Death, art, cults, zombies—the year in literature was as eclectic as it was excellent. There were crimes in need of solving, an infamous witch telling her tale, and a woman who just wants to sleep for a year. Characters have sex, they fall in love, and a bunch of folks get their heads chopped off (the undead meet just as sad of fates). Fiction, novels in particular, reigns on our list this year—with one under-the-radar book of essays sneaking into the top 10 and two master short story writers offering up instant-classic collections. As is so often the case, it was an embarrassment of riches in the book department. Here are our reviewers’ personal favorites from 2018.
The Largesse Of The Sea Maiden by Denis Johnson (Random House)
At a memorial service, the narrator of The Largesse Of The Sea Maiden’s title story is told he was the deceased’s best friend, information that comes as news to the narrator, who barely knew him. “Rather than memorializing him, we found ourselves asking, ‘Who the hell was this guy?’” A lesser writer would play the scene as tragedy, but Denis Johnson portrays it as yet another one of life’s endless curious circumstances, of which he was one of fiction’s finest chroniclers. Published eight months after the author’s death, the collection’s stories all circle around mortality in one way or another. Johnson proceeds almost casually, stringing together anecdote and incident, before making a big move, in an epiphany or a proclamation, including one of the best last lines in recent memory. A book that looks so closely at death is necessarily also about everything that comes before it: work, relationships, and always the passage of time. As one character puts it: “You make your own hours, mess around the house in your pajamas, listening to jazz recordings and sipping coffee while another day makes its escape.” [Laura Adamczyk]
I Wrote This Book Because I Love You by Tim Kreider (Simon & Schuster)
Tim Kreider makes love’s hardships—all those breakups, makeups, and fuckups—look easy. In I Wrote This Book Because I Love You, his second essay collection, Kreider pens long-form love letters to exes, including a groupie who works as a for-hire “pleasure activist,” a progressive pastor who embraces his atheism, and a circus performer who invites him on a Barnum & Bailey train ride to Mexico. He dives deep into mercurial relationships with his literary agent, a married friend, his mother, his star-crushed students at a predominantly female college, and his beloved elderly cat, all the while waxing personal on romantic love, lost love, Platonic love, divine love, friends with and without benefits love, the love for all creatures, and self-love. Yet, Kreider writes, “We have fewer words in our language to distinguish kinds of love than we do for distant cousins.” If love is all we need, Kreider shows us—tenderly and tragically—how to get there. [Rien Fertel]
The Gone World by Tom Sweterlitsch (Putnam)
The Gone World impressively balances tense, high-speed action with deep philosophical questions, resulting in a fast but thought-provoking read. The time-travel crime thriller asks readers to consider what they would do if they learned their lives were just a possibility, that they existed in a potential future that might never come to pass. Would you fight to preserve your existence even if it could cause disaster for other timelines or embrace the unknown and accept what would be a very different life? Other quandaries include: would you kill yourself to ensure humanity’s future, and if our species’ desire to understand the universe will eventually doom us because we don’t know how to stop when all signs point to disaster. Add in a genuinely unsettling vision of the end of humanity, a compelling cast of noir-inspired characters, and realistic interpretations of how new technology could shape society, and you have a novel with the power to haunt your thoughts long after you’ve finished reading. [Samantha Nelson]
Circe by Madeline Miller (Little, Brown & Company)
Doing for Greek mythology what Wicked did for Oz, Circe lets its titular witch tell her side of the story. While Circe’s most famous for turning men into pigs in The Odyssey, Miller’s book starts well before Odysseus lands on her shores, chronicling her pampered but neglected childhood as a daughter of the titan Helios, fraught relationships with her immortal family, discovery of her magic, and first interactions with the mortal world. Classic myths like the war between the gods and titans, the torment of Prometheus, the minotaur’s labyrinth, and the death of Icarus provide a familiar backdrop, but Miller beautifully embellishes them to show the cruelty of men and gods alike, weaving them together to build a coming-of-age story that explores the price of power and how legends are made. [Samantha Nelson]
My Year Of Rest And Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh (Penguin Press)
Ottessa Moshfegh’s second novel follows an unnamed character trying to sleep for a year. The saga is darkly comic, unexpected, and disquietingly grotesque—in other words, standard Moshfegh fare. “Since adolescence, I’d vacillated between wanting to look like the spoiled WASP that I was and the bum that I felt I was and should have been if I’d had any courage,” the woman explains. Much of the book’s unlikely pathos comes from the discrepancy between what the woman looks like on the outside—young, model thin, beautiful, wealthy—and the reasons she has for wanting to hibernate. She does this with a potpourri of prescription drugs obtained from New York City’s most negligent psychiatrist, and My Year Of Rest And Relaxation really picking up when the character starts taking “Infermiterol,” a drug that leads to entire days of blackout. It’s another acerbic character study from an author making a career out of bringing absurdly unlikable people to life. No one can discomfit a reader quite like her. [Caitlin PenzeyMoog]
Comemadre by Roque Larraquy (translated by Heather Cleary, Coffee House Press)
The mind-body divide becomes deliciously literal in Comemadre, Argentinian writer Roque Larraquy’s grotesque novel of art, lust, and ego. It’s not just the poor, doomed souls getting their heads lopped off in a sanatorium outside Buenos Aires—a group of doctors’ rivalry-fueled exploration of life after death—but nearly everything is doubled or split in two: There’s a pair of artist doppelgängers, a two-headed boy, and the complementary halves of the book itself. Meaning arises from external action, physical action, rather than turns within internal monologues. And so much happens: fires blaze, flesh decays, performance art is staged, and literal and figurative punches are thrown, to say nothing of all the severed heads and limbs. Layered without growing dense, the book is crisply comic, scenes punctuated like punchlines. That it all happens within a mere 130 pages is a sort of magic trick—the dizzying kind where a body gets sawed in half. [Laura Adamczyk]
The Incendiaries by R.O. Kwon (Riverhead Books)
R.O. Kwon’s debut novel is a potent story of obsession and religious faith. Those big themes are examined through the relationship between college students Will and Phoebe, who are drawn into the orbit of the charismatic, dubious John Leal, leader of a “Christian organization.” The Incendiaries weaves these three character arcs together through chapters that alternate among their point of views, and Kwon’s deliberate, sparkling prose is heavy with portending tragedy. One of the characters may be entering a cult—but is it a cult? Kwon keeps the reader unsure through to the very end, crafting a compelling page-turner that is still less interested in telling a sensationalistic cult story than it is in a deep and sympathetic probing of the appeals and perils of faith. [Caitlin PenzeyMoog]
Severance by Ling Ma (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Zombie stories may be played out, but the zombies in Ling Ma’s Severance suffer something more terrifying than being undead. These technically-still-alive people are trapped performing the routines they enacted mindlessly in their normal lives: endlessly setting the table for dinner, watching TV, driving to work, trapped in loops of the activities grooved into their brains by repetition. And though the zombie-like actions are thought to be the symptoms of “Shen Fever,” the disease seems to be communicable in psychological ways. Puzzling out the truth is just one of the pleasures of reading Severance, as Ma leaves much of the reality ambiguous. It is also a very funny book, skewering metropolitan millennial life and relationships. It centers on Candace Chen, a first-generation American whose life is slowly stripped away, first as New York City experiences an apocalyptic storm, then as its inhabitants succumb to the mysterious fever. Ma’s ending for Candace, through the power of that ambiguity, is one for the ages. [Caitlin PenzeyMoog]
The Collected Stories Of Diane Williams (Soho Press)
Few writers’ work truly merits descriptors like “original” or “unique,” words that mean less and less the more they’re used, but Diane Williams’ sentences are so singularly constructed as to call for hyperbole. As consistently surprising as her work is—akin to a tortuous hallway, wherein each blind turn might lead a reader to danger or delight—Williams is also a writer who seems to become more and more herself as time goes on. Part of the pleasure in reading her Collected Stories, more than 300 new and previously published (very) short fictions, is identifying a certain Williamsy-ness in the prose: the cartoonish sex, winking self-awareness, and sudden insights, bursting as fast and loud as a popping balloon—to say nothing of her ruthless concision and the abstract, unexpected language itself. “I was saying all of the appropriate things to everyone to get happiness from the happiness, to have a good time at the good time and I was getting it done,” one narrator notes. Dickinson’s mandate to “tell it slant” doesn’t get more slanted, or fun, than this. [Laura Adamczyk]
The Best Bad Things by Katrina Carrasco (MCD x FSG)
Katrina Carrasco’s gripping debut novel, The Best Bad Things, is essentially three books in one: a sexy noir, social critique, and historical fiction. That’s quite an undertaking for a first outing, but Carrasco quickly proves she has enough imagination to fill whole shelves. The author is as adept at building this 1930s world as she is a compelling mystery. Her protagonist, Alma Rosales, is one of the most fascinating and complex literary characters in recent memory. The hard-drinking, rabble-rousing Pinkerton detective enjoys a good fight (and fuck), as well as flouting conventions. She’s like the Hulk—the setbacks and beatings actually feed her desire to get to the bottom of her case. The whole experience is rather tactile; every time Alma’s masculine alter ego, Jack Camp, was sucker punched, I felt the wind rush out of me. The Best Bad Things is the rare book that should be savored, but is impossible to put down. [Danette Chavez]
63 Comments
Some of my favorite books this year include Chloe Benjamin’s The Immortalists, about the lives of four siblings who learn their exact (and varied) death dates as children; Justina Ireland’s Dread Nation, a YA historical fiction novel where a zombie uprising interrupts the Civil War and African-American girls are trained to fight them, and Leni Zumas’ Red Clocks, following several women in a near-future Oregon where abortion is illegal, adoption is only for couples, and there’s still ennui in the suburbs.
I was looking for Benjamin’s book here! Really enjoyed it. That and Circe were top of my list this year.
I’m reading Dread Nation right now, it’s great.
I loved Dread Nation, but the last third of The Immortalists was a slog for me. The lab/testing stuff.
Unfortunately The Immortalists fell short for me too. Dread Nation I liked, but didn’t love–there were parts that felt too slow, parts that felt too fast. The pacing felt off in some way. The narrator was an absolute delight. I do plan on reading the sequel as I thought there was enough there that I enjoyed and wanted to see where it went.
I think Bahni Turpin is the narrator, and she always does a great job. I haven’t listened to Dread Nation on Audible, but I have listened to her on several other books, like The Hate U Give, Children of Blood and Bone, and Everything, Everything.
Yes, she is the narrator! I have not listened or read Children of Blood and Bone, but when I do get to it perhaps I’ll choose audio then! I’m waiting till the series is complete.
That’s exactly how I felt about Dread Nation. Loved the main character, but thought the book was uneven and that the zany tone was a weird match for the realistically cruel racism that she faces. Hope that the various elements are balanced better in the sequel.
Haha yeah I totally read new books that weren’t fantasy or scifi this year….. 🙁
Thank you for the nod to Circe. It was one of those books that I kept bugging my friends incessantly to read this year. I loaned my copy to my daughter in Boston and I have this feeling I’m not getting it back and need to go out and buy another copy. It was one of those books I polished off on a Saturday afternoon and will re-read again.
I’m going to try to convince my book club to read Circe next. For some reason it’s hard to get them to read fiction, though.
I don’t plan on reading it again because it left me so emotional. I seriously couldn’t even handle all my feelings.
Severance is a great read. Picked it up based on Maureen Corrigan’s review on Fresh Air. And that may be the most poseur cognoscenti thing I’ve said … this morning.
It’s intriguing. This is the first I’ve heard of it.
I second Severance, it’s the most unusual book I’ve read all year and I just loved it. In fact I ordered a copy so I can read it again (my first go-round was borrowed audio).
Hey, no shame here. Corrigan is a terrific reviewer and it’s a fascinating book.
I enjoyed Severance also.
Severance was a great read. Picked it up based on Maureen Corrigan’s review on Fresh Air. And that may be the most poseur-cognoscenti thing I’ve said … this morning.
I must assume literally nobody at AVC read either GNOMON by Nick Harkaway or 84K by Claire North.
I loved GNOMON. I felt like it completely outpaced my ability to keep up with it, but in a really agreeable way. Definitely one I look forward to reading again.
I really like Claire North and I tried to read 84K but the shifting back and forth in that novel drove me crazy. I couldn’t keep going.
I liked it but it was a bit too depressing and plausible. I like my dystopias to look less like the world outside my window.
Gnomon was pretty rad, but – it was 2017, wasn’t it? Feels like it’s been a while since I read it…
UK late 2017, US early 2018.
thanks for putting these on my radar!I read a *LOT* of books and I’ve still never read Nick Harkaway.
I love Nick Hathaway and Gnomon is on my tbr list. Circe was great so I’m reading Miller’s first book Song of Achilles right now
Largesse is such a wonderful collection of stories. I miss DJ.
What does the number of short story collections here mean for the book market? My Dear Friend is a writer.
this year was pretty killer for short story collections. There are a bunch I loved that came out this year not even on this list–Florida, Heads of the Colored People, Friday Black.
I didn’t read any of them. That’s sad.Well i really enjoyed Lauren Groff’s Florida. I read the review here on the AVClub (1) and i bought the electronic version of it on Amazon immediately after reading it. And Florida is not even my favorite state. That’s mostly because of the climate. And you can interpret that in more ways than one ;)(1) https://aux.avclub.com/lauren-groff-s-florida-explores-the-dark-side-of-the-su-1826454717I also read the non-fiction book Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly by Anthony Bourdain. The book was written in 2000 so i was a little late to the party. Sometimes people got to die before i start reading their books. How macabre is that? Still, i highly recommend it. Another reason for reading it was that i miss him. The good ones always leave too soon…
Florida was really great. I grew up there, and her short stories definitely captured its spirit. I also liked this year’s I’ll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman’s Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer by Michelle McNamara, and, on the YA side of things, Tess of the Road by Rachel Hartman and The Dark Descent of Elizabeth Frankenstein by Kiersten White.
Florida was absolutely fantastic. I felt I could relate so, so much to many of the stories in that book.
The Gone World ruled. I flew through it. The author’s view of time travel and also the end of humanity stuck with me for a long time.
OR DID IT
Brilliant
I liked it at the time but it didn’t really stick with me. Some of it reminded me of the novel Dark Matter.
Ha, I read this one first before Dark Matter.
Yeah – really enjoyed this one. Genuinely unsettling at points, too.
I have Circe but haven’t read it yet. I read Miller’s Song of Achilles earlier this year and loved it. For anyone considering Circe, put that one on your list as well.
I haven’t gotten around to any 2018 fiction yet. I’ve listened to most of Chris Hedges’ America: The Farewell Tour on audiobook, and paged through William T. Vollmann’s Carbon Ideologies at the library. Peter Kingsley’s got an intriguing new book on Carl Jung, and Maryanne Wolf on reading in the digital era. I intend to read Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules sometime. I feel like I could choose a best book of 2018 in about 2023 or so.
Oh, I guess I read Harbor Me by Jacqueline Woodson, for an adolescent literature course. I’d have to name that my current favorite piece of 2018 fiction, as I’m pretty sure it’s the only one I’ve read.
I read scant few books that were actually published this year, but Rebecca Makai’s The Great Believers ended up being one of my favorite books of all time. Perhaps combining homosexuality, the AIDS epidemic, and art history is a bit of an easy sell for me, but that doesn’t diminish what an incredible piece of (mostly) fiction it was.
A little surprised that isn’t popping up on more year-end lists. Not that I’ve read it, but I do know her and she did put an incredible amount of research into it.
Ooh, sounds right up my alley for next year! Adding to my booklist. I was thinking about doing a Year of Queer where I (mainly (gotta have some wiggle room)) read/watch queer-themed history, stories, and theory. After nearly 30 years of primarily heteronormative media consumption, I need some balance in my life.
Yes, this was absolutely fantastic. So well done.
My Year of Rest and Relaxation was my fave this year. The psychiatrist was awesome, as was the friend. I lived in NYC in the time period mentioned and I had a premonition of the obviously foreshadowed end. But when it came it him me like a ton of bricks. Absurd, sad, beautiful.
It’s sad how generic most of those covers are.
I liked Gary Shteyngart’s Lake Success. I think it’s the only book I read that was actually released in 2018, so it makes up the entirety of my top 10 list.
AV Club sure loves it some Ottessa Moshfegh. The fascination will forever elude me.
S’ok, you are allowed to be wrong this once.
Are all the book critics in the byline women? That’s not good. I know Ryan Vlastelica reviews books here, but I hope the book department—if there’s even one—isn’t just women, because, stereotypically, men don’t read.
I’ll bite. I’m not sure what you’re getting at. Can’t a guy read these 10 books too?
No, what I was trying to get at was that a byline of presumably all of the AVC’s book reviewers, for their year end list, ostensibly being all women made me think of the stereotype that men don’t read and especially fiction. Which made me feel disappointed if the stereotype is somewhat true. Even though I’ve read plenty of male book reviewers from other media outlets. I wasn’t trying to be sexist in one direction or the other.
Don’t worry, you can rest easy that men are still all over the place: https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2017/oct/19/male-writers-still-dominate-book-reviews-and-critic-jobs-vida-study-finds
My top 10 published in 2018 are:Small CountryThe girl who smiled beadsFight no moreButtermilk graffitiAn american marriageSeveranceFriday blackBad stories: what the hell just happened to this countryBrothers of the gunEloquent RageBut i also read some excellent backlist this year too.Thanks for the list, av club! Looking forward to some of these I haven’t yet read.
Space Opera by Catherynne M. Valente rocked my world this year. I can’t get over how good it is.
A couple of debut novels really blew me away this year: BABY TEETH by Zoje Stage and CHERRY by Nico Walker. Also really enjoyed Michelle McNamara’s Golden State Killer book.
the gone world was a snoozer.
Even in its partially unfinished state I’ll be Gone in the Dark is one of the best true crime novels I’ve ever read. I’m shocked it’s is not on this list.
Impossible Owls – Brian Phillips
ah, the time of the year when websites reveal all the good shit the writers are into that never sees the light of day as features, reviews or interviews for the other 11 months of the year. better get back to covering celebrity gossip and political clickbait quick before your bosses notice.
Alan Hollinghurst’s The Sparsholt Affair came out last year in the UK when I read it, but this year in the US, and it’s the one book that’s stuck with me this long. Perfect writing, and moments that I think are among his best. He continues to reach further than just writing about gay men, and a section written from the perspective of a young girl varies between seeming note perfect, and too perfect, but still highly recommended.
Beastie Boys book. Fantastic, and fantastically told, anecdotes strung together to form a bittersweet, funny tribute to the late MCA and the early 80s NYC that exposed 14 year old punks to all the influences they needed to become Beastie Boys.