The 17 Best Books of 2018
God Save Texas
By Lawrence Wright
After tackling 9/11 and Scientology, journalist Lawrence Wright wrangles his toughest subject yet: home, the Lone Star State. With a balance of deep reporting and memoir, the New Yorker staff writer offers a personal history of Texas, a place both singular and the bellwether of American politics and morality. It's a different approach, and one that Wright nails.
Lawrence Wright Recommends: Ticker by Mimi Swartz
“I was enthralled by Swartz's book on the race to build an artificial heart. In addition to being a tutorial on the bloody science of heart surgery, it read like a thriller.”
Small Fry
By Lisa Brennan-Jobs
Growing up with an absent father—not easy! But what if your MIA dad is Steve Jobs? For years, the Apple co-founder denied his paternity of his first daughter. And in the exceptionally written Small Fry, penned by that very daughter, this was just one of the many abhorrent qualities about Jobs. But while the book is critical of him, it's far from a takedown. This memoir is one of rejection, longing, and forgiveness.
Lisa Brennan-Jobs Recommends: Good Trouble by Joseph O'Neill
“This story collection is insightful, sly, and made me guffaw.”
Playing Changes
By Nate Chinen
Does jazz need to be saved? Ryan Gosling in La La Land might think so, but that's not the case for NPR's foremost jazz expert, Nate Chinen. Over 12 colorfully written chapters, he argues that the genre is as vital as ever. In its breadth, the book embraces jazz's diversity as evidence that it needs no saviors. Plus, Chinen ends the book with the 129 best albums of this century so you can hear for yourself.
Nate Chinen Recommends: Boom Town by Sam Anderson
“This is a book about Oklahoma City that wraps so much in its wry embrace: Manifest Destiny, the NBA, extreme weather, urban planning, the Flaming Lips.”
Asymmetry
By Lisa Halliday
This appears to be a New York novel with familiar beats: a young aspiring novelist has an affair with a thinly veiled Philip Roth type. But the book transforms into a subversive novel about power structures, and its hella divisive ending will leave you totally floored.
Lisa Halliday Recommends: Deviation by Luce d'Eramo
“In this novelistic treatment of her life experiences with Fascists and Nazis, d'Eramo explores the unreliability of memory, the mutability of morality, the multiplicity of the self, and the miseries of war.”
Bad Blood
By John Carreyrou
Elizabeth Holmes was supposed to be the Steve Jobs of the medical world—but may have turned out to be the greatest fraud in recent history. Her company, Theranos, promoted a device that would revolutionize blood testing. Those machines seemingly ended up being lemons. But when life gives you lemons, you can apparently just lie out your ass about it to venture capitalists. Remarkably, Theranos became a $9 billion Silicon Valley darling before Holmes's alleged misdeeds were ultimately exposed. This Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter shares every detail.
John Carreyrou Recommends: Red Card by Ken Bensinger
“I'm a soccer fan (I grew up in France rooting for Les Bleus), and reading this deeply reported account of how U.S. prosecutors unraveled the web of corruption that gangrened the beautiful game was both fun and infuriating.”
My Year of Rest and Relaxation
By Ottessa Moshfegh
The unnamed narrator of this acerbic novel has a plan: to sequester herself in her apartment and try to sleep as much as possible for an entire year. “Why?” you ask. “Why not?” the book, Moshfegh's fourth, seems to say, as it tours us through an otherworldly, drug-induced semi-coma that also involves a tumultuous best-friend relationship and a lot of hilarious therapy.
Ottessa Moshfegh Recommends: The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish by Katya Apekina
“The father character, a maniacally selfish writer, made me cringe, to put it lightly!”
The Penguin Book of Japanese Short Stories
Edited by Jay Rubin
Assembled by longtime Haruki Murakami translator Jay Rubin (and blessed with an introduction by Murakami himself), this handsome 576-page tome is cleverly organized by theme rather than chronology, giving the book a stronger sense of cohesion than if it had started in the 19th century and ended with stories from today. Still, the best way to read this collection is to treat it like a survey—that is, skip around a bunch. You might encounter a witch, or a devastating earthquake, or “The Girl from Ipanema.”
Jay Rubin Recommends: The Penguin Book of Haiku
“After word of this book gets out, the English-language practice and study of haiku will never be the same.”
Junk
By Tommy Pico
Junk is a book-length poem about displacement, but also candy. It's the third in the Teebs trilogy, Teebs being the guiding voice in Pico's IRL and Nature Poem—queer, young, Native American, New Yorker. In Junk, Teebs races through stanzas with midnight-cigarette musings on eating, dating, aging, losing, bodies, beauty (“tho fuck beauty”), celebs and identity and media and cheese, in text-Tumblr shorthand. It's razor sharp, dirty, and relevant, delivering the super funny-sad tenor of reality in poetic meter. “I am / in the Junk shop of my 30s,” he writes. “I suppose Junk is also a way of not letting go.” —Genevieve Walker
Tommy Pico Recommends: There There by Tommy Orange
“It's exciting to be living in a time when there are two Native Tommys in contemporary literature such that I live for the days on social media when someone says they can't wait to read There There by Tommy PICO and I screencap that shit and send it to our ongoing e-mail thread. Dead.”
There There
By Tommy Orange
If Tommy Orange has a thesis, it's that Native stories are often lost, if not ignored, in American history. So the 36-year-old wrote a book that's unforgettable. Orange's stunning debut novel, There There, jumps across many voices and characters (think A Visit from the Goon Squad x The Savage Detectives), all of whom converge on the Big Oakland Powwow in the novel's concluding set piece. It's a book that's smart and often funny about race and power, wrapped in a propulsive, kaleidoscopic story that hurtles toward a violent end.
Tommy Orange Recommends: Heart Berries by Terese Marie Mailhot
“Terse and tough and fierce and honest, Mailhot is an essential new voice in the Native literary world, as well as in the world at large.”
This story originally appeared in the December 2018/January 2019 issue with the title "It Was A Year For The Books."
