The Great American Novels
136 books that made America think
In 1868, a little-known writer by the name of John William DeForest proposed a new type of literature, a collective artistic project for a nation just emerging from an existential conflict: a work of fiction that accomplished “the task of painting the American soul.” It would be called the Great American Novel, and no one had written it yet, DeForest admitted. Maybe soon.
A century and a half later, the idea has endured, even as it has become more complicated. In 2024, our definition of literary greatness is wider, deeper, and weirder than DeForest likely could have imagined. At the same time, the novel is also under threat, as the forces of anti-intellectualism and authoritarianism seek to ban books and curtail freedom of expression. The American canon is more capacious, more fluid, and more fragile than perhaps ever before. But what, exactly, is in it? What follows is our attempt to discover just that.
In setting out to identify that new American canon, we decided to define American as having first been published in the United States (or intended to be—read more in our entries on Lolita and The Bell Jar). And we narrowed our aperture to the past 100 years—a period that began as literary modernism was cresting and contains all manner of literary pleasure and possibility, including the experimentations of postmodernism and the narrative satisfactions of genre fiction.
This still left millions of potential titles. So we approached experts—scholars, critics, and novelists, both at The Atlantic and outside it—and asked for their suggestions. From there, we added and subtracted and debated and negotiated and considered and reconsidered until we landed on the list you’re about to read. We didn’t limit ourselves to a round, arbitrary number; we wanted to recognize the very best—novels that say something intriguing about the world and do it distinctively, in intentional, artful prose—no matter how many or few that ended up being (136, as it turns out). Our goal was to single out those classics that stand the test of time, but also to make the case for the unexpected, the unfairly forgotten, and the recently published works that already feel indelible. We aimed for comprehensiveness, rigor, and open-mindedness. Serendipity, too: We hoped to replicate that particular joy of a friend pressing a book into your hand and saying, “You have to read this; you’ll love it.”
This list includes 45 debut novels, nine winners of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and three children’s books. Twelve were published before the introduction of the mass-market paperback to America, and 24 after the release of the Kindle. At least 60 have been banned by schools or libraries. Together, they represent the best of what novels can do: challenge us, delight us, pull us in and then release us, a little smarter and a little more alive than we were before. You have to read them.
Jump to this decade: 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, 2010s, 2020s.
The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1925
Fitzgerald’s third novel received mixed reviews and was a commercial flop, plunging its author into a sense of failure from which he never really recovered. A century later, Gatsby is one of the few books still required of most high-school students. Why has it achieved that rare thing, permanence? Because the prose, sentence by gorgeous sentence, goes down like spun sugar. Because the romantic myth of self-creation speaks deeply to readers—especially Americans, especially young ones. Because no novel has more thrillingly portrayed the corrupting obsessions of love and money. And because the story of the “foul dust” that swirls through Gatsby’s mind—the empty allure of Daisy and Tom Buchanan, the partygoers of West Egg, the American dream itself—is told by the most stringent and generous of narrators. — George Packer
An American Tragedy, by Theodore Dreiser, 1925
A contemporaneous review of An American Tragedy in The Atlantic compared Dreiser’s “method of creation” to that of an oyster. The author researched exhaustively—for this novel, he gathered everything he could find about the 1906 drowning of a pregnant girl in upstate New York and the young man sentenced to the electric chair for the crime. After ingesting all that information, Dreiser, much like the oyster, “smoothed, agglutinated, worked over” the material for a decade, to produce more than 800 dense pages. Dreiser’s pearl was an intricate morality tale: the making and unmaking of Clyde Griffiths, a boy who wants out of poverty, and then, once he glimpses a new life for himself, will do anything to protect his status. This country will make you chase the wrong things, and the consequences, in this sordid tale, are no less than death. — Gal Beckerman
The Making of Americans, by Gertrude Stein, 1925
Stein’s nearly 1,000-page opus is perhaps the work on this list that most shrewdly explodes the conventions of the novel while making the case for a different kind of storytelling. The Making of Americans tells the saga of a family across three generations; its subtitle, “Being a History of a Family’s Progress,” both explains the premise and serves as an early taste of Stein’s peculiar, elliptical style. Stein writes very plainly, but also oddly—“just far enough out of the ordinary to disconcert,” as the novelist William H. Gass put it. Using simple words and phrases that she repeats and morphs into almost chantlike rhythms, Stein examines the roles of fathers and mothers and children, as members of a family and as individuals. This is a challenging, often infuriating read. But if you’re able to give yourself over to its dulcet, quasi-musical cadences, you might develop the sneaking suspicion that more conventional narratives are only scratching the surface of what language can reveal. Stein’s risky repetitions, and the way she writes sentences—cerebrally but always playfully—to draw attention to both the passage of time and the eternity of the present, are mind-expanding. And they’re evidence of true ambition and vision. — Jane Yong Kim
Death Comes for the Archbishop, by Willa Cather, 1927
Cather thought the 19th-century realist novel of Balzac and his heirs was “over-furnished.” Death Comes for the Archbishop is as elegantly spare as one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Prairie houses. Set in the New Mexican outback “still waiting to be made into a landscape,” the novel follows two French clergymen seeking to establish order in the chaotic and violent region after American incorporation in 1850. Cather’s Father Latour is scrupulously respectful of the local Indians, friendly with the frontiersman Kit Carson, and not afraid to pull a gun on predatory settlers. Not Catholic herself, Cather imbued her archbishop with an Emersonian faith that true miracles arise from refining our perceptions, “so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there about us always.” — Christopher Benfey
A Farewell to Arms, by Ernest Hemingway, 1929
Hemingway wrote 47 potential endings to A Farewell to Arms, all of which Scribner published in a 2012 collection. Among them were “The Nada Ending” (“You will die and I will die and that’s all I can promise you”) and “The Fitzgerald Ending,” suggested to Hemingway by his friend F. Scott Fitzgerald. Yet the one Hemingway eventually settled on helped make this book one of the most unforgettable novels of the 20th century: “After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain.” Based largely on Hemingway’s own experiences during World War I, the novel follows an American lieutenant and his doomed romance with the English nurse Catherine Barkley. Their love story, unfolding across Europe, is shot through with quiet existentialism and disillusionment. Hemingway’s rhythmic, stripped-down, often-mimicked style lulls readers into a sort of trance that allows his final line to explode like a tossed grenade, devastating in its simplicity. — Valerie Trapp
Passing, by Nella Larsen, 1929
This classic novel of the Harlem Renaissance studies the charged relationship between two women, childhood friends who reencounter each other in the racially stratified environment of 1920s New York. There is the prim and orderly Irene Redfield, an upright member of the Black bourgeoisie. And there is the seductive, pleasure-seeking Clare Kendry, who “passes” as white. These women, first presented as opposites, come to seem like eerie doubles, for this is a novel in which even the most profound binary division of Larsen’s era—the color line—is revealed as unstable. With the ringing laugh and languorous eyes of the doomed Clare, Larsen transformed the stock character of the “tragic mulatta.” The “old Harlem” Larsen depicts is long gone. But her haunting inquiry into the mutability of identity will retain its power for years to come. — Charlie Tyson
The Sound and the Fury, by William Faulkner, 1929
The Sound and the Fury is, genre-wise, a work of southern Gothic—but menace afflicts more than the novel’s plot. Its storytelling is haunted too. Faulkner was a contemporary of Freud’s, and the fortunes of the Compson family of Mississippi, conveyed by multiple members, spin psychology’s emergent insights into fiction. Though the novel’s immediate timeline is constrained (much of its action takes place over the Easter weekend of 1928), its story races and roves: Readers learn of ancient hatreds, remedial kindnesses, dissolutions both preventable and inescapable. And Faulkner relays much of the saga through stream-of-consciousness narration that was innovative in its time and remains resonant in our own. The novel’s several narrators are not merely unreliable; they are also incompatible. They live the world so differently that the discord leaks into their language. The result is a story that is occasionally beautiful, frequently wrenching, and thoroughly destabilizing—a tale told by a genius, signifying, somehow … everything. — Megan Garber
Absalom, Absalom!, by William Faulkner, 1936
Faulkner won two National Book Awards, two Pulitzer Prizes, and a Nobel over the course of his career, but he also, for a while, held the Guinness World Record for the longest sentence in literature. It comes in the middle of Chapter 6 of Absalom, Absalom! and it is 1,288 words long. It contains at least eight distinct scenes, more than a dozen characters, and very little punctuation. Like so many of Faulkner’s sentences, it runs on, swerves abruptly, implodes, and is really, really not for everyone: The New York Times, in its pan of Absalom, described Faulkner’s writing as “one of the most complex, unreadable, and uncommunicative prose styles ever to find its way into print.” But the reward is commensurate with the effort, because Faulkner is literature’s master technician, and every one of his choices is intentional. These sentences are fractals, each as complex and as thrilling as the entire novel—a structurally innovative exploration of hubris, legacy, race, obsession, and evil that traces the rise and fall of a poor Virginian determined to build a dynasty in antebellum Mississippi. Faulkner isn’t uncommunicative; he’s communicating it all, all the time. “The truth seems to be that Faulkner fears banality,” that Times review surmised. Thank goodness. — Ellen Cushing
Nightwood, by Djuna Barnes, 1936
One of the first popular novels to portray lesbian relationships—and an early example of what today would be called metafiction—Nightwood follows members of Paris’s underground scene in the 1920s as they are pulled into the orbit of the young American Robin Vote, who leaves behind multiple anguished men and women over the course of a story that also explores anger, identity, and isolation. Barnes’s intimate prose explores the convolutions of these relationships, and the passion driving them. As the book’s editor, T. S. Eliot, wrote, the result is “so good a novel that only sensibilities trained on poetry can wholly appreciate it.” — Elise Hannum
East Goes West, by Younghill Kang, 1937
In 1921, Kang left behind his native Korea for America, just before all Asians were legally barred from entering the country. He settled in New York, worked at NYU and the Met, married an American woman, and connected with his future editor, Maxwell Perkins. In 1931, The Grass Roof—a bildungsroman starring the precocious young Chungpa Han—made Kang the first Korean American novelist. East Goes West is the rare sequel that eclipses its predecessor; the word-drunk Han is less of a prig here, more the endlessly amusing innocent abroad. Kang’s overstuffed opus shape-shifts from vivid New York novel to hectic picaresque to nightmare vision of a collapsed American dream. — Ed Park
Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston, 1937
Hurston was born in segregation and died penniless, but throughout her life, she deplored the role of victim and insisted on a fierce independence. She was a conservative who opposed both the New Deal and desegregation, a Black woman who refused to be categorized by race or to allow male judgment to crush her spirit. Discrimination, she once wrote, didn’t anger but only surprised her: “How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It’s beyond me.” A prolific writer, she was also an anthropologist of Black American and Caribbean culture, and her field research informs her great novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. Set in the small, all-Black Florida town of her childhood, it’s a bewitching folktale, told in a rich vernacular, about loyalty, jealousy, heartbreak, and a woman’s unkillable struggle for fulfillment. Criticized by Richard Wright, W. E. B. Du Bois, and others for ignoring politics, Hurston replied: “I am not interested in the race problem, but I am interested in the problems of individuals, white ones and black ones.” She upset the expectations of her time and still challenges those of ours. — George Packer
U.S.A., by John Dos Passos, 1937
This utterly original trilogy—since collected in one volume—conveys the wild energy, brutal injustice, and disillusioned hopes of the young republic, from the turn of the 20th century through the First World War to the stock-market crash of 1929. Each novel is a hybrid contraption, consisting of a recurring cast of generally thwarted fictional characters; prose-poem biographies of the era’s public figures, such as Frank Lloyd Wright, J. P. Morgan, Woodrow Wilson, and Isadora Duncan; autobiographical interludes in first-person stream of consciousness; and “Newsreels” that mash up headlines, song lyrics, ad slogans, and overheard vernacular. Unlike most American literature, U.S.A. is more interested in social history and class conflict than in the private dramas of individuals. This might help explain why Dos Passos—who once ranked in the company of Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway—has fallen into the near-obscurity that is the fate of most writers, even some great ones. — George Packer
Ask the Dust, by John Fante, 1939
Ask the Dust brings the downtown Bunker Hill area of Los Angeles to sharp, raging life. Set during the Great Depression, the novel follows Arturo Bandini, a striving writer (and Fante’s alter ego), as he tries to get his stories published, keep from getting kicked out of his crummy boarding house, and make Camilla, a waitress, fall in love with him. Fante writes with an intoxicating energy; I’ve never forgotten his spare, exuberant description of Bandini’s diet of oranges, which he buys for five cents a dozen: “Eat them in bed, eat them for lunch, push them down for dinner.” This is an L.A. novel through and through: Bandini comes to the city “to write a love story, to learn about life.” Over the course of a book that somehow feels made of automotive exhaust, dust from the Mojave Desert, and hot Santa Ana winds—a book that is also about the fierce allure of art—he does exactly that. — Jane Yong Kim
The Big Sleep, by Raymond Chandler, 1939
In The Big Sleep, Chandler introduced the world to Philip Marlowe, the hard-boiled, incorruptible private detective who would feature in a series of novels and stories. What chance did anyone have? It was as if Rembrandt had inked comic books, or Rodin had sculpted sex dolls: Chandler, a writer who could somehow dazzle while describing a bougainvillea in a Los Angeles streetscape, placed an impossible-to-dislike protagonist in intricate plots with drawn-out mysteries, surprise twists, seductive dames, and enough corpses to keep the mortician’s wife in mink. The voice that croaks to life in The Big Sleep would be imitated many times over, but this was the book that first exposed readers to that combination of cynicism and wit. With time and a big-enough magnifying glass, you might spot an inconsequential loose end, but no matter. Chandler would be worth reading even if the plots were nonsense—for mood, for character, for sentence-by-sentence quality, and, most of all, for the lines. Here’s one to whet your appetite: “Dead men are heavier than broken hearts.” — Conor Friedersdorf
The Day of the Locust, by Nathanael West, 1939
West’s darkest, most hard-edged novel acutely renders the loneliness and struggle at the outskirts of Hollywood’s limelight. The Day of the Locust is populated with sad sacks, daydreamers, and weirdos: the sloppy-grinned studio artist Tod, who decorates sets while working on an epic painting called The Burning of Los Angeles; the aspiring actor Faye, blessed with looks but not talent; the accountant Homer, plagued by inner angst and a pair of curiously large hands. Theirs is an insignificant world that’s propped up by fantasy and artifice, not unlike Homer’s pitiful rented cottage, with its “roof thatching, which was not really straw but heavy fireproof paper colored and ribbed to look like straw.” West saw Hollywood with an unusual clarity, the way its cruel absurdities inevitably lead to tragedy and violence. He didn’t pull his punches, and the novel is the more brilliant for it. — Jane Yong Kim
The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck, 1939
Ma and Pa Joad and the rest of their world-weary clan, packed inside a makeshift truck, driving to California through squalid Depression shantytowns—the images of Steinbeck’s seventh novel are so indelible now that readers may overlook how radical they were in their time. At a moment when many of his novelist contemporaries were primarily interested in the glamorous and coastal, Steinbeck devoted himself to looking human suffering square in the face, telling stories about unfortunate, unloved, unlovable people in a plainspoken and sometimes profane style. (“I tried to write this book the way lives are being lived, not the way books are written,” he told his editor.) Readers, especially working-class ones, adored The Grapes of Wrath, making it an instant best seller, even as powerful tastemakers criticized its sentimentality and its politics. Since then, it has been banned and burned, widely assigned and widely adapted, turned into shorthand for the horrors of the Dust Bowl and the perseverance of the downtrodden; it is also probably the only novel on this formidable list to have inspired a Bruce Springsteen song. But before all that, there were the Joads: refugees, survivors, driven away from home by desperation and climate disaster, headed west, into that golden light. — Ellen Cushing
Native Son, by Richard Wright, 1940
The story of Bigger Thomas—a poor Black man who responds to the conditions of his life with progressively more brutal violence—has been provoking vigorous debate since it was published. Wright’s subverted bildungsroman suggests that American racism is as much to blame for Bigger’s gruesome crimes as he is: Every Black man, the novel contends, is already guilty in the eyes of the law. Native Son is not a particularly subtle book, to be sure, but the ideas about anti-Blackness and poverty that Wright presented nearly a century ago are still relevant—and worth seriously engaging with—today. — Hannah Giorgis
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, by Carson McCullers, 1940
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter launched the career of one of our greatest and most original writers: A 23-year-old white woman from segregated Georgia, born Lula Carson Smith, who had taken the first name Carson and the last name of her new husband, and who had never published a novel before. In his review in The New Republic, Richard Wright—the author of Black Boy and Native Son—wrote, “To me the most impressive aspect of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter is the astonishing humanity that enables a white writer, for the first time in Southern fiction, to handle Negro characters with as much ease and justice as those of her own race.” In a life plagued by illness and addiction, resulting in an early death at age 50, McCullers produced four novels, an unfinished memoir, two plays, and many short stories, letters, and commentaries. But Heart demonstrates her rare, core capacity to inhabit any kind of person. In her work, she created characters who were Black (conversing across differences, with no white people in the room), Jewish, deaf, Filipino, and every kind of queer. — Sarah Schulman
A Time to Be Born, by Dawn Powell, 1942
Set in New York City just before America’s entry into World War II, Powell’s satire tells the story of a pompous newspaperman named Julian Evans and his second wife, Amanda Keeler, a manipulative writer who stole him out from under the nose of his first. After Amanda’s novel becomes wildly successful, bolstered by planted reviews in Julian’s papers, she spends her days throwing parties, expounding on pressing geopolitical matters in various outlets (with the help of the most informed experts money can buy), and avoiding her husband. Powell’s novel is effortlessly funny, fantastically mean without ever being cynical, and particularly astute on gender politics while avoiding earnestness and essentialism; as Powell’s friend Edmund Wilson once put it, “The women who appear in her stories are likely to be as sordid and absurd as the men.” — Maya Chung
All the King’s Men, by Robert Penn Warren, 1946
The greatest novel about American politics is a mirror of its subject—more than a little messy, occasionally melodramatic, but also completely transfixing. Warren was inspired by the Depression era’s most seductive populist, the Louisiana politician Huey P. Long, who was assassinated in 1935, and he fictionalized him as the unforgettably charismatic Willie Stark. Warren lyrically and unstintingly captures the American South in a time before air-conditioning, writes about corruption with gritty realism, and displays both the rhetorical power of the demagogue and the convenience of moral relativism. Warren once protested that his book wasn’t actually about political life but what he described vaguely as “deeper concerns”—which is, in fact, why he so nails his depiction of it. — Franklin Foer
The Street, by Ann Petry, 1946
The Street was the first novel by a Black woman to sell 1 million copies. It tells the story of Lutie Johnson, a single mother bringing up her son in 1940s Harlem. The story rarely leaves this neighborhood, which grows more and more claustrophobic to both Lutie and the reader. In lucid prose, Petry captures the physical exhaustion and unforgiving logic of poverty, the way its calculations leave no margin for error. And although we meet multiple residents of this street, Petry is almost relentlessly focused on Lutie. Through the prism of her experience, the novel delivers a powerful indictment of racism, sexism, and the class system in America. At times, The Street reads almost like documentation; this is clear-eyed critique by way of clear-eyed observation, and it’s all the more devastating because of it. — Katie Kitamura
In a Lonely Place, by Dorothy B. Hughes, 1947
To try to re-create the thrill of World War II combat, Dix Steele takes to wandering the streets of Los Angeles at night—and committing serial murder. Hughes wastes little time hiding her killer’s identity, instead building a gripping noir in the anticipation of his inevitable capture. — Elise Hannum
The Mountain Lion, by Jean Stafford, 1947
Stafford is one of the 20th century’s most undervalued writers, too often remembered only as Robert Lowell’s first wife—the one he disfigured in a car crash while driving drunk—instead of as the top-tier fiction writer she was. In masterful short stories and especially her second and greatest novel, she managed an American miracle: combining Jamesian psychological depth and style—at once lapidary and viscous, like see-through molasses—with Mark Twain’s backwoods wildness and humor. The Mountain Lion sits, nestled between What Maisie Knew and Huckleberry Finn, on the slim shelf of great novels about childhood. It’s the story of a pair of siblings, 8-year-old Molly and 10-year-old Ralph, and the summers they spend on their uncle’s ranch in Colorado. Stafford treats both natural landscapes and the inner worlds of childhood with extraordinary reverence, as sites of perilous mystery. In her portrayal of Ralph, she writes the single greatest account I know of an adolescent boy coming into his sexuality, a terrifying discovery that alienates him from himself and others. How could she know this? I wondered as I read it. Only by means of a great writer’s clairvoyance. — Garth Greenwell
The Catcher in the Rye, by J. D. Salinger, 1951
Allie’s baseball glove. The ducks in Central Park. Mr. Antolini. Phoebe on the carousel. And the imitated-ever-after voice of the teenage narrator, Holden Caulfield, who sees “phonies” everywhere: “They were coming in the goddam window.” Caulfield’s alienation may be associated with the 1950s, but Salinger began giving form to his central character at least a decade earlier, while still a student at Columbia. (In manuscript form, Salinger even carried Caulfield in his knapsack when he landed at Utah Beach on D-Day.) Catcher has anchored high-school reading lists for generations, and read is still what you have to do—it has never been made into a movie. — Cullen Murphy
Charlotte’s Web, by E. B. White, 1952
Many critics have called Charlotte’s Web the greatest children’s book of the 20th century. The praise is both richly deserved and something of an error. White’s novel may take place, for the most part, on a farm; its protagonists may be a pig named Wilbur, a spider named Charlotte, and a feisty girl named Fern; it may involve, through Charlotte’s ability to weave words into her webs, a little bit of magic. But childishness, in the novel, is a feint. A standard work of kid lit would not describe a young pig learning of his own mortality and moaning in reply. (The novel’s genesis may be found in an essay White published in The Atlantic called “Death of a Pig.”) Nor would it feature a spider asking, “After all, what’s a life, anyway?” White’s novel—as Wilbur, affable and innocent and raised to be slaughtered, fights for survival; as Charlotte and other creatures strive to save him—is a sly kind of fable, and a uniquely mature one: a nature-versus-man adventure that considers the tenderness of the human story. Growing up, growing old, finding purpose along the way—it’s all here, in this children’s book and this novel for the ages, conveyed through a spider that is, in the story’s estimation, that rarest and most remarkable of things: “a true friend and a good writer.” — Megan Garber
Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison, 1952
You might love to tell people at parties that Invisible Man is one of your favorite books; perhaps it even is. The first-ever novel written by a Black author to win the National Book Award, Invisible Man has taken on a revered status among the signifiers of American erudition. There’s a reason, though, for all of that esteem. Through the surrealist journey of its nameless narrator, from a gladiator-style fight in the post-Reconstruction South to a hidden underground apartment in the North, Ellison’s novel is to this day the most compelling treatment of W. E. B. Du Bois’s theory of Black “double consciousness.” In his nightmares, the narrator encounters a motif, a letter stating simply: “To Whom It May Concern, Keep This Nigger Boy Running.” He’s a race man, after all. — Vann R. Newkirk II
Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury, 1953
In addition to writing one of literature’s all-time-great first lines, Bradbury bestowed twin gifts upon humanity with Fahrenheit 451. The first gift is the terrible familiarity of the world he made, and the second is his blueprint for a way out—a warning, then an exit. Here are the firemen who burn books instead of putting out fires. Here is the mechanical hound of surveillance technology tracking your every move. Here are the screen-addled citizens, their “night-frightened faces, like gray animals peering from electric caves.” But there are also the rebels. There are those who still ask questions and still read books. Those who pick dandelions, and smell autumn on forest walks, and gaze in wonder at the stars in “great processions of wheeling fire.” Dystopian futures will always creep in if you let them, but those who seek beauty and truth can still fight to win. — Adrienne LaFrance
Maud Martha, by Gwendolyn Brooks, 1953
Although Virginia Woolf is usually credited as a progenitor of stream-of-consciousness writing, Maud Martha —the only novel by Brooks, who was best known as a poet—pushes such techniques in new directions, with powerful, lyrical narration. And Maud Martha is no Mrs. Dalloway: She is a Black woman contending with the limits on her dreams and desires imposed by racism, colorism, and sexism. Full of disappointment but also a survivor’s joy, Maud Martha is a complicated woman, and readers get to follow her into the close confines of domesticity. The story is told in a series of linked vignettes, and its innovative structure will forever be emulated. The book’s feminist intimacy and its percolating anger show that Brooks was not writing for a mainstream, white audience; she was speaking to another reader altogether. — Helena María Viramontes
The Adventures of Augie March, by Saul Bellow, 1953
“In Augie March I wanted to invent a new sort of American sentence,” Bellow said of his third, wildly amusing novel. Its narrator, Augie March, is a fidgety, impulsive, intelligent, and cocky boy, a Jewish American picaro who gets swept up in the illicit schemes and hijinks of Depression-era Chicago. The sentences that Bellow invented do not just flow; they exert an explosive pressure that never, ever lets up. Augie March is a great geyser of a novel, spewing high eloquence and low comedy, flooding the eyes and ears with Yiddish puns and gangster slang. Yet Bellow’s riotous style carries in its depths a terrible, almost unbearable existential angst. Augie’s restlessness is born of his desperation to understand what he should do and who he should be. “His desire is to be an Augie,” Bellow explained. “Surely the greatest human desire—not the deepest but the widest—is to be used.” But what if you can’t figure out how the world should use you? Then you end up “an Augie”—a wisecracking, uninhibited antihero, and one of American literature’s mildest and most lovable outlaws. — Merve Emre
Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov, 1955
The 1997 paperback edition of Lolita has a blurb on the back calling it “the only convincing love story of our century.” This is just one example of how people, even for decades after the initial uproar about the novel’s publication (in 1955 in France and in 1958 in the U.S., after some skittishness about obscenity), continue to be so weird about it. Lolita is, of course, not a love story but a horrific spin on the travelogue. And the line most often cited as its first (“Light of my life, fire of my loins”) is not the actual first line, or on the first page. Oh well. Everybody knows what it’s about. Lolita needs its disgusting premise for the opportunity that such constraints offer for inventive language, or “aesthetic bliss,” which was Nabokov’s self-stated only goal. He has his pedophilic narrator describe the act of looking at old photographs of a woman when she was a child in an effort to become sexually attracted to her as an adult: “I tom-peeped across the hedges of years, into wan little windows.” You have to do things the hard way to get to a sentence like that. — Kaitlyn Tiffany
Giovanni’s Room, by James Baldwin, 1956
After publishing Go Tell It on the Mountain, a novel about Black life in Harlem, Baldwin’s publisher, Knopf, balked at his next, which was about a group of queer white men in Paris. “This new book will ruin your career, because you’re not writing about the same things and in the same manner as you were before, and we won’t publish this book as a favor to you,” Baldwin said Knopf told him. But Baldwin did not believe that his identity as a Black American man should preclude him from excavating another aspect of what makes us human—whom and how we love, and what we risk losing in pursuit of love. Giovanni’s Room, which was ultimately published by Dial Press, demonstrates the deftness of Baldwin’s writing, and it brought me into the minds and lives of characters I have never forgotten. — Clint Smith
Peyton Place, by Grace Metalious, 1956
Metalious’s scandalous page-turner was an instant phenomenon, selling 60,000 copies in its first 10 days after publication. The fascination came from the ways it exposed the lurid underbelly of a small New England town: Characters get abortions and engage in incest, murder, alcholism, rape. In Eisenhower’s America, this was the id raging beneath all of the postwar conformity (so successful was the conceit that a Peyton Place film and soap opera would follow). Looking back at the book in 2014, the novelist Thomas Mallon wrote that Metalious was at her best in the novel’s “portraits of women with a moment to themselves, reflective, solitary stretches.” If Metalious was revealing hidden lustiness, she was also tapping into a well of sadness. Americans were desperate to see their dark fantasies and anxieties revealed on the page, and she gave them what they wanted. — Gal Beckerman
Deep Water, by Patricia Highsmith, 1957
Highsmith once called her protagonists “my psychopath heroes,” and Vic Van Allen is one of her more underrated creations. A taciturn man who buries his disgust over his loveless marriage by busying himself with “intellectual” hobbies—running a boutique printing press, designing hand-set colophons, breeding snails—Vic is the picture of self-deception. Deep Water dissects Vic’s emasculated psyche as he coolly watches his wife neglect their daughter and carry on affairs. When his frustration leads to violence, though, the crime is not the point; as with many Highsmith stories, Deep Water is a slow-burn study of ego, obsession, and greed—as well as how gender roles, social status, and extreme wealth can shelter the guilty. Highsmith achieved more success abroad than in the States, but through characters like Vic, she proved herself adept at diagnosing a specific, all-American amorality. — Shirley Li
No-No Boy, by John Okada, 1957
No-No Boy is angry and raw, a gut punch of a novel that takes place in 1946, as Japanese Americans are reeling from the joint traumas of internment and war. Ichiro has just come back to Seattle after four years away. While many young Japanese American men are returning from fighting abroad, Ichiro is among those called “no-no boys,” who were imprisoned for resisting the military draft and, to the consternation of some friends and family, refusing to sign a loyalty oath to the U.S. Ichiro feels guilty, furious, and lonely all at once, “like an intruder in a world to which he had no claim.” He finds his way forward in “a demimonde of broken dreams, fallen heroes and brawling drunks,” as the writer Ruth Ozeki has described it. Okada’s novel was published only 12 years after World War II ended and initially wasn’t received well; it was rediscovered in the 1970s by a group of Asian American writers in San Francisco and reissued, this time to greater acclaim. What those writers saw then remains potent today. The bitter shame of having one’s fealty questioned, the aching pain of family conflict, the lurking sadness of a community shattered by internment and beset by the existential question of how to truly belong to this country—with the particular honesty that fiction can afford, Okada manages to capture it all. — Jane Yong Kim
On the Road, by Jack Kerouac, 1957
Kerouac’s chronicle of Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty’s druggy, boozy odyssey by car fictionalized a generation’s disillusionment in the years after World War II and became the defining novel of the Beat movement. But for all of its countercultural influence, On the Road is fundamentally, traditionally American, as its characters cross the country chasing after a mythic and unattainable dream. — Elise Hannum
The Haunting of Hill House, by Shirley Jackson, 1959
Jackson is most known for her short story “The Lottery.” I remain convinced, however, that her strongest work is The Haunting of Hill House. As far as Gothic literature goes, it has it all: ghosts, lesbians, surprise staircases, the titular haunted house. But what distinguishes it as one of the best American novels ever written (and I’m not being hyperbolic) is Jackson’s intricate, almost surreptitious craft. Hill House’s earliest scenes don’t even really resemble those of a ghost story. Instead, it opens almost like a feminist road novel, with its heroine, Eleanor, taking a car on a joy ride. The alarming speed with which vehicular freedom switches gears into landlocked claustrophobia is one of Jackson’s signature magic tricks. Each time I reread this novel, I end up asking myself: How did she do that? — Jane Hu
Catch-22, by Joseph Heller, 1961
Not many book titles contribute a new term to the language. Would this one have caught on if it had been Catch-14 (rejected because the number 14 was deemed not funny enough)? Heller’s darkly comic and absurdist anti-war novel drew on the many bombing missions he’d flown in Europe during the Second World War. The “catch” in Catch-22 took various forms, famously this one: You can’t stop flying missions unless you can show you’re crazy, but you can’t be crazy if you want to stop flying missions. A logical trap—and, as readers know, one applicable to all of modern life. — Cullen Murphy
A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeleine L'Engle, 1962
In the expansive universe of A Wrinkle in Time, science feels like magic, creativity is a force against creeping darkness, and children have more agency than adults. But what I always loved most was how Meg Murry’s normal teenage troubles—her awkwardness, her indignation—could be formidable gifts. — Elise Hannum
Another Country, by James Baldwin, 1962
The friends and lovers who animate Another Country are reminiscent of the characters who filled Baldwin’s own itinerant life. The novel begins by following Rufus Scott, a depressed jazz drummer, and then tracks the reverberations after he jumps off the George Washington Bridge. A wide circle of artists experience the pain of losing Scott; his sorrows echo their own. Baldwin, with his usual poetry, summed up the story of one character, a writer in Greenwich Village: “Love was a country he knew nothing about.” — Gal Beckerman
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, by Ken Kesey, 1962
No book captured the stultifying conformity of American society in the late 1950s and early ’60s better than Kesey’s portrait of an Oregon mental institution. Our main character, McMurphy, finds himself there simply because he is an individual unafraid to speak his mind. But as the novel progresses, this quality will become even more of a liability, and the oppressiveness of the hospital, of a society that will not accept difference, will break him. — Gal Beckerman
Pale Fire, by Vladimir Nabokov, 1962
There’s the poet (John Shade). There’s the critic (Charles Kinbote). The story they tell together—an autobiographical poem of 999 lines, written by the one and discussed at length by the other—becomes Pale Fire, and the novel is Nabokov at his Nabokoviest: puns and puzzles and heroic couplets, words as form and function, slyness summoned to explore the banality of grief. The book is also Nabokov at his most inventive. With its prose-addled poetry and ever-expanding web of cross-references, Pale Fire captured the headiness of hypertextual discourse decades in advance. The book reads, at times, like the internet. It is a prescient piece of metafiction. That alone explains its significance. But Nabokov’s most complicated novel is also his starkest. All fiction is, in some way, a reckoning with death, and Pale Fire is ingenuity that aches: an attempt to wrangle poetry from, as Shade calls it, the “twisted life” and “the inadmissible abyss.” — Megan Garber
The Zebra-Striped Hearse, by Ross Macdonald, 1962
Worms don’t have eyes, but it’s fitting that the keen and ponderous narrator of The Zebra-Striped Hearse describes his perspective as “the worm’s-eye view.” The private eye Lew Archer is a notably empathic investigator, as prone to catching people lie as he is to mulling the reasons they do so. His thoughtful disposition both softens the machismo of the hard-boiled story and sharpens its focus. Macdonald imagines the detective as society’s skeptic and its witness, sending Archer on a twisty yet tender jaunt through California, Nevada, and Mexico. Genre tropes abound, but they’re always starting points for deeper inquiries into romance, sexuality, and class mobility. Zebra’s lean prose and snappy dialogue place Macdonald among crime fiction’s great stylists, but the novel’s staying power is rooted in its intense curiosity. For the worm, the underworld is the world. — Stephen Kearse
The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath, 1963
There’s the depression of popular conception—the listless sadness of a character in a pharmaceutical advertisement—and then there’s the biting, brisk, darkly comic version that Plath brings to life in The Bell Jar. It is a curiously unyielding read: Though the book is semi-autobiographical, Plath’s lucid prose belies the mystery she was and remains. (She died by suicide a month after the book’s publication, under a pseudonym, in the U.K.; Plath’s family was embarrassed by the novel and blocked it from being released in her native United States for close to a decade.) The Bell Jar is as frustrating and brilliant as its author. — Elizabeth Bruenig
The Group, by Mary McCarthy, 1963
The Group follows eight friends, freshly graduated from Vassar, as they drink and debate and get into exploits so saucy that the book was banned in several countries. If that sounds very Sex and the City, it’s because—seriously—it helped inspire Sex and the City. But it has a harder edge than that description might imply: The main characters are frequently mean to one another, and McCarthy is mean about them. Her satiric descriptions spare none, whether she’s skewering the women’s naivete, their narcissism, their failed social strivings, or their haughty pretensions. (The men who show up intermittently are even worse, saying things such as “She has a thermal look. Nacreous skin, plumped with oysters. Yum, yum, yum; money, money, money.”) The novel is funny and sharp and gossipy, but it’s also sweepingly sad, a “history of the loss of faith in progress,” as McCarthy bleakly put it, that captures a collective shattering of optimism in the years between the New Deal and World War II—and the individual shattering, too, that can come just from growing up. — Faith Hill
The Crying of Lot 49, by Thomas Pynchon, 1966
Measured against its peers within Pynchon’s bibliography, the brevity of The Crying of Lot 49 is conspicuous—like when Beethoven compressed all of his talents into the three minutes of “Für Elise.” Yet this novella’s density is appropriate, considering the tangled, conspiratorial web that ensnares its protagonist, the young and easily influenced Oedipa Maas. Asked to execute the final affairs of a former lover, Maas is quickly diverted into a world of quack doctors, mob lawyers, garden-variety perverts, warring secret societies, and many other phantasmagoric phenomena of the bleary-eyed, burned-out 1960s counterculture. Rendered in Pynchon’s allusive and idiosyncratic prose, her journey feels like the trip from hell—and it becomes a shared dream for readers to snap out of too. — Jeremy Gordon
A Sport and a Pastime, by James Salter, 1967
I suppose the line would have to go something like: “Come for the sex, stay for the sentences.”
Come for the sex, stay for the narrative ingenuity? Come for the sex, stay for the unerringly precise observations of life in all of its vital, transient detail. Come for the sex, stay for the affect, the mood of the thing—the indolence, melancholy, sudden bursts of animal joy. A Sport and a Pastime is known—and for good reason—as an erotic novel. Indeed, there is a lot of sex in this short book. And not just a lot of sex, but a lot of good sex; sex that is satisfying to its fictional participants as well as to its readers. Meaning that it is well-written sex. All that sex is being had by the American Phillip Dean and the French shopgirl Anne-Marie. They are the novel’s protagonists, or at least they are the narrator’s protagonists. The narrator, an associate of Dean’s, is somehow privy to everything that transpires behind the closed door of his friend’s bedroom. The book never explains the narrator’s omniscience. He seems unlikely—given his all-encompassing view of the proceedings—to be recounting something learned secondhand. That his vantage is neither prurient nor voyeuristic excludes a Peeping Tom hypothesis. And though he seems to know Dean’s and Anne-Marie’s interior thoughts, it is also not entirely clear whether the narrator is concocting these scenes from whole cloth. At one point he refers to himself as a “somnambulist,” which seems about right. His account of these lovers is suspended between sleep and wakefulness, between fantasy and fact—and as such, makes this book less an erotic novel and more an interrogation of fiction itself. (Though by all means, come for the sex.) — Peter Mendelsund
Couples, by John Updike, 1968
Couples caused a scandal when it was published, but it was easy for Updike to weather. Having written a novel about suburban adultery before such novels were commonplace, he anticipated some outrage. No matter: The fainting-couch wailing only made him more famous. But what did matter to Updike were the friendships that he nuked. The book was a thinly disguised ethnography of his bored and prosperous social set in Ipswich, Massachusetts, which was torn between rigid WASPy mores and the enticements of the sexual revolution. Not all of his friends forgave him. How could they? It’s one thing to have your dinner-party pretensions and proto-polyamory exposed on the page. It’s quite another to have them rendered in precise lyrical prose by an all-time great American stylist. Nearly 60 years on, their loss is still our gain. — Ross Andersen
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, by Philip K. Dick, 1968
Before there was Blade Runner, there was Dick’s prescient science-fiction noir, which opens not with the movie adaptation’s columns of fire spewing into a degraded sky, but with a tedious domestic dispute. Both scenes communicate dystopia in their own ways, but Dick’s is sneakier: Bounty Hunter Rick Deckard and his wife argue over the settings on the machine that controls their mood, immediately raising the question of just how real they are in comparison to the rogue androids that Deckard is paid to capture and “retire,” or, essentially, kill. This is a bleak, wry, and mind-bending novel—a consideration of the all-too-porous lines that separate human from animal from machine. — Lenika Cruz
Divorcing, by Susan Taubes, 1969
Divorcing is a rediscovered masterpiece, a raw, witty, and utterly original novel about the life and afterlife of a mordant female Jewish philosopher. When it came out, a sneering critic for The New York Times called it the noodlings of a “lady novelist.” Taubes drowned herself a few days later. The book was reissued in 2020, this time to delirious praise. Extraordinary scenes include the narrator’s own funeral as seen from her pink-silk-lined coffin, her head’s jubilant liberation from her body after it is decapitated in a traffic accident on the Champs-Élysées, and an argument between her and her husband narrated by way of a hilarious close analysis of his hand gestures, how his outraged index finger launches on “a vertical course to the sublime.” Taubes’s voice, assured and vulnerable at the same time, comes out of nowhere anyone else has ever been. She should have been a major American novelist. — Judith Shulevitz
Portnoy’s Complaint, by Philip Roth, 1969
Before I read Portnoy’s Complaint, I thought it wasn’t for girls. I knew it was full of masturbation and mommy issues, something about sex with a piece of liver? But I read it anyway and couldn’t believe what a loss it would have been not to. No book better channels the strangeness of being Jewish in America, for one. It’s also a nasty, horny book—which matters. Portnoy’s Complaint is the novel in which Roth taught himself to write freely about sex and desire. Without Portnoy, there’s no Sabbath’s Theater, no Counterlife, none of the David Kepesh books. And without those, who could say how dirty John Updike, a famous Roth-envier, would have let himself get in those later Rabbit novels? What avenues would have been open, more recently, to writers such as Melissa Broder and Patricia Lockwood? Would we have gotten the serious threesomes in Lillian Fishman’s Acts of Service without the tragicomic ones in Portnoy? Alexander Portnoy, his shrink, and his piece of liver flung the bedroom doors open for postwar American fiction. We all owe him—which is to say we owe Roth—for that. — Lily Meyer
Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut, 1969
Slaughterhouse-Five is Vonnegut’s most enduring novel, thanks to its blend of his signature preoccupations: science fiction (time-traveling extra-dimensional aliens), black humor (a full military trial over the theft of a teapot, held amid the ashes of an utterly destroyed city), and good-natured fatalism. Told in deceptively simple language via nonchronological flashes, it cartwheels between moments and planets, focusing on its protagonist’s imprisonment by the Germans on the eve of the Allied firebombing of Dresden. The novel is an attempt to live with the horrors that repeat on loop in our memories, impervious to any attempts to rewrite them. In the end, its characters, and the reader, are left with no comfort beyond the book’s resigned refrain, its alien race’s response to death: “So it goes.” — Emma Sarappo
Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, by Judy Blume, 1970
In the five decades since this novel’s publication, Blume has become one of America’s most beloved, most banned authors, and its protagonist, Margaret Simon, a kind of a patron saint of flat-chested preteen girls (who can forget the famous “I must, I must, I must increase my bust!” chant?). That reputation is well earned; Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret is indeed full of first periods and crushes and kissing games. But don’t let the sixth-grade setting fool you: This book is for people of all ages (and genders). It’s about feeling like the odd one out, the existential pain of yearning to belong, what it means to define your own relationship to religious faith. It’s got a big heart, subtle wisdom, and impeccable comedic timing. — Amy Weiss-Meyer
Desperate Characters, by Paula Fox, 1970
Sophie Bentwood, a literary translator, is living in the late 1960s with her husband, a lawyer, in a so-called transitional Brooklyn neighborhood. Insulated in their professional and domestic lives from the rage and violence sweeping the nation, they nevertheless carry a sense of encroaching dread. Their notional sympathy for Black and poor people recedes before fear and disgust as, slicing tomatoes with their Sabatier knives for a meal of “risotto Milanese in a green ceramic bowl,” they watch addicts and drunks through their brownstone windows. Desperate Characters follows this couple through one weekend during which Sophie, bitten by a stray cat, focuses her fear on tetanus and rabies. Even the slightest bits of mundane dialogue in Fox’s delicately wrought novel convey the suffocating force of the couple’s “ordinary estrangement” from the world and from each other. With exquisite control of tone, gesture, and incidental detail, Fox delineates the corrosive effects of mutual wariness, suspicion, boredom, and sometimes sheer hatred upon two people beset with thoughts of passion spent, dreams deferred, lovers lost: “Ticking away inside the carapace of ordinary life and its sketchy agreements was anarchy.” Desperate Characters is a dark and gripping meditation on Thoreau’s famous observation that “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” — Andrew Delbanco
Play It as It Lays, by Joan Didion, 1970
A stylish, pitiless tour through an arid West seething with artifice, Didion’s Hollywood gothic is at once claustrophobic and anomic. Readers join the distant and ironic narrator, Maria, on a journey that takes her from the cocktail parties of Los Angeles’s glitterati to sizzling wide-open highways to a psychiatric institution where she begins atoning for a life half-lived. Didion withholds explicit judgment on Maria’s behavior; the sum of her actions and motives is for readers to determine. But her world is a dark vision of American discontent at a moment of turmoil and transition. — Elizabeth Bruenig
Log of the S.S. The Mrs Unguentine, by Stanley Crawford, 1972
Crawford died in January, leaving behind a corpus of strange and exhilarating work. There’s probably no better place to start than Log of the S.S. The Mrs Unguentine, which Crawford himself described as “the best thing I have ever written.” A slim novel that evades easy description, it recounts the story of a married couple, the Unguentines, and their decades drifting at sea. They live on a fantastical barge that is an island unto itself, outfitted with gardens and improbable contraptions. Log of the S.S. The Mrs Unguentine is, like much of Crawford’s work, concerned with the solitude within marriage, here heightened by the Unguentines’ mutual withdrawal from society. But the retreat from civilization is also a journey to the outer shores of what can be expressed through words, and with virtuosic skill, Crawford probes the ways language falls apart, starting with the syntactical awkwardness of the title itself. In so doing, he makes something utterly, delightfully, memorably new. — Katie Kitamura
Mumbo Jumbo, by Ishmael Reed, 1972
In the introduction to the 50th-anniversary edition of Mumbo Jumbo, Reed cites Egyptology, jazz, pulp novels, hoodoo, various visual artists, the Harlem Renaissance, the Asian American literary renaissance, and his own family lore as influences. I’d also add Greek mythology, the Crusades, the entire history of all major world religions, and pillars of Black intellectualism such as Marcus Garvey and W. E. B. Du Bois, who appear as themselves in the novel, sharing a world with characters of Reed’s own invention, some of whom are spirits. Mumbo Jumbo is a mixtape, a collage, a palimpsest, told in part via newspaper clippings, footnotes, and illustrations: “I threw all the knowledge I had accumulated up to that point—the kitchen sink—into the book,” Reed writes. It is like nothing that came before it. The story itself feels newly relevant: A virus is sweeping America; its symptoms include happiness, wild dancing, and the appreciation of Black culture; the establishment is very, very concerned. But even if this book didn’t have an eerie bearing on our modern politics, it’d be worth reading simply for the pleasure of spending time in Reed’s roving mind. — Ellen Cushing
Sula, by Toni Morrison, 1973
I can’t call the Bottom—the insular and folkloric Black neighborhood where Sula mostly takes place—a character. That’s usually the finest compliment a reader can offer an author who imbues a setting with personality, but Morrison deserves higher praise. The Bottom evolves beyond personhood as she traces the lives of its beleaguered and eccentric residents across decades, morphing into a trickster god, a blues tapestry, a hormonal topography of Black lives bursting with urges and traumas, regrets and dreams. A key agent of the Bottom’s constant upheaval is Sula, a brash girl and later a self-assured woman, who refuses to bow to the Bottom’s stifling social order. “I don’t want to make somebody else. I want to make myself,” she says when her grandmother tells her to find a man and settle down. This project of self-making is cruel and isolating work, but Morrison trains her anthropological eye on the people of the Bottom who both rebuke and admire Sula’s temerity, and the effort feels liberatory. Despite this impressive arc, I can’t call Sula a character study. It is ultimately an ode to its protagonist and to the villages that raise us despite our damnedest attempts to escape them. — Stephen Kearse
The Revolt of the Cockroach People, by Oscar Zeta Acosta, 1973
This visceral, politically charged novel fictionalizes its author’s involvement with El Movimiento, the Chicano civil-rights movement, in early-1970s Los Angeles. Acosta, who gained prominence as a charismatic activist attorney, was influenced by New Journalism, including the work of his friend Hunter S. Thompson (the lawyer Dr. Gonzo in Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was based on Acosta). But Acosta is an iconoclastic writer in a league of his own. In his work, readers encounter a mix of gritty anecdotes, courtroom dramas, and surreal, drug-fueled adventures, all narrated with a poetic voice that undercuts the story’s wry cynicism. His writing captures the chaotic nature of his times, combining scathing social critique with irreverent humor. Though the novel ends in uncertainty, it offers a galvanizing message of hope that’s as needed today as it was in the ’70s. — Marissa K. López
Oreo, by Fran Ross, 1974
Christine “Oreo” Clark is a teenage Philadelphian born to a Black mother (a concert pianist who thinks in equations) and an absentee Jewish father (a voice actor, bearing the name Schwartz, with a fondness for possibly meaningless puzzles); in search of the latter, she sets out alone into the sinister carnival of 1970s Manhattan. Her story might be a paradigmatic American one, of mixed identity and its solitary desperations. But Oreo flies so fast and so exuberantly into that story that it bursts its boundaries almost immediately. Oreo’s own name, in one of the novel’s got-you-there jokes, is actually a mishearing of the grandmaternal nickname “Oriole,” and that’s what the book does: It soars, through a wild profusion of hybridized, invented, parodic, and essentially private languages, in which the coruscations of race become the basis for endlessly fantastic reversals. It’s a brilliant send-up of the mythic search for the father, but above all, it’s a cacophony of techniques and voices that has never been matched or even sufficiently recognized. Ross’s only novel, Oreo was inadequately loved at the time and is still almost unknown. It seems clear now that no American style of her time, or ours, has ever sounded so fully liberated. — Nicholas Dames
The Dispossessed, by Ursula K. Le Guin, 1974
The plot of this book does not describe it; neither do its themes. There is a planet that resembles our own, rich with natural splendor and ruled by money; patriarchal; capitalist; at war with itself. There is a moon like our moon, a barren rock; unlike ours, it is habitable, and inhabited by utopian anarchists who live a harsh but free existence without weapons, prisons, or hierarchy. The story starts when a brilliant physicist leaves this “ambiguous utopia” in hopes of breaking down the wall between the two worlds. Le Guin expanded the boundaries of fiction not just by committing to its revolutionary capacities but also by considering deeply, and with great clarity, other ways of being. The Dispossessed, her most intricate and beautifully realized book, channels her lifelong obsessions—Daoism, pacifism, humanity’s sacred relationship to the natural world—into a moving story that is also about loneliness, will, and what it means to return home. More than a novel, this is an ontological work of extraordinary imagination and compassion. “Our earth is their Moon; our Moon is their earth,” a moon child observes. Another replies, “Where, then, is Truth?” — Meng Jin
Winter in the Blood, by James Welch, 1974
In her introduction to the reissue of Winter in the Blood, Louise Erdrich writes, “In 1974 no fiction award was given for the Pulitzer Prize, but it should have gone to the book you are holding.” The slender novel can be finished in a day, but its textured imagery, abundant subtext, unvoiced tension, and delicate pattern of motifs reward deliberate reading and rereading. The book’s unnamed narrator heads from the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation into towns on the Montana Hi-Line to find his absent girlfriend, who has taken his razor and gun. The ensuing search is more of a bender than anything, and after the narrator returns home and learns of his grandmother’s death, the drunken fuzz dissipates, leaving behind a despair built on the ache of ancestors whose histories he didn’t know he carried. — Elissa Washuta
Corregidora, by Gayl Jones, 1975
A remarkable debut published when Jones was only 26, Corregidora reads more like an oral history than a rigidly structured novel. Set largely in 1940s Kentucky, the book follows a blues singer named Ursa Corregidora after a harrowing fall down a flight of stairs. To recover, the recalcitrant Ursa must face injuries that aren’t immediately visible. Corregidora excavates her familial wounds, drawing direct lines from Ursa’s embattled relationships to her foremothers’ painful memories of slavery: The Corregidora women don’t just bear witness to violence; they bear new generations because of it. In 1979, when she was interviewed by the literary critic Claudia C. Tate, Jones reflected on one of the many lessons suffused into the story: “Perhaps brutality enables one to recognize what tenderness is,” she said then. Decades later, Corregidora’s exploration of both remains just as poignant. — Hannah Giorgis
Speedboat, by Renata Adler, 1976
David Foster Wallace taught Speedboat at Pomona College; Joan Didion included it on a list of her favorite books. They couldn’t have been drawn to the plot: Adler’s debut has none to speak of. If it’s “about” something, it’s probably city life, and rats, and Broadway Junction—which “might have been created by an architect with an Erector Set and recurrent amnesia”—and parties in the 1970s as observed by the journalist Jen Fain. But Speedboat’s admirers are drawn to the prose. You know how the wolverine is sometimes called the strongest mammal in the world, pound for pound? Speedboat is the most exhilarating American novel of the past century, sentence for sentence. — Juliet Lapidos
Ceremony, by Leslie Marmon Silko, 1977
After World War II, a former soldier by the name of Tayo returns to New Mexico’s Laguna Pueblo reservation with intense PTSD. Tayo’s family is willing to do whatever is necessary to stop his suffering, including seeking out an elder and healer. Skeptical, Tayo admits, “I wonder what good Indian ceremonies can do against the sickness which comes from their wars, their bombs, their lies?” But the elder proceeds with a dynamic telling of an origin story and begins to cure Tayo. Silko’s mythic poems, interspersed throughout the novel, have a cumulative effect, and readers are reminded that storytelling is not mere ritual but rather a rite of understanding, healing, and survival. War and its horrific afterlife are never far from us, and Ceremony continues to offer readers solace in real time. — Helena María Viramontes
Song of Solomon, by Toni Morrison, 1977
Song of Solomon is America’s most compelling Black epic. The novel follows the young and entitled Milkman Dead in his tumultuous pursuit of wealth, his family history, and, ultimately, belonging. Morrison blends classic Gothic elements with the raw past and current reality of Black life in a segregated, depressed Michigan town. As Milkman sets out on a surreal, transcendent romp through Black America, Morrison slowly reveals why he is so restless, impulsive, and bitter. And while her story touches on Black resistance, community isolation, and gender roles, the book’s center is the historical catastrophe of slavery and its impact on the Black family, demonstrated through an authentic, multigenerational ensemble cast. Burdened by the sins of his father, and equally buoyed by the support of his enigmatic aunt, Milkman forges a path of both creation and destruction, all in an effort to reach what he (like his ancestors) yearns for so deeply—real freedom. — Malcolm Ferguson
A Contract With God, by Will Eisner, 1978
It’s not a happy tale, is what sticks out. Eisner, a cartoonist, wanted to chronicle the Bronx tenements of his childhood, partly as a means of saying something lasting and true about Jewish American life in the early 20th century—and A Contract With God, which popularized the graphic novel as modern readers understand it, looks back with no small measure of despair and misery. Like those in stories by Malamud and Roth, Eisner’s characters struggle to reconcile their old-world values within the unsparing crucible of American progress; they struggle with sexual desire and alcohol dependency; they struggle to find work in lean times. Doused in relentless rain and packed into claustrophobic housing, they struggle. Eisner’s keen awareness of his milieu allows him to make sharp insights about their hopes and sorrows—and his soulful line work makes these characters, and their world, feel real. A Contract With God is more than a “serious comic book”: It’s a testament to the unique power of pairing words with art. — Jeremy Gordon
Dancer From the Dance, by Andrew Holleran, 1978
Dancer From the Dance is the best and most profound record we have of a brief, unprecedented world: the queer carnival of disco clubs and bathhouses that flourished in New York City between the Stonewall uprising in 1969 and the onset of the AIDS crisis in the early 1980s. Holleran is at once bewitched by and critical of that world, and his hero, Anthony Malone, is equal parts heartthrob, Platonic seer, and Christian mystic. The glory of the book is Malone’s mentor in queer life, Andrew Sutherland, one of the great characters in American fiction: a brilliantly outrageous, aging queen who is the novel’s emotional heart and hedonistic sage. His advice to a young gay man wallowing in despairful self-loathing still holds true, 46 years later: “For heaven’s sake, don’t take it so seriously! Just repeat after me: ‘My face seats five, my honeypot’s on fire.’” — Garth Greenwell
The Stand, by Stephen King, 1978
King didn’t invent the apocalypse, but when you’re reading The Stand, it almost feels like he did. His 1,100-page tome about the accidental release of a deadly virus mesmerizes as it unfolds every layer of the chaos, with death enveloping towns, cities, and then continents. But the heady aftermath of extermination is what makes this King’s opus: a tale of good and evil doing glorious battle in the desert, a retro-futuristic Lord of the Rings shot through with gritty Americana. The Stand’s villain, the charismatic and terrifying Randall Flagg, ended up being the only one King really needed, a merciless figure recognizable in every cultish strongman who pops up in the real world to this day. — David Sims
Kindred, by Octavia E. Butler, 1979
Butler’s best-known and most important book, Kindred reimagines the slave narrative with a modern perspective and a time-travel conceit, collapsing the emotional and literal distance between its Black protagonist and her past. Over the course of the story, Dana finds herself inexplicably and repeatedly transported from her home in 1970s Los Angeles to a plantation in the antebellum South, where she meets her ancestors and is enslaved herself. As each visit lasts longer and grows more dangerous, Butler forces readers to confront brutal realities that American-history books tend to gloss over or erase, particularly those from when the novel was published. She renders every character—the vile, pathetic enslaver Rufus; Dana’s desperate and courageous ally, Alice—with rare compassion and complexity, which makes the story that much more devastating. — Lenika Cruz
The Dog of the South, by Charles Portis, 1979
Portis found a huge audience when his 1968 Western, True Grit, about a 14-year-old girl avenging her father’s murder with the help of a trigger-happy U.S. marshall, was adapted into a John Wayne movie. Who would have expected, 11 years later, a shaggy follow-up about the low-key adventures of a copy editor trying to track down his wife and her new lover (and ex-husband) in British Honduras? The hero of The Dog of the South might be a “pill” (per his wife), but Portis shapes his protagonist’s voice into comic gold—we laugh at him, but we also are him: fussy, literal-minded, blind to personal shortcomings. He encounters an array of oddballs and charlatans, most memorably Dr. Reo Symes, a nonstop talker and failed serial entrepreneur who worships a mystically inclined self-help author named John Selmer Dix. I would quote a funny line here, but then I’d have to give you the next sentence too, and the next, because it just doesn’t stop. — Ed Park
Housekeeping, by Marilynne Robinson, 1980
I first discovered Robinson in calculus class. This was unexpected: I attended an Orthodox Jewish high school, and Robinson is one of the country’s preeminent Christian novelists. But one day, our eccentric math teacher began class by reading to us from Robinson’s Pulitzer-winning Gilead, which takes the form of letters written by a dying minister to his young son. He was onto something, because although I can’t really do calculus anymore, I still read Robinson. Housekeeping is her debut novel about two sisters raised by a series of flawed relatives in a remote Idaho town. It’s a meditation on the transience of human existence, the meaning of family, and the burdens of kinship—and it marks the arrival of an exceptional American talent whose words can reach even the unlikeliest of audiences. — Yair Rosenberg
The Salt Eaters, by Toni Cade Bambara, 1980
Sometime in the 1970s, in a fictional town called Claybourne, Georgia, Velma Henry, a Black woman involved in the civil-rights movement, finds herself at an infirmary after attempting suicide. Her recovery begins in the company of a group of faith healers and is led by a woman named Minnie Ransom, who herself is guided by a spirit called Old Wife. Velma’s pain and fatigue are emblematic of her community’s exhaustion from the fight for equality, and as she heals, Bambara’s novel makes the powerful argument that for Black activists, especially female ones, there can be no justice without wellness. — Maya Chung
Little, Big: Or, the Fairies’ Parliament, by John Crowley, 1981
Little, Big is a hybrid of Lewis Carroll, Shakespeare, and the Sufi poetry of Farīd al-Dīn ʿAṭṭār —and yet this magnificent mutt of a book is as American as The Wizard of Oz. It follows a New York family living on the boundary between the mundane and the realm of elves and fairies. The bookish and earthly interloper Smoky Barnable meets this semi-ethereal clan once they have retired with their fortune to a country house that is a gateway to the other worlds. The worlds of fairy and nonfairy cannot meaningfully coexist, and a subplot follows the rise of a strange politician, with certain Trumpian characteristics, bent on hastening their clash. These multitudes of themes compel a reader to imagine this book as several in one. It is a romance, in the love-story and other senses of the term. It is a post-Christian religious odyssey, an imagining of a spiritual order consistent with the pains and rigors of modern life. Also somewhere in there is a depiction of brokenhearted living in 1970s Manhattan. Twenty-five years ago, when I first heard about Little, Big, it was impossible to find a copy in Boston. I found a paperback in London and have reread and annotated it ever since. If you are hearing about this novel for the first time, the full experience can be found in the revised, art nouveau illustrated edition put out just last year. This version’s beauty is worthy of a novel not just destined for the canon but likely to be read as long as there are books and Americans to read them. — Graeme Wood
Oxherding Tale, by Charles Johnson, 1982
A drunken slave master on an antebellum South Carolina plantation fancies himself a gentleman—so before enjoying himself upon the body of his favorite slave’s wife, he orders the cuckold upstairs to service his own wife. From this reluctant rape, a child is born. The boy, Andrew Hawkins, grows up light-skinned enough to pass as white but learns that “again and again, and yet again, the New World said to blacks and women, ‘You are nothing.’” Oxherding Tale is replete with echoes of the fugitive-slave narrative, the picaresque adventure tale, the Puritan-conversion memoir, and the Zen parable in which an oxherd’s struggle to manage his beast serves as a metaphor for his quest for enlightenment. Andrew, the narrator, roams through a gallery of demonic characters who seem to exist somewhere between reality and projections of his own mind. Johnson’s novel is among the most searching books we have on “the ridiculously tangled subject Race,” but it reaches far beyond even that expansive topic. To read it is to encounter—in its inventiveness, allusive density, and sheer intellectual power—the boundless freedom of consciousness itself. — Andrew Delbanco
Machine Dreams, by Jayne Anne Phillips, 1984
In a family chronicle firmly anchored in a particular past and place, Phillips evokes that timeless American spirit of promise infused with loss, community shot through with loneliness. “Look at you—born here and think you have to get to California, go so far, do so much so fast,” Jean Hampson, deeply rooted in West Virginia, tells her angry, grieving daughter as this remarkable novel opens in the early 1970s. “Life wasn’t like it is now,” she reminisces. “We had the Depression and then the war; we didn’t have to go looking for something to happen. And the things that happened were so big.” In fact, yearning and grief—and smoldering anger, too—are everywhere, always, stirred by big things (social turmoil, another war) as well as intimate moments. Phillips proceeds to unfurl a patchwork of Hampson backstories that span almost half a century, giving voice to restless women (Jean, her daughter) and men adrift (the husband Jean has lately left, and the son who is now gone). Family and country are derailed, yet a fierce loyalty persists. So does fear about what’s in store. — Ann Hulbert
Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy, 1985
McCarthy’s masterpiece follows an aimless teenager known only as “the kid” and his exploits as part of the murderous Glanton gang, led by the tyrannical Judge Holden. This is a Western stripped of romanticism, an unrelenting, unforgettable depiction of violence that scarcely allows its reader a moment to breathe. — Elise Hannum
A Summons to Memphis, by Peter Taylor, 1986
Phillip Carver, a middle-aged book editor in New York City, has suddenly been called back to Memphis by his older sisters, who are hoping he can help stop their widowed father from remarrying. This is the literal summons to Memphis of the Pulitzer-winning novel’s title, but in countless instances over the course of the story, Phillip is bidden, emotionally, back to his Tennessee childhood. More than anything, Taylor’s subtle yet absorbing novel of manners suggests that where you’re from—especially if that place is a rigidly circumscribed society with a long history of rules, expectations, and gossip—is inextricably embedded in who you are. — Maya Chung
Watchmen, by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, 1986
How did a graphic novel by a pair of Brits end up on a list of great American books? Because it tells a fundamentally American story, one that’s rooted in this country’s experience of the Cold War, and built from elements—superheroes and comic books—pioneered and perfected in the United States. (It was first published here, too.) I read it in the late 1980s. Ronald Reagan was on my television set, but inside the novel, I was buried in Watchmen’s alternate timeline, where Richard Nixon was still president in 1985, and America had won the Vietnam War not thanks to invulnerable caped patriots such as Superman, but because of the intervention of neurotic and odd “heroes” who make very human (and sometimes dreadful) choices. The novel is a reminder to Americans that power, even when used for good, always has a brutal, ugly side. It turned the bright colors of the superhero world into something dark, even dirty, and after reading Watchmen, I was never again able to enjoy its more idealized renditions without seeing an alternate America just out of the corner of my eye. — Tom Nichols
Beloved, by Toni Morrison, 1987
Sethe knows what happened to her baby daughter, but the reader doesn’t, not right away. Slowly, Beloved unspools the daily, accumulating cruelties Sethe endured while enslaved on the “Sweet Home” plantation, the love that stubbornly grew despite it all, and the child she fiercely wanted to protect. When you are robbed of the ability to do so, Morrison asks—when you don’t have control over the lives for which you’re responsible—what does it mean to be a mother? How fitting that the answer comes by way of an exquisitely told ghost story—set in a haunted house but also in a haunted nation, and in a present that will never be freed from the nightmares of its past. — Faith Hill
Dawn, by Octavia E. Butler, 1987
“Alive! Still alive. Alive … again.” Butler opens Dawn by banging on the same word, alive, each time coaxing out a different tone: exhilaration, ambivalence, and finally dread. What more perfect way to capture the heroine Lilith Iyapo’s fraught feelings about survival, both her own and humanity’s? After a global war that makes Earth uninhabitable, Lilith awakes on a spaceship run by extraterrestrials who have a grand plan to help repopulate the planet—at a disturbing cost. The first entry in Butler’s Xenogenesis science-fiction trilogy, Dawn is a nuanced examination of race and gender, freedom and control, empathy and fear, centered on the relationship between Lilith and her alien captors slash caretakers. By turns a horror novel, a philosophical meditation, and a speculative parable, Dawn asks whether human beings deserve another chance despite their cruelty and destructiveness. Butler’s answer is a resounding but hard-won yes. — Lenika Cruz
Geek Love, by Katherine Dunn, 1989
The Binewskis, the carny family at the center of this twisted marvel of a novel, are happy to be freaks. By injecting toxic drugs during gestation, parents Al and Lil have produced genetically altered children they dub “dreamlets”: flipper-limbed Arty, conjoined twins Iphy and Elly, hunchback albino dwarf Oly, and telekinetic Chick. With language that’s simultaneously florid and clear, Dunn explores what being original really means in a country that purports to prize individualism yet encourages conformity. As they age, the Binewskis clash over their notions of normalcy until the sideshow they’ve toured across America turns into something horribly obscene. What follows is an outlandish story, but Dunn never stops making the Binewskis feel real. It’s an electrifying balancing act that argues for imperfection as its own form of high art. — Shirley Li
Tripmaster Monkey, by Maxine Hong Kingston, 1989
It’s the 1960s. Wittman Ah Sing—our obnoxious but endearing 23-year-old beatnik playwright protagonist—recites Rilke aloud on the bus, skips from one psychedelic party to the next, and rants about race and representation to anyone who will listen. He meets a girl; he visits his retired vaudevillian mother (a Floradora dancer named Ruby Long Legs) and driftless father (named Zeppelin); he searches for his missing grandmother; he drives; he broods; he attempts to stage a play so epic, it will end the Vietnam War. That’s the plot, more or less, of Tripmaster Monkey, a postmodern picaresque about a young man journeying through the Bay Area, which his family has called home for five generations. With a surname—Ah Sing—that exists only in America, and a given name as American as the famous poet who is his namesake, Wittman aspires to write himself, a Chinese American (no hyphen please), into legibility. This novel is a wild and at times infuriating read, full of linguistic pyrotechnics and play, with enough pop-culture references and buried California history to preoccupy you for multiple rereadings. I first read it when I was a young artist trying to locate myself in the cultural landscape. Here was a model, just for me. I knew I was home. — Anelise Chen
Dogeaters, by Jessica Hagedorn, 1990
It is the 1950s, and the Philippines has shrugged off centuries of colonial rule only to face down the beginnings of a military-corporate dictatorship. Corruption is ubiquitous, society is brutally stratified, and America—its pop culture, its imperial legacy, its gravitational pull—is everywhere. Drug addicts, beauty queens, rich kids, oligarchs, and activists search for meaning in fragmented, dreamlike vignettes, and then the story clenches like a fist, and their fates converge spectacularly and violently. If Dogeaters has a protagonist, it’s Rio, a Hagedorn stand-in who begins the book as a 10-year-old and ends it looking back with the insight of adulthood. But the novel’s real life force comes from Manila itself: surreal, spiky, vital. — Ellen Cushing
American Psycho, by Bret Easton Ellis, 1991
This notoriously revolting novel has become only more disturbing with time, and not just because its serial-killer narrator, Patrick Bateman, is a racist, misogynistic businessman who idolizes Donald Trump. Ellis’s satire of the late-’80s consumerist buffet—so many power suits, power lunches, power tools—dissects social problems that have worsened since the book was published: Choice breeds nihilism; materialism smothers individuality; inequality kills. Somehow both circular and propulsive, jaded and frenzied, Ellis’s prose invites the reader to binge it compulsively, mimicking the protagonist’s madness. Never before or since has a book so precisely rendered the thinking of someone for whom the point of life is cruelty. — Spencer Kornhaber
How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, by Julia Alvarez, 1991
Alvarez’s first novel follows the García sisters, forced to abandon their life of privilege in the Dominican Republic for New York City after their father is found to have participated in a coup attempt. The story moves backwards through time and is told from the perspectives of the four sisters as they experience the freedom and discrimination of the new world, as well as the safety and oppression of the old. Through poetic language and lively dialogue, Alvarez tells a tale that feels universal—about sibling bonds, about fluctuating familial relationships, and about finding one’s place, even as one’s position changes. — Maya Chung
Mating, by Norman Rush, 1991
Two Americans living abroad in Botswana fall in love. He is the charismatic founder of a matriarchal commune deep in the Kalahari; she is a graduate student in anthropology, dazzlingly articulate and thirsting for some more egalitarian form of pairing between men and women. Mating is a comic-philosophical fantasia about heterosexuality after the 20th century’s incomplete emancipations—about the stubborn utopian fantasy that love might satisfy both intellectual commitment and erotic play (or intellectual play and erotic commitment), that men and women could coexist without domination or self-harm. Yes, it all ends badly. It also ends hilariously. Imagine the delights of a 1930s screwball comedy blended with the intoxication of high academic theory: Rush pulled off the unlikeliest of unions, and Mating’s appeal has only grown. His book has become a mirror the young and not-so-young hold up to their own romantic aspirations. But above all, there is Rush’s real miracle, the brilliantly memorable idiolect of his unnamed female narrator. When has contemporary intellectual life ever had such a compulsively interesting voice, one so funny, so dryly and winningly self-aware even in the midst of its delusions? Never wanting someone to stop talking: Now, that’s love. — Nicholas Dames
Bastard Out of Carolina, by Dorothy Allison, 1992
Ruth Anne Boatwright, more often called Bone, could be an object of pity in a lesser author’s hands: She’s poor, she’s what her 1950s milieu calls “illegitimate,” and she’s the child victim of repeated sexual and physical abuse. Her story starts and ends with great betrayals from the adults who are supposed to love and protect her. But the power of her voice, her unwavering connections to the piece of South Carolina she’s from and the large family she belongs to, and Allison’s sensitivity to the needs and feelings of a kid who deserves better make Bone and Bastard crucial additions to the literature of the South. — Emma Sarappo
The Secret History, by Donna Tartt, 1992
Richard Papen hails from a working-class background he describes as involving “little of interest, less of beauty.” But in his first semester at a cloistered liberal-arts school, he falls under the sway of five enthrallingly chic students. In the way of Greek tragedy, the events that follow feel inevitable, straight through to the long-prophesied end. The Secret History is an elegantly written, expertly paced story about how evil can unfold from boredom and loneliness, and how horrible it is when the desire for life to be somehow more—more vivid, more uninhibited, more cinematic—is actually fulfilled. — Faith Hill
So Far From God, by Ana Castillo, 1993
Before it was part of the American Southwest, New Mexico was simply part of Mexico—and it is in this setting, generations deep into a desert town becoming Americanized, that Castillo’s So Far From God takes place. The book is a radical work of fiction that refuses to bend to any particular genre—it contains poetry, folk tales, and flashes of absurdism—while offering up a consistently good story. At the center is Sofia, a matriarch married to a gambler, and her four daughters: Esperanza, Fe, La Caridad, and La Loca—who all, after living full and sometimes-fantastical lives, die before their mother. Fear not a tale of woe, however. Each death marks, if not a life well lived, a life remembered and honored by Sofia’s resiliency. There is plenty of magical realism here—corpses rising from the dead, ghosts visiting the living—but it’s rendered so deftly that it feels less like a literary device and more like a way to let the supernatural permeate the beautiful, contained universe of the book. Though published in the early 1990s, when what we think of as American Latino literature was still in its infancy, the book does not shy away from the breadth of the Latina experience. Religion, capitalism, sexual orientation, medicine, the military, marriage—all are placed under Castillo’s tender microscope and written about in prose that, like mystical smoke, lingers on the reader for years afterward. — Xochitl Gonzalez
Stone Butch Blues, by Leslie Feinberg, 1993
Feinberg died in 2014 but continues to be a crucial, revolutionary voice. More than two decades after Stone Butch Blues was first published, it remains an enduring touchstone, tenderly focusing on complex transgender and gender-diverse identities not broadly represented in the mainstream. (It was instrumental in widening my perception of the ways ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality intersect.) Blues immerses readers in the world of its trans protagonist, Jess Goldberg, exploring the suffering of marginalization and the spiritual consequences of violence while also bearing witness to personal evolution. For Jess, community building becomes essential, activism in social movements brings awareness, union organizing pushes for justice, and love’s hopeful threads stitch together resistance and solidarity. — Helena María Viramontes
The Shipping News, by Annie Proulx, 1993
The mononymous Quoyle may be one of literature’s most unforgettably pathetic characters: As The Shipping News opens, his parents have died by suicide; soon enough his wife is dead too, but she managed to run off with another man and unsuccessfully peddle their children to some strangers from Connecticut before expiring. Quoyle has a nowhere career, a nothing affect, “features as bunched as kissed fingertips,” “eyes the color of plastic.” An aunt persuades him to move from upstate New York to their long-abandoned ancestral home in remote Newfoundland, where the local delicacy is seal flipper pie, winter lasts nine months, and the best job he can get is writing for a newspaper that’s mostly interested in stories about car crashes and sexual abuse. It’s all a bit of a bummer. But The Shipping News is a joy to read. It’s like if Tolstoy were funny, or your local weatherperson were a world-class poet: “The bay crawled with whitecaps like maggots seething in a bright wound … The waves pouring onshore had a thick look to them, a kind of moody rage.” This is a book that, in theory, really shouldn’t work, but does, spectacularly, thanks to Proulx’s darkly comic sensibility and unmatched ability to make a wild place feel real. The people who populate this novel have names like Nutbeem and Tert and Bunny; they are undeniably strange but recognizably human. They have been broken, too, by love or inheritance or the cruelty of their environment. Storm-battered and wind-bruised, they find it in them to find a way forward, here at the end of the world. — Ellen Cushing
Native Speaker, by Chang-rae Lee, 1995
What does it mean to betray your race? The Korean American protagonist of Lee’s debut novel, Henry Park, wrestles with that question throughout the book. The day that Henry’s white wife leaves him, she hands him a note describing him as a traitor. Shortly afterward, Henry is tasked by his employer, a private surveillance firm, with spying on—and sabotaging—the New York City mayoral campaign of John Kwang, a Korean American politician. The mission is compromised, though, when Henry begins to take a liking to John. The relationship between the two propels Native Speaker, as Henry proves willing to make sacrifice after sacrifice in order to solidify a sense of American identity. By painting a clear-eyed portrait of the two flawed men, Lee offers a sharp, thoughtful take on the kinds of pressures that many children of immigrants face. If Park is indeed “the most prodigal and mundane of historians,” as he describes himself, then Native Speaker finds meaning in his small rebellions. — Hannah Giorgis
Sabbath’s Theater, by Philip Roth, 1995
Whenever Roth let his ranting mode take full flight, American literature was infused with something utterly new—florid, irreverent, incensed, obscene, half Borscht Belt and half psychotherapy session. And although Portnoy’s Complaint was the first time he let loose in this way, Sabbath’s Theater was the novel that married this genius for provocation with the pathos of a mature writer facing life’s greatest indignity: death. Leaving behind the alter egos who for decades featured in his novels, Roth invented the character of Mickey Sabbath, an aging puppeteer and performance artist plagued by arthritis and stricken by the recent passing of his beloved mistress. In a book-length scream of consciousness, Sabbath rages against the end of it all, reliving the sex and splendor of his outrageous life, in which he seemed to offend all he met but also loved with an almost painful passion. “It takes a lifetime to determine what matters,” says Sabbath, “and by then it’s not there anymore.” — Gal Beckerman
Under the Feet of Jesus, by Helena María Viramontes, 1995
This coming-of-age tale sets a budding romance between two teenagers, Estrella and Alejo, against the ongoing racist violence that characterizes their life as migrant farmworkers in California’s Central Valley. When Alejo falls ill after being exposed to pesticides, Estrella’s family risks everything to get him the care he needs, even as they face monumental struggles of their own. The novel was published a year after California voters passed Proposition 187, a draconian measure that sought to deny social services—such as the nonemergency medical care Alejo requires—to undocumented immigrants. (It was officially declared unconstitutional in 1998.) Under the Feet of Jesus combines historical significance with literary achievement: It deftly intervenes in major social debates, but its rich, symbolic prose and absence of specific time markers help it avoid didacticism. — Marissa K. López
Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace, 1996
We all worship something, Infinite Jest argues. The novel eschews the climax and resolution of a traditional plot in favor of a dense, staggered epic, told half through endnotes. Together, these swirling pages imagine what that supplication might look like in a hyper-capitalist future that now feels alarmingly close to America in the 2020s. It endures—despite its mammoth size, despite its frenetic digressions, despite Wallace’s curdled reputation as a so-called toxic male genius—for the prescience of its vision and the clarity of its messages about addiction and devotion. The recovering 12-steppers it follows at a halfway house are not the only characters who submit to a higher power. Various people—secret agents, boarding-school students, lost Bostonites—are in thrall to drugs, to tennis, to depression, to the cause of Quebec separatism (really), and Infinite Jest demonstrates that their various compulsions and repetitions are as much a religion as reciting the Serenity Prayer is. That’s why the book’s most famous device, a film so lethally entertaining that anyone who sees it watches it until they die, is so compelling: It represents the ultimate form of surrender. — Emma Sarappo
I Love Dick, by Chris Kraus, 1997
Kraus—or, rather, a lightly fictionalized version of her—meets, falls for, and plays out a fervid, epistolary obsession with “Dick.” People deal with bouts of unrelenting horniness in different ways, but they don’t often publish a semi-autobiographical novel about it, especially one as exhilarating, hilarious, and honest as this. — Elise Hannum
Underworld, by Don DeLillo, 1997
Underworld is a work of such preposterous ambition that it could only be either a failure or a masterpiece. Yes, it’s the book that opens with that sustained set piece of an infamous Brooklyn Dodgers game, but, no, it’s not a book about baseball. Underworld is concerned with art and garbage (maybe they’re the same thing), but also with crime, faith, and technology. The novel is somehow about the entirety of the 20th century, or the modern age, or America itself, or all of the above. Deranged girth and sprawling cast notwithstanding (summary is impossible so I won’t bother), Underworld is almost a page-turner, going down much easier than many of DeLillo’s slimmer books. DeLillo is a writer with serious intellectual preoccupations, but here he’s equally invested in character and storytelling. Whether the subject is waste management or a serial killer, Underworld is humane, even tender. Perhaps most extraordinarily, the book’s final assessment of its subject—that capacious all of the above—is not what you might expect from this writer. How do you end an 800-plus-page novel? Underworld’s perfect last line holds it all. It’s almost heartbreaking in its optimism. At any rate, it’s one of the very few lines in any book that has made me cry. — Rumaan Alam
The Intuitionist, by Colson Whitehead, 1999
Whitehead has won two Pulitzers for his fiction, one for The Underground Railroad and another for The Nickel Boys, but his most mesmerizing novel might be his first, for its atmospheric world-building. Like much of Whitehead’s work, The Intuitionist is elevated genre fiction—in this case, speculative noir. It’s also literally about heights. The story follows one Lila Mae Watson—the first Black female elevator inspector and Whitehead’s nominal “intuitionist”—who must navigate the treacherous corporate world of elevator inspectors, long monopolized by white men. When the novel begins, Lila Mae is poised for a promotion, which is soon jeopardized by a disaster on the job: One of her elevators goes into “total freefall” right after she inspects and clears it. The plummeting elevator sets the whodunit plot in motion—though what happens next is more mundane than melodramatic, more paperwork than narrative propulsion. What makes The Intuitionist so remarkable is just how uncannily uneventful it is, while still managing to convey so much paranoia and dread. — Jane Hu
Blonde, by Joyce Carol Oates, 2000
Oates reimagines the life of Marilyn Monroe as a tragedy in archetypes—the lost girl, the ingenue, the sex symbol—letting the actor’s body serve as a cipher, giving form and name to all manner of wicked desires. It’s a dream that shades into a nightmare, an elegy scattered with snippets of poetry and meditations on Monroe’s spiritual condition. This isn’t the book to read for factual biographical detail, but it offers something just as good: a confessional intimacy with the woman behind the legend. — Elizabeth Bruenig
House of Leaves, by Mark Z. Danielewski, 2000
House of Leaves documents the unraveling of Johnny Truant, an otherwise unexceptional young man who has found and is obsessively assembling the unfinished scholarly work of a dead man: an exegesis of a movie that doesn’t exist, The Navidson Record. That film is supposedly a documentary by the photographer Will Navidson, who makes the eerie discovery that his house is bigger on the inside than its outside dimensions should allow, and eventually plunges into an endless labyrinth inside his walls. As Navidson ventures into the maze, trying to outsmart an unseen monster in its depths, Truant goes from skeptical to unhinged, looking over his shoulder while adding footnote after footnote. The plot itself is an imaginative take on both Gothic horror and academic satire, but the form is what makes Leaves unforgettable: The novel unfurls in multiple typefaces and ink colors, backwards and in code; some pages are dense with jargon, and others contain only a few words placed at odd angles, as though the sentences themselves have been attacked by some unseen force. It’s a deliberately disorienting, endlessly rewarding work whose every new page doesn’t just chronicle a psychic undoing but actually feels like one. — Emma Sarappo
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, by Michael Chabon, 2000
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay sometimes reads like it was written by a superhero. How else to account for its stunning immersion yet zippy pace? This historical novel—about two young Jewish artists in pre– and post–World War II New York City whose lives reflect the promise and heartbreak of trying to make it in America—is a nesting doll of origin stories: of the duo’s fictional comic-book hero, but also of the creators themselves, who, as they navigate the nascent comic-book industry, are molded into fully realized adults. Today’s spandexed superheroes generate box-office revenues that are higher than the GDPs of some small countries, but early comic books were the product of immense struggle while being a means for Jewish creators such as the legendary Jack Kirby to make some kind of lasting imprint on a rapidly shifting society. Even without any colorful panels, Chabon captures all the resultant glories and agonies of their efforts. — Jeremy Gordon
The Last Samurai, by Helen DeWitt, 2000
A woman named Sybilla explains to a one-night stand her idea for a new Rosetta Stone. It will be, like the first, both “pompous” and a “gift to posterity.” He finds it cute that she’s so worked up; she sleeps with him so as not to be rude. Jump ahead a bit and Sybilla has to worry constantly about money—her 5-year-old son, Ludo, is always interrupting her menial freelance work in order to ask questions about Japanese syllables or higher math (or his mysterious father, aforementioned). The Last Samurai is sometimes read as snobbish and rarefied because it puts so much emphasis on the acquisition of obscure knowledge, but Ludo’s quest in the second half of the novel is a classic one of self-discovery, and DeWitt’s position is that people are kept from being as brilliant as they might be by the dismal material conditions of modern life. The book is funny and thrilling and a gift to posterity: DeWitt, to make a point about the capability of whoever is reading, includes fairly thorough instructions on learning ancient Greek. — Kaitlyn Tiffany
The Quick and the Dead, by Joy Williams, 2000
In this strange, discomfiting novel about three teenage girls united over the loss of their mothers, Williams evokes a world in which the idea of childhood innocence is a farce. The Quick and the Dead contains some of American fiction’s most haunting evocations of the desert; in this bleak, windburned landscape, the dead seem always in danger of wandering into the spaces of the living (and sometimes they do). Williams’s sentences often take unexpected turns, and her dialogue can be off-kilter, but she’s so dexterous with language that the ultimate effect is oddly pleasing. Though the novel contains many scenes of depravity and violence, these moments feel driven not by nihilism but by a tender love of the Earth and its creatures in the face of the destruction human beings have wrought. — Maya Chung
Erasure, by Percival Everett, 2001
Few works dismantle liberal pieties about racial politics as deftly and thoroughly as Everett’s Erasure, a satirical account of an experimental novelist, Thelonius “Monk” Ellison. He happens to be Black, and his editor wishes he would write “true, gritty” books. But “the hard, gritty truth of the matter,” Monk reflects, “is that I hardly ever think about race.” Instead, he rewrites Aeschylus’s The Persians and presents a paper at the annual meeting of the Nouveau Roman Society. At a low point, Monk decides to give everyone what they want—the “raw” story of a young Black man who descends into crime, titled My Pafology and published under the pseudonym “Stagg R. Leigh.” In a virtuosic move, Everett includes the novel within the novel. But what makes Erasure so distinctive is his juxtaposition of this metafiction with the tender scenes of Monk with his mother, who has dementia. The aesthetically layered masterpiece offers a scathing critique of American racism even as it dramatizes, through Monk’s extended reflections on the purpose of art, the absurdity of the idea that Black artists must always write about race. — Meghan O’Rourke
I, the Divine, by Rabih Alameddine, 2001
Alameddine is our contemporary Nabokov, but with a much broader range of subjects and a deeper and more expansive understanding of humanity. His first work, Koolaids: The Art of War, is perhaps the most sophisticated and truthful novel of the AIDS crisis, juxtaposing the protagonist’s experience of disease and suffering against the backdrop of the civil war in Lebanon. But I, the Divine is one of the most underrecognized novels of successful formal invention of the 21st century. Sarah, a Lebanese woman, is trying to write a book about her life, but she doesn’t know how it should begin. So she writes a series of first chapters, each a different route of entry into her biography. She tries to start the book at the beginning of her life, then at the middle. She makes an attempt in conventional literary language, and then turns to experimental diction. She puts forward a first chapter in French. By the end of the novel, the reader has accrued a cumulative intimacy with all of the ways she approaches herself, so we know her more deeply than we would had the author, a true writer’s writer, restricted himself to conventional narrative. — Sarah Schulman
The Corrections, by Jonathan Franzen, 2001
If you’ve ever had parents or siblings or children, or lived in the United States, or lived anywhere, there’s a good chance that some part of this quintessential turn-of-the-millennium novel will feel as though it’s making direct, rather uncomfortable eye contact with you, and only you. Franzen takes us inside the mind of each hapless member of the Lambert family—two aging midwestern parents and their three adult offspring, who now inhabit various East Coast social milieus—and through the mores and manners of their diverging Americas. Almost everything is fair game for Franzen’s finely honed satire: capitalism, sex, child-rearing, pharmaceuticals, foodie culture, queer studies, WASP snobbery, cruise ships, cities, suburbs. The result is hilarious, cringe-inducing, and ultimately, somehow, deeply human. — Amy Weiss-Meyer
Caramelo, by Sandra Cisneros, 2002
Cisneros’s second novel has been overlooked time and time again because The House on Mango Street has so deservingly become a classic. But Caramelo, and its multigenerational, multi-setting plot, is due for more attention. The book speaks with humor and authenticity to a whole cohort of Chicanos—and to anyone else experiencing the conundrum of being neither here nor there. It depicts a specific generation of Mexican Americans: Whether in Chicago, East Los Angeles, New York, or San Antonio, we were instilled with Mexicanness by our parents, who remained very much connected to their parents in Mexico City or Zacatecas; simultaneously, we negotiated our identities as Americans. The novel is a wild ride of narration and a bilingual reconfiguration of storytelling, yet the lyricism of its observations is stunning. The chapters are curated to bring forth our exuberant lives; the novel is as sonically rich as a family in the kitchen preparing for the tamalada. I see our history in this work, our complicated worlds and willful loves. I see all of me in Caramelo. Cisneros is an artist supreme. — Helena María Viramontes
Perma Red, by Debra Magpie Earling, 2002
After nine rewrites and the loss of a draft in a house fire, Perma Red was published in 2002 by BlueHen Books, a Penguin imprint that closed soon after the book’s publication; the novel subsequently went out of print. Still, it managed to become an essential piece of the Native literary canon and influenced a generation of writers and teachers. Before its reissue by Milkweed, in 2022, word of mouth propelled new readers to find their way to copies in libraries and used bookstores, while devotees bewitched by Earling’s story held it close. It follows Louise White Elk, a teen girl buffeted by the chaotic forces of men’s attention and men’s power, which are exercised through the competing forms of the law, money, and the supernatural. That last current—shown in the sinister otherworldliness of Louise’s husband, Baptiste Yellow Knife—sets the novel’s mood and sends readers hurtling from its haunting beginning to its breathtaking end. Set on the Flathead Indian Reservation in the 1940s, Perma Red intertwines land and people with the invisible forces of society, nature, and what may exist beyond that, using exquisite sentences that turn into page after page of unforgettable rhythm. — Elissa Washuta
The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, by Gary Shteyngart, 2002
With tremendous humor and raw honesty, The Russian Debutante’s Handbook captures the paradox of the American immigrant: Citizenship might be attainable, but feeling “American” can be far more elusive. In the early 1990s, Vladimir—our 20-something Russian Jewish immigrant protagonist—toils away at the Emma Lazarus Immigrant Absorption Society, smothered by his parents’ expectations of him and his relationship with a dominatrix named Challah. Things look up when a wealthy Manhattan WASP takes an interest in him. In her eyes, his innate foreignness is recast as cosmopolitan: Russia is, after all, where Prava is, and Prava—Shteyngart’s stand-in for Prague—is the “Paris of the 90s.” Keeping up with his WASP girlfriend, however, runs poor Vladimir into debt, which he pays off through a favor to a shady Russian mobster named the Groundhog. Ironically, the Groundhog is impressed with Vladimir’s deep understanding of Americans, and he lures him to Prava to work as his right-hand man. Of course, it is there, half a world away from the country he’s never truly felt a part of and scheming to capitalize on Prava’s popularity with the jet set, that Vladimir discovers just how American he truly is. The book is raucous, exuberant, touching, and belly-laugh funny. — Xochitl Gonzalez
The Namesake, by Jhumpa Lahiri, 2003
At the age of 32, Lahiri won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction with her first book, the short-story collection Interpreter of Maladies, making her one of the youngest-ever recipients of the award. Three years later, she published her debut novel, which takes the themes she explored in her collection and knits them into a striking, singular narrative. The Namesake is about an Indian family that moves from Calcutta to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and how the immigrant parents and U.S.-born children navigate their new home. But it is really a story about what it means to belong—to a country, to our kin, to tradition—and how we find our way in the world. Few writers capture the interior lives of their characters as well as Lahiri does; their tension and their sense of longing spill off every page. — Clint Smith
Veronica, by Mary Gaitskill, 2005
Gaitskill’s writing is often described as unsentimental, but it is not without sentiment—hard-earned and unsparing sentiment, yes, but tender about the conditions that make people the way they are. Veronica focuses on the complicated friendship between a young woman stumbling away from the wreckage of her younger life and an older woman walking clear-eyed toward her death—a relationship that encompasses kindness and cruelty while remaining emotionally truthful. The unforgettable people captured in Gaitskill’s cool sentences appear before us unvarnished and unpretentious, forcing us to consider what it really means to see someone else. — Jeremy Gordon
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Díaz, 2007
Narrators are a tricky thing in contemporary literature. All-knowing, godlike ones are out; tightly focused first-person perspectives are in. The latter are great for creating intimacy but can lack the soaring view and freewheeling power that makes a third-person novel (think Pride and Prejudice or Anna Karenina) so pleasurable. Unless the I in question belongs to Yunior, the narrator of Díaz’s magisterial novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Yunior is an omniscient storyteller and a fallible jerk. He’s a minor character—Oscar’s sister’s cheating would-be boyfriend; Oscar’s fair-weather friend—but his heartbroken, profane, register-shifting, code-switching narration makes the book. Oscar Wao is about the poor, doomed Oscar, yes; it’s about grief and displacement and diaspora; but really, it’s about the way Yunior talks about those things. He makes the massive specific. Only a very special I can do that. — Lily Meyer
A Visit From the Goon Squad, by Jennifer Egan, 2010
When people talk about A Visit From the Goon Squad, they’re often praising its form. For good reason: In a constellation of stories spanning several decades, Egan follows a wide cast of interconnected characters. (It’s the kind of book that begs reviewers to call it “kaleidoscopic.”) And the writing is genuinely innovative: One chapter is written as a PowerPoint presentation, another as a celebrity profile, another in the second person. These structural risks pay off, though, because they reveal people who are flawed, funny, disappointed, and lost, and Egan has empathy for all of them. Even when it presents itself in witty or ingenious packaging, the emotional core of Goon Squad is achingly earnest—that’s its real gift. — Faith Hill
I Hotel, by Karen Tei Yamashita, 2010
848 Kearney, in San Francisco, was for decades the International Hotel, the center of gravity for the city’s Asian American activist and artistic communities. Yamashita brings the hotel, its residents, and their political world to life in 10 fascinating, assiduously researched, linked novellas—one per year, beginning in 1968—that combine fact and fiction, ethnography and poetry, experimentalism and sincerity, and a cacophony of voices and formats. — Ellen Cushing
Open City, by Teju Cole, 2011
When I first encountered Open City, I wasn’t familiar with the idea of the flaneur—a figure in 19th-century French literature who strolls about a city, observing the landscape and the people surrounding him. The flaneur is a way for a writer to excavate the granularities and idiosyncrasies of their environment that otherwise go overlooked. In Open City, Cole’s protagonist, Julius, a Nigerian man finishing up a fellowship in psychiatry, walks around New York. As he wanders, his encounters tell a story about the metropolis that goes beyond the bright lights that draw in tourists. The book, propelled not by a traditional plot but by the movements of Julius’s mind as he traces the history, architecture, and pulse of the world around him, expanded my understanding of what a novel could be. — Clint Smith
Salvage the Bones, by Jesmyn Ward, 2011
Ward’s National Book Award–winning novel is narrated by Esch, a poor, Black teenager who lives in the Mississippi bayou with her three brothers and a mercurial, alcoholic father in the immediate lead-up to and aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Befitting that setting, it is visceral, brutal, and full of unblinking descriptions of blood and guts and bodies, both human and animal. Esch is a fascinating protagonist—she is sensitive to the world around her, but she is tough; she deals with adult matters (sex, pregnancy, caretaking) resolutely, but swoons for an older boy. Ward’s language is poetic and lush, yet specific—a perfect match for the story, which is at once a wide-angled tragedy and an intimate family drama. — Maya Chung
The Round House, by Louise Erdrich, 2012
Thirteen-year-old Joe Coutts is abruptly and devastatingly robbed of his innocence when his mother is raped not far from their home on a North Dakota reservation. Justice is complicated by jurisdictional questions—namely, whether the attack happened on state or tribal land, and whether it was committed by an Indian or a non-Indian. The tale is expertly woven rather than told: Bit by bit, Erdrich charts the aftermath of the rape, focusing on not just how a traumatic event affects the victim, but also how it shatters those around her. — Maya Chung
Americanah, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, 2013
“I did not think of myself as black and I only became black when I came to America,” Ifemelu, the Nigerian protagonist of Americanah, says to a poet at a Manhattan dinner party. It’s from this outsider’s perspective that Adichie’s third and best-known novel examines the hypocrisies and cruelties of American society. At the center is the story of Ifemelu and her first love, Obinze, whose romance, beginning in adolescence, is ruptured when circumstances send Obinze barreling down a different life path, in the United Kingdom. Bridging three continents and written with erudite discernment, Americanah is a huge-hearted story. — Valerie Trapp
Nevada, by Imogen Binnie, 2013
Nevada has lived a distinctly contemporary life. It came out in 2013 and grew into a word-of-mouth hit, especially among queer and trans readers. When its publisher, the indie Topside Press, folded in 2017, Nevada went out of print, but its audience kept it alive online. Websites, message boards, and discussion forums sustained the book, just as the book sustained some of its readers; it eventually came to the attention of an editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, which reissued the book in 2022. It’s no wonder that Nevada didn’t go away when its original publisher did. Binnie and her protagonist, Maria Griffiths, are both trans women, a rarity in American literature then and (to a lesser degree) now. More important, Maria is a great character. She’s prickly and disaffected, selfish and self-sabotaging, far too pleased with her own mind. She’s also charismatic, funny, and rude in a way that feels like an invitation for us to join in. Reading Nevada is, in the end, about the experience of hanging out with Maria, which is worth doing again and again. — Lily Meyer
A Brief History of Seven Killings, by Marlon James, 2014
Violence is everywhere in James’s Booker-winning epic. The novel begins with a ghostly Jamaican politician recounting his own murder, and hinges on the real-life 1976 attempt to assassinate Bob Marley. The book dispenses with the brevity promised in its title, tangling together history and plot as various reporters, gangs, CIA operatives, and prominent leaders struggle for dominance in Kingston and New York City over three decades. Its many rivers of story all flow toward the same preoccupation, however: James is interested in the psychology of brutality, and the dark urges that push men to break down social contracts in search of power. — Emma Sarappo
Family Life, by Akhil Sharma, 2014
This short, gutting novel begins as a standard story of immigration, with the Mishra family’s move from Delhi to Queens in the mid-1970s, but becomes a portrait of grief and its warping power. At the center of Family Life is an accident: The elder Mishra son, the confident, successful Birju, slams his head after diving into a swimming pool; brain damage renders him unable to speak or walk. We see the story unfold through the eyes of Ajay, Birju’s younger brother, who is left to navigate a family that barely functions and parents who have seemingly lost the ability to love or, at least, really see Ajay and his pain. This sorrow circles around Birju, who lies inert in the family’s home, as Mrs. Mishra brings healers to try to “wake” him and Ajay lies down next to his brother and shares his deepest secrets. In Sharma’s story, America is filled with new challenges, but nothing as difficult as the country of sadness where Ajay and his parents find themselves wandering alone together. — Gal Beckerman
Fates and Furies, by Lauren Groff, 2015
First, the rosy view of Lotto, the self-absorbed playwright husband. Then, the spikier vantage of his secretive wife, Mathilde. This is a story about partnership, about the void between our private and performative selves, about creativity and death. Hopscotching between genres, Groff makes the domestic operatic, mythical—timeless. But the real joy is in her sentences: A man has “deltoids like hand grenades”; a bus “knelt the passengers off like a carnival elephant.” Like the novel as a whole, they crackle and fizzle and constantly surprise. — Stephanie Hayes
The Fifth Season, by N. K. Jemisin, 2015
In speculative fiction, archetypes can be stifling. Popular works in the genre can be so beholden to J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, and the other golden-age titans that homage often becomes pastiche. That’s part of why The Fifth Season is such a massive accomplishment. The first book in Jemisin’s trilogy about earth-moving magic-wielders fighting to save humanity from catastrophe certainly draws the expected points of comparison with the canon, but Jemisin’s deep world-building and consideration of her characters’ motives within that established world make for a fresh, thrilling story. These are people, not types, and their dramas are as heartbreaking and emotional as the cataclysm that threatens them. — Vann R. Newkirk II
The Sellout, by Paul Beatty, 2015
The Sellout is that true rarity, a comic novel. It doesn’t elicit a knowing grin or a shake of the head. The book is funny. This is more than a discomfited response to an outlandish plot: A Black man in suburban Los Angeles decides to reinstate the institution of slavery. Beatty’s exuberant story is thick with gags, puns, and one-liners; there’s a bit of business about Condoleezza Rice that made me laugh out loud, but every reader will find their own moment of such catharsis. If the essential ingredient of humor is intelligence, readers can conclude only that this author is a genius. It’s the lot of the Black writer in America that no matter what they write, it will be understood as being about race. Might as well go for it, Beatty seems to be saying. He pairs his narrator with a minstrel, an 80-something former child star from Our Gang and … well, hijinks ensue. With great glee, The Sellout skewers the academy, the police, hip-hop, respectability politics—basically every aspect of contemporary American life. It’s billed as satire but that doesn’t quite get at it, maybe because that form is rarely done this well. On the page, Beatty finds what has eluded Black Americans since this nation’s inception: freedom. — Rumaan Alam
The Sympathizer, by Viet Thanh Nguyen, 2015
The Sympathizer was published the year I first attended Kundiman, a retreat for Asian American writers; I remember the brilliant Gina Apostol, who was on faculty, declaring that it should win the Pulitzer—and then it did. Perhaps because of this timing, Nguyen’s genre-slashing, table-turning Vietnam War novel will always be linked in my mind to the opening-up of a lush and newly vital period of Asian American writing. Nearly a decade later, Nguyen’s titular sympathizer, “a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces” who possesses the “talent”—or “hazard”—of being “able to see any issue from both sides,” still expresses not just the definitive pain of hyphenated consciousness but also how it feels to be alive and thinking in a divided, opinion-saturated age. The story is written as a confession—possibly the literary form of the 20th century’s two big opposing ideas, individualism and communism—and Nguyen’s prose is intimidatingly erudite but also so fun and rambunctious that you barely notice it. This book changed the way many readers imagined U.S. wars abroad and coaxed us into a rowdier, more irreverent era of Asian American literature. — Meng Jin
Amiable With Big Teeth, by Claude McKay, 2017
In 2009, a doctoral student came across a typewritten manuscript while going through boxes in a rare-book library at Columbia University. It turned out to be the thrilling, long-lost final novel by McKay, a leading voice of the Harlem Renaissance. Its story follows a fictional charity raising money for Ethiopian soldiers fighting against Mussolini’s Italy, and the infiltration of white, Communist interlopers who were looking for converts to their cause with little care for the Black community in Harlem itself. As the critic Jennifer Wilson has written, Amiable is as relevant today as it was when it was written: “a master key into a world where the intersection of race and global revolutionary politics plays out in the lives of characters who are as dynamic and fully realized as the novel itself.” — Elise Hannum
Lincoln in the Bardo, by George Saunders, 2017
Saunders’s experimental, ambitious novel uses the true story of the death of Abraham Lincoln’s son Willie—and the apocryphal claim that Lincoln entered the crypt where Willlie’s body lay and cradled him—as a scaffold. Willie’s spirit lingers around the graveyard where he’s buried, along with a huge cast of other ghosts still clinging to the unfinished business of their lives. The grieving president’s visit disrupts the dead’s navel-gazing, and they become invested in helping Willie move on. Saunders builds the story out of fragments, arranging quotes from historical accounts (some real, some made up) alongside snippets of the specters’ backstories and absurd, sometimes gross experiences in their purgatory. The novel is a reflection on the inner life of a great man at a crucial juncture in history, but it feels universal, too: The chaotic chorus of spirits surrounding the Lincolns represents a kaleidoscope of humanity in all its sweetness and awfulness, in all its crudeness, cruelty, and beauty. — Julie Beck
Sabrina, by Nick Drnaso, 2018
After a young woman’s disappearance and murder, the forces of conspiracism and collective paranoia turn a senseless crime into something even darker. Though she appears alive only in the graphic novel’s first dozen pages, Sabrina haunts her boyfriend’s nightmares and her sister’s daydreams with the same faraway half-smile she wears in photos splashed across news articles. A quiet anger infuses Drnaso’s study of the ways in which modern American life can strangle our experiences of both private mourning and public tragedy. Meanwhile, his illustrations create an aura of nauseous dread with muted colors, spare panels, and minimally drawn characters who might be staring blankly in one frame and crouching behind a door with a knife in the next. Still, a fragile but real humanity holds Sabrina together, palpable in scenes of a grieving man searching for a lost cat, or a child playing on the beach. The final spread shows a character following the advice given by its title character, words that might as well come from Drnaso himself: “Get away from the internet.” — Lenika Cruz
Severance, by Ling Ma, 2018
Severance is an eerily prescient, expertly plotted pandemic novel, yes—but it’s also uncommonly insightful about our attachment to normalcy. The story’s fictional infection causes a type of dementia that dooms the sick to mindlessly repeat the habits of their life—such as setting the table for dinner—on a loop until they die. Survivors must fight the urge to dwell on how the world used to be, and dare to imagine something better. — Elise Hannum
There There, by Tommy Orange, 2018
There There raises questions about what it means to be Native but refuses to handily answer them. The queries of identity taken up by previous generations of writers remain, but in this novel, they are renewed by the complications of digital interconnectedness. Through chapters that shift from one protagonist to another, slipping across familial ties and reestablishing severed bonds, Orange foregrounds relationships in his imagining of an urban Native community in Oakland. — Elissa Washuta
Lost Children Archive, by Valeria Luiselli, 2019
A family—referred to throughout as “Ma,” “Pa,” “the boy,” and “the girl”—sets out from the Bronx, driving toward the Southwest. Theirs is a summer break with no prospect of being carefree. The parents each have a documentary project. He aims to create an archive of sounds recorded among the Chiricahua Mountains in Arizona, at the center of what was once Apache country. Her audio quest is for stories of migrant children who’ve gone missing on the dangerous trek from Central and South America to the United States. Their own children (the son biologically his, the daughter hers) are along for the adventure, and are a crucial adhesive: This is a family on the verge of fracture. In a novel that is itself a narrative and archival marvel—Ma’s road-trip chronicle is interspersed with newspaper clippings, inventories, bibliographies, photos, tape transcriptions—Luiselli updates and undoes the American frontier myth. In the process, she discovers a polyphonic, prismatic form of fiction with a rare power to convey experiences of loss. — Ann Hulbert
Nothing to See Here, by Kevin Wilson, 2019
Somewhat unexpectedly, Lillian, an aimless 20-something, is made the caregiver for two twin 10-year-olds—who happen to spontaneously catch on fire when upset. Lillian reconnects with their stepmother, Madison, who was her roommate at boarding school, and comes to understand that her role is to create a self-contained, presentable family that can orbit the twins’ father, a senator on the precipice of a political rise. Despite its surprising premise, Nothing to See Here can be as understated as its title suggests; as the two women and the two children cobble together some kind of stability, the book discards the supernatural to focus on the emotional, becoming a bittersweet examination of how people who love one another disappoint one another. — Emma Sarappo
The Old Drift, by Namwali Serpell, 2019
When I first read Serpell’s debut novel, I was overwhelmed by one specific curiosity: How many whiteboards, legal pads, or Google Docs had it taken to pull together a story so intricate and complex? The Old Drift follows three families—one Zambian, one Italian, and one Indian—across three generations. But characterizing it as a family story belies its ambitious scope and historical weight: The book’s first narrator is based on a real-life colonist who moved to Zambia in the early 20th century, when it was still Rhodesia. In following her characters through Zambia’s colonial past and into the near future, Serpell weaves a magical-realist tale of political revolutions, bodily excesses, all-consuming loves, ecological warfare, technological innovation, and human greed. The Old Drift’s characters never get lost in that smorgasbord of themes, a testament to Serpell’s keen observational skills, wry humor, and narrative confidence. — Hannah Giorgis
No One Is Talking About This, by Patricia Lockwood, 2021
How do you pull a novel out of the great suck, out of the bristling, blithering nothing that is the world online? You write it in chunks, in bytes, in flashes of lightning. You use ecstatic prose and filthy jokes. You move fast, at a pitch of humor that goes whining past irony into a form of emergency sincerity. You describe things previously undescribed. You are fearless in the presence of the sublime, and equally fearless in the presence of the very un-sublime indeed. It helps if you’re also an excellent journalist. Oh yeah, and an excellent poet. No One Is Talking About This is a simple story: A woman made online-famous by a single tweet (“Can a dog be twins?”) travels the world, gets on panels, answers questions at seminars, generally enacts the viral version of Being a Great Writer. Then something happens—something real, something offline. Read it once in amazement. Read it a second time in renewed amazement. — James Parker
The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois, by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, 2021
Jeffers’s novel is an epic in the purest sense. It spans centuries and takes its time reveling in the story of America in all its splendor and shame. But it is simultaneously and incredibly also an intimate portrait of one Black woman, Ailey Pearl Garfield, coming of age at the end of the 20th century. The book toggles back and forth in time, delving into Garfield’s family history in Georgia—one populated with Native Americans, enslaved people, and Scottish immigrants. In the present day, Garfield finds her way to adulthood in a society acutely attuned to gradations of class and color. She searches for traces of her family’s past and does the work of uncovering, which is also what Jeffers accomplishes with this capacious novel: to surface all of those forgotten songs whose tunes still sound in us today. — Gal Beckerman
Biography of X, by Catherine Lacey, 2023
The world is riddled with Xs. Those who are illiterate use it as a signature, and others deploy it to leave their mark—a name and not a name at the same time. In Biography of X, the titular character, an artist, is a woman with no past who has fashioned herself into a cultural chameleon: She’s part Kathy Acker, part Marina Abramović, part Cindy Sherman, but also entirely original—and potentially a con. Her widow, C. M., is writing X’s posthumous biography but is as puzzled—and furious—as the rest of the world at the void that X left underneath all of her assumed personalities. Lacey presses right on the place where our culture of performing identity intersects with our equally strong mania for authenticity. She creates an icon of the art world who is as magnetic as she is repulsive, and mischievously, deliciously encourages readers to wonder why we, too, can’t get enough of her. Biography of X is a wild, frenetic novel—one that points a finger right back at the reader. — Hillary Kelly
What's Your Reaction?