Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis

by Jonathan Blitzer

The story of migration from Central America to the United States over the past few decades—especially in the last decade—is almost unutterably complex, and the misery driving it, and the misery further caused by the border's cruelty, are almost unutterable as well. But Blitzer makes a coherent and moving story out of this history, both by tracing the larger political forces across the region and by finding personal stories inextricable from those politics, especially of those, like Juan Romagoza, a Salvadoran health worker who is tortured by his home government, escapes north to work as an activist and clinician in San Francisco and Washington, D.C., and returns home to continue his work, who find they can only respond to the crisis with labor and love. In the world Blitzer describes—our world—borders are everything, and are at the same time constantly blurred by the human connections made across them.

A Question of Value: Stories from the Life of an Auctioneer

by Robert Brunk

In an ideal world, every person would write a book like this near the end of their career, summing up their life's work with anecdotes, some funny, some wistful and even regretful, that capture the philosophy-in-action of a profession and a passion. But not everyone is as quietly stylish a writer as Brunk, who became an auctioneer in mid-life and built one of the most prominent auction houses in the South, nor has everyone had the good fortune to find a calling that matched his curiosity so well. His tales are about people as well as pieces, presented with some of the value-drama that makes Antiques Roadshow so watchable, but with a real tenderness for his clients and the history their objects represent. His book reminded me most of Thomas Lynch's lovely The Undertaking, both in his similar plain-spoken understanding of life and in the recurring presence of death in these stories of inheriting and letting go.

The Book of Sleep

by Haytham El Wardany, translated by Robin Moger

Forget space, or the dark depths of the oceans: the true unexplored human frontier is the third of our lives we spend suspended in the strange netherworld of sleep. For all the talk of dreams, how little has been written of those hours! This slim book, by an Egyptian writer who lives in Berlin, grants that world its inaccessibility—the "neglected excess that everyone knows about and no one speaks of"—but speaks of it nevertheless, in lovely, exact, mind-broadening philosophical vignettes that make it one of my favorite discoveries of the year, and the one I'm likely to keep by my bedside for years to come.

Question 7

by Richard Flanagan

One of the first books I reviewed for this newsletter was Richard Flanagan's novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North, which soon after won the Booker Prize and remains one of the best books I've read in the last decade. Somewhat inexplicably, I've hardly read him since, but his new book must have been what I was waiting for: it's every bit as good. A memoir (if you can call it that) rather than a novel, it returns to the same source as The Narrow Road (his father's harrowing time as a Japanese prisoner during World War II), but in this book that memory, beginning with the moral question of the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima (which Flanagan is sure saved his father's life), sets off a chain reaction of its own, from H.G. Wells to physicist Leo Szilard to the near-destruction of Aboriginal Tasmania (Flanagan's home) to his own near-death experience in his 20s. It's a book of deep seriousness worn lightly, and one worthy of a lifetime's thought and experience.

Small Rain

by Garth Greenwell

Greenwell's first two books, What Belongs to You and Cleanness, each made my year-end top 10, and this third one is likely to as well. Those earlier books were both disarmingly frank (and often breathtakingly beautiful) accounts of desire, seen through the eyes of a young gay American man in Bulgaria. In this new one the setting has shifted—to Iowa City—and the subject has too, to an aspect of the body equally autobiographical and nearly as unspoken: the vulnerability of sudden illness and the intimacy of medical care. The story is almost artless in its structure, following, with some digressions, the ten days of its narrator's hospitalization in close clinical detail, but full of art in its close attention to the body, to life and near-death, to the transcendence and the banality of everyday love. A beauty once again.

Illumination in the Flatwoods

by Joe Hutto

This is a joyful book. Much of the joy comes from the wild turkeys Joe Hutto raises from a clutch of eggs, as they investigate and appreciate their portion of north Florida woodland, but Hutto is full of the delight of animal curiosity himself. As the young birds imprint on him, accepting him as their parent and protector as they grow into independence, they leave perhaps a greater imprint on him. He records their months together with the quality of observation of Thoreau's journals, but without Thoreau's compulsion to turn every moment into metaphor. He does, though, finally come to some profound philosophical insights himself, about the comparative intelligences of humans and birds and about the eternal nature/nuture debate. And about the capacity for human and animal joy.

All Fours

by Miranda July

Well, this might be the best book I've read so far this year. For all the flutter of "quirkiness" that surrounds July, she is a stone-cold artist, in whatever form she chooses, and this is a capital-N Novel in all the best ways: morally serious, formally surprising and ambitious, and frigging hilarious. Imagine a character somewhat like Ms. July (middle-aged, "semi-famous"), and then launch her into a plot of self-transformation whose first half strikingly resembles an Emily Henry rom-com (driven urban woman connects with small-town hunk) and then shifts into something closer to the rebuild-the-world-from-scratch revolution of Women Talking. Throughout, it's funny, startling, moving, vividly and charmingly weird, and so breathtakingly raunchy it reads like a vegan Sabbath's Theater. Wow.

The Bluest Eye

by Toni Morrison

The literary highlight of my year so far came from a writer I thought I knew well already. I had read (and loved) many of Morrison's novels, but when I learned that she narrates the audio versions of some of her best-known books, I took that chance to catch up with one I'd missed, her debut. And my god, what a debut, and what an experience to hear it in the author's voice, recorded decades after she wrote it. The precision of her language, the surprises of her choices at every turn (which only feel inevitable after she has made them), her persistence in fully inhabiting each of her characters, even the most reprehensible: all of these are heightened by the resonance and sheer delight of Morrison's reading. A revelation!

Godwin

by Joseph O’Neill

Godwin is, as advertised, about the search for a teenage soccer prodigy who may or may not exist in West Africa and who may or may not be the next Messi. But it's also about a minor power struggle at a small Pittsburgh firm of tech-writer freelancers. That O'Neill can credibly braid these two stories together—and make the latter drama as compelling as its more glamorous counterpart—is a sign of his particular talent for nailing with graceful irony (as he did in his marvelous novel, Netherland) the wonder, the pettiness, the greed, and the kindness that are all part of our interconnected modern world. He's one of the few writers I always read, and Godwin made me once again glad I do.

James

by Percival Everett

Mark Twain famously began Huckleberry Finn by declaring, "Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot." You get the feeling Twain and Percival Everett might have gotten along fine. Everett has made a career out of upending narratives and skewering literary expectations; by his standards, Everett plays this one, a retelling of Twain's classic from Jim's perspective, pretty straight; plenty is upended (Jim reads Voltaire on the sly, and joins a real-life minstrel troupe), but there might be a moral or two in it, and some dead-serious philosophy-in-action. It'll make you want to read Huck Finn again; it's so good it'll also make you want to read James again.

A Woman in the Polar Night

by Christiane Ritter, translated by Jane Degras

In 1933, Christiane Ritter, an Austrian artist, told her husband, who had spent the last few years living off the land on the remote Arctic island of Spitsbergen, that she wanted to join him. And so she does, spending the full, dark winter in a tiny hut with her husband and a young Norwegian friend, who admitted later he was looking forward to watching her lose her mind. She keeps her sanity, grounded by her good humor and the constant tasks required to survive, but it's as if she found a whole new mind in that year, broadened by the isolation and the fierce elements. It's a spare and beautiful book, bright in its vision against the months of darkness it records.

I Heard Her Call My Name: A Memoir of Transition

by Lucy Sante

About three years ago, Sante, a writer in her mid-60s known until then as Luc, sent to a few dozen close friends a piece of writing titled "Lucy," a tender, exact, joyful, and terrified confession and declaration that she, feeling "something liquefy in the core of my body," was ready to take a step she had dreamed of (when she allowed herself to) for nearly her whole life: to publicly transition to being a woman. It's a choice not uncommon now, but Sante brings to it the wisdom and regret and exhilaration of a decision made late in life, as well as the wry, frank, chiseled style that has long made her one of my favorite writers. She tells this story in parallel: the cracking of her egg, as the trans phrase goes, in the present alongside a memoir of a bohemian life in which almost anything felt possible, except what she most wanted.

Forces of Nature

by Edward Steed

The New Yorker cartoon is one of those venerable comedy institutions that, like Saturday Night Live, is at this point often more "funny" than funny. But, as also happens on Saturday Night Live, once in a while a genius still emerges, and it's become clear that this generation's New Yorkercartoon genius is a young British transplant named Edward Steed. It was the bitter brilliance of "You call that a banana-mobile?" that first made me notice his name, but with dashes of Booth and Addams, and of Steadman and Stamaty, he has maintained that level of hilariously angry impotence and sadly misplaced hopefulness ever since, whether in the "World's Tallest Potato Contest," "Staff Picks" (oh that hits home for us booksellers), "You're not going to find anything in your price range that isn't full of bees," or this wordless gem. I weep with joy.