The 29 Best Books of 2018
2018's literary treasures took us from sexy mermen to post-apocalyptic New York City and behind the scenes at the infamous health-tech start-up Theranos. Not sure where to start? If you'd like to catch up, here are the very best books of 2018.
amazon.com
$18.36
I’ve recommended this novel to everyone. It’s a beautiful family saga-mother, father, two daughters, and an estranged son-that begins as they prepare for the oldest daughter’s wedding. In a series of flashbacks, debut author Fatima Farheen Mirza carefully peels back the layers on the siblings’ loving, turbulent childhoods as second-generation kids in the Bay Area. This book is both full of heart and utterly heartbreaking. It tells a very American tale of negotiating their Muslim parents’ expectations and everyday teenagerdom. Mirza guides the story with a gentle hand as the rounded, flawed characters confront racism, addiction, and generational divides. -Bri Kovan, Associate Editor
amazon.com
$14.84
I love a good dystopian page-turner, and Peng Shepherd’s debut novel is the real deal. It imagines a global plague that steals peoples’ shadows, and then their memories as well. It originates in a Pune, India spice market and eventually spreads internationally, reaching Arlington, Virginia, where husband-and-wife duo Ory and Max have holed up in the forest for safety. When Max’s shadow disappears, so does she. The novel then follows both her and Ory’s parallel storylines as they search for community, a rumored cure in New Orleans, and each other. Shepherd mixes in elements of multiple genres, like post-apocalyptic thriller and fantasy. But at its core, it’s a meditation on memories and personhood, as Shepherd asks which one defines the other. -Bri Kovan, Associate Editor
amazon.com
$13.00
Sarah Smarsh’s debut memoir invites readers into Kansas farmhouses to meet her family, the people surviving rural American poverty. It was just nominated for the National Book Award shortlist, and for good reason. Smarsh addresses the book to her unborn, fictional daughter-a daughter whose existence would have confirmed the reality she’d seen around her: Young, poor women had babies, often locking them in a cycle of poverty. By stepping out of that circle, she analyzes its patterns as both insider and outsider. Heartland is stunning and candid, showing the determined strength of the men and women in the rural American Midwest. -Bri Kovan, Associate Editor
amazon.com
$10.39
I first read Adjei-Brenyah’s short-story collection a few months ago and haven’t stopped thinking about it since. Like Kurt Vonnegut, the debut author introduces readers to worlds adjacent to our reality. They’re familiar enough for us to recognize ourselves within them-until Adjei-Brenyah takes the tough-to-stomach parts of humanity to extremes, like Black Friday shoppers turning into violent, materialistic murderers. The stories wrestle with racism, mob mentality, police violence, and unrestrained consumerism. They’re quick to read, and incredibly hard to forget. -Bri Kovan, Associate Editor
amazon.com
$17.70
American women are mad: righteously, indignantly mad. Cultural critic Rebecca Traister returns at the perfect time. Her book, Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger, tracks the history of female rage, from the suffragettes to the Shitty Media Men list. “Anger has often been the sparking impetus for long-lasting, legal, or institutional reform in the United States,” Traister writes. But women rarely get credit for catalyzing national movements. Traister cites Mamie Till’s decision to publish her son Emmett’s beaten face in Jet magazine, which helped launch the civil rights movement, and Alicia Garza, who cofounded Black Lives Matter in 2013. Rage is an effective organizing tool, Traister argues. But women aren’t “supposed” to be mad, socially, so their political potential is muzzled. Good and Mad is fascinating. I’ve never been prouder of my rage, or more grateful to understand its historical lineage. -Bri Kovan, Associate Editor
amazon.com
$13.00
In his highly anticipated memoir, Heavy, essayist Kiese Laymon sifts through his childhood memories from Jackson, Mississippi, and pens a staggering opus on growing up as a husky black boy in the 1980s South. Much of the book pays homage to his complicated mother, a brilliant academic who disciplined with physical violence. It is a heartbreaking narrative on black bodies: how we hurt them, protect them, and try to heal them. Laymon writes, “America seems filled with violent people who like causing people pain but hate when those people tell them that pain hurts.” -Bri Kovan, Associate Editor
amazon.com
$17.10
“Magical realism is the genre that’s most organic to me,” says Wayétu Moore about her debut novel, She Would Be King. Her three protagonists-village girl Gbessa, plantation-born June Dey, and Jamaican outsider Norman Aragon-employ supernatural skills on their journeys to newfound Liberia, where their paths converge. “African- and black-diaspora fantasy aren’t new frontiers,” says the Brooklyn novelist. Black storytellers are returning to their culturally authentic storytelling methods.” This book is spellbinding on its own, and even more important given recent hubbub about Black mythology and folklore. -Bri Kovan, Associate Editor
Knopf
amazon.com
$16.77
In a year of high-profile scammers, Elizabeth Holmes stands out. Bad Blood, by investigative reporter John Carreyrou, stalks Holmes on her dramatic rise and fall as the founder and CEO of Theranos, a blood-testing startup whose technology never worked, despite a 9-billion dollar valuation. Her story is a parable about Silicon Valley delusion, but the gossipy fun comes from seeing which high-profile man (James Mattis, Joe Biden) gets drawn into Holmes’ scammy web next. -Kat Stoeffel, Features Director
amazon.com
$17.68
One of 2018’s most talked-about authors, Ottessa Moshfegh’s writing is weird, perverted, transporting, addictive, and pithy-like a John Waters gloss on Twitter. Her latest novel, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, is about a sociopathic gallery girl who aspires to sleep all the time, despite the frequent interruptions of her last college friend, an administrative assistant with an eating disorder. It’s a bleak buddy comedy about a pair of BFFs who unhappily inhabit two modern archetypes: the pill-head and the basic bitch. -Kat Stoeffel, Features Director
amazon.com
$19.04
For years Beth Macy has been tracking the opioid epidemic in Central Appalachia for her job as a local newspaper reporter in Virginia. Dopesick pulls together her decades of research and interviews to highlight why and how doctors, dealers and drug companies conspired (in some cases knowingly) to get large swaths of the American population addicted to painkillers. -Jessica Roy, Deputy Editor
amazon.com
$15.11
If you’re like one of my close friends and hungered for any and all books ISIS-related after listening to the New York Times podcast Caliphate, Two Sisters will satisfy your appetite. Written by Norwegian journalist Asne Seierstad, the book follows the journey of two Somali teen girls living in Norway as they become radicalized and move to Syria to join ISIS, and their father’s desperate attempts to bring them home. -Jessica Roy, Deputy Editor
amazon.com
$15.57
Tommy Orange’s poetic, extraordinarily observed, fragmented novel is nothing short of a miracle. It sings with a mix of rage and determination; the words will barrel through you and leave you breathless. Focusing on a disparate set of characters, most of them Native American, who are all drawn together in anticipation of a Powwow, the book paints a picture of Native life that is both contemporaneous and centuries-long. It seeks to wrestle with the lives and fates of this country’s original inhabitants and the generations-spanning acts of violence that continue to affect their descendants. It is, brilliantly, furiously, magnificently, tragically, the story of America. -R. Eric Thomas, Senior Staff Writer
amazon.com
$15.75
You will not read a more peculiar nor familiar memoir this year than that of indie film darling Parker Posey. Using the framework of casual conversations between seatmates on an airplane, Posey embarks on a rambling but winning tour of her life, fascinations, memories, thoughts about the film industry, and the occasional recipe. It takes all of the tropes of the celebrity memoir and, like the best Parker Posey performances, adds an off-kilter sensibility that casts the whole thing in a new light. Posey reads the audiobook herself, so pick that up if you want the full “riding next to Parker Posey on a very long flight” experience. -R. Eric Thomas, Senior Staff Writer
amazon.com
$10.87
Brian Phillips has a way of making you care about the things he cares about in the way he cares about them, which is passionately, almost obsessively. In the former Grantland writer’s book of eight impeccably researched non-fiction essays, the nature of being human is approached from all sides. Phillips’ curiosity takes him to places as far flung as the Iditarod and sends him chasing after subjects as dissimilar as Queen Elizabeth, a Russian animator, and a sumo wrestler. The essays are invigorating and muscular; the perspective is enthusiastic and vital; the book is a must-get. -R. Eric Thomas, Senior Staff Writer
amazon.com
$14.39
The teen love story has never gone away, but recently, audiences have been guzzling them like candy. This YA novel is a tender account of two misfits falling in love via text message, after college freshman Penny and tattooed baker Sam forge an unlikely friendship. All the tiny pleasures and stresses of digital courting are much more enjoyable when it’s delightful fictional characters doing it. Extra points for all the delicious-sounding pastries. -Estelle Tang, Senior Editor
amazon.com
$10.40
Romance is for everyone, but Stella Lane suspects she’s behind the eight ball on the whole shebang. She’d much prefer to think about algorithms than making out, so she decides to hire the very hot Michael Phan, who’s an escort, to help her get used to the whole thing. This is a sweetly sexy, super fun tale of a woman determined to figure out one of the trickiest puzzles of all, and it’s inspired by the author’s own experience with Asperger’s. -Estelle Tang, Senior Editor
amazon.com
$17.00
It really does seem like everyone was talking about screwing mermen for a second, thanks to The Shape of Water and this novel by @sosadtoday’s Melissa Broder. Academic Lucy is flopping in an existential puddle-break-up, stalled career-when she meets the gorgeous Theo at the beach. Dude has a tail-but does that really matter when it’s love? -Estelle Tang, Senior Editor
amazon.com
$23.40
Drawing on the author’s own past relationship with acclaimed author Philip Roth, Asymmetry details the affair between 20-something writer Alice and the much older literary figure Ezra Blazer. Interspersed with this story is that of Iraqi-American Amar, who’s been detained at Heathrow on his way to visit his brother. The links between the two stories are delicate and resonant and surprising. -Estelle Tang, Senior Editor
amazon.com
$23.40
The most 2018 “joke” is that dystopian fiction hits too close to home. But this bare-bones near-future tale, which imagines the world’s population decimated by a virus, deals with the idea of home itself. What exactly is home, and why are we drawn there? For Chinese-American Candace Chen, who takes photographs of a New York City rapidly emptying of inhabitants, the question takes on interesting dimensions when she falls in with a mysterious group of other survivors. -Estelle Tang, Senior Editor
amazon.com
$19.04
Joyful is the culmination of industrial designer Ingrid Fetell Lee’s ten-year investigation into how our physical surroundings psychologically affect us. How we can tweak our homes, offices, and even vacations to bring us more joy? Fetell Lee visits far-flung places like the Reverse Destiny Lofts in Tokyo and Pierre Cardin’s Palais Bulles (Bubble Palace) on the French Riviera to unpack why particular environments, shapes, colors, and people bring us more joy than others. Be warned, reading this book may prompt installing monkey bars in the living room and ditching your spiky cacti. -Angela Ledgerwood, freelance writer and host of Lit Up Podcast
amazon.com
$18.30
Mystery novels always have that Mindhunter thing-if you don't know whodunit with the candlestick in the library, the best way to figure out who-might-have-done-it is through various questions of psychology and motivation. Tana French is one of the very best at teasing out the implications and justifications of that who; in her 2018 book The Witch Elm, we explore it through Toby, the victim of a shockingly violent break-and-enter robbery. Toby has so far had a charmed life, but the attack and a subsequent grisly discovery at his family estate (a skull with an unexpected connection to the past) makes him question that in a radical way. -Estelle Tang, Senior Editor
amazon.com
$16.68
The Book Thief, Zusak’s first novel, had Death as the narrator-a tough act to follow. Maybe that’s why it took Zusak over a decade to write this epic family saga. Regardless, it was well worth the wait. In Bridge of Clay, five unruly brothers known as the Dunbar boys are raising themselves. Their mother is dead and their father, “the Murderer,” has disappeared. When the Murderer returns and wants the boys’ help to build a bridge the old-fashioned way, without mortar, it’s the quietest of them all, Clay, who decides to help. What follows is as much about reconciliation and shared grief as building a bridge across a river. -Angela Ledgerwood, freelance writer and host of Lit Up Podcast
amazon.com
$16.20
Miller’s reimagining of the Greek myth of Circe, the sun god’s unloved daughter and a witch who seduced Homer’s Odysseus, is a powerful and enchanting feminist parable about the binds of family and the extent to which a woman must fight for her sovereignty. If the mention of a Greek myth brings boring ancient history class to mind, think again. This is the most mesmerizing novel of the year. -Angela Ledgerwood, freelance writer and host of Lit Up Podcast
Algonquin Books
amazon.com
$14.78
Many couples have a safe word they use to call time out from rough sex or to stop a conversation from going into a too-hurtful place. For happily married Celestial and Roy, it is two words: “November 17,” the anniversary of their first date. When Roy utters these words in the midst of a fight with Celestial, it’s impossible to fathom the repercussions of trying to do the right thing. That night, Roy is wrongly accused of committing a violent crime, and later sentenced to twelve years in prison. What follows is a tender and propulsive story set in the New South about honoring love and family while daring to imagine a brighter future. -Angela Ledgerwood, freelance writer and host of Lit Up Podcast
Random Housee
amazon.com
$16.80
During a European history class at Cambridge University, Tara Westover raised her hand and asked what the Holocaust was. Her professor and classmates were shocked. No one believed she’d genuinely asked the question, and they thought she was a racist. But Westover was telling the truth. She was born around 1986 (she has no birth certificate) in the remote mountains of Idaho to Mormon survivalist parents and was given no formal education. In this remarkable memoir, she shares her harrowing journey of discovering the world at the expense of losing her family. -Angela Ledgerwood, freelance writer and host of Lit Up Podcast
amazon.com
$14.12
From the writer of The Lonely City, this page-turning novella chronicles Laing’s summer of 2017-what it was like to be a newlywed adjusting to married life while dealing with spikes of anxiety induced by Trump tweets and Brexit bafflement. She draws from her own life and the life and work of Kathy Acker, the late punk poet, writer, and counterculture experimentalist. By combining these voices she creates one of the most compelling commitment-phobic protagonists to come along in years. -Angela Ledgerwood, freelance writer and host of Lit Up Podcast
amazon.com
$13.59
When did you first see yourself in fiction? In this anthology of essays, Glory Edim, founder of the book-club-turned-online-community Well-Read Black Girl, asks a group of the most important American thinkers of today-like Tayari Jones, Zadie Smith, Jacqueline Woodson, and Pulitzer-winning playwright Lynn Nottage-to reflect on when they recognized themselves in literature and how they found their unique voices.
-Angela Ledgerwood, freelance writer and host of Lit Up Podcast
amazon.com
$5.24
Moran’s hilarious sequel to the soon-to-be adapted How to Build a Girl is all about the power of young women’s voices. This time witty and willful Woverhampton native Johanna Morrigan has transformed herself into a fearless music journalist under the pen name Dolly Wilde; her unapologetic writing (and sex life) ends up catapulting her to fame in her own right, with explosive consequences. -Angela Ledgerwood, freelance writer and host of Lit Up Podcast
amazon.com
$10.87
How far would you go to avoid having to attend your ex’s wedding? Would you plan a rather fabulous globe-trotting trip, including stops in Morocco and Berlin? I wish! Accompanying Arthur Less, the novelist protagonist of this gorgeous transatlantic journey, will leave you chuckling and wanting to read sentences aloud to anyone who will listen. It won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for fiction, too. -Angela Ledgerwood, freelance writer and host of Lit Up Podcast
2018's literary treasures took us from sexy mermen to post-apocalyptic New York City and behind the scenes at the infamous health-tech start-up Theranos. Not sure where to start? If you'd like to catch up, here are the very best books of 2018.
Gotta read 'em all.
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