{"id":169436,"date":"2024-12-20T10:00:48","date_gmt":"2024-12-20T15:00:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=169436"},"modified":"2024-12-21T19:18:16","modified_gmt":"2024-12-22T00:18:16","slug":"the-best-books-of-2024-according-to-friends-of-the-review-part-two","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2024\/12\/20\/the-best-books-of-2024-according-to-friends-of-the-review-part-two\/","title":{"rendered":"The Best Books of 2024, According to Friends of the Review<\/em>: Part Two"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

Wilhelm Amberg, Reading from Goethe’s<\/em> Werther (1870), via Wikimedia Commons<\/a>. Public domain.<\/p><\/div>\n

Colored Television<\/em> by Danzy Senna: among its subjects (not in order of importance) are LA, the vagaries of a writer\u2019s life, and race\u2014often in terms of a word that, coming from New Orleans, I am deeply familiar with, but which I thought I was not allowed to use. Until Danzy Senna said it was OK. More than OK. She prefers it to any less specific word. What is this word? Mulatto<\/em>. The book\u2019s heroine is writing a gigantic historical novel on this topic, which her husband describes as the \u201cmulatto War and Peace<\/em>,\u201d and which is destined for failure\u2014a failure resonant with universal poignance. Danzy Senna\u2019s novel is deeply hilarious, though the passages I highlighted are not: \u201cShe\u2019d never understood so profoundly how much being a novelist was at odds with domestic life, with sanity. \u2026 That kind of writing had no beginning and no end. It just crept around the house, infecting every element of family life.\u201d<\/p>\n

The new (posthumous) Gabriel Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez novel, Until August <\/em>(translated by Anne McLean), which he did not think was good enough to publish, is so good that its essential Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez qualities put one to shame\u2014the quality of his vision, the quality of his prose, of his emotional capacity, and basically of his entire life. No, it isn\u2019t his best, but I reveled in the memory of a master whose mere scraps I scarfed up adoringly, such as: \u201ctorrential geniuses with short and troubled lives,\u201d as he remarks of Mozart and Schubert.<\/p>\n

\u2014Nancy Lemann, author of \u201c<\/strong>The Oyster Diaries<\/strong><\/a>\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Damir Karaka\u0161\u2019s Celebration<\/em>, translated by Ellen Elias-Bursa\u0107, begins at the end of World War II. Its four sections\u2014\u201cHouse,\u201d \u201cDogs,\u201d \u201cCelebration,\u201d and \u201cFather\u201d\u2014move from 1945 to 1935, then 1941 to 1928, and follow Mijo, a man whose yellow-brown uniform marks him as a member of the recently fallen Croatian fascist organization of the Usta\u0161e. Exiled to the forest overlooking his home, a small Croatian village, Mijo awaits the moment when he can rejoin his family. It\u2019s a novel that kept its hold over me long after I put it down.<\/p>\n

\u2014Ena Selimovi\u0107, translator of Abdulah Sidran’s <\/strong>\u201c<\/strong>Scraps<\/strong><\/a>\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Tara Selter, the protagonist of Solvej Balle\u2019s On the Calculation of Volume <\/em>(translated by Barbara J. Haveland), is stuck on the day of November 18, which she repeats endlessly. Trapped in time, she makes an official project of it. Looking becomes ritualistic. The day\u2019s relentless sameness is double-checked, until she can predict the movement of birds. Wonderfully, this is the first book in a series of seven.<\/p>\n

\u2014K Patrick, author of \u201c<\/strong>Blue<\/strong><\/a>\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Jamie Quatro’s Two-Step Devil<\/em> is the rare contemporary work of fiction that takes the Deep South, with its essentially biblical figures of thought and speech, as seriously as the region should be taken. Set in 2014, the novel combines the lessons of literary Modernism with a kind of tricky gritty realism to produce a fable about sex trafficking in rural Alabama, one which, by its end, becomes a plaintive, painful, and surprising defense of the right to abortion. It is a prophetic book about the recent past and I have not read anything like it for a long time.<\/p>\n

\u2014Alec Niedenthal, author of \u201cSch\u00e4ndung (Desecration)<\/a>\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Mourning a Breast<\/em>, the Chinese writer Xi Xi’s account of breast cancer, is perhaps the only illness memoir to address head-on how difficult it is to choose books to read in the hospital. (“Perhaps Dostoyevsky\u2019s Crime and Punishment<\/em>? But that was too heavy to hold. What about Donald Barthelme\u2019s City Life<\/em>? But Barthelme had passed away from blood cancer; I didn\u2019t want to read him just now.”) The book, translated by Jennifer Feeley and first published in China in 1992, switches from short essays to stretches of dialogue, sometimes addressing the reader directly, like the narrator of a guidebook, sometimes following Xi Xi\u2019s thoughts so closely it\u2019s as though she isn\u2019t worrying about the reader at all. Intimate, charming, and open, it is a book to be enjoyed in sickness and in health.<\/p>\n

\u2014Madeleine Schwartz, advisory editor<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Morgan V\u00f5\u2019s debut poetry collection, The Selkie<\/em>, is a wonderful, sometimes very funny book about the proximity of ordinary life to the production of mass death. It stars \u201cthe monger.\u201d He sells fish. Are his wares alive? Not exactly, he explains, they just \u201ckeep \/ eating and shitting.\u201d The monger mistakes a fish for a dollar bill and so it goes into circulation, gets worn thin, torn in two, then taped back together. Together, the fish and the monger do durational performance art, \u00e0 la Tehching Hsieh and Linda Montano in Rope Piece<\/em>. The monger shows the fish a DaBaby meme. In 2024, I read V\u00f5\u2019s poems again and again. I\u2019m obsessed with the way they seem to search, as we all do, for words for extreme violence. In one, the monger goes to see Anthony Bourdain speak at a local library. \u201cwhat do i have left \/ to say?\u201d Bourdain-in-the-poem asks. \u201cwhat do i do now?\u201d In another, a fish corpse is found to contain a delicate scroll that reads \u201cafter \/\/ all \/\/ you \/\/ know \/\/ and \/\/ tibet \/\/ is \/\/ still \/\/ not \/\/ free?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2014Silas Jones, author of \u201c<\/strong>Regular Decision<\/strong><\/a>\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Mariana Enr\u00edquez\u2019s new story collection, A Sunny Place for Shady People<\/em>, seethes and roils with a body horror that evokes the films of Richard Kern and David Cronenberg. Her monsters are real: misogynists, corrupt dictators. There is a surreal and visceral magic to these stories of cruelty, sexual violence, and poverty, brilliantly captured in Megan McDowell\u2019s translations.<\/p>\n

\u2014Frank Wynne, advisory editor<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

La llamada<\/em> by Leila Guerreiro: I wasn\u2019t expecting my favorite book of the year to be a cr\u00f3nica<\/em>. I didn\u2019t think it possible for a story so contemporary, so political, and so steeped in reality to be infused with the intensity of a thriller and with such poetic force. La llamada<\/em> (forthcoming in English translation from Pushkin in spring 2025) is a master class in writing an impossible book. In our world of radicalisms today, few dare to explore with such tenacity the gray areas and contradictions that make up who we are. A hundred years from now, we\u2019ll still be talking about this tour de force of Leila Guerreiro\u2019s.<\/p>\n

\u2014Samanta Schweblin (trans. Alejandra Quintana Arocho), author of \u201c<\/strong>An Eye in the Throat<\/strong><\/a>\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

One of my favorite books this year is the late Dubravka Ugre\u0161i\u0107\u2019s A Muzzle for Witches<\/em>, translated from the Croatian by Ellen Elias-Bursa\u0107 and published by Open Letter Books. Ugre\u0161i\u0107\u2014the Neustadt International Prize for Literature\u2013winning author of seven books of fiction and six essay collections to appear in English\u2014was born in the former Yugoslavia, but when her homeland was riven by war in the nineties and she was forced into exile for her antinationalist views, she became a renowned if reluctant icon of resistance. Structured as an interview with the Bosnian-Herzegovinian theorist Merima Omeragi\u0107, this slim volume allows Ugre\u0161i\u0107 to expound on themes that have animated her work throughout her career\u2014of exile and belonging, of nationalism and misogyny, of history, literary culture, and technology. She decries the scourge of autofiction that has writers \u201cwriting their own hagiographies,\u201d comparing this self-aggrandizing and attention-seeking impulse to that of influencers and serial killers. \u201cIf literature is to survive,\u201d she says, \u201cit must move into a zone of invisibility and go underground.\u201d But the book is not lacking in hope: Ugre\u0161i\u0107 sees literature as fundamentally about and fundamental to human connection. \u201cOne real reader,\u201d she writes, \u201cis enough to persuade me of the meaningfulness of my work.\u201d Ugre\u0161i\u0107 is a brilliant thinker, a consummate stylist and literary trickster, and I can think of no better writer to read and recommend in these frightening and uncertain times.<\/p>\n

\u2014Will Vanderhyden, translator of Rodolfo Enrique Fogwill’s \u201c<\/strong>Passengers on the Night Train<\/strong><\/a>\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Sandhya Mary\u2019s Maria, Just Maria<\/em>, translated from the Malayalam by Jayasree Kalathil, is about a \u201cmad\u201d little girl who is baffled by the world\u2019s compulsive need to divide everything and everyone into normal and abnormal. Maria\u2019s world is inhabited by a philosophizing dog; a grandfather who takes her along on his toddy-shop rounds; dead, \u201cmad\u201d ancestors; a jealous patron saint who gives his followers strange dreams; and other such audacious characters. She critiques, with great humor, joy, and innocence, a range of society\u2019s absurdities, including competitive exams in schools, elections, and the hypocrisy of liberal politics. The novel is a call for a more inclusive, kinder world, yes. But it\u2019s also a reminder that perhaps an appropriate response to reality is to go insane.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u2014Deepa Bhasthi, translator of Banu Mushtaq’s <\/strong>\u201cRed Lungi<\/a>\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

This year, I often joked to myself that I was \u201coff books.\u201d Nothing, from Neil Postman\u2019s Amusing Ourselves to Death <\/em>to a rereading of Brideshead Revisited<\/em>, was cutting it. Maybe it was my ambient anxiety about the state of the world, an imminent breakup, or the seventy-five-degree fall days, but all I could take in were science podcasts about lucid dreaming and white noise tracks on loop. Into this fog slipped Halle Butler\u2019s Banal Nightmare<\/em>. The novel, Butler\u2019s third, is the story of Moddie, an overeducated and underachieving thirtysomething who, following a seismic breakup, abandons Chicago for her Midwestern hometown, where she tries to get a grip on her life. It\u2019s a sharp book, with painfully real characters and perfectly pitched sentences. It\u2019s also cruel, comically so. At first, it left me feeling more depressed, and then (somehow) happy. Happy that I wasn\u2019t as constitutionally fucked-up as Butler\u2019s gang of misanthropes, and happy to be reminded that fiction like this\u2014so funny and smart\u2014is there to pull me out of a state, make me feel less alone.<\/p>\n

\u2014Camille Jacobson, engagement editor<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

In the spring, before I began teaching and lost the capacity to read anything more robust than a play (no offense to plays), I read Isabel Waidner\u2019s second novel,\u00a0Corey Fah Does Social Mobility<\/em>, whose eponymous protagonist has just won a prestigious literary prize for the Fictionalization of Social Evils. And yet the trophy itself eludes him: neon beige and UFO-like, it appears in his peripheral vision, always just out of reach. The novel\u2019s narrative engine is fueled by the conceit of mythmaking. Everything, in Waidner\u2019s treatment, is topsy-turvy. Corey Fah finds an unlikely companion in Bambi Pavok, who, like the Disney character, emerges from a forest, but with a very unorthodox background (and anatomy): she is the child of a wasteman and an alcoholic, with eight spider legs where we might expect four dainty hooves. The novel is wild, smart, and very fun.<\/p>\n

\u2014Maya Binyam, advisory editor<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Recommendations from five Paris Review fiction writers, three translators, and four editors.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[68386],"tags":[67827,883],"class_list":["post-169436","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-reviews-review","tag-featured","tag-staff-picks"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Best Books of 2024, According to Friends of the Review: Part Two by The Paris Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"December 20, 2024 \u2013 Recommendations from five Paris Review fiction writers, three translators, and four editors.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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