke and Isla Fisher as George and Myrtle Wilson. Dead on. (v) The way DiCaprio’s Gatsby says the line “I’m certainly glad to see you, as well.” So intense. DiCaprio, the boyishly handsome rhino and Millennial/Gen Z model enthusiast who has spent a decade in roles that require him to look perennially on the brink of a complete mental breakdown, was born to play this role and I will brook no argument there (vi) Joel Edgerton absolutely going for it as Tom Buchanan. Not since Billy Zane’s Cal Hockley I enjoyed a wealthy shittheel villain so much. (vii) The way the movie wisely tones down the anti-Semitic Meyer Wolfsheim caricature. Good note, Baz. Good note. (viii) That Leo-raising-a-champagne-glass gif we all know and love. (ix) The way Tobey Maguire’s Nick Carraway adds that flourish to his sanatorium framing device novel at the movie’s close. All movie codas should be as bold in their purist-trolling as this.

–Dan Sheehan, Book Marks Editor

Much Ado About Nothing (2013)
Based on: Much Ado About Nothing, by William Shakespeare (1623)

Certain people in the office groaned when I announced that I wanted to write about this film, but those people are foolish. Look, no one would claim that this Much Ado About Nothing, directed by Joss Whedon and staged in his own house, is better than the official Much Ado About Nothing, directed by Kenneth Branagh in the ’90s (two more groan-worthy things), but it’s certainly more elegant, and hey, it’s the same play (my favorite). You can’t really mess up this play, which contains the best character in Shakespeare’s oeuvre—or maybe I’d give Beatrice and Puck a shared top billing, but the point stands. Perhaps most importantly, if you are a fan of other works created by Joss Whedon, ahem, this movie can be understood as an extended piece of fan fiction in which Wesley and Fred finally get together instead of the latter dying tragically in the former’s arms before they’ve even slept together. I mean, look at them, up there. Trust me when I say it’s very satisfying.

–Emily Temple, Senior Editor

Snowpiercer (2013)
Based on: Le Transperceneige by Jacques Lob, Benjamin Legrand and Jean-Marc Rochette

Snowpiercer!!!!!! It’s so good, y’all.

Snowpiercer is a 2013 Korean-American production directed by indie darling Bong Joon-ho and based on the French graphic novel Le Transperceneige by Jacques Lob with a striking (get-it?) premise. In an apocalyptic scenario where the world has become too frozen to sustain human life, the only survivors are on board a train called Snowpiercer, barreling around the world just fast enough to preserve the lives of those onboard – but all survivors are not equal. We begin the narrative in the “third class” section of the apocalypse, as we learn about the train’s highly stratified class system, held in place by a rigidly applied system of barbaric punishment administered by a terrifying Tilda Swinton.

The oppressed masses soon begin a rebellion against their fur-clad overlords, and as they journey from the back of the train through gradually increasing opulence, fighting their way to the engine car, audiences are forced to question if this kind of survival is worth surviving at all. Snowpiercer also gets mad props most creative/prolific arm removal – like, five characters get their arms cut off this movie. Each in a different way. Something to know ahead of time, especially if you’re planning a drinking game around it.

A perfect action film with a solid Marxist message that draws strong visuals from its comic book origins and takes narrative inspiration from video games, Snowpiercer is one of the must-see films of the decade.

–Molly Odintz, CrimeReads Associate Editor

The Edge of Tomorrow (2014)
Based on: Hiroshi Sakurazaka, All You Need Is Kill (2004)

The 2014 Tom Cruise sci-fi actioner The Edge of Tomorrow AKA Live Die Repeat is adapted from Hiroshi Sakurazaka’s light novel, All You Need Is Kill, but perhaps the true ur-text is the 1993 Harold Ramis/Bill Murray classic Groundhog Day. What’s it about? Well, the plot is almost beside the point; its the premise here that’s everything: it’s the near future, and aliens have invaded Europe, and Cruise—a combat-unready military PR sleazeball—is dragooned by Brendan Gleeson into active duty for a D-Day style invasion, where he is almost instantly killed only to awaken the day before with his memory intact and forced to live through the slaughter again and again and again. Until, that is, with the help of badass warrior Emily Blunt, he learns to become a mechanized-bodysuit-fighting master and to better understand his enemy and, maybe, himself? I know, but it’s incredibly satisfying. There’s just so much glee to be had in the bonkersness and boldfaced derivativeness of the conceit, the video-game action sequences and the scenery-chewing supporting performances—and, of course, in watching Cruise (as the type of smarmy bastard that usually gets described as “playing against type” but always seems to suit him best) get 86-ed over and over. To watch this movie is to appreciate how little so many of its genre-mates are able to enjoy themselves, and how little they seem interested in your enjoyment. The Edge of Tomorrow, above all else, knows what I need to enjoy myself, and it wants me to have it.

–Emily Firetog, Deputy Editor

Inherent Vice (2014)
Based on: Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon (2009)

The reputation of Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2014 adaptation of Pynchon’s gonzo-PI novel has been growing fairly steadily since its first release, when, let’s be honest, it was hard to know exactly what to make of this thing. First off, like just about any PI story worth its salt, the “plot” doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense. Sense isn’t the point. (See, e.g. The Long Goodbye, book and movie; rinse, repeat.) Atmosphere is the point—an ambiance, some style, a little confusion, a little tension, and in this case a fine, drug-laced balancing act somewhere between ennui and paranoia, a certain feeling in the air that went hand-in-glove with the mourning of a decade’s promise, innocence lost, friends disappeared, dead and gone. Based on the 2009 Pynchon neo-noir, Inherent Vice is set in 1970s “Gordita Beach”—a stand-in for Manhattan Beach in its scruffy bohemian heyday—and follows the dubious private eye casework of one Doc Sportello, a man capable of walking the city’s mean streets in the mode of Chandler’s Marlowe, though in this case the streets are full of 1960s washouts and burnouts, and the bete noir is one Bigfoot Bjornsen, the LAPD’s local fascist hippie-hater. That’s a fairly ineffable mood but Paul Thomas Anderson manages to capture it along with some help from Joaquin Phoenix, Katherine Waterston, Josh Brolin, Benicio Del Toro and a long, strange cast of characters. What starts out seeming to be an exercise in oddness and unexpected detour slowly, almost inexplicably morphs into something far more tender and poignant, a weird, lovely meditation on the people and scenes that move in and out of our lives, gone forever.

–Dwyer Murphy, CrimeReads Managing Editor

Elle (2016)
Based on: Oh… by Philippe Djian

Elleis a brilliant, disturbing movie that I will not watch again. Isabelle Huppert plays Michèle Leblanc, the artistic director of a video game company, who is one day raped in her home by a masked assailant. After the assault, Michèle does not call the police but instead cleans up the blood and broken glass, and resumes her life. One might list Elle among a long list of “rape revenge” movies, as many critics have, though it was immediately clear that the film was attempting something much bolder than the usual fare. The fact that director Paul Verhoeven wasn’t able to convince American actresses or film studios to make the film says something about the ugly frankness of Elle’s Machiavellian attempts to rebuild her life and self-image after such a heinous violation. Elle, which was released in 2016, the year before the #MeToo movement spiked in popularity, was an inadvertent bellwether of soon-to-be-revived debates around male and female power, sex, and sexual ethics. –Aaron Robertson, Assistant Editor

Lady Macbeth (2017)
Based on: Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District by Nikolai Leskov (1865)

Has there ever been a protagonist more terrifying than Katherine, the Lady Macbeth of William Oldroyd’s haunting adaptation of Leskov’s novella (itself inspired by Shakespeare’s most famous female character)? Sure, a lot of characters are cold, and a lot of characters start with one little murder and then work their way up in intensity (of method and victim), but as I’ve written in this space before, most of them don’t, well, win at the end, and most of them aren’t played by Florence Pugh, who nails Katherine as a blank, amoral antiheroine in a fairy tale—one of the original fairy tales, where people routinely die, disappear and get dismembered—who suffers, more than anything else, from idle hands. It’s a shame more people didn’t see this film, despite its disturbing imagery; any lovers of Ottessa Moshfegh and Catherine Lacey and yes, the Bard himself, should seek it out.

–Emily Temple, Senior Editor

Hidden Figures (2018)
Based on: Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly (2016)

Based on Margot Lee Shetterly’s bestselling nonfiction book of the same name, Hidden Figures tells the little-known story of Katherine G. Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson—the brilliant black women who were behind one of NASA’s greatest achievements. (Had you heard of them before this? I certainly hadn’t.) Without these women breaking down barriers and fighting for a seat at the table, astronaut John Glenn never would have been successfully launched into orbit. Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer, and Janelle Monáe do an incredible job of bringing these women to the forefront of this Space Race story. There is one scene that has stuck in my mind, years after I’ve seen it. Because segregated bathrooms are still in place at NASA when the events of this film unfold, we see Taraji P. Henson running across the campus grounds, crossing a great distance to go to the “colored bathroom.” At first, it’s almost played up for a little bit of comic relief. But as it goes on, we see the toll it takes on her work. Then her white male supervisor berates her in front of her colleagues for leaving her desk for so long, and she finally fires back telling them where she’s been going for forty minutes at a time, screaming that this is something they would never even have to consider. It’s a real turning point in the movie, a cleverly included detail that hits on a terrible reality of the time. But Hidden Figures doesn’t hit you over the head with it. It doesn’t linger in this injustice. The movie is also filled with joy and laughter and small victories and strong female friendship. The story itself is heartwarming and inspiring, and the film adaptation is a fitting celebration of these game-changing women.

–Katie Yee, Book Marks Assistant Editor

Can You Ever Forgive Me? (2018)
Based on: Can You Ever Forgive Me? by Lee Israel

I find it very comforting to watch characters act out of desperation and that’s not something I intend to examine at all! Even if you don’t share my totally unremarkably interest in downward spirals, Can You Ever Forgive Me? is worth watching. Adapted from Lee Israel’s memoir of the same name, the film is part buddy comedy (Melissa McCarthy and Richard E. Grant play Israel and her friend/partner in crime Jack Hock), part heist, and all spiny dark comedy. It’s also, as A.O. Scott writes, “catnip for the bookish,” as the crime in question is selling forged correspondence from literary giants including Dorothy Parker and Noël Coward. One of the things I love about the film is that while it certainly doesn’t glamorize Israel’s crime spree (she forged 400 letters, which I think qualifies as a spree), it does respect her talent as a mimic. The script—written by Jeff Whitty and the brilliant Nicole Holofcener—is funny and mean and very, very tense, and Melissa McCarthy’s Lee Israel is one of my favorite Unlikeable Women of the decade.

–Jessie Gaynor, Social Media Editor

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Honorable Mentions

A selection of other adaptations that we seriously considered for both lists—just to be extra about it (and because decisions are hard).

127 Hours (2010) · The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2011) · Moneyball (2011) · Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Part 1) (2011) · Jane Eyre (2011) · Anna Karenina (2012) · Cloud Atlas itself (2012) · The Perks of Being a Wallflower (2012) · Cosmopolis (2012) · Under the Skin (2013) · Blue is the Warmest Color (2013) · The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (2013) · Divergent (2014) · Room (2015) · The Diary of a Teenage Girl (2015) · The Martian (2015) · Still Alice (2015) · Spotlight (2015) · The Lost City of Z (2016) · If Beale Street Could Talk (2018) · Blackkklansman (2018) · We the Animals (2018) · The Sisters Brothers (2018) · The Wife (2018).

As you may have noticed, over the past few weeks, we’re been looking back at the best books from the decade, from novels to poetry to nonfiction. As a sort of coda to that project, I’ve also polled the Literary Hub staff about their favorite literary adaptations of the decade, on both the big and small screens. Our list of favorite film adaptations will be along later this week, but for now, here are the decade’s very best television shows that started out from books.

Take note that we attempted to judge the shows in question on their own independent merits; while many of us have read the books these shows are based on, we didn’t base our decisions on fidelity to, or creativity of departure from, the original text. We just wanted to pick the best television experiences.

As with the previous lists, the following top ten small screen adaptations were chosen after a lengthy debate among the Literary Hub staff. It got testy, but in the end, we agreed—though many of us had to include our dissenting opinions at the end of the list. If we’ve missed your favorite, tell us why we’re wrong in the comments.

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The Top Ten

Justified (FX, 2010-2015)
Based on: “Fire in the Hole” by Elmore Leonard

Calling Justified, the FX series that premiered in March of 2010 and ran for six glorious seasons, a literary adaptation is at once misleading and fundamentally, somewhat poetically accurate. As a starting point, it’s nominally based on the Elmore Leonard short story, “Fire in the Hole,” which introduces US Marshal Raylan Givens, a plays-by-his-own-rules fugitive hunter who returns to his hometown of Harlan, Kentucky and has some tension with an old coal mining buddy turned criminal, Boyd Crowder. All of that gets the show through a few episodes. But what really, and a little counterintuitively, makes Justified such an achievement of literary adaptation is that even once the series was off-book, as it were, it always felt distinctly located within the strange and wonderful moral universe of Elmore Leonard’s fiction.

Every character had a hustle going, every crime required several minutes of banter, and the line between hero and lowlife was ever thin. The Crowders, the Crowes, the Bennetts, the Givens—all these hill clans, criminal or otherwise, carried down their own traditions and moral codes, and sure enough they more often than not came into conflict. Creator and showrunner Graham Yost has famously said that the writers of the series would wear bracelets bearing the initials WWED as a reminder, whenever they were stuck on a plot development or a character arc, to ask themselves, “What Would Elmore Do?” The great author’s stamp is all over this show, a modern western-cum-crime show that smuggles in a few Shakespearean touches and adds some pretty steamy sexual tension to boot. Through the magic of great source material and great week-to-week writing, not to mention the phenomenal acting, Justified established itself as one of the decade’s most entertaining series, and without a doubt one of its most stylish.

–Dwyer Murphy, CrimeReads Managing Editor

Sherlock (BBC, 2010-2017)
Based on: The Sherlock Holmes stories, by Arthur Conan Doyle (1887-1927)

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Adventures of Sherlock Homes has taken on a life of its own. The characters have starred in other writers’ stories, and the premise has been adapted for television and film many, many times. The best adaptation, I daresay, features Benedict Cumberbatch as a brilliant, impatient, delightfully smug Sherlock to Martin Freeman’s compassionate Watson, an earnest war veteran who blogs about their crime-solving adventures. And who could forget Andrew Scott’s role as Moriarity? Before he was the Fleabag’s Hot Priest, he was a twisted mastermind pulling the strings in a theatre of cruelty. The crimes are eerie and psychologically haunting (years later, you’ll find yourself thinking of the woman in “A Study In Pink,” who tried to claw her daughter’s name in the floorboards before she died, as a clue) but there’s a playfulness there, too. Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock and Andrew Scott’s Moriarity mirror each other in a clever cat-and-mouse dance, and it’s fun to watch. You buy into their love of the game. You learn to love it, too. (The fun makes it all the more creepy, really. You wonder if Sherlock, if all of us, aren’t a little more like Moriarity than we care to admit.) And, of course, the unlikely friendship between Sherlock and Martin Freeman’s Watson is another great joy of the series. The wonderful thing about this adaptation is that as it goes on, it becomes less about individual one-off mysteries and more about the characters’ backstories and growth, their individual psychology—the greatest mystery of all.

–Katie Yee, Book Marks Assistant Editor

Game of Thrones (HBO, 2011-2019)
Based on: A Song of Ice and Fire by George R. R. Martin

Quibble with the final season, go ahead, I won’t stop you. Quibble with the bouts of misogyny and overly graphic/exploitative background action, which may or may not have been appropriate to the time and place depicted, a fantasy realm so who the hell knows? But what you can’t quibble with, or even overstate, really, is the cultural impact of Game of Thrones, one of the most fervently and widely watched series in the history of modern television and a global pop culture phenomenon like no other on this list. It didn’t matter if you were a fantasy nerd, a reader, an avid watcher of television, or a virtual recluse; chances are at some point during the decade past, Game of Thrones came across your radar, you decided to watch it, and probably got into some very involved discussions of its progress.

There were kings, queens, courtiers, schemers, risers, fallers, dragons, clashing civilizations, more dragons, and more worlds to discover every week. And it was ambitious to boot. With David Benioff and D.B. Weiss at the helm, adapting the epic works of George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire cycle, the priority was placed on closely observed worlds and the type of passionate, high-stakes storytelling that have marked sagas and origin stories from the dawn of time. Look, if you’ve read this far and have never tried or enjoyed Game of Thrones, I don’t know what to tell you. Probably you can’t be converted. Or maybe now that the dust has settled you’ll give it another shake. Maybe not. All I’m sure of is that for several years this decade, there was a show that a good portion of the human race was really, really into. It was the show everybody seemed to be watching, and when they went off-book, for better or worse, and drew the whole thing to a close, it was invigorating to know that a community around the world was fully immersed in the same rich story.

–Dwyer Murphy, CrimeReads Managing Editor

Orange is the New Black (Netflix, 2013-present)
Based on: Orange is the New Black by Piper Kerman (2010)

Admittedly, Orange is the New Black had its ups and downs (everyone has their own ranking, and while I’m not sure there’s any true consensus, I feel confident in saying Season 2 forever), but on the whole, it’s impossible not to highlight it here. We were introduced to the inmates of Litchfield Penitentiary in 2013, only a few years after the release of Kerman’s much-hyped memoir about her time as a Nice White Lady in prison, but the show has far eclipsed the book. Part of it was luck: it was one of Netflix’s earliest forays into original programming. As TV critic Judy Berman wrote:

Brought to bear on [creator Jenji Kohan’s] expansive vision at a critical moment in the rise of streaming, that freedom yielded a series that smoothed the transition from cable’s 2000s golden age to the vibrant and diverse, if fragmented, era that’s come to be known as Peak TV. More than a bold experiment in representational sleight of hand, Orange became the most influential show of the decade.

. . .

[I]t would be hard to underestimate how much has changed on the small screen since 2013. . . . the phrase “binge watching” was just starting to gain currency when the first season of Orange—all 13 hours of it—showed up on Netflix. Viewers who now regularly consume a full season’s worth of a given series within 24 hours still weren’t sure that they could get used to this new form of couch potato–dom. Kohan’s show played no small part in converting skeptics. I remember marathoning the season in a weekend, spurred on by my impatience to know everyone in Orange’s tremendous cast of characters. For better or worse, bingeing is now so common that a term for watching one episode of TV at a time would be more useful.

Which isn’t even to scratch the surface of what has really been so influential and satisfying about this show: its massive cast, and that cast’s ability to portray a diverse, complicated group of women—something never seen before on television, or at least not at this magnitude. Judy again:

When it came to representation, this wasn’t merely the first prestige show since The Wire built around poor and nonwhite people—or the rare program intended for a general audience that featured more than a token queer regular. It also endowed each of these characters with stereotype-­defying specificity. In 2014, when this magazine declared that America had reached a “transgender tipping point,” Laverne Cox’s breakthrough role as trans inmate Sophia Burset made her the face of that moment. For once, women whom mainstream society habitually ignored were being represented in pop culture as individuals with virtues and flaws, rather than as a monolithic mass of degenerates or vixens.

And of course, it was a hell of a lot of fun, too. It had good stories, unforgettable characters, and witty repartee in spades—and those are probably why it’s actually been so massively popular: Netflix says that 105 million people (actually, users, which as we all know might mean multiple people) have watched at least one episode, which makes it the platform’s most-watched original offering. Which certainly says something. We’ll just forget about season six. And five.

–Emily Temple, Senior Editor

The Leftovers (HBO, 2014-2017)
Based on: The Leftovers by Tom Perrotta (2011)

Damon Lindelof and Tom Perotta’s supernatural mystery drama series (centered around brooding upstate New York police chief Kevin Garvey and his family as they struggle to adjust to life in the wake of the Departure—a mysterious global event that resulted in 2% of the world’s population disappearing from the face of the earth) was that rarest of birds: a literary adaptation that successfully expanded upon, and eventually transcended, its source material to become something altogether more glorious and profound. The first season (which many found too relentlessly grim but which I have a real soft spot for), a relatively straightforward adaptation of Perotta’s novel, focused on Garvey’s attempts to keep the peace between the still-raw citizenry of his small town and the inscrutable nihilist cult (the Guilty Remnant) which has ensnared his wife. The Second (which marked a complete tonal reimagining of the show) took place in Jarden, Texas—the site of the Garveys’ fresh start, chosen for its famed status as the only town in America which suffered no Departures—and the Third brought our battered antiheroes and their hefty emotional baggage to Australia as the auspicious seventh anniversary of the Departure approached.

There are so many scorching, aching performances in this show—from Christopher Eccleston’s increasingly desperate reverend to Ann Dowd’s uncompromising Guilty Remnant matriarch, Liv Tyler’s terrifying convert-turned-zealot to Scott Glenn’s grizzled and (possibly) insane Kevin Garvey Sr.—but none more memorable than Carrie Coon’s career-making turn as Nora Garvey, a woman stripped bare, reconstituted, by the enormity of her Departure Day trauma. Like Watchmen, Lindelof’s equally brilliant new creation, The Leftovers was a wildly ambitious vision—epic in scope, devastating in emotional impact, and admirably unafraid of drifting into silliness, surrealism, and near-incomprehensibility when it wanted to. It was a show about the weight of grief, about trying to live in a world made strange and terrible by incomprehensible loss, with all the rage and despair and absurdity that would characterize the experience of such a world.

–Dan Sheehan, Book Marks Editor

The Magicians (Syfy, 2015-present)
Based on: The Magicians trilogy by Lev Grossman (2009-2014)

The Magicians is a show for nerds. I’m not saying that if you’re not a nerd, you won’t enjoy it—I think there’s a little something for everyone—but The Magicians trades on references, on lampshading tropes and reinventing legends, and as such it rewards prior knowledge. For those of us who have been consuming fantasy and science fiction for our whole lives, it is deeply funny and satisfying—after all, at its core, it’s about a group of people just like us, who watched Buffy and read The Lord of the Rings, and then one day woke up to find that the were invited to magical grad school.

And sure, the first season is only okay. But after that, it becomes pretty stunning. It’s fucking fun, and smart, and populated by fresh characters—which sets it securely apart from most fantasy, to be fair. Season three contains one of the best episodes of television I’ve ever seen: Eliot and Quentin get stuck out of time on a quest, and it takes decades, and they live their entire lives together, and they die. Of course there’s a way out, their characters continue, but it shakes you to your core—because it suddenly shows you how much you’ve come to care about the characters on a silly, magical, backtalking show.

–Emily Temple, Senior Editor

The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story (FX, 2016)
Based on: The Run of His Life: The People v. O. J. Simpson by Jeffrey Toobin (1997)

For at least the past century, the United States has had a central role in enabling global celebrity cults thanks, in large part, to the Hollywood-industrial complex and the widespread diffusion of visual media. The appeal of memes and GIFs, as we now know them, have something to do with the spectacle of a re-playable moment, or a strange, indelible image circulated in like-minded groups. Ultimately The People v. O.J. Simpson, the first season of the American Crime Story anthology series, is a screenshot of one of the most pivotal cultural moments in late 20th-century U.S. history. This dramatization of the O.J. Simpson trial, steered along by an excellent cast led by Sterling Brown, Sarah Paulson, Courtney Vance, and Cuba Gooding Jr., took the audience back through a scandal seen around the world that revealed how wealth, fame, and race captivated the American public on the very eve of the Internet boom. What you didn’t talk about at the dinner table if you wanted to keep your most private feelings to yourself was money, religion, and whether you were for or against O.J.

–Aaron Robertson, Assistant Editor

Mindhunter (Netflix, 2017-present)
Based on: Mindhunter: Inside the FBI’s Elite Serial Crime Unit by John E. Douglas and Mark Olshaker (1995)

Though not quite true crime, the most fascinating characters and storylines of Mindhunter are based on real-life nightmares. Loosely inspired by Joe Penhall’s 1995 book Mindhunter: Inside the FBI’s Elite Serial Crime Unit, the series is set in the late 1970s and early 80s, when the FBI first began systematizing the nature of “multiple murderers,” more commonly known as serial killers. Agent Holden Ford (Jonathan Groff), a brilliant and aloof hotshot in the bureau, teams up with the straight-shooting veteran agent Bill Tench (Holt McCallany) and psychologist Wendy Carr (Anna Torv) to do prison interviews with some of the most notorious mass murderers in US history to understand and apprehend active killers. This includes the likes of Ed Kemper, David Berkowitz (the “Son of Sam”), Charles Manson, and many more. The show leans into noir and, obviously, is not for those with a weak stomach or fluttering heart. Anchored by charismatic performances from the main cast and the excellent guest actors who play the criminals, Mindhunter makes you second-guess how much you can really know about the motivations and psychology of your neighbor, your relatives and, of course, yourself.

–Aaron Robertson, Assistant Editor

The Handmaid’s Tale (Hulu, 2017-present)
Based on: The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood (1985)

Disclaimer: The Handmaid’s Tale is on this list for the first season only. After that, it becomes misery porn.

Despite the way its reputation has been corrupted by overextension and over-merchandising, the first season of The Handmaid’s Tale is incredible. The show is deeply affecting, especially coming at the time it did, when we were all feeling the first, dizzying moments of the normalization of Donald Trump’s behavior. Yes, we were tender, and this show drove the knife in. The adaptation is visually excellent, and extremely successful as horror. The third episode, in which a flashback shows the world just as the world tipped, made me cry, which is an uncommon event. At the time, I wrote:

The horror of the flashbacks is carefully balanced. This does not seem like a society at the edge of a dystopia. It seems exactly like the world we know. But it isn’t. Unless, of course, it is. Would we know? Moira and June laugh at the rude barista because they don’t realize where they live. They are standing on the edge; they can’t see how much things have changed. They are too close, and so are we. This is why the flashbacks are so much more frightening than the present action of the show, despite the bleakness and creep of the latter. A reflection of the violence of your own reality is always much scarier than any dystopian society with special outfits, no matter how many parallels you can draw, no matter how many people are tortured, murdered, or raped. I’m not saying these parts aren’t horrifying—just that they don’t cut to the bone in quite the same way.

That was the brilliance of Atwood’s novel, and that is the brilliance of the show—at least if we ignore everything after 2017.

–Emily Temple, Senior Editor

Killing Eve (BBC, 2018-present)
Based on: The Codename Villanelle series by Luke Jennings (2014-2016)

It seems like at this point we should probably have some kind of universal abbreviation to acknowledge how much we all love everything Phoebe Waller-Bridge does so that when the time comes to write about her, we can just pop it in there and not have to spend time trying to figure out a new way to talk about how great she is. For the purposes of this write-up, let’s just agree that everyone in the world would run our loved ones over with a truck just so Phoebe Waller-Bridge would… run us over with a truck. Killing Eve, Waller-Bridge’s adaptation of Luke Jennings’ Codename Villanelle and her follow-up to the first season of Fleabag, is a tremendously fun series that also manages to be taut with suspense. Jodie Comer is fantastic as the beautiful, charming, flirty asshole/contract killer whose mutual obsession with Sandra Oh’s British intelligence officer Eve powers the show, and Fiona Shaw is typically excellent as Eve’s boss/mentor/foil. The script is as sharp and fast and smart as anyone familiar with Waller-Bridge’s work would expect (seriously, run us over with a truck).

–Jessie Gaynor, Social Media Editor

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Dissenting Opinions

The following adaptations were just barely nudged out of the top twenty, but we (or at least one of us) couldn’t let them pass without comment.

Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries (ABC, 2012-2015)
Based on: the Phryne Fisher book series by Kerry Greenwood (1989-2013)

Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries, based on the Phryne Fisher book series by Kerry Greenwood, is one of the most enjoyable television series I’ve ever encountered. It’s endlessly delightful. Is it maybe a little too anachronistically on-the-nose with some of its feminist theses? Who cares. Are the CGI locomotives a little too stylized? Why does it matter? Is it maybe a little cheesy how perfectly everything falls into place all the time? Shut up.

Miss Fisher (Essie Davis) is an ahead-of-her-time single lady living in 20s Melbourne. She’s super wealthy and a total flapper, so the show is about how she just does whatever she wants, including (but not limited to) driving fast in fancy motorcars, flirting with a host of handsome dudes, and solving murder mysteries. Much to the chagrin of her old-fashioned Aunt (Australian national treasure Miriam Margoyles), and often accompanied by her BFF Mac (Tammy MacIntosh), a lady doctor who wears men’s clothes, the indefatigable Miss Fisher operates as a private investigator, consternating the Melbourne Police Chief, Detective Jack Robinson (Nathan Page) and, really, the patriarchy at large. Obviously, his annoyance grows into admiration, but they have one of the most enjoyable slow-burn love stories on modern television. Miss Fisher’s is an ensemble program that places questions about labor and compensation front and center—she employs everybody she enlists, which means that her gorgeous Victorian terraced house is full of (paid) talented misfits, including Mr. Butler (Richard Bligh), her mild-mannered but former-special-ops butler; Burt and Cec (Travis McMahon and Anthony J. Sharpe), two charming lower-class communist factotums who do ground-level espionage (and car maintenance); and Dot (Ashleigh Cummings), her shy gal-Friday who grows more empowered with every passing episode. A cute but also very meaningful aspect of the show is that Dot is being courted by Hugh (Hugo Johnstone-Burt), a handsome but bumbling police officer who means well but has fuddy-duddy ideas about women, and we get to watch him slowly internalize how to be a true ally as Dot learns she deserves an ally.

So. The jazzy aesthetic is fabulous and the chemistry between the actors is superb. It is the perfect show for when you just want to watch a sartorially-superior, vaguely-historically-revisionist period piece detective show in which women kick ass and men respectfully defer to their expertise. The show’s principles really mean a lot; it’s a thrill to live in its world, even for forty-three minutes at a time. No matter what else in this world is not, Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries is there for you.

–Olivia Rutigliano, CrimeReads Editorial Fellow

The Man in the High Castle (Amazon, 2015-2019)
Based on: The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick (1962)

Based on Philip K. Dick’s 1962 novel about an alternate history in which the Axis Powers won World War II, The Man in the High Castle is one of Amazon Studio’s best original series. In the show’s universe—one of them, at least—Nazi Germany rules the eastern seaboard while the Japanese empire has control of the West. These powers are separated by a “Neutral Zone” in the middle of the country, a lawless region that is also the only nominally safe area for ethnic and religious minorities. The first season’s phenomenal world-building set the stage for a long, dark tale of resistance and complicity within a social order that, unfortunately, is not so far removed from our own reality. Though the writing sometimes veered unintentionally into melodrama, the show was largely exceptional in mixing elements of espionage thrillers, speculative horror, and the multiverse romp. The final season is the most explicit in questioning the extent to which social surroundings shape our characters. We’d like to think the distance between an American patriot and a fascist loyalist is substantial. What if the most frightening thing about our worst selves is that we are able to imagine it at all?

–Aaron Robertson, Assistant Editor

Harlots (Hulu, 2017-present)
Based on: The Covent Garden Ladies by Hallie Rubenhold (2005)

Harlots is the best show on TV you’re not watching—and possibly the best show on TV, period.  Adapted from The Covent Garden Ladies: Pimp General Jack and the Extraordinary Story of Harris’ List, by Hallie Rubenhold, Harlots takes place in Georgian England, at a time when one in five women in London worked in the sex industry, and when many of the better paid escorts would receive reviews in a little black book that made its way to all the most discerning johns of the era, providing modern historians with rich details of a bygone era.

Harlots primarily explores the rivalry between two opposing bordellos; one is dedicated to providing basic shelter and protection for sex workers (for a small fee), while the other is classier, but more exploitative of its residents. Like The Deuce, Harlots provides a model for how to make a feminist show about sex workers. Harlots is not only based on a book by a woman, it’s also directed by a woman, stars primarily women, is written almost entirely by women, and generally passes the Bechdel Test in almost every scene. There was even (briefly) a blog created by sex workers to review each episode of Harlots.

It’s also incredibly well-written and oodles of fun, with more drama in each episode than in an entire season of Big Little Lies. Each season wraps up neatly but leaves plenty of room for the next, and as the show progresses, we’re introduced to the wider world of Georgian England, filled with bare-knuckle boxing, dissolute aristocrats, molly houses, and entrepreneurs of all stripes.

The lavish set design and deep historical research compliments the feminism of the series. Most sex scenes are filmed with sex workers fully clothed, given that it was far too cold and took too long anyway to take all those layers off. Heaving bosoms proliferate, as was the style of the era, but bright colors and warm lighting help distinguish the happier house of prostitution from the more miserable French-influenced house of procurement, where the women are clothed in pastels representing both the aspirations of their house and the rigidity of their madame. For every hooker with a heart of gold, there’s a complicated new take on an old archetype. Queer characters, and characters of color, make their own choices and live their own lives; gender and sexual identity are fluid, and kink alternates between sophisticated and played for laughs.

Hallie Rubenhold has dedicated her career to examining women’s choices (and women’s lots) within the context of their era—a valuable and eminently feminist project. She just won the Bailley Gifford Prize for her most recent work, The Five, which makes the case that Jack the Ripper’s victims were not employed as sex workers, but were, in fact, complicated 19^th century women with complicated 19^th century lives (primarily, the Ripper’s victims were unhoused women suffering from alcoholism).

–Molly Odintz, CrimeReads Associate Editor

Big Little Lies (HBO, 2017-present)
Based on: Big Little Lies by Liane Moriarty (2014)

Big Little Lies is, on the whole, a good argument for letting Nicole Kidman and Reese Witherspoon do whatever they want; the show is a visually stunning meditation on the inner lives of its five leads, featuring the kinds of complex character studies we rarely see devoted to women. Based on Liane Moriarty’s novel, the show’s first season, directed by Jean-Marc Vallée, builds to a climactic reveal of the titular lie, and along the way it shows each of the five leads at the height of their acting abilities—particularly Nicole Kidman, whose portrayal of surviving physical abuse is unlike anything I’ve ever seen. The characters’ relationship to the surrounding landscape—the stark cliffs of Big Sur and the thin bridges that connect them, the ocean—underlie the show’s sense of tension and precarity, which we see expressed in the constantly shifting social alliances of white, wealthy, privileged Monterey.

However, the series is not without its flaws, and in particular, the show’s treatment of race has been disappointingly vague. The presence of Bonnie’s mother in the second season felt like a missed opportunity to introduce some nuance to that conversation; Reshmi Hebbar noted in Slate that her storyline “catered to racist stereotypes about violent black mothers,” exacerbating the show’s existing issues with race. And in the show’s second season, a battle for creative control between the show’s director and producers gave the show a visually muddled style. Regardless, it’s a pleasure to watch, and its strengths are enough to merit its place on this list.

–Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

You (Lifetime, 2018-present)
Based on: You by Caroline Kepnes (2014)

You is grim but also cheesy, and it is also just… great. It’s great. It is a variety of television maybe equivalent to a White Castle fast food order: highly addictive, bad for your blood pressure, fun to consume with friends, a little bit trashy but also highbrow (did you guys know that White Castle serves the Impossible Burger now?), and manufactured in Yorkville, a quiet neighborhood in Manhattan due East of the Upper East Side, home mostly to dog-owning elderly people, that bookstore where the show takes place, and the last white concrete hamburger palace left on the island.

Based on the novel by Caroline Kepnes, You is nostalgic for an old-school, local New York, which is clever because of the narrative’s heavy reliance on twenty-first-century digital technology. The show might seem to condemn social media, say, for being the reason why predatory men can find things out about the women over whom they obsess, but all the show’s roadsters, old books, and J.D. Salinger references remind us that what the show is, is old-fashioned. Actually, it’s timeless. Like the many beautiful brownstones and non-over-developed quaint neighborhoods the show likes to take us to, the creepiness and entitlement exhibited by You’s male protagonist have long been grandfathered into our culture.

The protagonist is Joe Goldberg (Penn Badgley), a mild-mannered bookstore manager and antique book restorer who falls for a young writer named Guinevere Beck (Elizabeth Lail). She prefers to be called “Beck,” which is dumb. Except then he stalks her—learning everything about her on the internet, watching her in her apartment, breaking into her apartment, stealing her things, murdering her good-for-nothing rich guy hookup, murdering her suspicious best friend, and eventually manipulating her into falling for him too, becoming her boyfriend while still continuing to stalk her. Mostly, he’s obsessed with taking care of her, and nurturing her talent (she is a mess). Actually, she is pretty poorly-written and I wish she were as good a character as Joe. She’s a very clichéd, lost-but-beautiful basic white girl with lots of privilege and daddy issues who is, we are told all the time, ‘a very good writer.” But she is, ultimately, a victim, and the most important thing about her character is that we know none of this is her fault. When she finds out what Joe is, she blames herself, and this is sad. Joe is responsible for it all. He is the spider and she is the fly. As she will write, in her best piece of writing in the show, he seems to be Prince Charming, but turns out to be Bluebeard. His castle will turn out to be her prison.

Joe is an extremely sinister figure, whose evilness is properly disguised and revealingly compounded by the fact that he thinks he is the protagonist in a romantic comedy, and that he is very handsome and charming. (The show sets a lot of scenes in that charming café from You’ve Got Mail on the Upper West Side, and you’re crazy if you don’t see parallels between Joe, and Annie in Sleepless in Seattle.) You has a few things to say about how many rom-coms (or fairy tales!) are actually creepy. The show is invested in representing how monsters are made of men, and this is sometimes very interesting and productive; other times, the show is fine to just thrill you with its shocking, suspenseful plot points. The intensity of Joe’s obsession (plus all scenes about graduate school) occasionally balloon into absurdity. Sometimes the writing is super sensationalistic. But it is also very serious and worry-inducing. You will worry about Beck. You will hope she gets away from him. You will worry about all women. And you will be scared by the idea that the cute guy you meet on a dating app might be a psychotic murderer. And then you’ll remember that Beck meets Joe in person, in a bookstore, and that the modern trappings of his villainy are purely incidental—a new framework for a very old, eternal danger.

–Olivia Rutigliano, CrimeReads Editorial Fellow

The Haunting of Hill House (Netflix, 2018-present)
Based on: The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson (1959)

The Haunting of Hill House, the book, profoundly moved me when I read it. (Haunted, actually, would be the term seeing as I couldn’t sleep for two weeks after completing it, but I’m trying to not be too on-the-nose.) Shirley Jackson published The Haunting of Hill House in 1959: Eleanor Vance a shy, anxious 32-year-old woman has just lost her mother, whom she had been nursing for 11 years, and has been invited by a paranormal researcher, along with two other people, to spend the summer at a haunted house. The possibility of escaping her drab life gives Eleanor the chutzpah to steal her sister’s car and, on her drive to the house, dream up an entirely new personality and life for herself. The Haunting of Hill House, the book, is focused entirely on Eleanor, her eccentricities, her anxieties, her relationship to the house which, creepily, gradually, reciprocates her attention in ways she did not anticipate. Jackson pried open the female psyche and criticized the oppressiveness of the household, the prison that could be the home, and in the process also wrote a hell of a ghost story. The Haunting of Hill House, the Netflix original series directed by Mike Flanagan, focuses on a family, the Crains, who live in Hill House until its hauntings become too much to bear.

One disturbing night, the father—having seen his wife increasingly grow ill under the influence of the house (seeing things, hearing things, being possessed: he wakes up one night to find his wife straddling in him in an attempt to kill him)—packs his five kids in the car and flees, leaving his wife to the cursed fate of the house. Flanagan’s show trades the feminist, subtle, horror of Jackson’s novel, for a more overt kind of terror, including jump scares and masked ghosts and women clinging to the ceiling even if he keeps some of Jackson’s original elements. Doors still slam unexpectedly, unexplained drafts plague certain parts of the house, and written on the walls in paint are the words, HELP ELEANOR COME HOME. All the same, the success and lingering impression of the series is its slowly unraveling family drama. A favorite, indelible episode is the most confrontational.

In “Two Storms” the family gathers for the funeral of one of its members and, as they all drink, they become as argumentative as they become sincere. The children ask their father for answers about the past, the house, his choice to abandon their mother, and finally, he tells them. The cinematography of the episode is stunning, placing its characters in the corners of one room of the funeral home, playing with shadows and deep colors and seamless switches between the characters’ perspectives. The narrative arc blends past and present, and their discussion is interspersed with flashbacks from 30 years ago. The episode is heartbreaking and tense and it is representative of the real pain and horror experienced by the family: the loss of their mother and their home and now, their sister and daughter. So, ultimately, coming to the Hill House series may not completely satiate those obsessed with Jackson’s masterpiece, but what Hill House offers is the untangling of fraught family relationships and so, it becomes, a study of vulnerability and connection, through the powerful lens of horror, that shows just how terrifying it can feel to love someone, unconditionally.

–Eleni Theodoropoulos, Editorial Fellow

Patrick Melrose (Showtime, 2018)
Based on: The Patrick Melrose novels by Edward St. Aubyn (1992-2012)

This stunning adaptation of Edward St. Aubyn’s semi-autobiographical Patrick Melrose novels is the reason why miniseries should exist. Each episode of the five part series adapts a different book in the five volume cycle, detailing Patrick Melrose’s childhood traumas, youthful self-destruction, and complex journey to healing. The book cycle and miniseries also both function as brutal takedowns of a corrupt aristocracy, rotten to its core, and in need of dismantling.

The first episode of the miniseries follows Patrick on a bender after learning of the death of his father, the second episode introduces us to the horrific abuse the elder Melrose inflicted upon his son (trigger warning for sexual violence), and the third episode takes place during an aristocratic party where Princess Margaret makes a scene and Patrick begins the path to healing. In the 4^th episode, we catch up with Patrick as he tries his best to alienate his wife and children, and in the 5^th episode, we witness Patrick’s attempt to reconcile with his mother, despite her long history of neglect.

The main difference between books and show is one of story order—the miniseries waits until episode two to drop the bomb about Melrose’s early childhood trauma, while the books are told in chronological order. Benedict Cumberbatch lets his intensity and dark humor out to play Melrose, and while the show as a whole was beautifully (and heart-breakingly) rendered, Cumberbatch’s embodiment of the role deserves a special shoutout.

–Molly Odintz, CrimeReads Associate Editor

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Honorable Mentions

A selection of other adaptations that we seriously considered for both lists—just to be extra about it (and because decisions are hard).

Mildred Pierce (2011) · Parade’s End (2012) · Longmire (2012-2017) · A Young Doctor’s Notebook (2013)  · Olive Kitteridge (2014) · Bosch (2014-present) · Outlander (2014-present) · The Night Manager (2016) · I Love Dick (2016-2017) · Alias Grace (2017) · American Gods (2017-present) · My Brilliant Friend (2018-present) · The Terror (2018-present) · Sharp Objects (2018) · Altered Carbon (2018-present) · Good Omens (2019) · Shrill (2019)

With the end of anything comes reflection. We’ve been doing quite a bit of it here at Literary Hub, as you may have noticed, but even we haven’t read everything. And besides, publishing is a machine, and a business, and so is book media, and sometimes it seems that all we hear about are the same 30 books, the same 30 authors, recycled and rehyped over and over again. This is not to say that those ubiquitous books aren’t great—only that there’s more out there. So with that in mind, we asked some of our favorite writers to recommend an underappreciated book (or two), published in the last ten years, that they think more people should read. They came back with a list of short stories collections, novels, novellas, and memoirs from the tiniest presses to the largest ones, from authors you’ve heard of and authors you haven’t. If I do say so myself, this is a good list as any to take you into 2020.

Bennett Sims, White Dialogues
(Two Dollar Radio, 2017)

My selection is Bennett Sims’ White Dialogues (Two Dollar Radio) one of the most genuinely terrifying, brilliant short story collections of the past decade. These stories are so smart and so unsettling; every sentence will unnerve you. He’s kind of like if Alfred Hitchcock and Brian Evenson raised a baby with David Foster Wallace and Nicholson Baker. Sims should be a household name in horror, and it is one of my personal and professional goals to make that happen. (He also has a criminally underrated novel, A Questionable Shape.)

–Carmen Maria Machado, author of In the Dream House

D. Wystan Owen, Other People’s Love Affairs
(Algonquin Books, 2018)

Why didn’t more people recognize D. Wystan Owen’s Other People’s Love Affairs for what it was, the debut of a major writer, on par with the best new writers the decade delivered? Why didn’t more people recognize it as an extraordinary book in itself, full of some of the most exquisitely etched, psychologically complex, tender stories I’ve read? Owen’s work embodies the classic virtues, but he speaks to us from the future; we’ll need a decade or two to catch up. When Lit Hub surveys English-language literature from 2050, the work of D. Wystan Owen—and I hope he will have many, many books by then—will loom large.

–Garth Greenwell, author What Belongs to You and Cleanness (January 2020)

Jade Sharma, Problems
(Coffee House Press, 2016)

I really loved Jade Sharma’s Problems and while underappreciated feels like a fraught word—I know lots of people who read and loved this book too—I do think Problems, which is jagged and hilarious and challenging and smart as hell, deserves wider audience. I didn’t know Jade Sharma outside her work and was so sorry to hear of her death earlier this year; she left us all a great gift, with this book.

–Laura van den Berg, author of The Third Hotel and I Hold a Wolf By the Ears (June 2020)

Jarvis Masters, That Bird Has My Wings: The Autobiography of an Innocent Man on Death Row
(HarperOne, 2009)

Jarvis Masters’s memoir That Bird Has My Wings: The Autobiography of an Innocent Man on Death Row is a gripping, lyrical, heartbreaking account of how a black child full of hope and love, born into poverty and racism, was criminalized for running away from abuse, abused in juvenile prisons, set on the path to adult prison, and how once there he was framed for participation in a murder that has stranded him on death row for thirty years. And it’s also the story of how, there, he became a generous, compassionate, and creative person as well as a writer of great power.

–Rebecca Solnit, author of Recollections of My Nonexistence (March 2020)

Melissa Rivero, The Affairs of the Falcóns
(Ecco, 2019)

I recommend The Affairs of the Falcóns, Melissa Rivero’s stunning debut novel about a young undocumented woman fighting to make a life for herself and her family in 1990s New York City. This book achieves the very best of what fiction can do: it invites you to sit inside someone else’s mind, builds connections between the story on its pages and the world in which you live, and leaves you, whoever you are, changed after reading.

–Julia Phillips, author of Disappearing Earth

Alexis Wright, Tracker
(Giramondo, 2017)

I do not know if it is “unsung,” but I do know that the book of which I wish to sing is Tracker (2017), by Alexis Wright, one of the most important writers at work today. Tracker is at once biography, oral history, the portrait of a community and the story of one man, the Indigenous activist Tracker Tilmouth who was at the forefront of Aboriginal rights campaigns in Australia for decades. Wright is as indefinable and experimental as her book and subject; she is also the author of Carpentaria, one of the most important modern Australian novels, a lands-right activist, an essayist and, here, an oral historian and memoirist gathering and braiding a chorus of voices. Read it, and sing of it.

–Robert Macfarlane, author of Underland

Arif Gamal, Morning in Serra Matu
(McSweeney’s, 2014)

This epic poem, its interrelated stories and gorgeous evocation of eighteen thousand years of Nubian history, is unlike any other book I’ve read in the last decade. Arif Gamal was born in Sudan to a Nubian family whose history along the Nile dates back nearly two millennia. That ancient Nubian culture is the clay of Gamal’s poems, over which he sees “Islam is like a glaze.” Gamal told the lines in this unprecedented book to E.G. Dubovsky, who the title page says “recorded it in verse.” The book doesn’t explain how closely the two of them worked to edit the poems once they were on paper, but however this sequence came into being, it is an astonishing book, at once intimate and epic.

Gamal brings masterful lyric restraint to the book’s central tragedy: the displacement of the Nubians again and again for the creation of dams along the Nile. A passionate environmentalist, Gamal brings to the book an extensive knowledge of the Aswan Dam and its destruction of Nubia but he keeps the focus fixed on the emotional journey of those displaced. Of the mass exodus the dam produced, he doesn’t speak of where the migrants go or how many they were, only that “the train cars were packed with people/ all weeping where they sat.” At the end of this powerful epic, when Gamal evokes the “high unhindered Nubian stars,” I felt that physical ache that only happens with the books that will stay with you for the rest of your life.

–Idra Novey, author of Those Who Knew

Sara Majka, Cities I’ve Never Lived In
(Graywolf, 2016)

Sara Majka should be much wider known. Her stories remind me of Lydia Davis’s longer pieces. Intensely felt, ghostly, beautifully strange snapshots of love and loss and desperation—but so different from what you’ve read. Many of her stories are about lonely women on the edge of whatever you may call normal; they’re introverted, broken down, dark, and often isolated. So much of the drama happens in the cold liminal spaces in a long life, like characters from a Hopper painting. They have this intense, unflinching vulnerability that made me squirm and scratched at my heart.

–Dina Nayeri, author of The Ungrateful Refugee

Samanta Schweblin, tr. Megan McDowell, Fever Dream
(Riverhead, 2017)

This was the first book to truly frighten me as an adult. For that reason alone, I recommend it constantly. Schweblin creates a mood of unease and disorientation that is both startling and brilliant. Reading translations also opens up new possibilities in literature; there’s so much we can learn about form and style across linguistic difference.

–Crystal Hana Kim, author of If You Leave Me

Viola Di Grado, tr. Antony Shugaar, Hollow Heart
(Europa, 2015)

I came across this novel while I was reading stacks and stacks of books as a judge for the PEN Translation prize. This story cut through the fray, pulling my attention away from the hundreds of other worthy nominees right from its first line: “In 2011, the world ended: I killed myself.” The novel follows Dorotea Giglio’s posthumous “life” as well as her bodily decomposition in minute detail. I was taken by the specifics of the mundane, everyday life of a dead person, and am awed by the way translator Antony Shugaar crafted a complex and darkly funny voice for Dorotea in English, too.

–Sara Nović, author of Girl at War

Danzy Senna, New People
(Riverhead, 2017)

This wickedly hilarious novel about the contradictions of race and belonging has the heartbeat of a thriller, and conjures the best of Patricia Highsmith and Shirley Jackson while offering a razor-sharp critique of both the notion of a post-racial society and the pursuit of an authentic, uncompromised identity politics. Senna is a keen observer of racial dynamics, recording both those moments that clearly resonate with trauma and inequity and those that lie outside the realm of intelligibility—racial authenticity as riddle, a puzzle that may never be solved. This book was lauded when it came out, but its twisty, prickly lens on American belonging deserves an even wider audience today.

–Alexandra Kleeman, author of You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine

Aoko Matsuda, tr. Angus Turvill, The Girl Who Is Getting Married
(Strangers Press, 2017)

One nice thing this decade was discovering the funny, surreal, slyly ingenuous, sometimes eerily incantatory fiction of Aoko Matsuda. In this short novella, Matsuda’s longest work to be translated so far, the narrator travels up five flights of stairs to see the titular girl who is getting married, while reflecting on their relationship—now intimate, now distant, now ontologically suspect. The girl who is getting married is referred to only as “the girl who is getting married,” which lets Matsuda write sentences like: “The girl who is getting married announced that she was now a girl who is getting married. The girl who is getting married is getting married!” It’s a delightfully strange story strange right down to its syntax.

–Adam Ehrlich Sachs, author of The Organs of Sense

David Mitchell, The Bone Clocks
(Random House, 2014)

The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell remains one of the most incredible contemporary fiction reading experiences I’ve ever had. Not only is it a genre bending feat of imagination that spans decades and voices, but Mitchell’s storytelling style is just irresistible. His uncanny ability to fully inhabit the voices of his characters and bring them to such crackling, dimensional life not only makes for some of the most gripping fiction but also the most moving. The equally brilliant Slade House, which takes place in the same imagined universe as BC, is a close second favorite. A tale of wonder and horror that will always stay with me.

–Mona Awad, author of Bunny

Emma Reyes, tr. Daniel Alarcón, The Book of Emma Reyes
(Penguin Classics, 2017)

This strange and wildly engrossing book recounts the phantasmagoric early years of the author’s life in a series of letters to a friend written in middle-age.  She and her sister were raised in horrific poverty in Bogota, Colombia, abandoned by their mother as children, and raised, for the most part, in an especially grim convent. Reyes went on to become a renowned (if underappreciated) painter, befriended by Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera; her letters were admired by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (though his praise of them, after they were shown to him without her permission, led to her ceasing her correspondence for decades.) Reyes captures the distortions and agonies of childhood with a desperate immediacy that has rarely been matched in contemporary literature, and with a disarmingly chatty insouciance to boot. “If you think it’s enough to have ideas,” she writes as an aside, ”I’d say if one doesn’t know how to express them so they’re comprehensible, it’s the same as not having them at all.” I wish more people would read this book so I could have more conversations about it.

–Andrew Martin, author of Early Work and Cool for America (July 2020)

Alexis Coe, Alice + Freda Forever: A Murder in Memphis
(Zest Books, 2014)

Alice + Freda Forever: A Murder in Memphis (2014), a historical tale by Alexis Coe, is being made into a film by the woman who brought us The Babadook, and will no doubt find a new audience at that time. Until then, I hope that I can bring attention to this heartbreaking, nail-biting story of lesbianism, obsessive teenaged love, and murder in the 1890s South, painstakingly researched by Coe and written with compassion and skill.

–Esmé Weijun Wang, author of The Collected Schizophrenias 

Chris Bachelder, Abbott Awaits
(Louisiana State University Press, 2011)

This is the best book I know of about being the father to a young child, on what remains a relatively short shelf. (There are a lot more laughs than Knausgaard!) Bachelder has been justifiably celebrated for his depiction of desperate masculinity in The Throwback Special, and his earlier novels, Bear v Shark and U.S.! are exuberant, bristling vivisections of contemporary culture and of the novel form itself. Abbott Awaits contains all of these aspects of his work: it’s warm and humane, but also stylistically adventurous. The book is divided into the months—June, July, and August—leading up to the birth of the narrator and his wife’s second child, and each month is divided into short vignettes, many just two or three pages long, that correspond to the number of days in each month. The events recounted are mundane—“Abbott Adds a Key to the Ring” is the title for July 17—but never tedious. It’s early Lydia Davis meets early Nicholson Baker, plus an excellent dog. Track it down.

–Andrew Martin, author of Early Work and Cool for America (July 2020)

Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich, The Fact of a Body: a Murder and a Memoir
(Flatiron, 2017)

I don’t believe this book could be “underappreciated” by anyone who’s been lucky enough to spend time with it, but I do wish this book would be read and revered more carefully. Yes, the story will shock and unmoor you, but this book is so much more than its stories, its headlines. Marzano-Lesnevich is a genius who skillfully dismantles our ideas of good and evil, power and the powerless; they ask, instead: who gets to claim the histories of our bodies? Our lives? This is the most exciting, shattering, exquisitely crafted (and researched) book of the decade for me.

–T Kira Madden, author of Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls

Nescio, tr. Damion Searls, Amsterdam Stories
(NYRB, 2012)

No book published in the last ten years has had a bigger impact on me, one of those books that speaks directly to your gut, a revelation. Nescio—in Latin it means “I don’t know”—and there’s something unclassifiable about the way Nescio goes about his stories, as if every sentence is a surprise even to the writer, a spontaneous irruption. At the same time, there’s nobody less pretentious and more down-to-earth. A classic in Holland, but virtually unknown here.

–Peter Orner, author of Maggie Brown & Others

Donald Antrim, The Emerald Light in the Air
(FSG, 2014)

It’s funny to think that someone I first encountered when he was an up-and-coming young writer could now be considered a modern classic, but that’s exactly what Donald Antrim is. The Emerald Light in the Air is his only collection of stories, and it includes “Another Manhattan,” which might be the best story written in this century so far.

–Benjamin Moser, author of Sontag: Her Life and Work

Aminatta Forna, The Hired Man
(Atlantic Monthly, 2013)

In this ingeniously crafted and exquisitely written novel, a British woman buys a summer home in Gost, a small village in Croatia. A local handyman, still haunted by events that took place twenty years earlier during the civil war, helps her with needed repairs to the house. Forna explores the connections between past and present, the difference between ignorance and innocence, and the deeply human desire to survive.

–Laila Lalami, author of The Other Americans

Marisa Silver, Little Nothing
(Blue Rider Press, 2016)

A wild, dark, exhilarating tale that leaps from surprise to astonishment to the lurking realities of ignorance, intolerance, war and love.  A girl is a dwarf, then she is a wolf. Fantasy, magical realism, fairy tale, adventure story, parable, Dickensian novel?  Whatever you choose to call Little Nothing, it is deeply odd and oddly moving. “Like a rat or icy wind,” Silver writes, “love creeps in.”

–Cathleen Schine, author of The Grammarians

Jess Arndt, Large Animals
(Catapult, 2017)

Sentence by sentence, these stories are alert, nervy, funny, alive, lonesome, queer, and just plain weird—no dead zones in sight. And Arndt knows how to make a landscape resonate with the power of a dream, whether it’s the Atlantic City Boardwalk or the Southern California desert. Fans of Joy Williams, take heed.

–Paul Lisicky, author of Later: My Life at the Edge of the World

Bernice L. McFadden, The Book of Harlan
(Akashic, 2016)

Bernice L. McFadden took me on a melodious literary journey through time and place in her masterpiece, The Book of Harlan. It’s complex, real, and raw. Harlan, McFadden’s main protagonist, is a solidifying fixture in her novel spanning almost 60 years from his pre-conception in Macon, GA slightly before 1917, to his migration with his parents to Harlem as a child, to his stint in Paris, to his enslavement by the Nazis in Buchenwald, and eventually back to his once joyous roots where he struggles to overcome the soul wounds that consume him. One thing that stood out in this book was the compelling way in which McFadden writes about the horrors of the Holocaust through the lens of an African American. McFadden intricately and purposefully weaves history as a backdrop in her fiction. The Book of Harlan brilliantly explores questions about agency, purpose, freedom, and survival.

–Nicole Dennis-Benn, author of Patsy

Mira T. Lee, Everything Here is Beautiful
(Pamela Dorman/Viking, 2017)

Mira T. Lee’s Everything Here is Beautiful is a deeply moving story about mental illness, family loyalty, immigration, and cultural displacement. It made me laugh out loud, cry out in frustration, and marvel at the gorgeous, lyrical prose. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

–Angie Kim, author of Miracle Creek

Susan Stinson, Spider in a Tree
(Small Beer Press, 2013)

Susan Stinson is one of my favorite living writers and all of her books deserve to be widely read. Her 2013 novel, Spider in a Tree, is, plainly, a beautiful novel, dark and also full of light. It’s about the world and family of Jonathan Edwards, an 18th century theologian, but because it’s by Stinson it talks about faith with the same precision it talks about bodies; it brilliantly explores the interiors of every character, including, quite often, spiders; it is concerned with both the holy and the homely, cold water crusts and home remedies involving spider webs, spiritual and bodily hungers. Spider in a Tree is both immaculately researched and up-to-the-minute, concerning as it does the dangers of moral certitude. Sentence to sentence, it will knock you out:   “He thought he could eat sheets of paper with nothing to wash them down but his own copious spit, and then speak books. His mouth was full of desires.” (It’s published by the excellent and daring Small Beer Press.)

–Elizabeth McCracken, author of Bowlaway

Yiyun Li, Where Reasons End
(Random House, 2019)

When my daughter was six months old, often while she was nursing, I read Yiyun Li’s astonishing novel Where Reasons End, an imagined conversation between a mother and her teenage son who has recently committed suicide. To call it bleak would do a disservice to the ferocity of its love—to the feral, striated, quality of a mother’s awe at her son’s mind, and her insistent desire to conjure him back into conversation. To say it wrecked me to think of a child dying, while my child lay in my arms, would be true, but it wouldn’t quite hold everything else that novel did for me: the way it made me think about language, about dialogue, about the partial, glorious, aching ways we know—or fail to know—one another.

–Leslie Jamison, author of Make it Scream, Make it Burn

Friends, it’s true: the end of the decade approaches. It’s been a difficult, anxiety-provoking, morally compromised decade, but at least it’s been populated by some damn fine literature. We’ll take our silver linings where we can.

So, as is our hallowed duty as a literary and culture website—though with full awareness of the potentially fruitless and endlessly contestable nature of the task—in the coming weeks, we’ll be taking a look at the best and most important (these being not always the same) books of the decade that was. We will do this, of course, by means of a variety of lists. We began with the best debut novels, the best short story collections, the best poetry collections, the best memoirs, the best essay collections, and the best (other) nonfiction of the decade. We have now reached the seventh list in our series: the best novels translated into and published in English between 2010 and 2019.

Each of these lists has presented its own set of problems; with this one we worried about whether it was somehow condescending to books in translation to give them their own list (especially considering they do appear on many of the linked lists above). But in the end, considering that books in translation still make up only a tiny percentage of the books published in English every year, we figured it was worth highlighting some of our favorites. (We stuck to novels because that was the biggest group.)

The following books were chosen after much debate (and several rounds of voting) by the Literary Hub staff. Tears were spilled, feelings were hurt, books were re-read. And as you’ll shortly see, we had a hard time choosing just ten—so we’ve also included a list of dissenting opinions, and an even longer list of also-rans. As ever, free to add any of your own favorites that we’ve missed in the comments below.

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The Top Ten

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.   –Emily Temple, Senior Editor

Elena Ferrante, tr. Ann Goldstein, My Brilliant Friend (2012)

Before I read My Brilliant Friend, the first of Elena Ferrante’s four Neapolitan novels, I was told by several colleagues that the books were written pseudonymously. All I knew was that they are autobiographical, chronicling the lives and friendships of two young women, Lila and Elena. This conversation took place before the 2016 press attempt to expose Ferrante’s real name, and so someone in the group mentioned that they wondered if the real author of those female-centric stories were a man. Another colleague (a woman) responded quickly, “Absolutely not,” and added “they are written by a woman. You can just tell. They understand women in a way only a woman can.”

Translated from Italian by Ann Goldstein in 2013, the Neapolitan novels (and My Brilliant Friend, particularly, since it broke the ground) are so perfectly, beautifully intuitive. They are about women’s voices—what it means to be a woman and to have a voice as a woman—but also the ways women speak and not speak and who they sound like when they do or don’t. My Brilliant Friend introduces Lila and Elena, childhood friends, as the two bright starts in a depressed Italian neighborhood—precocious readers and writers. They each are beautiful and compelling, but they take different paths. Elena becomes a writer. Lila should have become a writer. My Brilliant Friend is wise, it is nostalgic, it is wistful. But more importantly, it is a love story—between the two central friends, yes, but also between each woman and herself.  –Olivia Rutigliano, CrimeReads Editorial Fellow

Marie NDiaye, tr. John Fletcher, Three Strong Women (2012)

Published in France in 2009, Three Strong Women won the Prix Goncourt, France’s most prestigious literary award, making Marie NDiaye the first black woman to have ever won the prize. Having already written Self-Portrait in Green, a wonderful, experimental memoir, and later to publish Ladivine, which was longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize, NDiaye has by now established herself as a significant, international literary prose stylist and playwright. One can look to NDiaye not only for well-rounded, complicated portraits of characters but for her “fantastical narratives,” as The New York Times writes, in which “the destabilization and even duplication of the self occurs frequently, particularly in families.” Three Strong Women is structured in three parts and moves between France and Senegal to accommodate the stories of Norah, Fanta, and Khady, three women whose resilience and self-worth is called upon to deal with the men of the world who are trying to control and subjugate them. Norah, a lawyer born in France goes to Senegal to deal with another of her father’s offspring; Fanta must leave the teaching job she loves behind to move to France with her husband, where she will not be able to teach; and Khady, a penniless widow, must take to France, where she has one distant cousin, to save herself. Told with incisive wit and deep dives into her characters, NDiaye’s narrative is completely immersive and invokes empathy, and humanity juxtaposed against the toxic masculinity that often plagues families; fathers and daughters, husbands and wives are often at odds in NDiaye’s works, meanwhile the matrilineal line reigns as a force of strength, unending support, and guidance. NDiaye’s ability to invite the reader into the lives of her characters is peerless, and for me, her symbolism and imagery—that verges on surreal or hallucinatory at times—deepens and complicates the layers of the themes of identity, womanhood, lineage, inheritance, and responsibility which she explores with utmost elegance and force.  –Eleni Theodoropoulos, Editorial Fellow

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.  –Dwyer Murphy, CrimeReads Managing Editor

Eka Kurniawan, tr. Annie Tucker, Beauty is a Wound (2015)

Beauty is a Wound—Eka Kurniawan’s epic, polyphonic, multi-genre novel—is the story of the prostitute Dewi Ayu (who returns from the dead in the first sentence of the novel) and her four daughters. Set against the backdrop of Indonesia’s history of colonialism, its independence struggles, and its depredations under Suharto’s despotic rule, Beauty is a violent family saga flooded with incest, murder, bestiality, and rape (a lot of rape). Dewi Ayu, a mixed race descendant of a Dutch East India Company trader (her parents are half siblings), is taken to a Japanese internment camp reserved for Dutch colonists at the start of World War II; there she survives by becoming a whore—the most beautiful, most sought after prostitute ever. She gives birth to three beautiful daughters who marry important, political men. It’s her fourth daughter, Beauty, who is born (as per Dewi Ayu’s wish) “so hideous that the midwife assisting her couldn’t be sure whether it really was a baby and thought that maybe it was a pile” of excrement. The novel’s evocation of fairy tale and fondness for the tropes (and sexual politics) of magical realism are reminiscent of Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and, at times, Rushdie—there are lovers whose kisses create flames and man who, despite many efforts, cannot be shot or stabbed. But the hyperbolic, maximalist voice brought to rapturous life by Annie Tucker’s 2015 English translation for New Directions is thoroughly Kurniawan’s own. Sometimes maddening in its scope and innumerable characters, it’s an exhilarating novel, and one of the best in translation published this decade.  –Emily Firetog, Deputy Editor

Magda Szabó, tr. Len Rix, The Door (2015)

Magda Szabó’s The Door was first published in Hungary in 1987; it wasn’t published in America until 1995, and I didn’t discover it until 2015, almost a decade after Szabó’s death, when it was reissued by the New York Review of Books. I can’t remember why I picked it up, but I remember the feeling I had only a few pages in: that this was a voice unlike any I’d ever read—elevated, almost cold, but bristling with passion beneath the surface—and that the book was very, very good. And I know I’m not alone. “I’ve been haunted by this novel,” Claire Messud wrote in The New York Times Book Review. “Szabó’s lines and images come to my mind unexpectedly, and with them powerful emotions. It has altered the way I understand my own life.”

The plot is simple, even boring. (More and more, I find that my favorite novels defy snappy summation; there’s no clever, alluring way to describe a quality of mind that can only be understood by reading.) Our narrator tells us a story from years before, when she, a writer whose career had been until recently held up for political reasons, hired a woman to help around the house. But she is no ordinary woman, and the novel is the story of their relationship, one which culminates in a truly extraordinary set piece. “It won’t do to say much more about the plot of the book,” Deborah Eisenberg wrote in her NYRB review, “first because the rather white-knuckled experience of reading it depends largely on Szabó’s finely calibrated parceling out of information, and second (though this might be something that could be said of most good fiction) because the plot, although it conveys the essence of the book, is a conveyance only, to which the essence—in this case a penumbra of reflections, questions, and sensations—clings.”

You see—all that’s left to explain is where you can buy a copy, and I figure, if you’re reading this space, you know that already.  –Emily Temple, Senior Editor

Han Kang, tr. Deborah Smith, The Vegetarian (2016)

The Vegetarian is the most beautiful work of body horror I’ve ever ingested. It makes sense—what is a body if not a beautiful horror? (Too on the nose? Fine.) Han Kang’s first novel to be translated into English, The Vegetarian is divided into three sections and centers around a woman, Yeonge-hye, described by her husband as “completely unremarkable in any way.” Yeonge-hye is the catalyst for the story’s action—in the novel’s first section, her husband wakes up to find her throwing away all the meat in their kitchen because of a dream she had—but the story, which shifts perspective in each section, is never told in her voice. Yeonge-hye doesn’t rebel against erasures of her person. Instead, she leans further into unpersoning. She stops eating meat, which infuriates her family, then stops eating altogether. In the book’s second section, “Mongolian Mark,” Yeonge-hye’s brother-in-law becomes obsessed with her, specifically a birthmark on her backside, and paints flowers all over her body as part of an art project. Even his desiring of her unpersons her. The scene is horrific and beautiful at once, like so much of the novel. Its language is spare and matter-of-fact, which makes the violence all the more unsettling. Porochista Khakpour describes The Vegetarian as “magnificently death-affirming,” and I’m at a loss to do better than that.  –Jessie Gaynor, Social Media Editor

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.”  –Aaron Robertson, Assistant Editor

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.”  –Dan Sheehan, Book Marks Editor

Can Xue, tr. Annelise Finegan Wasmoen, Love in the New Millennium (2018)

We quickly learn that nothing is as it seems in Love in the New Millennium, a book by experimental Chinese author Deng Xiaohua, known by her pseudonym Can Xue. This is a work ostensibly about love stories. Not much “happens” in the sense of a through line from points A to Z, which is the draw of this perplexing book. Translator Annelise Finegan Wasmoen conveys a remarkable linguistic simplicity while maintaining the weirdness of Xue’s descriptive passages and dialogues, which are rather like non-sequiturs, fragments of barely connected thought that make us think they are meant to follow from one another because they are framed a certain way on the page. There’s a little passage in a chapter about an antique store owner named Mr. You that sums Xue’s book up well. Speaking of Mr. You: “His personal life was hardly smooth sailing, but there were no life-or-death crises. His nature quietly settled into shape apart from anyone’s notice […] A stranger looking at Mr. You would have seen no trace of time’s passage on that face—he looked too much, in fact, like someone a little over thirty.” If there is a crisis at all in the book, it’s that minute changes are often happening quietly, such that characters and readers might easily miss them. Each of the book’s chapters are often narrated by one or two new characters, one being at least tangentially connected to the next. Movements of time are questionable, and just about every encounter in some way minor. This is a challenging but worthy path into Xue’s body of work.  –Aaron Robertson, Assistant Editor

***

Dissenting Opinions

The following books were just barely nudged out of the top ten, but we (or at least one of us) couldn’t let them pass without comment.

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, seven 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.  –Emily Firetog, Deputy Editor

Fuminori Nakamura, tr. Satoko Izumo and Stephen Coates, The Thief (2012)

Fuminori Nakamura is one of the most intriguing crime writers around, and in 2012, SoHo Press began a decade of bringing his spare, minimalist prose and intellectual noir aesthetic to American audiences. The Thief is a perfect noir—we follow an unnamed protagonist as he wends his way around the cityscape, thieving and thinking, until he encounters a shoplifting child and saves him from arrest. When the titular thief meets the child’s mother, he finds his hard edges softening, and in the process, finds himself less and less suited to the life of a desperado, and increasingly vulnerable to the dangers of the streets. Japanese noir, with its frequent emphasis on alienated cityscapes and the difficulty of human connections, has always appealed to me, but The Thief is the ultimate example of noir distilled to its essence. Nakamura writes harsh poetry for the modern world, and his works are essential reading for fans of translated works and just plain literature alike.   –Molly Odintz, CrimeReads Associate Editor

Valeria Luiselli, tr. Christina MacSweeney, The Story of My Teeth (2013)

Valeria Luiselli’s short novel The Story of My Teeth, written in Spanish and translated by Christina MacSweeny, was produced in collaboration workers at the Jumex Juice Factory in Mexico. She would send chapters of the novel to the juice factory workers, who would read, discuss, and provide feedback on the story in a kind of book-club format. Then the writing project was commissioned in conjunction with an art exhibit, called “The Hunter and the Factory,” which was installed in the juice factory, itself. The Story of My Teeth was originally included in the exhibition catalog—Luiselli eventually expanded it into the full novel later. This background, which she presents in the novel, makes perfect sense, given that The Story of My Teeth is about the incredible meaning of objects—not merely as symbols, but as transformative, personal, material things, whose very materiality has the most significance.

Told in seven parts, it tells the story of Gustavo (“Highway”) Sánchez Sánchez, a compulsive liar, flamboyant auctioneer, and a collector of teeth from famous people (including Plato, Petrarch, G.K. Chesterton, and Virginia Woolf). He trades all these in to buy a pair of teeth that purportedly belonged to Marilyn Monroe, which he then has implanted into his own mouth. He is kicked out of his son’s house and set adrift, and wanders. That’s all there is to the story, except it’s also not—while the narrative concludes, the book picks up in a series of photographs and a “Chronologic” (this one drawn by Christina MacSweeney, the novel’s translator—additionally emphasizing the true collaborative spirit of the project). The book is about relics—the morsels of things that last throughout time, and are imbued with great significance specifically for being lasting material things. The book itself plays with its being an object—there are marbled paper pages printed into it, whole pages which are devoted to reproducing fortune cookie fortunes, photographs, illustrations, a map. In this way, it reads much like Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, which also experiments with a book’s ability to be an object, as well as a character’s own awareness that he is literally writing a book (Sterne, a printer who published his own book, also formatted it creatively, slipping in blank and marbled pages on purpose, among other things). It’s a clever, delightful, expanding-center of a book, one which draws on centuries of inquiry about what books are and what they can do.  –Olivia Rutigliano, CrimeReads Editorial Fellow

Kamel Daoud, tr. John Cullen, The Meursault Investigation (2015)

I’m a huge believer in culture as an ongoing conversation, and many of the most beloved works in history are also intensely problematic; so much so that in order to continue loving what’s good about the original, we first need to see a response to its ugliest parts. Kamel Daoud does this in spades with his lyrical reworking of Camus’ The Stranger; told from the perspective the unnamed Arab’s brother, Daoud takes us long past the events of the stranger to take on a sweeping tale of identity and vengeance against the backdrop of the Algerian Revolution. By focusing on the story of Meursault’s victim and his family, Daoud restores humanity to a character used as racially insensitive plot device in Camus’ original, and helps us to understand that Camus’ pretension at distance and invention of “existentialism” was merely another version of colonialist prejudice. Here’s hoping that future schoolteachers take heed from Daoud’s text and change up the way they talk about The Stranger!  –Molly Odintz, CrimeReads Associate Editor

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

Signs Preceding the End of the World is a slim novel, 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.  –Emily Temple, Senior Editor

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.  –Jonny Diamond, Editor in Chief

Álvaro Enrigue, tr. Natasha Wimmer, Sudden Death (2016)

I have, from time to time, been accused of only liking “cold” literature. Writers like Tom McCarthy, W. G. Sebald, Rachel Cusk, David Markson, whose primary pleasures (one could argue) are intellectual, not emotional. I will not deny it.  (Well, I’ll deny the “only,” maybe downshift it to a “primarily.”) I’d personally much rather be dazzled by prose and form than fully convinced of a fictional character’s personhood and traumatized by their love affairs over a few hundred pages. And those who feel the opposite may not go in for Álvaro Enrigue’s amusing, ramshackle, hyper-intellectual, mischievous tennis match of a novel, Sudden Death, but those with similar proclivities should pick it up immediately.

It is more or less half about an imaginary game of tennis played between Caravaggio (yes, the painter) and Quevedo (the poet), who are using a tennis ball made out of Anne Boleyn’s hair (why not), and half a smattering of other historical musings and anecdotes (one of the most striking is the story of Cortés and La Malinche), with all the timelines thrown together, including some of our current ones (this novel includes emails written between Enrigue and his editor).

None of it makes any overarching sense, exactly, and the many moving parts don’t quite fit together, but they don’t need to. Each one is sheer delight and obvious brilliance, which makes the experience of reading this novel something of an intellectual thrill, and that is more than enough for me.  –Emily Temple, Senior Editor

Andrés Barba, tr. Lisa Dillman, Such Small Hands (2017)

Andrés Barba’s Such Small Hands will haunt you. It begins, “Her father died instantly, her mother in the hospital.” This is how we are introduced to seven-year-old Marina, left parentless after a horrible car accident. But the story isn’t so much about the tragedy as it is about the ways she copes with it, starting with language. The first section has her repeat that horrible first line many times, like a refrain. From the concerned paramedics: “But the girl doesn’t cry, doesn’t erupt, doesn’t react. The girl still inhabits the suburbs of the words.” The suburbs of the words!! In Lisa Dillman’s beautiful and biting translation, Andrés Barba gives a physicality to miscommunication and the feeling of dislocation in such a powerful and surprising way. (I read this slender gem of a novel months ago, and I still think of this phrasing often.) Another shiny turn of phrase: “A second later it broke. What did? Logic. Like a melon dropped on the ground, split in one go. It started like a crack in the seat she sat on, its contact was no longer the same contact: the seatbelt had become severe.”

All of Such Small Hands reads like logic breaking, like a melon dropping on the ground. It is the unexpected word choice (the seatbelt had become severe!) that makes this work simultaneously sinister and a joy to read. After the car accident, we follow Marina to an orphanage, where she struggles to find her place amongst the other girls there. In this section, another unexpected turn: the narration starts to switch off, and the reader is met by the collective “we” of the girls who came before her. We (the readers) are brought gracefully into that special realm of make-believe that they have created for themselves, where there exists the real world and the world they all agree on: “We used to touch the fig tree in the garden and say, ‘This is the castle.’ And then we walked to the black sculpture and said, ‘This is the devil.’” Marina eventually finds her place by introducing a menacing game to the orphanage. At only 94 pages, Such Small Hands is a cruelly quick read that makes you feel, in the best way, like the walls of language are closing in on you.  –Katie Yee, Book Marks Assistant Editor

Samanta Schweblin, tr. Megan McDowell, Fever Dream (2017)

While Fever Dream, Argentine writer Samanta Schweblin’s mesmerizingly eerie debut novel (novella, really, but who cares), isn’t what you’d call an enjoyable read, it is a remarkably intense and compelling work of existential and environmental dread. A hallucinatory eco-parable clocking in at less than 200 pages, it tells the story of a young woman, Amanda, dying in a hospital bed in rural Argentina, and of the creepy young boy, David, with whom she is carrying on a surreal and fragmented dialogue. Both David and Amanda, as well as Amanda’s missing daughter and the rest of the town’s children, have been poisoned by toxic agricultural chemicals, and while a mysterious local healer saved David’s life, he also replaced half of the boy’s soul with that of a stranger. As you do. And so David and Amanda excavate distressing memories of the recent past together—he the interrogator, uttering the same “That is not important” when displeased, and she the delirious subject, grasping at disintegrating images to stave off nonexistence. As Jia Tolentino wrote in the New Yorker: “The reader begins to feel as if she is Amanda, tethered to a conversation that thrums with malevolence but which provides the only alternative to the void.” The cursed offspring of Waiting for Godot and Pedro Páramo (Juan Ruflo’s iconic 1955 novella about a man returning to his dead mother’s hometown in search of his father, only to find it peopled entirely by ghosts), Fever Dream is a literary haunting of the highest order.   –Dan Sheehan, Book Marks Editor

Yan Lianke, tr. Carlos Rojas, The Years, Months, Days (2017)

Okay, I know picking The Years, Months, Days is sort of cheating because technically it’s two novellas, but I had to champion them somehow because they’ve really stuck with me.

The eponymous novella follows an old man known only as the Elder in his last days of the abandoned village he calls home. A terrible drought has forced the rest of the residents to flee, leaving the Elder and his vision-impaired dog, Blindy, as the sole inhabitants. They become obsessed with salvaging seeds and attempting to grow a new crop for the next season. The bond between the two, the way the dog becomes a way for the Elder to project his thoughts and feelings, is part of what makes this such an interesting story. It is very much a tale about survival, and it will stick its struggling claws in you, much like the second novella, “Marrow,” which tells the story of a widow who will do anything (anything!) to provide a more normal life for her disabled children. She discovers that soup made of bone marrow (especially that of kin) is the solution. She feeds her children soup made of the marrow of their deceased father. It is a chilling story of sacrifice and the lengths a mother will go to to help her children.

It is dark, yes, but there is also something sly and funny in it. It reads like a wink. It feels like a tale being told, like a fable. While the circumstances are dire and shocking, once you enter this surreal world, you might not be surprised at what happens to the characters in it. There is a beautiful, understated repetition to these pages that creates the eerie feeling that you’ve been here before, that you know what’s coming. The prose cradles you in dread. Yan Lianke was the recipient of China’s Lu Xun Literary Prize and the Franz Kafka Award, in addition to being a Man Booker International Prize finalist. His writing, wonderfully translated from the Chinese by Carlos Rojas, feels like a very old, very magical folktale being passed on to you.  –Katie Yee, Book Marks Assistant Editor

Sayaka Murata, tr. Ginny Tapley Takemori, Convenience Store Woman (2018)

A number of the reviews of Sayaka Murata’s slim, dry, and very funny novel about a 30-something convenience store worker use the word “weird” to describe it. “It’s the novel’s cumulative, idiosyncratic poetry that lingers, attaining a weird, fluorescent kind of beauty all of its own,” writes Julie Myerson in The Guardian. I agree—Convenience Store Woman is weird, in a deeply enjoyable way. Its narrator and protagonist, Keiko, is weird, too—she has been aware, since childhood, of her strangeness, and has taken some pains to cloak her differences (peeking at the labels on a coworker’s clothing in order to imitate her manner of dress, for instance). But Keiko isn’t tormented by her strangeness, and her efforts to conform are mostly so she can live her life unharassed, doing what she loves: working at a convenience store.  Keiko’s—and by extension, the novel’s—voice is a clipped deadpan. It’s simple and even repetitive, like the tasks Keiko performs at her job each day, but not monotonous. It reads, by turns, like a love story (woman meets store), an unusually charming employee handbook, and a psychological thriller—but somehow, it never feels disjointed. It was interesting to read this novel in the midst of a glut of English books about the dehumanizing nature of underemployment. Convenience Store Woman doesn’t, in my reading, take a stance on the Value of Work. Instead, it presents Keiko in all her glorious strangeness, and invites the reader to delight in it.  –Jessie Gaynor, Social Media Editor

Negar Djavadi, tr. Tina Kover, Disoriental (2018)

I am the lover of a certain kind of story, where geographic and interior movement shape one another across various countries and times. This is often explicitly a story about migration and the multiple generations of a family that such movement influences. French-Iranian screenwriter Négar Djavadi’s debut novel ticks these boxes, though it is also a somewhat comic epic about familial fate, sexual awakenings, traditional and unorthodox gender roles, political dissent, and the modern history of Iran. At least one event in Djavadi’s own childhood mirrors something that happens to her protagonist, Kimiâ. Like Kimiâ, Djavadi was born in Tehran shortly before the Iranian Revolution and can remember when she and her family fled as exiles opposed to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. At one point in the book, Kimiâ and her mother are literally smuggled into their lives on horseback. Kimiâ is the daughter of Sara and journalist-activist Darius Sadr, the man who occupies much of the novel as a loving but aloof figure who has decided that the fight for his country’s soul matters more than the preservation of his family. Kimiâ’s story is partly an attempt to understand Darius, and Darius’s effects on Sara, but also the patriarchal norms that were being upended in a modernizing Iran. Djavadi isn’t content exploring only the disorientation caused by cultural and political revolution; the novel’s transition to Paris brings with it a shift in self-awareness, too. Kimiâ came from an upper-class Iranian family that was something of intellectual royalty, though in France the notion of such stability and assurance begins to seem a silly thing. Disoriental plays with various genres, from magical to social realism, and in its wonderful English translation by Tina Kover, did so at a time when borders between totalitarianism and democracy; Europe and the Middle East; and men and women were being questioned anew.  –Aaron Robertson, Assistant Editor

Scholastique Mukasonga, tr. Jordan Stump, The Barefoot Woman (2019)

Set in Rwanda, before the genocide, The Barefoot Woman defies categorization—it sometimes is described as memoir, others as fiction, but no matter the label it is a tribute of a daughter, Scholastique, to her loving mother, Stefania. The first time Stefania speaks, she says, “When I die, when you see me lying dead before you, you’ll have to cover my body.” These words haunt the rest of the book’s pages, and signify just one of the many recurring instances when Stefania will tell her three daughters stories foreshadowing her death. Though Scholastique is just a young girl and admits she does not always comprehend her mother’s warnings, her mother’s “land of stories” “impregnated the slow drift of [her] reveries.” Bearing in mind the impending genocide while reading, imbues each page with an additional sonorous depth, and as contraries fuel each other, the monstrousness and tragedy of the genocide fortify the mother’s love.

Scholastique Mukasonga reveals, throughout the book, the daily life, customs, and labor that bound mother and daughter and the rest of the Tutsi women to each other and to their land. Each chapter represents a different window into their entwined lives: on “Bread,” on “Sorghum,” on “Beauty and Marriage.” The encroaching violence against Rwanda is felt from the first pages but is anchored by the mother whose worry for her children drives her fastidious efforts to save them; she teaches them the path to the border, she hides food, she listens like a hawk to any sounds of approaching militia. A Finalist for the National Book Award for Translated Literature, The Barefoot Woman is described by Zadie Smith as a “simultaneously a powerful work of witness and memorial, a loving act of reconstruction, and an unflinching reckoning with the Rwandan Civil War.” The memories of childhood, a lost home, a mother who sacrificed herself are the pounding heart of the book, and Mukasonga has produced a work that anyone who might read it will remember.  –Eleni Theodoropoulos, Editorial Fellow

***

Honorable Mentions

A selection of other books that we seriously considered for both lists—just to be extra about it (and because decisions are hard).

Haruki Murakami, tr. Jay Rubin and Philip Gabriel, 1Q84 (2011) · Peter Nadas, tr. Imre Goldstein, Parallel Stories (2011) · Alina Bronsky, tr. Tim Mohr, The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine (2011) · Peter Stamm, tr. Michael Hofmann, Seven Years (2011) · Santiago Gamboa, tr. Howard Curtis, Night Prayers (2012) · Laurent Binet, tr. Sam Taylor, HHhH (2012) · Javier Marías, tr. Margaret Jull Costa, The Infatuations (2013) · Herman Koch, tr. Sam Garrett, The Dinner (2013) · Patrick Modiano, tr. Euan Cameron, So You Don’t Get Lost in the Neighborhood (2015) · Daniel Galera, tr. Alison Entrekin, Blood Drenched Beard (2015) · Juan Gabriel Vásquez, tr. Anne McLean, Reputations (2016) · Stefan Hertmans, tr. David McKay, War and Turpentine (2016) · Johanna Sinisalo, tr. Lola Rogers, The Core of the Sun (2016) · Yoko Tawada, tr. Susan Bernofsky, Memoirs of a Polar Bear (2016) · Edouard Louis, tr. Michael Lucey, The End of Eddy (2017) · Domenico Starnone, tr. Jhumpa Lahiri, Ties (2017) · Cristina Rivera Garza, tr. Sarah Booker, The Iliac Crest (2017)· Elvira Navarro, tr. Christina MacSweeney, A Working Woman (2017) · Mathias Enard, tr. Charlotte Mandell, Compass (2017) · Pola Oloixarac, tr. Roy Kesey, Savage Theories (2017) · Hideo Yokoyama, tr. Jonathan Lloyd-Davies, Six Four (2017) · Anne Serre, tr. Mark Hutchinson, The Governesses (2018) · Jenny Erpenbeck, tr. Susan Bernofsky, Go, Went, Gone (2018) · Patrick Chamoiseau, tr. Linda Coverdale, Slave Old Man (2018) · Dubravka Ugrešić, tr. Ellen Elias-Bursać and David Williams, Fox (2018) · Leila Slimani, tr. Sam Taylor, The Perfect Nanny (2018) · Roque Larraquy, tr. Heather Cleary, Comemadre (2018) · Jose Revueltas, tr. Amanda Hopkinson and Sophie Hughes, The Hole (2018) · Henne Orstavik, tr. Martin Aitken, Love (2018) · Yukio Mishima, tr. Andrew Clare, The Frolic of the Beasts (2018) · Yoko Tawada, tr. Margaret Mitsutani, The Emissary (2018) · Khaled Khalifa, tr. Leri Price, Death Is Hard Work (2019) · Yoko Ogawa, tr. Stephen Snyder, The Memory Police (2019), Valérie Mréjen, tr. Katie Shireen Assef, Black Forest (2019) · Olga Tokarczuk, tr. Antonia Lloyd-Jones, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (2019) · María Gainza, tr. Thomas Bunstead, Optic Nerve (2019).