In a special holiday edition of On Our Nightstands next week, the Public Books editorial staff will talk about our favorite books of the year. Meanwhile, we’ve gathered together our reviews of the books that made best-of lists in the New York Times, the Huffington Post, the Guardian, and NPR. Some of them we loved too; others we’d reserve for the readers on Santa’s naughty list.
Picked by the Guardian and NPR
“In a moment when literary culture presents only a menu of minority niches, it seems to be necessary to invent the Obsolete Realist to make all those other options seem urgent. Other writers attack the Obsolete Realist for being insufficiently populist (see Weiner, Jennifer) or insufficiently avant-garde (see Marcus, Ben). He is too preachy and too apolitical, too wedded to sheer boring fact, not aware of enough facts. The Obsolete Realist seems to bring out the Dorothy Parker in just about everybody. … Franzen’s latest is a symptomatically fascinating, but ultimately depressing, attempt to answer his critics by identifying wholly with the role they have assigned him.”
Picked by the Guardian, the Huffington Post, and the New York Times
“What happens when the most ambitious rethinking of the politics of realism in recent memory can’t be attached to a face? (Can they give the Nobel Prize to a pseudonym?) … The addictive quality of the Neapolitan novels on which everyone agrees may finally derive from their unequaled sensitivity to what it feels like to be in and with history—sometimes in anticipation, often in contempt or fear, always with excitement and attention.”
Picked by the New York Times and NPR
“Although H Is for Hawk has no explicit environmental agenda, its nuanced depiction of the guilt and pleasure that attend human interactions with the natural world is keenly attuned to our own ecological moment … Macdonald neither reconciles guilt with pleasure, nor chooses one over the other; instead, she vividly shows how the two can uncomfortably coexist.”
Picked by the Guardian, the Huffington Post, and NPR
“Despite its enormous length, Yanagihara’s novel is in the end quite limited, at least as far as the history of sexuality is concerned. I take it that any ‘great gay novel’ would have to deal with that history and its intersections with other histories. This is why it ends up being so frustrating that Yanagihara’s characters seem not to be required to move through time and social space the way the rest of us do, or to cope with the ways we are marked, wittingly or unwittingly, by the way the social world and its categories and divisions press in upon us.”
Picked by the Guardian, the Huffington Post, and NPR
“If this novel deals less devastating blows than Ishiguro has trained us to expect, the fault lies with the absence of a protagonist’s ‘I’, and the loss of the razor-edged ironies, the measured, meticulous parceling of knowledge, to which that technique has allowed him such searing access in the past.”
Picked by the New York Times
“In our era of climate change, when international science and the institutions of global governance present the only hope for addressing the crisis, Humboldt’s scientific and prophetic legacy deserves revival and reevaluation. Andrea Wulf’s masterful The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World represents the best of the handful of English-language books that have appeared in the last decade focused on Humboldt and his science.”
Picked by the Huffington Post and NPR
“A regional novel is a work whose commitments to verisimilitude are strongest in its engagement with setting. The level of attention that Gold Fame Citrus pays to the geography, history, and culture of California and the American West signals to its readers that they ought to pay attention to those surroundings—that the true plot may in fact be there.”
Picked by the Guardian and NPR
“On the outside, the novel is the tale of one man’s life, and the lives that intersect his—his parents, siblings, crewmates, wife, children. Inside this humble premise, however, A God in Ruins aspires to theorize the relationship between art and the incoherent violence of human endeavor.”
Picked by the Huffington Post and NPR
“Johnson’s story of a white adolescent from modest means encountering culture shock when leaving home for school may recall Curtis Sittenfeld’s best-selling novel Prep (2005). The way students displaced from their familiar surroundings respond by disavowing their origins—what [Johnson’s protagonist] D’aron’s father calls “shitting on your own shoe”—features in both texts. The similarities end there, however. Whereas Sittenfeld brought us close to her protagonist, following her through four years of boarding school, with intimate access to her interiority, Johnson promises similar access only to deny it.”
Picked by the Huffington Post and NPR
“Like Woolf, whose presence haunts this incendiary blast of a novel, Yuknavitch locates the sources of war in a gendered violence that we carry in our bodies.”
Picked by the New York Times
“What Outline ultimately illuminates is a global literary network that is socially stitched together by writing workshops. Literary prizes and national origins … establish the relative status of writers in this network. But status doesn’t necessarily translate into income, nor does it determine the concrete social relations between writers. Thus it falls to the writing workshop, a form that is rapidly expanding and diversifying across the globe, to ensure that writers have the opportunity to congregate, associate, and, most crucially, make enough money to survive. The irony, as Outline affirms, is that it doesn’t always leave them time to write.”
Picked by the Guardian
“There are risks involved in the kind of work James is doing here, and this is a wild and an important novel that takes many risks. If A Brief History of Seven Killings is a bold proposition about anglophone Caribbean fiction now—how its referents are Southern and hemispheric, not just classically postcolonial; how the noise, clutter, and violence of people’s lives can be linked to the anodyne fact of ‘globalized capital’—then it is the kind of proposition that an explosive blast makes.” 