10 Must-Read Books of 2024
Web Exclusives
With 2024 coming to a close, we’re looking back at the year in publishing. In no particular order, these are the ten books SwR loved most.
Fury by Clyo Mendoza (tr. Christina MacSweeney)
“In a market flush with meticulously messaged, overly earnest contemporary fiction, the dizzying, knotty nature of Fury is a welcome delight. Which isn’t to imply that Mendoza shies away from capital-D discourse. She doesn’t. Her novel is all about the internal battle between competing versions of ourselves, whether those sides are aspects of our psychology, sexuality, or even corporeality. Fury also explores cycles of love and abuse, the corrupting force of violence, and the damaging emphasis society places on gender norms. And it does so in a way that is almost guaranteed to spark conversation, as all of these topics are addressed with a creative fearlessness that can feel deliriously untrammeled.”
—Cory Oldweiler, SwR contributor
Cartoons by Kit Schluter
“Story after story, Schluter suggests that the impossible is not simply possible but probable with the right eyes. Certain writers reaffirm reality in their prose. Others endorse the idea that a consensus certainty is an entirely unreal set of expectations and that there’s always more to it than we can ever account for. In a time when many writers speak in talking points and debate the sanctioned issues of the day on social media, Schluter seems content to retreat into the wilderness of his imagination and dream up what he calls his ‘little cartoons.’”
—Ryan Ridge, author of New Bad News
Reservoir Bitches by Dahlia de la Cerda (tr. Heather Cleary and Julia Sanches)
“The thirteen stories in Reservoir Bitches—thirteen for bad luck; thirteen for sin and rebellion; thirteen for Death in the tarot—are less stories than they are intimations, less structured narratives than streaming confessionals, pressed into your ear, your soul, your hand. Nothing is filtered, nothing contrived. The effect is polyphonic and devastatingly resonant. Cleary and Sanches’s seamless transmission from the Spanish to English arrives in a voice so distinct and immediate it’s like being gripped by the throat.”
—Mila Jaroniec, author of Plastic Vodka Bottle Sleepover
Broiler by Eli Cranor
“Broiler may feature a crime at its center, but it isn’t a crime novel. Not really. It’s something far stranger, far more surreal, far more reaching, using as it does everything from America’s class sociopolitics to Southern culture to the grisly atrocity exhibition of a chicken processing plant as a vivid backdrop to what is a character-driven horror-noir psychodrama about the relationships and expectations between brutishly childlike men and the shell-shocked, exhausted women who are stuck with them.”
—Travis Woods, writer/editor for Bright Wall/Dark Room
We Were the Universe by Kimberly King Parsons
“There is a reason rock and roll keeps company with sex and drugs: they allow us to disassociate into something loose and transcendent. In her debut novel, Kimberly King Parsons departs from the usual beats of band literature: in We Were the Universe, we see that the most punk rock act is failure. This is a story of a band and its ashes.”
—Madison Ford, SwR contributor
Berlin Atomized by Julia Kornberg (co-tr. Jack Kornwell)
“In attempting to characterize the misgivings and anger of a generation that has inherited a world that many young people see—correctly, in my view—as careening in the wrong direction, Kornberg has written an incredibly ambitious novel. The future of Kornberg as an author seems dazzlingly bright, and I can’t wait to read what she writes next.”
—Cory Oldweiler, SwR contributor
Last Date in El Zapotal by Mateo García Elizondo (tr. Robin Myers)
“The book’s opening lines are at once an homage to Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo and a casual salute to the history of the Mexican novel. They also establish the tone of the book, which goes on to remix the Rulfian motif of the rural ghost. This story, written in the first person, in which relatively few events occur, comes together thanks to detailed, sometimes poetic, and overwhelmingly reflective descriptions that make the narrative rhythm a hypnotic, almost ecstatic downtempo.”
—Atenea Cruz, SwR contributor
Good Night, Sleep Tight by Brian Evenson
“It’s a book about childhood, about dreamtime ghosts conjured out of the dark by words and ritual. Like almost all of Brian Evenson’s collections, it’s a gathering of stories that worries at a theme, pulls at some cosmic thread you’d just as soon stay un-pulled.”
Andy Davidson, author of The Boatman’s Daughter and The Hollow Kind
The Queens’ Ball by Copi (tr. Kit Schluter)
“Guilt, consequences, and their seeming absence are a key thread running through The Queens’ Ball, whose ceaseless churn of languages, events, and characters will dizzy and arouse in equal measure. Tragedies and horrors accrue with little explanation or emotional load, as if everything could be rolled into a joint and smoked away—weed and drawing being the narrative’s only constants.”
—Federico Perelmuter, SwR contributing writer
Bad Foundations by Brian Allen Carr
“From a cursory glance, it’s easy to read this as a funny novel moving from one foundational rumination to the next. But such a reading would undercut Carr’s excellent humor, which serves to make his constant recurves to underlying societal cracks effortless and never annoyingly obvious. Perhaps, too, none of this recurving ever comes off as stale because of how entertainingly everything is rendered through Cook’s eyes. This novel is funny in its bizarreness, while also being astutely observational of its world and the characters occupying it.”
—Robert Warf, SwR contributor
More Web Exclusives