Best Books 2024: Publishers Weekly Publishers Weekly

All Fours

Miranda July (Riverhead)

Funny, sexy, weird, but most of all deeply serious, July’s novel is better than anything she’s ever done, whether on the page, in film, or any of the other mediums she’s worked in. With this story about aging, desire, and mortality, July dramatizes how for an artist, the only way to face questions about life and death is by making art.

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The Book of Love

Kelly Link (Random House)

Short story writer Link tries her hand at a novel and magnificently pulls it off with this fantasy-fueled ghost story. It’s about three dead teens who get a chance to come back to life, and as Link chronicles their interlocking lives, the narrative sheds fascinating light on the nature of love.

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By the Fire We Carry: The Generations-Long Fight for Justice on Native Land

Rebecca Nagle (Harper)

Nagle draws on archival sources to paint an astonishing picture of 19th-century Native dispossession and its aftershocks. Bringing together stories of Native Americans struggling against settler violence across time—from high-stakes treaty negotiations to modern-day courtroom dramas—this is a kaleidoscopic overview of the dense legal webs that have ensnared and nullified Indigenous rights for generations.

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The Heart That Fed: A Father, a Son, and the Long Shadow of War

Carl Sciacchitano (Gallery 13)

Comics artist Schiacchitano accomplishes a rare feat in this superb graphic nonfiction narrative. As he documents his father’s Vietnam War–era military service and PTSD, he employs comics’ cinematic tricks to grab readers while also grounding the narrative in dialogue and historical detail. The result is a moving and meticulously constructed examination of the legacy of violence.

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Herscht 07769

László Krasznahorkai, trans. from the Hungarian by Ottilie Mulzet (New Directions)

The form is demanding (it’s a single 400-page sentence), but Krasznahorkai’s latest is worth every moment of concentration. At the center of the narrative is Florian Herscht, a gentle giant with an intellectual disability who’s being exploited by a neo-Nazi gang leader. What makes this so exciting and satisfying is the author’s clear-eyed and open-hearted exploration of conspiracy thinking and nationalism, and the divisiveness they fuel.

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James

Percival Everett (Doubleday)

Everett has ascended to blockbuster status without leaving behind what makes him special. Here, he rewrites Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in a novel that’s more kinetic and intellectually stimulating than the original. Language is a central subject, as the literate and well-read Jim slyly coarsens his speech when talking to whites. So is revenge, which figures into the book’s explosive and satisfying climax.

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My Friends

Hisham Matar (Random House)

Matar channels Roberto Bolaño’s theme of literary obsession in this sublime novel of a Libyan exile in London whose two friends return to Libya in 2011 to take part in the overthrow of Gadhafi. As the narrator describes his quest to understand life through literature, the novel’s sense of truthfulness and urgency restores the reader’s belief in what fiction can do.

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Survival Is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde

Alexis Pauline Gumbs (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Written in coruscating prose, Gumbs’s innovative account of Audre Lorde’s life, focused loosely on how the natural world informed the feminist poet’s thinking, toys with chronology and form as it unpacks the mentorships, romances, and traumas that shaped her. It’s the rare literary biography that stands up next to its subject’s achievements.

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Traveling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell

Ann Powers (Dey Street)

Reaching beyond the public image of Joni Mitchell as either a “misunderstood musical genius” or a megawatt pop star, Powers takes a freewheeling and fascinating trip through her subject’s influences and obsessions, capturing her shifting “musical selves” and the gaps and inconsistencies between them. Interweaving meditations on feminism, gender, and success, Powers paints a dazzling portrait of an inimitable artist while challenging traditional notions of what a biography can be.

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When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s

John Ganz (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

The politics of the right-wingers at the margins of the 1992 U.S. presidential election—and the center of Ganz’s brilliant and witty narrative—will be eerily familiar to anyone who’s been listening to Trump. In his startlingly accomplished first book, Ganz makes a revelatory case for the origins of today’s authoritarian posturing and its appeal to voters.

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