My Top Books of 2024

My 10 favorite reads of the year, plus the authors—and publishers—I'm excited about in 2025.

Jan 01, 2025

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My Favorite New Releases of 2024

5. Anita de Monte Laughs Last by Xochitl Gonzalez (Flatiron)

Rare is the piece of historical fiction that takes such clear inspiration from a real-life murder without feeling like an unauthorized biography or otherwise replicating the exploitative, greasy nature of true crime. But in Anita de Monte Laughs Last, it’s not just the true story of Cuban artist Ana Mendieta that serves as the novel’s historical basis; the surreal, otherworldly quality of Mendieta’s art actively shapes the structure in which Gonzalez tells her story. So close is the fictional Anita de Monte to her real-life inspiration that initially, the line between character and historical figure seems almost nonexistent. But Gonzalez isn’t interested in merely rehashing the intricacies of Mendieta’s suspicious death or her artist husband’s swift acquittal.

Instead, the moment of the pseudo-Mendieta’s death is a crossroads at which Anita de Monte Laughs Last becomes a magical realist interrogation of the forces that would have its titular artist, or her inspiration, erased from history. Anita de Monte achieves a bait-and-switch with its readers, revealing itself to center not the story of the murder, but the narrative of another young Latina artist more than a decade later (this one perhaps inspired by Gonzalez herself), who uncovers Monte’s work even as the surrounding art world attempts to keep it buried. Neither a Capote-esque “true crime novel” or a traditional bildungsroman, Anita de Monte Laughs Last is a decade- and genre-spanning treatise on who is remembered, and why.

4. Margo’s Got Money Troubles by Rufi Thorpe (William Morrow)

It’s no surprise to see that Rufi Thorpe’s Margo’s Got Money Troubles has Kevin Wilson’s stamp of approval in the form of a back-cover blurb; the two authors share a flavor. In a sense, they’re both contributors to the canon of alienated young women not afforded the luxury of wallowing in this title, forced instead into a scrappy, often comical survival mode.

In Margo, the titular heroine is a promising college freshman when an affair with her married English professor turns her into a single mother with few options to make ends meet. Things start to turn around when Margo’s usually-absentee father, former wrestling promoter Jinx, suddenly re-enters her life as her roommate, and Margo finally finds a way to make money by using his promotional strategies to launch an OnlyFans career. But soon, she learns overnight success might not come so easy. Margo’s Got Money Troubles has the poignant humor and lived-in worldbuilding that made Wilson’s Nothing to See Here magnetic, but a formal inventiveness that makes Thorpe’s prose distinctly her own.

3. Colored Television by Danzy Senna (Riverhead)

Scarcely in the last century of fiction has American literature not been fascinated with multiracial identity. That should come as no surprise: America itself has been fascinated with the idea of multiracial identity for longer than it has been “America” proper—so long, in fact, that taxonomizing mixed race individuals is ingrained in our earliest colonial laws.

By the time Nella Larsen released Passing—her seminal novella about a biracial woman who shirks her Black identity to live as a white woman—in 1929, the country was already centuries-deep into its curiosity with the subject. In the 21st century, the American literary world embraced a newer (and very meta) racial fascination, with satirical novels—like Percival Everett’s Erasure or more recently, Elaine Hsieh Chou’s Disorientation and R.F. Kuang’s Yellowface, among others—that explore the alternatively strategic and fetishistic roles of racial identity in artmaking.

Enter Danzy Senna’s Colored Television, a novel that blends those centuries of artistic and academic musing on the multiracial individual with this more recent satirical canon of tokenization. In Colored Television, Jane is a frustrated, middle-aged biracial novelist-turned-professor whose latest book, which she believes will be the Great American Biracial Novel, has dominated the last decade of her life. But when things with the novel start to disintegrate, Jane takes an all-too-precarious leap into the television industry, only to find the world of multiracial media is not what it seems. With nods to her husband’s work in Erasure, Senna’s novel is a roller coaster that oscillates as smoothly between self-satire and earnest reckoning as its protagonist does between overconfidence and despair.

2. A Sunny Place for Shady People by Mariana Enriquez, translated by Megan McDowell (Hogarth)

There is perhaps no more interesting literary duo working today than Mariana Enriquez and her longtime translator, Megan McDowell. Enriquez spins haunting, visceral, horrifically beautiful tales that confront the darkest areas of Argentina’s broad history with a far more intimate darkness inside her human characters. Then, McDowell captures the deepest, most eerie sentiments in Enriquez’s words, and brings them to a new life in a way few contemporary literary translators—particularly in horror—have perfected.

After bringing Enriquez’s full-length novel, Our Share of Night, to English-speaking audiences in 2021, the pair returned this year for an English translation of Enriquez’s latest collection of short stories, A Sunny Place for Shady People, which, like much of Enriquez’s work, follows women across Argentina who live mundane, sometimes depressing lives in the presence of supernatural horror. It is the domestic, atmospheric terror of Flannery O’Connor with the body horror of David Cronenberg, realized through a feminist lens. In A Sunny Place for Shady People, Enriquez seems to find that the only way to reckon with a legacy of political despair is to match its absurdity with something equally horrific.

1. The Fetishist by Katherine Min (Putnam)

In a sense, The Fetishist is three different novels. The first, a revenge thriller in which, Kyoko, an orphaned punk musician, is hungry for vengeance. The second, a tragicomic romance in which Daniel, the classical musician whom Kyoto blames for causing her mother’s death, is desperate to repent for the women he’s wronged. The third, a devastating death journey in which Alma, Daniel’s first love, is desperate for understanding in her last days of a terminal illness. But as disparate as they seem at first, none of the three stories can exist without the other; The Fetishist is a cyclical novel about doing wrong and being forgiven.

The Fetishist could easily fall into the aforementioned canon of racial satires a la Chou’s Disorientation—it has the same biting, critical humor and the twist-filled, sometimes surreal air of suspense. But there is more nuance to The Fetishist than can be contained in its semi-thriller premise. Min’s novel, written as the author herself was dying of cancer, is a meditation on anticipatory grief that feels anything but resigned to fate—it rages against it, fighting to find some meaning as it barrels toward an inevitable conclusion. The result is truly singular.

Honorable Mentions: The Husbands by Holly Gramazio (Doubleday), Thirst by Marina Yuszczuk (Dutton), Big Fan by Alexandra Romanoff (831 Stories)

My Favorite Non-2024 Releases

5. The Princess of 72nd Street by Elaine Kraf (The Modern Library, originally published 1979)

With languid, unabashedly unreliable narration from a protagonist in the throes of mania, The Princess of 72nd Street feels something like what could have been Shirley Jackson in her later years (had her career not been cut short by an early death), with a hint of what Ottessa Moshfegh reached for with My Year of Rest and Relaxation. It feels impossible to give away too much—or too little—of Kraf’s final novella, in which an Upper West Side artist inhabits a new persona while avoiding hospitalization for an undisclosed mental illness, except to say that it’s a thoroughly haunting endeavor.

4. Nothing to See Here by Kevin Wilson (Ecco, 2019)

At the start of Kevin Wilson’s endearing, poignant fifth novel, Lillian is 28 and working a dead-end job in Tennessee a decade after the scandal that killed her academic career. Then she receives an offer from Madison, her wealthy former best friend: spend the summer caring for Madison’s twin stepchildren, whose mysterious condition causes them to catch fire when agitated, and earn a life-changing salary. But when Lillian accepts the position, she finds the chance to start anew may come at too steep a cost. Nothing to See Here is a perpetually delightful surprise, and an addictive, absurd ode to dysfunctional—and found—families.

3. Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield (Picador, 2022)

If the 2020s have brought us anything, it’s a bounty of feminist literary horror, from Mona Awad’s unreliable narrators to Mariana Enriquez’s twisted imagery, to Claire Kohda’s monstrous bildungsromane, to Rachel Yoder’s psychological horror-satire, to Sarah Rose Etter’s apocalypse-era body horror. Still, among all the bounty, Julia Armfield stands out, a haunting, tragic voice that strikes a balance between establishing the deepest possible emotional intimacy and never fully pulling back the curtain on her novel’s looming sci-fi threat.

In Our Wives Under the Sea, something lurks beneath the surface—something deep in the recesses of the Mariana Trench, where marine biologist Leah has found her submarine indefinitely stranded. But it’s what happens after her return, when Leah’s wife, Miri, attempts to rebuild their shattered life together, that the real horrors begin to bubble up. Equal parts horrific and devastating, Our Wives Under the Sea solidifies Armfield’s place as a must-read author in the feminist horror canon.

2. Vladimir by Julia May Jonas (Avid, 2022)

Julia May Jonas’ debut novel feels hard to pin down. What begins as a campus novel dissolves into a full-blown thriller before we know it; but unlike its peers Bunny or The Secret History, which take similar turns, at the helm of Vladimir is a perpetual campus-dweller. Vladimir’s unnamed narrator is not a student, but a middle-aged, long-tenured English professor, one who finds herself isolated and at an ethical impasse when her husband, a fellow professor, becomes the center of a #MeToo scandal at their small New England college. Already, the university setting is transformed, no longer the backdrop for coming of age, but a prison sentence, constricting a protagonist for whom any decisive action feels like a betrayal.

Then a young, attractive novelist on the rise joins the English department as a visiting professor, and nothing in the world of Vladimir goes unchanged. The novel that bucked at its setting from the outset once again subverts expectations, burrowing into its protagonist’s most taboo, concealed desires until it forces us—and her—to reckon with the structure of power in which she once peacefully built a life.

1. I Have Some Questions for You by Rebecca Makkai (Viking, 2023)

Since her novel The Great Believers hit shelves in 2018, there have been few contemporary authors as widely celebrated, yet non-prolific, as Rebecca Makkai. But I Have Some Questions For You, though less celebrated than its predecessor, surpasses even Makkai’s massive reputation.

I Have Some Questions For You follows a successful true crime podcaster across two timelines—her senior year at an elite boarding school and twenty years later, when she returns as a visiting professor—as she attempts to navigate her own personal connection to a murder on campus, both avoiding and profiting off of the truth. It is at once a searing, unrelenting confrontation of the true crime industry in all its exploitative, ethically murky glory, and a deeply intimate, profoundly empathetic, and long-delayed coming of age.

Honorable Mentions: All This Could Be Different by Sarah Thankham Mathews (Viking, 2022), All’s Well by Mona Awad (Simon & Schuster, 2021), Disorientation by Elaine Hsieh Chou (Penguin Press, 2023), My Last Innocent Year by Daisy Alpert Florin (Henry Holt and Co., 2023), Ripe by Sarah Rose Etter (Scribner, 2023), The Stepdaughter by Caroline Blackwood (McNally Editions, originally published 1976)

Honorable Mention: My Favorite Publishers of 2024

831 Stories

It’s a rare treat to discover a publisher so early into its existence, but 831 Stories was anything but quiet in its debut. Beginning with Alexandra Romanoff’s Big Fan, released in September of this year, the nascent publisher set out to introduce not just a new canon of romance novellas with a literary fiction sensibility, but an entire literary universe to surround them. The novels themselves are hardly the end of the publisher’s output; 831 Stories couches each release in a myriad of fan-oriented bonuses, from exclusive online epilogues to high-end merch, to publisher-moderated fan boards, and even author-approved fan fiction. When co-founder Erica Cerulo told Glamour she’d set out to create the “A24 for romance,” she wasn’t kidding. 831 Stories may trade in fanfare, but luckily, its output (thus far) has the literary prowess to back it up.

Favorite 2024 Reads:

Big Fan by Alexandra Romanoff
Hardly Strangers by A.C. Robinson

McNally Editions & The Modern Library

Neither McNally Editions—the publishing arm of independent bookstore chain McNally Jackson—nor The Modern Library, an offshoot of Random House, actually deals in new releases. But in 2024, they’ve been prolific all the same. Both publishers are dedicated to republishing underappreciated novels from the last century of literature, especially those with marginalized authors or transgressive-for-the-era themes. That makes them two great sources for rediscovering mid-20th century would-be classics, like Elaine Kraf’s The Princess of 72nd Street, which made my Top 5 list this year, and Caroline Blackwood’s (also Shirley Jackson-adjacent) domestic satire The Stepdaughter. Entering 2025, they’re the publishers most present on my reading list.

Favorite 2024 Reads:

The Stepdaughter by Caroline Blackwood (McNally, originally published 1976, republished 2024)
The Princess of 72nd Street by Elaine Kraf (The Modern Library Torchbearers series, originally published 1979, republished 2024)

On My Reading List:

Ex-Wife by Ursula Parrott (McNally, originally published 1929, republished 2023)
The House of Madelaine by Elaine Kraf (The Modern Library Torchbearers collection, originally published 1971, republished 2024)
Ladies of the Rachmaninoff Eyes by Henry van Dyke (McNally, originally published 1965, republished 2024)
Quicksand by Nella Larsen (The Modern Library Torchbearers collection, originally published 1928, republished 2024)

12 Books I Want to Read Next Year

You Dreamed of Empires by Álvaro Enrigue (Riverhead, 2024)
The Skin and Its Girl by Sarah Cypher (Ballantine, 2023)
Ladies of the Rachmaninoff Eyes by Henry van Dyke (McNally Editions, originally published 1965)
Private Rites by Julia Armfield (Flatiron, 2024)
This Motherless Land by Nikki May (Mariner, 2024)
Sister Snake by Amanda Lee Koe (Ecco, 2024)
Poor Deer by Claire Oshetsky (Ecco, 2024)
Everyone Knows Your Mother is a Witch by Rivka Galchen (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2021)
The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride (Riverhead, 2023)
Mona at Sea by Elizabeth Gonzalez James (Santa Fe Writers Project, 2021)
The Berry Pickers by Amanda Peters (Catapult, 2024)
Hungerstone by Kat Dunn (Manilla Press, forthcoming 2025)

Bonus: My Favorite Films of 2024

2024 was a solid, if sparse, year for my movie-watching habits. But considering that for the previous month—and for at least the next month after today—this blog has been knee-deep in awards season film reviews, I thought that for the purpose of this article, I’d pare down and move away from focusing on new releases. Instead, below are a few of my favorite first watches of 2024.

5. Fancy Dance (2024, dir. Erica Tremblay)

Perhaps the anti-true crime crime story, as seen in Anita de Monte and I Have Some Questions for You, is the strongest thread running through my list of favorites this year. On the film side, documentarian Erica Tremblay reimagines this idea in her narrative debut, Fancy Dance, which grapples with the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women crisis through the lens of family drama. In Fancy Dance, Lily Gladstone is (once again) astounding as Jax, a small-time thief forced to take in her 13-year-old niece, Roki (Isabel Deroy-Olsen), after her sister vanishes from their home on a Seneca-Cayuga reservation. When police both on and off the reservation prove incapable of—or uninterested in—making progress on the case, Jax and Roki set out on their own for a cross-country trek to solve the disappearance and find their way out of increasingly controlling, oppressive circumstances.

Fancy Dance doesn’t sensationalize the disappearance at the center of its story, as so much other media attempting to navigate the same issue is wont to do. Instead, it’s an intimate, heart-wrenching, simultaneously beautiful and hard-to-watch ode to the impossible resilience of family bonds.

4. A Thousand and One (2023, dir. A.V. Rockwell)

As intimate as the conflict in A Thousand and One turns out to be, A.V. Rockwell’s directorial debut has the feeling of a modern American epic. It’s the story not just of Inez, a young mother (Teyana Taylor in a career-defining role) who abducts her own son from foster care—more willing to live as a fugitive than to live without him—but of a gentrifying Harlem that gradually turns on those who call it home.

Where other films in my watch log this year—like Tim Fehlbaum’s ill-advised September 5—seem to utilize archival footage and soundbite as a gimmick, distracting their audiences from their films’ lack of perspective, in A Thousand and One, real news clips and soundbites are merely some of the tools Rockwell uses to execute her masterful vision. The result is something that simultaneously falls in the canon of great American outlaw romances like Thelma & Louise or Queen & Slim and forms a living artifact of a city at a crossroads.

3. La Chimera (2023, dir. Alice Rohrwacher)

Something about La Chimera feels ancient, beyond its setting. As an archeologist-turned-looter in 1980s Italy, Josh O’Connor is a not-quite-Orpheus whose pseudo-magical, grief-fueled odyssey leads him through the Etruscan artifact black market in search of his lost love, or a portal to the underworld—whichever comes first. In the year that brought us Challengers, this may be O’Connor’s career-best performance, one that utilizes his tightrope walk between posturing and sincerity. Part adventure story, part period tragedy, La Chimera is unforgettable.

2. Problemista (2024, dir. Julio Torres)

After nearly a year of pre-release delays, Problemista may be the most under-celebrated film of the year. It’s the culmination of all the best, most singular parts of Julio Torres—the surreal deadpan comedy of Los Espookys, the object-based inventive sensibility of My Favorite Shapes, and the apocalypse-defying optimism of Fantasmas all come together for a fantastical, strikingly earnest feature-length debut. Problemista—in which a young Salvadoran (Torres), desperate to secure a work visa, accepts a job assisting a reclusive art critic (Tilda Swinton)—is a colorful contemporary fairy tale that, like most of Torres’ work, is nothing short of magic.

1. Nosferatu (2024, dir Robert Eggers)

True, I’ve already reviewed Nosferatu (what will soon be) twice—but ten times wouldn’t be enough to capture every nuance of Robert Eggers’ vampire epic. In the century of the sexy vampire, Eggers imagines the monster at its most grotesque, an undead embodiment of pure, unchecked evil. But that doesn’t mean he abandons the vampire’s unfettered, inescapable sexuality—in Bill Skarsgård’s Count Orlok, the two fears coexist as one. Nosferatu is grotesque and fiercely sensual in a way that honors its predecessors not just in the vampire canon, but in the canon of Eggers’ immersive period folktales.

Previously Reviewed: Conclave (2024, dir. Edward Berger), Challengers (2024, dir. Luca Guadagnino), A Different Man (2024, dir. Aaron Schimberg)

Honorable Mentions: A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014, dir. Ana Lily Amirpour), Love Lies Bleeding (2024, dir. Rose Glass), Queer (2024, dir. Luca Guadagnino), Scrapper (2023, dir. Charlotte Regan), Shattered Glass (2003, dir. Billy Ray), The Squid and the Whale (2005, dir. Noah Baumbach), Stress Positions (2024, dir. Theda Hammel), You Hurt My Feelings (2023, dir. Nicole Holofcener)

My Most Anticipated Films of 2025

Paddington in Peru (dir. Dougal Wilson))
Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery (dir. Rian Johnson)
Mother Mary (dir. David Lowery)
The Bride! (dir. Maggie Gyllenhaal)
Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein (dir. Guillermo del Toro)
Hamnet (dir. Chloe Zhao)
Mickey 17 (dir. Bong Joon-ho)
Sinners (dir. Ryan Coogler)
The Monkey (dir. Osgood Perkins)
Bugonia (dir. Yorgos Lanthimos)
Oh, Hi! (dir. Sophie Brooks)
After the Hunt (dir. Luca Guadagnino)

My Full 2024 Reading Log

Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield (Picador, 2022)
All’s Well by Mona Awad (Simon & Schuster, 2020)
Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder (Doubleday, 2021)
Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen (Penguin Classics, originally published 1817)
Anita de Monte Laughs Last by Xochitl Gonzalez (Flatiron, 2024)
Mrs. S by K Patrick (Europa Editions, 2023)
Come & Get It by Kiley Reid (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2024)
The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins (Penguin Classics, originally published 1859)
Vladimir by Julia May Jonas (Avid, 2022)
The Witches of Bellinas by J. Nicole Jones (Catapult, 2024)
Sirens and Muses by Antonia Angress (Ballantine, 2022)
My Last Innocent Year by Daisy Alpert Florin (Henry Holt & Co. 2023)
Disorientation by Elaine Hsieh Chou (Penguin Press, 2023)
Funny Story by Emily Henry (Berkley, 2024)
Gunk Baby by Jamie Marina Lau (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2024)
Murder at the Vicarage by Agatha Christie (William & Morrow, 1930)
The Husbands by Holly Gramazio (Doubleday, 2024)
Nothing to See Here by Kevin Wilson (Ecco, 2019)
All This Could Be Different by Sarah Thankham Mathews (Viking, 2022)
The Moving Finger by Agatha Christie (HarperCollins, originally published 1942)
The Coin by Yasmin Zaher (Catapult, 2024)
The Fetishist by Katherine Min (Putnam, 2024)
I Have Some Questions For You by Rebecca Makkai (Viking, 2023)
The Secret Place by Tana French (Penguin, 2014)
Thirst by Marina Yusczuk (Dutton, 2024)
Natural Beauty by Ling Ling Huang (Dutton, 2023)
Blue Sisters by Coco Mellors (Random House, 2024)
Colored Television by Danzy Senna (Riverhead, 2024)
Ripe by Sarah Rose Etter (Scribner, 2023)
Apprentice in Wonderland: How Donald Trump and Mark Burnett Took America Through the Looking Glass by Ramin Setoodeh (Harper, 2024)
A Sunny Place for Shady People by Mariana Enriquez (Hogarth, 2024)
Big Fan by Alexandra Romanoff (831 Stories, 2024)
A Lady’s Guide to Selling Out by Sally Franson (HarperCollins, 2018)
Hardly Strangers (831 Stories, 2024)
Margo’s Got Money Troubles by Rufi Thorpe (William Morrow, 2024)
Lucky Dogs by Helen Schulman (Knopf, 2023)
The Princess of 72nd Street by Elaine Kraf (The Modern Library, originally published 1979)
The Stepdaughter by Caroline Blackwood (McNally Editions, originally published 1976)

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