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Keeping up with all of the latest must-read books can quickly turn into an overwhelming endeavor -- finish one, add five more to the pile, and the cycle wears on until it's simply too unbearable to pay attention anymore. Here's another solution: Leave the sorting of what's good and what's bad to us, dedicated readers of impeccable taste. We'll be regularly updating this list of the most exciting titles from 2019 -- join us on this literary journey, won't you?
Like this kind of stuff? Good: Check out our picks for the Best Movies of 2019 and the Best TV Shows of 2019. For all our favorite books from 2018, look no further.
Written by: Mallory O'Meara
Release date: March 5
Why it's a great book: A ton of important history has no doubt been lost due to good ol' fashioned sexism. For Hollywood monster movie fans, one of the most heinous of these crimes is that Milicent Patrick was written out of her own history as the real creator of the titular monster from Creature From the Black Lagoon. Here, O'Meara reverses this injustice, and then some, with her own investigative reporting into Patrick's entire life, from how her father was one of the chief architects on the Hearst Castle to her trailblazing career in animation as one of the first female animators at Disney to the forces that kept her from claiming the rightful credit to the monster. (Surprise! It was men.) Equally enlightening and infuriating, O'Meara wrote the posthumous biography Milicent Patrick deserved to have many, many years ago.
Written by: Rachel Deloache Williams
Release date: July 23
Why it's a great book: The story of Anna Delvey, aka Anna Sorokin, went as viral as things come when New York Magazine dropped a major exposé on her shady financial track record of stiffing everyone from hotels to her closest friends that eventually led to her arrest for larceny. The whole thing spun out into summer 2018 being dubbed the Summer of the Scam -- but that lighthearted fun excluded the very people at the end of this long con, namely Rachel Deloache Williams, at the time a photo editor for Vanity Fair and Anna Delvey's best friend. Her memoir recounts the intimate details of Delvey we never got in the press, including a record of their texts and emails and how Williams became the reluctant catalyst in taking her down, making for an engrossing read you'll blow through in a day.
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Written by: Roberto Bolaño (2666, The Savage Detectives)
Release date: February 5
Why it's a great book: This posthumous release from the Chilean master of fiction, translated from Spanish by Natasha Wimmer, was finished around 1984 and is seen as a sandbox for the ideas that would later coalesce into Bolaño's 1998 epic of aimless poets in Mexico City, The Savage Detectives. A brief novel that meanders through poetry workshops and unreturned letters to science fiction masters until finding its stride on the back of a motorcycle, The Spirit of Science Fiction reads like an early draft of an accomplished novelist finding his footing with a clear path to something that will eventually be great.
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Written by: Han Kang (The Vegetarian, Human Acts)
Release date: February 19
Why it's a great book: After winning the Man Booker Prize in 2016 for The Vegetarian, Han Kang returns with a much different kind of novel that aligns more to her past work as a poet. The White Book, translated from Korean by Deborah Levy, is a gorgeous autobiographical meditation on all-things white, from blizzards to breast milk, embedded in the narrator's mother's grief of losing a child hours after birth and her own guilt of trading lives with her dead sister. Between these chapters, the book -- Is it a poetry collection? A novel? -- becomes a kind of travelogue, the kind of observational, but fiercely introspective writing that would make W.G. Sebald jealous. In spite of the pages' deceptive sparseness, Han's genre-defying The White Book carries a quiet emotional heft that'll have you inhale its 157 pages in a single sitting.
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Written by: Karl Ove Knausgaard (My Struggle)
Release date: March 26
Why it's great: If you enjoyed (and/or finished) Karl Ove Knausgaard's six-volume solipsistic masterwork, My Struggle, you'll find plenty to love about his treatment of Norway's most celebrated painter, Edvard Munch, best known for his iconic "The Scream." Part art criticism, part biography, part personal essay, So Much Longing is like My Struggle in that it achieves a unique form that never condescends to the reader, while maintaining plenty of erudition in discussing its subject. In looking at Munch's work -- and art, in general -- Knausgaard hopes in part to discover: How does it inspire emotional reactions? Whether or not it's possible to answer that question will seem irrelevant when you're hypnotized reading about the author's feelings about curating an exhibition, or discussing Munch with a contemporary artist.
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Written by: G. Willow Wilson (Alif the Unseen, Ms. Marvel)
Release date: March 12
Why it's a great book: G. Willow Wilson's settings always have elements of the fantastical embedded in them or floating just on top of the surface, and The Bird King has both, crafting a mythic fairy tale from the historical time period around the Christian Reconquista of Muslim Iberia. With the Inquisition invading Granada, palace concubine Fatima and her beloved friend Hassan must flee their comfortable, controlling home environment, helped along their way by shapeshifting jinn and Hassan's mysterious magical power, to find a legendary land that may or may not even exist.
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Written by: Ted Chiang (Tower of Babylon, Hell Is the Absence of God)
Release date: May 7
Why it's a great book: Ted Chiang has won four Nebula Awards, four Hugo Awards, and four Locus Awards -- the equivalent of four hat tricks in the world of science fiction -- and one of his short stories, "Story of Your Life," was the basis of 2016's Arrival. Much of his work has focused on sentience, free will, and the perennial human quest for the meaning of life, and these nine stories in his new collection Exhalation are no different. Chiang's prose, as always, is taut, and these stories are complex but traffic in clear moral dramas, not fantastical galactic romps, even while the worlds in which they are set are so deeply fleshed out. Chiang traffics in hard sci-fi, not wildly speculative space opera: he prefers tight scientific constraints on his artificial intelligences and fluctuating laws of quantum physics. That gives the lessons these stories hold all the more power.
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Written by: Elizabeth McCracken (The Giant's House)
Release date: February 5
Why it's a great book: Perhaps single-handedly responsible for getting 21st century book readers to care about the old-timey pastime of candlepin bowling through her new novel, Bowlaway, Elizabeth McCracken spins a yarn over the course of nearly a century about generations of an unconventional matriarch and her small family, and the gossip-prone townspeople around them, who opens a small-town Massachusetts candlepin bowling alley. The novel's deliberate pacing, taking the time to drill down into the minutiae that defines a person, awful as they may be, is its greatest asset, yielding some particularly strange and funny passages.
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Written by: Mary Adkins
Release date: February 5
Why it's a great book: Told exclusively through email exchanges and posts from the platform Dying to Blog, where the terminally ill can, well, blog, When You Read This mostly deals with the eerie modern phenomenon of the digital footprint people leave behind when they die, and who gets what kind of say over complex last wishes. Though mostly exchanges between the deceased's sister and her now-former boss (and his insanely annoying, over-eager intern), Mary Atkins wrings a lot out of seemingly peripheral emails with the wrong people CC'd on it, marketing blasts, and comment threads that actually can say a lot about a person's interests and deepest concerns, and the health of the internet at large. It's an uncanny novel that hits the zeitgeist, while also finding the space to be profoundly sad.
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Tin House / Grove AtlanticWritten by: Kristen Arnett (Felt in the Jaw)
Release date: June 4
Why it's a great book: Kristen Arnett is the internet's queer librarian folk hero, and Mostly Dead Things, her debut novel, has been anticipated with much salivating and anxious pacing at least since the launch of her debut story collection, Felt In the Jaw, in August 2017, and probably since before that. It's a novel she calls a "lesbian domestic": queer, but not a coming-out story, it deals with a family reeling from the suicide of its patriarch, a messy love triangle in which two of the three wheels are siblings and the third disappeared without a word long ago, and a mother making pornographic art using her late husband's taxidermied animals. Oh, right: its protagonist, Jessa-Lynn, is a hard-drinking Floridian taxidermist. You haven't read anything like it.
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Written by: Niviaq Korneliussen
Release date: January 15
Why it's a great book: There are exactly zero writers from Greenland, a country with a population the size of New Brunswick, New Jersey, that have become household names in the United States. Try to name one, I dare you. Hopefully that changes with queer, Greenlandic author Niviaq Korneliussen's breakout novel (translated into English by Anna Halager), an absorbing and sad coming-out tale centered around five young adults in the writer's home country's capital city of Nuuk. Korneliussen takes care to make the background of the city, particularly its nightlife and smallness, come alive as her characters grapple with their identities and complicated, entwined relationships, on top of the country's entrenched homophobia and distinct neuroses.
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Archipelago / RiverheadWritten by: Antonio Tabucchi (Indian Nocturne, Requiem, Pereira Declares)
Release date: May 14
Why it's a great book: Italian writer and scholar Antonio Tabucchi specialized in the study of Portuguese literature, especially the work of Fernando Pessoa. His prose proves it, buried as it is in saudade, the feeling of deep longing, pervasive melancholy, and aching nostalgia at the absence of something loved profoundly and now lost. (Saudade is particularly characteristic of fado, a form of Portuguese music Tabucchi writes of here in "The Woman of Porto Pim," a story that includes an eel fisherman, a murderer, and a fado singer who are all, of course, the same person.) Tabucchi's stories -- translated from Italian by Martha Cooley, Frances Frenaye, Elizabeth Harris, Tim Parks, Antonio Romani, and Janice M. Thresher, and published posthumously -- drip with this longing and, too, with a dreamlike quality that is tempting to characterize as magic realism. In these stories, the world as we know it and its author's "shadow world" are often indistinguishable -- to the reader's great benefit.
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Written by: Sarah Blake (The Guest Book, The Postmistress)
Release date: April 9
Why it's a great book: Sarah Blake's Naamah would most succinctly be summed up as a biblical tale, but doing so would be a great disservice to those who'd be turned off by such a description and a total act of sacrilege to those who might gravitate towards it. (For evidence, check out the Goodreads reviews!) As a retelling of Noah and the ark, Naamah discards everything but the skeleton that you might have known about the Old Testament story, turning the parable into a visceral, sexy, and surreal struggle of life aboard a boat with wild animals after God kills the world's population through the Great Flood told entirely from the perspective of Noah's wife, Naamah. Doing away with any ancient pretenses, Blake writes with a thoroughly modern (and feminist) flare -- you won't find any "thou oughts" here. Instead, expect crises of faith written with the same frankness of the sex scenes, an angel kind of abusing its infinite power, and daydreaming asides of God as a being with three penises.
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Farrar, Straus and GirouxWritten by: Sarah Moss (The Tidal Zone, Signs for Lost Children, Bodies of Light)
Release date: January 8
Why it's a great book: The novella might be the ideal literary form for the 21st-century attention span. Like a novel, it's got heft and room for development of character; like a short story, it's gripping and forceful in its concision. Sarah Moss, whose last name is almost too on the nose, delivers the best of both worlds in Ghost Wall, a short and unmooring story following Silvie, a 17-year-old girl who is forced by her father, a history fanatic, to go back to the Iron Ages. Figuratively, that is: she must live for a time like a Briton in the pre-Roman era with three college students, an archaeology professor, and her dad. Silvie forages for food in a remote corner of the English countryside and watches as the men of the group adorn a replica of a "ghost wall" (meant to scare the advancing Romans away) with skulls. Her father slides into something resembling madness, or primeval, or both.
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Written by: Maylis de Kerangal (The Heart)
Release date: March 26
Why it's a great book: There should be more novels about food, mostly because food is one of the only things in this idiot world of which we could always use more. More is also what chefs are always searching for: more flavor, more techniques, more ways to present their culinary creations. More is also precisely what Mauro (coincidental name? doubtful), the titular cook at the center of Maylis de Kerangal's latest novel to be translated into English from the French (by Sam Taylor), is in quest of in this slim but punchy novel of tastes sought and triumphs thinly won, narrated by a young woman acquainted (and perhaps in love) with the scraggly young chef hoping to make his name.
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Catapult / New DirectionsWritten by: María Gainza
Release date: April 9
Why it's a great book: Maria Gainza's first book translated into English from Spanish (by Thomas Bunstead) is a curiously fascinating piece of autofiction, a genre where a writer mines her own life for inspiration without keeping to the factitical restraints of a memoir. Like Gainza, the protagonist here is an art critic also named María from Argentina, but as the author said in an interview with LitHub, the connections mostly end there, aside from a shared grave fear of flying. The loosely connected chapters are like short essays of sharply written art criticism, bringing in real artists, their lives, and their work as they apply to smaller moments in Maria's life. From thinking about Mark Rothko while her husband is in this hospital making friends with a prostitute, to exploring Gustave Courbet’s seascapes in relation to her strange, aimless cousin, each anecdote deftly draws the unassuming connections from art to life.
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Written by: Fleur Jaeggy (Proleterka, I Am the Brother of XX)
Release date: October 29
Why it's a great book: Technically, New Directions Publishing released Tim Parks' English-language translation of this extraordinarily eerie little Italian-language debut novel from Fleur Jaeggy, the David Lynch of Swiss literature, in 1990. Technically, its reissue doesn't hit shelves until October. Who cares? It's still the finest novel of the year: a boarding school tale set in an all-girls institution in northern Switzerland following the borderline-sociopathic narrator's failed attempts to conquer her beautiful schoolmate body and soul. Jaeggy's prose is sharp-angled and sinister, evoking the sensation of winter wind blowing through the Swiss mountains at night. Plus, it's short. Don't miss it.
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Riverhead / New DirectionsWritten by: Marlon James (A History of Seven Killings, John Crow's Devil, The Book of Night Women)
Release date: February 5
Why it's a great book: The first novel of Marlon James' new Dark Star Trilogy has been smartly marketed as "an African Game of Thrones" -- only that sells Black Leopard, Red Wolf short on the strength of its incisive prose and its truly magical world-building about the unwieldiness of truth. It wholly makes sense that Michael B. Jordan bought the rights to turn this novel into a movie shortly after its release; it's wrought with striking imagery of typical fantasy staples like witches and giants made new, and a driving plot of shape-shifting mercenaries searching for a murdered child that ends -- or rather, starts -- with the protagonist, Tracker, imprisoned and interrogated over what happened. The rest is an expansive, exciting, exhaustive epic that's only just begun.
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Written by: Yukio Mishima (Spring Snow, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, Golden Colours)
Release date: April 30
Why it's a great book: One of Japan's greatest novelists was also one of its strangest and most badass. Following a life of polarizing nationalism, Yukio Mishima killed himself via ritual suicide following an unsuccessful attempt at a coup d'état by the militia he founded and led (the "Tatenokai," or "shield society") to restore the power of the emperor of Japan -- just two years after he lost out on the Nobel Prize in Literature to his contemporary, Yasunari Kawabata. But that wasn't for lack of daring work. Star, translated from Japanese by Sam Bett, is a strange, avant-garde little novella following a young actor whose portrayals of yakuza in a series of successful films has won him a significant following among Japan's women, along with the kind of attention that could drive any person slowly insane. It's a compelling portrait of celebrity meltdown, and especially potent during an era in which a melted-down celebrity is also ruler of the free world. Time for another coup?
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Written by: Sophie Mackintosh
Release date: January 8
Why it's a great book: During this dystopian era in which feminism, despite all the brazen societal and governmental efforts to quash it, is thriving in the public sphere, the words "feminist dystopia" should be enough to hook any reader on a book. If they're not, consider that Sophie Mackintosh's debut novel also features: a remote island surrounded by barbed wire; three sisters trained to feel no emotions; a Greek chorus (sort of); a gun to make Chekhov warily proud; and lots of literal toxic masculinity (no, really -- it's literal). This harrowing book manages, somehow, to simultaneously walk the line between fairy tale, coming-of-age tale, and morality tale. It does them all with plenty of intensity, and with muscular prose to boot.
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Written by: Pola Oloixarac (Savage Theories)
Release date: April 16
Why it's a great book: Her follow-up to 2017's criminally underrated Savage Theories, Dark Constellations confirms once again that Pola Oloixarac is probably the smartest person in whatever room she's in. Known as the brightest literary voice in Argentina today, Oloixarac has the singular ability to connect seemingly unrelated events across centuries as universal truths about the way the world works, down to its biological level. Dark Constellations, translated from Spanish by Roy Kesey, is broken up into three sections, starting with the field log of a young researcher studying strange plants in the Canary Islands in the 1880s, fast-forwarding 100 years later to a mini-biography of Argentina's first huge anarcho-hacker, and ending in a secret technohub in 2024 with an ethically unpalatable DNA and surveillance experiment called the Estromatoliton project. It's a dense, rewarding novel for those open to an intellectual challenge.
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Written by: Sally Rooney (Conversations With Friends)
Release date: April 16
Why it's a great book: Sally Rooney's debut novel Conversations With Friends earned her a reputation as a freakishly prodigious writer, but this Man Booker Prize-long-listed follow-up proves she’s a Great Writer, period. It follows the intense, magnetic connection of two young people from different social classes in Ireland over the course of high school and college, and somehow feels utterly modern while giving you the old-fashioned pleasures that are, well, the reason you pick up books to begin with: rich characters you care for so deeply it’s scary, a plot that’ll take precedence over your actual life, and a sense that spending time in Rooney’s brain has made you a smarter, better person.
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Written by: Jia Tolentino
Release date: August 6
Why it's a great book: It is a truth fairly universally acknowledged that Jia Tolentino, currently a New Yorker staff writer, is the best young reported essayist of her generation, much to the envy of all the other essayists in her generation. Her debut collection from Random House does little to disprove the argument. There are nine essays in them about "self deception," but the only thing Tolentino could possibly be deceiving herself about is how utterly perceptive she truly is as a journalist, and how skilled in presenting those perceptions she is as a writer. Being Jia Tolentino should be illegal. You really shouldn't be able to own a dog this floofy and be this exceptional at everything you do.
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Written by: Robert Macfarlane (Landmarks, The Lost Words, The Old Ways)
Release date: May 2
Why it's a great book: The latest in MacFarlane's unofficial "series" of books on humanity's relationship with natural phenomena, Underland is a tremendous undertaking often spiritual in its scope, detailing the many ways humans have created our connections with the world underneath the Earth's surface, from swathes of cave paintings within our remotest mountains to webs of grisly catacombs beneath our oldest cities to mines so deep and so silent it's the only place where scientists can listen for the breath of the universe. The winner of 2019's Wainwright Golden Beer Book Prize, a UK-based award for nature books, Underland is a true masterpiece of naturalism, one that will have you in complete and total awe of our world.
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Written by: Helen Oyeyemi (What is Not Yours Is Not Yours, Boy, Snow, Bird)
Release date: March 5
Why it's a great book: Gingerbread is undoubtedly the weirdest book you'll read all year. Helen Oyeyemi's prose pushes and pulls in ways that make every sentence essential; skim too lackadaisically through a paragraph and you probably missed a crucial detail. In this way, Oyeyemi's writing here feels almost refreshingly dangerous while recounting a fantastical, hilarious, and wry story about three generations of Lee women hailing from the nonexistent (according to Google) farmsteaded countryside of Druhástrana, catapulting to Britain, and back. A story within a story (within a story), the novel asks you to trust in its methods -- talking dolls which might also be trees, the suggestion of wealth managing Stormzy, and, of course, the mythic Lee women's gingerbread recipe -- and wholehearted buy-in with few spoilers is absolutely the best approach to this clever reimagined twisting of the Grimm fairy tale, Hansel and Gretel, which is practically unrecognizable in this form. Never without a sinister cloud hanging over it despite its whimsical airiness, Gingerbread is one of the rare finds where the first reading is a head-spinning delight, but a second and third turn would inevitably open the door to the novel's delirious true genius.
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