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The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2019 (2019)
(Best American Nonrequired Reading)
edited by
Edan Lepucki
Awards
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Award nominations
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Garth Greenwell recommends
Two-Step Devil (2024)
Jamie Quatro
"Reading this novel is like holding on to a live wire. Jamie Quatro is the real thing. The music of these sentences lights my hair on fire."
Rejection (2024)
Tony Tulathimutte
"Tony Tulathimutte's supercharged prose and profound existential comedy reveal something true at the heart of our desperate human condition. Rejection is a book of mad, madcap genius."
Misrecognition (2024)
Madison Newbound
"Numbed by heartbreak, lost in a peculiarly American loneness, the protagonist of Madison Newbound's haunting novel brings new understandings of identity and sex to old experiences of melancholy and obsession. I've never read anything that captures so vividly the distinct texture of desire, at once feverish and vacant, engendered by the infinite scroll of online life. Misrecognition is a brave and blazingly smart debut."
The Anthropologists (2024)
Ayşegül Savaş
"Like Walter Benjamin, Aysegul Savas uncovers trapdoors to bewilderment everywhere in everyday life; like Henry James, she sees marriage as a mystery, unsoundably deep. The Anthropologists is mesmerizing; I felt I read it in a single breath."
All the World Beside (2024)
Garrard Conley
"Garrard Conley has found a new and ravishing music: a language that straddles the 18th and 21st centuries, a vehicle for faith and desire. In its closing movements, this novel contains some of the finest writing I've encountered in recent American fiction."
River East, River West (2024)
Aube Rey Lescure
"River East, River West portrays the powerlessness of our loves against the riptides of history."
Digging Stars (2023)
Novuyo Rosa Tshuma
"Novuyo Rosa Tshuma's virtuosic, word-drunk sentences cast bridges across the abysses of history and the gaps between the stars. In Digging Stars, she chronicles a family's fractures and a young woman's determination to conquer the terrors of both outer and inner space. This is a brave and moving book."
The Humble Lover (2023)
Edmund White
"The work of Edmund White stands as an unignorable achievement in the past half century of American literature. It is astonishing to see him, in his ninth decade, after more than a dozen novels, writing with such daring and abandon, with the true artist's bracing, vivifying disregard for the stifling canons of good taste. He is one of our living treasures, an inspiration and a wonder."
Calling Ukraine (2023)
Johannes Lichtman
"Johannes Lichtman's great subject is morally compromised idealism, and he brings to it an electric intelligence and an allergy to ready-made judgments. Calling Ukraine is the funniest tragedy I've ever read, or maybe the saddest comedy; it's also a merciless dissection of American moral vanity. Lichtman's brilliance lies in showing how all our categories--for books, for people--are inadequate. He's one of the most exciting novelists working today."
In Memoriam (2023)
Alice Winn
"I read through the night to finish this blistering debut, too feverishly engrossed to sleep. When was the last time characters in a novel seemed so real to me, so cherishable, so alive? Alice Winn has made familiar history fresh; no account of the First World War has made me feel so vividly its horror, or how irrevocably it mutilated the world. That In Memoriam is also an extraordinary love story is a sign of Winn's wild ambition and her prodigious gifts: this is a novel that claims both beauty and brutality, the whole range of human life."
Biography of X (2023)
Catherine Lacey
"I'm not sure I know another novel that manages to be so many books at once... A profound novel about love and what it can license, about the toll - and maybe the con - of genius. Only Catherine Lacey could have written it."
Up with the Sun (2023)
Thomas Mallon
"In this funny, vicious tale of ambition and moral corrosion, Thomas Mallon turns his rapier intelligence and seismographic sense of the workings of power to the worlds of Hollywood and Broadway. Among imperishable legends and declining stars, he chronicles desperate competition and half-open secrets, the longing for the next new thing and the lure of the past. Up With the Sun is a novel as stark as a Greek drama and as delicious as gossip."
Other Names for Love (2022)
Taymour Soomro
"This haunted, haunting novel is about the cruelties we commit in our search for freedom and the bonds from which we can never be free. Taymour Soomro's piercing insight is that both the freedom and the bonds are constituent of love."
Time Shelter (2022)
Georgi Gospodinov
"A trickster at heart, and often very funny... Gospodinov is one of the leading writers in Europe: every book is an event."
Savage Tongues (2021)
Azareen Van Der Vliet Oloomi
"Against the gorgeous, punishing landscapes of Andalusia, the narrator of Savage Tongues relentlessly and movingly anatomizes the links between violence—both personal and systemic—and desire. This uncompromising novel lives at the border of memory and dream, restlessly seeking a logic that can transform cruelty into love."
The Magician (2021)
Colm Tóibín
"No living novelist dramatizes artistic creation as profoundly, as luminously, as Colm Tóibín, or conveys so well the entanglement of imagination and desire . . . [His] style, with its faultless elegance and unsparing gaze, gives the sense of mastery threatened everywhere by passion. Reading him is among the deepest pleasures our literature can offer."
A Passage North (2021)
Anuk Arudpragasam
"A profound and disquieting account of the making of a self, of the pressures of history, desire, will, and chance that determine the shape of a life. It’s difficult to think of comparisons for Arudpragasam’s work among current English-language writers; one senses, reading his two extraordinary novels, a new mastery coming into being."
Intimacies (2021)
Katie Kitamura
"A novel about the ruthlessness of power, the check of virtue, and the purportedly neutral bureaucracy meant to mediate between them. Katie Kitamura is among the most brilliant and profound writers at work today; she reminds me how high the moral stakes of fiction can be."
The Great Mistake (2021)
Jonathan Lee
"Jonathan Lee's wily, virtuosic, very beautiful new novel is an intimate portrait of a public man that also serves as an X-ray of America. The Great Mistake is a great novel of New York, in which the shaping of public space becomes inextricable from the loneliness, longing, and ferocious ambition of a single, damaged man."
Swimming Back to Trout River (2021)
Linda Rui Feng
"What can account for the astonishing emotional force of this debut novel? Maybe it’s that Linda Rui Feng understands her characters with an intimacy one seldom encounters, or the sense one has that she loves them so much. Or maybe it’s Feng’s exceedingly rare gift for putting language to feelings so profound, and so exquisitely observed, that they escape all readymade names. Everything in this gorgeously orchestrated novel surprises, everything outraces expectation. Swimming Back to Trout River is one of the most beautiful debuts I have read in years."
Libertie (2021)
Kaitlyn Greenidge
"The voice that fuels this novel is rooted in the body and rises toward myth, forged of history, ocean salt, iron, and hope. With Libertie, Kaitlyn Greenidge adds an indelible new sound to American literature, and confirms her status as one of our most gifted young writers."
Missionaries (2020)
Phil Klay
"Phil Klay’s Missionaries has a sweep and incisiveness to it I had almost forgotten novels were capable of. I haven’t been so gripped by a book in years. It is immensely smart and farseeing, and utterly unsparing. Extraordinary."
What Happens at Night (2020)
Peter Cameron
"The prose in What Happens at Night is faultlessly elegant and quietly menacing, like a tuxedo lined with knives. I can’t think of another book at once so beautiful and so unnerving, so poised between miracle and disaster. Peter Cameron is one of America’s greatest writers, the living stylist I most revere."
The Lightness (2020)
Emily Temple
"This remarkable novel is made up of equal parts desire and dread; it constantly surprised me, eerily outpacing my expectations."
All My Mother's Lovers (2020)
Ilana Masad
"This ambitious, deft, compassionate debut novel finds eternal truths in a very contemporary story: that even those we care for most remain mysteries to us, that our judgments of others' lives are always inadequate, that love demands heroism. Ilana Masad is an exciting talent."
How Much of These Hills is Gold (2020)
C Pam Zhang
"This exhilarating novel unweaves the myths of the American West and offers in their place a gorgeous, broken, soulful, feral song of family and yearning, origin and earth. C Pam Zhang is a brilliant, fearless writer. This book is a wonder."
Strange Hotel (2020)
Eimear McBride
"No writer currently working excites me more than Eimear McBride - in her writing of the body, in her radical reimagining of the sentence, in her invention of new intimacies. Nothing else feels so fresh, so radically new. Strange Hotel challenges and expands my sense of what art can do. Each of McBride’s novels feels like an event?not just in English-language literature but in the English language itself."
Sea Monsters (2019)
Chloe Aridjis
"Sea Monsters is a mesmerizing, revelatory novel, smart and funny and laced with a strangeness that is never facile but serves as a profound and poetic tool for navigating our shared world. Chloe Aridjis is the rare writer who reinvents herself in each book; she is, for my money, one of the most brilliant novelists working in English today."
Leading Men (2019)
Christopher Castellani
"With extraordinary artistry and grace, Christopher Castellani interweaves history and invention to show us both the depths great artists are driven to and the love that draws them back. I know of few books that give such a moving account of the indispensable value of genius and its intolerable human cost. This is a novel of rare insight and beauty, and Castellani is a writer of brilliant gifts."
The Third Hotel (2018)
Laura van den Berg
"In this gorgeous, frighteningly smart novel, a woman deranged by grief becomes an imposter in her own life. As inventive and inexorable as a dream, The Third Hotel is a devastating excavation of the unconscionable demands we place on those we love, and a profound portrait of the uncanny composite creature that is a marriage. Laura van den Berg is one of our best writers, an absolute marvel."
Southernmost (2018)
Silas House
"A novel of fierce love and necessary disaster, of the bravery required to escape the prison of our days, to make a better and more worthy life."
A Place for Us (2018)
Fatima Farheen Mirza
"Fatima Mirza is brilliant and this novel will break your heart and make it new again."
Never Anyone But You (2018)
Rupert Thomson
"In this novel about Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, Rupert Thomson tells the thrilling story of how, fusing love and art, one of the great collaborative partnerships of the 20th century mounted an unthinkably brave, largely unsung campaign of political witness and resistance. The voice Thomson gives Marcel is a brilliant invention: flashes of poetry trouble the patina of its self-control, intimations of the wildness and terror of genius."
The Great Believers (2018)
Rebecca Makkai
"This expansive, huge-hearted novel conveys the scale of the trauma that was the early AIDS crisis, and conveys, too, the scale of the anger and love that rose up to meet it. Rebecca Makkai shows us characters who are devastated but not defeated, who remain devoted, in the face of death, to friendship and desire and joyful, irrepressible life. I loved this book."
My Ex-Life (2018)
Stephen McCauley
"This wonderful novel has its finger on the pulse of the present, but the questions it asks?about family and the ineluctable past and the strange, sustaining grace of friendship?are as timeless as the elegance and craft of its prose. Stephen McCauley is a master, one of our wisest and funniest observers of American life."
The Third Reel (2018)
S J Naude
"I read this haunting and brilliant book in a white heat of wonder...The Third Reel gives that rare excitement peculiar to great novels: the thrill of discovering a new and necessary world."
Ponti (2018)
Sharlene Teo
"This haunting debut hopscotches between decades and cultures, eschewing the usual moves of the coming-of-age story for something truer to the desperate, surreal stakes of adolescence. Sharlene Teo is a daring and genuinely original novelist."
Eat Only When You're Hungry (2017)
Lindsay Hunter
"This novel takes us on a road trip with an American Everyman into the heart of American hunger--for freedom, for connection, for junk food, for love. Hunter has a brilliant sense for the perfectly telling image, and her humor is so biting and smart it was almost a surprise, at the end of this engrossing book, to realize how thoroughly she had broken my heart."
Made for Love (2017)
Alissa Nutting
"So blisteringly smart and feverishly inventive that it's difficult to decide which element pins most precisely the absurdity of our present or the terror of our future. This is a novel as frightening as it is hilarious, melding pathos, comedy, and delight as only great satire can."
Stephen Florida (2017)
Gabe Habash
"Stephen Florida is an unforgettable addition to the canon of great literary eccentrics. At once a chronicle of obsession, a philosophical treatise, and a deeply affecting love story, this singular novel is perhaps most profoundly an anatomy of American loneliness. Gabe Habash is a writer of powerful gifts, and this is a wonderful book."
The Destroyers (2017)
Christopher Bollen
"Equal parts Graham Greene, Patricia Highsmith, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Destroyers is at once lyrical and suspenseful, thoughtful and riveting."
The Jungle Around Us (2016)
Anne Raeff
"This masterful collection records the long psychic toll of the twentieth century's traumas, offering portraits of people in various kinds of exile: displaced from their countries or uneasy in their hometowns or somehow alien in their own bodies and minds. Anne Raeff's exquisite stories are remarkable for their combination of intimacy and reverence for the mysteries and private griefs her characters fold their lives around. Seldom have I read work so confident in the power of what's left unspoken and in the deep eloquence of gesture. The Jungle around Us is a haunting and breathtakingly beautiful book."
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© 1999 - Fantastic Fiction
