Radhika Jones, Editor, Vanity Fair

I have to keep Kate Atkinson's Jackson Brodie series on a very high shelf, because if I so much as pick up my copy of When Will There Be Good News? I will ignore work, family, everything until I've reread it (again). This year brought a new temptation by way of the fifth Brodie novel, Big Sky, which features our favorite ex-policeman, his now teenage son, and an appearance by the winning young sleuth of Good News, Reggie Chase, now working as a detective. I felt like I was at a reunion—a reunion where people may or may not be running sex-trafficking rings out of Yorkshire, but still! Kate Atkinson is an international treasure: She creates characters with the ease of Agatha Christie, makes narratives out of mysteries and mystery out of narrative (see Life After Life), and has written some of the most memorable scenes and dialogue I've encountered in the past decade. Block out time for this one, and for the rest of her oeuvre, if you're lucky enough to be new to it.

In the first chapter of Disappearing Earth, two young girls, sisters, accept a ride with a man who promises to take them home but clearly, stomach-churningly, has other plans. I got that far and almost put the book down; I couldn't face their inevitable ending. But the book takes another path, through the Kamchatka town where the girls and their mother live, to explore how their disappearance ricochets around the community. A collection of interwoven stories is a hard thing to execute—how do you keep the reader engaged when you're introducing new characters and arcs every 25 pages, especially when all those characters and arcs might serve a greater mystery—but Julia Phillips pulls it off with verve, intelligence, and a mesmerizing, atmospheric sense of place.

Michael Hogan, Executive Digital Director, VF.com

It’s difficult, if not impossible, to write about the Irish Republican Army dispassionately. Eight hundred years of oppression and blood-feud politics have a way of coloring the conversation. But Patrick Radden Keefe comes as close as anyone I can think of with this book, which calmly, methodically, and, in the end, devastatingly peels back the layers of coded silence and tribal hypocrisy that surrounds the three-decade campaign of violent resistance (or was it terrorism?) that vaulted Gerry Adams from scruffy underground militia leader to cuddly avatar of political reconciliation. Keefe’s secret is to tune out the blood-raising propaganda and stay focused on the human costs of the conflict, be they borne by a Protestant widow kidnapped in front of her children or a car-bombing, hunger-striking Catholic revolutionary left behind by the movement she helped build.

With this book, the author of Columbine, an evergreen best-seller and staple of high-school curricula, turns his formidable storytelling talents to a different kind of school-shooting saga. Whereas Dave Cullen's earlier book succeeded by demystifying the minds of the killers, Parkland burrows into the heart of a movement built by survivors turned activists who, thanks to their astonishing courage and natural savvy, captivated the nation and reframed the gun-policy debate heading into 2020. Read it to understand the horror of this American epidemic, yes, but also the hope felt by those on the front-lines of the battle for common-sense reform.

Claire Howorth, Executive Editor, Vanity Fair

One of Twitter’s (and the New York Times’s and Time magazine’s and Goop’s and of course now Vanity Fair’s) favorite books of 2019 is Fleishman Is in Trouble, by the grandmaster of the meta-profile, Taffy Brodesser-Akner. You likely are familiar with Brodesser-Akner’s writing: Tom Hanks, Gwyneth Paltrow, Bradley Cooper, and Jonathan Franzen have all been on the other side of her velvety pen. Now poor old Toby Fleishman gets his turn as he navigates estrangement from his wife, Rachel, and enters his freaky-jeaky post-mature bachelorhood as an unlikely sex object. Like a signature “Taffy” profile, Fleishman shifts between observation and reflection—it’s an amalgam of all the things that make her profiles the rich experiences they are. The “all is not as it seems!” debunking of Don Lemon, the curtain-pullback on the aforementioned Goop, the “get a load of this guy” of Franzen. As Brodesser-Akner herself has tweeted, the big D makes for uneasy art—the writer has said she couldn’t “fucking take” Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story. Yet somehow she herself waxes mighty funny over 373 pages of marital bust-up.

Generally it seems preferable not to read too much about a book before reading it, but Jesmyn Ward’s Vanity Fair profile of Ta-Nehisi Coates, on the occasion of the publication of his first novel, The Water Dancer, is an exception. Ward, who’s won countless awards for her own books, plumbs Coates’s biography for an illuminating, expansive understanding of his fiction. And his fiction sings. As Ward puts it (because why do anything but crib the best recommendation standing?): “Coates has written a novel, a wondrous, unpredictable novel set in Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Virginia called The Water Dancer; it follows an enslaved man named Hiram as he attempts to find his way to freedom. But it is not straightforward and cutting like his nonfiction, where he wields his mind to devastating effect. In The Water Dancer, amid love and covetousness and tenderness and brutality, Hiram wields magic…. I believe The Water Dancer will not be the last novel you read by Ta-Nehisi Coates.”

Daniel Kile, Executive Editor, Vanity Fair

From suburban cocktail parties to Latin American hostage situations, Ann Patchett’s books are crowded with memorable homes. Enter The Dutch House, the titular estate of her brisk and enjoyable new novel that becomes the obsession—and albatross—of three generations of a small and splintered family. At the heart of the story sit siblings Danny and Maeve, a modern-day Hansel and Gretel surrounded by characters worthy of the Brothers Grimm: a remote father, a wicked stepmother, fairy god–servants, and a mysteriously absent mother. As Patchett follows brother and sister on a decades-long quest to find their way home, she plumbs the fault lines of family to exhilarating effect, all the while revealing our contemporary obsessions with property, inheritance, and the American Dream.

Keziah Weir, Associate Editor, Vanity Fair

All hail the resurrection of Clarice Lispector! A revived interest in her work has brought us new translations of early novels, including this, her second, about a young woman living in Switzerland, navigating love and life and lust in a world made for men. In Benjamin Moser's introduction, he notes that Lispector herself once referred to The Besieged City as one of her “least liked books”—in hindsight, one wonders if she was simply ahead of her time. It is certainly not a fast read, but the slower, more careful reader is rewarded with brilliant prose: “She’d fallen into an ancient art of the body and this body was seeking itself out fumbling along in ignorance.” In his intro, Moser also points out that Lispector was a perpetual reviser (like so many wonderful writers, from Henry James to Lore Segal, whose books merit a reread this year as well), and so one might imagine Ukraine-born, Brazil-raised Lispector holed up in Bern, a city she hated, teasing apart her sentences, groping toward an understanding of what it means to be a woman, what it means to create.

This dizzying, dazzling amalgamation of memoir and criticism spins out from its central subject—an abusive relationship between Carmen Maria Machado and the beautiful, angry blond woman with whom she falls in love—into investigations of literary tropes and cliches, queer theory and representation, and the power (or lack thereof) of storytelling. It’s a Very Smart Book, but one that does not sacrifice the gritty, real-life feelings entrenched in the relationship. It made me cry and think: my two favorite provocations in a book.

In an interview with the New York Times By the Book this year, Cathleen Schine called reading Samuel Johnson’s dictionary “joyous, guilt-free procrastination,” which is exactly the kind of gloriously nerdy, language-lover spirit that infuses The Grammarians. It is a book about twins and language—an apt pairing, given that both concepts elicit questions about bridging gaps between ourselves and others (language connects us, except when it falls short; twins are so similar, but see how they’re different!)—that is filled with word games and a feeling of genuine affection for human beings despite (and often because of) all their quirks.

More word games! Based on Ben Lerner’s life growing up as the child of psychiatrists in Topeka, Kansas, this novel weaves together a taut narrative around high school debating, talk therapy, and the precursors to today’s online trolls. I read (and wrote about) The Topeka School and The Grammarians back to back—an experience I highly recommend. Very different books that are much in conversation with each other.

“I received the new diagnosis of schizoaffective disorder after twelve years of being considered bipolar, in the middle of a psychiatric crisis that went on for ten months,” writes Esmé Weijun Wang in The Collected Schizophrenias, her incisive and personal exploration of mental illness. Over the course of the essay collection, Wang, a novelist and former lab manager at the Stanford psychology department, writes about tragic case studies and news items (the young man afflicted with paranoid schizophrenia who was murdered by his sister by the side of the road while their mother waited in the car), harrowing personal experiences (as an undergraduate, Wang was “asked to leave” Yale following two hospitalizations; she has experienced terrifying hallucinations that she describes as “a state of rapid fracture”), and historical and medical context. There is gravity and gallows humor, despair and optimism. In tackling common misconceptions and teasing out the complexities of living with—not to mention writing and talking about—her diagnosis, Wang has shone a much-needed klieg light onto a subject that has too long and too often been unknown and taboo.

These days, I find it difficult to commit to a book that I know will depress me, but the tremendous peril of turning a blind eye is at the heart of Nathaniel Rich’s investigation in Losing Earth, which unpacks the complex scientific breakthroughs and political decisions made during the decade from 1979 to 1989, when scientists, activists, and politicians were working toward a viable climate solution—one they might have achieved, had the effort not been essentially squashed by the United States government and fossil fuel companies. Rich is a deft storyteller (he is a novelist and a journalist, and recently wrote for Vanity Fair), and it is impossible to read the book, adapted from Rich’s single-article issue of the New York Times Magazine, without feeling a profound sense of anger. If that anger elicits action, all the better.

Daniel Mendelsohn's writing has been expanding my worldview for the last decade. (I first encountered his unique capacity for layered thought while taking classes from him as an undergrad at Bard College.) After receiving his Ph.D. in classics, Mendelsohn all but abandoned academia in favor of more public writings, from investigative memoirs like An Odyssey: A Father, A Son, and an Epic, to essays about classics and contemporary culture, often in conversation with each other, in the pages of the New York Review of Books and the New Yorker. The pieces in Ecstasy and Terror are a selection from the latter, and range magnificently in topic to include Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, the poetry of Sappho and Cavafy, the assassination of JFK, the Boston bombings, and Hanya Yanigahara’s A Little Life. His work is a much-needed reminder that it is possible to be fair, thoughtful, and accurate while nevertheless offering a definitively positive or negative critique. It is a pleasure to think with him.

Erin Vanderhoof, Associate Editor, VF.com

We’re living through a quiet renaissance of American poetry as a community art form, though it can be hard to tell through the din of politics and pop culture. Occasionally books emerge—the last great one was Claudia Rankine’s Citizen— that meld public anxiety with private expression of self in a way that makes them feel like required reading for anyone, regardless of your commitment to the cruelest art. In Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky, the tragedy of a nation takes form in a narrative collection of gorgeous poems. When a young deaf boy is murdered in an Eastern European street by a repressive government, the rest of the town also loses its ability to hear. Rather than (only) despair, the townspeople mount a resistance—and they go on living, having sex, and building families. The poems work together as the type of storytelling native to a writer comfortable with fragments. But individual lines pack a wallop, too. He writes, “You are alive, I whisper to myself, therefore something in you listens.”

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In my head, the Platonic ideal of a novel is something that is both hyper-personal in its content and universal in its concerns; both supremely lucid and completely beguiling; both indulgent of people’s impulses to create and their compulsions to burn it all down. That a book about a performing arts school in the suburbs of Houston could come closest to that form in 2019 is a perfect explanation of why Trust Exercise by Susan Choi will likely have resonance for years to come. The novel, which won this year’s National Book Award for fiction, starts with a summer romance between teens but comes to embody modern discussions about family, female agency, friendship, and the arts. It’s packed with metafictional tricks, and as a reader, you’re constantly destabilized but never so shocked that it feels cheap. Last month, when Vanity Fair spoke to Choi, a modest and perspicacious thinker in fiction and in life, she wouldn’t divulge what she thought really happened in the book. Some of the highest praise I can give to Trust Exercise is that I’m not positive that even Choi knows for sure.

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For a book about atrocities, Samantha Power’s 2002 Pulitzer Prize–winning tome, A Problem From Hell, managed to find an extremely wide audience. If you’ve been even slightly interested in foreign policy in the past two decades, you probably know about the war correspondent and sharp prose stylist whose experiences led her to a role in the Obama White House and the United Nations. In her memoir, The Education of an Idealist, she sidesteps the moral question of going from human rights activism and academia into policy-making by going back to the beginning: What were the forces, both internal and external, that allowed her to be unusually committed to advocacy in the first place? She tells the story of A Problem From Hell and the wartime excursions that led to it, but its focus on Power’s emotional development is unusual for a political memoir. There are few self-exculpatory arguments about the controversial aspects of her work, and many more disquisitions about how she came to think about empathy and emotional trauma while doing it. The book is aided by the strangely sweet love story at its core—her relationship with her husband, law professor Cass Sunstein (and Barack Obama's initial disapproval of the match), is a joyous counterpoint to the stresses of political life. It’s only natural that a person so fascinated by human rights would want to put her own experiences of being human to paper, and the result is both an interesting historical document and a fascinating read.

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The best tweet I saw all year said: “economics is just astrology for men.” It’s glib, sure, but it gets to a question that has occupied a lot of us since the Great Recession: Why is it that we take economists so seriously when they’ve frequently been proved wrong and we’re not entirely sure what they do? In his first book, The Economist’s Hour, New York Times business correspondent Binyamin Appelbaum traces the history of the economist as a public intellectual since the middle of the 20th century—and attempts to explain why economists have had an outsized influence in our politics and our cultural conversation ever since. It probably wouldn’t surprise too many of us to hear that personality, networks, and power politics played into it more than empirics, but Appelbaum lays out his case through narrative means, and it makes the book as irresistible as a reading experience as it is informative. I don’t think Appelbaum would agree that the theories he discusses are as flimsy as astrology, but The Economist’s Hour is a great resource for anyone looking to rethink the economic ideas our politicians have long accepted as faith.

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Arimeta Diop, Editorial Assistant, Vanity Fair

Much like watching Rihanna release a clothing line after a makeup line, seeing a favorite poet put out books that are not poetry collections holds a certain bittersweetness. There’s the understanding that this is a multi-hyphenate individual who does great work other than poetry, but we still yearn for what we first fell in love with. This year Hanif Abdurraqib—poet, essayist, editor and Twitter’s voice of reason through the everyday churn of pop culture—gave us what we came for. A Fortune for Your Disaster is a welcome return. “No one wants to imagine their god/as the knuckles cracking on a father watching their son/picking a good switch from the tree and certainly/no one wants to imagine their god as the tree.” The Ohioan ponders the merits of, then dares nonetheless to write about, flowers in the midst of this moment’s turmoil. He traces over the well-understood scars of heartbreak as only he can, peppering in specific cultural references that ground the reader in his worldview. And, with careful humor, he lays out the emotional murkiness that comes with grief and loss. The collection is that of catching up with an old friend without missing a beat.

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Alexis Kanter, Accessories Editor, Vanity Fair

ABCs of Art is a surprisingly fresh take on the classic children's ABCs book. In lieu of zoo animals, vegetables, and fruit, the book references various elements of iconic paintings to teach children the alphabet through the lens of fine art. Among others, Van Gogh's Starry Night and Gustav Klimt's The Kiss make an appearance, helping to mold your child into the budding art sophisticate of your dreams. I gifted this book to my energetic nephew, and its short witty rhymes have proved both easily digestible and a sufficient distraction from mom's smartphone.

Richard Lawson, Chief Critic, VF.com

Casey McQuiston’s bright, buoyant, goofily romantic Red, White & Royal Blue does something surprising. It’s got all the makings of chaste, YA-adjacent fanfic: the hot son of the first U.S. woman president falls in love with the hot grandson of the Queen of England. The story bounces along sweetly and engagingly, if a bit predictably. But then there’s also, well, a lot of sex in the book, something that’s rather rare for mainstream books featuring gay characters. McQuiston’s novel isn’t tawdry, but it certainly gets the blood up—that it’s been such a hit while still getting a bit naughty feels like some kind of minor revolution.

Dan Adler, Staff Writer, VF.com

In the two years since Gucci backed the reopening of his influential Harlem atelier, Dapper Dan’s designs have dotted countless red carpets. His memoir, Made in Harlem, co-written with Mikael Awake, is hardly about any of that, and it doesn’t dwell too long on the period when the boutique first opened either. Instead, as the title suggests, it’s about the making of the person. It’s spiritually probing, propulsive, and resists easy answers to questions about personal history. Its treatment of a parallel gambling career is richly textured and constitutes its own narrative arc. There are plenty of anecdotes here for fans of hip-hop and fashion, but there may be more to be learned about how we arrive at a style of self-inquiry. Amazon | IndieBound

Claire Landsbaum, Senior Editor, The Hive

Packed with dead peacocks, the unending anguish of lost love, and more Florida than you can possibly imagine, Mostly Dead Things might be the best book I read this year. Back in May, I spoke to author Kristen Arnett about taxidermy as a queer art form, and how she conceived of a love triangle that left me feeling empty and full at the same time.

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Tegan and Sara Quin’s memoir was released in September in conjunction with a new album—a reworking of songs they wrote as teenagers. When I read it, I felt as if a candy-striped cane had extended from the wings of my life and yanked me back to my own high school era. Before the book’s release, Tegan and Sara talked to me about their writing process, what it felt like to revisit being closeted, and all the acid they dropped.

I didn’t know anything about Bryan Washington’s debut short-story collection when I picked it up, except that people generally thought it was good. When I discovered it was set in Houston, where I grew up, and that its protagonist was gay, which I am, it felt like fate. Washington’s stories wind through the city; the book opens from the perspective of its narrator, Nicolás, a young half-black Latinx exploring his queerness amid the slow splintering of his family, and is interspersed with chapters from new characters. But always, Houston is the centerpiece. Washington’s writing is blunt yet beautiful, peppered with Spanish, a true exploration of what it means to be from and of a place and yet always other.

Anderson Tepper, Copy Production Director, Vanity Fair

The American novel is being reimagined, its map and scope redrawn by a new generation of writers. Two of the most gifted—both were awarded MacArthur “genius” grants this year—are Valeria Luiselli and Ocean Vuong. Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive (which I talked to her about earlier this year) is a brilliantly layered voyage through America’s heartland, a haunting meditation on mass deportations, historical amnesia, and marital rift.

Vuong’s debut novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, burns with a fierce poetic intensity as it follows a Vietnamese-American son’s struggle to find himself in the darker corners of Hartford, Connecticut. (Read my interview with Vuong here.)

“The literature of the children” is how author Alejandro Zambra has described the novels written by his generation of Chileans who grew up in the 1970s and ‘80s under the Pinochet dictatorship. (His own book, Ways of Going Home, is a classic of the genre.) As the violent protests in Chile made clear this fall, the shadow of that era still haunts the country. Alia Trabucco Zerán’s The Remainder creates an eery vision of modern-day Santiago, where the ghosts of the past linger in the streets. When three friends speed across the Andes to retrieve a wayward corpse, the action turns both madcap and melancholy, unearthing painful secrets of their parents’ lives during the years of repression.

Nona Fernández’s Space Invaders also considers how Chile’s dictatorship was perceived—or blindly felt—by the children of the time. Stitching together the experiences of a group of students who years later wonder about the fate of a former classmate, Fernández’s short, hypnotic novel plays with ideas of history and powerlessness, memory and forgetting. What did they think of their mysteriously missing friend? How much did they actually understand of her disappearance and her father’s connection to the regime? In impressionistic snippets of dreams, letter fragments, and the blinking imagery of video games they re-create a portrait of a generation’s lost childhood.

Gun Island, the latest work by acclaimed Indian author Amitav Ghosh, is everything you’d expect of a Ghosh book: an erudite thriller steeped in history that moves swiftly around the globe while tackling some of the world’s most pressing issues. Returning to the territory of his earlier novel The Hungry Tide, Ghosh is again concerned with the devastating effects of environmental change in the Sundarbans region (bordering India and Bangladesh), weaving together a plot that includes a Brooklyn bookseller obsessed with Bengali folklore, an Italian scholar of the Inquisition, and Bangladeshi migrant workers in Venice. Ghosh’s polymathic intelligence and restless conscience make every word he writes feel urgent and compelling.

Curdella Forbes’s A Tall History of Sugar is the most recent in an impressive new wave of novels by Jamaican writers—from Marlon James’s Booker Prize–winning A Brief History of Seven Killings to Kei Miller’s Augustown, Marcia Douglas’s The Marvelous Equations of the Dread, and Nicole Dennis-Benn’s Patsy, among others. Forbes provides an eclectic, feverish vision of Jamaican “history” from the 1950s to the present glimpsed through the experiences of an abandoned mystic-child named Moshe, whose translucent skin and mismatched eyes defy racial category. Who he is and who he becomes—like the country itself—is a riddle that unfolds in episodic bursts and linguistic flourishes.

Caitlin Brody, Entertainment Editor, Vanity Fair

Three Women is a masterpiece of exemplary journalism. Writer Lisa Taddeo spent eight years immersed in the romantic, sexual, and emotional lives of three women: Lina, who tries to distract herself from her lackluster marriage by embarking on an affair with a high school flame; Maggie, a high school student who has a relationship with her married English teacher; and Sloane, a restaurateur in an open marriage. This nonfiction work delves into desire, heartbreak, intimacy, and self-worth, lifting the veil on subjects that are often taboo—but no doubt, you'll find parts of yourself in these women.

I lugged around this hardcover everywhere I went, because if I had even 30 seconds to spare—in an elevator, waiting in line at the coffee shop—sticking my nose in my copy of City of Girls was exactly how I wanted to spend it. Elizabeth Gilbert's novel swirls with booze, cigarettes, and sequins in the 1940s coming-of-age tale centered on 19-year-old Vivian, who is kicked out of Vassar and heads to New York City, where she moves in with her eccentric and fabulous (is there any better combo?) aunt Peg, who owns a decrepit theater. With City of Girls's high energy, theatrical backdrop and unforgettable cast of characters, it's no wonder the swirling novel has already been optioned for the big screen.

It's been 11 years since Elizabeth Strout gave us the Pulitzer Prize–winning Olive Kitteridge and its titular, cantankerous protagonist living in Crosby, Maine; it's been five years since Frances McDormand portrayed Olive in the award-winning HBO miniseries. With Strout's follow-up, Olive, Again, readers are enveloped back into Strout's beautiful prose, with fly-on-the-wall glimpses into the everyday, intersecting lives of the somehow lovable Olive and her various neighbors—some of whom she reluctantly enjoys, and others who she barks at. Olive, Again is a perfect example of finding the extraordinary in the ordinary.

Mary Alice Miller, Associate Editor, Vanity Fair

Whenever there is a rare down moment in the office, I like to dig into the Vanity Fair archives for inspiration. For years, this exercise took place in our dusty back-issues closet, and occasionally, in the Condé Nast library where the cracking bound volumes of the magazine live in all of their old-book smell and yellowed-paper glory. This year, Vanity Fair digitized its archives. It's all there—every issue from 1913 to now. Also this year: We published a book based on some very specific archival content: the best of the magazine's writing about women by female contributors. Vanity Fair's Women on Women is an anthology of 30 profiles, essays, and columns from the ‘80s, ‘90s, aughts, and today. Gail Sheehy on Hillary Clinton. Ingrid Sischy on Nicole Kidman, Jacqueline Woodson on Lena Waithe. It's the kind of stuff I used to have to dig deep for, issue by issue, in our library. Now it's all in one place. Women on Women is a veritable time capsule and a study of how the ways we write about women have evolved over the last three decades. Perhaps I'm biased (having worked on this book for two years, I most certainly am), but Vanity Fair's Women on Women, edited by Radhika Jones with David Friend, is a treat.

This post has been updated.

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