A Premature Attempt at the 21st Century Canon

The Corrections, by Jonathan Franzen (September 1, 2001) | 6 votes
Arriving in bookstores ten days before the September 11 attacks, The Corrections recounts the tragicomic breakdown of a 20th-century American dream of middle-ness: midwestern and middle-class. The Lamberts, with their mentally disintegrating patriarch, Christmas-obsessed mother, and grown siblings tackling depression, professional failure, adultery, and celebrity chefdom, may not seem as universal as they once did, but the sensation of certainties evaporating as we pitch headlong into this still-young century has only gotten stronger. —Laura Miller

Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro (March 3, 2005) | 6 votes
You can think of this as Ishiguro’s The Road — his haunting masterpiece. The ratio of taut plot to ghastly subject matter is disturbingly effective. Kathy H.’s multidimensional but methodical storytelling of this adolescent Gothic horror show is indelible (and difficult to review without spoiling). The questions it raises are perfectly of-our-century. Never Let Me Go is a prime example of an author with impeccable taste in ideas and the control to execute them. Most authors are lucky if they have one of those things going for them. This novel is a rare symphony of both. —Sloane Crosley

How Should a Person Be?, by Sheila Heti (September 25, 2010) | 5 votes
Heti doesn’t get enough credit from her advocates for being funny or from her critics for being serious. Slipping imperceptibly from ironic to earnest, challenging to chatty, her voice is sui generis and ideally suited to capturing the experience of making art — and decisions — in the modern world. The concerns of her breakout work of autofiction include sex, self-documentation, aesthetics, and friendship, as well as the titular question. The title is a perfect joke, a mission statement of deranged grandiosity, straight-faced and self-aware. Isn’t this what every book, ever, wants (in its own way) to ask? —Molly Fischer

The Neapolitan Novels, by Elena Ferrante (2011-2015) | 5 votes
Elena Ferrante’s Italy is where the personal is political, the male gaze is visceral, and the past clings to the present with potent force. Across four books and over the lifetimes of its two unforgettable main characters, the Neapolitan quartet explores female rage, agency, and friendship with a raw power. (All that over a decade when women have begun to express their anger and agency in new ways.) Lila and Elena grow up inured to the violence and corruption that defines their hometown of Naples in the 1950s, even as they yearn for something better: beauty amidst the ugliness, and intellectual fulfillment, which can be as heady as romantic love. Ferrante fever struck readers all over the world, captivated by Lila and Elena’s complicated relationship. —Maris Kreizman

The Argonauts, by Maggie Nelson (May 5, 2015) | 5 votes
Around the time it was published, Maggie Nelson read aloud the opening of this book — an extremely graphic and surprising sex scene, awkwardly lighting up that New York room and clanging a bell that people had just not heard before. Her 21st-century classic is structurally just that kind of awoke re-shuffling. It’s not that you don’t know about anal sex, childbirth, or even about a partner’s transition or a parent dying, but Nelson puts each next to the other in a manner that changes our perception of each and all. I’m always glad to have never had a baby, yet Maggie has writ birthing so deeply that I’m grateful to say I’ve missed nothing in this life, thanks to this uncanny saint of a book. —Eileen Myles

2666, by Roberto Bolaño (November 11, 2008) | 4 votes
Bolaño’s final legacy to the world before his death in 2003 is a labyrinthine mystery taking in three continents and most of the 20th century. Its playful first part might make you think you are stepping into a steady old-fashioned cruise ship of a novel, à la Victor Hugo, but the tone shifts as abruptly as the locale. At its center is the book-length fourth part, a mercilessly clipped recital of some of the hundreds of femicides in Ciudad Juárez, which is both integral to the story and a direct confrontation with the reader. The book is a world: teeming, immeasurable, unplumbable, materially solid but finally enigmatic. —Luc Sante

The Sellout, by Paul Beatty (March 3, 2015) | 4 votes
It takes a master of language, culture, and comic timing to create a satire that excoriates contemporary American life, with jokes coming at a furious pace, almost line by line. The novel takes on the idea of living in a “post-racial� society, which even during the Obama administration was ridiculous. The Sellout details the trials of a black man charged with reinstating slavery and segregation in his California hometown, in a voice that is unabashedly profane; so unflinchingly silly and smart that it’s impossible to look away. —Maris Kreizman

The Outline Trilogy (Outline, Transit, and Kudos), by Rachel Cusk (2014–2018) | 4 votes
In its basic contours, Cusk’s trilogy is a masterpiece of rigorous denial: The books, mostly plotless, follow a British writer named Faye about whom we learn little. Yet Faye is less a protagonist than a character-shaped black hole, pulling stories and confessions out of everyone she encounters as if by inexorable gravitational force. Their disclosures allow Cusk to examine the ways we try (and fail) to make meaning out of life. The result is fiction like ice water, cold and clear, a mirror of our time. —Molly Fischer

Atonement, by Ian McEwan (September 2001) | 3 votes
At once a war story, a love story, and a story about the destructive and redemptive powers of the imagination, Atonement pivots around a terrible lie told by a 13-year-old girl that will shatter her family. At the same time, the novel opens out into a deeply moving portrait of England careerning from the quiescent 1930s into the horrors of World War II. A bravura account of the 1940 Allied retreat from Dunkirk stands as one of the most indelible combat scenes in recent literature, slamming home the confusion, terror, and banality of war with visceral immediacy. It is only the most memorable sequence in a brilliantly orchestrated novel that injects many of the author’s favorite themes — the hazards of innocence, the sudden intrusion of bad luck into ordinary lives, the blurring of lines between art and life — with a new resonance and depth. —Michiko Kakutani

The Year of Magical Thinking, by Joan Didion (September 1, 2005) | 3 votes
This is often referred to as Didion’s “departure� — the underbelly everyone always longed to see after reading Slouching Towards Bethlehem and thinking: But surely she’d pick me. Surely we’d live happily ever after, observing the world with our cool eyes. In short: No, she wouldn’t. And The Year of Magical Thinking is actually not her “personal� anomaly. It’s the Didion that’s been there all along — funny, humane, trenchant — transformed by tragedy and grief. The 21st century is young, but this one will be on this list 50 years from now. There’s something so reassuring about a bar that can never be surpassed. —Sloane Crosley

Leaving the Atocha Station, by Ben Lerner (August 23, 2011) | 3 votes
When our alien overlords want to know what was new in the novel in the first quarter of the 21st century, give them Atocha Station. Some will contend that Lerner’s second novel, 10:04, is a more mature work, but this one is leaner and shapelier, and more directly explores the disconnect between our hopes for art and our actual experience of it. The narrator, a self-loathing stoner American poet on a fellowship in Madrid, is a privileged jackass trying to appear deep. The trick, of course, is that he’s brilliant, and his anxious stream of thought is philosophically rich. What is the average person’s role in history? How can we live with our own fraudulence? Why should we make art, and what kind of art can we make now? To all these questions Atocha Station is an answer. —Christine Smallwood

The Flamethrowers, by Rachel Kushner (April 2, 2013) | 3 votes
This fever-dream of the 1970s would make a spectacular movie — if anyone had the budget to make a picture that takes in speed records at the Bonneville Salt Flats, vast street riots in Rome, escapes through the Alps, and intrigue in the international art world. Kushner sets her heroine, Reno, in the middle of all of it, usually astride her battered Moto Valera; passionate, vulnerable, relentlessly curious, and only a little bit compromised. The book is a feminist action-adventure, a love note to the last decade before neoliberalism choked the world, and a monument to sheer gumption. —Luc Sante

Erasure, by Percival Everett (August 1, 2001)
The University of Southern California English professor has published some 30 volumes, mostly fiction, and Erasure is among his best. A comic romp through academic pieties and perversities, it centers on a literary hoax gone bad, in ways that predicted our current higher-educational climate. Everett is always, in a sense, writing about race, and always not. (He also writes about himself — and not — with a Hitchcock-like cameo in the form of a derelict-in-his-duty, wastrel of a literature professor by the name of Percival Everett.) —Tom Lutz

Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides (September 4, 2002)
“Sing now, O Muse, of the recessive mutation on my fifth chromosome,� proclaims Cal/Calliope Stephanides, Middlesex’s pseudo-hermaphroditic protagonist, recounting his family’s long hereditary slide towards her mixed-up gender identity. And then: “Sorry if I get a little Homeric at times. That’s genetic, too.� Eugenides packs so much richness into this Classical saga-cum-bildungsroman-cum–paean to the American Dream that Dickens would be proud. Starting with the burning of Smyrna and winding its way through Prohibition to the 1967 Detroit race riots, Middlesex does what any viable candidate for the Great American Novel should; it broadens the definition of “American.� —Hillary Kelly

Platform, by Michel Houellebecq (September 5, 2002)
Houellebecq’s second novel (after his incendiary debut, The Elementary Particles) is full of loathsome, corrosive wit; it continues his savagely pessimistic project exploring the future of France (and, by extension, Europe and the West), caught between the distractions of late capitalism and the amorality of a post-1968 society. Houellebecq is abrasive, offensive, and in many ways obviously wrong, but his grim outlook on globalization and his anger at his parents’ generation make him one of the essential European novelists of the 21st century. —Jess Row

Do Everything in the Dark, by Gary Indiana (June 1, 2003)
A working title for this novel was “Psychotic Friends Network.� Composed in 74 short sections, it follows a group of loosely bound friends — artists, actors, writers, and careerless people who once had other plans — into the damaged state of middle age. Downtown Manhattan is their center of gravity, but these characters have been scattered, before waking up to find themselves so much human debris in the wake of personal failures, betrayals, and AIDS. A literary descendant of Renata Adler’s Speedboat and a forerunner of recent autofiction, Do Everything in the Dark concludes on the weekend before 9/11, and demonstrates that American wreckage wasn’t something invented on that sunny Tuesday morning. —Christian Lorentzen

The Known World, by Edward P. Jones (August 14, 2003)
This intimate portrait of the great national nightmare of slavery comes disguised in the britches and mourning dresses of an antebellum historical novel. It was widely praised upon publication for revealing an obscure chapter of American history — free people of color who owned slaves — but the history itself was largely invented. The Virginian county of Henry Townsend’s plantation, the reference citations, and many of the period details are made up. Having denied the consolations of historical distance, The Known World forces a reckoning with a moral horror that lives still. —Nathaniel Rich

The Plot Against America, by Philip Roth (September 30, 2004)
It can be easy to forget that The Plot Against America, which today reads as a parable for Trump’s America, was widely received as an allegory for W.’s — an interpretation that Roth encouraged by insisting the opposite. The novel begins in a buzz of fear and the pitch increases steadily, unbearably. But it’s Roth’s doomed hero, Walter Winchell, whose speeches have the uncanny urgency of prophecy: “How long will Americans remain asleep while their cherished Constitution is torn to shreds by the fascist fifth column of the Republican right marching under the sign of the cross and the flag?� —Nathaniel Rich

The Line of Beauty, by Alan Hollinghurst (October 1, 2004)
Sometimes a book just feels monumental. The Line of Beauty follows a young gay man, Nick, who lives with the family of a Tory MP under Thatcher — who makes an unforgettable cameo appearance. This is the story of two initiations. It’s about a loss of innocence coinciding with social success, but also about a coming in of sorts: Nick’s entrance into London’s gay subculture. He is always seduced by beauty, but as AIDS looms — along with the threat of discovery by his conservative hosts — Nick can’t outrun the politics of his aesthetics or the contradictions in the social structures to which he clings. —Alice Bolin

Veronica, by Mary Gaitskill (October 11, 2005)
Like her first novel, Two Girls, Fat and Thin (1991), Gaitskill’s second revolves around a friendship between two women. Alison Owen, a former model living with hepatitis C, reflects on her complex closeness with Veronica Ross, a woman we learn died alone with AIDS. How we care for people in pain is at the heart of this moving, unsentimental look at our fragility, written with remarkable metaphorical and lyrical power. In a book not about living through hardships but about living in their aftermath, Gaitskill’s Alison is indelible, as is her memory of her lost friend. —Wyatt Mason

The Road, by Cormac McCarthy (September 26, 2006)
Here is the author of Blood Meridian and No Country for Old Men still trafficking in his primordial themes — good vs. evil — but locating it tenderly within the relationship between a father and son (as they journey through a post-Apocalyptic hellscape). The father knows he is dying and, in a world overrun by cannibalism and violence, he’s trying to teach his son how to tell the “good guys� from the bad. This is McCarthy at his most restrained, and consequently most resonant. There is no fiction subject more trendy (and more urgent) than the multifarious possible ends of the world; McCarthy led the way, and might be impossible to surpass. —Edward Hart

Ooga-Booga, by Frederick Seidel (November 14, 2006)
“The title is Kill Poetry, / And in the book poetry kills.� The poems in Frederick Seidel’s 12th collection, Ooga Booga, don’t kill but they come awfully close. Some poets are easy to love; Seidel is so good you revere him despite yourself. Born in 1936 and still living in New York, he’s the heir to a family coal fortune, a famously dapper dresser, and a writer of odes to Ducati motorcycles. He also captures the absurd melancholy of modern existence in dark, crystalline stanzas. “The poet the 20th century deserved� is how one critic put it, and it’s not clear if that’s a compliment or not, or if it matters. At 82, he’s the poet the 21st century deserves, too, and still desperately needs. —Adam Sternbergh

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Díaz (September 6, 2007)
Junot Díaz’s first novel not only affirmed the vitality and the talent displayed in his first book, Drown, in a resounding way, it expanded the idea of what is possible, and what American literature could be. It could be written for an audience in ascendancy, told in vernacular but expertly formed and composed. It could concern the intensely personal, but telescope out to the historic and the political. The astounding Oscar Wao did all of that, leaving us with a lasting understanding of the American experience as encompassing lives beyond our blinkered borders. —Oscar Villalon

Wolf Hall, by Hilary Mantel (April 30, 2009)
Any writer could have done the research that informs this remarkable historical novel. But only genius, gimlet-eyed, wicked Hilary Mantel could have created the animating intelligence at the heart of it: Thomas Cromwell, adviser to Henry VIII, antagonist to Thomas More, brilliant and ambitious, heartbroken and ruthless. “As some men have an eye for horseflesh or cattle to be fattened,� Mantel writes, “he has an eye for risk,� and as a novelist she shares this quality, taking unlikely narrative leaps that always pay off. No book this learned should be so wildly entertaining. —Dan Kois

The Possessed, by Elif Batuman (February 16, 2010)
The best essay collections are about the writer’s strange and hungry mind groping around the contours of the world, but this one is also a hilarious book on a famously grave subject: Russian literature. Batuman creates a memoir of her time in Stanford’s PhD program obliquely, writing about authors first and herself second. She mimics the forms of fiction — a Sherlock Holmes–style detective story in “The Murder of Leo Tolstoy,� an old-school travelogue of studying abroad in Uzbekistan — to better comment on them. The Possessed and Batuman’s novel, The Idiot, together form a body of work that queries the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction — and between books and their readers. —Alice Bolin

The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, by Aimee Bender (June 1, 2010)
All of Bender’s stories are written in a mode that is not quite fantasy, certainly not realist, and somewhat fairy-tale-ish (in other words a style that is all her own), offering beautiful, profound stories about, for instance, a six-inch-tall man who lives in a bird cage in his wife’s house; or, as in the title of another collection, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt. It really doesn’t matter which of her books you pick up first; you’ll be immediately hooked and read them all. —Tom Lutz

Mr. Fox, by Helen Oyeyemi (June 1,
2011)
Not since Angela Carter has a writer subverted classic fairy-tale tropes the way Helen Oyeyemi does, to transformative effect. Mr. Fox is perhaps the first brilliant work of romantic metafiction, a novel that tells the story of a few characters over and over again in pitch-perfect iterations that reveal volumes about love and loneliness and violence. Undeniably clever — but not so clever as to obscure the sentiment embedded in Oyeyemi’s shrewd structure — Mr. Fox has the brains and the heart to win over both those who enjoy unraveling how fiction works and those who just seek pure enjoyment. —Maris Kreizman

Lives Other Than My Own, by Emmanuel Carrère (September 13, 2011)
The sui-generis French author of fiction, nonfiction, and works that bridge the two has published many excellent books, among them the true-crime account The Adversary (2000) and The Kingdom (2014). My favorite by a nose is Lives Other Than My Own, a book that defies tidy summary, but which, though preoccupied with the very saddest human experiences — the deaths of a young child and a sibling — is also believably a book about happiness, one which earns its happy ending. —Wyatt Mason

Zone One, by Colson Whitehead (October 6, 2011)
In a century marked by the erosion of the high-low divide that once separated “literature� from genre fiction, Zone One is the exemplary hybrid, the paragon of what each mode offers the other. Whitehead’s post-apocalyptic experiment — a zombie novel that’s also a 9/11 meditation that’s also a cultural satire — delivers both moving psychological realism and satisfying gore. (The moment when hero Mark Spitz discovers his undead mother feasting on his dad’s corpse will stay with me until the day a zombie chows down on mine.) Whitehead has written terrific novels that more directly address the horrors of American history, but never one that more accurately portrays the horrors of the American present. —Dan Kois

Gone Girl, by Gillian Flynn (May 24, 2012)
Six years, a film adaptation, and many, many imitators later, it can be difficult to recall why Flynn’s third thriller was such a genre game-changer. But I’ll never forget how loudly I gasped at the now-infamous mid-novel narrative twist, as audacious as Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (both of these play fair with the reader, by the way). Flynn’s writing, always Ginsu-sharp, leveled up here, especially on the stress of a marriage under strain in the wake of 2008’s economic collapse. We’re playing by Gone Girl rules now. —Sarah Weinman

NW, by Zadie Smith (August 27, 2012)
Zadie Smith is maybe the most important British novelist of the 21st century (yeah, I said it). She unpacks layered cultural identities in the tradition of Dickens, Eliot, and Austen. If Smith was in E.M. Forster mode in the wonderful On Beauty, she went full Virginia Woolf in NW, her fourth and maybe her best novel, undertaking a Mrs. Dalloway–esque journey through London. NW is not only about the intersecting lives of characters who grew up together in a Northwest London housing project, but also leveraging the complexity of the modernist project to ask difficult questions about race and social status. —Alice Bolin

White Girls, by Hilton Als (January 1, 2013)
En route to the airport, I ask one of my boyfriends to tell me, in his own words, why White Girls belongs here. As it happens, the boyfriend has, stored on his phone, favorite lines from the book. Here are some: “Other people are always our parents.� “I cannot bear to imagine unraveling my mother, her hair, her retribution.� “Nowadays, no one leaves the house without some kind of script.� “I’d like to fuck some truth into Suicide Bitch, if I could get it up.� “We hate white girls because we are white girls and that’s what white girls do.� —David Velasco

My Struggle: A Man in Love, by Karl Ove Knausgaard (May 13, 2013)
What was it about this thoroughly Gen-X Norwegian man that caused so many readers to plunge into his struggle — an epic stretching over nearly 4,000 pages — as if it were their own? Was it the agony of his relationship with his alcoholic father? Was it the tribulations of parenthood, so many hours at kiddie parties and not the writing desk? Or was it the passion that seized him when he first met his future second wife and cut up his face when she rejected him? With its digressions within digressions, A Man in Love — book two of My Struggle — is the most formally thrilling in the series. In its pathetic way, it’s also the funniest. —Christian Lorentzen

The Goldfinch, by Donna Tartt (September 23, 2013)
Tartt seems to have inhaled the complete works of Charles Dickens and magically exhaled them into a thoroughly original narrative that reinvents the old-fashioned social novel, while capturing our anxious post-9/11 age with uncommon fervor and precision. Like Great Expectations, it concerns the sentimental education of an orphan as well as a mysterious benefactor. The story takes young Theo from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where a bomb kills his mother, to sojourns in Las Vegas and Amsterdam and dangerous encounters with drug dealers, mobsters, and other sinister types. In the hands of a lesser novelist, such developments might feel contrived, but Tartt writes with such authority and verve and understanding of character that her story becomes just as persuasive as it is suspenseful. —Michiko Kakutani

Dept. of Speculation, by Jenny Offill (January 28, 2014)
If the novel exists to help readers reconcile themselves to the disappointments of adulthood, Dept. of Speculation ranks up there with Balzac’s Lost Illusions. Its narrator is a type relatively new in literature — a female writer who is also a mother. (The book is written in fragments, reflecting the temporality of motherhood and depression, that are alternately wry, bereft, tender, furious, despairing, and joyful.) Before having a baby, she had dreamed of being an “art monster.� But this book is proof that great art does not require a spouse who licks your stamps. It requires only what Offill possesses in abundance, and what her narrator knows is the highest wisdom: “attention.� —Christine Smallwood

All My Puny Sorrows, by Miriam Toews (April 11, 2014)
There have been bigger, splashier novels featuring suicidal characters published in the 21st century, but none so resonant as Toews’s stunner — the story of two sisters, one of whom is kind of miserable while the other is accomplished, talented, and determined to kill herself. A profoundly tender love story about deep despair, Sorrows also brims with jokes that are real and plentiful and well-earned, as well as a keen sense of what joy looks like even in the darkest of times. —Maris Kreizman

Citizen: An American Lyric, by Claudia Rankine (October 7, 2014)
Rankine’s compilation of lyric poems, micro-essays, snatches of cultural commentary, and startlingly direct descriptions of her everyday experiences as a black woman became the essential literary complement to Black Lives Matter and probably the most important work of American poetry in the 21st century. Fiercely eccentric, refusing any easy resolutions, Citizen’s success represents a redefinition of the conventions of American literature. —Jess Row

consent not to be a single being, by Fred Moten (2017–2018)
At a time when both theory and criticism are frequently and convincingly attacked as exhausted forms, Moten’s trilogy has reinvented both. Reading hip-hop and jazz musicians through and against philosophers and visual artists, he interrogates aesthetic, political, and social phenomena through analyses of blackness. He offers a profusion of arguments and deconstructions to create a coherence that nonetheless remains open to active reading and interpretation. In its mixture of theoretical complexity and disarming directness, Moten’s beautifully written trilogy offers the sheer pleasure of art. —Lidija Haas

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, by Michael Chabon (September 19, 2000)
The star creation of the comic-book whiz kids Joe Kavalier and Sammy Klayman is the Escapist, a superhero cloaked in a midnight-blue costume emblazoned with a golden key. The Escapist lacks physical might, but like the novel, he possesses a shrewd intelligence, courage, and an insatiable appetite for adventure. As Clay puts it, the Escapist doesn’t just fight crime, “he frees the world of it. He frees people, see?� In this novel of Houdinis, femme fatales, and comic book villains (including Adolf Hitler) — a novel about the American genius for self-invention, in all its glorious and hideous manifestations — Michael Chabon proves that the strongest superpower of all is the ability to tell a great story. —Nathaniel Rich

The Amber Spyglass, by Philip Pullman (October 10, 2000)
The concluding volume of Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy takes its teenaged heroes, Lyra and Will, across universes, up to heaven, and deep into the shadowlands of the dead. But intertwined with their epic tale is the quiet, odd story of physicist Mary Malone, one of the greatest of Pullman’s creations, who uses the rational tools of the scientist to untangle the trilogy’s cosmological mysteries. The Harry Potter series may have launched children’s books into the commercial stratosphere, but it was this book — a stew of Milton and Blake, rich with allusion, kind and fierce — that made clear the imaginative and literary heights to which books for young people could ascend. And the ending: Oh! The ending! My heart breaks again just thinking of it. —Dan Kois

True History of the Kelly Gang, by Peter Carey (January 9, 2001)
There isn’t a novelist alive shy of Toni Morrison who can forge sprung poetry from the speech of mere mortals quite like Carey. In True History of the Kelly Gang, which won him a second Booker Prize in 2001, he conjured the clang and twang of Australia’s infamous bushranger, Ned Kelly, telling his life story from beyond the grave to a daughter he left behind. Here’s all the adventure of robbing banks to give to the poor, but also the shame and rage of a convict long gone turned into eternal narrative. An ecstatic and furious book. —John Freeman

The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos, by Anne Carson (February 6, 2001)
Among the most immediate, most poignant, and funniest of Carson’s works, Beauty tells the story of a marriage to a vampiric, manipulative narcissist, and explores some of her favorite themes: frustration over what cannot be understood or communicated; power struggles enacted through language; erotic longing. The sharp, fragmentary collision of essay, poetry, fiction, and memoir is arguably becoming a dominant form in 21st-century literature so far, and Carson created a compelling template for it that won’t be easily surpassed. —Lidija Haas

The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, by Louise Erdrich (April 3, 2001)
In our age of fake presidents and wished-for miracles, I’ve begun to long for a rediscovery of Erdrich’s novel. The book tells the tale of Father Damien, a woman who for 50 years disguises herself as a man so she can serve an Ojibwe congregation. Damien’s anguished, searching voice is the book’s oaken rudder, as she steers through currents of moral dilemma. Is a lie a sin if it preserves her work? Should she instigate against a false prophet, or dedicate herself to highlighting humans’ capacity for good? Perhaps the last question is eternal, but Erdrich makes it feel freshly so. —John Freeman

Austerlitz, by W.G. Sebald (October 2, 2001)
Austerlitz bears all of Sebald’s hallmarks: a saturnine narrator, a love of archives and depositories, and a series of chance encounters with someone who has a story to tell. That someone, Jacques Austerlitz, was brought to England aboard a kindertransport as an infant, and he is in the process of recovering the truth about his parents — he first learns that his mother, an opera singer, was killed at Theresienstadt. The sweep of European cultural history is laid out like an enormous map in order to precisely locate the circumstances of the crime. The sentences are long, the paragraphs cyclopean, the pacing leisurely, and yet it’s all hypnotically gripping. —Luc Sante

Fingersmith, by Sarah Waters (February 4, 2002)
You know a twist is coming. About ten million friends have hinted about the twist. “You haven’t read Fingersmith?� they said. “Oh man, that twist.� But it doesn’t matter that you know the twist is coming because when it arrives in this page-turner about a shifty ladies’ maid and her neurotic, beautiful lady, you will still cackle with glee. I myself threw the book to the ground, shouting, “Holy shit!� You have never had a reading experience quite as propulsive and enjoyable as barreling through Sarah Waters’s sordid, sexy saga of swindlers and smut-peddlers screwing each other all across Victorian England. —Dan Kois

The Time of Our Singing, by Richard Powers (October 3, 2002)
Powers revisits the civil rights struggles of the last century from an unexpected angle, illuminating some of the deepest rifts and tensions in American life via an often exhilarating meditation on time and music. The novel follows a German Jewish physicist; his African-American wife, whose ambitions as a singer are thwarted early; and their children, two of whom become classical musicians. Few writers have captured the experience of listening to music the way Powers does, and his evocations of historical events have the same vividness. The book’s scope and grandeur make clear that the realist novel can still embody ideas as few other forms can. —Lidija Haas

The Book of Salt, by Monique Truong (April 7, 2003)
Based on a passing reference to a Vietnamese cook in The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book, Truong’s first novel reimagines the domestic life of Gertrude Stein and Toklas through the eyes of Binh, whose rich and caustic voice makes him one of the great fictional narrators of the last quarter-century. It’s a miraculous paradox — a novel that lovingly reproduces the atmosphere of European modernism in order to reveal its racist and imperialist underpinnings. —Jess Row

Mortals, by Norman Rush (May 27, 2003)
A novel of adultery and conspiracy, of Americans in Africa on the morning after the end of the Cold War, Mortals follows a CIA agent (and Milton scholar) in Botswana in 1992. Rush is the most politically committed and engaged of contemporary American novelists, and Mortals is the most sustained and well-informed fictional account of U.S. meddling in countries that rarely feature in our headlines. The human story of a faltering marriage merges with the geopolitical in the form of a boiling civil conflict. Rush is Joseph Conrad’s heir in the era of globalization. —Christian Lorentzen

Home Land, by Sam Lipsyte (February 16, 2004)
What would a Gen-X Notes from Underground look like? In Lipsyte’s version, it comes in the form of letters written to a high-school alumni newspaper, confessing to the nightmare of the American meritocracy: “I did not pan out.� Lipsyte’s Underground Man has a name and a nickname, both of which mark him as pathetic. Lewis “Teabag� Miner is the embodiment of the loser under late capitalism. Location: New Jersey, a place just across the river from the precincts of power, but in fact a wasteland of strip malls, fast food, dive bars, and work-from-home content-generation jobs. Teabag has graduated into a world of bullshit, and what he has to tell his high-school classmates is that they were living in a land of bullshit all along. —Christian Lorentzen

Oblivion, by David Foster Wallace (June 8, 2004)
Oblivion was the final book of fiction Wallace published before his life was cut short by suicide. Although a great writer of nonfiction, Wallace’s idea of fiction was of another order of magnitude. As Oblivion showcases, one of the things that made Wallace so necessary was his insistence on formal inventiveness: None of the eight stories in Oblivion resembles any other, each a kind of experiment that never has the whiff of the lab. Rather, these stories attempt to find new ways of getting at the deep, dark difficulty of being a modern human, a predicament so funny it could make you weep, as these stories themselves are likely to make you do: in rage, in sorrow, in gratitude. —Wyatt Mason

Honored Guest, by Joy Williams (October 5, 2004)
Joy Williams is one of the contemporary masters of the American short story, and her 2004 collection Honored Guest finds her at her most bizarre and profound. It is easy to be wrapped up in Williams’s sentences, in lines of dialogue like, “‘I’m Priscilla Dickman and I’m an ex-agoraphobic. Can I buy you a drink?’� But Honored Guest is much more than its delightful surface. These are stories of lonely characters on the rim of tragedy — a girl living with her terminally ill mother, a woman whose boyfriend is gravely injured in a hunting accident — probing the eternal with hilarious detachment and moving, sorrowful confusion. —Alice Bolin

Suite Française, by Irène Némirovsky (October 31, 2004)
Enough time has passed that the astounding story of this posthumous, unfinished novel — which Némirovsky wrote in secret in Nazi-occupied France and was discovered by her daughters six decades after she was killed at Auschwitz — can cede center stage to the book itself. And what a marvel Suite Française is, an incisive, heartbreaking portrait of a small French town under seige, and the people trying to survive, even to live, as Hitler’s horrors march closer and closer to their doors. Even incomplete, it’s a masterpiece of observation and character study, a standout of Holocaust literature. —Sarah Weinman

The Sluts, by Dennis Cooper (January 13, 2005)
Once upon a time, in the prelude to the plague years, gay male desire invented its most mesmeric and unbearable object: the twink. Blond, white, underweight, and user-friendly, he was a plastic icon of inverted, Aryan masculinity. As AIDS destroyed a population, as the internet quickened and anarchized our pornographies, the twink took off. Dennis Cooper hit this crepuscular intersection of web and death with effortless genius. A series of online rent-boy reviews describe the discovery, torture, and maybe murder of a barely-legal, no-limits hustler named Brad. Call it the twink cri de coeur — all surface, and so, perversely impenetrable. It is a dangerous fantasia, slipping so easily into the mouths and minds of homophobes. But go ahead, let them taste it. They want it as much as anyone. —David Velasco

Voices From Chernobyl, by Svetlana Alexievich (June 28, 2005)
The Belarusian Alexievich, who won the Nobel Prize in 2015, ostensibly trades in oral history. Her books do not, however, bear much resemblance to the form as it is usually practiced. Here the accounts of witnesses and victims are orchestrated, arranged in counterpoint and as fugues and descants, with purposeful ellipses and repetitions, and edited to make every voice sound like a poet. Alexievich is clear about the extent to which she reshapes her material, and her books are only nominally about facts — they are concerned with impressions and feelings, and they remain in your ear long after you’ve turned the last page. —Luc Sante

Magic for Beginners, by Kelly Link (July 1, 2005)
Any collection of Kelly Link’s stories will do. They shimmer in the borderlands of myth, genre, and literature. A convenience store caters to the mild-mannered zombies who emerge from a nearby gorge and clumsily attempt to shop. A group of teenagers bond over an elusive TV series. A suburban family becomes slowly and methodically alienated from every possession they own. Link’s stories can make you shudder, then laugh, then feel like a god has just walked past your window. —Laura Miller

The Afterlife, by Donald Antrim (May 30, 2006)
A book of fierce love and heartbreaking shame, Antrim’s memoir of his mother, written in the wake of her death from lung cancer, was a radical departure from his wild comic novels of the 1990s. It was also an artistic breakthrough. Antrim’s mother was an alcoholic. Her marriage to his father, an English professor who left her for another woman and returned years later, was happy in neither of its incarnations. The emotions in this book are raw, the writing exquisite, and the family pain shattering. —Christian Lorentzen

Winter’s Bone, by Daniel Woodrell (August 7, 2006)
Can a film adaptation be too good? I worry that Jennifer Lawrence’s breakout performance in the 2010 film has overshadowed this outstanding novel, which features what one critic called “the character of a lifetime.� The story of 16-year-old Ree Dolly trying to save her Ozark family is at once intimate and mythic. Woodrell’s language has a spiky beauty, he also uses localisms carefully. His depictions of violence are first-rate, vivid, and essential to the story. Oh, and it’s a glancing look at the methamphetamine scourge, largely forgotten but far from gone as the country now focuses on opioids. —Laura Lippman

Wizard of the Crow, by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (August 8, 2006)
Thiong’o, often talked about as a Nobel Prize contender, was among the first celebrated post-independence African writers, along with Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka. Imprisoned and then exiled from Kenya, he has been writing his memoirs and is now on his fourth volume. Wizard of the Crow, a fantastic (in all senses of the word) novel written in his native Kikuyu, is his masterpiece, published when he was 68. No novel has ever so profoundly mixed oral tradition, novelistic gamesmanship, serious political critique, literary meta-analysis, and every genre under the sun, from farce to tragedy. —Tom Lutz

American Genius, A Comedy, by Lynne Tillman (September 25, 2006)
A modernist adventure for a new century: You spend the novel roaming around inside the mind of a woman who has taken refuge in a Magic Mountain–style sanatorium-cum–artists’ colony. Her compulsive digressions and recurring preoccupations mostly take the place of a conventional plot, and Tillman’s beautifully constructed sentences create their own propulsion, able to take a reader in any direction at any moment. From the opening pages, a singular consciousness emerges, both porous and radically isolated, and by stripping out most other elements, the book confirms the ultimate primacy of literary voice, of which this is a rare triumph. —Lidija Haas

Eat the Document, by Dana Spiotta (November 28, 2006)
If Don DeLillo is a sage of 20th-century American politics and popular culture, Dana Spiotta is the author who has carried the torch into the 21st. Her prose is as catchy and melodic as the music she describes in so many of her novels with the insight of a rock critic, and her fiction often illuminates the way we distort our memories. Eat the Document is the story of a woman who goes underground in the 1970s after participating in violence with a radical group, and her son who uncovers her past in the 1990s, when the ideals of the leftist movement have been romanticized and perverted. —Maris Kreizman

The Harry Potter novels, by J.K. Rowling (1997–2007)
With her seven Harry Potter novels, J.K. Rowling has created a fictional world as fully imagined as Oz or Narnia or Middle Earth. Each volume grows progressively darker, and as more responsibilities are heaped on Harry’s shoulders, the Boy Who Lived becomes the leader of the Resistance. Grounding his story in the mundane Muggle world, with its ordinary frustrations and challenges, even as she conjures a wildly inventive magical realm, Rowling has crafted an epic that transcends its classical sources as effortlessly as it leapfrogs conventional genres. In doing so, she created a series of books that have captivated both children and adults — novels that hold a mirror to our own mortal world as it lurches into the uncertainties of the 21st century. —Michiko Kakutani

Sleeping It Off in Rapid City, by August Kleinzahler (April 1, 2008)
August Kleinzahler is such a good poet, such a master of English vernaculars and a variety of modernisms, with such a gift for observational detail, that I think he gets overlooked or underpraised, partly for his consistency. Sleeping It Off in Rapid City is one of the great collections of American poetry, from the opening title poem, which exudes the bleak vastness and kitsch of midwestern landscapes, to the various blues lyrics and seemingly offhand evocations of San Francisco weather, as classical as the Tang Dynasty greats they recall. —Nikil Saval

The White Tiger, by Aravind Adiga (April 22, 2008)
The White Tiger promised “you will know everything there is to know about how entrepreneurship is born, nurtured, and developed in this, the glorious 21st century of man,� launching a relentless attack on the myth of a “new� capitalism, and not just in India. Adiga’s comic monologue and many-voiced testament follows Balram Halwai, naïve servant and caged spirit, to the climactic “act of entrepreneurship�: braining his master with an empty bottle of Johnny Walker Black in Delhi, then stealing his bag of politicians’ bribes to conquer the tech world of Bangalore. Spiritually the equal of Wright’s Native Son and Balzac’s Père Goriot, this Booker Prize–winning debut was how a major writer announced himself — in fury. —Mark Greif

The Lazarus Project, by Aleksandar Hemon (May 1, 2008)
A fictional Bosnian writer (and Hemon doppelgänger of sorts) travels to Eastern Europe to retrace the footsteps of Lazarus Averbuch, a Jewish immigrant who survived a pogrom only to be gunned down in the home of Chicago’s police chief in 1908, while in alternating chapters Averbuch’s story unspools. Hemon transmogrifies the smallest details into strangely vivid prose: Gunsmoke moves slowly “like a school of fish� while a character hears “straw crepitating� in her pillow. Hemon’s verbal effects accumulate into a haunting portrait of immigrant life. Hemon is Nabokov’s heir, in a more perilous time for American newcomers. —Edward Hart

Home, by Marilynne Robinson (September 2, 2008)
Grace suffuses this novel, and not just its prose. Twenty-four years after her debut, the magnificent Housekeeping, Robinson returned to fiction with Gilead, winner of the 2005 Pulitzer Prize. But its sequel, Home, is the more sublime realization of her vasts gifts, the masterpiece of what’s so far a trilogy (Robinson’s Lila appeared in 2014). A retelling of the prodigal-son parable set in 1950s Iowa, Home is also something rare in American literature these days: a meditation on Christian transfiguration. It derives its power from family pain and the radical nature of forgiveness. —Christian Lorentzen

Fine Just the Way It Is, by Annie Proulx (September 9, 2008)
The short story is often offered the kiddie table when seated beside the novel. Annie Proulx the novelist is and will remain one of America’s greatest, but here she elevates story to a category that tips over the word fiction. Proulx’s Wyoming is a brutal, raw life and landscape, characters battered and isolated; and she is so unafraid of the dark that these stories become like religious parables not just of a region or nation, but of existence. Add to that her pitch-black humor — she got the chuckles writing these gigantic stories. —Dagoberto Gilb

Scenes From a Provincial Life: Boyhood, Youth, and Summertime, by J.M. Coetzee (1997–2009)
In this autobiographical trilogy, Coetzee forged a clinical way of writing about the self and raised the meta stakes. Are these memoirs or novels? (The last one kills off the author, among other departures from the facts.) Boyhood presents a detached account of growing up an English-speaking Afrikaner in apartheid South Africa, a sickly boy with imaginings of greatness and a mounting sense of shame about his cruel society. Youth moves to London, where Coetzee worked as a programmer for IBM, and plumbs the anguish of the aspiring, exiled poet. The form is broken in Summertime, which combines diary fragments and a fictional biographer’s interviews of the dead writer’s acquaintances. The self-portrait that emerges from these (very funny) books is pitiless and unforgettable. —Christian Lorentzen

Notes From No Man’s Land, by Eula Biss (February 3, 2009)
Biss’s insanely good collection has been instrumental in fostering a new generation of essayists. She writes poignantly on racism, gentrification, home, and identity, probing the proximity of white and black in America. She also forges new styles for the personal essay, braiding literary quotations, academic research, ironic anecdotes, and scenes from her own life to construct arguments that are complex and profound. The medium is the message here: The title essay connects Laura Ingalls Wilder, a gentrifying Chicago neighborhood, and swimming in Lake Michigan to understand the American fixation on — and fear of — borders and frontiers. —Alice Bolin

Spreadeagle, by Kevin Killian (March 1, 2010)
Killian is a poet as well as perhaps the most experienced society novelist of the gay demimonde since John Rechy, but Spreadeagle is like Rechy meets Robert Walser. It’s both comically droll and ardently, deeply noir. The plot feels kind of British fin de siècle — a menage involving a confused young art student and an older couple, one an activist and the other a gay pulp-novelist, all of whom collide with a pair of pornographers and drug dealers, the entirety taking place under the shadow of AIDS. It’s a quintessentially California novel as well as simply an occasion for Killian’s flawless poet’s ear to roll out for us pages of the most memorably dank, swift, and knowing gay dialogue I’ve ever read. —Eileen Myles

Super Sad True Love Story, by Gary Shteyngart (July 27, 2010)
Gary Shteyngart’s best novel (so far) virtually invented its own literary category — near-dystopian satire — and it has indeed proved shockingly accurate. It’s set in a future New York where the dollar is pegged to the Chinese yuan, inequality has transformed Central Park into a protest camp, and phone apps display your potential date’s credit score. But the real key to the novel is the hopeless relationship between its protagonists, Lenny Abramov and Eunice Park, whose relatively small age gap — Lenny is in his late 30s, Eunice her mid-20s — measures the difference between the last generation to grow up before the internet and the first generation to grow up saturated in it. —Jess Row

Seven Years, by Peter Stamm (March 22, 2011)
Whatever it is that flattens so much American MFA fiction is blissfully missing from this Swiss novelist’s haunting European realism. Seven Years employs strong and supple sentences evocative of Camus to tell the all-too-recognizable story of a successful man, Alex, who ought to be happily married to his beautiful and accomplished wife, Sonia, but is silently exploding. Through Stamm’s deft strokes of observation and insight, the bizarre affair Alex pursues with a woman who physically repulses him somehow seems not only plausible but revelatory — shedding light on the extent to which we can never really figure out another person or even, maybe, ourselves. —Thomas Chatterton Williams

The Sense of an Ending, by Julian Barnes (August 4, 2011)
This is an elegant, deceptively simple little novel, a quietly devastating, deftly plotted moral mystery that hinges on the unreliable juncture of memory, time, and history, with aging and remorse thrown in. Its title invites dual interpretations — the feeling that something has ended, and making sense of an ending. The story centers on a retired divorcé for whom an unexpected bequest leads to a reassessment of his memories and a painful recognition of how much he’d gotten wrong. “History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.� —Heller McAlpin

1Q84, by Haruki Murakami (October 25, 2011)
Murakami’s magnum opus (though probably not his very best novel — I would still vote for The Wind-up Bird Chronicle) brings together a haunting love story with the sinister manipulations of a personality cult not unlike Aum Shinrikyo. Like many writers of his generation, Murakami is preoccupied with the aftereffects of the 1960s, and though on the surface 1Q84 appears concerned with the mundane lives of disappointed and awkward lovers, the novel represents something like a Grand Unified Theory of Japanese life over four decades. —Jess Row

The Gentrification of the Mind, by Sarah Schulman (January 7, 2012)
Sarah Schulman is a first-class thinker who upholds our duty to preserve the marginal, the complicated history. This memoir maps out how the razing, via AIDS, of queer, diverse communities in New York and San Francisco paved the way for “urban transformations� that in fact led to suburbanized experiences and cramped intellectual lives. She protests sophistry and demonstrates the saneness of radical notions. When she points out that “very few children actually grow up to make the world a better place,� you may feel not only doubtful about reproducing, but also sorry you yourself were born. It’s unforgettable — which is the point. —Sarah Nicole Prickett

Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, by Ben Fountain (May 1, 2012)
No novel better captures the first decade of this century in a certain sector of America — pro-Bush, pro–Iraq War, pro–free-market capitalism, and steeped in evangelical Christianity and Fox News — than Fountain’s satire of heartland jingoism and the one-percenter cynicism that exploits it. It’s seen through the eyes of a young but increasingly disillusioned soldier being honored for heroism in a football stadium extravaganza. Both savagely funny and heartbreaking, Billy Lynn scrutinizes a facet of the American character that has since slid into an unsatirizable sump of excess, but like all great novelists, Fountain was able to locate the humanity in it all the same. —Laura Miller

Capital, by John Lanchester (June 11, 2012)
In a world where people write porny fan-fiction about the Property Brothers — no, seriously, they do — why aren’t there more great novels about real estate? Capital has a simple set-up, telling the interconnected stories of a single block in South London in 2008, where house prices are going up, up, up, and residents find themselves receiving mysterious postcards stating, “We Want What You Have.� Lanchester employs a bird’s-eye view that sweeps in for dazzling close-ups, then swoops out again, until you see not only the entirety of Pepys Road, but the city, the world — and the economy that’s crumbling under the weight of everyone’s aspirations. —Laura Lippman

The MaddAddam Trilogy (Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood, and MaddAddam), by Margaret Atwood (2003-2013)
“Speculations about what the world would be like after human control of it ended had been — long ago, briefly — a queasy form of popular entertainment.� Queasy, yes, but exhilarating too. The human beings and humanoids of Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy lose control of the natural world, then of themselves, in a bloody wonderland of mutant raccoons, endangered-species luxury couture, and ethereal beings with genitalia that turns blue at times of sexual arousal. But Atwood herself never loses control. The trilogy is the rare work of literature in which dread and joy exist in equal — and extreme — measure. —Nathaniel Rich

A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, by Anthony Marra (May 7, 2013)
This extraordinary debut novel set in war-torn Chechnya is a feat of empathetic imagination. It makes a compelling case for what literature — and so-called cultural appropriation — can do to transcend our personal experience and reduce the blind spots in our lives. Tolstoyan in its ambition, breadth, and deep humanity, Marra’s portrait of a nation devastated by war — and of a terrified man who risks his life to save a young girl — is harrowing and heartrending, but also brightened by humor and transcendent hopefulness. Taking its title from a medical dictionary’s definition of life, the novel is a constellation of six interwoven points of view — all vital and phenomenally moving. —Heller McAlpin

Taipei, by Tao Lin (June 4, 2013)
Lin came to fame as a blogger and poet with a notoriously blank style. His was the language of the digital native, and when he started writing novels, his detractors saw his attempts to turn the vernacular of the internet into literature as a sort of fraud. With Taipei, his fifth work of fiction, his style evolved into something undeniably sophisticated and often beautiful; he translated the consciousness of a life lived largely online into a new way of describing the world IRL, as mediated by an almost relentless (and relentlessly quantified) intake of pills and powders. One of the book’s central repeated images is a crucial image for our times: the narrator lying on his back and dropping his phone on his own face. —Christian Lorentzen

Men We Reaped, by Jesmyn Ward (September 17, 2013)
Yes, I rate Jesmyn Ward’s 2013 memoir above her two novels, Salvage the Bones and Sing, Unburied, Sing, that won National Book Awards. It’s that good, that important. Well into its third century, the United States has yet to reckon with the death rate of young African-American men, an epidemic hiding in plain sight. Ward, who lost five family members and friends in a four-year span, harnesses her incandescent prose to make a deeply personal story universal. Part of the book’s genius is its nonlinear structure; her peripatetic journey amplifies the doggedness of grief and rage. —Laura Lippman

Family Life, by Akhil Sharma (April 7, 2014)
Shortly after the Mishra family emigrates from Delhi to Queens, their older son dives into a swimming pool and becomes brain dead. The narrator is a young child when the accident occurs, and must navigate the embarrassments of being a recent immigrant as well as the grief that deforms his family. Sharma possesses a rare understanding of psychology and an unsentimental, bleakly comic sensibility. (“You’re sad?� the father says. “I want to hang myself every day.�) Every detail has been burnished and floats precipitously over depths of feeling, while the plot zooms ahead. The point is not to wring meaning out of suffering — Sharma never does — but to bear witness to it. —Christine Smallwood

How to Be Both, by Ali Smith (August 28, 2014)
Scottish writer Ali Smith’s furious yet-to-be-completed seasonal quartet may turn out to be her crowning achievement, but its predecessor, How to Be Both, stands out for its ingeniousness and heart. There’s more than meets the eye in this structurally innovative, two-part novel that encompasses a mother-daughter relationship truncated by unexpected death, a gender-bending Renaissance artist, and a moving exploration of time, mortality, and the consolations of unconventional love, friendship, and art. Smith’s literary double-take models how to be both complex and inviting, linguistically playful and dead serious, mournful and joyous, brainy and tender. —Heller McAlpin

A Brief History of Seven Killings, by Marlon James (October 2, 2014)
A Brief History is a sweltering chorus of voices, all constellating around the Jamaican musician Bob Marley and an attempt to assassinate him in 1976. James is a brilliant ventriloquist, whether speaking through an angry young woman, a feckless gangster, or a jaded American spy. Like Père Goriot and Our Mutual Friend, this is one of the great city novels, even if not all of it is set in Kingston. It makes the city rise in the reader’s imagination like a leviathan conjured out of talent, desperation, desire, grief, and an unstoppable life force. —Laura Miller

Preparation for the Next Life, by Atticus Lish (November 11, 2014)
America’s brutal wars and the inhumanity of its immigration policies come together in this novel, but its real achievement is a transformative vision of New York City. Seen through the eyes of an immigrant from Western China and a traumatized American veteran, the city, especially Queens, comes to seem less the glistening metropolis of the Bloomberg imaginary than a brick-and-mortar wasteland constantly encroached by dust and weeds but possessed of its own strange beauty. It’s a beauty these two still perceive in the face of poverty, hunger, violence, and fear of incarceration because theirs is also a love story. And that may be the most radical thing about Lish’s magnificent novel. —Christian Lorentzen

The Sympathizer, by Viet Thanh Nguyen (April 7, 2015)
Viet Thanh Nguyen’s recent first novel comes after a career as a leading scholar of Vietnamese and Southeast Asian culture. It is part thriller, part the “Empire Writing Back,� part revenge tragedy, part screed against Apocalypse Now, and the best novel about the Vietnamese diaspora. The form — a series of confessions forced on the narrator by his shadowy prison warden — turns his stories from self-revelation to more complex utterances, adding a level of second-guessing for readers. An exquisite examination of the psyche under duress. —Tom Lutz

The Light of the World, by Elizabeth Alexander (April 21, 2015)
After her husband, Ficre Ghebreyesus, dies unexpectedly just days after turning 50, poet and essayist Alexander writes, “Now, I know for sure the soul is an evanescent thing and the body is its temporary container, because I saw it. I saw the body with the soul in it, I saw the body with the soul leaving it, and I saw the body with the soul gone.� In this exquisite account of marriage and widowhood, written with the magical simplicity of a fairy tale, Alexander meditates on her husband’s life as a refugee, an immigrant, an artist, an African man, a father, a son, a husband. —Kate Tuttle

The Broken Earth trilogy, by N.K. Jemisin (2015-2017)
Jemisin, the first black writer to win sci-fi’s prestigious Hugo Award for best novel, made history again last month, becoming the first author ever to win the prize for each book in a trilogy. Her Broken Earth series, about a warring mother and daughter who each possess the power to incite, or quell, a world-destroying earthquake, is about institutional racism, climate change, and the terrible things the powerful will do to stay powerful. If that sounds a little too close to home, take heart: You’ve never been anywhere quite like the Stillness, a continent scattered with floating crystal obelisks and people who eat stone. Beautifully written, with epic magical battles and earthquakes, these books are literally groundbreaking. —Lila Shapiro

What Belongs to You, by Garth Greenwell (January 19, 2016)
One of the most exquisite prose performances of the past decade, Greenwell’s first novel partakes in autofiction and the novel of trauma, and his writing about sex eschews the transgressive in favor of an elegiac mode. An American teacher of high school English in Sofia, Bulgaria, narrates a passionate affair with a young man he met in a public toilet. A phone call informs him that, back in Kentucky, his estranged father is dying, prompting a dreamlike series of memories that return him to the awakening of his sexuality in the homophobic heartland. Greenwell is a poet, and his sinuous sentences seem to come from another time. Since it can’t be the past, it must be the future. —Christian Lorentzen

Collected Essays & Memoirs (Library of America edition), by Albert Murray (October 18, 2016)
Murray — renaissance man, blues philosopher, resolute non-victim — was almost criminally overlooked in the previous century. Perhaps this was because he was constitutionally incapable of suffering fools of any complexion and insisted on pointing out the most elemental truths: “The United States is in actuality not a nation of black people and white people. It is a nation of multicolored people,� Murray notes in his masterpiece, The Omni-Americans. We are in desperate need of such lucidity. If the arc of the intellectual universe also bends towards justice, then the Library of America’s canonization will resituate Murray alongside contemporaries James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison. —Thomas Chatterton Williams

The Needle’s Eye, by Fanny Howe (November 1, 2016)
Fanny Howe is a poet, a novelist, a memoirist, and one of America’s deepest, most whimsical and emotionally grounded writers. Here she takes the energy of a song like Nat King Cole’s “Nature Boy� (“There was a boy, a very strange enchanted boy …�) and guides us into a meditation on youth and its proclivity to wander and find itself. Moving on that tack, she animates the story of the Boston bombers, two Kyrgyz-Americans whose fraught road to self-knowledge took a turn that killed three people and seriously maimed more than a dozen. It’s a tiny masterpiece, this book, and a gloriously weird read. —Eileen Myles

Ghachar Ghochar, by Vivek Shanbhag (February 7, 2017)
Written with an economy of means — on just over 100 pages — that puts most nation-spanning epics to shame, Ghachar Ghochar conjures a South Indian family transformed by money in a narrative voice at once inimitable, funny, and filled with dread. The level of effortless glancing detail with which it draws minor characters — like a waiter in a Bangalore coffee house who acts as everyone’s therapist — is extraordinary. That it is one of the few novels translated (beautifully) from Kannada, a language spoken by millions and with its own literary tradition, to be published in the United States says a lot about our literary world’s myopia when it comes to the Indian novel. —Nikil Saval

The Hate U Give, by Angie Thomas (February 28, 2017)
No crossover novel has proven the vitality of YA fiction as an art form more than Angie Thomas’s debut about one teenage girl’s entry into the Black Lives Matter movement. Taking its name from a Tupac Shakur acronym about the ills of systemic racism, The Hate U Give, or, THUG, explores the consequences of police violence against young men of color with more nuance, charm, and levity than you might imagine possible. THUG doesn’t offer easy answers, nor does it portray any of its diverse cast in binary terms, and the fact that it’s been banned in areas of the U.S. just shows how much it has hit a nerve. —Maris Kreizman

All Grown Up, by Jami Attenberg (March 7, 2017)
One of the toughest bars to clear in fiction is the novel of connected stories, beautiful parts that add up to a gorgeous whole — and Jami Attenberg soared over it with her sixth book. The protagonist, Andrea, is a person who happens to be a woman who happens to be single who happens to live in Brooklyn. “Why is being single the only thing people think of when they think of me?� Andrea asks her therapist, who instructs her to list the other things she is. “In my head I think: I’m alone. I’m a drinker. I’m a former artist. I’m a shrieker in bed. I’m the captain of the sinking ship that is my flesh. To my therapist I say, ‘I’m a brunette.’� It’s the kind of novel I keep handy, like a pocket flask, taking little nips to get me through the day. —Laura Lippman

The Best We Could Do: An Illustrated Memoir, by Thi Bui (March 7, 2017)
“How much of ME is my own and how much is stamped into my blood and bone, predestined?� Posed at the end of Thi Bui’s graphic memoir, this is the persistent, yearning question underlying this quietly heartbreaking book. Thi Bui chronicles her family’s journey from Vietnam to America, as well as her own transformation from daughter to mother. Stunningly self-assured, this is epic, intimate history rendered in understated words and images. —Kate Tuttle

Tell Me How it Ends, by Valeria Luiselli (March 13, 2017)
This extraordinary little book is a powerful glimpse of how we extract stories in exchange for safety and belonging in America today. As a volunteer interpreter for migrant children fleeing poverty and violence, Luiselli describes 6- and 7-year-olds asked to perform and interpret their pain for an immigration system that sees a hard border—a border where, for most of Luiselli’s clients, the troubles have just begun. Cycling between her own life in the U.S. as a semi-documented American and mother, the lives of children she helps, and the questionnaire, Luiselli has woven an essential moral text for an age of migration. —John Freeman

Priestdaddy, by Patricia Lockwood (May 2, 2017)
This poet’s memoir is the story of Lockwood’s adult return home when her husband temporarily loses his sight and the couple can no longer pay the rent. They are hipsters exiled to the heartland. Lockwood’s father is a clergyman and a conservative, but the resemblance to his bohemian poet daughter is unmistakable. The family dog is named Whimsy. Priestdaddy is the funniest book yet written about millennial–boomer culture clash. It is also moving in its accounts of Lockwood’s loss of faith, her teenage suicide attempt, and the pain that came with giving up her first love — singing — and then rediscovering herself as a writer. —Christian Lorentzen

Red Clocks, by Leni Zumas (January 16, 2018)
This book follows a handful of female narrators in the Northwest in a future only slightly pushed from now (except for one, a polar explorer who is the biographical subject of one of the narrators) and, in prose that tingles with life and perversity and research and attitude and authenticity, brings them all to life. It’s political speculative fiction in an America where women have lost rights over their bodies and go to Canada to get abortions, crossing what’s come to be known as “the Pink Wall.� It’s brilliant stuff, and the woods surrounding the witchy herbalist character are both glittering and informed. To read this is to feel Leni Zumas knows everything. —Eileen Myles

The Largesse of the Sea Maiden, by Denis Johnson (January 16, 2018)
Once upon a time a hard-living man, Johnson didn’t survive to see the publication of his final collection of stories, but it’s the near equal and spiritual cousin of his immortal Jesus’ Son. These stories flash through unforgettable images (notably a woman leaning in to kiss an amputee veteran’s stump) of men and women wounded by their own wildness. The beauty in Johnson’s stories is the beauty of the broken wing. Elvis and 9/11, junk and jail, hangovers and halfway houses — Johnson was a searcher in a lowlife America that’s largely vanished from our literature. —Christian Lorentzen

Asymmetry, by Lisa Halliday (February 6, 2018)
On one hand, it would be unfair to consider Asymmetry only through the lens of Philip Roth. Lisa Halliday’s debut novel is bracing and brilliant entirely on its own terms, engrossing as a coming-of-age story and astute in exploring the project of fiction. On the other hand, not to consider it also through the lens of Philip Roth — who was once involved with Halliday and maps readily onto the novel’s Ezra Blazer — is to ignore a clue to what makes Asymmetry so exhilarating. Halliday considers the 20th-century canon from an intimate vantage: She sees not some abstract patriarchy but the patriarchs themselves, with their bypass scars and their tired pick-up lines. She demonstrates that power is never as simple as the familiar binaries of “privilege� might lead you to believe, at least not when it comes to art. —Molly Fischer