The Top Ten

Oliver Sacks, The Mind's EyeOLIVER SACKS, THE MIND’S EYE (2010)

Toward the end of his life, maybe suspecting or sensing that it was coming to a close, Dr. Oliver Sacks
tended to focus his efforts on sweeping intellectual projects like On the Move (a memoir), The River of
Consciousness (a hybrid intellectual history), and Hallucinations (a book-length meditation on, what else,
hallucinations). But in 2010, he gave us one more classic in the style that first made him famous, a form
he revolutionized and brought into the contemporary literary canon: the medical case study as essay. In
The Mind’s Eye, Sacks focuses on vision, expanding the notion to embrace not only how we see the
world, but also how we map that world onto our brains when our eyes are closed and we’re communing
with the deeper recesses of consciousness. Relaying histories of patients and public figures, as well as his
own history of ocular cancer (the condition that would eventually spread and contribute to his death),
Sacks uses vision as a lens through which to see all of what makes us human, what binds us together,
and what keeps us painfully apart. The essays that make up this collection are quintessential Sacks:
sensitive, searching, with an expertise that conveys scientific information and experimentation in terms
we can not only comprehend, but which also expand how we see life carrying on around us. The case
studies of “Stereo Sue,” of the concert pianist Lillian Kalir, and of Howard, the mystery novelist who can
no longer read, are highlights of the collection, but each essay is a kind of gem, mined and polished by
one of the great storytellers of our era. –Dwyer Murphy, CrimeReads Managing Editor

John Jeremiah Sullivan, PulpheadJOHN JEREMIAH SULLIVAN, PULPHEAD (2011)

The American essay was having a moment at the beginning of the decade, and Pulphead was smack in
the middle. Without any hard data, I can tell you that this collection of John Jeremiah Sullivan’s magazine
features—published primarily in GQ, but also in The Paris Review, and Harper’s—was the only full book
of essays most of my literary friends had read since Slouching Towards Bethlehem, and probably one of
the only full books of essays they had even heard of.
Well, we all picked a good one. Every essay in Pulphead is brilliant and entertaining, and illuminates
some small corner of the American experience—even if it’s just one house, with Sullivan and an aging
writer inside (“Mr. Lytle” is in fact a standout in a collection with no filler; fittingly, it won a National
Magazine Award and a Pushcart Prize). But what are they about? Oh, Axl Rose, Christian Rock festivals,
living around the filming of One Tree Hill, the Tea Party movement, Michael Jackson, Bunny Wailer, the
influence of animals, and by god, the Miz (of Real World/Road Rules Challenge fame).

But as Dan Kois has pointed out, what connects these essays, apart from their general tone and
excellence, is “their author’s essential curiosity about the world, his eye for the perfect detail, and his
great good humor in revealing both his subjects’ and his own foibles.” They are also extremely well
written, drawing much from fictional techniques and sentence craft, their literary pleasures so acute and
remarkable that James Wood began his review of the collection in The New Yorker with a quiz: “Are the
following sentences the beginnings of essays or of short stories?” (It was not a hard quiz, considering the
context.)

It’s hard not to feel, reading this collection, like someone reached into your brain, took out the half-
baked stuff you talk about with your friends, researched it, lived it, and represented it to you smarter
and better and more thoroughly than you ever could. So read it in awe if you must, but read it. –Emily
Temple, Senior Editor

Aleksandar Hemon, The Book of My LivesALEKSANDAR HEMON, THE BOOK OF MY LIVES (2013)

Such is the sentence-level virtuosity of Aleksandar Hemon—the Bosnian-American writer, essayist, and
critic—that throughout his career he has frequently been compared to the granddaddy of borrowed
language prose stylists: Vladimir Nabokov. While it is, of course, objectively remarkable that anyone
could write so beautifully in a language they learned in their twenties, what I admire most about
Hemon’s work is the way in which he infuses every essay and story and novel with both a deep humanity
and a controlled (but never subdued) fury. He can also be damn funny. Hemon grew up in Sarajevo and
left in 1992 to study in Chicago, where he almost immediately found himself stranded, forced to watch
from afar as his beloved home city was subjected to a relentless four-year bombardment, the longest
siege of a capital in the history of modern warfare. This extraordinary memoir-in-essays is many things:
it’s a love letter to both the family that raised him and the family he built in exile; it’s a rich, joyous, and
complex portrait of a place the 90s made synonymous with war and devastation; and it’s an elegy for the
wrenching loss of precious things. There’s an essay about coming of age in Sarajevo and another about
why he can’t bring himself to leave Chicago. There are stories about relationships forged and maintained
on the soccer pitch or over the chessboard, and stories about neighbors and mentors turned monstrous
by ethnic prejudice. As a chorus they sing with insight, wry humor, and unimaginable sorrow. I am not
exaggerating when I say that the collection’s devastating final piece, “The Aquarium”—which details his
infant daughter’s brain tumor and the agonizing months which led up to her death—remains the most
painful essay I have ever read. –Dan Sheehan, Book Marks Editor

Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding SweetgrassROBIN WALL KIMMERER, BRAIDING SWEETGRASS (2013)

Of every essay in my relentlessly earmarked copy of Braiding Sweetgrass, Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer’s
gorgeously rendered argument for why and how we should keep going, there’s one that especially hits
home: her account of professor-turned-forester Franz Dolp. When Dolp, several decades ago, revisited
the farm that he had once shared with his ex-wife, he found a scene of destruction: The farm’s new
owners had razed the land where he had tried to build a life. “I sat among the stumps and the swirling
red dust and I cried,” he wrote in his journal.

So many in my generation (and younger) feel this kind of helplessness–and considerable rage–at finding
ourselves newly adult in a world where those in power seem determined to abandon or destroy
everything that human bodies have always needed to survive: air, water, land. Asking any single book to
speak to this helplessness feels unfair, somehow; yet, Braiding Sweetgrass does, by weaving descriptions
of indigenous tradition with the environmental sciences in order to show what survival has looked like
over the course of many millennia. Kimmerer’s essays describe her personal experience as a Potawotami
woman, plant ecologist, and teacher alongside stories of the many ways that humans have lived in
relationship to other species. Whether describing Dolp’s work–he left the stumps for a life of forest
restoration on the Oregon coast–or the work of others in maple sugar harvesting, creating black ash
baskets, or planting a Three Sisters garden of corn, beans, and squash, she brings hope. “In ripe ears and
swelling fruit, they counsel us that all gifts are multiplied in relationship,” she writes of the Three Sisters,
which all sustain one another as they grow. “This is how the world keeps going.” –Corinne Segal, Senior
Editor
white girls hilton alsHILTON ALS, WHITE GIRLS (2013)

In a world where we are so often reduced to one essential self, Hilton Als’ breathtaking book of critical
essays, White Girls, which meditates on the ways he and other subjects read, project and absorb parts of
white femininity, is a radically liberating book. It’s one of the only works of critical thinking that doesn’t
ask the reader, its author or anyone he writes about to stoop before the doorframe of complete legibility
before entering. Something he also permitted the subjects and readers of his first book, the glorious
book-length essay, The Women, a series of riffs and psychological portraits of Dorothy Dean, Owen
Dodson, and the author’s own mother, among others. One of the shifts of that book, uncommon at the
time, was how it acknowledges the way we inhabit bodies made up of variously gendered influences. To
read White Girls now is to experience the utter freedom of this gift and to marvel at Als’ tremendous
versatility and intelligence.

He is easily the most diversely talented American critic alive. He can write into genres like pop music and
film where being part of an audience is a fantasy happening in the dark. He’s also wired enough to know
how the art world builds reputations on the nod of rich white patrons, a significant collision in a time
when Jean-Michel Basquiat is America’s most expensive modern artist. Als’ swerving and always moving
grip on performance means he’s especially good on describing the effect of art which is volatile and
unstable and built on the mingling of made-up concepts and the hard fact of their effect on behavior,
such as race. Writing on Flannery O’Connor for instance he alone puts a finger on her “uneasy and
unavoidable union between black and white, the sacred and the profane, the shit and the stars.” From
Eminem to Richard Pryor, André Leon Talley to Michael Jackson, Als enters the life and work of numerous
artists here who turn the fascinations of race and with whiteness into fury and song and describes the
complexity of their beauty like his life depended upon it. There are also brief memoirs here that will stop
your heart. This is an essential work to understanding American culture. –John Freeman, Executive
Editor
Eula Biss, On ImmunityEULA BISS, ON IMMUNITY (2014)

We move through the world as if we can protect ourselves from its myriad dangers, exercising what little
agency we have in an effort to keep at bay those fears that gather at the edges of any given life: of loss,
illness, disaster, death. It is these fears—amplified by the birth of her first child—that Eula Biss confronts
in her essential 2014 essay collection, On Immunity. As any great essayist does, Biss moves outward in
concentric circles from her own very private view of the world to reveal wider truths, discovering as she
does a culture consumed by anxiety at the pervasive toxicity of contemporary life. As Biss interrogates
this culture—of privilege, of whiteness—she interrogates herself, questioning the flimsy ways in which
we arm ourselves with science or superstition against the impurities of daily existence.

Five years on from its publication, it is dismaying that On Immunity feels as urgent (and necessary) a
defense of basic science as ever. Vaccination, we learn, is derived from vacca—for cow—after the 17th-
century discovery that a small application of cowpox was often enough to inoculate against the scourge
of smallpox, an etymological digression that belies modern conspiratorial fears of Big Pharma and its
vaccination agenda. But Biss never scolds or belittles the fears of others, and in her generosity and
openness pulls off a neat (and important) trick: insofar as we are of the very world we fear, she seems to
be suggesting, we ourselves are impure, have always been so, permeable, vulnerable, yet so much
stronger than we think. –Jonny Diamond, Editor-in-Chief

Rebecca Solnit, The Mother of All QuestionsREBECCA SOLNIT, THE MOTHER OF ALL QUESTIONS (2016)

When Rebecca Solnit’s essay, “Men Explain Things to Me,” was published in 2008, it quickly became a
cultural phenomenon unlike almost any other in recent memory, assigning language to a behavior that
almost every woman has witnessed—mansplaining—and, in the course of identifying that behavior,
spurring a movement, online and offline, to share the ways in which patriarchal arrogance has
intersected all our lives. (It would also come to be the titular essay in her collection published in 2014.)
The Mother of All Questions follows up on that work and takes it further in order to examine the nature
of self-expression—who is afforded it and denied it, what institutions have been put in place to limit it,
and what happens when it is employed by women. Solnit has a singular gift for describing and decoding
the misogynistic dynamics that govern the world so universally that they can seem invisible and the
gendered violence that is so common as to seem unremarkable; this naming is powerful, and it opens
space for sharing the stories that shape our lives.

The Mother of All Questions, comprised of essays written between 2014 and 2016, in many ways armed
us with some of the tools necessary to survive the gaslighting of the Trump years, in which many of us—
and especially women—have continued to hear from those in power that the things we see and hear do
not exist and never existed. Solnit also acknowledges that labels like “woman,” and other gendered
labels, are identities that are fluid in reality; in reviewing the book for The New Yorker, Moira Donegan
suggested that, “One useful working definition of a woman might be ‘someone who experiences
misogyny.'” Whichever words we use, Solnit writes in the introduction to the book that “when words
break through unspeakability, what was tolerated by a society sometimes becomes intolerable.” This
storytelling work has always been vital; it continues to be vital, and in this book, it is brilliantly done. –
Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Valeria Luiselli, Tell Me How It EndsVALERIA LUISELLI, TELL ME HOW IT ENDS (2017)

The newly minted MacArthur fellow Valeria Luiselli’s four-part (but really six-part) essay Tell Me How It
Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions was inspired by her time spent volunteering at the federal immigration
court in New York City, working as an interpreter for undocumented, unaccompanied migrant children
who crossed the U.S.-Mexico border. Written concurrently with her novel Lost Children Archive (a
fictional exploration of the same topic), Luiselli’s essay offers a fascinating conceit, the fashioning of an
argument from the questions on the government intake form given to these children to process their
arrivals. (Aside from the fact that this essay is a heartbreaking masterpiece, this is such a good conceit—
transforming a cold, reproducible administrative document into highly personal literature.) Luiselli
interweaves a grounded discussion of the questionnaire with a narrative of the road trip Luiselli takes
with her husband and family, across America, while they (both Mexican citizens) wait for their own
Green Card applications to be processed. It is on this trip when Luiselli reflects on the thousands of
migrant children mysteriously traveling across the border by themselves. But the real point of the essay
is to actually delve into the real stories of some of these children, which are agonizing, as well as to
gravely, clearly expose what literally happens, procedural, when they do arrive—from forms to courts, as
they’re swallowed by a bureaucratic vortex. Amid all of this, Luiselli also takes on more, exploring the
larger contextual relationship between the United States of America and Mexico (as well as other
countries in Central America, more broadly) as it has evolved to our current, adverse moment. Tell Me
How It Ends is so small, but it is so passionate and vigorous: it desperately accomplishes in its less-than-
100-pages-of-prose what centuries and miles and endless records of federal bureaucracy have never
been able, and have never cared, to do: reverse the dehumanization of Latin American immigrants that
occurs once they set foot in this country. –Olivia Rutigliano, CrimeReads Editorial Fellow

Zadie Smith, Feel FreeZADIE SMITH, FEEL FREE (2018)

In the essay “Meet Justin Bieber!” in Feel Free, Zadie Smith writes that her interest in Justin Bieber is not
an interest in the interiority of the singer himself, but in “the idea of the love object”. This essay—in
which Smith imagines a meeting between Bieber and the late philosopher Martin Buber (“Bieber and
Buber are alternative spellings of the same German surname,” she explains in one of many winning
footnotes. “Who am I to ignore these hints from the universe?”). Smith allows that this premise is a bit
premise-y: “I know, I know.” Still, the resulting essay is a very funny, very smart, and un-tricky exploration
of individuality and true “meeting,” with a dash of late capitalism thrown in for good measure. The
melding of high and low culture is the bread and butter of pretty much every prestige publication on the
internet these days (and certainly of the Twitter feeds of all “public intellectuals”), but the essays in
Smith’s collection don’t feel familiar—perhaps because hers is, as we’ve long known, an uncommon skill.
Though I believe Smith could probably write compellingly about anything, she chooses her subjects
wisely. She writes with as much electricity about Brexit as the aforementioned Beliebers—and each
essay is utterly engrossing. “She contains multitudes, but her point is we all do,” writes Hermione Hoby
in her review of the collection in The New Republic. “At the same time, we are, in our endless difference,
nobody but ourselves.” –Jessie Gaynor, Social Media Editor

Tressie McMillan Cottom, ThickTRESSIE MCMILLAN COTTOM, THICK: AND OTHER ESSAYS (2019)

Tressie McMillan Cottom is an academic who has transcended the ivory tower to become the sort of
public intellectual who can easily appear on radio or television talk shows to discuss race, gender, and
capitalism. Her collection of essays reflects this duality, blending scholarly work with memoir to create a
collection on the black female experience in postmodern America that’s “intersectional analysis with a
side of pop culture.” The essays range from an analysis of sexual violence, to populist politics, to social
media, but in centering her own experiences throughout, the collection becomes something unlike other
pieces of criticism of contemporary culture. In explaining the title, she reflects on what an editor had
said about her work: “I was too readable to be academic, too deep to be popular, too country black to be
literary, and too naïve to show the rigor of my thinking in the complexity of my prose. I had wanted to
create something meaningful that sounded not only like me, but like all of me. It was too thick.” One of
the most powerful essays in the book is “Dying to be Competent” which begins with her unpacking the
idiocy of LinkedIn (and the myth of meritocracy) and ends with a description of her miscarriage, the
mishandling of black woman’s pain, and a condemnation of healthcare bureaucracy. A finalist for the
2019 National Book Award for Nonfiction, Thick confirms McMillan Cottom as one of our most fearless
public intellectuals and one of the most vital. –Emily Firetog, Deputy Editor

***

Dissenting Opinions

The following books were just barely nudged out of the top ten, but we (or at least one of us) couldn’t let
them pass without comment.

Elif Batuman, The PossessedELIF BATUMAN, THE POSSESSED (2010)

In The Possessed Elif Batuman indulges her love of Russian literature and the result is hilarious and
remarkable. Each essay of the collection chronicles some adventure or other that she had while in
graduate school for Comparative Literature and each is more unpredictable than the next. There’s the
time a “well-known 20th-centuryist” gave a graduate student the finger; and the time when Batuman
ended up living in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, for a summer; and the time that she convinced herself Tolstoy
was murdered and spent the length of the Tolstoy Conference in Yasnaya Polyana considering clues and
motives. Rich in historic detail about Russian authors and literature and thoughtfully constructed, each
essay is an amalgam of critical analysis, cultural criticism, and serious contemplation of big ideas like that
of identity, intellectual legacy, and authorship. With wit and a serpentine-like shape to her narratives,
Batuman adopts a form reminiscent of a Socratic discourse, setting up questions at the beginning of her
essays and then following digressions that more or less entreat the reader to synthesize the answer for
herself. The digressions are always amusing and arguably the backbone of the collection, relaying absurd
anecdotes with foreign scholars or awkward, surreal encounters with Eastern European strangers.
Central also to the collection are Batuman’s intellectual asides where she entertains a theory—like the
“problem of the person”: the inability to ever wholly capture one’s character—that ultimately layer the
book’s themes. “You are certainly my most entertaining student,” a professor said to Batuman. But she is
also curious and enthusiastic and reflective and so knowledgeable that she might even convince you (she
has me!) that you too love Russian literature as much as she does. –Eleni Theodoropoulos, Editorial
Fellow

Roxane Gay, Bad FeministROXANE GAY, BAD FEMINIST (2014)

Roxane Gay’s now-classic essay collection is a book that will make you laugh, think, cry, and then wonder,
how can cultural criticism be this fun? My favorite essays in the book include Gay’s musings on
competitive Scrabble, her stranded-in-academia dispatches, and her joyous film and television criticism,
but given the breadth of topics Roxane Gay can discuss in an entertaining manner, there’s something for
everyone in this one. This book is accessible because feminism itself should be accessible – Roxane Gay is
as likely to draw inspiration from YA novels, or middle-brow shows about friendship, as she is to
introduce concepts from the academic world, and if there’s anyone I trust to bridge the gap between
high culture, low culture, and pop culture, it’s the Goddess of Twitter. I used to host a book club
dedicated to radical reads, and this was one of the first picks for the club; a week after the book club
met, I spied a few of the attendees meeting in the café of the bookstore, and found out that they had
bonded so much over discussing Bad Feminist that they couldn’t wait for the next meeting of the book
club to keep discussing politics and intersectionality, and that, in a nutshell, is the power of Roxane. –
Molly Odintz, CrimeReads Associate Editor
Rivka Galchen, Little LaborsRIVKA GALCHEN, LITTLE LABORS (2016)

Generally, I find stories about the trials and tribulations of child-having to be of limited appeal—useful,
maybe, insofar as they offer validation that other people have also endured the bizarre realities of living
with a tiny human, but otherwise liable to drift into the musings of parents thrilled at the simple fact of
their own fecundity, as if they were the first ones to figure the process out (or not). But Little Labors is
not simply an essay collection about motherhood, perhaps because Galchen initially “didn’t want to
write about” her new baby—mostly, she writes, “because I had never been interested in babies, or
mothers; in fact, those subjects had seemed perfectly not interesting to me.” Like many new mothers,
though, Galchen soon discovered her baby—which she refers to sometimes as “the puma”—to be a
preoccupying thought, demanding to be written about. Galchen’s interest isn’t just in her own progeny,
but in babies in literature (“Literature has more dogs than babies, and also more abortions”), The Pillow
Book, the eleventh-century collection of musings by Sei Shōnagon, and writers who are mothers. There
are sections that made me laugh out loud, like when Galchen continually finds herself in an elevator with
a neighbor who never fails to remark on the puma’s size. There are also deeper, darker musings, like the
realization that the baby means “that it’s not permissible to die. There are days when this does not feel
good.” It is a slim collection that I happened to read at the perfect time, and it remains one of my
favorites of the decade. –Emily Firetog, Deputy Editor

Charlie Fox, This Young MonsterCHARLIE FOX, THIS YOUNG MONSTER (2017)

On social media as in his writing, British art critic Charlie Fox rejects lucidity for allusion and doesn’t
quite answer the Twitter textbox’s persistent question: “What’s happening?” These days, it’s hard to tell.
This Young Monster (2017), Fox’s first book,was published a few months after Donald Trump’s election,
and at one point Fox takes a swipe at a man he judges “direct from a nightmare and just a repulsive
fucking goon.” Fox doesn’t linger on politics, though, since most of the monsters he looks at “embody
otherness and make it into art, ripping any conventional idea of beauty to shreds and replacing it with
something weird and troubling of their own invention.”

If clichés are loathed because they conform to what philosopher Georges Bataille called “the common
measure,” then monsters are rebellious non-sequiturs, comedic or horrific derailments from a classical
ideal. Perverts in the most literal sense, monsters have gone astray from some “proper” course. The
book’s nine chapters, which are about a specific monster or type of monster, are full of callbacks to
familiar and lesser-known media. Fox cites visual art, film, songs, and books with the screwy buoyancy of
a savant. Take one of his essays, “Spook House,” framed as a stage play with two principal characters,
Klaus (“an intoxicated young skinhead vampire”) and Hermione (“a teen sorceress with green skin and
jet-black hair” who looks more like The Wicked Witch than her namesake). The chorus is a troupe of
trick-or-treaters. Using the filmmaker Cameron Jamie as a starting point, the rest is free association on
gothic decadence and Detroit and L.A. as cities of the dead. All the while, Klaus quotes from Artforum,
Dazed & Confused, and Time Out.It’s a technical feat that makes fictionalized dialogue a conveyor belt
for cultural criticism.

In Fox’s imagination, David Bowie and the Hydra coexist alongside Peter Pan, Dennis Hopper, and the
maenads. Fox’s book reaches for the monster’s mask, not really to peel it off but to feel and smell the
rubber schnoz, to know how it’s made before making sure it’s still snugly set. With a stylistic blend of
arthouse suavity and B-movie chic, This Young Monster considers how monsters in culture are made.
Aren’t the scariest things made in post-production? Isn’t the creature just duplicity, like a looping choir
or a dubbed scream? –Aaron Robertson, Assistant Editor

Elena Passarello, Animals Strike Curious PosesELENA PASSARELLO, ANIMALS STRIKE CURIOUS POSES
(2017)

Elena Passarello’s collection of essays Animals Strike Curious Poses picks out infamous animals and
grants them the voice, narrative, and history they deserve. Not only is a collection like this relevant
during the sixth extinction but it is an ambitious historical and anthropological undertaking, which
Passarello has tackled with thorough research and a playful tone that rather than compromise her
subject, complicates and humanizes it. Passarello’s intention is to investigate the role of animals across
the span of human civilization and in doing so, to construct a timeline of humanity as told through
people’s interactions with said animals. “Of all the images that make our world, animal images are
particularly buried inside us,” Passarello writes in her first essay, to introduce us to the object of the book
and also to the oldest of her chosen characters: Yuka, a 39,000-year-old mummified woolly mammoth
discovered in the Siberian permafrost in 2010. It was an occasion so remarkable and so unfathomable
given the span of human civilization that Passarello says of Yuka: “Since language is epically younger than
both thought and experience, ‘woolly mammoth’ means, to a human brain, something more like time.”
The essay ends with a character placing a hand on a cave drawing of a woolly mammoth, accompanied
by a phrase which encapsulates the author’s vision for the book: “And he becomes the mammoth so he
can envision the mammoth.” In Passarello’s hands the imagined boundaries between the animal,
natural, and human world disintegrate and what emerges is a cohesive if baffling integrated history of
life. With the accuracy and tenacity of a journalist and the spirit of a storyteller, Elena Passarello has
assembled a modern bestiary worthy of contemplation and awe. –Eleni Theodoropoulos, Editorial Fellow

Esmé Weijun Wang, The Collected SchizophreniasESMÉ WEIJUN WANG, THE COLLECTED
SCHIZOPHRENIAS (2019)

Esmé Weijun Wang’s collection of essays is a kaleidoscopic look at mental health and the lives affected
by the schizophrenias. Each essay takes on a different aspect of the topic, but you’ll want to read them
together for a holistic perspective. Esmé Weijun Wang generously begins The Collected Schizophrenias
by acknowledging the stereotype, “Schizophrenia terrifies. It is the archetypal disorder of lunacy.” From
there, she walks us through the technical language, breaks down the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual
(DSM-5)’s clinical definition. And then she gets very personal, telling us about how she came to her own
diagnosis and the way it’s touched her daily life (her relationships, her ideas about motherhood). Esmé
Weijun Wang is uniquely situated to write about this topic. As a former lab researcher at Stanford, she
turns a precise, analytical eye to her experience while simultaneously unfolding everything with great
patience for her reader. Throughout, she brilliantly dissects the language around mental health. (On
saying “a person living with bipolar disorder” instead of using “bipolar” as the sole subject: “…we are not
our diseases. We are instead individuals with disorders and malfunctions. Our conditions lie over us like
smallpox blankets; we are one thing and the illness is another.”) She pinpoints the ways she arms herself
against anticipated reactions to the schizophrenias: high fashion, having attended an Ivy League
institution. In a particularly piercing essay, she traces mental illness back through her family tree. She
also places her story within more mainstream cultural contexts, calling on groundbreaking exposés about
the dangerous of institutionalization and depictions of mental illness in television and film (like the
infamous Slender Man case, in which two young girls stab their best friend because an invented Internet
figure told them to). At once intimate and far-reaching, The Collected Schizophrenias is an informative
and important (and let’s not forget artful) work. I’ve never read a collection quite so beautifully-written
and laid-bare as this. –Katie Yee, Book Marks Assistant Editor
Ross Gay, The Book of DelightsROSS GAY, THE BOOK OF DELIGHTS (2019)

When Ross Gay began writing what would become The Book of Delights, he envisioned it as a project of
daily essays, each focused on a moment or point of delight in his day. This plan quickly disintegrated; on
day four, he skipped his self-imposed assignment and decided to “in honor and love, delight in blowing it
off.” (Clearly, “blowing it off” is a relative term here, as he still produced the book.) Ross Gay is a
generous teacher of how to live, and this moment of reveling in self-compassion is one lesson among
many in The Book of Delights, which wanders from moments of connection with strangers to a shade of
“red I don’t think I actually have words for,” a text from a friend reading “I love you breadfruit,” and “the
sun like a guiding hand on my back, saying everything is possible. Everything.”

Gay does not linger on any one subject for long, creating the sense that delight is a product not of
extenuating circumstances, but of our attention; his attunement to the possibilities of a single day, and
awareness of all the small moments that produce delight, are a model for life amid the warring factions
of the attention economy. These small moments range from the physical–hugging a stranger,
transplanting fig cuttings–to the spiritual and philosophical, giving the impression of sitting beside Gay in
his garden as he thinks out loud in real time. It’s a privilege to listen. –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

A selection of other books that we seriously considered for both lists—just to be extra about it (and
because decisions are hard).

Terry Castle, The Professor and Other Writings (2010) · Joyce Carol Oates, In Rough Country (2010) ·
Geoff Dyer, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition (2011) · Christopher Hitchens, Arguably (2011) ·
Roberto Bolaño, tr. Natasha Wimmer, Between Parentheses (2011) · Dubravka Ugresic, tr. David Williams,
Karaoke Culture (2011) · Tom Bissell, Magic Hours (2012) · Kevin Young, The Grey Album (2012) · William
H. Gass, Life Sentences: Literary Judgments and Accounts (2012) · Mary Ruefle, Madness, Rack, and
Honey (2012) · Herta Müller, tr. Geoffrey Mulligan, Cristina and Her Double (2013) · Leslie Jamison, The
Empathy Exams (2014) · Meghan Daum, The Unspeakable (2014) · Daphne Merkin, The Fame Lunches
(2014) · Charles D’Ambrosio, Loitering (2015) · Wendy Walters, Multiply/Divide (2015) · Colm Tóibín, On
Elizabeth Bishop (2015) · Renee Gladman, Calamities (2016) · Jesmyn Ward, ed. The Fire This Time (2016)
· Lindy West, Shrill (2016) · Mary Oliver, Upstream (2016) · Emily Witt, Future Sex (2016) · Olivia Laing,
The Lonely City (2016) · Mark Greif, Against Everything (2016) · Durga Chew-Bose, Too Much and Not the
Mood (2017) · Sarah Gerard, Sunshine State (2017) · Jim Harrison, A Really Big Lunch (2017) · J.M.
Coetzee, Late Essays: 2006-2017 (2017) · Melissa Febos, Abandon Me (2017) · Louise Glück, American
Originality (2017) · Joan Didion, South and West (2017) · Tom McCarthy, Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish
(2017) · Hanif Abdurraqib, They Can’t Kill Us Until they Kill Us (2017) · Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight
Years in Power (2017) · Samantha Irby, We Are Never Meeting in Real Life (2017) · Alexander Chee, How
to Write an Autobiographical Novel (2018) · Alice Bolin, Dead Girls (2018) · Marilynne Robinson, What
Are We Doing Here? (2018) · Lorrie Moore, See What Can Be Done (2018) · Maggie O’Farrell, I Am I Am I
Am (2018) · Ijeoma Oluo, So You Want to Talk About Race (2018) · Rachel Cusk, Coventry (2019) · Jia
Tolentino, Trick Mirror (2019) · Emily Bernard, Black is the Body (2019) · Toni Morrison, The Source of
Self-Regard (2019) · Margaret Renkl, Late Migrations (2019) · Rachel Munroe, Savage Appetites (2019) ·
Robert A. Caro, Working (2019) · Arundhati Roy, My Seditious Heart (2019).

The 10 Best Short Story Collections of the Decade

And Then Some

By Emily Temple

December 23, 2019

Friends, it’s true: the end of the decade approaches. It’s been a difficult, anxiety-provoking, morally
compromised decade, but at least it’s been populated by some damn fine literature. We’ll take our silver
linings where we can.

So, as is our hallowed duty as a literary and culture website—though with full awareness of the
potentially fruitless and endlessly contestable nature of the task—in the coming weeks, we’ll be taking a
look at the best and most important (these being not always the same) books of the decade that was.
We will do this, of course, by means of a variety of lists. We began with the best debut novels of the
decade, and now we’re back with the best short story collections of the decade—or to be precise, the
best collections published in English between 2010 and 2019.

The following books were chosen after much debate (and several rounds of voting) by the Literary Hub
staff. Tears were spilled, feelings were hurt, books were re-read. And as you’ll shortly see, we had a hard
time choosing just ten—so we’ve also included a list of dissenting opinions, and an even longer list of
also-rans. Feel free to add any favorites we’ve missed in the comments below.

***
The Top Ten

Claire Vaye Watkins, Battleborn

2012

Claire Vaye Watkins’ searing, Nevada-set debut collection—which includes a sixty-page novella that takes
place during the 1848 Gold Rush and a dazzling, devastating opening tale in which Watkins audaciously
blends fiction, local history, and myth with the story of father’s involvement in the Manson Family during
the late ’60s—is as starkly beautiful, as lonesome and sinister and death-haunted, as the desert frontier
through which its stories roam. There’s an enviable fearlessness to Watkins’ writing, a refusal to look
away from the despair that lies within the hearts of her lost and weary characters, to give them tidy
trajectories or tidy resolutions. Her landscapes are exquisitely drawn, full of lush sensory detailing and
characters stalked by the sorrows and violence of their pasts, the parched desperation of their presents.
In one particularly aching story, a man finds a bundle of letters amid the strewn wreckage of a car crash,
and proceeds to carry on a therapeutic, and increasingly revealing, one-sided correspondence with their
owner, onto whom he superimposes the identity of a desperate neighbor he killed decades previous. In
his reverie he remembers how nature marked the season it happened: “Late that Spring, a swarm of
grasshoppers moved though Beatty on their way to the alfalfa fields down south. They were thick and
fierce, rolling like a thunderstorm in your head.” It’s remarkable to come across a debut collection in
which the voice, the vision, is so fully formed, so assured, but that’s what Watkins has achieved with this
exceptional work. –Dan Sheehan, Book Marks Editor

ALICE MUNRO, DEAR LIFE

2012

Well, this one’s not really fair. I mean, any Alice Munro collection published in any given period of time
has to automatically be on the list of best collections of said period. (I guess what I really mean is that it’s
not really fair to other writers that Munro is such a goddamn genius.) Most of the stories in Dear Life
were previously published in The New Yorker, Harper’s, and Granta; they all display Munro’s uncanny
ability to take a lifetime—or even generations of a single family—and shrink it into a thirty-page text—
not by spinning out event after event, but by delivering a character so textured, and a series of moments
so precise, that we can’t help but feel we know all about them. These stories and characters are not
flashy, there’s little in the way of high concept; it’s simply that Munro knows people, and represents
them so accurately, so wisely, and so humanely, that you can’t help but be moved. This is despite the fact
that, as Michiko Kakutani pointed out, with age, Munro has gotten a little bit sharper in her portrayals of
the common man. “Though Ms. Munro has not become judgmental exactly, she seems more focused on
the selfishness, irrationality and carelessness people are capable of.” The collection also includes a few
semi-autobiographical sketches—“autobiographical in feeling, though not, sometimes, entirely so in
fact”—we are told. She writes: “I believe they are the first and last—and the closest—things I have to say
about my own life.” They too are wonderful.

Munro was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature the year after the publication of Dear Life, in 2013; the
Swedish Academy called her a “master of the contemporary short story.” No shit. –Emily Temple, Senior
Editor

GEORGE SAUNDERS, TENTH OF DECEMBER

2013

It can be hard to tell what historical era you’re actually living through, as its happening. Is this the post-
9/11 era or the Trump era? Or maybe we’re really in what will one day (I hope) be labeled the
Misinformation Era. Honestly, though, this is probably the “we had a chance to save the planet but did
nothing” era, in which case, there probably won’t be historians around in 200 years to call it anything…
How ever you choose to see the last decade of life on Planet America, it is likely some version of it
appears in George Saunders contemporary classic, Tenth of December.

This collection is as remarkable for its range of emotional registers as it is for its formal variety. From the
aching, class-conscious pathos of “Puppy,” in which two families intersect around the possible purchase
of a dog, to the grim, neo-futurist allegory of “Escape From Spiderhead,” in which clinical drug trials go
way too far, Saunders sets his characters down in a series of bespoke narrative dioramas, a wry and
loving god forever suspicious of the disappointments his creations engender, yet unable to resist setting
little boobytraps to see how they’ll react. With a tenderness and generosity that catalyzes satirical clarity
rather than the cloudiness of sentimentality, Saunders lets his characters puzzle their way through the
confines of their own fictional lives, as wounded and joyous and magnificently broken as any among us,
the living.
It is a dark timeline, in which reality has outpaced satire, but at least it is a world we have seen before, in
the short stories of George Saunders. –Jonny Diamond, Editor in Chief

Clarice Lispector, tr. Katrina Dodson, The Complete StoriesCLARICE LISPECTOR, TR. KATRINA DODSON,
ED. BENJAMIN MOSER, THE COMPLETE STORIES

2015

It’s complicated to include a “complete stories” collection in our list for the best of the decade, not least
because Clarice Lispector has been considered Brazil’s greatest writer more or less since 1943 when her
revolutionary debut novel, Near to the Wild Heart, was first published (she was 23). But in 2012,
publisher New Directions began releasing new translations, from four different translators, of Lispector’s
novels, a concerted effort to bring her remarkable work to the attention of an English-speaking
readership. In 2015, the novels were followed by these “Complete Stories”—86 in all, originally
published between 1952 and 1979. Translated by Katrina Dodson, the collection received dazzling
reviews, establishing Lispector firmly in America’s consciousness as one of the preeminent writers of the
last century.

A Clarice Lispector story is not easy to describe; they are feminist and absurdist, charting familial drama,
love affairs, and existential surrealism, wheeling through the preoccupations and modes of twentieth
century literary experimentation with a disorientating facility—and disorientation is the point.
“Coherence is mutilation,” a character reflects at one point, “I want disorder”—an urge that Lispector
understands and brings to life with more power than almost any writer I can think of, and perhaps with
more relevance and urgency in these times than in any other in the four decades since her death. –Emily
Firetog, Deputy Editor
LUCIA BERLIN, ED. STEPHEN EMERSON, A MANUAL FOR CLEANING WOMEN

2015

Is it all that remarkable that a short story collection by a writer who died in 2004 should, in fact, be one
of the best collections of the decade that followed? Aside from the earthy brilliance of Berlin’s A Manual
for Cleaning Women itself, the fact of its phenomenon—at least among those who consume multiple
story collections a year—speaks to a great gap in our literary culture. It won’t ever be possible to fully
account for the stories and novels that went unheralded and untaught in a literary culture geared toward
canonizing the anxieties and insights of well-to-do white guys, but at least in Berlin’s posthumous
collection—and its frank rendering of women’s lives—we have a small correction to the record.

When Berlin writes of last-chance bus depots or cheap borderland hotels or third-rate nursing homes
she does so minus the literary tourist’s appropriative bravado, that triumphalist wild boy tick that seems
to define so much of the fiction of her male contemporaries. For Berlin, these are not places we pass
through, to mine for epiphany or authenticity, but rather the locations in which life happens: as one
reviewer put it, the stories in this collection are “all beginnings and middles with no ends,” and one only
wishes Berlin had lived long enough to see the beginning of her own renaissance. –Jonny Diamond,
Editor in Chief

Colin Barrett, Young SkinsCOLIN BARRETT, YOUNG SKINS

2015

I first read Colin Barrett’s stories when I worked at The Stinging Fly magazine and press in Dublin. The
editor had been working with Barrett for a couple of months on a few stories, and we were publishing
one in an upcoming issue. I distinctly remember finishing the copy edit and turning to the editor and
simply saying, “Holy shit.” When we put out Colin’s collection Young Skins in 2013, it wasn’t long before
Grove Atlantic picked it up in the US, and it was published here in 2015. In the vein of William Faulkner’s
Yoknapatawpha County, its seven stories all take place within the limits of the fictional town of
Glanbeigh on the west coast of Ireland. Barrett’s characters live hard lives in the aftermath of Ireland’s
Celtic Tiger years, an economic boom time that happened to other people but the effects of whose
abrupt end are felt everywhere. There is drink and there are drugs and moments of shocking violence.
There is the steady inescapability of failure and loss, and every so often there are moments of soaringly
lyrical writing. Barrett’s mastery of the short story form won him the Guardian First Book Award, the
Frank O’Connor International Short Story Prize, and a National Book Foundation 5 under 35 honor. It’s a
collection that’s striking for its audacity to be a debut—completely assured of voice, of character, and of
a setting that is utterly realized. Thus, we’re calling it one of the best short story collections of the
decade. –Emily Firetog, Deputy Editor

Ken Liu, The Paper MenagerieKEN LIU, THE PAPER MENAGERIE

2016

“Whatever has been lost in translation in the long journey of my thoughts through the maze of
civilization to your mind, I think you do understand me, and you think you do understand me,” Ken Liu
writes in the preface to The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories, a collection in which metaphors are
fully unwound into tangible corollaries. The Paper Menagerie gathers some of Liu’s most celebrated
stories, summaries of which do little to convey the scope of his imagination. Take, for example, “State
Change,” a bleak office rom-com set in a world where people’s souls are physical objects—an ice cube, a
cigarette pack, a beech tree branch—that must be protected from mundane things like hot weather and
nicotine addiction. “Good Hunting” begins as a folktale about a demon-hunting father-son duo in a small
Chinese village and ends with a critique of British colonialism and modernity in Hong Kong, as well as a
surprising reversal of misogynistic narrative tropes. The titular story, which won Nebula, Hugo, and
World Fantasy Awards, shows Liu in top form. The protagonist, born of a Chinese immigrant mother and
white father, grows up loving the origami animals that his mother brings to life with her breath, only to
spurn his Chinese heritage as he grows older. Though not all the stories here are quite as moving as this
one, The Paper Menagerie cemented Liu as one of the decade’s most inventive (and popular) short story
writers, adept at infusing his shapeshifting work with a touch of Charlie Kaufman-esque hyperreality and
Eastern Asian folklore. –Aaron Robertson, Assistant Editor
Lesley Nneka Arimah, What It Means When a Man Falls from the 2017

Lesley Nneka Arimah calls herself a pessimist. Thus unfolds her collection of short stories, What It Means
When A Man Falls From The Sky, most of which are set in Nigeria and utilize dystopian themes to reveal
the bleak consequences of humankind’s ruthlessness towards the natural world as well as fellow
humans. The title story, for example, is about a world ravaged by climate change, where a group of
scientists try, by the creation of a “formula,” to undo what has been done and make it so the human
body can defy gravity. The flaws in this hubristic, quick-fix mindset are immediately revealed when the
eponymous man falls from the sky. Another story in the collection “What Is A Volcano?” reflects a similar
human urge to play god, drawing on myth and literally presenting feuding gods who argue over each
other’s primacy. Arimah blends magical realism and fable into her narratives to illuminate as she says,
the “baser instincts” of humankind, to watch humanity “turn grotesque.”

Arimah tackles the pressures of womanhood, familial relationships, and Nigerian culture, including its
religious and social expectations. “Glory” is about a girl of the same name, bearing the pressure of her
family to achieve greatly; “Who Will Greet You At Home” is about a woman so desperate for a child and
her mother’s blessing that she risks weaving one out of hair: “Everybody knew how risky it was to make
a child out of hair, infused with the identity of the person who had shed it. But a child of many hairs?
Forbidden.” Despite the variety of its incarnations, this collection portrays a variety of hauntings, often
literal in the form of ghosts or dolls coming to life, and others figurative, as in a father’s fear for his
daughter out in the world. Underlying all of Arimah’s narratives ultimately though, is emotion: the ways
in which we show or suppress love and affection and display vulnerability. Being as we are each an entire
mind away from another, grief accompanies not only big events but even everyday instances of a missed
chance at getting across to someone we care about what we really mean and want. –Eleni
Theodoropoulos, Editorial Fellow

Carmen Maria Machado, Her Body and Other PartiesCARMEN MARIA MACHADO, HER BODY AND OTHER
PARTIES
2017

“[P]erhaps you’re thinking,” the narrator of “Resident,” a short story by Carmen Maria Machado in Her
Body and Other Parties, muses, “that I’m a cliché—a weak, trembling thing with a silly root of adolescent
trauma, straight out of a gothic novel.” The reference to being in a gothic story is intriguingly apt. On the
one hand, “Resident” deliberately conjures up a gothic atmosphere of dread that feels like it could have
been taken from many other stories in the genre; on the other, though, it says something about
Machado’s haunting collection as a whole. Many of the stories in Her Bodies and Other Parties contain
echoes of the images and themes that so often constellate gothic literature and “the gothic” as a mode
or atmosphere of writing: ghosts, beheadings, violence, trauma, claustrophobic environments, a
pervading sense of unease or uncertainty. But while many classic tales of gothic literature—with a few
exceptions—have portrayed women as tropes at best and monsters at worst, Machado’s stories
beautifully and poignantly focus on what it means to be a woman, to inhabit a woman’s body, in a gothic
landscape that, for all its ghosts and mysterious plagues, feels all too terrifyingly, traumatically like the
world we live in. Women are harassed in the stories, as much by people as by the unsettling
atmospheres around them. From the title itself, Machado makes it clear that collection will focus on
women’s bodies–and her deployment of the dispassionate-sounding “parties” as the title’s second half
suggests the cool detachment with which male harassment, for instance, so often involves equating
women’s worth to their bodies. Yet “parties” can also suggest festivity, and her women, for all the horror
around them, have moments of happiness and release, too. Her Body and Other Parties is a masterful
reimagining of what the gothic can do and be, creating a world in which the tremendous weight of being
a woman is chillingly palpable throughout nearly all of the stories. It’s a powerful collection that
surprised me in the best of ways, and I think it will continue to for a long time to come. –Gabrielle Bellot,
Staff Writer

OTTESSA MOSHFEGH, HOMESICK FOR ANOTHER WORLD

2017

Even before Ottessa Moshfegh had published her first book, people were calling her “the best writer of
our generation.” I know this for a fact, because one of those people was me, and I was sure of it based
on the short stories she’d been publishing in The Paris Review, including the wonderful (and frequently
horrifying, in the best way) “Bettering Myself,” the opening story of Homesick for Another World, which
won the Plimpton Prize in 2013.
Most of the stories in Homesick for Another World were originally published in The Paris Review—
though a couple are from The New Yorker and Vice, one each from Granta and The Baffler, one original.
They are all basically realist, if dark, psychological portraits, but there’s something fabulistic about them
—Moshfegh pushes humanity to its logical extension, and the results are grotesque and poignant. It’s
not quite surrealism—maybe I would call it slime-coated realism. She has a sharp, ironic eye, and a flat
affect, which contributes to the sense of irreality, but she’s doing more than just rolling her eyes at her—
often horrible—characters; she’s getting into the muck with them, and pulling us along for the ride.

It may not be my actual favorite, but the story I think about most often from this collection is “The Beach
Boy”—which may be because, as a committed hypochondriac, I am in constant fear of dying the way
Marcia does in this story, but also because of the expert unspooling of her husband once she’s gone. –
Emily Temple, Senior Editor

***

Dissenting Opinions

The following books were just barely nudged out of the top ten, but we (or at least one of us) couldn’t let
them pass without comment.

Karen Russell, Vampires in the Lemon Grove

2013

The title short story of Karen Russell’s Vampires in the Lemon Grove is my favorite short story of all time,
but the collection itself is mesmerizing. A friend, a fellow English teacher at the high school where I used
to teach, first shared a copy with me when I had my seniors read Dracula, and I read it at my desk,
towards the end of the day. I discovered that it’s a book that doesn’t so much draw you in as creep up on
you. You don’t glide through it, you’ll burrow into it; you’ll start reading it, and by the time you’re
finished, the lights in the department office will be out, dusk will have fallen outside, and all your
colleagues and some passing students will have stood in front of you trying to get your attention and
wave goodbye before giving up and walking out. You don’t simply finish this book, you are released from
it. Materially speaking, anyway. It’ll still haunt you after you’re done. This might be because its stories
are so tender, so perfectly painful—another reason might be because that they can be so genuinely
creepy, so softly scary that you’ll find yourself rereading parts over and over, trying to experience the
section more deeply to make sure that what you think is happening is really happening. And then, when
it is finally done with you, you’ll walk yourself home in the dark, and it’s a good thing you’ll know the
route by heart, because you won’t be able to think about where you’re going. –Olivia Rutigliano,
CrimeReads Editorial Fellow

DIANE COOK, MAN V. NATURE

2014

When I first read this collection, during graduate school, I remember having to stop in the middle and
take a break. The collection was making me feel bad, and almost panicky. It was just too good. It was so
good that I felt confident there was no reason for me to ever write another word; Diane Cook had
already done everything I was trying to do and more. Eventually, I got over it (the writer’s ego being a
slippery but unquenchable fiend) and finished this surreal and glorious book of stories.

I mean, what to say: in “The Way the End of Days Should Be” a woman tries to keep out invaders as the
seas rise around her (Doric columned) home: “This man in the nice suit asked for food and water, then
tried to strangle me, choked back tears, apologized, asked to be let in, and when I refused, tried to
strangle me again. When I managed to close the door on him, he sat on my veranda and cried.” Did I
mention Diane Cook is hilarious? Especially at her darkest, she is a comedic genius. The title story is
equally funny and equally bleak; it also involves water as an adversary, and also the men who used to be
your friends. At least one of them, anyway.

In closing: where is the next book from Diane Cook? I’ve been waiting for years; it’s starting to feel unfair.
Who knows what a woman might do without one? –Emily Temple, Senior Editor

HASSAN BLASIM, TR. JONATHAN WRIGHT, THE CORPSE EXHIBITION

2014

It’s rare for a conflict to go on for so long that witnesses may begin to record its history before the
conflict is over, and yet that is what has happened as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan continue, and
publishing does its duty to bring suffering into print. Hassan Blasim was a vocal critic of Saddam
Hussein’s government, in exile in Finland for much of his literary career, so it makes sense that his story
collection would explore the Iraqi expat experience as well as crafting stories immersed in the war itself;
several stories are stranded between judging and defending those who have gotten out and who then,
refuse to return. Whether Blasim is writing about the war itself or its many rippling effects, he brings a
sardonic sensibility to his stories, parodying the language of bureaucracy and always pointing to the
violence common to both order and chaos. This is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand
both the war and the ongoing attempts to process the conflict through literature, and a necessary
complement to the wide array of fiction by American veterans released over the past few years. –Molly
Odintz, CrimeReads Associate Editor

Dorthe Nors , Karate Chop

DORTHE NORS, KARATE CHOP

2014

Karate Chop was the first of Dorthe Nors’ books to be available to the English-speaking world (translated
from the Danish). It was pressed into my hands by the amazing Julie Buntin (author of Marlena) when
she was my internship supervisor, back in 2014. She told me it was a perfect gem of a collection, and that
I was going to love it. Boy oh boy was she right! Karate Chop is a compact powerhouse, with fifteen pithy
stories (no more than a few pages apiece!) that pull back the curtain on everyday life to reveal
something much more odd and sinister. (A few notable examples: after his wife goes to bed, a man
obsessively falls down the online rabbit hole of female serial killers; two hunters agree to kill each
other’s dogs in an exploration of male friendship; a young woman leaps from thought to thought, trying
very hard to avoid thinking about something traumatic that’s happened. I could go on!) Dorthe Nors
writes with such a dry, biting specificity. Her matter-of-fact tone makes you trust her. And then she pulls
the rug out from under you in the best way! The situations she throws her characters (and her readers)
into could only be conjured up by her. (The story about the hunters that hatch a plan to kill their dogs?
It’s also a story about a failing marriage. But in a Dorthe Nors story, it has to be tangled up in this
amazing way. Just surrender to the logic.) In a lot of ways, this is a collection about the ways we fail to
connect to one another, and the mental and emotional acrobatics we partake in to avoid hurt. –Katie
Yee, Book Marks Assistant Editor

PHIL KLAY, REDEPLOYMENT

2014

Redeployment is a classic exploration of the veteran’s experience, going back and forth between stories
immersed in the moment of trauma and those exploring the dislocating experience of return to a
peacetime world after the disruptions of war – my favorite story in the collection details a philosophical
confrontation between a veteran at college on the GI Bill and a student activist who feels threatened by
him (and whom he, in turn, feels threatened by). Their attempt to understand each other is one of the
best dialogue sequences I’ve ever come across, and symbolic of the book’s larger message of humanism,
although some stories embrace a bleaker message of the dark comedy of errors and bureaucracy that is
war. I’m including this on the list as the first of many works to be written by returning veterans – the Iraq
and Afghanistan conflicts have had the dubious honor of being long enough for an entire generation to
have returned home, enrolled in MFA programs, and published novels en masse as the war continues. If
fiction is the first step in processing trauma, than perhaps this means we’re getting a head start—or
perhaps, there’s just too much suffering in the world to wait for a thing to end before writing books
about it. –Molly Odintz, CrimeReads Associate Editor

AMELIA GRAY, GUTSHOT

2015

In my former life as a bookseller, this one made its way around the story with hushed whispers and
bated breath, furtively paged through and softly recommended in brief lulls between helping customers,
perused at the registers as we yawned and waiting for the store to close, on the quiet second floor in the
early hours of a Saturday morning, or in the deathly quiet of the children’s section in mid-week to a
soundtrack of Muzac radio and the booms and thuds of near-by construction. You have to read this, we
said to each other; start with the story in the middle, we commanded to friends and colleagues; don’t
talk to me until after you finish reading it, we mock-warned to those who appeared on the fence about
finishing.

What makes this one so special, in a sea of collections that each try their hardest to capture some kind of
zeitgeist with sentences beautiful enough to guarantee that the era their contents define will be
remembered? Amelia Grey is the grand-guignol heiress to Angela Carter, crafting grotesque body horror
and immersed in the violence of everyday life, full of more blood, sugar, sex, and magic than a 90s-era
record store. Although perhaps, given the matter-of-fact way her characters accept their bloody,
inglorious fates, I should describe her as Angela Carter meets Etgar Keret, whose story collection The Bus
Driver Who Wanted to be God ushered in a new era of magical realism grounded in the everyday,
ordinary, and mundane. If art is meant to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable, then
Amelia Grey’s Gutshot is very high art indeed. –Molly Odintz, CrimeReads Associate Editor

Kelly Link, Get In Trouble

KELLY LINK, GET IN TROUBLE

2015

I am here for literally everything Kelly Link writes (have you heard she’s writing a novel?)—after all, she is
an official genius whose work combines fairy tale archetypes, horror tropes, pop culture references, and
surrealist play with some of the finest literary writing around. I know, this isn’t as uncommon as it once
was, but Link is the OG short story irrealist, and she’s also the best. People who haven’t read Kelly Link
can’t really understand that they need Kelly Link in their lives, but they do. This is part of why I always
think of her work as being a secret, like something only my friends and I know about and reference and
pass around to one another and try to copy, a kind of shibboleth for a certain type of writer.

However, when I think this, I am wrong: not only did Link win a MacArthur, but her most recent
collection, Get In Trouble, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and widely and well reviewed. The secret’s
out. And well, fine, because I want (most) people to be happy. Like every Link collection, Get In Trouble is
full of classics: all killer, no filler, as the kids—maybe once, one time, used to—say. “The New Boyfriend”
is like something out of Grimm’s My So Called Life, “The Summer People” is mysterious, atmospheric
masterpiece, and “Valley of the Girls” is a story that I do not fully understand, and never will, but that I
read again every year and think about all the time. –Emily Temple, Senior Editor

KIRSTIN VALDEZ QUADE, NIGHT AT THE FIESTAS

2015

Kirstin Valdez Quade’s debut collection, Night at the Fiestas, came out almost five years ago now, in early
2015, and it’s not overstating to say that it managed on a first reading to expand my conception of
American literary fiction, what it could do, what a story collection could do, and the kinds of stories that
could and should be told. Returning to the stories in the time since—especially to the visceral, driving
“Five Wounds” and the haunting “Nemecia”—has only confirmed that feeling, that Valdez Quade is one
of the most talented storytellers at work today. New Mexico—its landscapes, its cultures, its families—is
the setting for her work, and the majority of the stories center around people dealing with the weight of
everyday life, spiritual striving, and the deep, complex connections that bind them. In “Five Wounds,” a
man reenacts the Passion of the Christ; in “Nemecia,” two girls reckon with a dark family legacy.
Throughout the collection, the strange textures of sin, blood, and relations arise again and again. The
stories are intense, finely observed works of realism, but they pulsate with a special kind of energy that
seems to allow for an enhanced reality, another plane of possibility. A religious feeling, in short. It’s rare
to find that kind of power or preoccupation in contemporary fiction. When you do, it’s a reminder of why
we tell stories in the first place, of the kind of communal reckoning we’re undertaking when we explain
our stories, our families, our pasts. –Dwyer Murphy, CrimeReads Managing Editor
ADAM JOHNSON, FORTUNE SMILES

(2015)

I’m a little perplexed as to why more people haven’t read this book. Or, if they have, why it seems to
have all-but disappeared from the Best Books of the Twenty-First Century conversation (despite having
won the National Book Award for Fiction less than five short years ago). Perhaps the rapturous reception
that greeted The Orphan Master’s Son, the grimly absurdist novel for which Johnson won the Pulitzer
Prize three years previous, served to drown out his quieter follow-up. Perhaps it’s the fault of the book’s
cheery cast of characters, which includes an uncomfortably sympathetic child-porn addict, an
unrepentant former Stasi prison guard, a young mother with cancer, a pair of North Korean defectors, a
hologram of a recently-assassinated US president, and a woman with advanced Guillain-Barré syndrome.
Or perhaps it’s that every one of these six lengthy tales—dark, disquieting, and all the more unsettling
for their subtle infusions of tenderness—leaves an indelible, but rarely pleasant, mark on the reader’s
consciousness. As Lauren Groff wrote in her New York Times review: “Each of these stories plants a small
bomb in the reader’s head; life after reading Fortune Smiles is a series of small explosions in which the
reader—perhaps unwillingly—recognizes Adam Johnson’s gleefully bleak world in her own.” This is not
an uplifting collection. It will illicit chuckles only as a means to further devastate. It will not make you feel
good about yourself, about technology, about our ability to successfully navigate life’s random cruelties.
But it will exhilarate. It will suck the breath from your lungs. –Dan Sheehan, Book Marks Editor

Steven Millhauser, Voices in the Night 2015

I’ve never understood why Stephen Millhauser isn’t more widely read (at least in the United States—
apparently he’s big in France, which makes sense, because the French tend to appreciate the finer
things). Maybe it’s because his “most famous” book—Martin Dressler, which was awarded the Pulitzer
Prize in 1997—is his least interesting. Listen, I love Millhauser, and I can easily imagine someone reading
Martin Dressler, thinking “hmm, okay,” and then forgetting all about him forever. But no one should do
this. Because Millhauser’s stories, on the other hand, are wonderful, weird things, steady and fantastical
at once, as if Raymond Carver had developed a thing for ghosts and girls who die of laughter.
This latest collection contains some of my favorite stories from Millhauser’s long career, including the
opener, “Miracle Polish,” which I won’t describe, but will tell you that I return to it regularly, and am
moved every time. If you find that more frustrating than intriguing, I’ll tell you that at the beginning of
We Others, Millhauser’s 2011 collection of new and selected stories (also considered for this list,
naturally), he writes: “What makes a story bad, or good, or better than good, can be explained and
understood up to a point, but only up to a point. What’s seductive is mysterious and can never be
known. I prefer to leave it at that.”

So I’ll leave it at this: these stories are better than good. –Emily Temple, Senior Editor

Helen Oyeyemi, What Is Not Yours Is Not YoursHELEN OYEYEMI, WHAT IS NOT YOURS IS NOT YOURS

2016

Helen Oyeyemi’s writing is woven with imagination, complexity, and such fierce intelligence that I have
always been thoroughly amused and fascinated with anything she writes. In her collection What Is Not
Yours Is Not Yours, Oyeyemi showcases this talent by planting keys, hidden rooms, puppets, ghosts,
magical libraries, and secret gardens which the reader follows, as if they were breadcrumbs, hoping they
will lead to answers. Admirably, equal to Oyeyemi’s appetite for adventure is her commitment to
attaining truth. In that way, she reminds me of storytellers like Angela Carter, Ursula Le Guin, and Jorge
Luis Borges.

Embracing a voice uniquely her own, however, Oyeyemi toys with the reader with titles like “if a book is
locked there’s probably a good reason for that don’t you think.” Then, she infuses that wryness with
piercing emotion, as in the story “is your blood as red as this,” in which the narrator, uninhibited,
observes a character at a party, “you had a string of fairy lights wrapped around your neck. I sort of
understood how that would be comforting.” The narrator continues, “Sometimes I dream I’m falling, and
it’s not so much frightening as it is tedious, just falling and falling until I’m sick of it, but then a noose
stops me short and I think, well, at least I’m not falling anymore.” A signature of Oyeyemi’s creative
talent is that she can begin a story from somewhere, drag the reader by the hand and then suddenly
drop them into unknown territory.
What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours deserves a place on this list because each narrative is immersive, a
complete universe onto itself. Each story flaunts a whole cast of diverse characters imitating life in the
many comings-and-goings of people; it delves into historical moments, like the Spanish saint’s day, The
Day of the Book and the Rose, just to tell the obscure story of some character affected by this moment in
time. Though curiosity may launch an Oyeyemi story, the ultimate joy of it is that it’s all about
connection, forged under unexpected circumstances by moments of pure synchronicity. –Eleni
Theodoropoulos, Editorial Fellow

Samantha Hunt, The Dark DarkSAMANTHA HUNT, THE DARK DARK

2017

This is Samantha Hunt’s first short-story collection, though her fourth book. She’s an eccentric,
imaginative creator and a candid storyteller, often presenting slightly fantastical, vaguely supernatural
scenarios frankly and unblinkingly. She can make the most far-flung ideas seem very real. The Dark Dark
dials this tendency back down. The most common site of magic in these stories is actually the female
body, which, she points out, always transforms itself and has the power to make life and to kill parts of
itself and can turn women into endless new versions of themselves. The Dark Dark is about women,
mostly, and about fear, loneliness, being a parent, losing a parent, becoming someone else, realizing
you’re losing yourself. Despite the lack of literal magic, these stories are still shivery, still eerie, and still,
when they need to be, dreamy. –Olivia Rutigliano, CrimeReads Editorial Fellow

Honorable Mentions

A selection of other books that we seriously considered for both lists—just to be extra about it (and
because decisions are hard).

Danielle Evans, Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self (2010) ·

Brad Watson, Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives (2010) ·

Patricia Engel, Vida (2010) ·

Don DeLillo, The Angel Esmeralda (2011) ·

Charles Baxter, Gryphon (2011) ·

Colm Toíbín, The Empty Family (2011) ·

Can Xue, tr. Karen Gernant, Vertical Motion (2011) ·

Jamie Quatro, I Want to Show You More (2013) ·

Aimee Bender, The Color Master (2013) ·

Susan Steinberg, Spectacle (2013) ·

Rebecca Lee, Bobcat (2013) · Ramona Ausubel,

A Guide to Being Born (2013) ·

Laura van den Berg, The Isle of Youth (2013) ·

Rivka Galchen, American Innovations (2014) ·

Naja Marie Aidt, tr. Denise Newman, Baboon (2014) ·

Lydia Davis, Can’t and Won’t (2014) ·

Stuart Dybek, Paper Lantern (2014) ·

Donald Antrim, The Emerald Light in the Air (2014) ·

Joy Williams, The Visiting Privilege (2015) ·

Thomas Pierce, Hall of Small Mammals (2015) ·

Jen George, The Babysitter at Rest (2016) ·

Rion Amilcar Scott, The Insurrections (2016) ·

Alexandra Kleeman, Intimations (2016) ·

James McBride, Five-Carat Soul (2017) ·

Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Refugees (2017) ·

Denis Johnson, The Largesse of the Sea Maiden (2018) ·

Jamel Brinkley, A Lucky Man (2018) ·

Lauren Groff, Florida (2018) ·

Xuan Juliana Wang, Home Remedies (2019) ·

Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Friday Black (2018) ·

Karen Russell, Orange World (2019),

Edwidge Danticat, Everything Inside (2019).

The 10 Best Memoirs of the Decade

The Top Ten

PATTI SMITH, JUST KIDS (2010)

In 1967, 20-year old aspiring poet Patti Smith moved to New York City, where she expected to make ends
meet by working as a waitress, got a job instead at a bookstore, met budding artist Robert
Mapplethorpe, and embarked with him upon the kind of bohemian late-twentieth century life that
defined downtown during the city’s last great period of artistic foment. More than fifty years later, with
CBGBs now a shoe store and Velvet Underground t-shirts available in toddler sizes, the counter-culture
has become the culture, and it’s near impossible to differentiate the baby-boom mythology from fact.
Those wishing to know how it was, though—or at least how it felt—can do no better than turning to
Smith’s 2010 National Book Award-winning memoir, Just Kids, a masterpiece of social observation and
self-scrutiny, exhilaratingly alive with what it is to be young and to love someone and to want things. The
book flows through the city in all its energy and squalor, from mornings at the Chelsea Hotel to nights at
Max’s Kansas City, until, one by one, Smith and Mapplethorpe get famous. Throughout, she is good
company, by turns shrewd chronicler of the hard work that goes into building an artist’s career and
disbelieving observer of her own success. Plus she’s an excellent, often hilarious portraitist, with a
seemingly endless supply of captivating subjects, from Burroughs to Warhol, to Mapplethorpe, whom
she is endlessly tender about and loyal to and infatuated with, and whose passing elicits one of the most
raw-nerve eulogies you’re ever likely to read. Most importantly, Smith is possessed of that quality that
sets apart the truly great work of autobiography from the merely good: she knows herself. –Emily
Firetog, Deputy Editor
JESMYN WARD, MEN WE REAPED (2013)

Most readers of contemporary American fiction know Jesmyn Ward (the prodigiously talented McArthur
Genius Fellowship-winning Mississippi writer who, at barely forty years old, became the first woman to
win two National Book Awards for Fiction) for Salvage the Bones (2011) and Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017)
—a pair of haunted, lyrical novels, subtly infused with the mythic, which examined southern black
communities ravaged by unimaginable disaster and generational trauma. Her harrowing 2013 memoir,
Men We Reaped—in which Ward considers the premature deaths, over just four years, of five men in her
life (including her beloved brother), as well as the terrible risks inherent in just trying to simply live as a
young black man in the rural south—deserves to stand right alongside these magnificent novels. Ward is
drawing from a deep and shimmering well of sorrow here, describing with exquisite tenderness the lives
these doomed men lived—who they were, the people they aspired to become, and what they meant to
their families and friends—before poverty and the eroding nature of systemic racism wore away at their
defenses and left them vulnerable. Having navigated a childhood of familial instability and extreme
financial hardship, Ward became the first member of her family to attend college, leaving behind a
community that was full of both nourishing love and wearying strife, and some of the most
heartbreaking writing in Men We Reaped juxtaposes her warm memories of joyful Mississippi nights
back home with the intense feeling of survivor’s guilt that washes over her in the wake of these terrible
losses. –Dan Sheehan, Book Marks Editor

MAGGIE NELSON, THE ARGONAUTS (2015)

Creative nonfiction already redefines, for many readers and writers alike, what nonfiction can do; as
nonfiction that uses the mechanical techniques of fiction, it allows us to create expansive, experimental
writing that may look, at a glance, almost indistinguishable from a short story, novel, or lyrical prose
poem. Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts takes this to heart. It is a beautiful, astonishing memoir—a piece
of “autotheory,” really, meaning a work that applies literary and philosophical theory to the writer’s own
life—that reimagines what a memoir can look like.

Told non-linearly in sharp fragments, it explores desire, what it means to be cis or trans, the limits of the
gender binary itself for people who are non-binary, sexist and heteronormative expectations, and what it
means to exist as a woman in the world broadly—and it does all this in one of the most devastatingly
gorgeous bits of prose I’ve seen in a while. Its exploration of queer desire is poignant and powerful. The
Argonauts pushes creative nonfiction to its limits, and I can’t recommend it enough as an example of
how some memoirs—particularly ones like these—can only be written out of order, because that, in
reality, is just the right order for it. –Gabrielle Bellott, Lit Hub staff writer

HELEN MACDONALD, H IS FOR HAWK (2015)

Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk was, to say the least, a surprise phenomenon in America. An erudite,
lyric, very British memoir that describes the simultaneous grieving of a beloved parent, the mourning of
a particular version of the English countryside, and the attempt to cohabitate with a ferocious raptor?
Not what most publishers would consider a license to print money; add to that the embedded retelling
of T.H. White’s own deeply troubled account of life with a fractious goshawk and “bestseller” seems
unlikely at best. And though a book’s sales should factor fairly low (if at all) when considering its
worthiness, one is tempted to make an exception for memoir, the genre that most wants to be read.

But it is neither the familiarity of the circumstances (they are decidedly not) nor the plainness of the
language (this is the memoir of a poet!) that makes Macdonald’s memoir so universally accessible—it is
the unrelenting honesty of a writer grappling on the page with the hard stuff most of us reserve for 4am:
the finality of death, the paralysis of self-doubt, the loss of the natural world, and… the winged killing
machine lurking in the other room. That Macdonald manages literary biography, pastoral meditation,
grief diary, and falconry how-to all in one book is a true marvel, and will remain so as this nearly perfect
memoir takes its rightful place in the canon. –Jonny Diamond, Lit Hub Editor-in-Chief

WILLIAM FINNEGAN, BARBARIAN DAYS (2015)

“They were silhouettes, backlit by low sun, and they danced silently through the glare, their boards like
big dark blades, slashing and gliding, swift beneath their feet.” Not the type of language we’ve come to
associate with sporting memoirs, but as anyone who has picked up this extraordinary work—which Alice
Gregory, writing in the New York Review of Books, astutely described as “an utterly convincing study in
the joy of treating seriously an unserious thing”—will attest, this is no ordinary sporting memoir. New
Yorker staff writer William Finnegan has lived an impassioned and peripatetic life that would be the envy
of even the most seasoned vagabond reporter. For over forty years he has been roaming the world’s
outer reaches, chronicling everything from journalists in Apartheid South Africa to youth poverty in the
United States, from drug cartels in Mexico to billionaire mining tycoons in Australia. Throughout it all,
though, his great love, his obsession, his savior and muse, his sin and his soul and his North star, has
been that most solitary and mystical of pastimes: surfing. Barbarian Days is Finnegan’s ode to a life spent
slaying liquid dragons, meeting bodacious kindred spirits, and finding contentment inside the tubes of
some of the most awesome waves on the face of the earth. Finnegan is a magnificent, humane writer, as
adept at conjuring thirty-year-old swells and breaks from memory as he is at describing the unique, and
often tender, bonds that are forged between dreamy acolytes of the ocean. With Barbarian Days, he has
given us a genuinely moving and profound meditation on an elemental existence. –Dan Sheehan, Book
Marks Editor

MARGO JEFFERSON, NEGROLAND (2015)

The title of Margo Jefferson’s Negroland, her memoir of growing up in Chicago in the 1950s and 60s, is
her nickname for the space in which she grew up: not just a physical location, but a state of mind.
“Negroland” is, in Jefferson’s words, her “name for a small region of Negro America where residents
were sheltered by a certain amount of privilege and plenty.” Jefferson’s father was a prominent
physician, and her mother was a socialite. She grew up as a member of the black upper-middle-class—
experiencing greater wealth and better education, and living a life of greater refinement than most of
the white people she encountered while also immersed in a culture that insisted on exceptionalism
among the national black community. “Children in Negroland,” she writes, “were warned that few
Negroes enjoyed privilege or plenty and that most whites would be glad to see them returned to
indigence, deference and subservience. Children there were taught that most other Negroes ought to be
emulating us when too many of them (out of envy or ignorance) went on behaving in ways that
encouraged racial prejudice.”
Jefferson’s mission, in this magnificent account, is to unfurl all the different, painful, awkward, damaging,
and sometimes quasi-empowering components of this highly complicated mass mindset, as well unpack
the cultural forces that begat this specific crystallization. Besides that Jefferson’s reflections are so
movingly written, her book clearly fulfills a critical need: so rarely do scholars approach issues of race
and class simultaneously to such productive ends. Jefferson’s memoir is useful in expressing that the
black experience in America is not unilaterally one of inequality and persecution—but that these are
components of a larger, varied, more nuanced national identity which also incorporates excellence,
achievement, and status.

Negroland additionally offers essential considerations about how oppression manifests within specific
groups and grows as forms of self-love and hate. It is also about identification and alienation: who do
you identify with, Jefferson asks herself, and why? –Olivia Rutigliano, CrimeReads Editorial Fellow

SUSAN FALUDI, IN THE DARKROOM (2016)

I borrowed this one from work, and, afraid of doing damage to its white binding, I bought a cloth cover,
originally no doubt intended for bibles, to protect the book from smudges or anything else untoward.
That covering became symbolic as I dived into this memoir of hiding, transformation, and reversals. In
the Darkroom follows feminist scholar Susan Faludi as she reunites with her estranged father, who is now
living as a woman in the Budapest of her youth. Her father survived the Holocaust through disguises and
subterfuge, then found refuge after the war in depictions of women on film; she is proud to show her
daughter the life she has made in Budapest, even as right wing nationalism grows around her. Susan
Faludi frankly discusses her struggle to accept her father, both in her estrangement and in her new life as
woman, and reading the memoir of an old school feminist figure out how to be trans-inclusive is one of
the most heartwarming things you’ll ever come across.

The book also serves as a snapshot of the entire Jewish century—Faludi’s father survived the Holocaust
as a boy, then strived to be the most American of Americans after starting a family in the US; Susan
Faludi came to an appreciation of her heritage more through history and her family’s lived experience
rather than through religion, and the whole family embraced artistic expression of some kind or other.
In the Darkroom is brilliant, beautiful, and very difficult to describe, but I do hope you’ll read it. –Molly
Odintz, CrimeReads Associate Editor

Annie Ernaux, tr. Alison L. Strayer, The Years (2017)ANNIE ERNAUX, TR. ALISON L. STRAYER, THE YEARS
(2017)

There’s a revolution happening in life writing and the French novelist Annie Ernaux deserves far more
credit than she’s received for showing how a depth of style and tone can situate a life within the larger
rivers of time. Ernaux was born in 1940 in the heart of the France’s working class Normandy. Since that
time period, up until 2006, when this book ends, France has lived through the war, the pill, the rise of
consumer culture and a whole blizzard of idea-fads, which she threads her life through and around—a
boat traveling down a current of past-ness. Along the way Ernaux became a public person, a famous
person even, in small circles, and this book comes to grip with the loss of singularity that entails. Mostly,
though, to read The Years is to re-experience, as if anew, what the past feels like. Not just what it is made
of, what rocks around which a times flow, but how it feels to be traveling upon a before. In an era when
nostalgia is so rapidly commodified—witness the 1970s—Ernaux’s attempt to forge a way of considering
life as singular and collective is strangely moving, unfashionable, and dignified. –John Freeman,
Executive Editor, Lit Hub

SARAH M. BROOM, THE YELLOW HOUSE (2019)

Before I picked it up, Sarah Broom’s The Yellow House was intriguing to me precisely because it blends
memoir with so many other forms. In her review of the books, Angela Flournoy describes it as “part oral
history, part urban history, part celebration of a bygone way of life.”

The oral history component is drawn from Broom’s interviews with her mother and her 12 siblings about
their lives in New Orleans East, an area of the city once vaunted as “a ‘new frontier,’ ripe for
development,” which by the time Broom was coming of age there had been largely abandoned by the
city. Her brothers and mother tell their stories of Katrina, “the Water,” which Broom experienced from
New York, in one of the most wrenching sections of the book. The hurricane destroys the titular Yellow
House and scatters the Broom family across the country. Broom herself lives for some months in Burundi
before returning to New Orleans to work as a speechwriter for the mayor, then back to New York, then
to New Orleans once more.

Broom is a master of sentences, but she also knows precisely when to hand over the floor. The result is a
gorgeous pastiche of histories that is at once deeply personal and incredibly wide-ranging. Home—both
the physical and the intangible sorts—are at the center of the story. The question of who gets to have a
home in America, in the face of vast income inequality, institutional racism, and climate change, is ever-
present. In his review, Dwight Garner predicts that The Yellow House “will come to be considered among
the essential memoirs of this vexing decade.” I couldn’t agree more. –Jessie Gaynor, Social Media Editor

Naja Marie Aidt, tr. Denise Newman, When Death Takes Something From You Give It Back (2019)NAJA
MARIE AIDT, TR. DENISE NEWMAN, WHEN DEATH TAKES SOMETHING FROM YOU GIVE IT BACK (2019)

This remarkable memoir is easily one of the best of any kind published in the last decade. On a
fundamental level, it paints a warm, vivid portrait of Danish writer Aidt’s son, a chef and searcher who
died tragically in his early twenties when a home-made batch of hallucinogenics led to a terrible
accident. Drawing on the author’s diaries in the aftermath, poets of lacunae like Anne Carson and Ingrid
Christensen, and narrating the boy’s life and upbringing, it is also a powerful formal assertion of the
heartbreaking illegibility of loss, even as all one wants to do with the missing is keep them alive, present,
somehow. Watching Aidt pull it off is akin to watching Philippe Petit walk a tight-rope between the Twin
Towers. There’s such dexterity and joy even line by line in her prose. Yet the gap over which Aidt strings
her lines is terrifying. It’s not just a grief this book narrates, it’s how to rethread time’s projector when an
accident has caused a sudden tear in the reel. In Denmark, Aidt has long been read as an essential poet,
and her fiction, Baboon, is taught in high schools. This book secures her role in a very small collection of
writers who have taken the form of a memoir and revealed how much thought and loss live in the same
ventricle of the heart’s true accounts. –John Freeman, Executive Editor, Lit Hub

***

Dissenting Opinions

The following books were just barely nudged out of the top ten, but we (or at least one of us) couldn’t let
them pass without comment.

Vivian Gornick, The Odd Woman and the CityVIVIAN GORNICK, THE ODD WOMAN AND THE CITY (2015)

In an essay for the Village Voice in 1973, Vivian Gornick described her engagement with contemporary
feminist thought as a process of redefining what it meant to move through life as a woman. “It is a
journey of unimaginable pain and loneliness, this journey, a battle all the way, one in which the same
inch of emotional ground must be fought for over and over again, alone and without allies, the only
soldier in the army the struggling self,” she wrote. “But on the other side lies freedom: self-possession.”
The Odd Woman and the City, her memoir published in 2015, shows part of Gornick’s long road of self-
examination and is filled with the sharply self-aware observations and insights that have marked her as
one of our most important memoir writers. The book showcases Gornick as an incredible documentarian
of the emotional worlds that collide throughout the course of a day in New York City; her book focuses in
particular on her friendship with a man named Leonard, but also on all the other small interactions that
fill city life and all the minuscule, passing ways in which humans seek connection with one another.
Describing these with clarity and compassion is one of Gornick’s biggest strengths; this memoir is a
model of self-reflection and a mirror for those of us that have not yet fully arrived in ourselves, but are
on the way. –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor
OLIVER SACKS, ON THE MOVE (2015)

There are many records of Oliver Sacks’s life and work, but none marries the two subjects quite so
powerfully as his memoir, On the Move, a book published just a few short months before his death in
2015. Sacks was one of the century’s great intellects, a mind alive to experience, nuance, the unknown,
experimentation, and, above all, communication. Few scientists have ever been so gifted in the art of
storytelling. Over the years, Sacks expanded our notions of the world, our bodies, and our minds. Those
were the stories of his professional work. But the story of his own life was just as compelling. In On the
Move, he grapples with his past, his sexuality, his literary craft, his medical achievements, his failures,
and his many, many experiments of all stripes and colors. We may come to a book like this one for the
medicine tales, but we stay for the stories of cross-country motorcycle rides, self-administered
experiments with powerful drugs, struggles with addiction, bodily transformations, and affairs of the
heart. Throughout it all, Sacks maintains the intense, at times wrenching intimacy of his prose. In a
perfect encapsulation of the storytelling approach that made him legendary, Sacks writes, “All sorts of
generalizations are made possible by dealing with populations, but one needs the concrete, the
particular, the personal too.” With those particulars, those personal items, Sacks made a kind of magic.
On the Move is that rare memoir written by an author whose life experiences and ideas are the match
for his literary talents. He was the consummate storyteller. His stories had rigor and power, and they
served to make the world seem like larger place, and ever more curious. –Dwyer Murphy, CrimeReads
Managing Editor

Sally Mann, Hold StillSALLY MANN, HOLD STILL (2015)

I remember the first time I saw a Sally Mann portrait in real life—I nearly walked by, but something
caught me and held me there, for much longer than I expected. The eyes, the pose, the exposure, the
cobwebby Southern trees—I still can’t put my finger on it, can’t explain, a phenomenon that for me is
the mark of artistic genius.
In this exquisite memoir, the widely lauded and highly controversial Mann unpacks her family’s history in
her beloved Virginia, telling her own tales as well as shaking out old boxes of photographs and letters
that point towards “deceit and scandal, alcohol, domestic abuse, car crashes, bogeymen, clandestine
affairs, dearly loved and disputed family land . . . racial complications, vast sums of money made and lost,
the return of the prodigal son, and maybe even bloody murder.”

All that is about as fun as it sounds, but Hold Still stands out most of all for being a true photographer’s
memoir: in weaving her photographs throughout, Mann both showcases her art and uses it to illustrate
her story—and sometimes her point. She responds to her critics with a sort of bemused tolerance, and
shows shots taken fractions of seconds apart, in which her children’s faces break from hard-edged
vamping into goofy smiles. But she also grapples with the fear that they might, in some sense, be right—
that she has put her children in danger by making them her subjects. It’s complicated, and ultimately
unresolved, which feels like truth. Read an excerpt here. –Emily Temple, Senior Editor

J. Drew Lanham, The Home PlaceJ. DREW LANHAM, THE HOME PLACE: MEMOIRS OF A COLORED MAN’S
LOVE AFFAIR WITH NATURE (2017)

“I am, in the deepest sense, colored,” writes naturalist and wildlife biologist J. Drew Lanham, in a memoir
whose masterful opening sections bring to mind Jean Toomer’s descriptions of Georgia in Cane
(1923).The Home Place is on one level about lives not easily categorized, a man who watches the people
and landscapes of his childhood shift and disappear as often as he watches the birds he so dearly prizes.
Lanham is as much a poet as an academic. He writes not only in homage to the family that made him
who he is, but also to decouple nature and environmental literature from academia, which he accuses of
alienating readers who might otherwise find a way in. The “in-between place” that the title refers to is a
200-acre inholding in the tiny county of Edgefield, South Carolina, where Lanham grows up with his
parents, siblings and grandmother. Lanham aptly writes with the precision of an agriculturalist; his prose
is circuitous, humorous, and often understated: “There were three or four old crepe myrtles in the yard
that erupted in purple and white blooms in April and May. Little copses of lemon-yellow daffodils and
nodding snowdrops preceded the crepe myrtles in the new warmth of march.” Or: “[R]oving gangs of
noisy blue jays conducted morning raids to gather a share of nuts.” Though lingering in this kind of
descriptive prose is the book’s greatest pleasure, Lanham also speaks to the difficulties he’s encountered
throughout his career. He’s aware that, unfortunately, a black man in his profession is relatively rare, and
Lanham’s private experiences in and beyond the Home Place are always circumscribed by this
knowledge. Coincidentally, The Home Place was published just months before the election of a president
whose administration would roll back key legislation meant to protect endangered species. Lanham took
a more placid approach than the post-2016 “doomsday” mode of ecological writing, though we must
now wonder what Lanham might say in an introduction if the book ever gets another printing. –Aaron
Robertson, Assistant Editor

Nora Krug, BelongingNORA KRUG, BELONGING (2018)

Reading Nora Krug’s Belonging is like watching a mind unfold in front of you. It’s classified as a graphic
memoir (and it won the 2019 National Book Critic Circle Award for Autobiography!), but it feels like a
scrapbook. (You can see what I mean here, in this excerpt on homesickness and heimat, or “the place
that a person is born into.”) Belonging is Nora Krug’s honest attempt to reckon with her German
heritage. Born decades after the Holocaust but surrounded by a familial silence about it, she boldly
interrogates her family’s role in this terrible history. Belonging doesn’t just tell Nora Krug’s story. Yes,
there are plenty of her own handwritten notes and beautiful illustrations, but she also cobbles together
family photographs and letters to tell this story through the generations. Belonging reads like a home
video and a history textbook rolled into one. On one page, you’ll have an anecdote about mushroom-
foraging with her family. On another, you’ll trace the history of a particular kind of German bandage,
which her mother used to patch up her six-year-old knee after a skating accident. But on the next, she’ll
include some of her uncle’s journal, complete with anti-Semitic rhetoric and his drawings of swastikas.
(Random and hodge-podge as it may sound, trust me: the curation feels organic. These things are
connected, is what Nora Krug seems to be saying.) There is something unbelievably generous about the
way she offers these bits of history to us. The story isn’t brought to us as an olive branch or a request for
forgiveness for her family. It’s an open-ended question. This is perhaps why the graphic memoir/collage
medium is the perfect one in which to tell this story; there is no posturing or justification or attempt at
explanation. She can leave us with an image and let us sit with the complicated discomfort. We join her
in the midst of her reckoning. –Katie Yee, Book Marks Assistant Editor
CARMEN MARIA MACHADO, IN THE DREAM HOUSE (2019)

It feels appropriate that describing Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House—comprised of the
tellings and retellings of Machado’s relationship with an abusive ex-girlfriend—falls to the three of us
who loved this memoir so much that we all had to have a say. This is a story with many forms, all
centered on the Dream House: a real place where Machado and her ex-girlfriend lived, but also a series
of mental fortifications forged through emotional abuse, physical violence, gaslighting, and suspicion.
Machado calls on a series of narrative traditions in recounting this story, one for which there is little to
no existing narrative precedent, since abusive queer relationships have so rarely been addressed in
popular culture; the result is a dizzying, monumental achievement. So many of us have our own versions
of this story, and reading through hers feels intensely personal and powerfully affirmative, the equivalent
of a friend looking you in the eye and saying, over and over, you’re not crazy. I needed this book; I think a
lot of us do. –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

The dedication page to In the Dream House goes: “If you need this book, it is for you.” Carmen Maria
Machado’s memoir does something I’ve never seen done before, which is to examine an abusive queer
relationship from many different angles, to hold it in many different lights. She uses footnotes to call
upon tropes in mythology and taboos in literature. She references queer theory. It’s all in an attempt to
situate the story in a different context, to find a way to tell it that can help us make sense of what’s
happening. In the Dream House is a dizzying, raw, and deeply personal story and with her experimental
structure, she is casting lines out, trying to find (and helping others find) the structure that holds. –Katie
Yee, Book Marks Assistant Editor

I have never before read a memoir that reads like a thriller. Machado deconstructs the memories of her
abusive relationship and filters them through literary tropes in order to lay out the signs, interpret,
organize and in doing so repeatedly, in what becomes a pattern that never satisfies, she and the reader
come to the understanding that there will never be a unity of narrative, nor any traditional resolution to
a tale of trauma. Machado’s course through the Dream House strikes me as the inverse of the
madwoman narrative—rather than a downward spiral, the recognition of danger calls upon the
protagonist’s inner strength, while the continual grappling with what is true and what isn’t only sharpens
her resolve to save herself. In the Dream House is a Heroine’s Journey and it is stunning in both its
invention of a new memoir form and its emotional resonance. To echo Corinne and Katie, this is a book
you need to read. –Eleni Theodoropoulos, Editorial Fellow
Kier-la Janisse, House of Psychotic WomenKIER-LA JANISSE, HOUSE OF PSYCHOTIC WOMEN: A PERSONAL
TOPOGRAPHY OF FEMALE NEUROSIS IN HORROR AND EXPLOITATION FILMS (2012)

I’ve always been of the mind that the best way to get to know someone is not through their experience
so much as their taste, a little-explored topic in the wide world of recorded lives—until now.

In her brilliant and bizarre memoir, Kier-la Janisse reinvents film criticism as memoir, and tells the story
of her life through the horror and exploitation films she enjoyed growing up and which later became her
life’s passion. Anecdotal musings and harrowing life accounts mix together with astute criticism
incorporating a quarter-century of thought on horror cinema; the chapter on films of teenage rebellion
goes together with Janisse’s account of her baby delinquency, while Janisse’s relationship with her father,
always fraught, leads into discussions of family, gender and sexuality as represented by exploitation
cinema. Janisse isn’t making the case that these films are valuable works of art, so much as windows into
the modern psyche, and occasionally (as in the case of rape and revenge cinema) a narrative form to be
reclaimed by feminists despite its original prurient intent. House of Psychotic Women is what I hope all
works of pop culture criticism to be in the future— erudite, personal, intense, mind-bending, and
refusing to draw a line between literary merit and personal taste. Plus, the design is awesome! –Molly
Odintz, CrimeReads Associate Editor

***

Honorable Mentions

A selection of other books that we seriously considered for both lists—just to be extra about it (and
because decisions are hard).

Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22 (2010) · Binyavanga Wainaina, One Day I Will Write About This Place
(2011) · Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? (2011) · Emmanuel Carrère, tr.
Linda Coverdale, Lives Other Than My Own (2011) · Gabrielle Hamilton, Blood, Bones and Butter: The
Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef (2011) · Meghan O’Rourke, The Long Goodbye (2011) · Tony
Judt, The Memory Chalet (2011) · Lidia Yuknavitch, The Chronology of Water (2011) · Joan Didion, Blue
Nights (2011) · Joshua Cody, [Sic]: A Memoir (2011) · Mira Bartók, The Memory Palace (2011) · Alison
Bechdel, Are You My Mother? (2012) · Anthony Shadid, House of Stone (2012) · Héctor Abad, tr. Anne
McLean and Rosalind Harvey, Oblivion (2012) · Leanne Shapton, Swimming Studies (2012) · Cheryl
Strayed, Wild (2012) · Edna O’Brien, Country Girl (2013) · Malala Yousafzai and Christina Lamb, I Am
Malala (2013) · Liao Yiwu, tr. Wenguang Huang, For a Song and a Hundred Songs (2013) · Sonali
Deraniyagala, Wave (2013) · Amy Wilentz, Farewell, Fred Voodoo (2013) · Roz Chast, Can’t We Talk About
Something More Pleasant? (2014) · Viv Albertine, Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys,
Boys, Boys. (2014) · Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy (2014) · Rebecca Mead, My Life in Middlemarch (2014)
· Heidi Julavits, The Folded Clock (2015) · Tracy K. Smith, Ordinary Light (2015) · Patrick Modiano, tr. Mark
Polizzotti, Pedigree (2015) · Lacey Johnson, The Other Side (2015) · Mohamedou Ould Slahi, ed. Larry
Siems, Guantanamo Diary (2015) · Jenny Diski, In Gratitude (2016) · Scholastique Mukasonga, tr. Jordan
Stump, Cockroaches (2016) · Hisham Matar, The Return (2016) · Hope Jahren, Lab Girl (2016) · Patricia
Lockwood, Priestdaddy (2017) · Daniel Mendelsohn, An Odyssey (2017) · Xiaolu Guo, Nine Continents
(2017) · Annie Ernaux, tr. Alison L. Strayer, The Years (2017) · Kiese Laymon, Heavy (2018) · Lisa Brennan-
Jobs, Small Fry (2018) · Sarah Smarsh, Heartland (2018) · Francisco Cantú, The Line Becomes a River
(2018) · Leslie Jamison, The Recovering (2018) · Terese Marie Mailhot, Heart Berries (2018) · T Kira
Madden, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls (2019).