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The 10 Best Books of 2021

Editors at The Times Book Review choose the best fiction and nonfiction titles this year.

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How Beautiful We Were

By imbolo mbue.

books about books 2021

Following her 2016 debut, “ Behold the Dreamers ,” Mbue’s sweeping and quietly devastating second novel begins in 1980 in the fictional African village of Kosawa, where representatives from an American oil company have come to meet with the locals, whose children are dying because of the environmental havoc (fallow fields, poisoned water) wreaked by its drilling and pipelines. This decades-spanning fable of power and corruption turns out to be something much less clear-cut than the familiar David-and-Goliath tale of a sociopathic corporation and the lives it steamrolls. Through the eyes of Kosawa’s citizens young and old, Mbue constructs a nuanced exploration of self-interest, of what it means to want in the age of capitalism and colonialism — these machines of malicious, insatiable wanting.

Random House. $28. | Read our review | Read our profile of Mbue | Listen to Mbue on the podcast

By Katie Kitamura

In Kitamura’s fourth novel, an unnamed court translator in The Hague is tasked with intimately vanishing into the voices and stories of war criminals whom she alone can communicate with; falling meanwhile into a tumultuous entanglement with a man whose marriage may or may not be over for good. Kitamura’s sleek and spare prose elegantly breaks grammatical convention, mirroring the book’s concern with the bleeding lines between intimacies — especially between the sincere and the coercive. Like her previous novel, “A Separation,” “Intimacies” scrutinizes the knowability of those around us, not as an end in itself but as a lens on grand social issues from gentrification to colonialism to feminism. The path a life cuts through the world, this book seems to say, has its greatest significance in the effect it has on others.

Riverhead Books. $26. | Read our review | Read our profile of Kitamura

The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois

By honorée fanonne jeffers.

“The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois,” the first novel by Jeffers, a celebrated poet, is many things at once: a moving coming-of-age saga, an examination of race and an excavation of American history. It cuts back and forth between the tale of Ailey Pearl Garfield, a Black girl growing up at the end of the 20th century, and the “songs” of her ancestors, Native Americans and enslaved African Americans who lived through the formation of the United States. As their stories converge, “Love Songs” creates an unforgettable portrait of Black life that reveals how the past still reverberates today.

Harper/HarperCollins. $28.99. | Read our review | Listen to Jeffers on the podcast

No One Is Talking About This

By patricia lockwood.

Lockwood first found acclaim as a poet on the internet, with gloriously inventive and ribald verse — sexts elevated to virtuosity. In “ Priestdaddy ,” her indelible 2017 memoir about growing up in rectories across the Midwest presided over by her gun-loving, guitar-playing father, a Catholic priest, she called tweeting “an art form, like sculpture, or honking the national anthem under your armpit.” Here, in her first novel, she distills the pleasures and deprivations of life split between online and flesh-and-blood interactions, transfiguring the dissonance into art. The result is a book that reads like a prose poem, at once sublime, profane, intimate, philosophical, hilarious and, eventually, deeply moving.

Riverhead Books. $25. | Read our review | Read our profile of Lockwood

When We Cease to Understand the World

By benjamín labatut. translated by adrian nathan west..

Labatut expertly stitches together the stories of the 20th century’s greatest thinkers to explore both the ecstasy and agony of scientific breakthroughs: their immense gains for society as well as their steep human costs. His journey to the outermost edges of knowledge — guided by the mathematician Alexander Grothendieck , the physicist Werner Heisenberg and the chemist Fritz Haber , among others — offers glimpses of a universe with limitless potential underlying the observable world, a “dark nucleus at the heart of things” that some of its witnesses decide is better left alone. This extraordinary hybrid of fiction and nonfiction also provokes the frisson of an extended true-or-false test: The further we read, the blurrier the line gets between fact and fabulism.

New York Review Books. Paper, $17.95. | Read our review

The Copenhagen Trilogy: Childhood; Youth; Dependency

By tove ditlevsen. translated by tiina nunnally and michael favala goldman..

Ditlevsen’s gorgeous memoirs, first published in Denmark in the 1960s and ’70s and collected here in a single volume, detail her hardscrabble upbringing, career path and merciless addictions: a powerful account of the struggle to reconcile art and life. She joined the working ranks at 14, became a renowned poet by her early 20s, and found herself, after two failed marriages, wedded to a psychopathic doctor and hopelessly dependent on opioids by her 30s. Yet for all the dramatic twists of her life, these books together project a stunning clarity, humor and candidness, casting light not just on the world’s harsh realities but on the inexplicable impulses of our secret selves.

Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $30. | Read our review

How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America

By clint smith.

For this timely and thought-provoking book, Smith, a poet and journalist, toured sites key to the history of slavery and its present-day legacy, including Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello; Angola, the Louisiana State Penitentiary; and a Confederate cemetery. Interspersing interviews with the tourists, guides, activists and local historians he meets along the way with close readings of scholarship and poignant personal reflection, Smith holds up a mirror to America’s fraught relationship with its past, capturing a potent mixture of good intentions, earnest corrective, willful ignorance and blatant distortion.

Little, Brown & Company. $29. | Read our review | Listen to Smith on the podcast

Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival and Hope in an American City

By andrea elliott.

To expand on her acclaimed 2013 series for The Times about Dasani Coates, a homeless New York schoolgirl, and her family, Elliott spent years following her subjects in their daily lives, through shelters, schools, courtrooms and welfare offices. The book she has produced — intimately reported, elegantly written and suffused with the fierce love and savvy observations of Dasani and her mother — is a searing account of one family’s struggle with poverty, homelessness and addiction in a city and country that have failed to address these issues with efficacy or compassion.

Random House. $30. | Read our review | Listen to Elliott on the podcast

On Juneteenth

By annette gordon-reed.

This book weaves together history and memoir into a short volume that is insightful, touching and courageous. Exploring the racial and social complexities of Texas, her home state, Gordon-Reed asks readers to step back from the current heated debates and take a more nuanced look at history and the surprises it can offer. Such a perspective comes easy to her because she was a part of history — the first Black child to integrate her East Texas school. On several occasions, she found herself shunned by whites and Blacks alike, learning at an early age that breaking the color line can be threatening to both races.

Liveright Publishing. $15.95. | Read our review | Listen to Gordon-Reed on the podcast

Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath

By heather clark.

It’s daring to undertake a new biography of Plath, whose life, and death by suicide at 30 in 1963, have been thoroughly picked over by scholars. Yet this meticulously researched and, at more than 1,000 pages, unexpectedly riveting portrait is a monumental achievement. Determined to rescue the poet from posthumous caricature as a doomed madwoman and “reposition her as one of the most important American writers of the 20th century,” Clark, a professor of poetry in England, delivers a transporting account of a rare literary talent and the familial and intellectual milieu that both thwarted and encouraged her, enlivened throughout by quotations from Plath’s letters, diaries, poetry and prose.

Alfred A. Knopf. $40. | Read our review

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The best books of 2021

John le Carré’s final novel, the race to make a vaccine and the conclusion of the groundbreaking Noughts and Crosses series… Guardian critics pick the year’s best fiction, politics, science, children’s books and more. Let us know in the comments what your favourite books have been.

  • The Observer’s best books of 2021, chosen by guest authors

Best fiction of 2021.

Sally Rooney’s much-anticipated third novel, Damon Galgut’s Booker-winning family saga and Kazuo Ishiguro’s take on AI - Justine Jordan chooses the best novels of the year.

Read the full list Best fiction of 2021

Children’s books

Best children’s books of 2021.

Imogen Russell Williams on reimaginings of King Arthur and Medusa, luminous fairytales and the conclusion to the unforgettable Noughts and Crosses series - plus books for young readers by Ben Okri and inaugural poet Amanda Gorman.

Read the full list Best children’s books of 2021

Crime and thrillers

Best crime novels and thrillers of 2021.

Final outings from John le Carré and Andrea Camilleri, plus three standout debuts - Laura Wilson picks five of the year’s best thrillers and crime novels.

Read the full list Best crime and thrillers of 2021

Science fiction

Best science fiction of 2021.

Adam Roberts selects five of the best science fiction novels of the year - from murder on a spaceship to a feminist utopia.

Read the full list Best science fiction books of 2021

Biography and memoir

Best biography and memoir books of 2021

Fiona Sturges rounds up the best celebrity autobiographies, from Brian Cox to Miriam Margolyes, as well as a poignant account of a woman who helped Aids patients and terrific studies of DH Lawrence and Barbara Pym.

Read the full list Best biography and memoir books of 2021

Best politics books of 2021.

The inside stories of Brexit, Sage and Unite, plus a reckoning with Britain’s imperial history - Gaby Hinsliff’s choice of books about politics and politicians.

Read the full list Best politics books of 2021

Best sport books of 2021.

Nicholas Wroe picks the best books about sport, covering everything from racism on the pitch to the history of female cycling - as well as memoirs by Billie Jean King and Rob Burrow.

Read the full list Best sport books of 2021

Best science books of 2021.

Ian Sample on a history of quarantine, a biography of the family that helped to fuel the US opioid crisis and the inside story of how the Oxford vaccine was made.

Read the full list Best science books of 2021

Best poetry books of 2021.

Covid-19 and the climate crisis haunt much of this year’s poetry, including Michael Rosen’s response to his experience in intensive care and Kate Simpson’s hopeful environmentally-themed anthology - Rishi Dastidar picks the best collections.

Read the full list Best poetry books of 2021

Comics and graphic novels

Best comics and graphic novels of 2021.

The return of Alison Bechdel, a cold war epic and a nuanced observation of a mother’s illness - James Smart marks a year of excellent graphic books.

Read the full list Best comics and graphic novels of 2021

Best music books of 2021.

Alexis Petridis chooses the best books about music and musicians - including Sinéad O’Connor’s striking memoir, Paul McCartney’s autobiography in lyrics and the story of a stolen piece of Nina Simone’s chewing gum.

Read the full list Best music books of 2021

Best food books of 2021.

A fascinating memoir of food and grief, Stanley Tucci’s life story in recipes and new cookbooks from Ruby Tandoh and the Ottolenghi test kitchen - Rukmini Iyer selects the best food books of the year.

Read the full list Best food books of 2021
  • Best books of the year
  • Best books of 2021

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Penguin Random House

The Must-Read Books of 2021

2021 has brought us some incredible titles. if you want to read the books that people couldn’t stop talking about this year, see below for our list of powerful memoirs, page-turning novels, and more.

Project Hail Mary Book Cover Picture

Project Hail Mary

By andy weir, paperback $20.00, buy from other retailers:.

Hamnet Book Cover Picture

by Maggie O'Farrell

Paperback $16.95.

Klara and the Sun Book Cover Picture

Klara and the Sun

By kazuo ishiguro, paperback $18.00.

The Anthropocene Reviewed Book Cover Picture

The Anthropocene Reviewed

By john green.

Gold Diggers Book Cover Picture

Gold Diggers

By sanjena sathian, paperback $17.00.

Broken Horses Book Cover Picture

Broken Horses

By brandi carlile.

Before She Disappeared Book Cover Picture

Before She Disappeared

By lisa gardner.

The Prophets Book Cover Picture

The Prophets

By robert jones, jr..

Four Hundred Souls Book Cover Picture

Four Hundred Souls

By ibram x. kendi and keisha n. blain.

Great Circle Book Cover Picture

Great Circle

By maggie shipstead.

People We Meet on Vacation Book Cover Picture

People We Meet on Vacation

By emily henry, paperback $16.00.

My Life in Full Book Cover Picture

My Life in Full

By indra nooyi, hardcover $28.00.

Crying in H Mart Book Cover Picture

Crying in H Mart

By michelle zauner.

Oh William! Book Cover Picture

Oh William!

By elizabeth strout.

Malibu Rising Book Cover Picture

Malibu Rising

By taylor jenkins reid.

The Turnout Book Cover Picture

The Turnout

By megan abbott.

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain Book Cover Picture

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain

By george saunders.

How to Avoid a Climate Disaster Book Cover Picture

How to Avoid a Climate Disaster

By bill gates.

The Sum of Us Book Cover Picture

The Sum of Us

By heather mcghee.

Call Us What We Carry Book Cover Picture

Call Us What We Carry

By amanda gorman, paperback $17.99.

While Justice Sleeps Book Cover Picture

While Justice Sleeps

By stacey abrams.

1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows Book Cover Picture

1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows

By ai weiwei, paperback $18.99.

Yearbook Book Cover Picture

by Seth Rogen

The Paper Palace (Reese's Book Club) Book Cover Picture

The Paper Palace (Reese’s Book Club)

By miranda cowley heller.

Empire of Pain Book Cover Picture

Empire of Pain

By patrick radden keefe.

The Judge's List Book Cover Picture

The Judge’s List

By john grisham.

Beautiful Country Book Cover Picture

Beautiful Country

By qian julie wang.

Will Book Cover Picture

by Will Smith

Hardcover $30.00.

Whereabouts Book Cover Picture

Whereabouts

By jhumpa lahiri.

Go Tell the Bees That I Am Gone Book Cover Picture

Go Tell the Bees That I Am Gone

By diana gabaldon, paperback $22.00.

Harlem Shuffle Book Cover Picture

Harlem Shuffle

By colson whitehead.

Matrix Book Cover Picture

by Lauren Groff

A Slow Fire Burning Book Cover Picture

A Slow Fire Burning

By paula hawkins.

No Cure for Being Human Book Cover Picture

No Cure for Being Human

By kate bowler.

The Lincoln Highway Book Cover Picture

The Lincoln Highway

By amor towles, paperback $19.00.

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The Best Books We Read in 2021

By The New Yorker

Illustration of hand writing

“ De Gaulle ,” by Julian Jackson

Black and white cover image of an archival photograph of Charles de Gaulle in military uniform with men in suits and the...

New Yorker writers reflect on the year’s highs and lows.

This superb biography of the former French leader brilliantly explores how he managed to dominate his country’s political life for decades. Jackson’s account of De Gaulle’s youth and conservative milieu only enhances one’s respect for De Gaulle’s stand, in 1940, against the Vichy government, and his account of De Gaulle’s war years in London makes clear why Churchill and Roosevelt found him almost impossible to deal with. The second half of the book—which deals with De Gaulle’s return to power during the conflict in Algeria, and his somewhat autocratic presidency—is even more compelling; together the two halves form as good an argument as one can make for believing that a single individual can alter the course of history. But Jackson, with sublime prose and a sure grasp of the politics and personalities of the Third, Fourth, and Fifth Republics, never allows that argument to overshadow De Gaulle’s extremely difficult and domineering personality, and why it never entirely fit the democracy he helped rescue and then presided over. —Isaac Chotiner

“ Segu: A Novel ,” by Maryse Condé

Red black and yellow book cover with an old drawing of 5 people and a horse.

In a year that began with an attempted coup, it was good to remember that zealotry and factionalism have menaced every society—and often make for excellent storytelling, too. Maryse Condé’s 1984 novel “Segu” opens in the ruthlessly competitive capital of the eighteenth-century Bambara Empire, in present-day Mali, where the ruling mansa uneasily monitors the rise of Islam and the mysterious arrival of white explorers. Griots sing the exploits of a noble family, the Traores, whose sons are destined to suffer every consequence of modernity’s upheavals. Condé, who was born in Guadeloupe but spent years in West Africa, is the great novelist of the Afro-Atlantic world, and “Segu,” her masterpiece, is the mother of diaspora epics. The novel follows the Traores as they are scattered across the globe, from Moroccan universities to Brazilian sugarcane fields, pulled every which way by their ambitions, lusts, and religious yearnings. Condé excels at evoking the tensions of a world in flux, whether it’s the ambivalence of a man torn between his family gods and Islam’s cosmopolitanism or the cynicism of a wealthy mixed woman who sells slaves on the coast of Senegal. Despite its magisterial scope, “Segu” is also warm and gossipy, and completely devoid of the sentimental attachment to heritage that turns too many family sagas into ancestral stations of the cross. Condé has a wicked sense of humor that doesn’t play favorites, especially with her mostly male protagonists, whose naïve adventurism and absent-minded cruelty (especially toward women) profoundly shape the history that eludes their grasp. —Julian Lucas

“ Upper Bohemia: A Memoir ,” by Hayden Herrera

Black and white image of two children leaning out of a vintage car window. The title of the book covers part of the image.

I came upon this recent memoir while browsing the shelves at the Brooklyn Public Library, and was immediately drawn in by its cover: a black-and-white photograph of two young girls, perched out the back window of a sports car, whose ruffled blouses and blond hair suggested a kind of patrician free-spiritedness. Herrera is known for her biographies of artists such as Frida Kahlo and Arshile Gorky, but in “Upper Bohemia” she turns to the story of her own family, a high-Wasp clan as privileged as it was screwed up. During the nineteen-forties and fifties, Herrera and her older sister Blair were shunted, willy-nilly, between their divorced parents, both of whom were possessed of great looks, flighty temperaments, and intense narcissism. Her mother and father—each married five times—often disregarded the girls, treating them as considerably less significant than their own artistic or sexual fulfillment, whose pursuit took them through urbane, artsy circles in Cape Cod and New York, Mexico City and Cambridge. Herrera tells a fascinating cultural history of a particular milieu, but what is most affecting is her ability to channel, in sensate detail, the life of a lonely child trying to make sense of the world around her. Her tone carries a measure of detachment, but I often found it immensely moving. “Blair and I had not spent much time with our mother since the fall of 1948 when, after putting us on a train to go to boarding school in Vermont, she drove to Mexico to get a divorce,” she writes. “Whenever our mother did turn up, she brought presents from Mexico, animals made of clay or embroidered blouses for Blair and me. She always made everything sound wonderful. She was like sunshine. Blair and I moved toward her like two Icaruses, but we never touched her golden rays.” This is a beautiful book. —Naomi Fry

“ Long Live the Post Horn! ,” by Vigdis Hjorth, translated by Charlotte Barslund

Photograph of a hand reaching up to a phone on a desk where two framed pictures one of a building and one of a redheaded...

Vigdis Hjorth’s “Long Live the Post Horn!”—a swift, darkly funny novel about existential despair, collective commitment, and the Norwegian postal service—buoyed me during this strange, roiling year. Ellinor, the novel’s narrator, is a thirty-five-year-old public-relations consultant whose projects and relationships are characterized by a bleak, steady detachment. When her colleague Dag leaves town, Ellinor grudgingly inherits one of his clients: Postkom, the Norwegian Post and Communications Union, which wants to fight an E.U. directive that would usher in competition from the private sector. For Ellinor, the project begins creakily; gradually, she gets swept up. What results is a personal awakening of sorts—a newfound desire to live, connect, and communicate—and a genuinely gripping treatment of bureaucratic tedium. “Long Live the Post Horn!” is rich with political and philosophical inquiries, and gentle with their delivery. They arrive in the form of dissociative diary entries, awkward Christmas gift exchanges, and the world’s loneliest description of a sex toy (“he had bought the most popular model online, the one with the highest ratings”). There’s also a long yarn told by a postal worker, which makes for a wonderful, near-mythic embedded narrative. “What exactly did ‘real’ mean?” Ellinor wonders, experiencing a crisis of authenticity while desperately trying to produce P.R. copy for the Real Thing, an American restaurant chain. “Was the man behind the Real Thing himself the real thing, I wondered? I googled him; he looked like every other capitalist.” Expansive and mundane—this novel was, for me, sheer joy. —Anna Wiener

“ Free: A Child and a Country at the End of History ,” by Lea Ypi

A statue against a red background.

Some people feel free to imagine their lives unbounded by history. Lea Ypi did not have that luxury. Born in 1979 in Albania, then one of the most sealed-off countries in the Communist bloc, she had little reason to question her love for Stalin until the day, in 1990, that she went to hug his statue and found that protesters had decapitated it. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, the edifice of Albanian socialism collapsed, too. Even more disorienting was the fact that Ypi’s parents turned out never to have believed in it—they’d just talked a good line to prevent their dissident, bourgeois backgrounds from tainting her prospects. Ypi’s new book, “Free,” out in the U.K. and to be published stateside in January, is a tart and tender childhood memoir. But it’s also a work of social criticism, and a meditation on how to live with purpose in a world where history, far from having ended, seems energized by disinformation. Ypi, a political theorist at the London School of Economics, is interested in how categories of thought—“proletariat,” for instance—were replaced by reductive rallying cries like “freedom.” “When freedom finally arrived, it was like a dish served frozen,” she writes. “We chewed little, swallowed fast and remained hungry.” Her parents became leaders in the new democratic opposition but lost their savings to a shady investment scheme, and when the country devolved into civil war, in 1997, her formidable mother had to leave for Italy, where she worked cleaning houses. When Ypi studied abroad, her leftist friends didn’t want to hear about her experience: their socialism would be done right, and Albania’s was best forgotten. But Ypi is not in the business of forgetting—neither the repression of the system she grew up in nor the harshness of capitalism. Her book is a quick read, but, like Marx’s spectre haunting Europe, it stays with you. —Margaret Talbot

“ Harrow: A Novel ,” by Joy Williams

Bright green cover with an illustration of a horse stuck in black oil at the center.

I have already written at length about the wonder of Joy Williams’s most recent novel , “Harrow.” But I feel compelled to re-state my case. The book is set in a world that climate change has transformed into a grave, and it’s dense with wild oddity, mystical intelligence, and with a keenness and beauty that start at the sentence level but sink down to the book’s core. “Harrow” tracks a teen-ager named Khristen across the desert, where she eventually meets up with a sort of “terrorist hospice” of retirees determined to avenge the earth. Her companion, Jeffrey, is either a ten-year-old with an alcoholic mother or the Judge of the Underworld. Williams, the real Judge of the Underworld, moonlights here as a theologist, animal-rights activist, mad oracle, social historian, and philosopher of language. Her comic set pieces—e.g., a birthday party in which the hastily provisioned cake depicts a replica, in icing, of Goya’s “Saturn Devouring His Son”—unlock tears, and her elegies wrest out laughter, if only because it’s absurd to find such pleasure in a study of devastation. When the book was over, I missed the awful, cleansing darkness of its eyes upon me. —Katy Waldman

“ A Mad Love: An Introduction to Opera ,” by Vivien Schweitzer

Blue image of an opera stage where one character points a sword at another character who lies on the floor in the...

My late grandfather spent most of his weekends holed up in his study—a sunken room, adorned with a ratty Chesterfield sofa and posters from various international chess championships—listening to opera. As a child, I found this practice impenetrable. I didn’t understand the languages blaring out of his record player, and I wasn’t old enough to grasp the rhapsodic emotion inherent in the form. Opera is about Big Feelings; it radiates youth, yet it remains a passion that most people age into. (Perhaps that has something to do with the cost of a Met ticket.) Then the pandemic hit, and suddenly all I wanted to do was listen to Maria Callas, whose unhinged arias clicked into place as the soundtrack for my anxious, pacing mind. My grandfather was no longer around to discuss my fixation, but, fortunately, I found Vivien Schweitzer’s 2018 book, “A Mad Love,” which is a sparkling cultural history of opera’s greatest composers and their obsessive brains. Beginning with Monteverdi and barrelling through to Philip Glass, the book is about the blood and sweat that goes into writing an opera (an often lunatic effort, it seems), and about the feverish attachment fans have to the resulting work. I found myself tearing through it in the bathtub, delighted not just to inhale the gossipy backstories of the “Ring” cycle and “La Traviata” but to join the society of opera nuts of which my grandfather was a card-carrying member. I finally understood what he was listening for on those Sunday afternoons: anguish, joy, love, betrayal. —Rachel Syme

“ Not One Day ,” by Anne Garréta, translated by Emma Ramadan

Pink and orange abstract art cover with the title 'Not one day printed in large text.

It is a peculiar feeling, reading a book that seems to have been written for you but wasn’t. The friend who recommended the Oulipian writer Anne Garréta’s “Not One Day” must have known that I would find this merger of intimacy and anonymity irresistible. While recovering from an accident that has left her body immobile, the book’s narrator, a nomadic literature professor, decides that she will write about the women she has desired. Each woman will be identified by a letter of the alphabet; to each letter, she will devote five hours a day for precisely one month. She knows that narrating desire requires discipline—and she finds that desire always, always exceeds it. Letters are skipped and jumbled, so that the table of contents reads, “B, X, E, K, L, D, H, N, Y, C, I, Z.” The narrator takes a long break from the project and, when she comes back to it, one of the stories she writes is fiction. Slowly, the categories that keep desire and its creation of “our little selves” in check—self and other, past and present, man and woman, heterosexual and homosexual, solipsistic alienation and shared passion—get wonderfully and terrifyingly muddled. Instead of a confession written in the familiar “alphabet of desire,” we glimpse the making of a whole new language. I could smother the book with adoration—it is aching and maddening, intelligent and wildly sexy. But it would be simpler to say that reading it is like meeting someone new and feeling the world come undone. Here is a book that insists that the desire for fiction, for its mimicry and its mirage, is indistinguishable from the desire for another person. —Merve Emre

“ Tom Stoppard: A Life ,” by Hermione Lee

Black and white photograph of Tom Stoppard with the title and author's name printed over it in blue and white type.

For a time this year, Lee’s newest biography just seemed to be around , and during a couple weeks when I was ostensibly reading other things, I found myself opening it in odd moments—over breakfast, waiting for the pasta pot to boil—until I realized that I’d worked my way through the whole thing. The biography is nearly nine hundred pages, so my experience of it as a side pleasure, a lark, is a testament to Lee’s craft. Much of Stoppard’s history is widely known: his passage from peripatetic refugee youth to Bristol newspaperman and radio-drama hack, and then, with “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,” to fame and fortune as a witty playwright. What Lee adds is detail, particularly around interesting career turns, plus a big serving of her own admiration. (Not entirely to its credit, I think, this is the sort of biography that everyone dreams of having written about them; our protagonist is always brilliant, invariably a delight. Stoppard, on reading it, was apparently moved to clarify that he was “not as nice as people think.”) What Stoppard contributes is an air of whimsy on the ride up his great tower of success. There is pleasant cohesion to his body of work, with its blend of bookish intellection and breezy verbal humor. Off the page, it becomes clear, he pairs casual social climbing with the cheery pursuit of material ease, often courtesy of Hollywood. He has maintained a stream of scriptwriting work, on projects such as the Indiana Jones franchise, and his constant efforts to boondoggle more luxury out of what’s offered him—his budget must be increased to accommodate a high-end hotel suite, he tells a studio, “because I prefer not to sleep and work in the same room”—are among the smaller charms of this book. Lee’s biography is ultimately such a pleasure, though, because it is a writer’s book: full of respect for the thrill of the craft, able to keep the progress of the life and the work aloft in the right balance. To read it is to be excited about the act of literature all over again. —Nathan Heller

“ Novel 11, Book 18 ,” by Dag Solstad, translated by Sverre Lyngstad

Beige cover with a simple drawing of a shirt and tie and green die.

I first encountered “Novel 11, Book 18,” by the great Norwegian novelist Dag Solstad, on a bright, warm day, on a walk with some friends who were visiting from out of town. Buzzed on the weather and the handsome paperback cover—deep green on cream—and, above all, on the nearness of my friends, I bought it. It was almost funny, then, to discover how relentlessly bleak the book is. Published in 1992, but released in the United States this year, by New Directions, with an English translation by Sverre Lyngstad, it tells the story of Bjørn Hansen, a mild-mannered civil servant who has left his wife and son in pursuit of his lover, Turid Lammers. The change of life means a change of locale: Hansen leaves Oslo and settles in Kongsberg, a small, airless town where he soon joins an amateur theatre troupe, of which Turid is widely considered the most talented performer and a kind of spiritual leader. In probably the best and darkest bit of situational comedy that I read all year, Hansen tries to persuade the troupe—usually a vehicle for light musicals—to put on a production of Henrik Ibsen’s play “The Wild Duck.” He wins out, but the show is a terrible flop—and, worse in Hansen’s eyes, Turid gives a cynical, crowd-pleasing performance that inoculates her, and only her, from the more general disapproval of the audience. The relationship is soon over. Solstad tells the story in deceptively simple sentences that repeat themselves in a fugal fashion, gathering new and ever sadder aspects of meaning as they recur. Hansen, wading through the disappointing wash of his life—he’s having the worst midlife crisis imaginable—eventually cooks up a scheme of revenge that’s so sad and absurd it’s almost slapstick. The book’s generic title implies that tiny tragedies like Hansen’s are happening everywhere, all the time, as a simple cost of being alive. For Solstad, what feels like a reprieve—sun and intimacy, the company of friends—is just another step on a tightrope that stretches across the void. Maybe save this one for summer. —Vinson Cunningham

“ Patch Work: A Life Amongst Clothes ,” by Claire Wilcox

White image of an embroidered piece of fabric with buttons and a needle and thread with text over it.

Among the books that most surprised and most moved me this year was “Patch Work: A Life Amongst Clothes,” a memoir by Claire Wilcox. Wilcox is senior curator of fashion at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, and she writes about clothing with an intoxicating specificity: century-old gowns are made from “narrow lengths of the finest Japanese silk, hand-stitched together and then pleated into rills like the delicate underside of a field mushroom.” But this fragmentary, dreamlike book is not about fashion as it is often understood. There is no industry gossip, no analysis of trends. Rather, Wilcox uses her encounters with objects—the bags of lace in the museum’s collection, the pair of purple velvet trousers she borrowed from a charismatic friend—to explore themes of love and loss, birth and bereavement, family and tribe. The book, which is as skillful and oblique in its structure as the precious gowns she describes, is stitched together with loving care from narrative scraps and images, ultimately revealing how materiality and memory operate on one another, so that the sensation of holding a button in her fingers brings Wilcox back to her earliest memory of fastening her mother’s cardigan: “buttoning and unbuttoning her all the way up, and then all the way down again.” —Rebecca Mead

“ Sabbath’s Theater ,” by Philip Roth

Red cover of a detail of Sailor and Girl  by German painter Otto Dix.

Over the course of the pandemic, the actor John Turturro and I have been adapting Roth’s novel for the stage, so I’ve read the book probably twenty times now. I have been astonished again and again. It’s never the adulterous urinating or alte kaker underwear-sniffing that shock me. It’s Roth’s singular capacity for conjuring death—its promises, its terrors, its reliability, and the relentless ache that it leaves behind. There are times when Roth approaches the subject with a cosmic lightheartedness: “Exactly how present are you, Ma? Are you only here or are you everywhere?” Mickey Sabbath, the aging, insatiable puppeteer, asks his dead mother’s ghost. “Do you know only what you knew when you were living, or do you now know everything, or is ‘knowing’ no longer an issue?” When it pertains to Drenka, Sabbath’s Croatian mistress—his “sidekicker,” as she puts it—death is tinged with so much yearning that it’s almost too much to bear, for both Sabbath and the reader (this one, anyway). “Got used to the oxygen prong in her nose. Got used to the drainage bag pinned to the bed,” Sabbath thinks, recalling the last of many nights he spent at her hospital bedside. “Cancer too widespread for surgery. I’d got used to that, too.” For all of Sabbath’s lubricious opportunism, Drenka is his one love. “We can live with widespread and we can live with tears; night after night, we can live with all of it, as long as it doesn’t stop.” But it does, of course. It always stops. Though not, in this book, for Sabbath, Roth’s most unrepentantly diabolical hero, despite his relentless flirtation with suicide: “He could not fucking die. How could he leave? How could he go? Everything he hated was here.” —Ariel Levy

“ Warmth ,” by Daniel Sherrell

Orange cover with an image of an orange flower field and white and black text.

In “Warmth,” the writer and organizer Daniel Sherrell’s bracing début memoir , he refers to climate change as “the Problem”—the horrifying, galvanizing fact that should cause all sentient people to lose sleep, to shout themselves hoarse, to reorient their lives in fundamental ways. And yet, apart from a small minority, most people seem content to listen to the string ensemble on the deck of the Titanic, shushing anyone who tries to interrupt the music. To be clear, this is my harsh indictment, not Sherrell’s. For an unabashed climate alarmist, he is mostly compassionate to the quietists, in part because, like all Americans, he used to be one. Sherrell was born in 1990. His father, an oceanographer, took long research trips to the polar ice caps. Of all people, the Sherrells understood what an emergency climate change was—and yet their household was a normal one, in the sense that the Problem didn’t come up much. “Even when all the evidence was there before us,” Sherrell writes, “it was difficult to name.” The book is marketed as a climate-grief memoir, and it certainly is that, but what came through for me, even more clearly than the grief, was a kind of existential irony: not only are we apparently unable to solve the Problem, we can’t even seem to find an honest way to talk about it. Most Americans claim to believe the science; the science says that, unless we make drastic changes, the future will be cataclysmic; and yet, Sherrell observes, “it still sounded uncouth, even a little ridiculous, to spell this all out in conversation.” This is the way the world ends: not with a bang, and not even with much of a whimper. “Warmth,” written in the form of a letter to a child that Sherrell may or may not conceive, is not a thesis-y sort of book. But, if it has a central claim, it’s that the activist chestnut “Don’t mourn, organize!” is a facile mantra, a false choice. Why not both? —Andrew Marantz

“ Brothers and Keepers ,” by John Edgar Wideman

Orange and yellow illustration of two hands reaching out for one another.

John Edgar Wideman was teaching at the University of Wyoming in the mid-seventies when, one day, his brother, Robert, showed up in town unannounced. Wideman had a young family and a steady job as a writer and an academic. Robert was on a more tumultuous path; he was on the run after a botched robbery back home, in Pittsburgh, had ended with one of his accomplices shooting a man, who later died from his injuries. Published in 1984, “Brothers and Keepers” is Wideman’s attempt to reckon with their diverging lives, and with the bond that they will never relinquish. He sifts through episodes from their childhood, searching for overlooked turning points. No single genre can tell such a complex story. Sometimes, the book is about the deprivations of the criminal-justice system, as Wideman describes in granular detail his visits to the prison where Robert serves a life term. (Robert would pursue education himself in prison, and, in 2019, his sentence was commuted.) At other times, the book feels surreal and fantastical, as Wideman entertains the possibility that their lives might have taken them elsewhere. And there are moments of austerity and dread, as he contemplates the ethics of turning his brother into a character. I often find that memoirs flatten the degree to which “the personal is political” is an idea rife with contradictions. What makes “Brothers and Keepers” so absorbing is that Wideman feels love but not sympathy—not for his brother, and certainly not for himself. —Hua Hsu

2021 in Review

  • Richard Brody on the best movies .
  • Doreen St. Félix on essential TV shows .
  • Ian Crouch on the funniest jokes .
  • Amanda Petrusich on the best music .
  • Alex Ross on notable performances and recordings .
  • Michael Schulman on the greatest onscreen and onstage performances .
  • Kyle Chayka on the year in vibes .
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Beyond the Myth of Rural America

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books about books 2021

The Ultimate Best Books of 2021 List

Reading all the lists so you don't have to since 2017.

For good or for ill, no matter what happens in any given year—be it insurrection, new variants, the rise of #BookTok, or even a free Britney—the end-of-year lists will go on. And therefore, per Literary Hub tradition , we will count them. After all, didn’t 2021 teach us anything about the value of personal opinions vs. actual data? (No, actually, I’m sorry to say that it looks like it didn’t, but for the record: listen to the data.)

So this year, I counted up 49 lists from 33 outlets (as ever, there are . . . even more out there , but life and time are both finite), which recommended 785 total books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. 138 of those appeared on 3 or more lists, and I have collated those for you here, in descending order of frequency.

Does this mean that these are the absolute Best Books of the Year? Who knows! But if you pay attention to a single popularity contest this year, you could do worse than choosing this one.

Patrick Radden Keefe_Empire of Pain

Patrick Radden Keefe, Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty Patricia Lockwood, No One Is Talking About This

Colson Whitehead Harlem Shuffle

Colson Whitehead, Harlem Shuffle

Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun

Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun Torrey Peters, Detransition, Baby

Jonathan Franzen, Crossroads

Jonathan Franzen, Crossroads Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart: A Memoir

Maggie Shipstead, Great Circle

Maggie Shipstead, Great Circle

Hanif Abdurraqib, A Little Devil in America

Hanif Abdurraqib, A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance Clint Smith, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America

Anthony Veasna So, Afterparties

Anthony Veasna So, Afterparties

Rachel Cusk, Second Place

Rachel Cusk, Second Place Anthony Doerr, Cloud Cuckoo Land Louise Erdrich, The Sentence Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois Katie Kitamura, Intimacies Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You

matrix groff

Lauren Groff, Matrix

My Monticello, Jocelyn Nicole Johnson

Jocelyn Nicole Johnson, My Monticello Robert Jones Jr., The Prophets

How Beautiful We Were by Imbolo Mbue

Imbolo Mbue, How Beautiful We Were George Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain

Melissa Broder, Milk Fed; cover design by Jaya Miceli (Scribner, February)

Melissa Broder, Milk Fed Tove Ditlevsen, tr. Tiina Nunnally and Michael Favala Goldman, The Copenhagen Trilogy: Childhood, Youth, Dependency Ashley C. Ford, Somebody’s Daughter: A Memoir Damon Galgut, The Promise Annette Gordon-Reed, On Juneteenth Kaitlyn Greenidge, Libertie Zakiya Dalila Harris, The Other Black Girl Alexandra Kleeman, Something New Under the Sun Elizabeth Kolbert, Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future Tiya Miles, All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Committed Sarah Ruhl, Smile: The Story of a Face Amor Towles, The Lincoln Highway

Alison Bechdel, The Secret to Superhuman Strength Patricia Engel, Infinite Country Rivka Galchen, Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch Jason Mott, Hell of a Book Pola Oloixarac, tr. Adam Morris Mona Nadia Owusu, Aftershocks: A Memoir Richard Powers, Bewilderment Kristen Radtke, Seek You: A Journey Through American Loneliness Suzanne Simard, Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest Christine Smallwood, The Life of the Mind Dana Spiotta, Wayward Elizabeth Strout, Oh William! Claire Vaye Watkins, I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness Joy Williams, Harrow

Joan Didion, Let Me Tell You What I Mean

Joan Didion, Let Me Tell You What I Mean Rebecca Donner, All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days: The True Story of the American Woman at the Heart of the German Resistance to Hitler Mariana Enriquez, The Dangers of Smoking in Bed Joshua Ferris, A Calling for Charlie Barnes Nikole Hannah-Jones, ed., The 1619 Project Walter Isaacson, The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race Gayl Jones, Palmares Mieko Kawakami, Heaven Billie Jean King, All In: An Autobiography Jean Hanff Korelitz, The Plot Chang-rae Lee, My Year Abroad Atticus Lish, The War for Gloria Maggie Nelson, On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint Doireann Ní Ghríofa, A Ghost in the Throat Gary Shteyngart, Our Country Friends Francis Spufford, Light Perpetual Dawn Turner, Three Girls From Bronzeville: A Uniquely American Memoir of Race, Fate, and Sisterhood Dawnie Walton, The Final Revival of Opal & Nev Richard Wright, The Man Who Lived Underground

Assembly Natasha Brown

Natasha Brown, Assembly Te-Ping Chen, Land of Big Numbers Joshua Cohen, The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family S.A. Cosby, Razorblade Tears Ash Davidson, Damnation Spring Omar El Akkad, What Strange Paradise Andrea Elliott, Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival and Hope in an American City Akwaeke Emezi, Dear Senthuran: A Black Spirit Memoir Percival Everett, The Trees Nathan Harris, The Sweetness of Water Elizabeth Hinton, America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s Benjamin Labatut, tr. Adrian Nathan West, When We Cease to Understand the World Paul McCartney, The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present Elizabeth McCracken, The Souvenir Museum Casey McQuiston, One Last Stop Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Velvet Was the Night Lauren Oyler, Fake Accounts Mary Roach, Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law Rivers Solomon, Sorrowland Wole Soyinka, Chronicles From the Land of the Happiest People on Earth Brandon Taylor, Filthy Animals Miriam Toews, Fight Night Colm Tóibín, The Magician Qian Julie Wang, Beautiful Country: A Memoir Ai Weiwei, 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows

One Friday in April, Donald Antrim

Donald Antrim, One Friday in April: A Story of Suicide and Survival Jo Ann Beard, Festival Days Matt Bell, Appleseed Brian Broome, Punch Me Up to the Gods: A Memoir Tarana Burke, Unbound: My Story of Liberation and the Birth of the Me Too Movement Myriam J.A. Chancy, What Storm, What Thunder Kat Chow, Seeing Ghosts: A Memoir Heather Clark, Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath Alexis Daria, A Lot Like Adiós Peter Ho Davies, A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself Nicole Eustace, Covered With Night Glenn Frankel, Shooting Midnight Cowboy: Art, Sex, Loneliness, Liberation, and the Making of a Dark Classic Gabrielle Glaser, American Baby: A Mother, a Child, and the Shadow History of Adoption Farah Jasmine Griffin, Read Until You Understand Sarah Hall, Burntcoat Mark Harris, Mike Nichols: A Life Katherine Heiny, Early Morning Riser Emily Henry, People We Meet on Vacation Fiona Hill, There Is Nothing For You Here Brandon Hobson, The Removed Dara Horn, People Love Dead Jews: Reports From a Haunted Present Ladee Hubbard, The Rib King Morgan Jerkins, Caul Baby Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blaine, Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019 Maylis de Kerangal, tr. Jessica Moore, Painting Time John Le Carré, Silverview Hervé Le Tellier, The Anomaly Deborah Levy, Real Estate Heather McGhee, The Sum of Us Louis Menand, The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War Dantiel W. Moniz, Milk Blood Heat Caleb Azumah Nelson, Open Water Ruth Ozeki, The Book of Form and Emptiness Ann Patchett, These Precious Days: Essays Eyal Press, Dirty Work: Essential Jobs and the Hidden Toll of Inequality in America Kelefa Sanneh, Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres Diane Seuss, Frank: Sonnets Maria Stepanova, tr. Sasha Dugdale, In Memory of Memory Jeff VanderMeer, Hummingbird Salamander Nghi Vo, The Chosen and the Beautiful Jackie Wang, The Sunflower Cast a Spell to Save Us From the Void Elissa Washuta, White Magic Tia Williams, Seven Days in June Jessica Winter, The Fourth Child Rachel Yoder, Nightbitch

The List of Lists Surveyed:

The New York Times Book Review’s  100 Notable Books of 2021 and The 10 Best Books of 2021 •  TIME’s The 100 Must-Read Books of 2021 and The 10 Best Nonfiction Books of 2021 and The 10 Best Fiction Books of 2021 • Kirkus’ Best Fiction Books of the Year and Best Nonfiction Books of the Year • The Washington Post’s 50 Notable Works of Fiction and 50 Notable Works of Nonfiction and The 10 Best Books of 2021 • BuzzFeed’s Here Are The Best Books of 2021 •  Esquire’s The 50 Best Books of 2021 • Vulture’s The Best Books of 2021 • EW’s 10 Best Books of 2021 • Vogue’s The Best Books to Read in 2021 • The A.V. Club’s 15 Favorite Books of 2021 •  People’s  Top 10 Books of 2021 •  The Boston Globe ‘s  Best Books of 2021 • The Guardian’s Best Books of 2021  • Slate’s The Best Books of 2021 • NPR’s Maureen Corrigan’s 2021 Best Books List • USA Today’s The Best Books of 2021 •  The Economist’s  The Best Books of 2021 • Barnes & Noble’s Top 10 Books of 2021 • Publishers Weekly’s Best Books 2021: Top 10 ; Fiction ; Mystery/Thriller ; Poetry ; Romance ; SF/Fantasy/Horror ; Nonfiction ; Comics • The Independent’s  20 Best Books of 2021 • Oprah Daily’s Our 20 Favorite Books of 2021 • Powells’ Best Fiction of 2021 and Best Nonfiction of 2021 and Best Sci-Fi, Fantasy, Horror, Romance & Graphic Novels of 2021 •  Bookforum’s  Best Books of the Year • Real Simple’s 59 Best Books of 2021 • The Chicago Tribune’s Best of Books 2021 •  Town & Country’s  Best Books of 2021 • The Wall Street Journal’s 10 Best Books of 2021 • The Christian Science Monitor’s  Best Reads of 2021 • The New York Public Library’s Best Books for Adults 2021 •  The Philadelphia Inquirer’s  Best Books of 2021 • BookPage’s Best Fiction of 2021 and Best Nonfiction of 2021 • Thrillist’s Best Books of 2021 • and of course, Literary Hub’s 48 Favorite Books of 2021

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The Best Books of 2021

From radical nuns to gut-wrenching memoir, this year’s books hit us where it hurt..

books about books 2021

This was a big year in bookworld for the phrase “much-anticipated.” As publishers reinstated some semblance of normalcy after pandemic shipping delays, a bevy of marquee names beckoned readers with long-awaited follow-ups — and, in some cases, unexpected merch . The heavy hitters met with mixed success , but this year was still abundant with books that scribbled outside the lines, upended old conventions or freshened them up, and dug out stories we’d forgotten or never known to ask about. The best of the lot were invigorating — the kinds of books that crawl outside their text and into your life. And, of course, there was a new Franzen novel .

10. Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder

books about books 2021

This story of a resentful artist turned stay-at-home mom morphing into a dog claws its way out of the pile. Yes, the premise sounds a bit like it was found on the reject list at a B-movie studio, but Yoder’s commitment to describing the animal nature of parenting carries it through with maximal success. The protagonist grows a scruff of coarse hair above her sacrum and sniffs out bunnies in her yard; playtime with her son involves licking and biting. Her metamorphosis is a “a pure, throbbing state” that redirects her energy and moves her beyond learned helplessness. Yoder goes deep on the performative nature of mothering — how so much of it feels like a Marina Abramović performance in which strange creatures are invited to scream in our ears and wrestle raisins from our fuzzy pockets, all while we gaze ahead coolly. In a crowded field of novel-manifestos about the indignity of parenting, Nightbitch is primal and corporeal, a labor scream of a book.

9. The Copenhagen Trilogy by Tove Ditlevsen

Translated by tiina nunnally and michael favala goldman.

books about books 2021

For months this was my pitch to potential readers of The Copenhagen Trilogy : “You have to read this. It was so good I couldn’t finish it.” Blame my low tolerance for inhabiting someone else’s psychosis. These books percolate with the sickening anxiety of madness, a state that the best writers can render as a kind of hell. From her muffled young adulthood in Nazi-occupied Denmark to her rise as a writing wunderkind and spin into a romantically mangled, drug-fueled early adulthood, Ditlevsen’s autobiographical collection (composed of three formerly separate memoirs — Childhood, Youth, and Dependency — first published between 1967 and ’71) spares neither the writer nor the reader. This is not a tale of heroic endurance. It’s a sally inside the mind of a young writer who tentatively climbs toward professional success and familial stability, only to find that both are moving targets.

8. All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake by Tiya Miles

books about books 2021

The stories of enslaved Black Americans are still far too scarce, lost to time by a nation indifferent to more personal aspects of the experience. Miles, a Harvard historian and MacArthur fellow, had little definitive information about a simple embroidered sack found at a flea market in 2007, other than what it said: My great grandmother Rose mother of Ashley gave her this sack when she was sold at age 9 in South Carolina / it held a tattered dress 3 handfulls of pecans a braid of Roses hair. Told her It be filled with my Love always / she never saw her again / Ashley is my grandmother / Ruth Middleton / 1921

From there, she traces the likely lineage of this unlikely object — a bit of cotton that might have crumpled into dust, but instead carried a whole family’s legacy — and puts both what she learned and what might have been into this riveting book, which just won the National Book Award for Nonfiction. All That She Carried balances two aims: to share what it can of Ruth Middleton’s matrilineal family and to explore what their lives might tell us about the experiences of other Black women connected, thread by thread, to an uncertain past. The result is as delicate and determined as the story that inspired it.

7. I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness by Claire Vaye Watkins

books about books 2021

Forget reading for comfort. Watkins has no interest in the concept, for herself or for you. I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness follows a protagonist (also named Claire Vaye Watkins) who leaves her family behind as she smokes and ruminates and screws her way through the Mojave Desert, where she grew up. The story alternates with real (but edited) letters written by Watkins’s mother as a teenager and excerpts from Watkins’s father’s book about his role as Charles Manson’s “number one procurer of young girls.” The desert setting is as prickly and vast and mutable as Watkins’s writing; the book is a stern kick to the groin of heroic tales about the majesty of the American West. Watkins wrote two brilliant books before this — the otherworldly good story collection Battleborn and a terrifying enviro-novel, Gold Fame Citrus — but this is the work that should put her on the map. Watkins is a necessary writer for a changing American pastoral.

6. Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe

books about books 2021

For the first time, the U.S. has surpassed 100,000 deaths from drug overdoses in a single year — and opioid deaths accounted for more than 75 percent of those. Opioid overdose has grown so common that some cities have installed Narcan vending machines and pharmacies put up posters showing customers how to administer it. The epidemic has spilled into every corner of American life. In Radden Keefe’s meticulously reported and brilliantly assembled Empire of Pain, he traces that spill back to the family at the very center: the billionaire Sackler family, the owners of Purdue Pharma. Like Gilded Age barons before them, the Sacklers sat atop a massive fortune, behind a fortress of lawyers and corporate privacy screens, while their company pushed OxyContin onto prescription pads and out into America. It’s a blood-boiling story of American apathy — of a family more concerned with putting their name on museums than keeping people from harm, a pharmaceutical industry shrugging its shoulders at staggering death rates, and a medical community entirely unequipped to handle the surge.

5. Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro

books about books 2021

In the very near future, an AF (Artificial Friend) named Klara, manufactured as a companion for a child, stands in the sunlit window of a quiet shop and narrates her yearning to be purchased and taken home. She’s childlike herself and exceptionally naïve; we are immediately endeared to her, though we know her insides are wire, her thoughts determined by code. Ishiguro has claimed his prose is nothing special, but over the course of his career, he has again and again managed to push readers into mourning for some of the most isolated members of society. Klara and the Sun glides in on tiptoe, tracing delicate circles around Klara’s time in the shop; her life with Josie, the young girl who takes her home; and the realization that Josie’s mother’s decision to genetically “lift” her daughter’s intelligence is costing the girl a normal life. Even in the book’s quietest moments, there’s a sense that humanity’s control over itself is on the line. And much like Ishiguro’s earlier book Never Let Me Go, this novel delivers a tender, enthralling twist.

4. Dear Senthuran: A Black Spirit Memoir by Akwaeke Emezi

books about books 2021

Sometimes a writer comes along who seems to float above language and direct it like a sorcerer, raising up whole worlds then sliding them out of the way. That’s Emezi. Dear Senthuran is their fourth book in three years (with another three on the way), and they organize this memoir — about their childhood in Nigeria; their role as an ogbanje, which they describe as a spirit reborn to cause suffering; and their painful, necessary gender-confirmation surgeries — as a series of letters to friends and family, a form that amps up the intimacy and penetration of the work. Emezi’s words emerge, bold and annunciatory.

3. One Friday in April: A Story of Suicide and Survival by Donald Antrim

books about books 2021

One Friday in April 2006, Antrim checked himself into the psychiatric facility at Columbia Presbyterian; late that summer he finally exited its doors, after several new medications had failed and innumerable group- and individual-therapy sessions, as well as about a dozen rounds of electroshock treatments that made it possible for him to at least “look forward to feeling well.” His memoir about the experience ought to immediately join the pantheon of classic works about the treacherous pull between life and death that can occur in one person’s mind. Antrim cracks himself wide open. The book is declarative and urgent, tracing the precise contours of suicidal thinking; it’s also quiet and engineered, a fully reasoned tour of a recalcitrant brain. “Maybe you’ve spent some time trying every day not to die, out on your own somewhere,” Antrim writes. “Maybe that effort has become your work in life.” One Friday in April may be remembered as the work of his own.

2. No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood

books about books 2021

I started the year thinking that Lockwood’s pseudo-autobiographical bait and switch irritated me too much to ever wiggle its way onto a list of my favorites. Then the damn thing crawled inside my head and refused to leave. If this sounds like the opposite of an endorsement for this book — which begins as a story about the noxious pull of the Twitterverse and turns into a family drama — that’s because when I first encountered it, I felt primed to reject a novel propelled by social-media discourse. (“The word toxic had been anointed, and now could not go back to being a regular word,” Lockwood writes. “It was like a person becoming famous. They would never have a normal lunch again, would never eat a Cobb salad outdoors without tasting the full awareness of what they were. Toxic. Labor. Discourse. Normalize.”) Here’s what’s kept me bouncing back to it: Lockwood doesn’t give a shit about the traditional novel or what anyone might want from it. She knows she can nab you with descriptions of the self-imposed suffocation of being Very Online before wringing your heart out with the tale of a dying infant. No One Is Talking About This flicks the Establishment in the face and giggles.

1. Matrix by Lauren Groff

books about books 2021

I wanted to live inside this novel, to peel apples and dig in the soil and repair the stone walls of the nunnery Groff manifests as she builds a life around Marie de France, the 12th-century poet and maybe-abbess about whom we know very little. And what a life Groff designs, unfurling Marie’s story in ribbons. Big, awkward, and of mildly noble heritage, the teenager is cast out of the French royal court by Eleanor of Aquitaine, whom she adores, and sent to starve in a dripping, tumbledown convent. But through sheer grit and wildly progressive plans, she spends the next decades turning the abbey into a paradise for women — a sheltered place where their work has meaning and their faith can catapult beyond unthinking ritual. Matrix practically draws blood in its bid to evince ecstasy, physical, spiritual, and emotional. This novel has its own racing heartbeat.

Honorable Mentions

Throughout 2021, I maintained a “Best Books of the Year (So Far)” list. Many of those selections appear above in my top 10 picks. Below are the rest of the books that stood out to me this year:

The Fourth Child, by Jessica Winter

The bloody pyrotechnics of anti-abortion organizations in the early ’90s, country-club drunks and their cruel domestic antics, the pre-internet teen scene in Buffalo: Jessica Winter’s sophomore novel is Franzen-esque in its broad sweep of a Rust Belt family coming down off the highs of mid-century American capitalism. (I say that as a huge compliment.) Winter starts with Jane Brennan’s accidental pregnancy in the late 1970s, then works through her tempestuous relationship with her shotgun husband and the push-and-pull dynamic with her eldest daughter Lauren, and finally into the utter displacement the Brennan family undergoes when Jane brings home Mirela, one of hundreds of thousands of “ Ceausescu’s children ” — Romanian children abandoned in orphanages in poor living conditions. Like Graham Greene before her, Winter is fascinated by the Catholic draw to suffering — Jane’s as a beleaguered mother, Lauren’s as a misunderstood young woman, and Mirela’s as a nearly feral outsider — and she manages to elegantly and movingly write a novel about faith that doesn’t proselytize or condemn.

Libertie, by Kaitlyn Greenidge

Greenidge debuted with a bang in 2016 with her novel We Love You, Charlie Freeman , about a Black family who agrees to participate in a psychological study more nefarious than it first seems. Libertie is a tamer work, though no less forceful and imaginative. Libertie is the dark-skinned, free-born daughter of a light-skinned doctor mother in Civil War–era Brooklyn. The story begins when an enslaved man named Ben Daisy is delivered to them in a coffin — alive. From there, Greenidge charts Libertie’s development from college student to young wife, and then stranger among family in Haiti, wondering where she belongs and whether she belongs to someone. Every bit of Libertie is rich and vibrant, offering the best of what historical fiction can do.

Infinite Country, by Patricia Engel

America isn’t paradise , one of Engel’s characters thinks to herself in this tale of a cleaved immigrant family. Co-workers murder each other with semi-automatics, kids blow each other’s brains out at school. And violence isn’t held at bay by ICE; in fact, it’s often perpetuated by the people who fill the agency’s ranks. Infinite Country follows whats happens when one member of an undocumented Colombian family is deported. Engel writes beyond mere frustration or sadness or economic hardship — and she brings individuality to a story too often told in statistics and two-minute news reports.

‘Detransition, Baby’ by Torrey Peters

Reading this novel is like holding a live wire in your hand. The first novel by a trans woman to be nominated for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, it follows a triangle of people — Reese, a trans woman desperate to be a mother; her ex Ames (formerly Amy), who detransitioned and is living as a man again; and Ames’s boss Katrina, who is pregnant with his child and unsure about the prospect. But there is so much more than that — Detransition, Baby is populated like a Dickens village of the queer community, with married HIV-positive cowboys and IVF-entangled trans couples. Most refreshingly, it isn’t out to prove that a trans love triangle can move copies just as affectively as cis ones do; there’s no mimicry here. It is what it is, an eyes-wide-open escapade.

The Book of Difficult Fruit by Kate Lebo

In this mash-up of culinary history, cultural criticism, and memoir, the cookbook author and essayist chooses a different “difficult” fruit for every letter of the alphabet — things like authentic maraschino cherries made with poisonous bitter almond juice, little-known thimbleberry, inedible Osage orange. Some entries are almost entirely personal histories, but most move around more freely — like a chapter on juniper berries’ unwritten history as an abortifacient, or the story of the eugenicist horticulturist who domesticated blackberries for the masses. Through it all, you can connect the dots on humanity’s history of turning fruits into magical entities capable of tightening our skin, supercharging our diets, and making sense of evil in the world.

Aftershocks by Nadia Owusu (January 12)

Nadia Owusu’s young life was splintered into dozens of little pieces — her Armenian American mother left the family, her sometimes cruel stepmother joined it, and she moved between continents for her father’s work for the United Nations. Her memoir Aftershocks , structured as a series of reverberations, doesn’t assemble those bits together. “I have written for meaning rather than order,” she explains. She whisks together the fractured history of her father’s homeland of Ghana and her own privileged bubble inside sometimes bomb-strewn locales, then teaches herself to reread her own childhood history, to see beyond the story she has always told herself of who she is.

Under a White Sky, by Elizabeth Kolbert

Cornflower blue, Simpsons -esque skies may be a thing of the past if the environmental scientists get their way. In Under a White Sky , the Pulitzer-winning Kolbert examines — in terrifying detail — the measures researchers and climatologists have already taken (like electrifying the waters of the Chicago River so invasive Asian carp can’t make their way to other tributaries) or are considering (filling the atmosphere with light-reflecting particles to form a sunshield and, in turn, a powdery firmament) to reverse-engineer the ecological mess humanity has gotten itself into. This is definitely an “It’s Time to Worry” book, but it’s also a wise rumination on hubris — how factories and engines and our desire for Progress set a ticking time bomb on our planet, and how mankind now thinks it can mastermind a way to cut the fuse.

In the Quick, by Kate Hope Day

Forgive me for screaming, but In the Quick is Jane Eyre IN SPACE! The idea sounds unhinged, but its execution is so fresh and so understanding of Brontë and genre fiction that it all comes together in a wild Ad Astra meets Prep mash-up. In a not-so-distant America, orphaned young June Reed is sent to study at the space program her brilliant uncle founded after his early death. At the same time, a crew he sent deep into the solar system suddenly goes quiet. As June endures a punishing regimen of robotic sciences, physical fitness, and team-building exercises, she quietly works on the problem of where the crew might be and how best to save them. An entirely fun adventure.

Hot Stew, by Fiona Mozley

Lately I’ve been missing the sweaty rub of strangers’ arms in tight city streets and the faint smell of yeast rising up from bar floorboards. Cities are made for clamor and bustle, and the past year has emptied them of both. Mozley’s Hot Stew is just the sensorial knockout I needed, alive with the hoots and steam of a small patch of London’s Soho, where an unlikely group of tenants works to keep their building, a French restaurant with a brothel on top, out of a developer’s grip. Among the tenants are a sex worker and her carer, a homeless couple who inhabit the grates beneath the building, a policewoman, and a bright young thing — a mix just as chaotic as any group of strangers sharing walls and air in the city’s bowels. Mozley writes across the spectrum of humanity — a talented juggler who throws a dozen plates in the air and then catches each one as if it were nothing.

Fierce Poise by Alexander Nemerov (March 23)

A biography that intentionally blows up its subject’s own image. On the cover: A demure Helen Frankenthaler neatly seated on one of her pastel-soaked canvases in a salmon-pink button-down that could blend right in with the paint, a dainty cream headband holding back her Veronica Lake curls. Inside: A rollicking beat-by-beat saunter through the downtown 1950s art scene and a long-overdue reckoning with Frankenthaler’s oft-derided, so-called “feminine” work. Too pretty, too rich, too well-connected — these were the bombs lobbed at Frankenthaler even after she produced Mountains and Sea , the seemingly brushstroke-free, nursery-colored work that Nemerov claims launched the genre of color field painting. Nemerov admits to his subject’s privileges, but undoes the (jealousy-induced) fantasy that Helen, as he calls her, was just a painter of pretty little pictures. This Helen is a woman of the mind, a crucial component of America’s mid-century dominance in the art world, and, at times, a provocateur, even if she didn’t see it that way.

Painting Time, by Maylis de Kerangal

Give me the glorious tangle of page-long sentences, the piled-up cacophony of crowded prose. In Painting Time , French novelist de Kerangal (she whose book covers always lure me in) refuses to match form to subject matter, a collision that yields a stylistic wildness we need more of. Protagonist Paula Karst is a young Parisian decorative painter learning trompe l’oeil, “the art of illusion,” at an intense Belgian institute that churns out faux marble re-creators and faux bois conjurers, but not artists. Formerly a glassy-eyed layabout, decorative painting has molded Paula into a rigorous worker, and Painting Time accompanies her through that transformation. As she moves from Paris to Moscow to Rome and back again, it’s de Kerangal’s meticulous understanding of the tiny devotions that craftspeople make again and again — the thin strokes, the blended edges, the changing of brushes — that elevates Painting Time into a pulsing ode to creative labor.

Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987–1993 by Sarah Schulman

The first time I heard about ACT UP — the organization that formed to demand that the political establishment and scientific community take action on AIDS — was nine years after it was founded, when activist David Reid poured the ashes of a friend who’d died of the disease onto the White House lawn in 1996. “If you won’t come to the funeral,” he said, “we’ll bring the funeral to you.” The act was shocking to my 12-year-old self, but it’s not nearly as shocking as the history of neglect, contempt, and disgust for the gay community that thinker, archivist, and ACT UP activist Sarah Schulman writes about in Let the Record Show , a necessarily expansive and bombastic corrective of modern history. Using years of interviews and her own vast inside knowledge (the Times ’ Parul Sehgal called Schulman “ a living archive ”), Schulman charts ACT UP’s highly effective barricade-storming tactics, eventual sway over drug companies, and early ’90s fracture. Let the Record Show is as righteous and revelatory as its subject matter.

books about books 2021

I counted over 130 exclamation points in Second Place , Rachel Cusk’s first novel since the end of her highly celebrated, much-dissected Outline trilogy. For Cusk, well-known for her tight control over her prose, such bluster and exuberance demonstrate a more unwieldy new direction, an experimental phase. Protagonist M is the bombastic exclamation-point user, as she writes a letter to a friend about her miserable experience hosting L, a famed painter of the Lucian Freud variety, at her home in an English marsh. Seeing L’s work once helped to transform M’s life, and she hopes his presence will provoke another revelation. Second Place grapples with the contradictory desire to be muse and artist, and with the extraordinary tolerance that the world shows intolerable men.

Good Behaviour by Molly Keane

In the first scene of Good Behaviour , originally published in 1981 and reissued in May by the reliable folks at NYRB Classics, protagonist Aroon St. Charles kills her mother with the mere scent of a rabbit mousse. She puts the lunch tray in front of her, and Mummy trembles, cries, vomits, and promptly dies in “a nest of pretty pillows.” Is it intentional? Why no, not exactly, but it is a glorious introduction to this novel with a hungry, wolfish smile but no visible claws. Aroon is a child of the Irish aristocracy, raised in the early 20th century in a manse built by her ancestors; she’s bent on explaining her good intentions to the reader, though she seemingly understands very little of her own motivations. This is not a damp, woe-is-the-child redux: Good Behaviour includes very little good behavior, featuring instead delicious and deleterious accounts of illicit sex and wild high jinks, and a mother-daughter duo who can scrap with the best of them.

Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch by Rivka Galchen

Witch hunt! The phrase has enjoyed a renaissance, courtesy of our former POTUS, along with MeToo-ed men of all varieties. It reverts to its original meaning in this romp, from the cerebral and daring novelist and essayist Rivka Galchen , that’s set in 17th-century Germany, a time and place where women were hunted, jailed, taunted, and tortured for actually (supposedly) being witches. Galchen’s novel focuses on illiterate but brilliant Katharina Kepler — a real historical figure and the mother of the iconic astronomer Johannes Kepler — as her neighbors turn against her, bringing wild charges of hexing and poisoning. This parable about the dangers of many little lies is also a true guffawer, with a protagonist so sharp and self-righteous she may have a direct familial line to Olive Kitteridge. Read it to leave this century behind for a while.

Filthy Animals by Brandon Taylor (June 22)

All of Taylor’s stories of young midwestern ennui are A sides, but one tale from this new collection, “Anne of Cleves,” is particularly bound-for-the-anthologies good. Sigrid is on her first date with Martha when she asks her with which wife of Henry VIII she most identifies. Martha is an engineer, living outside the shimmery dome of the liberal arts, and she barely understands the question. But it reverberates underneath their whole relationship; for the next 30 pages, the two women slide toward one another and then away in a mating dance reminiscent of a Shirley Hazzard story, where sighs and shifting thighs make huge waves. And yes, Martha is an Anne of Cleves: strong, stoic, and capable of survival. Taylor’s energy is so focused, his characters so full and motley, that each of the 11 tales here (some of which are linked) fleshes out a small spinning world of its own.

Intimacies by Katie Kitamura

Katie Kitamura’s novels are like recently vacated rooms. The occupant’s scent is still there, the warmth of their hand on the doorknob, but the space itself is desolate. Intimacies is the story of an interpreter for an international court in The Hague who is lingering in an in-between space of her own — she cannot pin down her Dutch boyfriend, who moves between her and his estranged wife, or the charismatic, recently deposed African president whose words she worriedly translates as he stands trial at the court for crimes against humanity. Is she misreading everyone and everything in her adopted country? Is there a reason for her to feel this low-level dread? Like Muriel Spark in her darker moments, Kitamura taps into the most basic human fear: that we will never really know anyone.

Something New Under the Sun by Alexandra Kleeman

Kleeman doesn’t do maudlin — she forces you to look into the fun-house mirror until you realize that what you’re seeing is reality. Something New Under the Sun starts off as a Hollywood send-up, when a novelist arrives on the set of a film adaptation of his work and discovers he’s actually a babysitter for the tabloid-ravaged teen bopster playing the lead. He also realizes he’s in a hellscape where water is scarce, a commodity for the yacht set, and WAT-R — a molecular near copy of the real stuff — is pumping out of every other faucet and plastic bottle in California. Because this is Kleeman, the plot is far less important than the view along the way. Her writing is cool, detached, and DeLillo-ish, the urgency red hot. Reading it while the West crackles, it’s easy to imagine this book may someday be a vital artifact from our era of climate twilight.

Burning Man: The Trials of D.H. Lawrence by Frances Wilson (May 25)

The British press has been singing the praises of Wilson’s wise, brutally honest, expansive consideration of Lawrence’s “middle years” — the time from 1915 to 1925 when he wrote Women in Love and The Rainbow , exiled himself from England, and tried to found a utopian community in New Mexico. American readers haven’t picked up on it yet, but it’s time to change that! For all the hoo-ha that once surrounded his reputation and antics, Lawrence is now considered a sturdy, capital- I Important writer. Nonetheless, his novels don’t make it to syllabi, and his life hasn’t been called up for a feverish prestige biopic. Wilson writes without undue flattery or inflation about this decade of Lawrence’s life, when he was convicted of spying for Germany and darted across America to meet a mildly mad heiress and produced some of the century’s most enduring novels. This is a biography on fire, brilliant with tiny anecdotes and broad assertions about English literature alike.

Harlem Shuffle, by Colson Whitehead

Whitehead knows how to slither into a new literary identity with perfect ease. He started his career writing magic-sprinkled novels about zombies, elevator-repair workers, and John Henry before publishing The Underground Railroad in 2016 and The Nickel Boys in 2019, both investigations of cruelty inflicted upon Black Americans. These books became runaway hits of the change-the-author’s-life variety. How to switch things up again? Harlem Shuffle is a zooming, maniacal caper; the fact that it’s wrapped up in a historical novel is a sweet little bonus. There’s too much (read: just enough) plot for one sentence to do it justice, but let’s leave things here: A scheme by a madcap cast of characters to rob a swanky uptown hotel canters alongside a potent reconstruction of mid-century Harlem’s buoyant vibes.

The Days of Afrekete by Asali Solomon

Liselle is a private-school teacher in a tony Philadelphia neighborhood; her lawyer husband, Winn, just lost an election for state representative, and the FBI is investigating him for his campaign’s behavior. Set around a dinner party Liselle is reluctantly hosting, Solomon’s insightful  The Days of Afrekete  dives back and forth between Liselle’s cracking veneer and her memories of an intoxicating relationship (with the brilliant, unconventional Selena) that once constituted her world. It’s in the nitty-gritty that Solomon nails things — Liselle’s fretting over whether financial success has recast her as an out-of-touch Black woman; the rightfully chaotic depictions of sexually ambiguous entanglements. The publisher describes The Days of Afrekete as  Sula  plus  Mrs. Dalloway ; Toni Morrison and Virginia Woolf may be towering names to live up to, but Solomon is on the right track.

Oh William! by Elizabeth Strout

The Lucy Barton universe keeps expanding. Strout published My Name Is Lucy Barton, the gentle blockbuster introducing the character, in 2016, then broadened the web with the interconnected stories in Anything Is Possible , set in Lucy’s quiet Illinois hometown. Now Strout has written a more linear follow-up with Oh William! , which takes place about 20 years after the events of the first book and sees Lucy widowed and reconnecting with her first husband, the titular William. Strout’s placid prose and unswerving style go down as easily as ever. In other hands, this novel might reek of franchise aspirations, but the Pulitzer-winning author remains as devoted as ever to storytelling that prods at life’s big questions about trauma, loneliness, and the search for a hand to hold in the dark.

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The 10 Best Fiction Books of 2021

books about books 2021

T he year 2021 was poised to be a great one for established, fan-favorite authors. We were blessed with new work from a buzzy roster of titans, from Colson Whitehead to Lauren Groff to Kazuo Ishiguro . But while they, along with several others, did not disappoint (see TIME’s list of the 100 Must-Read Books of 2021 ), it was debut authors who truly shined. In an industry that has long been criticized for exclusion—and where it’s increasingly difficult to break out from the crowd—a crop of bright new voices rose to the top. From Anthony Veasna So to Torrey Peters to Jocelyn Nicole Johnson and more, these writers introduced themselves to the world with fiction that surprised us, challenged our perspectives and kept us fulfilled. Here, the top 10 fiction books of 2021.

10. Klara and the Sun , Kazuo Ishiguro

books about books 2021

The eighth novel from Nobel Prize–winning author Kazuo Ishiguro, longlisted for the Booker Prize, follows a robot-like “Artificial Friend” named Klara, who sits in a store and waits to be purchased. When she becomes the companion of an ailing 14-year-old girl, Klara puts her observations of the world to the test. In exploring the dynamic between the AI and the teen, Ishiguro crafts a narrative that asks unsettling questions about humanity, technology and purpose , offering a vivid view into a future that may not be so far away.

Buy Now: Klara and the Sun on Bookshop | Amazon

9. Open Water , Caleb Azumah Nelson

books about books 2021

In his incisive debut novel, Caleb Azumah Nelson tells a bruising love story about young Black artists in London. His protagonist is a photographer who has fallen for a dancer, and Nelson proves masterly at writing young love, clocking the small and seemingly meaningless moments that encompass longing. In just over 150 intimate pages, Nelson celebrates the art that has shaped his characters’ lives while interrogating the unjust world that surrounds them.

Buy Now: Open Water on Bookshop | Amazon

Read more about the best entertainment of the year: TV shows | Movies | Songs | Albums | Podcasts | Nonfiction books | YA and children’s books | Movie performances | Video games | Theater

8. Afterparties , Anthony Veasna So

books about books 2021

The nine stories that constitute Anthony Veasna So’s stirring debut collection, published after his death at 28, reveal a portrait of a Cambodian American community in California. One follows two sisters at their family’s 24-hour donut shop as they reflect on the father who left them. Another focuses on a high school badminton coach who is stuck in the past and desperate to win a match against the local star, a teenager. There’s also a mother with a secret, a love story with a major age gap and a wedding afterparty gone very wrong. Together, So’s narratives offer a thoughtful view into the community that shaped him, and while he describes the tensions his characters navigate with humor and care, he also offers penetrating insights on immigration, queerness and identity.

Buy Now: Afterparties on Bookshop | Amazon

7. Cloud Cuckoo Land , Anthony Doerr

books about books 2021

The five protagonists of Anthony Doerr’s kaleidoscopic and remarkably constructed third novel, all living on the margins of society, are connected by an ancient Greek story. In Cloud Cuckoo Land, a National Book Award finalist, a present-day storyline anchors a sweeping narrative: in a library, an ex-prisoner of war is rehearsing a theatrical adaptation of the Greek story with five middle schoolers—and a lonely teenager has just hidden a bomb. Doerr catapults Cloud Cuckoo Land forward and back from this moment, from 15th-century Constantinople to an interstellar ship and back to this dusty library in Idaho where the impending crisis looms. His immersive world-building and dazzling prose tie together seemingly disparate threads as he underlines the value of storytelling and the power of imagination.

Buy Now: Cloud Cuckoo Land on Bookshop | Amazon

6. The Life of the Mind , Christine Smallwood

books about books 2021

The contemporary fiction landscape is full of protagonists like Christine Smallwood’s Dorothy: white millennial women who are grappling with their privilege and existence in a world that constantly feels like it’s on the verge of collapse. Plot is secondary to whatever is going on inside their heads. But Dorothy, an adjunct English professor enduring the sixth day of her miscarriage, stands apart. In Smallwood’s taut debut, this charming yet profound narrator relays amusing observations on her ever-collapsing universe. Languishing in academia, Dorothy wonders how her once-attainable goals came to feel impossible, and her ramblings—which are never irritating or tiring, but instead satirical and strange—give way to a gratifying examination of ambition, freedom and power.

Buy Now : The Life of the Mind on Bookshop | Amazon

5. The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois , Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

books about books 2021

The debut novel from poet Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, longlisted for a National Book Award, is a piercing epic that follows the story of one American family from the colonial slave trade to present day. At its core is the mission of Ailey Pearl Garfield, a Black woman coming of age in the 1980s and ’90s, determined to learn more about her family history. What Ailey discovers leads her to grapple with her identity, particularly as she discovers secrets about her ancestors. In 800 rewarding pages, Jeffers offers a comprehensive account of class, colorism and intergenerational trauma. It’s an aching tale told with nuance and compassion—one that illuminates the cost of survival.

Buy Now: The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois on Bookshop | Amazon

4. Detransition, Baby , Torrey Peters

books about books 2021

Reese is a 30-something trans woman who desperately wants a child. Her ex Ames, who recently detransitioned, just learned his new lover is pregnant with his baby. Ames presents Reese with the opportunity she’s been waiting for: perhaps the three of them can raise the baby together. In her delectable debut novel, Torrey Peters follows these characters as they become entangled in a messy, emotional web while considering this potentially catastrophic proposition—and simultaneously spins thought-provoking commentary on gender, sex and desire.

Buy Now: Detransition, Baby on Bookshop | Amazon

3. My Monticello , Jocelyn Nicole Johnson

books about books 2021

Jocelyn Nicole Johnson’s searing short-story collection is one to read in order. Its narratives dissect an American present that doesn’t feel at all removed from the country’s violent past, and they build to a brutal finish. The unnerving standout piece—the titular novella—follows a group of neighbors who seek refuge on Thomas Jefferson’s plantation while on the run from white supremacists. Johnson’s narrator is college student Da’Naisha, a Black descendant of Jefferson who is questioning her relationship to the land and the people with whom she’s found herself occupying it. The story is as apocalyptic as it is realistic, a haunting portrait of a community trying to survive in a nation that constantly undermines its very existence.

Buy Now: My Monticello on Bookshop | Amazon

2. The Prophets , Robert Jones, Jr.

books about books 2021

At a plantation in the antebellum South, enslaved teenagers Isaiah and Samuel work in a barn and seek refuge in each other until one of their own, after adopting their master’s religious beliefs, betrays their trust. In The Prophets, a National Book Award finalist, Robert Jones, Jr. traces the teens’ relationship, as well as the lives of the women who raised them, surround them and have been the backbone of the plantation for generations. In moving between their stories, Jones unveils a complex social hierarchy thrown off balance by the rejection of the young mens’ romance. The result is a crushing exploration of the legacy of slavery and a delicate story of Black queer love.

Buy Now: The Prophets on Bookshop | Amazon

1. Great Circle , Maggie Shipstead

books about books 2021

The beginning of Maggie Shipstead’s astounding novel , a Booker finalist, includes a series of endings: two plane crashes, a sunken ship and several people dead. The bad luck continues when one of the ship’s young survivors, Marian, grows up to become a pilot—only to disappear on the job. Shipstead unravels parallel narratives, Marian’s and that of another woman whose life is changed by Marian’s story, in glorious detail. Every character, whether mentioned once or 50 times, has a specific, necessary presence. It’s a narrative made to be devoured, one that is both timeless and satisfying.

Buy Now: Great Circle on Bookshop | Amazon

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books about books 2021

Ready or not, this year is almost over — which means it’s time for us to round up the best books of 2021! We’ve looked back over the entire year to bring you our picks across thrillers, fantasy, romance, children’s and YA, memoir, and more. Whether you want to laugh, cry, learn, be cozy, or be challenged, there’s something in here for you.

books about books 2021

A Lot Like Adiós

This second chance romance is the second in the Primas of Power series, focusing on independent graphic designer Michelle. She’s been on her own since she and her best friend, Gabe, had a huge fight right before he moved away. Thirteen years ago. When Gabe’s suddenly back in town for his gym business, they find themselves working in very tight quarters. It isn’t long before old feelings resurface, and well, they act on those feelings. Gabe and Michelle aren’t together together, even though that’s what everyone assumes. Can they sort out their feelings and resentments before it’s too late?

books about books 2021

A Master of Djinn

A Master of Djinn is a brilliant tale full of decadent imagery, descriptions (the food!), and explorations of power and oppression. Set it an alternate Cairo in 1912, where djinn and magical creatures walk among us and Cairo is the center of progress and innovation, it follows the fashionably besuited Fatma el-Sha’arawi, the youngest woman working for the Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments and Supernatural Entities. Fatma investigates a gruesome murder and the plot quickly thickens. I think about Fatma’s suits and bowler hat at least once a day. This is an adventure of ideals, love, and courage, in a world you’ll want to sink into and stay.

books about books 2021

Afterparties

The stories in Afterparties shimmer and surprise. They are full of affection and despair, generational trauma and millennial malaise, cynicism and tenderness. Each story is singular, but contains a universe of human emotion. Mostly set in one California town, the stories feature Cambodian immigrants and first-and-second generation Cambodian Americans, many of them queer, and many of whom survived the Khmer Rouge genocide. I have rarely encountered prose so electric, characters so vividly real, and stories so specific yet so attuned to the weird, harrowing, joyful experience of being human. This book will stay with me forever.

books about books 2021

All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake

With incredible scholarship and heartfelt attention, Tiya Miles deeply considers an artifact about which little was previously known. In the 1850s, a cloth sack was passed from an enslaved woman named Rose to her daughter Ashley. Later, Ashley’s granddaughter Ruth embroidered the sack with the story of what Rose packed for Ashley. This masterful investigation pinpoints biographical information about the women and thoughtfully interprets the significance of the sack and its contents. I was so moved by the story, including how Ruth bore witness to and documented her grandmother’s harrowing separation from her mother. A true gem.

books about books 2021

Amari and the Night Brothers

This incredible middle-grade novel mixes a Men in Black -style secret supernatural society with a training program for special kids and teens a la Percy Jackson and the X-Men. I haven’t felt magic like this in reading a children’s book since my own elementary school days of discovering the books and series that would change my life forever. This is the kind of book that can turn kids into lifelong readers. It’s that good.

books about books 2021

American Betiya

Rani Kelkar has always tried to be the perfect Indian American girl, but she knows that her parents will never approve of Oliver, the boy she’s seeing. As Rani gets more tangled up in Oliver and his life, she realises that he isn’t exactly as he seems. His prejudices about Rani’s culture, religion, and family begin to seep into their relationship, while Rani loses herself to maintain their love. American Betiya is a powerful exploration of young love, toxic relationships, and how interracial relationships can be infected by deeply held prejudices. Rajurkar doesn’t shy away from difficult topics, but navigates them deftly, and with nuance.

books about books 2021

Arsenic and Adobo

I love this book so much that I wrote about it for Book Riot’s Best of 2021 So Far. It deserves to be included in the best books for 2021. It’s got everything you need – murder, food, and more. Lila Macapagal returns home to Shady Pines to help out at her family’s Filipino restaurant after a failed relationship. But when her high school ex-boyfriend/food critic falls face first into their food and dies at the restaurant, the police suspect her and her family. I can’t wait to read the sequel, Homicide and Halo-Halo , coming out next year.

books about books 2021

Best Laid Plans

Six months after reading Best Laid Plans , the element of the small town romance that stays with me most is the way Roan Parrish builds this love story on patience and kindness. The 1 Corinthians passage “Love is patient, love is kind,” is a cliché at this point, but there’s no better way to describe the way Charlie, deeply responsible and lacking experience with intimacy, and Rye, lost and let down by everyone but his cat, slowly and gently build their relationship. Parrish manages to tell the story in a way that illustrates the risk each of these characters is taking, but also leaves no doubt that the love these two men share is worth it.

books about books 2021

Boys Run the Riot

One of the best things about today’s booming North American manga market is that we can enjoy titles that never would have been released in English a decade ago. A prime example? Keito Gaku’s story about a transgender teen’s lived experience in contemporary Japan. An unlikely friendship forms between protagonist Ryo, who has no one to confide in about his struggles, and new kid Jin, who’s not the bully everyone assumes him to be. Their common interest? Street fashion! Sympathetic and real, this is a title that belongs in every collection and that every manga fan should check out.

books about books 2021

Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism

Linguist and general badass Amanda Montell dives deep into the language of cults — from Scientology to SoulCycle — in the incredible Cultish . It covers how people get sucked into extreme groups, and how leaders manage such “brainwashing.” It all comes down to the language used, be it to entice new members or isolate them from the outside world. This type of language goes far beyond your typical image of a cult, though; social media and multi-level marketing and boutique gyms are cults all their own. If you like learning about cults and/or language and/or LuLaRoe, you need to get your hands on this book.

books about books 2021

Dial A for Aunties

Sutanto’s comic thriller-romance is the most fun I’d had with a book in ages. In it, Sutanto’s protagonist accidentally kills her blind date and, at a loss, turns to her Chinese-Indonesian aunties for guidance. They’re more than up for the challenge, even while they’re also prepping for the biggest wedding they’ve ever worked before. Thus kicks off a non-stop slapstick comedy in which readers can’t help but wonder: Will the leading lady reunite with the one who got away while also getting away with murder?

books about books 2021

Hello, Star

This beautiful STEM-themed picture book is about a young Black girl who spots a burning star in the night sky. Her mother explains the star is dying, and the girl becomes fascinated with space — particularly with the burning star, who she speaks to at night, determined to let the star know that it won’t die alone. Her fascination turns into her life’s work. She studies astronomy in college and becomes an astronaut. One day she’s able to travel to the moon and witnesses the moment when her star dies. Vashti Harrison’s art is stunning. My daughter adores this book just as much as I do, and now she looks for stars every night.

books about books 2021

How To Find A Princess (Runaway Royals #2)

What do you get when you take Makeda, a codependent people-pleaser who just got fired, add Beznaria, a chaotic-good investigator on the hunt for a missing princess, and put them together on a slow-boat to Ibarania with only one bed? You get a sapphic love story that felt like it was written for me. How To Find A Princess takes a hard look at family secrets (both of the royal and mundane kind), what it means to show up for others and for yourself, and just how hard it can be to find the right words sometimes, even when you’re trying. If gentle, hilarious, and healing are your romance vibes, you absolutely cannot go wrong.

books about books 2021

It Happened One Summer

If you want steamy romance books, Tessa Bailey is the queen of them. On It Happened One Summer , Piper Bellinger, a fashionable and influential wild child, goes a little out of control one night, resulting in her stepfather sending her to live in a small fishing town. There she meets a variety of new personalities, but also a grumpy, bearded sea captain who isn’t pleased she’s there to begin with. This Schitt’s Creek -inspired rom-com will become your new obsession!

books about books 2021

Jenny Mei Is Sad

Jenny Mei is sad. But it’s her best friend who narrates this story, explaining her friend’s feelings and how she can be supportive. What’s beautiful is that her friend doesn’t try to fix or change Jenny Mei’s emotions. There are small ways she can help, but overall the best thing the narrator can do is just to keep being Jenny Mei’s friend. This acceptance of sadness as a part of life and a part of friendship touched me deeply. It’s certainly a book made for children, but, after almost two years in the pandemic, I think we’re all in need of some gentle social emotional learning.  

books about books 2021

Klara and the Sun

Fresh off his Nobel Literature Prize win, Kazuo Ishiguro’s next novel was longlisted for the Booker Prize for 2021, and with good reason. It tells the story of Klara, an artificial friend. Beginning in a store, Klara observes the world around her with a keen eye and the innocence of childhood. When she is finally purchased to be the friend for a young woman, she soon discovers that her new friend is sick. What’s more, Klara’s role is more than it appears to be. This book is so full of heart and hope in a time that seems utterly hopeless, making it the perfect read for 2021.

books about books 2021

Last Night at the Telegraph Club

Lily is a Chinese American teen living in San Francisco’s Chinatown in 1953. She’s always felt that something about her is different, but she’s only able to explore her feelings and put this sense into words when she and a classmate named Kath discover community and possibility at the nearby Telegraph Club, an underground lesbian bar. Lo brings her setting and characters to life with vivid detail, capturing the danger and exhilaration of being queer and finding your people in the 1950’s. This is a heartfelt coming-of-age and coming out story about a crossroads of identities that illuminates a corner of history that most narratives gloss over.

books about books 2021

Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres

What are genres in music and do they matter at all? Sanneh’s outstanding book explores the history of seven genres over the last 50 years, showcasing why genres exist and where and how they overlap, inform, and transform one another. From hard rock to country, hip-hop to punk, this book goes beyond the Top 40 and taps into what defines each genre and its listeners, as well as how music consumption and understanding has changed. This is a brilliant deep dive into music nerdery that leaves readers tuning into their favorite songs — as well as new discoveries — in a completely fresh way.

books about books 2021

This book was an utter delight from beginning to end. It’s the story of a teen girl in 1970s Baltimore who spends her summer nannying for a psychiatrist’s family as they help a rock star to get sober. This world couldn’t more different from that of her very ordered, very conservative family. Over the summer, Mary Jane learns about spontaneity, expressing love freely, and music — and she brings a little much-needed order to their world, too. This is a joyful, touching coming-of-age novel.

books about books 2021

Never Pay the First Bill: And Other Ways to Fight the Health Care System and Win

This book is a must-read for anyone who is or cares for someone with complex medical issues. I have chronic illness and definitely avoid some healthcare due to the pain of dealing with the financial and insurance issues, so this book made me feel more confident in standing up for and advocating for myself. Learn about all the ways the medical industry has you paying more than you should and how to avoid it. The author has published several articles on the same topic, but it’s nice to have it all in one place, with letter templates, to refer back to.

books about books 2021

Perfect Black

An original member of the Affrilachian Poets collective and the current Kentucky Poet Laureate, Wilkinson has had poems appear across many publications. But Perfect Black is her first full-length poetry collection. In it, Wilkinson gives readers a kaleidoscope of poems, many of them inspired by her life. Each poem delves into ideas around being a Black, Appalachian woman from a long line of such women. From prose poems about foodways to more lyrical poems about living as a young girl with a mother struggling with mental illness, Wilkinson’s work illustrates her incredible range and impressive skill.

books about books 2021

Radiant Fugitives

It’s the last few weeks of Seema’s pregnancy after breaking up with the baby’s father. After being estranged from her Muslim Indian family after coming out as a lesbian, her mother and sister are visiting. What happens over the course of one week will change lives forever: secrets come out, relationships are changed, and love turns out to be more complicated and nuanced than it seems. The story is narrated by Seema’s baby from the moment of its birth, which could be a tricky narrative choice, but in Ahmed’s hands, it works wonderfully. This is a beautiful story of love, family, and forgiveness.

books about books 2021

What on the surface seems like a haunted house story full of blood and guts turned out to be so much more, and in the best way. Not only is it a traditional slasher horror complete with an actual nightmare setup (creepy clowns and dolls galore), but it’s also a commentary on societal horrors both of the time (the book is set in the late 1990s) and those horrors that persist today. It’s a nuanced and complicated book about racism, classism, and sexism, that just happens to take place at the world’s most violent haunted house.

books about books 2021

Set Boundaries, Find Peace: A Guide to Reclaiming Yourself

Nedra Tawwab is a therapist, content creator, and boundary expert. While this book is built on the premise that boundaries are healthy and make strong foundations for healthy relationships, it goes well beyond just cheerleading. It has concrete advice for drawing boundaries from what words to say and how to say them to advice on when boundaries should be drawn. Tawwab addresses all the guilt and fear around creating, communicating, and maintaining boundaries in explicit detail. It’s simultaneously a necessary wake-up call and a hug of support whether you’re drawing boundaries with friends, partners, parents, family, coworkers, and more.

books about books 2021

She Who Became the Sun

She Who Became the Sun is a brilliant story about destiny, desire, and the lengths people will go to get what they want. It reimagines the rise of the Ming Dynasty in 14th century China in a very unique and magical way. The story follows Zhu, a girl who is destined for nothing yet is full of raw want. So when her brother — who was destined for greatness — dies, she takes his name and his fate. Over the years, as she becomes a monk and then when she joins the rebellion, she’ll learn who she is and what she’s capable of in order to fulfill her deepest desires.

books about books 2021

Some Faraway Place

Everyone in the Atkinson family is Atypical — they have incredible abilities like telekinesis, mind reading, seeing the future — except Rose. Rose always thought she’d be happy and truly belong in her family if only she had an ability too. But when her ability to dreamdive finally does manifest, she realizes being Atypical is far more complicated and dangerous than she ever imagined. As with each and every part of The Bright Sessions series, this final installment is a fantastic showcase of Shippen’s skill as a writer, bringing readers a fresh and distinctive story while never losing the familiar warmth that is the backbone of this universe.

books about books 2021

The Adventure Zone: The Crystal Kingdom

The fourth installment of the Balance series from podcast The Adventure Zone , The Crystal Kingdom is the most beautiful yet. We follow Merle, Taako, and Magnus as they fight to reclaim a relic known as the Transmuter Stone. As a flying airbase is slowly overrun by crystals created by the relic, they must stop it before it crashes. Because should the airship touch the ground, the entire world will be slowly encased in crystal. Luckily, our three heroes are more or less up to the job, and of course, hijinks ensue. For fans of The Adventure Zone , Dungeons & Dragons, and graphic novels, The Crystal Kingdom is a wild ride from start to finish.

books about books 2021

The Collective

I want my thrillers to have a can’t-put-down-will-read-past-bedtime element, which Gaylin surely delivers with The Collective . It’s a smart exploration of grief and revenge that keeps you guessing throughout, as a secret group has taken it upon themselves to enact the punishment they see fit upon those they deem have gotten away with something. And when they discover the young man responsible for Camille Gardner’s daughter’s death is being honored with a humanitarian award, they decide to bring her into the fold… What could go wrong?! Clear your schedule for this page-turner that will stick with you after the final page.

books about books 2021

The Girls I’ve Been

I don’t read a lot of crime, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the blurb for this book…and I inhaled it in a single sitting. Nora’s best friend and ex, Wes, is mad at Nora for keeping her new girlfriend Iris a secret. But it is far from Nora’s only secret. The three of them become hostages in a bank robbery and Nora’s deepest secret is going to keep them alive: she hasn’t always been Nora, and she’s going to use the skills she picked up working with her con artist mother to get them out. This book has everything: found family, nonstop thrills, and it’s extremely queer. Content warning for past child abuse including sexual; discussion of abortion.

books about books 2021

The Heart Principle

This book is one that leaves you thinking for days after you finish it. Violinist Anna is in a rut, and she can’t get out of it. With her emotionally abusive boyfriend looking into opening up their relationship, issues with her family, and a brand new autism diagnosis, she isn’t sure how to move on with her life. But deciding to try a one night stand leads her to Quan and a series of close calls that bring the two closer than either ever expected. Helen Hoang is one of those authors that can take a sweet love story and build the lovers’ worlds around them to the point of pain, only to bring us back to the promise of the best possible future.

books about books 2021

The Last House on Needless Street

When I picked up The Last House on Needless Street, I wasn’t sure what to expect. All I knew was that it was probably going to be dark, psychological horror of some sort and that the story would be narrated by a black cat. Was I right? Yes and no. It’s best to go into this book knowing as little as possible, because this odd novel is all about subverting expectations. It’s set in a boarded-up house on Needless Street where a man lives alone with his cat and his daughter. All of this is true and not true. And as strange as this book sounds, it all really worked for me. I can’t stop thinking about this one.

books about books 2021

The Love Hypothesis

Ali Hazelwood’s debut romance novel dominated nearly every corner of the Internet. Whether you were drawn in by the fake dating, the thoughtful contemplation of being a woman in STEM, the coffee shop shenanigans, or the stoic man whose heart softens at the ray-of-sunshine woman, it’s clear this book was a joy for romance readers. Olive Smith is a biology doctoral student who gets into a fake relationship with the department’s most-hated professor, Dr. Adam Carlsen. She’s trying to convince her best friend Anh that she has a social life outside of the lab, while Adam wants to re-gain access to his research funding. This is a pitch-perfect romance novel where you’ll root for the main characters to figure out their feelings until you’re blue in the face. 

books about books 2021

The People We Keep

It’s 1994 in Little River, New York. After “borrowing” a neighbor’s car to go perform at an open-mic night, 16-year-old April Sawicki realizes that life has the potential to be so much more than she’s ever known. Leaving her small town and planning to never look back, April chronicles her life through the songs she writes and the people she keeps, yearning for the ability to stop running away from love and from herself. Championing the power of self-love and found family, Allison Larkin reminds us throughout The People We Keep that there is always beauty to be found in chaos and that this life is ours to choose.

books about books 2021

The Postscript Murders (Harbinder Kaur #2)

I was recommended this book while looking for queer crime novels and was delighted by its charming characters and cozy mystery-esque vibes. Ninety-year-old Peggy Smith’s death seems like natural causes, plain and simple. After all, is it so odd for elderly women with health issues to die? But when it is discovered that Peggy is mentioned in a number of mystery novel postscripts — and one author is found dead shortly later — her caretaker, her friends, and Detective Sergeant Harbinder Kaur are determined to catch her killer.

books about books 2021

The Prophets

The Prophets is an extraordinary historical novel: a defiantly poetic story of great love growing in a place of hate. Two enslaved boys, Samuel and Isaiah, childhood friends who become lovers, occupy the center, but they’re not alone. The plantation system, individuals, and communities around them are an essential part of the story too. Jones handles the multiple moving parts and perspectives masterfully — joy and beauty juxtaposed against pain to devastating effect. Truly, this book gutted me and I was grateful for it.

books about books 2021

The Rib King

I love this book and will continue to talk about it until the sun burns out. It’s a gripping, brilliant early 20th century story of the Black staff who work for a once-wealthy family. There is fighting and jealousy between the staff in the house, and violent racists outside the home. And when the family takes something that doesn’t belong to them, the house is shattered by violence. And that’s just the first half! The second follows a former staff member as she attempts to start her own business and get out from under the shadow of the events a decade earlier. The Rib King has sharp teeth that will grip your brain and not let go.

books about books 2021

The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together

One of the most frustrating arguments to address while fighting for equality is the false “slices of the pie” narrative, wherein marginalized people succeeding is conflated with less success for those already in power. In this book, political and economic researcher Heather McGhee explores how racism is at the root of most of America’s economic, infrastructural, and other public policy problems. Her writing criticizes the paradigm that progress for some comes at the expense of others, instead arguing that racism has a cost for everyone, not just people of color. This is a genius book in many ways, and it’s absolutely an antiracist must-read.

books about books 2021

The Way She Feels: My Life on the Borderline in Pictures and Pieces

Combining illustrations and text, Courtney Cook’s The Way She Feels highlights the turbulence of living with borderline personality disorder, one of the most stigmatized mental illnesses. Cook fearlessly details her harrowing struggle with borderline in essays about everything from music to self-harm. You won’t want to miss this honest, often quite witty graphic memoir that fills in the gaps of mental health representation.

books about books 2021

The Wrong End of the Telescope

Mina Simpson is traveling so close to her homeland for the first time in years. Her childhood has been less than ideal but she has worked hard to find her footing in the world. She is a doctor now. Dr. Simpson arrives at a refugee camp in Lesbos after being called by a friend who requested her to help out. There she meets Sumaiya, an immigrant woman suffering from terminal liver cancer. The unconventional bond these two women forge puts a lot of things into perspective for them. This powerful novel not only sheds light on identity and the immigrant experience, but also shows how our stories are bound to overlap regardless of our backgrounds.

books about books 2021

We Do This ’til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice

Kaba’s series of essays and interviews about abolition and the insufficiency of prison reform is not only a useful introduction to the topic, but also a rousing text that encourages collaboration, introspection, and hope. Why does justice look like punishment in the cultural imagination? Why are reforms counterproductive to abolitionist work? This book set my mind ablaze, and it’s already come up in several of my conversations with friends and family around the criminal legal system. Most of all, I’ve been inspired by Kaba’s conviction that our fears or misgivings should not hold us back from envisioning and pushing for a better future.

books about books 2021

Winter’s Orbit

Kiem, Prince Royal of a planet called Iskat, prefers to run away from his responsibilities but can’t get out of a political alliance his grandmother sets for him. The alliance? Marrying Prince Jainan of Thea – another world resembling post-apocalyptic Earth – who is the widow of Kiem’s late cousin. This is a sci-fi novel, a romance, and political drama wrapped in one, with gorgeous prose and a diverse set of characters. The worldbuilding is beautiful and immersive. The icy setting of Iskat and its inhabitants reminded me of Ursula K. Le Guin’s Left Hand of Darkness , although Jainan and Kiem’s time on the ice is a different kind of exciting.

books about books 2021

If you love Seth Rogen then you should have already read this. If you don’t think you love Seth Rogen, I have news for you — you love Seth Rogen! This book is funny, heartfelt, honest, and down-to-earth. You’ll learn about his ridiculous meetings with Nick Cage, Seth’s father’s “refreshing” attitude toward work (spoiler alert, he hates it — but for the most delightful reason), and you will laugh and laugh and laugh. Don’t believe me? Roxane Gay described this collection as “fucking delightful” so unless you hate delight, you will love this book.

The 50 Best Books of 2021

The year was a banner showing for literary treasures.

best books of 2021

Every product was carefully curated by an Esquire editor. We may earn a commission from these links.

With such an embarrassment of riches on offer, ranking these books is a downright impossible task, so we present our selections in no particular order. In this singularly strange and challenging year, books comforted us, allowed us to travel even when borders were closed, and ultimately, kept us sane. We made it to the end of this terrible, horrible, no good, very bad year, and we're still reading. Congratulate yourself for that—and don't waste any time stocking up your "to be read" pile.

Virtue, by Hermione Hoby

“That was just what you did on weekends—brunch and protest,” narrates Luca Lewis from the distant remove of 2027, looking back on his formative time as a magazine intern in New York City during the heated year of 2016. As he learns the elite ways and means of the rarefied magazine world, Luca dismisses a Black coworker’s efforts to recruit him to workplace activism, then becomes infatuated with a wealthy creative couple and their life of privilege. It takes a tragedy to awaken Luca to his misbegotten allegiances in this trenchant story of complacency and social consciousness.

The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story, edited by Nikole Hannah-Jones

In this groundbreaking compendium of essays, poems, works of fiction, and photography, Hannah-Jones expands on her Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times Magazine project about the “unparalleled impact” of chattel slavery on American life. These bracing and urgent works, by multidisciplinary visionaries ranging from Barry Jenkins to Jesmyn Ward, build on the existing scholarship of The 1619 Project , exploring how the nation’s original sin continues to shape everything from our music to our food to our democracy. This collection is an extraordinary update to an ongoing project of vital truth-telling.

I Love You but I've Chosen Darkness, by Claire Vaye Watkins

In this daring work of autofiction, a writer named Claire Vaye Watkins boards a plane to a speaking engagement in her hometown of Reno, where she aims to put the discontents of marriage and motherhood behind her. When her past rushes up to meet her, from her self-destructive first love to her father’s entanglement with the Manson Family, Claire’s brief getaway slides into a monthslong stay. Seared in visceral realizations about the pain of her past, Claire can’t go back home again, but how can she move forward? Boldly imagined and authoritatively told, this ambitious novel reminds us that Watkins is one of the most visionary writers working today.

Harrow, by Joy Williams

In her first novel since The Quick and the Dead , the inimitable Williams remains as beguilingly strange as ever. When teenage Khristen’s boarding school for gifted children shutters its doors, she roves across the desiccated American West until she washes up at Big Girl, a toxic lake frequented by the elderly residents of a “razed resort.” Together with these ecological terrorists and creative visionaries, Khristen queues up to wait for a looming climate apocalypse, while Williams meditates on finding hope, compassion, and reason as the doomsday clock ticks down.

Reprieve, by James Han Mattson

It’s April 1997, and four hopeful contestants have made it to the final room of the Quigley House, a “full contact” haunted escape room in Lincoln, Nebraska. If they can endure the home’s six cells of ghoulish horror without shouting “reprieve,” they’ll win a substantial cash prize, but not everyone will make it out alive. When a man breaks into Quigley House and murders one of the contestants, Reprieve sifts through its characters’ back stories and witness statements to solve the crime. Mattson crafts a nail-biting horror saga while also implicating us in our sick obsession with tales of this kind. Unrelenting and unforgettable, Reprieve is an American classic in the making.

My Body, by Emily Ratajkowski

Superstar model, entrepreneur, and actress Emily Ratajkowski explodes onto the literary scene with My Body , a revealing and personal exploration of what happens when a woman’s body becomes a commodity. My Body is a fascinating memoir of the objectification and misogyny Ratajkowski experienced as a young model, but also a searing work of cultural criticism about sexuality, power, fame, and consumption. My Body is the brilliant debut of a fearless multihyphenate from whom we’re eager to read more. Read an exclusive interview with Ratajkowski here at Esquire .

Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon, by Mark McGurl

With its staggering American market share of 50% of printed books and upwards of 75% of ebooks, Amazon has changed literary life as we know it. That's not all the Everything Store has done. According to Mark McGurl, it’s transformed not just how we buy, but what we buy as well as what we read and how we write. In Everything and Less , McGurl draws a line from Amazon’s distribution model to the contemporary dissolution of genre boundaries, arguing that Amazon’s algorithm has effectively turned all fiction into genre fiction. In lucid and well-argued prose, McGurl goes spelunking through the many genres shaped by Amazon’s consumerist logic, from the familiar realms of science fiction to the surprising outer reaches of billionaire romance and Adult Baby Diaper Erotica. Perceptive and often deeply funny, Everything and Less raises compelling questions about the past, present, and future of fiction. Read an exclusive interview with McGurl here at Esquire .

Farrar, Straus and Giroux Beautiful World, Where Are You, by Sally Rooney

Expectations were high for Beautiful World, Where Are You , Rooney’s first outing since she became a global literary phenom—and her 2021 novel doesn’t disappoint. In these pages, Rooney explores the intertwined lives of four twenty-somethings: in one corner, we have Alice, a novelist who takes up residence in the Irish countryside following a psychiatric breakdown, and Felix, a local warehouse worker with whom Alice begins a noncommittal tryst. Alice’s oldest friends are Eileen, a dissatisfied magazine editor with big ideas, and Simon, Eileen’s on-again, off-again beau, an earnest and devout political activist. In Alice, Rooney’s anxieties about precocious literary success come into view. At once stylistically consistent with her previous novels and touched with a maturing sensibility, Beautiful World, Where Are You lucidly explores the ways we break up and make up in a world on fire.

Palmares, by Gayl Jones

When Toni Morrison discovered Jones in the seventies, she said of her debut novel, Corregidora , “No novel about any Black woman could ever be the same after this.” Palmares , Jones’ long-awaited fifth book, is a blistering return to form worth the two decade wait. Set in colonial Brazil, Palmares is the story of Almeyda, a young enslaved woman spirited away to Palmares, the last of the nation’s seven fugitive slave settlements. When Palmares is razed in the night by Portuguese soldiers, Almeyda travels Brazil’s luscious landscapes in search of her missing husband, only to find that it may take a medicine woman’s enchantments to bring him back. Gorgeously suffused with mystery, history, and magic, Palmares is a remarkable new outing from a major voice in American letters.

A Calling for Charlie Barnes, by Joshua Ferris

With A Calling for Charlie Barnes , Ferris has written his finest novel yet: a fabulist yarn about a flawed father in the twilight of his life, whose numerous get-rich-quick schemes and busted marriages have vaulted the American Dream forever out of his reach. Our narrator is Jake Barnes, Charlie’s son, whose earnest but unreliable memories of his father call the narrative’s very fabric into question: how can we rightly remember those closest to us? Does our intimacy blot out the truth? By turns lively, laugh-out-loud funny, and tear-jerking, this is Ferris at the height of his powers.

Billy Summers, by Stephen King

King’s latest endeavor begins with a familiar premise: ex-Marine sniper Billy Summers, a principled hit man on the eve of retirement, agrees to do one last job. With a $2 million payout looming, Billy goes undercover to assassinate a criminal, but the cover his employers dream up hits a nerve: while masquerading as a novelist, avid reader Billy sets to the task of writing his own lightly fictionalized autobiography, unspooling the wounds of a traumatic childhood and a bruising tour of duty in the Iraq War. Billy's escape from the wreckage of the job is complicated by Alice, a young woman he rescues after her brutal gang rape, who becomes an unlikely partner in his plans to get even. Remembering a Tim O'Brien aphorism, that fiction "was a way to the truth," Billy writes his way through the morass of his past and present, making for a poignant story about how fiction can redeem, heal, and empower. Read an exclusive interview with King here at Esquire .

Doubleday Harlem Shuffle, by Colson Whitehead

Whitehead goes back to his literary beginnings in his first noir since 1999's The Intuitionist . In Harlem Shuffle , it’s 1959, and used furniture salesman Ray Carney is expecting a second child with his wife. The son of a small-time crook, Ray has worked hard to become an upstanding member of his community, but when money gets tight, Ray is soon wrapped up in a risky caper to rob “the Waldorf of Harlem.” Whitehead’s Harlem—“that rustling, keening thing of people and concrete”—pulses with a vibrant heartbeat, evoked through bars and greasy spoons and Strivers’ Row townhomes. In this page-turning novel about how good people come to justify lives of crime, a master storyteller delivers beautifully rendered people and places.

Riverhead Books Matrix, by Lauren Groff

Groff’s first novel since Fates and Furies (which dropped in 2015) turns the clock back— way back. In these incandescent pages, Groff reverently imagines her way into the life and lore of Marie de France, the twelfth-century poet considered the first woman to write poetry in French. Cast out from the court by Eleanor of Acquitaine, seventeen-year-old Marie washes up at an impoverished English abbey, where she transforms from a reluctant refugee to a fiercely devoted leader. Through great works of construction and community, Marie fashions the now-wealthy abbey into an “island of women,” all while furtively writing the divinely-inspired poems that made her name. Woven from Groff’s trademark ecstatic sentences and brimming with spiritual fervor, Matrix is a radiant work of imagination and accomplishment.

Doubleday Nightbitch , by Rachel Yoder

In this unforgettable debut novel, Yoder delivers an outrageous Kafka-esque parable about the mundanity and monstrosity of early motherhood. Our protagonist, an artist turned stay-at-home parent known only as “the mother," has become a husk of herself after two years of raising a toddler without the support of her husband, who's all-too often away on weekly business trips. Soon, her mind and body begin to change; she grows dense patches of hair, her teeth sharpen, and she develops canine impulses. It’s only through her surreal transformation into "Nightbitch" that she experiences liberation from the pressure cooker of motherhood. Yoder touches on a kaleidoscope of themes, from the towering inferno of female rage to grieving the loss of self that accompanies motherhood, all of it undergirded by feral, ferocious scenes of our heroine feasting on rabbits and pissing on the lawn. Nightbitch will grab you by the scruff and refuse to let go. Read an exclusive interview with Yoder here at Esquire .

Avid Reader Press Falling, by T.J. Newman

Written by a former flight attendant while she worked red eye trips, this bruising thriller unfolds over the course of one transcontinental flight. When the pilot’s family is kidnapped, he has a choice: crash the plane to save his loved ones, or deliver his 130 passengers safely and let his family die. With a terrorist organization holding the plane captive, the pilot and his resourceful crew must race against time to do the impossible; meanwhile, an impulsive FBI agent stationed on the ground goes rogue to save lives. Expect major anxiety as this nail-biter barrels to a stunning conclusion.

Flatiron Books Somebody's Daughter, by Ashley C. Ford

In this searingly honest memoir, Ford recounts her turbulent coming of age in Indiana, where she was raised by a volcanic and sometimes abusive mother. Her childhood was haunted by the specter of her incarcerated father, whom she visited only occasionally during his decades in prison, but idealized as the loving and supportive parent she lacked. When an adult Ford learns that her father will be released after almost thirty years, she is ushered to reckon with the heinous crime he committed. Ford’s vulnerability on the page is an extraordinary feat, as she masterfully traces how the yearning girl she once was became the empowered woman she is today.

Atria Books The Other Black Girl, by Zakiya Dalila Harris

Get Out meets The Devil Wears Prada in the summer’s buzziest debut: a blistering work of semi-autobiographical fiction about Nella, the lone Black employee at Wagner Books. The arrival of Hazel, another Black editorial assistant, seems like the answer to Nella’s prayers—but Hazel isn’t the ally she seems to be. When Nella begins to receive threatening anonymous notes demanding that she leave Wagner, she immediately suspects Hazel. The truth is far more sinister, exposing Nella to a dangerous conspiracy that alters her worldview forever. In this powerful story of racism, privilege, and gatekeeping’s damage to the Black psyche, Harris puts corporate America on blast. Read an exclusive interview with Harris here at Esquire .

Little, Brown and Company How the Word Is Passed, by Clint Smith

The summer’s most visionary work of nonfiction is this radical reckoning with slavery, as represented in the nation’s monuments, plantations, and landmarks. As he tours the country, Smith observes the wounds of slavery hiding in plain sight, from Confederate cemeteries to plantations turned tourist traps, like Monticello. As he considers how the darkest chapter of our nation’s past has been sanitized for public consumption, Smith explores how slavery has shaped our collective history, and how we might hope for a more truthful collective future.

CUSTOM HOUSE Appleseed, by Matt Bell

In this epic speculative novel, Bell braids three narrative strands: the eighteenth-century rise of a proto-Johnny Appleseed, a portrait of civilization on the brink of ecological collapse fifty years from now, and the tale of the next millennium’s inhospitable Earth, plunged into a new Ice Age. Together, these narrative threads coalesce into a gripping meditation on manifest destiny and humanity's relationship to this endangered planet, making for a breathtaking novel of ideas unlike anything you've ever read.

Harper Perennial An Ordinary Age, by Rainesford Stauffer

All too often, we’re told that young adulthood will be the time of our lives—so why isn’t it? Stauffer explores the diminishing returns of young adulthood in this soulful book, providing a meticulous cartography of how outer forces shape young people’s inner lives. From chronic burnout to the loneliness epidemic to the strictures of social media, An Ordinary Age leads with empathy in exploring the myriad challenges facing young adults, while also advocating for a better path forward: one where young people can live authentic lives filled with love, community, and self-knowledge.

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Our 20 Favorite Books of 2021

Playful, majestic, dazzling. These titles stole our hearts.

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2021 marked the release of new books by some of our most prominent authors—among them Richard Powers, Jonathan Franzen, Louise Erdrich, Amor Towles, Ann Patchett, Anthony Doerr, Colson Whitehead, and Maggie Shipstead, whose latest works made it onto our Top 20 List. Some of them, like Shipstead’s Great Circle, are epics in which the heroes and heroines’ adventures light up the reader’s imagination, while others go a bit more micro. For example, Whitehead’s Harlem Shuffle is a 1960s period piece in which a furniture dealer gets suckered into a caper; Erdrich’s The Sentence is a contemporary novel set in a Minneapolis bookstore exactly like the one the author owns.

Two of the debut novels on our list—the breathtaking The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois , by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, and Nathan Harris’s The Sweetness of Water —were also selected for Oprah’s Book Club. Fiction from rising stars Patricia Engel, Mariana Enriquez, and Virgina Feito also wowed us.

Maggie Nelson is one of America’s leading intellectuals, and her brilliant collection, On Freedom , is a must-read for anyone who wants to deconstruct the most urgent social debates of the day. And the The Man Who Lived Underground , which Richard Wright wrote in the 1940s but was unable to get published at the time, underscores that great literature never loses its relevance: His tale of police brutality and racial inequality reads like it happened today. And then there’s Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Annette Gordon Reed’s On Juneteenth, her stirring personal ode to a holiday that is only now finally getting its due.

And for fun, New York, My Village , by Uwem Akpan, satirizes the self-serious book publishing business, while James LaPine’s sublime Putting It Together is a reminder, amid all our world’s uncertainty, that making art and sharing it with audiences is one of those life-affirming acts we were put on this planet for.

Drumroll, please...

Cloud Cuckoo Land, by Anthony Doerr

The man who lived underground, by richard wright.

This previously unpublished novel, written in the 40s by the iconic author of Native Son , indicts police brutality and white supremacy through the terrifying saga of Fred Daniels, a Black man framed for double murder. Wright’s publisher refused to release the book at the time, deeming it incendiary. But this powerful, eerily prescient allegory finally saw the light of day earlier this year, at last getting the platform it has long deserved.

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Harper The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois, by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

This sweeping kitchen-table epic is the Great American Novel told through the family and ancestors of its protagonist, Ailey Pearl Garfield. Their narratives are anchored in centuries of oppression, sexual violations, and wounds made bearable by the humor, love, and resilience of Black matriarchs, then and now.

On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint, by Maggie Nelson

The acclaimed author of The Argonauts challenges, excites, and ignites with this cerebral mélange of reporting, memoir, and scholarship on topics ranging from cultural appropriation to climate change, to the distinction between obligation and responsibility. Settle in and observe Nelson’s mind at work and on fire.

Great Circle, by Maggie Shipstead

Shipstead’s exhilarating feminist epic is an ode to independence, persistence, and aviation. Marian Graves is the unforgettable protagonist at the heart of this Booker-nominated novel, who from an early age wants only to learn to fly. How she manages to make this dream come true as an orphan growing up in early-20th-century Montana is a study in courage, a thrilling ascent into a writer’s untethered imagination.

Farrar, Straus and Giroux Putting It Together, by James Lapine

The three-time Tony winner and Theater Hall of Fame inductee recounts the making of storied musical Sunday in the Park with  George , which he created with Stephen Sondheim. This illustrated book includes scintillating behind-the-scenes conversations with cast and crew. Anyone interested in how art is made will love Lapine’s tale of legends in collaboration.

The Sweetness of Water, by Nathan Harris

Newly freed in Old Ox, Georgia, two brothers, Prentiss and Landry, work on the homestead of George and Isabelle Walker—a couple mourning their son presumed lost to the Civil War—while also exploring the boundaries of their independence. A forbidden romance between Confederate soldiers underscores the tension between intimacy and duplicity in this singular debut, which also demonstrates how simple acts—of valor or violence—can ripple through time and space.

The Lincoln Highway, by Amor Towles

Towles’s picaresque tale is a paean to American mythology and the innocence of youth. In June 1954, four boys—Emmett, a Nebraska teenager just released from juvie; his little brother, Billy, a savant; Duchess, a streetwise hustler; and Woolly, heir to a Manhattan fortune—hit the road, staking out their dreams on opposite coasts but each drawn inevitably to New York. The author of A Gentleman i n Moscow has delivered a novel at once magical and melancholy.

New York, My Village, by Uwem Akpan

When Ekong Udousoro ventures from Nigeria to Manhattan to work as a book publishing fellow, he’s at first entranced and then gradually disillusioned by the patronizing, cultural superiority of his American colleagues. This satiric first novel, by the author of the memoir Say You’re One of Them , is both hilarious and spot-on.

Infinite Country, by Patricia Engel

Fifteen-year-old Talia escapes an all-girls correctional facility in the Colombian mountains on a mission to get back to Bogotá, where her father is waiting with her plane ticket to the U.S. It’s her one chance to unite with her mother and the siblings she has never met. Alternating between Talia’s journey and her parents’ struggles as undocumented immigrants separated by deportation, Engel’s astounding novel is an ode to family and heritage.

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Crossroads, by Jonathan Franzen

His strongest work since The  Corrections , Franzen’s sumptuous new novel maps the interior lives of the Hildebrandts, a suburban family mired in the quicksand of desire and deceit. It’s Christmas 1971, and a disingenuous pastor, his depressed wife, and their four children are torn between religious beliefs and roiling cultural change. Franzen embroiders his narrative with piercing social observation, an American Balzac.

Bewilderment, by Richard Powers

A grieving astrophysicist, his neuroatypical 9-year-old son, and the fern-fringed trails and waterfalls of Tennessee’s Smoky Mountains: From these elements the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The  Overstory weaves a gorgeous, generous heartbreak of a novel that mourns our ailing planet, as well as our ailing souls.

Harlem Shuffle, by Colson Whitehead

The two-time Pulitzer winner tilts genre on its head with an immersive, witty tale about a heist run amok. As the 1960s commence, Ray Carney, a Harlem furniture dealer, gets sucked into a hotel robbery. Afterward he dodges dangers real and imagined, glomming onto an American Dream that shrugs off his aspirations.

Hogarth The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, by Mariana Enriquez

An emerging Argentine star goes for Gothic gold, gleefully poking the scars of friendships and attraction in this spine-tingling, luminous collection whose enthralling characters all dance across the spectral line between our world and the beyond.

Mrs. March, by Virginia Feito

Feito’s electrifying debut novel opens a scary window into a husband’s gaslighting and its effects on his increasingly unhinged wife, Mrs. March... or is the gaslighting just in her head? Our heroine is beginning to fear that the walls of the Marches’ sumptuous Manhattan apartment have ears. Elisabeth Moss is set to star in the film version.

Intimacies, by Katie Kitamura

In the aftermath of her father’s death, the narrator of Kitamura’s crystalline novel trades New York for The Hague, translating in the World Court for a West African dictator accused of ethnic cleansing while fumbling through a tortuous romance. Kitamura is drawn to seductions, sexual and otherwise, and her slim, graceful novel punches above its weight, reckoning with the ways we deceive each other and ourselves.

These Precious Days: Essays, by Ann Patchett

To read this collection is to be invited into that sacred space where a writer steps out from behind the page to say  Hello; let’s really get to know each other.  Stoic, kindhearted, fierce, funny, brainy, Patchett’s essays honor what matters most “in this precarious and precious life.”

The Sentence, by Louise Erdrich

The 2021 Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist for The Night Watchman returns with a beguiling ode to bibliophiles set in an unnamed bookstore in Minneapolis that very closely resembles BirchBark, the shop Erdrich owns in real life. Her quirky, captivating characters—ex-con Tookie chief among them—care deeply about each other and our troubled world, but perhaps their deepest passion is for...books.

Major Labels, by Kelefa Sanneh

From Beyoncé to Kurt Cobain to De La Soul, the stars align in this virtuosic survey of popular music’s seven pillars: rock, R&B, country, punk, hip-hop, dance, and pop. Sanneh brings a contagious zeal for genres and cross-fertilizations to artists and records that are now playlists for an increasingly diverse America. “Over the past half-century, many musicians and listeners have belonged to tribes,” he writes. “What’s wrong with that?”

On Juneteenth, by Annette Gordon-Reed

A Harvard law professor and author of  The Hemingses of Monticello,  which won both the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize, Gordon-Reed is the textbook definition of public intellectual; and yet she gets personal in this slender, evocative memoir, blending textures from her small-town Texas girlhood with the unofficial celebration of slavery’s demise and the broader canvas of race in America, as when she integrated her public school: “My great-great-aunt…the one who lived in Houston and was also quite extravagant—bought boxes and boxes of dresses, tights, blouses, skirts, and hats from the most upscale department store in the city at the time, Sakowitz… Making sure I was dressed to the nines was her contribution to the civil rights movement.”

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Leigh Haber is Vice President, Books, Oprah Daily and O Quarterly. She is also Director of Oprah's Book Club. 

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A former book editor and the author of a memoir, This Boy's Faith, Hamilton Cain is Contributing Books Editor at Oprah Daily. As a freelance journalist, he has written for O, The Oprah Magazine, Men’s Health, The Good Men Project, and The List (Edinburgh, U.K.) and was a finalist for a National Magazine Award. He is currently a member of the National Book Critics Circle and lives with his family in Brooklyn.  

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Amazon Books Editors Announce 2021’s Best Books of the Year

Amor Towles’  The Lincoln Highway  named best book of 2021

SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 16, 2021-- Today, the Amazon Books Editors announced their selections for the Best Books of 2021, naming Amor Towles’  The Lincoln Highway  as the Best Book of the Year; Towles’  New York Times  bestseller  A Gentleman in Moscow  was also included in the Best Books selection in 2016. The annual list is hand-picked by a team of editors who read thousands of books each year. They share their recommendations with customers to help make holiday shopping easier. Featuring the top 100 books published this year, the editors’ selections also break out the top 20 books in numerous categories, including mysteries, memoirs, children’s books, and cookbooks. To explore the full list of the Best Books of 2021, visit  amazon.com/bestbooks2021 .

“This year, fiction reigned, with emerging and established authors telling stories of struggle, daring, and redemption,” said Sarah Gelman, Editorial Director of Amazon Books. “We all had our personal favorites this year, but the one book the team unanimously agreed on was Amor Towles’  The Lincoln Highway —we just couldn’t stop talking about it. The four main characters’ sense of innocence felt like the hope we needed as we end this year.”

The Lincoln Highway  resonates with readers, too. The quote most often highlighted by Kindle readers   is, “For what is kindness but the performance of an act that is both beneficial to another and unrequired?"

“It’s a real honor to have  The Lincoln Highway  singled out by the team at Amazon,” said Towles. “I can only hope that their confidence in the book is matched by the enjoyment of readers who join Emmett, Billy, Duchess, and Woolly on their fateful journey.”

The Amazon Books Editors Top 10 picks of 2021, as described by the editors, are:

  • The Lincoln Highway  by Amor Towles: Towles ( A Gentleman in Moscow ) might just have written one of the best novels of this decade, delivering one of the greatest gifts of fiction: hope. Filled with 1950s nostalgia and the gentle naïveté and hijinks of those who are young, optimistic, and on a mission,  The Lincoln Highway  follows four kids whose paths collide as they search for their mother and a stashed wad of cash.  –Al Woodworth
  • Crying in H Mart: A Memoir  by Michelle Zauner: You will laugh, you will cry, your stomach will rumble with hunger, and you’ll tap your toe to the beat of this powerful mother-daughter and Korean American story that shows just how important it is to accept someone fully for who they are—and love them just the same.  –Al Woodworth
  • The Plot  by Jean Hanff Korelitz: A story within a story that is a Rubik’s Cube of twists,  The Plot  follows an uninspired author fading into obscurity until his new book rockets him to fame. Only the plot isn’t his, and someone knows it. Korelitz keeps us guessing—even when all seems clear—right up to the knockout ending. – Seira Wilson
  • How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America  by Clint Smith: Smith’s tour of places and landmarks linked to slavery is the type of book that can change your perspective, even if you have known of the places (or thought you did) your entire life. – Chris Schluep
  • The Four Winds  by Kristin Hannah: Set during the Great Depression and featuring an unlikely heroine who will lodge herself in your heart,  The Four Winds  is a reminder, when we so urgently need it, of the resiliency not only of the human spirit, but of this country as well. Hannah's latest story reads like a classic. – Erin Kodicek
  • Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty  by Patrick Radden Keefe: From the author of  Say Nothing  comes an addictive account of the Sackler family—the founders and masterminds behind OxyContin. From their rise by marketing pharmaceuticals, to the backdoor dealings of FDA approvals, to the front door dealings of museum philanthropy, this is an impossible-to-put-down true story of ambition, power, deception, and greed.  –Vannessa Cronin
  • Harlem Shuffle  by Colson Whitehead: The two-time Pulitzer Prize winner of  The Nickel Boys  and  The Underground Railroad  tells a blisteringly entertaining tale of schemers and dreamers, mobsters and crooks, elaborate heists and furniture fronts, and the thrilling mischief of those who are up to no good and others who are just trying to make a living.  –Al Woodworth
  • Great Circle  by Maggie Shipstead: Shipstead has accomplished the impossible—an epic novel that is ambitious, literary, and utterly accessible.  Great Circle  follows two women who yearn for adventure and freedom—aviator Marian Graves and starlet Hadley Baxter—and like flying, it’s the thrill of the century. – Sarah Gelman
  • Project Hail Mary  by Andy Weir: As in  The Martian , Weir makes science and problem solving not only cool but absolutely essential to survival. In  Project Hail Mary , Weir delivers an electrifying space adventure sure to wrench your gut and pull at your heart strings. – Adrian Liang
  • Klara and the Sun  by Kazuo Ishiguro: Ishiguro’s quiet, emotional, and moving novel about a robot girl with artificial intelligence, who is designed as a playmate for real children, is a story that will captivate and haunt readers. – Chris Schluep

The Amazon Books Editors Top Children’s pick of 2021 is:

  • The Beatryce Prophecy   by Kate DiCamillo: An extraordinary tale of courage and found family, this book has all the hallmarks of an instant classic—a beautifully layered story with unforgettable characters who take root in your heart. – Seira Wilson

Authors of the top three books—Amor Towles, Michelle Zauner, and Jean Hanff Korelitz—will participate in an Amazon Live Author Series conversation in celebration of the Best Books of the Year selection on November 16, 2021, at 9 a.m. PST. To tune in, visit  Amazon Live .

For more information about the books featured on the Best Books of the Year list, as well as insightful reviews of new books, author interviews, and hand-curated roundups in popular categories, visit the Amazon Book Review at  www.amazon.com/amazonbookreview . You can also follow the Amazon Books Editors recommendations and conversations @amazonbooks on  Facebook ,  Twitter , and  Instagram .

About Amazon

Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Amazon strives to be Earth’s Most Customer-Centric Company, Earth’s Best Employer, and Earth’s Safest Place to Work. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Career Choice, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, Alexa, Just Walk Out technology, Amazon Studios, and The Climate Pledge are some of the things pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit  amazon.com/about  and follow @AmazonNews.

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Source: Amazon

Infrastructure in Dystopian and Post-apocalyptic Film, 1968-2021

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Infrastructure in Dystopian and Post-apocalyptic Film, 1968-2021

Christian Long

238 pages | 6.69 x 9.61 | © 2024

Film Studies

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A secret shelf of banned books thrives in a Texas school, under the nose of censors

Neda Ulaby - Square

A high school teacher in Houston has a library in her classroom of books she's not supposed to have, per state legislation. Students say she's helping them survive. ( Story aired on ATC on 1/29/24 .)

A secret shelf of banned books thrives in a Texas school, under the nose of censors

A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:

Efforts to ban books have sparked a countermovement to find new ways to keep those books in circulation. In Texas, where hundreds of school book bans have been reported in recent years, some teachers and students have been building underground libraries. NPR's Neda Ulaby reports.

NEDA ULABY, BYLINE: Three teenagers are giggling at a coffee shop in Texas about what it takes to get their hands on books.

UNIDENTIFIED STUDENT #1: Well, these are special books, so...

ULABY: We're in the far, far suburbs of Houston at a coffee shop so nondescript it looks like an ugly Starbucks knockoff. These three 17-year-old seniors brought me here to talk about a secret bookshelf in their teacher's classroom.

UNIDENTIFIED STUDENT #2: It's really low-key, very undercover.

ULABY: How undercover?

UNIDENTIFIED STUDENT #3: She tells, like, a select few of students who she feels might need a book to get them into reading.

ULABY: These students have a lot in common besides attending the same public school.

UNIDENTIFIED STUDENT #2: We're all minorities.

ULABY: And they're all queer. The secret bookshelf, they say, is the one place where they can easily find books that give them characters they can immediately relate to.

UNIDENTIFIED STUDENT #4: Just to see, like, Latinos, LGBTQ - that's not something, like, you really see in our community, or it's not very well represented at all.

UNIDENTIFIED STUDENT #3: Well, I am a young, Black lesbian, and I don't meet people like myself in my day-to-day life, either. So reading these characters in these books - it really gives me hope.

ULABY: You will not hear the names of these students. NPR has confirmed their identities, but they worry about the consequences of going public with their secret classroom bookshelf.

UNIDENTIFIED STUDENT #4: We don't want to jeopardize our teacher in any way - or the bookshelf or the district or the school.

ULABY: Or themselves. Sharing such books in a Texas public school has felt dangerous for the past few years. These students do not want to draw the ire of antagonistic activists or put their teacher at risk. She is a longtime public school employee, a Texas native. And like her state, her secret bookshelf is enormous.

UNIDENTIFIED TEACHER: At this point, I may have about maybe 600 books.

ULABY: They spill from two big bookshelves in her classroom into a bunch of plastic crates.

UNIDENTIFIED TEACHER: I'll never have enough bookshelves (laughter).

ULABY: This teacher started her secret library a couple of years ago, after a Texas lawmaker named Matt Krause sent public schools a list of 850 books he wanted banned because he felt they would make students uncomfortable about race and sex. That made this teacher furious.

UNIDENTIFIED TEACHER: The books that make you uncomfortable are the books that make you think, and isn't that what school is supposed to do? It's supposed to make you think.

ULABY: So she swung into action. First, she called friends.

UNIDENTIFIED TEACHER: I was like, y'all, I have this project. I want his impact to be that it's actually expanding kids' access to people that are different from them.

ULABY: Then she talked to her students. She gave one of them a job. Here's that student remembering the assignment.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Can you go through the list? Can you see, like, what books you'd recommend for us to add to the library? And then she gave me her card to buy them.

ULABY: Wait a minute, she literally was like, here are the books we're not supposed to have; go get them?

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Yeah. It was a lot of gay books, I remember that.

ULABY: This student has recently graduated. In high school, he came out as a transgender man to his parents.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: I wouldn't call them supportive, so I had to do a lot of sneaking around.

ULABY: Including sneaking books featuring romances between queer characters. Some on the bookshelf are about contemporary high school students now. Some, says the teacher, are queer classics.

UNIDENTIFIED TEACHER: Yes, I throw James Baldwin at them whenever I can. "Giovanni's Room" is really popular. That book is so wonderful. It's about travel and his identity and confusion. It's so wonderful.

ULABY: I reached out to former Texas lawmaker Matt Krause for comment repeatedly and got no response. He's currently running for county commissioner in Fort Worth. Here are some students talking about the books he's been trying to ban they've read from the secret bookshelf.

UNIDENTIFIED STUDENT #3: There was "1984" by George Orwell. I love that book. I love dystopian novels. "My Heart Underwater" by Laurel Flores Fantauzzo - that was banned strongly because of the LGBTQ main character.

ULABY: And here's another student.

UNIDENTIFIED STUDENT #1: Some of the books that I've read are books like "Hood Feminism," "Poet X," "Gabi, A Girl In Pieces" - like, books that have really helped me come to sense with feminism. How I grew up, I just see a lot of - like, especially in my community, a lot of women being talked down upon. And those books - it was really nice to read and be educated on.

ULABY: To be clear, this public school with the secret bookshelf in Texas, it's not in a fancy part of town. Many students there do not have parents who can drop everything to get their kids books about being queer. Here's the teacher.

UNIDENTIFIED TEACHER: Oh, I have taught kids whose parents have never set foot in a classroom. They are from small towns in other countries, and their parents were farmers. I've had kids whose names were not spelled correctly because their parents were illiterate. You know, a lot of the kids have parents that did not go to college. A high amount of kids here are on free and reduced lunch.

ULABY: A spokesperson for the school district where this teacher works said they prefer not to comment on the issue. The transgender student worries about how much worse it's getting in Texas for teachers who want to help students like him.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Because of the way the laws are going for trans people especially, it could become illegal to the point where it could be assumed that she's grooming kids. And that would be terrible because that's not what she's doing at all.

ULABY: A Texas teacher was fired last year for assigning a book to her students. It was a graphic novel about Anne Frank that showed Anne having a romantic daydream about another girl. There are other documented cases in Texas of teachers leaving jobs because of pressure over challenged books. One local Freedom to Read activist described the atmosphere as chilling. That's what makes the underground bookshelf started by this teacher remarkable, says Kasey Meehan of the free speech advocacy group PEN America.

KASEY MEEHAN: Yes. That is, in fact, incredible, and it's really courageous.

ULABY: It's not wrong for students to be worried, Meehan says, given how much things have escalated in Texas in recent years.

MEEHAN: Parents are taking books from schools and bringing them to police and sheriff's offices and accusing librarians and educators of providing sexually explicit material to students.

UNIDENTIFIED TEACHER: It does make me nervous. It does make me nervous. I mean, this is absolutely silly that I'm not free to talk about books without giving my name and worrying about repercussions because history has taught us this lesson over and over again.

ULABY: The teacher who runs the secret bookshelf of banned books.

UNIDENTIFIED TEACHER: You know, I intend for this library to just keep growing.

ULABY: And at some point, she hopes it will no longer have to be a secret.

UNIDENTIFIED TEACHER: I do believe that book banning is going to go away. I think it's kind of the last grasp of people trying to maintain control because they know it's slipping. That's what I tell myself anyway.

ULABY: Late last year, the Texas State Board of Education passed a policy prohibiting what it calls, quote, "sexually explicit, pervasively vulgar or educationally unsuitable" books in public schools. Critics say that language is dangerously vague. And although parts of that policy were just blocked by federal court, it was not overturned, and that language was left untouched.

Neda Ulaby, NPR News.

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Author Hanif Abdurraqib holds court on new basketball-themed book, mortality and more

books about books 2021

The early reviews of Columbus-bred writer Hanif Abdurraqib 's next book are in and as with his previous offerings, critics are applauding:

“Lyrically stunning and profoundly moving … a formally inventive, gorgeously personal triumph.” — Kirkus Reviews

" ... not only the most original sports book I’ve ever read, it’s also one of the most moving books I’ve ever read, period." — Steve James, director of "Hoop Dreams"

"While nominally his next book is about basketball — like the rest of his writing, it’s also about everything else.” — NPR

Although Abdurraqib says he tries not to read too many reviews of his work, he agrees with NPR's assessment of "There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension," due out on March 26 through Penguin Random House.

"(Critics) are shorthanding it as a basketball book, but this book can't just pursue the one thing," the 40-year-old essayist, poet and cultural critic said during a recent interview.

Ben Greenberg, Random House's vice president and editor-in-chief, agreed, saying Abdurraqib's books are too expansive to synopsize in a sentence or two.

"Like all Hanif books ("There's Always This Year") started as a seed of an idea — LeBron James — and grew into something far more vast throughout the course of his writing it," Greenberg said.

" … it still is a book about LeBron James, in a way, but it is also a book about getting older, and a book about the pride of coming from a place and what it means to stay there, and a book about people we lose along the way."

'A Little Devil in America': Abdurraqib's exploration of music, dance laced with memories

"There's Always This Year" is structured in quarters and minutes, like a basketball game, a sport he loves and has written about in previous works. In the book, Abdurraqib keeps several balls aloft as his thoughts pivot around central themes, including home (his love for Columbus is legendary), what it means to "make it," who deserves success, mortality and affording ourselves a measure of grace.

"I was considering time, mortality, and the mercies of aging when I didn't consider myself able to or interested in aging for so long," Abdurraqib said, explaining what compelled him to write "There's Always This Year."

"And also, of course, (there were) considerations of time as it relates to legacy, place, and personal mythologies."

A 2001 graduate of Beechcroft High School, Abdurraqib grew up on the East Side, which he calls "a kind of centralized hub for basketball," a world some youngsters dreamed of escaping for brighter lights in bigger cities, but which drew Abdurraqib back in 2017 after living in Connecticut for two and a half years.

"In the book, I try to deconstruct the idea of why 'making it' is aligned with the idea of getting out of a place," the Bronzeville resident said. "I've never wanted to leave Columbus.

"There comes a time in your life when you choose a place back."

On mortality, basketball and grace

Now beyond the age his father was when he was born, Abdurraqib has begun to ponder his own mortality, but he doesn't exchange living in the here and now for any sort of existential crisis. "It's about drawing parallels between time and wanting one's time back without disregarding the present," he explained.

A conversation with Abdurraqib is like trying to grasp the wind in one's hand. He breezes easily from one topic to the next, thoughts pouring out as rapidly as his agile mind conceives them. But there's a purposefulness, a connective thread that weaves through his ruminations as again, he turns to basketball to draw an analogy between the sport and growing older.

"I saw a video of LeBron James in late 2020 wearing a mask because it was during the pandemic," he said. "When he took it off, his beard was grayer than I'd ever seen. If he's aging, what does that mean for me ? He's seen as indestructible, but he is also aesthetically facing down time."

His musings on mortality give way to reflections on his father and how, through their bond, he's learning to cut himself some slack, as the saying goes.

"My relationship with my father is something I've reconsidered as I attempt to form a relationship with grace for myself. Often, we have a lot of grace for others, but we're harder on our past selves," he said.

His father still lives on Columbus' East side in the house where Abdurraqib, one of four children including a brother who lives locally, grew up. His mother died when he was 13.

"I wasn't a good kid — of course, the binary of good and bad is flimsy — but I was in trouble, in and out of jail when I was younger. I have a lot of gratitude for the grace (my father) showed me throughout my life.

"It would be nice if people pushed up against whatever door they have locked against grace for themselves."

The genesis of a writer

You'd never know it from his extensive body of work and countless accolades, but Abdurraqib never dreamed of being a writer. In fact, he studied marketing during his time at Capital University in 2002 and 2003.

Despite not having literary ambitions as a youth, Abdurraqib personifies the idiom about the apple not falling far from the tree: His mother was a writer, the first he'd ever witnessed at work.

And like many writers-to-be, Abdurraqib was a voracious reader as a child, getting lost in the library stacks for hours. "My parents placed a lot of emphasis on us understanding what we read," he said.

He found writing — or perhaps it found him — as a twentysomething coming up in the punk scene, when he began writing for local zines.

At a low point in his life — "around 2004 and 2005," he said — Abdurraqib found himself evicted and sleeping in a storage unit, showering at a YMCA by day and writing by night as a way to distract his mind from the struggle of surviving.

Q&A: Author Michele Norris explores racial identity in 'Our Hidden Conversations'

"I got into (writing) late, around 2012. I liked the idea of delivering information and reporting on the state of Columbus," he said.

"Writing for zines led to writing album reviews, but one of my editors said my writing was too poetic, too meandering. So, I began to study how to wield poetics more effectively. I wanted to learn to write poetry. I built a school of my own."

Eventually, he began showing up at the now-defunct Writer's Block , one of Columbus' longest-running poetry open-mic nights, where he would ask other writers for books to read.

"I went to Writer's Block for the first time in 2012, after I'd started hosting my own poetry night at Travonna Coffee House and wanted to see other poetry in the city," Abdurraqib said.

"(Co-founder) Scott Woods welcomed me, championed my work when no one else did. It was a great first poetry home for me."

Fostering the future

One might expect an air of self-importance from a Carnegie Medal winner and MacArthur Fellow whose face is emblazoned on the People's Mural of Columbus at 1450 E. Main St., where it was installed in 2021. But Abdurraqib insists, "I am pretty unspectacular in a lot of ways."

He's equally as unassuming about his impact on the community, especially on young writers such as Kade Weinmann, who first met Abdurraqib as a high school junior in 2019.

“I was finishing up high school with the arts and humanities program I attended called The Mosaic Program . Here is where I learned of and eventually met (Abdurraqib). He would come to our class and do workshops/readings with us,” said Weinmann, lead singer for local band Cellar Dwellar .

Weinmann, who graduated from Central Crossing High School in 2021, said he didn't see much of the ever-busy Abdurraqib after high school, but remained a fan of his work, which greatly influenced Cellar Dwellar's writing. It was in September 2023 that the two reconnected when the band played at the annual back-to-school bash hosted by Abdurraqib.

Black History Month: 29 Black-owned Columbus businesses to support this February

"After the fact, (we) asked Hanif if he'd read and record with us the poem that started off the writing process, Weinmann said. "The next week, he joined us in Moonlight Audio studio and did just that, for a small local band he barely knew.”

Abdurraqib, who can be heard reading the spoken-word piece, "Ecorche," written by Weinmann, on Cellar Dwellar's album, "In the Shape of a Swan," was just as impressed with the band as they were with him.

"They came and played (at the back-to-school bash), and I really connected with them. I listened to the album, and I wanted to be a part of it," he said.

Helping other writers to create in a way that makes them feel empowered is crucial to Abdurraqib. "It's important for young people in this city to have people in their orbit who say, 'I want to be into what you're into,' and not dismiss them," he said.

"Sometimes it takes just one person to show interest — a high school teacher, an editor — to give them confidence and a roadmap."

What's next?

What's in the works for the prolific Abdurraqib, whose mental cogs seemingly never stop churning? He certainly won't be resting on his laurels. The pots in which he has his hands are too numerous to list, but of course, he'll keep writing. And writing. And writing more.

He also will continue to serve as a nonfiction editor-at-large at Oregon-based Tin House publishing company, where he oversees the work of authors Prince Shakur and Athena Dixon and has amassed something of a fan club among the staff.

Masie Cochran, editorial director and interim publisher at Tin House, described his works as "gorgeous" and "hybrid in their structures,"

"The way he thinks about words and storytelling is enlightening and also spiriting," she said. "That's exactly the kind of work we need right now."

Cochran also praised Abdurraqib for championing "authors with distinct voices who have sort of been pushed to the margins," and for his self-admitted childlike curiosity.

"Hanif is also one of the most curious people I've ever known, whether it's basketball or baking or animals or whatever it is," she said. "He dives in with this full, open-minded curiosity and ebullience that is so rare.

"I feel lucky to be one of the people who gets to spend time with him."

Cochran posed a question that undoubtedly crosses the minds of anyone who knows Abdurraqib: How does he accomplish all that he does?

"I sometimes wonder how many hours he gets a day. I think he gets more than other people! I don't know how he does so much and does it so well," she said.

Modest to a fault, Abdurraqib takes such effusive praise humbly if a bit abashedly and with wonder that so many people consider him a pretty big deal. As for his work with Tin House, he'll stay as long as they'll have him.

"That's kind of up to them, though I do like the work I've done with them to this point," he said.

Naturally, Abdurraqib will continue to explore subjects that reflect his innumerable interests, but his primary focus, at least for the time being, is "There's Always This Year," he said.

"I'm mostly just looking forward to bringing this book into the world and doing the best I can to live alongside it."

[email protected]

Cosmopolitan

11 New Movies Based on Books to Watch in 2024

W hether you're a big reader who can't wait for your favorite book to make its way to the big screen or are a big film fan who wants to know what 2024 will bring, you've come to the right place. Obviously, a lot of movies are adapted from books and this year is no different. From children's stories being turned into animated features, to non-fiction books becoming historical films, to sci-fi epics coming to life, there's a something for everyone, from every genre.

As a preview of what you can look forward to, specifically: Colleen Hoover's hugely successful romance It Ends with Us is being adapted into a movie starring Blake Lively, part two of the adaptation of the space epic Dune by Frank Herbert is coming out, and Anne Hathaway is starring as a woman who falls in love with a Harry Styles-ish boy band-er in a movie based on Robinne Lee's The Idea of You .

For more on these films and eight more movies you can look forward to this year, keep reading.

Orion and the Dark

On Netflix Feb. 2

This new animated movie Orion and the Dark is based on the 2014 children's book of the same name by Emma Yarlett. It's about a boy, Orion (Jacob Tremblay), who has a whole variety of fears and anxieties, but comes into contact with the embodiment of one of them, the Dark (Paul Walter Hauser), and goes on a journey to overcome the things that scare him. The voice cast also includes Angela Bassett and Ike Barinholtz.

STREAM HERE

The tiger’s apprentice.

On Paramount+ Feb. 2

Another animated film being released this year is The Tiger's Apprentice , based on the 2003 book by Laurence Yep, which is the first in his fantasy trilogy. It's about a Chinese-American boy, Tom Lee (Brandon Soo Hoo), who becomes the apprentice of a talking tiger (Henry Golding) and the protector of a phoenix egg. Other voice actors in the cast include Michelle Yeoh, Lucy Liu, Bowen Yang, and Sandra Oh.

Dune: Part Two

In theaters March 1

Two-and-a-half years after the release of the first film, Dune: Part Two is hitting theaters on March 1. As with the 2021 movie, it's based on the the 1965 sci-fi novel Dune by Frank Herbert. Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya, Rebecca Ferguson, and others from the first movie's cast return for the space war epic, and this time they're joined by new additions including Florence Pugh and Austin Butler.

On Netflix March 1

For more outer space drama, there's Spaceman , based on the 2017 book Spaceman of Bohemia by Jaroslav Kalfař. Adam Sandler stars as an astronaut who is sent on a solo mission and ends up bonding with an alien spider (Paul Dano) with whom he confronts his past.

The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare

In theaters April 19

The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare is based on the 2014 non-fiction book Churchill's Secret Warriors: The Explosive True Story of the Special Forces Desperadoes of WWII by Damien Lewis (not that Damien Lewis ). The book title kind of says it all: It's about a secret British organization during World War II. The cast includes Henry Cavill, Eiza González, Henry Golding, and Hero Fiennes Tiffin.

The Idea of You

On Amazon Prime Video May 2

Anne Hathaway and Nicholas Galitzine star in The Idea of You based on Robinne Lee's 2017 novel of the same name. Hathaway plays Solène, a single mother who takes her teen daughter (Ella Rubin) to Coachella, where she unexpectedly ends up striking up a relationship with a super famous boy band member, Hayes Campbell (Galitzine), who is 16 years her junior. (By the way, the character of Hayes was partially inspired by Harry Styles .)

The Watchers

In theaters June 7

The horror movie The Watchers stars Dakota Fanning as a woman who becomes lost in a forrest in Ireland, and soon, she and a group of strangers find that they're being watched by unknown creatures. Spooky! It's based on the 2021 book of the same name by A. M. Shine.

The Bikeriders

In theaters June 21

Rather than being based on a novel, The Bikeriders is based on a 1967 photography book, also titled The Bikeriders , by Danny Lyon. The book documented a real Chicago based motorcycle club, while the film is about a fictional club during the same time period. Stars include Tom Hardy, Austin Butler, Jodie Comer, and Michael Shannon.

It Ends with Us

It Ends with Us is based on Colleen Hoover's romance of the same name from 2016. Blake Lively stars as Lily, a woman who begins a relationship with an abusive man, Ryle (Justin Baldoni), while still having feelings for another man, Atlas (Brandon Sklenar), who she reconnects with.

The Amateur

In theaters Nov. 8

Rami Malek, Rachel Brosnahan, Caitríona Balfe, and Laurence Fishburn star in The Amateur , based on the 1981 novel of the same name by Robert Littell. It's about a CIA cryptographer (Malek), who begins a revenge mission after losing his wife in a terrorist attack.

The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim

In theaters Dec. 13

Adding to the long list of adaptations of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings is The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim . It's adapted from a story told in the appendices of the 1954 book. This animated prequel features a voice that includes Brian Cox, Miranda Otto, and Luke Pasqualino.

Eleven new movies based on books to check out in 2024, from 'Dune: Part Two' to 'It Ends with Us'.

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