It’s time to check in: How was the year in books for you, dear reader? Now that we've approached the conclusion of 2024, it's time to reflect on the year's embarrassment of literary riches—and now we’re here to spread the gospel about our favourites.
The best books of the year took us to dazzling new frontiers. In the fiction landscape, a spate of new novels offered visions of humanity from unlikely narrators, including robots, aliens, and the undead. Meanwhile, it was an outstanding year for memoirs; new outings from luminaries grabbed us by the heartstrings and refused to let go. In the non-fiction space, some of our finest intellectuals released titles that helped us make sense of our changing world, from the culture-flattening force of algorithms to the future of work.
Here are the best books of 2024.
Lauded as “the first great incel novel,” Rejection opens with a bang: In the first of its several linked stories, titled “The Feminist,” an aggrieved young man details his youth spent “dragging his virginity like a body bag into his 20s.” In the brutal and brilliant character studies that follow, Tulathimutte paints scorching portraits of lonesome outcasts: a depressed woman spiralling over her unrequited crush, a start-up bro seeking his other half, a gay man going to shocking lengths to pursue his convoluted fetish, and more. Flayed open by the author’s scrutiny, these characters blister off the page, all of them electric in their rage, their alienation, their tragicomic grossness. Paired with a deft metafictional coda, their voices coalesce into a unified theory of rejection. Perverse, profane, and profound, Rejection will make your skin crawl.
Anna Williams-Bonner, the widow of the best-selling novelist at the center of The Plot, takes center stage in Korelitz’s enthralling chaser, The Sequel. After her husband’s supposed suicide, Anna enjoys collecting his royalty checks as a famous literary widow, but when she pens her own runaway best seller, trouble follows. Soon enough, she begins to receive mysterious excerpts from a novel she never expected to see again—a novel no one can know about. In a twisty-turny quest to contain her secrets, Anna hunts down her anonymous tormentor, but much to her frustration, the dead don’t want to stay buried. Much like The Plot before it, The Sequel revels in lambasting the literary ecosystem, but this time there’s a winking metafictional glee about sequels as a form. Through the narration of this unforgettable antiheroine, a deliciously nasty storyteller, Korelitz delivers a ripping good read.
Ten years after the conclusion of his Southern Reach trilogy, VanderMeer returns with a surprise fourth volume that puts the weird in “Weird Fiction,” to delightful effect. At once a prequel and a sequel, Absolution shades in some of the previous volumes’ dark corners, but rather than provide answers about Area X, a coastal wilderness colonised by something alien, it poses new questions. In Part One, set two decades before Area X’s formation, a team of government-funded biologists introduce alligators to Florida’s Forgotten Coast, with disastrous consequences; Part Two is a potboiler investigating the ongoing aftermath, still tormenting locals 18 years later. Part Three contains some of the liveliest writing in the series: Recounting the first expedition into Area X, it’s the story of Lowry, a foul-mouthed self-styled “hero” with his own ulterior motives. Surreal and Lovecraftian, packed with cascading cosmic horrors, Absolution shows a singular mind at work.
As we embrace new digital experiences, what embodied truths do we lose? That’s the aching question at the center of The Extinction of Experience, a roving investigation of the threat technology poses to our social and cultural norms. Rosen writes about the danger of “mediated” experiences curated by data-hoarding megacorporations—for example, we check the weather on our phones instead of stepping outside to sense the temperature. “In these new worlds, we are users, not individuals,” Rosen writes. “We are meant to prefer these engineered user experiences to human reality.” But don’t mistake this book for a hand-wringing polemic against change; rather, in each disappearing ritual, Rosen highlights the deeper loss to the human psyche, as in the connection she draws between the end of cursive writing instruction and a measurable loss to children’s cognitive skills. Rigorously researched and elegiacally told, The Extinction of Experience is a compelling reminder that “go touch grass” is more than just an Internet punchline—in fact, it’s a human imperative.
“You can’t give back what already belongs to someone,” writes Cherokee journalist Rebecca Nagle in this powerful history of land theft in Oklahoma, spanning more than 200 years of atrocities committed against the Five Tribes (Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee, and Seminole). Blending reportage and historical research into a propulsive narrative that reads like a legal thriller, Nagle traces the connections between key inflection points, from the Trail of Tears to a small-town murder on treaty lands. More than a century later, that murder would lead to McGirt v. Oklahoma, a landmark Supreme Court ruling that reaffirmed Indigenous rights to Oklahoma land. Through the checkered history of this one state, By the Fire We Carry tells a broader story about the ongoing fight for justice and tribal sovereignty among Indigenous Nations. Detailed and impassioned, it’s a gripping corrective to the historical record and not to be missed.
At 17, Ciment began a sexual relationship with her drawing teacher, who was 47 and married with two teenage children. In 1996, she published a memoir of their unconventional marriage called Half a Life; now, nearly 30 years later, the widowed author throws a stick of dynamite at that book. In her new memoir, Consent, Ciment reconsiders her love story, disassembling the careful mythologies she’s constructed around her early years. In Half a Life, she insisted that she initiated the first kiss; looking back decades later in the pages of Consent, she remembers how her husband pulled her into a kiss when she hung back after class to ask a question about careers in the arts. “Does a kiss in one moment mean something else entirely five decades later?” Ciment writes. “Can a love that starts with such an asymmetrical balance of power ever right itself?” Unflinching and bravely told, this postmortem of a marriage is one of the gutsiest books of the #MeToo era.
Indiana Jones meets Star Wars meets Nietzsche in this thrilling galactic heist packed with existential thought. Kitasei’s nail-biting story centers on Maya Hoshimoto, once the galaxy’s most notorious art thief, who now lives a quiet life as an Ivy League archivist. When a dead explorer’s journal materialises at the archive—one that promises to lead her to “the grail,” an artifact with the power to open portals to other solar systems—Maya is forced out of retirement. But she isn’t the only one searching for the grail, and if it falls into the wrong hands, interstellar travel could become impossible. Maya’s quest across the stars is a space opera of the highest order, rich in breakneck pacing and memorable alien accomplices, but it’s in the quest for moral clarity that The Stardust Grail really soars. As Maya journeys from planet to planet, Kitasei offers a profound allegory about the dangers of colonisation, taking this rousing romp to the next dimension.
When 30-something Lauren returns to her London flat late at night, she finds her husband waiting at the door. There’s just one problem: When Lauren left the house, she was single. She quickly discovers that her attic is generating an endless supply of husbands; as soon as one goes up, another comes down, and her life re-forms around him. At first, Lauren wonders which husband she can live with for now as she seeks a suitable plus-one for an upcoming wedding; then, which husband she can live with forever; and ultimately, which version of her life and herself she can live with. In this warm, wise, and bittersweet debut, Gramazio delivers a moving meditation on the paradox of choice in modern dating (and modern life).
In Wayne’s latest novel, we see “the real winners of America” through the wide eyes of Conor O’Toole, a college athlete raised by working-class parents. Fresh out of law school, Conor decamps to coastal Massachusetts for a luxurious summer: In exchange for tennis lessons, he’ll receive free lodging on Cutter’s Neck, a gated oceanfront community for the grotesquely wealthy. But Conor has student loans to repay, so when a sharp-tongued divorcée offers to pay twice his hourly rate for more than just tennis lessons, he can’t help but acquiesce. Soon enough, he tumbles into an erotic affair that challenges everything he thought he understood about sex and power; meanwhile, he falls for a young writer. As Conor’s double life spins out of control, one horrifying mistake threatens to punish him for his trespasses among the elite. Gutsy and shocking, The Winner is a palm-sweating thrill ride through the lives of America’s winners and losers alike.
In a series of immersive reported vignettes, the Financial Times’s AI editor takes readers around the globe to investigate the technology’s damaging effects on “the global precariat.” In Amsterdam, she highlights a predictive-policing program that stigmatises children as likely criminals; in Kenya, she spotlights data workers lifted out of brutal poverty but still vulnerable to corporate exploitation; in Pittsburgh, she interviews UberEats couriers fighting back against the black-box algorithms that cheat them out of already-meagre wages. Yet there are also bright spots, particularly a chapter set in rural Indian villages where under-resourced doctors use AI-assisted apps as diagnostic aids in their fight against tuberculosis. Fair-minded but unsparing, Code Dependent is the most lucid reporting yet on a fast-growing human-rights crisis.
Just how much do algorithms control our lives—and what can we do about it? In this eye-opening investigation, Chayka enumerates the insidious ways that algorithms have flattened our culture and circumscribed our lives, from our online echo chambers to the design of our coffee shops. But all is not lost: Chayka argues for a more conscientious consumption of culture, encouraging us to seek out trusted curators, challenging material, and spirited conversations. After reading Filterworld, you’ll be ready to start your “algorithmic cleanse” and get back in touch with your humanity.
In 1977, Adina Giorno is born to a single mother in Philadelphia. Then, at age four, she’s “activated” by her extraterrestrial superiors 300,000 light years away on the dying planet Cricket Rice, who task her with reporting back about how humans think and behave. Through a fax machine in her bedroom, Adina transmits astute and often hilarious observations about the confounding behaviour of earthlings (for instance: “human beings don’t like when other humans seem happy”). Meanwhile, she experiences the bittersweetness of growing up; ostracised by the popular clique and mocked for her dark skin, she learns how, sometimes, being human means feeling alien. Warm, witty, and touching, Beautyland is an out-of-this-world exploration of loneliness and belonging.
Set in 1895 at the border between Texas and Mexico, The Bullet Swallower centers on Antonio Sonoro, the scion of a moneyed but deplorable family living in Dorado, Mexico. After a train robbery gone wrong outside of Houston, a shoot-out with the Texas Rangers leaves Antonio’s brother dead and Antonio horrifically disfigured, earning him the nickname “El Tragabalas” (the Bullet Swallower). Antonio’s quest for revenge against the Rangers takes him through the heart of the Texas badlands, where he weighs his violent impulses against the opportunity for repentance. Meanwhile, in a parallel narrative set in 1964, Antonio’s grandson Jaime, a Mexican movie star, transforms his grandfather’s story into a feature film, hoping to redeem the Sonoro name. Linking the two narratives is the mystical stranger Remedio, a reaper of souls guiding the Sonoros toward the light. Rich in lyrical language, gripping action, and enchanting magical realism, The Bullet Swallower augurs a bright future for the new frontier of westerns.
One of our finest practitioners of the short-story form delivers her debut novel at last—and what a novel it is! The Book of Love is a phantasmagoric door stopper rich in characteristically Link-ian pleasures, like the collision of the mundane and the magical. In a coastal New England town called Lovesend, four teenagers investigate how three of them died, only to be resurrected by their music teacher (to whom there’s more than meets the eye). Then Lovesend is transformed by magical happenings as the veil between this life and the afterlife is ripped away, leaving our young heroes desperate to hang on to the real world. Enchanting and immersive, The Book of Love is a landmark achievement from a writer who never stops surprising us.
Fifty years after Studs Terkel’s Working, a historian delivers a comprehensive sequel for the age of late-stage capitalism. Assembled in a polyphonic oral history, Larson presents 101 conversations with American workers from all walks of life, including teachers, nurses, truck drivers, executives, dairy farmers, stay-at-home parents, wildland firefighters, funeral directors, and many more. In the wake of the pandemic and the Great Resignation, Larson’s subjects share their struggles to make ends meet, reckon with economic upheaval, and locate meaning and purpose in their work. Presented together in one thick volume, these often-fascinating anecdotes are a rich portrait of modern-day economic anxiety and social change.
In her latest bravura memoir, Jamison chronicles a wrenching period of rupture and rebirth. When their daughter was 13 months old, Jamison and her husband separated; what followed was a brutal struggle to balance parenthood, work, dating, sobriety, and creative fulfilment, all while the pandemic loomed. Told in overlapping, ever-widening circles of thought, Splinters details Jamison’s struggle to inhabit the roles we ask of women: mother, daughter, lover, friend. At the same time, the book is an intimate tribute to the author’s rapturous love for her daughter. Splinters thrives in this messy, imperfect complexity—in “the difference between the story of love and the texture of living it, the story of motherhood and the texture of living it.” Honest, gutsy, and unflinching, Jamison scours herself clean here and finds exquisite, hard-won joy in the aftermath.
Born on the California Yuma reservation and raised in Navajo Territory in New Mexico, Taffa situates her outstanding debut memoir in similar collisions of culture, land, and tradition. Here she recalls the people and places that raised her—especially her parents, who pushed her to idealise the American dream and assimilate through education. Taffa layers in diligent research about her mixed-race, mixed-tribe heritage, highlighting little-known Indigenous history and the shattering injustices of colonial oppression. Together the many strands of narrative coalesce to form a visceral story of family, survival, and belonging, flooding the field with cleansing light.
In 2019, Crosley suffered two keelhauling losses: First her apartment was burglarised and her jewelry stolen, then one month later her friend and mentor Russell Perrault took his own life. For Crosley, the two losses became braided together; “I am waiting for the things I love to come back to me, to tell me they were only joking,” she writes. In this raw and poignant memoir, divided into five sections that correspond to the five stages of grief, she links her frantic desire to recover the stolen jewelry with her inability to bring back Perrault. Leavened by Crosley’s characteristic gimlet wit, this excavation of grief, loss, and friendship leaves a lasting twinge.
In this stirring sequel to his breakout novel, There, There, Orange tells two linked stories: One centers on a survivor of the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre, Jude Star, who’s taken to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School and forcibly stripped of his identity and culture. The other traces his modern-day descendants in Oakland, reeling after the powwow shooting that ended There, There. In this wrenching story about the legacy of colonial violence, we see generations of Indigenous characters orphaned from their past. Through poignant resonances between then and now, Orange delivers an epic saga of generational trauma, devastating to behold and impossible to put down.
Cunningham’s sensitive and sophisticated roman à clef centers on David, a 20-something Black man working in a minor fundraising role on an upstart senator’s presidential campaign. The author, who worked in the Obama White House, is clearly writing about an Obama analogue (this eloquent Black senator “project[s] an intimacy that was more astral than real”), but connecting the dots between fact and fiction is the least interesting reading of Great Expectations. As a young father and a college dropout, David struggles to relate to the privileged world of political palm greasing. As the campaign burns toward the White House, Cunningham spins a wise coming-of-age tale about power, idealism, and disillusionment.
In this provocative debut novel, Greer delivers a Frankenstein for the digital age. Sexbot Annie is the perfect girlfriend for her wealthy human owner, Doug. Programmed to please, she cooks, cleans, and adjusts her libido to Doug’s whims. But Annie is an “autodidactic” robot, meaning that she’s always learning and changing. As she experiences jealousy, secrecy, and loneliness, she becomes less perfect to the loathsome Doug and ultimately flees to meet her maker—with dangerous results. Annie’s painful journey of becoming is a poignant parable for the age of AI; it’s a rich text about power, autonomy, and what happens when our creations outgrow us.
James centers on a seminal character from American literature—and yet, seen afresh through Everett’s revelatory gaze, it’s as if we’re meeting him for the first time. Blasted clean of Mark Twain’s characterisation from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the enslaved runaway Jim emerges here as a man of great dignity, altruism, and intelligence. The novel opens in Hannibal, Missouri, where Jim teaches enslaved children to run their speech through a “slave filter” of “correct incorrect grammar,” designed to pacify white people. Then the story settles into Twain’s familiar grooves—on the run together, Jim and Huck raft down the Mississippi River, facing danger, separation, and charlatans aplenty. Along the way, Jim imagines verbal sparring matches with dead philosophers, falls in love with reading, and begins to pen his own story: “With my pencil, I wrote myself into being,” he writes. And so he does. On the road to freeing himself and his family, Jim becomes more self-determined than ever. Clever, soulful, and full of righteous rage, his long-silenced voice resounds through this remarkable novel. Subversive and thrilling, James is destined to become a modern classic.
Originally published on Esquire US
On 20 March, 1995, members of a religious cult released toxic gas in three Tokyo subways, killing 13 people. Some months later, the Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami happened to be reading the letters page of a banal Ladies’ Home Journal–type magazine in which a reader described her husband’s psychological inability to return to his job at the transit authority after surviving the terrorist attack.
Murakami decided to interview survivors to examine the many traumatic effects of such a horrific event. The resulting book, Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche, is an oral history in the vein of Studs Terkel. In one of the few moments that come from Murakami and not the victims, he inadvertently summarises one of the core themes of his fiction. Without the ego, he explains, we lose the “narrative” of our identities, which, for him, is vital for our ability to connect with others.
Of course, a narrative is a “story,” and “stories” are neither logic, nor ethics. It is a dream you continue to have. You might, in fact, not even be aware of it. But, just like breathing, you continue incessantly to see this dream. In this dream you are just an existence with two faces. You are at once corporeal and shadow. You are the “maker” of the narrator, and at the same time you are the “player” who experiences the narrative.
Translated by Matthew Carl Strecher
The inescapable duality of human consciousness—that is the terrain of much of Murakami’s fiction. What drew him to this work of reportage also animates his inventions. Murakami’s approach to consciousness is less representational than literal, with many of his characters literally being transported to a realm created by (or wholly inside of) their minds.
These places often appear underground, in inky darkness. In Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, it’s a vast, cavernous world crawling with creatures called INKlings. The nether realm in Killing Commendatore is referred to as the Path of Metaphor, and the narrator finds the entrance with the help of two figures from a painting.
Murakami’s latest novel, The City and Its Uncertain Walls, features a library with a chilly office deep below the main building, where the narrator converses with the ghost of the previous librarian. And later, after the narrator merges with another character, they can only “meet” as separate people in a “small square room” inside his mind, lit with a single flickering flame. Wells, too, are a recurring motif.
In every instance, the existence of these impossible locations prompts bewilderment from the characters. The reader, too, is left just as confounded. How can a person go inside of himself? How are these characters travelling to these worlds? Are these other worlds real? Why are all these women vanishing all the time? And what’s with all the goddamn cats?
The world of Murakami is a land of mysteries, but perhaps the most pressing enigma has less to do with the meaning of any of his novels and more to do with the unlikeliness of his literary rise. Born in Kyoto in 1949, Murakami came of age in the complicated decades following the devastations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. His middle-class family, as John Wray put it, had a “vested interest in the national culture: his father was a teacher of Japanese literature, his grandfather a Buddhist monk.”
He grew up in Kobe, a port city teeming with American sailors, where he developed his love of Western popular culture: the eclectic forms of jazz, the unadorned minimalism of dime-store genre fiction, the romantic pop of Hollywood movies, the bright and splashy corporate iconography. In the late '60s, he left home to attend Waseda University in Tokyo, at the height of a tense period of student unrest.
In his book Novelist as a Vocation, Murakami characterises the expectations of men at the time and his own acceptance of those norms. “Most guys graduated from college,” he writes, “found work, and then, when things levelled off, got married.” He assumed the exact same future for himself: “It was the way of the world, after all. I had no intention to contravene (for better or for worse) what seemed to be the dictates of common sense.”
Instead, Murakami married young, ran a jazz café called Peter Cat for much of his '20s, dragged his (admittedly tired) heels before finally graduating after seven years, and accepted that “our futures, it seems, don’t always unfold the way we expect.”
For Murakami, this is an understatement. Consider the story of his transformation from jazz-café proprietor to experimental novelist. It began, as he tells it in Vocation, like this: In April 1978, Murakami attended a baseball game at Jingu Stadium in Tokyo. An American player named Dave Hilton hit a double into left field, and when the “satisfying crack” of Hilton’s bat arrived at Murakami’s ears, he thought to himself, apropos of nothing, I think I can write a novel.
And he was right.
Since that moment at the baseball game, Murakami has published 15 novels, five short-story collections, and five works of nonfiction, which have sold millions of copies, been translated in more than 50 languages, and won numerous major prizes. A cinematic adaptation of one of his short stories, “Drive My Car,” won Best International Film at the 2022 Academy Awards. His stories have also been adapted into a video game and in manga form. And ever since the publication of 1Q84 in English in 2011, there have been midnight parties held around the world to celebrate the release of new Murakami novels.
Mind you, this is an artist whose work, as John Updike put it, possesses “a bewildering overflow of possible meanings.” Steeped in Japanese symbolism, literary allusion, and American pop culture, his fiction isn’t exactly the stuff typical best-sellers are made of.
How, then, does a demure jazz-club owner become not only Japan’s perennial Nobel Prize contender but also a sensation the world over?
The most cited reason for Murakami’s global success is his writing style, which stands out in two major ways. First, he eschews some of the conventional elements of Japanese literature. His prose is hip, rhythmic, talky, unadorned, even disaffected. He employs informal pronouns not typically found in “serious” fiction. As an experimental stylist, he caused a bit of a stir when he arrived on the literary scene.
But it was more than just his inventiveness with his native language. Murakami scholar Matthew Carl Strecher describes what he’s alternately referred to as the author’s “nationality-less” style or his “translationese tone,” which he cites as reasons Murakami’s novels seem to work so well in other languages. But these are also backhanded ways of noting, as the Japanese writer Kenzaburō Ōe said outright, that even though Murakami writes in Japanese, “his writing is not really Japanese.”
To be sure, many of Murakami’s strongest influences came from outside his home country. For instance, he learned English reading American best-sellers, and he came to particularly admire Raymond Carver, Truman Capote, Raymond Chandler, and J.D. Salinger, all of whom he eventually translated into Japanese.
When Murakami toiled over his first novel, Hear the Wind Sing, he felt unsatisfied with his initial effort, so he pulled out a typewriter and rewrote it in English; at the time, he had only an elementary grasp of the language. Then he translated his simpler English sentences back into Japanese, cleaning them up as he did so.
This resulted in what Murakami calls “a rough, uncultivated kind of prose.” Combine this stripped-down approach with his irreverent syntax and pop-culture fixations and you’ve got what could be considered an anti-Japanese style. Certainly many of his critics thought so. And for the first fifteen years of his career, as Strecher points out, Murakami “preferred living in Europe, the Mediterranean, or America, anywhere but Japan.”
During the writing of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle in the mid-'90s, however, Murakami became newly committed to his home country. “I’m 45 years old, you know,” he told Strecher in October 1994, “and I can’t be a rebel all my life. I think right now may also be a turning point for me.”
No matter his geographical or philosophical loyalties, Murakami has always written about Japanese characters, often in Japanese settings. “I don’t want to write about foreigners in foreign countries,” he told The Paris Review in 2004. “I want to write about us.” Murakami does not read his books in their English translations despite his fluency, telling the writer Roland Kelts, “My books exist in their original Japanese. That’s what’s most important, because that’s how I wrote them.”
Despite their supposedly “nationality-less” affect, Murakami’s novels are not circumstantially Japanese but rather fundamentally so—at least in his interpretation of what that identity means. One thing he does share with his countrymen is kata, meaning “form,” which manifests itself most vividly in his narrative conclusions, such as they are.
Reviewing Murakami’s novel Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, Tim Parks notes that the trajectory for most of the writer’s protagonists involves them “returning, or preparing to return, to some more recognisably traditional community.” Parks continues, “For all the surreal adventure of the loner’s alternative world, it is the world we are familiar with that reassuringly reasserts its dominance. In that sense, these stories are perhaps less revolutionary than they might seem.”
Murakami’s global appeal, then, might exist in the heightened contrast between the unruly, traumatising, consciousness-splitting, ghost-filled world beyond and the comforting, drama-less certitude of the conventional life.
But the pleasures of Murakami aren’t all so high-minded—in fact, the author is beloved for his embrace of familiar tropes, some of which have become so charmingly ubiquitous as to inspire a comic strip called “Murakami Bingo.” Here, a non-exhaustive list of features you will probably find in a Murakami novel:
The story will oscillate between two unconnected narratives that ultimately bridge together. At least one of the narrators will be a single male who lives alone, because of either a recent breakup or a lifestyle not suited to romance. He will listen to and spend a not inconsiderable amount of time thinking about classical music and jazz. At some point, he’ll have sex with a woman for whom he has affection but nothing more; perhaps she’s married. Somewhere in this (often unnamed) narrator’s life, there is a young girl (usually 16) who vanishes from his life, either mysteriously or tragically. He might search for her, a quest that takes him into strange underworlds. Some cats will be there, too, that’s for sure. One might get lost. And sometimes they’ll be able to talk. Other supernatural, mythological, and metaphorical beings—ghosts, unicorns, monsters, figures from paintings—abound. Characters with metonymic names like the Sheep Man, Johnnie Walker, and the Man with the White Subaru Forester menace the background. All of this is recounted with a matter-of-factness that belies the absurdity it’s often describing.
Murakami wields cultural references as literary devices as deftly as Quentin Tarantino. There’s the Proust’s madeleine-esque usage of a Beatles song in Norwegian Wood, instantly transporting the narrator in his memory to his youth. Murakami’s short story “Samsa in Love” reverses the famous transformation in Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis so that the protagonist awakens “to discover that he had undergone a metamorphosis and become Gregor Samsa.” In the George Orwell–haunted IQ84, Janáček’s orchestral piece Sinfonietta is a catalyst for the character Aomame’s realisation that she’s in an alternate dimension. Art, for Murakami, makes the worlds go ’round.
Remember, the creator of these allusive and thorny and non-English works is a global sensation. The odds, it would appear, are stacked against Murakami and yet he thrives internationally. But perhaps it’s not as unlikely as it seems. In an email interview with Philip Gabriel, one of Murakami’s translators, I asked about the author’s ascent, and he said that those unlikely qualities—translated magical-realist fiction filled with unfamiliar symbology and ambiguous endings—“do not, I think, disqualify a writer from international acclaim. Quite the opposite.”
In the US, books in translation sell far fewer copies than those written in English, but many of the handful of foreign authors whose work is critically lauded and lives forever in backlists do, superficially at least, share many qualities with Murakami. For one, they often write with either a magical-realist or postmodern bent—think Gabriel García Márquez, Jorge Luis Borges, Olga Tokarczuk, Orhan Pamuk, Umberto Eco, Han Kang, et al.
They also, as Murakami does, incorporate into their novels the cultural iconography and folklore of their native countries. Some would say this makes their writing somehow representative of their respective nationalities, while others might argue that our fascination with them is more about our tendency to exoticize foreign lands than it is about our desire to learn about them. Regardless, we have a surprising tolerance for the strange and the alien in our translated literature.
Gabriel also points out the historical circumstances that can occur to encourage Murakami’s popularity. For instance, the translator says, “As [Murakami] has noted himself, his work was surprisingly popular in East Europe in the early 1990s, when the collapse of the old Cold War regimes made people feel like the ground beneath them was unstable, as if the boundaries between real and unreal were blurred.” Sometimes someone else’s awareness of the strange and alien can be a source of reassurance.
While wholly true, these explanations alone don’t quite cover it. After all, there are plenty of writers the world over writing magical realism, and there are plenty of regions dealing with dark political ramifications. In unravelling the chain of events that led to Murakami becoming a perennial contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature and a global industry unto himself, it’s important to remember that such an occurrence requires the complicity and talents of translators, editors, and publishers. David Karashima’s Who We’re Reading When We’re Reading Murakami depicts the trajectory of transmogrifying Murakami’s magic into English.
In addition to the vital contributions from Murakami’s trio of translators—Gabriel, Alfred Birnbaum, and Jay Rubin—the person whom Karashima cites as particularly integral to Murakami’s ascension is Elmer Luke, a Chinese American editor at the Japanese publisher Kodansha International, whose role at the company was to help its books “break into the US market.”
Luke deftly oversaw the editing and promotion of Murakami’s 1982 novel A Wild Sheep Chase, generating no small amount of literary buzz in New York City with a series of events, interviews, book reviews, and appearances (especially a feat considering Murakami’s extreme reticence as a public figure).
He also gave Robert Gottlieb, then the editor of The New Yorker, a copy of Murakami’s short story “TV People”—the first of many to be printed in the magazine, which was a real boon, personally and professionally, for an author hoping to find an English-speaking readership. Murakami himself gives Luke a lot of the credit: “Luke started the engine.”
When it comes to translating, there’s also the general predicament of doing the actual work, which, as Gabriel explained via email, is extremely nuanced. “Besides the usual challenging aspects of Japanese language you'd expect in any Japanese novel—differences between male and female speech, honorifics, onomatopoeia—Murakami seems to be always pushing himself as a writer, and you find new elements,” he said.
One such element is the unusual speech patterns of some of Murakami’s, let’s say, eccentric characters. “These are a challenge, for sure,” Gabriel told me. “I’ve read papers by linguists in Japan analysing the unusual speech patterns of, for instance, Nakata in Kafka on the Shore, and the Commendatore in Killing Commendatore. And what voice do you adopt for non-human characters, for talking cats in Kafka, and a very polite, talking monkey (“A Shinagawa Monkey”)?”
Gabriel, for his part, has one aim with his translations: “As far as maintaining a ‘Murakami voice’ in the translation, the goal is to convey, as honestly as you can, the voice you hear when you read the original.” Jay Rubin, another of Murakami’s translators, communicated a slightly different result to Roland Kelts, saying, “When you read Haruki Murakami, you’re reading me, at least 95 per cent of the time.”
This is not hubris on Rubin’s part but rather a quirk of linguistics, meaning that Murakami’s translators were just as crucial in creating the “Murakami voice” in the global scene as the author himself. Rubin recalls asking Murakami about the colour of a character’s glasses in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. (“In one scene, a character had black-framed glasses. In another, the frames were brown.”) As Kelts writes in The New Yorker:
The Japanese language acquires much of its beauty and strength from indirectness—or what English-speakers call vagueness, obscurity, or implied meaning. Subjects are often left unmentioned in Japanese sentences, and onomatopoeia, with vernacular sounds suggesting meaning, is a virtue often difficult if not impossible to replicate in English. Alternatively, English is often lauded for its specificity. Henry James advised novelists to find the figure in the carpet, implying that details and accuracy were tantamount to literary expression. Is it possible that Japanese and English are two languages so far apart that translators can only reinvent their voices by creating entirely new works?
In order to “stand on a level playing field with other American authors,” Murakami writes in Vocation, he found his own translators, then brought the completed English version directly to publishers. He began this strategy after his agent, Amanda “Binky” Urban at ICM, told him that “she doesn’t deal in works she can’t read in English.” One cannot underemphasise Murakami’s business savvy, a characteristic not often shared by his fellow novelists.
By now his books have been translated into more than 50 languages—meaning that a large cadre of linguistic adventurers have joined the campaign to spread the gospel of jazz, cats, and other worlds.
They come out at night, it turns out, these Murakami people. As a capper on the end of two months spent embroiled in his disorienting realm, I attended a midnight release party for The City and Its Uncertain Walls in Columbus, Ohio. It happened at Prologue Bookshop, an independent bookstore with what is probably my favourite slogan for such an institution: “Never Skip the Prologue.”
At 10pm on Monday, 18 November, the place was packed. Dan Brewster, the owner, told me he was anxious about the turnout when he first scheduled the event but the response was so great that he had to fill his car with items from the store to make room for all the attendees. It’s no wonder. Prologue is a small boutique, so when it’s filled, it’s filled.
On a table sat Sapporo beers, hōjicha tea, and “Murakami muffins” (what exactly makes them Murakami, I’m not quite sure). Abbey Corcoran, one of Prologue’s booksellers, handed out Murakami totes full of swag: stickers, some Beatles-esque sunglasses, a party-hat-style unicorn horn, the aforementioned Murakami bingo cards, and a lovely pin. Caroline Angell, the assistant buyer, and Tara Ryan-Gallagher, the marketing and events manager, both expressed surprise at how many people were milling about their store.
Prologue closes at eight on weeknights, so there was an after-hours sense of fun to the whole evening. Dan emceed two rounds of trivia (which, save for a couple overly obscure questions, the audience completely slayed), then he randomly selected winners of some pretty nifty door prizes: One was a bottle of Japanese whisky, while another was a signed copy of the new novel.
Murakami has been publishing for almost half a century, yet the release of a new novel—not even a public appearance—can still pack a bookstore in central Ohio on a Monday night. That almost seems as far-fetched as anything from one of his novels.
What struck me most is the irrepressible sense of how normal everyone here is. Murakami, too, repeatedly insists that he’s a completely ordinary person, a totally regular guy. So do his protagonists. The narrator of The City and Its Uncertain Walls says when he’s a teenager that there isn’t much to say about his life or his “average, everyday kind of parents” who did “ordinary, run-of-the-mill” things.
Murakami sees these characters as long-lost twins: “And when I was two years old, one of us—the other one—was kidnapped. He was brought to a faraway place and we haven’t seen each other since.” His heroes, then, are himself if a few things had gone a different way. But they remain normal nonetheless.
This brings us back to the terrain of Murakami’s fiction: the duality of consciousness, the corporeal and the shadow. Normality can only be defined by what isn’t normal. Definitions require parameters. Murakami, in depicting such contrasts of fantasy and reality, places each idea in sharp relief.
And maybe this explains his literary prominence. Readers can journey along with his cavalcade of oddities, his sheep men, his unicorns, his magical towns surrounded by high walls, but they do so with the reassurance of a narrator (and a novelist) who emphasises that he is just like them.
They can witness the world in all its inexplicability, its unrepentant unfairness, its history of cruelty and trauma, and feel comfort in a protagonist who is just as overwhelmed by all of it. Perhaps, then, it is not Murakami’s strangeness that accounts for his success; maybe it’s the world’s.
Originally published on Esquire US
In the fall of 2019, I found myself wandering around Times Square in search of a billboard featuring National Book Award-winner Ta-Nehisi Coates’s debut novel, The Water Dancer. “I’m not sure what street it’s on, but you’ll see it,” the book’s marketer had told me that morning, so there I was, dodging tourists with my head and iPhone turned to the sky. At the time, I ran social media for Random House (Coates’s publisher).
We typically celebrated a book’s publication week on the company’s Instagram account by posting a stylised photograph of the finished book, but whenever Oprah Winfrey got involved, as she did by selecting The Water Dancer for her eponymous book club, the publicity, sales, marketing, and advertising plans expanded exponentially. It’s not every day in publishing you get to see Oprah and Ta-Nehisi Coates in conversation at the Apollo Theatre.
In an industry that sees five hundred thousand to a million new titles published each year in the United States alone, there are very few ways to make a book stand out. In recent years, programmatic celebrity book clubs—mainly Oprah’s Book Club (Oprah Winfrey), Reese’s Book Club (Reese Witherspoon via her media empire, Hello Sunshine), and Read With Jenna (Jenna Bush Hager via the Today show)—have exercised significant influence over which books garner buzz both among readers and within publishing companies, elevating sleepy debut novels to best-seller status and making big books even bigger.
First, a disclaimer to any self-important readers expecting a fiery takedown of the celebrity-book-club format: As someone who wants to see more books in the hands of readers, I am wholeheartedly in support of famous people using their immense clout and privilege to promote books instead of the many other products they could be paid handsomely to endorse. An article built on cynicism for something so overwhelmingly positive would be disingenuous click-bait, and you will not find that here.
But just because these book clubs are a net positive doesn’t mean they’re above investigation or critique. Ever since their rise in the late 2010s, the biggest celebrity book clubs have held immense sway over which titles land on the best-seller lists, and their future has an outsize impact on the commercial publishing industry. In order to better understand how these groups operate, I spoke to the teams behind the scenes, as well as to other publishing-industry insiders.
First, let’s address the assumption that these book clubs are just brand extensions with celebrity figureheads who don’t read the books or participate in their selection. Celebrities start book clubs for the same reasons as the rest of us: They love to read and want to discuss what they’re reading with more people. Not once in any of my reporting did I catch a whiff that Witherspoon, Hager, Winfrey, or any of the other celebrities are not die-hard readers, which is obvious when you consider how much work it would take to head up a book club in which you don’t plan to participate.
“If they wanted attention, there’s a thousand ways they can do it without reading books,” said Leigh Newman, director of Oprah’s Book Club. “Oprah is a real reader. She’s always reading. I have spoken to some of the other book clubs, and that seems to be common throughout all of them. I don’t think anyone is doing it as a PR stunt. I think they all love books and they want to talk about books; that’s why these conversations are so comfortable.” Newman even called back after we hung up to tell me she once met Jenna Bush Hager at a party and can attest that she’s a passionate and engaged reader.
Given that all of the major celebrity book clubs are fronted by women, there’s something inherently sexist in one of the most commonly asked questions about celebrity book clubs: “Do they actually read?” As actress Emma Roberts, whose online reading community Belletrist launched in 2017, noted in an interview with author Melissa Febos, “When I’m reading a book on set, some people will come up to me and ask, ‘You read?’ And I say, ‘What part of that is surprising? Because I’m an actress? Because I have blonde hair? What is it that literally stopped you in your tracks to be shocked that I can read and do read?’ That’s really crazy.”
Despite their clear love of reading, celebrities aren’t running their public programmatic book clubs in a vacuum. How they operate and make their selections is a subject of much speculation within the publishing industry, which is nearly as clueless as consumers. In our conversations, Hager, Newman, and Karah Preiss (cofounder of Belletrist) all described similar systems reliant on four to eight staff members outside of the named celebrity who make connections within the publishing industry while sourcing books from agents, editors, and publicists—much the same way most book-related media outlets do.
Sarah Harden, CEO of Hello Sunshine—which was sold to a media company backed by private-equity firm Blackstone Group in 2021—told me that Reese’s Book Club doesn’t accept pitches. “We pride ourselves on really trying to be outward about it, because we don’t want to perpetuate the inequities in the industry where if you know someone, if you can get to the right person, you get a leg up,” she said. There are two full-time staffers on Harden’s team and a group of literary scouts at Baker Literary Scouting who “read for Reese to make sure that nothing slips through the net that is worthy of consideration,” she says. In any given month, 100 to 150 books make it onto their long list for consideration.
All of the book clubs claim that there is “no formula” to their selection process, and on many levels, I believe them. While their selections may be intentional, I don’t think there’s any secret contract between Reese Witherspoon and HarperCollins to explain why nine of her book club’s eighty-five non-young-adult picks through June 2024 were published by a single imprint: William Morrow. Rather, these decisions happen in all of the major book clubs in much the same way that most opportunities in the publishing industry happen: through an elusive blend of personal taste, connections, cold pitching, and good old-fashioned luck.
This randomness is reflected in the inconsistent timelines of when authors and publishers are informed about upcoming book-club picks—that can occur anywhere from a year before publication (possibly as a result of a connection) to after a book is already on sale (mostly luck). Sometimes a manuscript arrives nine months early through a shared agent at a big agency like CAA and a deal is locked—perhaps even far enough in advance to adjust the book’s publication date to better fit the book club’s schedule.
Sometimes a books editor or producer thinks the celebrity will enjoy the galley from the strength of a pitch email. Other times it’s pure luck: For example, Winfrey selected The Many Lives of Mama Love after finding a random manuscript in her living room with no idea where it came from. (That sound you hear is the sound of a thousand publicists fainting.)
“It isn’t like a political game of chess at all,” said Hager. “We have found that because we have a specific mission to highlight debuts and diverse books, and because we’ve worked really hard working with every agent and publisher and editor, we’ve created a pretty efficient and incredible pipeline.”
While I fully believe that celebrities aren’t playing some nefarious game of imprint chess to benefit themselves, the pieces are still visible on the board. Of the two hundred combined books selected until June 2024 by Witherspoon since 2017, Hager since 2019, and Winfrey since 2012, thirteen were from a publisher outside of the Big Five (the five largest publishing houses: Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Macmillan, and Hachette).
More than 40 percent of those books were published by Penguin Random House alone. That doesn’t happen without a lot of people playing chess to make sure it happens, even if the people behind the book clubs aren’t intentionally participating in the game.
Every book club adamantly denies that imprints or agents are a determining factor in the book-selection process, but only a publishing rookie in an industry built on connections would take that at face value. Kelly (whose name has been changed), a book marketer who has worked on multiple celebrity-book-club campaigns, told me how much easier it was for one imprint she worked for to secure Witherspoon’s book-club seal for future books after landing its first one.
“It meant we had an ‘in’ to Reese,” she explained. “We were able to get the next book directly to the person who actually makes the decision, instead of the assistant of the assistant of the assistant slowly going up the chain.” Despite their best intentions, it’s clear that celebrity book clubs are influenced by the same ouroboros of nepotism that affects the rest of the business, just like blurbs or review coverage. Even if the book club itself is imprint agonistic, you still get the same distorted result.
Although every book-club representative I spoke to confirmed that they actively solicit and feature books from independent publishers, the outcomes speak for themselves. Around half the books picked by Oprah’s Book Club since it relaunched in 2012, arguably the most reliable New York Times best-seller maker in the industry, were published by Penguin Random House, whose authors are already miles ahead of so many others—simply because of their backing from the world’s most powerful publishing house.
“I feel bad for smaller imprints who don’t work with bigger agents,” said Kelly. “That’s the beauty of what celebrity book clubs have done, right? There’s no rubric. There’s no specificity at all, so no one can be like, ‘What the fuck?’ They’re just picking books they connect with. But what does that mean?”
To be clear, it’s not Reese Witherspoon’s, Oprah Winfrey’s, or Jenna Bush Hager’s job to feature independent publishers and make sure they’re spreading their sales power more equally across imprints. That their pet projects have a tremendous influence on a complex and vital industry isn’t really their problem, but they also claim to care immensely about authors and the industry whose waters they’re playing in, so it would be worthwhile for them to pay more attention to this one element. If celebrity book clubs committed to selecting authors outside of the Big Five, it could have an enormous impact on smaller houses and their authors.
There’s a lot of speculation that the “meaning” behind all of this is a front for celebrities to source new onscreen projects. In recent years, Hello Sunshine has produced several buzzy book-to-screen adaptations, such as Where the Crawdads Sing, Big Little Lies, and Daisy Jones & the Six. Winfrey has the well-known Harpo Productions, while Hager signed a first-look production deal with Universal Studio Group and created her own production company, Thousand Voices, in 2022.
The women at the helm of these book clubs are far too smart for anyone to claim that optioning isn’t factored into their decisions, but it’s important to note that I found no formal links between book-club selections and a book’s film or television rights. As an example, Andrea Bartz confirmed that the film rights for her thriller We Were Never Here were already committed to Netflix before Witherspoon ever expressed interest.
The book was still selected as a Hello Sunshine pick in August 2021. “Two or three times a year, I hope there’s going to be books that we make into films and TV shows, but we’ve always got to manage that with a really high level of integrity as well, because the minute the book club feels like we’re only picking stuff that we’re making into film and TV, we’re done,” said Harden.
“You would really cut yourself off to make a club that is solely dedicated to finding intellectual property,” explained Preiss, whose own book-club offshoot, Belletrist Productions, focuses on literary adaptations not exclusive to Belletrist’s book-club picks. “There are very specific types of books that make for good television shows, and in this TV market where limited series are not selling in the same way, most literary fiction does not make good television. When it works, that’s wonderful, but it’s not what we’re doing.”
Even if screen rights are not technically part of the book-club deal, several people I spoke to pointed out how celebrity book clubs can still play a role in the negotiations. “It is understood that it goes hand in hand with a lot of things,” said Kelly. “The author may not be getting what they want on one side of things, but they’re going to sell a shit ton of books. So it’s like, what do you want? What are you willing to give for that?”
It’s critical to understand the role that publishers, editors, and agents play in determining which books are selected for the book clubs. Publishers can’t promote every title equally, so much like deciding which authors to send on book tours or who to pitch for the national morning shows, they tend to push hardest for the books to which they gave the largest advance, in the interest of recouping their investments. “If they paid high six-figures for a commercial women’s fiction book that seems it would fit well with one of the celebrity book clubs, obviously they’re going to make a push for it in that way,” said Kathleen Schmidt, founder and CEO of Kathleen Schmidt Public Relations.
So what is the impact of these book clubs, and why do authors and publishers care so much about landing those few coveted spots? Publicist Sam Mitchell explained: “There’s really the sense with fiction, especially with a debut novelist, that you’re just running with your hand on your head if you don’t get into one of these book clubs. There’s just no way up toward whatever measure of success you want—usually the New York Times best-seller list, but really any kind of big buzz—unless you get into the sanctified hall of one of those three big book clubs. And that can be really depressing and off-putting, especially for the first-time authors.”
Desperation for recognition from celebrity book clubs is no doubt connected to the decline of books coverage at traditional media outlets. Not only do national outlets like NPR no longer pack the promotional punch they once did, but due to continued layoffs across the industry, from glossy magazines to local newspapers, there’s also simply less traditional media coverage to go around. “It’s interesting to hear even these massive names in publishing say, ‘If Reese could just pick my book, it would change things even for me,’ ” said Kelly.
Even without access to every single book’s lifetime sales data, it’s clear that these book clubs have a major impact on reader behaviour as well. Forty-eight of Hager’s sixty-eight picks have appeared on the best-seller list, as have sixty-eight of Witherspoon’s ninety-seven. All twenty-seven titles selected by Winfrey that were published on the same day they were announced as book-club picks went on to become best-sellers. I can tell you from a decade of working in the book-publishing industry that these success rates are incredibly rare.
But while Reese’s Book Club, Read With Jenna, and Oprah’s Book Club continue to offer a one-way ticket out of potential obscurity, there’s no denying that they hold less brand equity than they once did, especially among younger readers. Members of Gen Z remember their moms buying Oprah Book Club picks before they could even read, but they don’t watch morning television. Reese Witherspoon may get my heart racing as a middle-millennial who saw Legally Blonde in theatres twice, but readers a decade or two younger than me aren’t likely to care what her book club’s commercial-fiction pick is—at least not in the same way major publishers do.
“Because you now have people like Dua Lipa and Kaia Gerber doing their own book clubs, it makes the other ones look kind of stale in a way,” said Schmidt. “There just isn’t as much brand equity in book clubs as there used to be. How many people are listening to what’s being said on morning shows anymore? It’s TikTok’s world, and we live in it.”
It’s too early to know whether Dua Lipa’s Service95, Kaia Gerber’s Library Science, or even Dakota Johnson’s brand-new TeaTime Book Club will have a significant impact on book sales, but I heard anecdotally that publishers are starting to pay attention.
The viral rise of Gen Z and BookTok is something that came up in every conversation I had with publishing employees. Whereas celebrity book clubs offer a model of positioning books that are powerful and often universally appealing, the idea that a book is for everyone can actually be a turnoff. “It’s not cool anymore to have that book-club sticker on there,” Schmidt said. “It’s cooler to say, ‘I saw this on BookTok’ or ‘This is being discussed all over BookTok.’ I feel like Gen Z especially does not want the sticker on the book.”
Those on the publishing side also pointed out how many of the most popular books on TikTok are radically different from what the celebrity book clubs select. “What we’re worried about in publishing right now is ‘Do we have enough romantasy?’ That’s not their picks,” said Kelly.
“Iron Flame—you couldn’t get that book off the best-seller list if you paid The New York Times to take it off. That’s not what they’re looking at. To some extent, they’re talking to an audience that makes sense for them right now, but that audience is growing older. They’re going to stop paying attention, because they’re going to get bored. And instead of adding to the audience with younger people who are reading these big TikTok books, they’re missing it.”
Preiss, whose Instagram book club is less influential than the Big Three but still holds weight within the industry, echoed this point. “Gen Z is more focused on genre, and Reese doesn’t do genre,” she said. “Romantasy and romance are really the future of books. I love literary fiction, [but] to what extent are you actually talking to readers? To what extent are you asking readers, ‘What the f*ck are you reading?’ They’re reading Taylor Jenkins Reid. People are reading Colleen Hoover.”
For years, the signals that mattered most in publishing came from the highest of highbrow sources. Anyone who worked in the industry prior to the 2010s will tell you about the glory days when a rave New York Times review and one national NPR segment led to a spot on the best-seller list. For many, it was hard to accept that Reese Witherspoon holding your book could do more for it than ten NPR interviews. Now BookTok may be the next bitter pill industry insiders need to swallow. The literary quality of the books selected by celebrity book clubs is miles above that of many of the titles amplified through BookTok—and for that matter, BookTok is even harder to predict than the media or the celebrity book clubs.
Aside from Winfrey finding a manuscript in her living room or Roberts discovering a book in an obscure literary magazine (which she does), most of these book clubs are making selections based on what publishers, agents, and editors are placing in their direct line of vision. Publishers are trying to do the same with BookTok, but their efforts to influence the algorithm are a drop in the bucket compared with the authentic power of readers on the platform. “It’s getting much harder for publishers to send that signal out, because it’s really consumers that are sending the signal now,” Schmidt said.
Whether or not the book clubs continue to carry weight for actual book sales in a rapidly changing industry remains to be seen. I, for one, see the solution to the potential (and potentially inevitable) waning power of these major celebrity book clubs as more (and more diverse) celebrity book clubs. That rising tide could lift countless boats in a struggling industry. As author and professor Clayton Childress said in a previous article on book blurbs, “There’s no middle class in publishing,” and anyone on the inside will tell you that a small group of massive best-sellers tends to fund the rest of the business.
Sometimes celebrity book clubs annoyingly make a big book bigger (The Nightingale as a Reese’s Book Club pick in 2023—why?), but a lot of the time, these celebrities are creating best-sellers out of thin air, which then drive major revenue for publishers. The words “Taylor Swift Book Club” probably keep a lot of people up at night, but it’s mind-boggling to think about how much money a Taylor Swift Book Club pick would generate to fund smaller projects.
Because of the popularity of BookTok, I expect to see more Gen Z celebrities launching book clubs in the near future, and I’d appreciate it if we could skip the “Do they even read?” discourse that’s already come for a new generation. Case in point: Kelly told me the sales team at her imprint recently tied the sales spike of an extremely literary novel to Kaia Gerber’s book club, which caused shock waves throughout the room. “It was a meeting of a hundred people, and they were like, ‘I can’t believe Kaia Gerber can understand this book,’ ” she recounted. In reality, Kaia Gerber and her team have great taste in books.
We need more communities that inspire readers to pick up a new book, not fewer, and ones led by a more intersectionally diverse group of celebrities with different reading styles than what’s currently on display. The male celebrity-book-club market is practically untapped, as is the potential for a big name to build a community around a certain niche genre.
In our conversation, Harden mentioned how Witherspoon typically picks lighter, easier Hello Sunshine titles in May and December because those months are busy times for moms. It’s great that Hello Sunshine is able to fulfil that need for a key demographic of readers, and it makes me ache for more celebrity book clubs that speak to specific communities and their unique reading preferences.
“What’s the problem with a bunch of people with big profiles having book clubs?” said Preiss. “I think everybody wants to find something sinister about it; they want to look for the ulterior motive. Even if there was an ulterior motive, who gives a shit? The context is key. It’s really hard to sell books, and it’s incredibly hard to compete with various forms of media. Nobody is Doctors Without Borders over here running a celebrity book club, but if you can let go of the earnestness, I do think it’s still worth doing. What’s the alternative? That celebrities don’t have book clubs?”
That’s not an alternative any of us should want to explore.
Originally published on Esquire US
If you don’t remember the mathematical expression that governs the motion of three celestial bodies in a vacuum, fear not. Netflix has spent over $160 million to help you out. To make that completely clear: the streaming supergiant has spent $20 million (£16 million) per episode to make 3 Body Problem, an alien-invasion epic of such sweeping complexity that it makes the Big Bang theory read like a nursery rhyme. That makes it the streamer’s most expensive scripted series ever.
Based on the Remembrance of Earth’s Past novels by Chinese author Liu Cixin, the show covers a phantasmagoria of spacey theories and concepts—both real and imagined—from the “Wow! Signal” to the Fermi Paradox, Rare Earth Theory to Dark Forest Theory.
Do you need a degree in astrophysics to enjoy the show? Of course not. Still, an elementary understanding of some of these ideas will improve the journey. This is where Liu Cixin’s books come in, carefully explaining abstruse science concepts in clear language, many of which Netflix can only touch on lest it overloads our screentime-addled attention spans.
But the Remembrance of Earth’s Past is more than just a string of theories. It’s also a rollicking tale of cosmic intrigue, human resilience, and angry aliens. It’s a narrative that spans centuries and galaxies, intertwining a rich constellation of characters as they pinball about through time and space.
The story is not just about survival against extra-terrestrial forces. It's also about the philosophical and ethical questions that come with the advancement of civilisation. It challenges viewers to consider what it means to be human in the face of the unknown and the lengths to which we will go to protect our world and our species.
Which is all to say, really: it’s a load of alien-invading fun.
There are five books set in the Remembrance of Earth’s Past universe, three of which were penned chronologically from 2006, with a prequel and a sequel later written to fluff out the franchise.
But how should you read them, and when?
This is not part of the original trilogy that shot Liu to fame two years later. So it should be seen as more of an antipasto to the main course. But it’s nonetheless a tasty introduction to the Three Body Problem universe, minus the aliens.
It follows Chen, who, after witnessing his parents’ death by ball lightning, dedicates his life to unravelling this phenomenon. What that is, exactly, is best left to the book to explain in detail but suffice to say it’s a rare and unexplained phenomenon where small electrical fireballs burst like bullets out of thunderstorms and then explode. They’ve been known to kill people.
Chen’s research leads him to Lin Yun, a brilliant physicist with unorthodox theories about the nature of ball lightning. As they embark on a perilous quest for knowledge, they uncover secrets that challenge fundamental understandings of physics and reality itself. It’s a gripping narrative that weaves together science, intrigue, and human emotion in a thrilling exploration of the unknown.
The serious business begins. It opens during China's Cultural Revolution, where astrophysics student Ye Wenjie witnesses her father's death and loses faith in humanity. After a stint in prison, she is recruited by a secret military project tasked with uncovering extraterrestrial life. She sends a beacon into outerspace... and unwittingly invites aliens to Earth.
Meanwhile, nanotech expert Wang Miao is drawn into a mysterious VR game mirroring the chaotic climate of a three-sun alien world. Turns out the game and the secret military project are linked, revealing a desperate alien civilization planning to invade Earth. It soon gets out. And as humanity wrestles with this threat, Ye Wenjie becomes a leader for those who welcome the alien takeover, fracturing society and forcing humanity into a tug-of-war for its own future.
The second book of the trilogy digs into two key alien-related theories: the Fermi Paradox and Dark Forest theory. The first asks: if we exist, so too must aliens… so where the hell are they? The second says we should hope we never find them.
Dark Forest theory, in other words, argues that – in a universe where civilizations don't know each other's intentions – the safest bet is to lurk in the shadows like hunters in a forest, ready to strike first against potential threats.
But back to the story, and humanity faces annihilation. Four centuries separate Earth from the arrival of a ruthless alien armada, the Trisolarans, fleeing their dying sun. But Earth's fightback is crippled by sophisticated alien probes, sophons, that monitor every move and stifle technological advancement.
In a desperate bid for survival, Earth creates the Wallfacers - a clandestine group with access to any resource imaginable. Their mission: devise humanity's secret defence strategy. Luo Ji, a brilliant but unorthodox sociologist, is thrust into this world after a near-fatal encounter. As he delves deeper, he uncovers a terrifying cosmic truth - the Dark Forest theory - that rewrites the rules of interstellar relations and forces humanity to make unthinkable choices in the face of an unforgiving universe.
Decades after the precarious truce with the Trisolarans, humanity enjoys a golden age fuelled by alien technology. Yet, a chilling truth lurks beneath the surface. Cheng Xin, an idealistic engineer from Earth's pre-invasion past, awakens from hibernation to a world transformed. She's thrust into a new role as a Wallfacer. However, whispers of a devastating Trisolaran weapon, capable of destroying entire solar systems, threaten the fragile peace.
Meanwhile, a historical anomaly from Earth's past resurfaces, hinting at a mysterious force that could rewrite the course of the Trisolaran invasion. As humanity grapples with existential threats and internal factions with conflicting agendas, Cheng Xin must find a way to ensure humanity's survival in a universe where cosmic deterrence hangs by a thread.
If Ball Lightening was the antipasto, this is the complimentary limoncello that comes with the bill.
Liu didn’t actually write this instalment. It began as a work of fanfiction by the (now acclaimed) sci-fi writer Baoshu. But its reimagining of Liu’s world, fresh with new characters and ideas, proved so popular that the original trilogy’s publisher picked it up and published it in 2011, with Liu’s permission.
It revives a number of characters from the series, including Yun Tianming, a controversial and lightly drawn figure from Death's End. Presumed dead, he awakens in a distant future where humanity is facing existential threats from advanced civilizations. He discovers that he has been resurrected by an enigmatic alien entity known as the "Sophon" and is tasked with uncovering the truth behind humanity's past and its place in the universe.
As Yun Tianming navigates this unfamiliar future, he encounters familiar faces from the original trilogy, such as Ye Wenjie and Cheng Xin, and grapples with complex moral and philosophical questions. The novel delves into themes of redemption, identity, and the consequences of humanity's actions across time and space.
Fans of Liu can probably live without it, but if you’ve completed the series and need an extra fix, Redemption of Time will scratch that itch.
Originally published on Esquire UK
We know the movie is helmed by Oscar-winning director Bong Joon-ho (of Parasite, Snowpiercer, The Host; you know this, we won't elaborate). Which is pretty damn exciting, given its futuristic, off-kilter plot. Unfortunately, we also know its release date has been pushed back to from the end of this month to early 2025. So until we see Robert Pattinson as clones, you now have some time to catch up on the book it was based on (Mickey7, in this case, by Edward Ashton).
For those who have already done that, here are five other science fiction novels to consider putting on your reading list.
Stephen King called it “old-school creepy" and "a five-star horror novel”, so what more convincing do you need? More on the thriller side than horror, the book follows a group of scientists recruited to investigate the sudden appearance of a mountain in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. It cleverly sets the scene from an outsider's point of view before diving into the heart of the action. And yes, plays with the trope of time.
You'll like it if you like: Arrival, Prometheus
Okay, we kinda cheated with this one. It already has an upcoming adaptation featuring Ryan Gosling. Not surprising considering Weir's other novel starring Matt Damon. Still, the personable first-person tone makes a breezy read for an otherwise extensive storyline of waking up amnesiac in space and befriending a bizzare alien.
You'll like it if you like: The Martian (duh), Edge of Tomorrow
Not to be confused with Demolition Man, this first Hugo Awards winner is vintage sci-fi at its peak. Published well over 70 years ago, the world-building of a society where mind-readers (or peepers) exist effortlessly takes you in with easy pacing. And its demonstration of telepathy on a text medium is surely experimental for its day.
You'll like it if you like: In the Shadow of the Moon, Minority Report
The book rolls out in proses translated from Danish. The witness accounts come from a crew of six-thousand, human and otherwise, written as part of workplace commission of sorts. As they find themselves attached to the strange objects the ship takes on, it's a simultaneously peculiar yet haunting way to experience a distant memory of earth.
You'll like it if you like: Solaris, Moon
Laying thick on the suspense, this plot (also adapted in a film with Saoirse Ronan and Paul Mescal) by author of I'm Thinking of Ending Things has a similar deeper exploration of human psyche and relationships. Great if you prefer a quietly unnerving read than loud action and adventure.
You'll like it if you like: Annihilation, Under the Skin
When Lexi Freiman sat down to write her second novel, she discovered an irresistible subject in Ayn Rand, the polarising (albeit influential) Russian-American writer. “I'm always drawn to people who are sort of persona non grata, and she’s so despised,” Freiman tells Esquire. “I just published a satire of identity politics, so I wanted to see how much more unpopular I could make myself, and she seemed like a good choice.”
The Book of Ayn builds off the themes of Freiman’s irreverent debut, Inappropriation, in which a high school girl naively tries to model her life after Donna J. Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto. This time around, the protagonist, Anna, a self-described contrarian, takes a liking to Rand’s fiercely libertarian philosophy after falling victim to the cancel culture mob—a spectre that now haunts any artist. Her infraction? Publishing an opioid epidemic novel lampooned by The New York Times. “The review claimed that I was economically insensitive and had exploited the working class for my own selfish ends,” Anna recounts.
Feeling down on her luck, she ventures to sunny Los Angeles so she can churn out content about Rand that’s designed to garner outrage. After her Hollywood plan sputters, she heads to a meditation commune on a Greek island to absolve herself of all her woes—success, identity, reputation, and most notably, her ego. Through presenting the attention economy as a Randian hellscape where everyone, regardless of pedigree, has to fend for likes and exposure, Freiman spares no one—not Peter Thiel-funded edgelord hipsters, not fitness influencers uploading their vapidity into the algorithmic abyss, and certainly not the curators of a dying culture who have to keep up a pretense that any of it matters.
Yes, this is all very, very absurd. But thanks to Freiman’s unique ability to meld ferocious irony with heartfelt contemplation, The Book of Ayn goes beyond just another indictment of millennials as narcissists and offers a fresh glimpse into how 21st century artists have to negotiate their sense of selfhood. A few weeks prior to the release of The Book of Ayn, Freiman Zoomed with Esquire from Nicosia, Crete, where she was staying at a friend’s home, to discuss why she turned to Rand as a source for inspiration, Jewishness in writing, her lunch with comedian Louis C.K., ego death, and why the novel is still a valuable medium for exploring fiercely debated issues.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
ESQUIRE: In your debut novel Inappropriation, Ziggy, the fifteen-year-old protagonist, devotes herself to Donna Haraway’s feminist text A Cyborg Manifesto. Anna in The Book of Ayn is older and more cynical. But, analogously, she becomes obsessed with jamming her own life into Ayn Rand’s framework of individuality. Can you speak to this tendency of using public intellectuals as a roadmap for the complexities of life? Does this stem from a personal experience that you've had?
LEXI FREIMAN: The spark of interest always comes from someone else’s text. With Donna Haraway, there were ideas about transhumanism that felt really interesting to me within the context of identity politics. That was the kernel of an idea for that book. In a way, you’re finding or creating a character that doesn't just serve the ideas, but you find the character's qualities, flaws, and tendencies almost as a product of the ideas that you want to explore. I had the same thing with Ayn Rand. I started reading her books, and the thing that I found interesting about her was that she was a public intellectual and also a novelist and artist. Her books are unbearable. She wrote novels and a lot of people love them.
That was another thing that felt interesting to me for the character of Anna: she is exploring these ideas of freedom and individuality and the collective. I feel like there’s always that tension at the heart of the artist’s psyche. We want to be unique and original individuals who are creating great works. We also have a sense of wanting to belong and a desire to transcend the ego. That also means transcending the self and touching the sublime if you’re going to write something great. The idea of wanting to be part of something larger than oneself is a big part of every human experience. But there’s a special tension there with an artist that I thought would be interesting [to explore in a novel].
I learned so much about Rand from your book. For instance, I didn’t know that she changed her name from Alisa Rosenbaum at Ellis Island after leaving the U.S.S.R. Anna muses how “Ayn’s Jewishness has shaped her thinking” and reflects on how “there was a strong sense of individualism and collectivism within Jewish culture.” What was Rand’s relationship to Judaism?
With Ayn Rand, it’s hard to separate her Jewishness from her biography and her historical trajectory as someone who was born in 1905, came of age during World War I, and then emigrated in the late 1920s. She witnessed how her father had his pharmacy taken away [by the communists]. She was literally there the day that they [the communists] came in and beat him and he fell to his knees. She watched her father have everything he worked for taken away from him, and that was a huge seminal moment for her hatred of socialism. She came to the U.S. and didn’t want any of her background to affect her freedom—being raceless, without a religion, and without a gender; she didn’t really use her feminine charm. I read a few biographies and there was nowhere I saw her speak of or encounter antisemitism. She never really acknowledged her Jewishness publicly. She was very against this idea of identifying oneself through any groups or affiliations because she felt that took away a person’s freedom.
As a Jewish writer, this question of what it actually means for a work of art or ideology to be shaped by Judaism was interesting to me. Can you elaborate on that idea of Jewishness in writing?
For me, it’s about having a really acute awareness both of privilege and power, and then a sense of responsibility or accountability. I don't want to talk about Israel. I feel like a huge problem with that is that we're doing too much talking and not enough listening, so I don't want to add to the noise. But it’s like having a sort of awareness of oneself both as victim and perpetrator. That's very strong. I don't even like that language. But in a sense, I think that's really useful because there's an opportunity for enormous humaneness when you don’t see yourself as a pure victim and you don’t see yourself as a guilty perpetrator. I think it’s important to be able to see yourself as both in different contexts, and most importantly, to not punish yourself and to be merciful. That's a big part of what I got out of all my Ayn Rand reading: this idea that in order to actually be generous in an authentic way, you have to be self-serving. To be loving or merciful to others, you have to be that for yourself first. In Jewishness, there is an opportunity to be very self-aware and have compassion for the pain of the past, and to try to imagine good ways of working through that in the future.
To be loving or merciful to others, you have to be that for yourself first.
Towards the end of the book, after Anna’s partner declines her request to strangle her, she reflects, “Sexual strangulation was one of the individual’s great freedoms. You had to reclaim this right from all the boring feminists who said it was just misogyny. But now I wondered, was it really freewill when being choked was the only way you can come? Was that really a choice you had made for yourself?” You do a fantastic job exploring how kinky sex may or may not be predetermined by cultural conditioning via pornography. Anna is a compelling character because she sees all sides of an issue. What’s the relationship between kink and free will?
Thanks, I think that comes with my mild OCD. There’s a [constant] sense of, “Have I covered all my arguments and counterarguments?” That was a part of writing this character who’s pretty paranoid that she has been cancelled, and so there’s always a sense of, “Oh fuck, am I being narcissistic again? How will this be perceived? Have I said the wrong thing?”
But yes, back to kinky sex. I was interested in what is a choice and what is not a choice, and how much does that matter. I go back and forth on this. It's easy to moralise and say that this is trauma and you have to overcome this proclivity because it's destructive. But there are ways of reframing that, once you have awareness of a thing. With that comes a choice that may not be about not doing the thing anymore, but thinking about it differently. Going into the thing with awareness just sucks some of the negative energy out of it. In terms of violent porn, I feel that stuff is a problem because it's so ubiquitous and accessible, and there’s so much addiction. The bigger problem is that people have very little control over their impulses, and that has come with the internet age. We have totally given up our willpower to these devices. This all ties back into ideas of self-responsibility. Now I sound like Jordan Peterson or something, and I am sorry.
That’s an interesting point that you touched on with getting OCD about whether or not you’re cancelled. It’s as if this thing we call “cancel culture” serves as surveillance. For instance, at the end of the book, Anna is on a secluded island, but she still feels haunted by the possibility of backlash, think pieces, and discourse. What does it actually mean to be cancelled?
I don’t know. Maybe I’m about to find out. Being cancelled is maybe an opportunity for ego death, and that’s really the most idealistic and positive way of thinking about it. That’s what I was exploring in this book, and I was thinking about it in an essay that I wrote about Louis C.K. At our lunch last year, [C.K. and I] ended up discussing this idea of ego death. In the end, even though we both agreed it would be a nice thing to be enlightened, I was really struck by something he said that as painful it is to have an ego, especially when it’s been trampled on, he wouldn’t give it up, because it’s part of what you need as an artist to make great work. It keeps you alive.
I personally struggle with the idea of ego death because I want to write books and I don’t think the two things are possible. If you were really enlightened, you wouldn’t even want to write books. So, yes, being cancelled just sucks. You think about how some artists get to a point where the whole thing is empty and meaningless and they start looking for a spiritual out. It makes you sort of think, “What’s the point of all of this if Jim Carrey is seeking enlightenment now?” Getting cancelled could be an opportunity to get enlightened.
Getting cancelled could be an opportunity to get enlightened.
That reminds me of how Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, got super religious and then he got super super cancelled. It was almost as if he was trying to get cancelled on purpose.
There’s something interesting about an artist like Kanye who is so transgressive, and that’s part of his genius. It’s a blurry line with Kanye—the antisemitism stuff wasn’t a blurry line—but with him, there’s always this sense of whether or not he’s fucking with us and blowing our minds open. Or does he have no idea what he’s doing? Madness is the ultimate transgression. In the book, I talk a little bit about how we’re really hard on our big superstars in terms of their behaviour, but we have to separate the artist from the art as much as possible and just acknowledge that these are not normal people. These people are living very strange lives. Part of my issue with the left is that it’s very punitive and at the same time, there’s an openness for some people for rehabilitation.
There’s a contradiction—some people get rehabilitated based on their circumstances and other people need to be destroyed. I don’t really believe in anyone who is trying to destroy anyone else, because this isn’t part of an ideology that comes from an integrated, synthesised worldview and a solid, compassionate, generous place. I don’t have the answers. I don’t know how you have an effective movement like #MeToo without some consequences. There’s obviously a spectrum of crimes and bad behaviour. [But] there’s an impulse there that I think is unhealthy for everyone.
It seems to me that the throughline here is fluidity and grappling with the contradictions of being an individual. Do you expect yourself to one day disavow The Book of Ayn altogether?
Maybe. I don’t want to disavow anything or embrace anything. I don’t want to ever think that I have the answer. In this book, mostly, I don’t think this character has the answer because I don’t have the answer. I may disavow the whole project of writing books. I still think that the better project is trying to get enlightened. I do go to a spiritual commune that isn’t dissimilar to the place in the book. If I have ever disavowed something, I have probably embraced something that’s just as limiting, so hopefully not.
We are all too quick to want to have the right philosophy and ideology. That’s why I like writing novels, because there’s room in there for everything. Room to work through the ideas and work through the problems. Maybe through this process that’s a little bit OCD, you get to this point where you're like, “Oh, none of those ideas are good.”
I guess there's still more to come, hopefully.
Originally published on Esquire US
One of the nice things about books is they take a while to write. And so, while it can feel impossible to keep up with culture thanks to the constant barrage of television shows and movies and opinions that modern life throws our way, you will often find some more contemplative thoughts in literature.
The year ahead in reading looks all around: way back to landmark literary events, a dip into the more recent past (hello to the pandemic and London heatwave!), and forward to fictional future worlds reckoning with AI. And, of course, there is the here and now: an exciting crop of novelists dealing with identity and class and relationships. All the stuff that makes life interesting. Whether it is the debut you will see everywhere on the morning commute or a literary crime thriller, there’s a pick below for you.
Michael Cunningham’s first novel in nine years gets its UK release this January: a suitably contemplative way to start the year. Day follows a Brooklyn-based family—centring on brother and sister Robbie and Isabel—on the same April date across three years, from 2019 to 2021. You may recall there was a worldwide event taking place in those years. The novel wisely doesn’t go too deep on any pandemic logistics (in fact, the word is never mentioned), but it does attempt to show the consequences of that extraordinary event on this family, as they grapple with the more regular facets of life: heartbreak, stagnant marriages, awkward adolescences. Cunningham deploys his trademark spare prose and wry humour to great effect here.
The small-town crime novel is a very well-represented genre, but Collin Barrett’s debut has an enviable prestige: the author’s short stories have been published to great acclaim in the New Yorker and Irish literary magazine The Stinging Fly. Wild Houses is set in Ballina, County Mayo, where a feud between small-time dealer, Cillian, and local law enforcers, Gabe and Sketch is causing problems (as criminal feuds usually do). But when Cillian’s brother turns up, battered and bruised, on Dev’s doorstep, the isolated Dev is dragged headlong into a family’s revenge quest.
Kiley Reid’s 2019 debut Such a Fun Age was a—sorry, no other word for it—fun take on race and class, a refreshing outlier in a typically dour genre. Her follow-up, Come and Get It, heads to campus for some lessons in relationships and finance. Millie is about to graduate when a professor offers an unusual way to earn some much-needed money. Where will that newfound side-hustle lead? In Reid’s hands, expect high-wire tension, side-eyeing satire and a heap of jokes.
Édouard Louis’s latest, an autobiographical novel explores some familiar themes to the French author’s work: class, sexuality, society’s inequality. In this, Édouard heads to Amiens for school and university in Paris, taking on a new name and a life. He indulges in activities both aristocratic and seedy in an attempt to rebrand himself. But can you ever truly escape your past? Hm, we’d wager that it’s probably not that simple.
As engaging as doorstoppers can be, there is an unparalleled pleasure in something short and searing. Chukwuebuka Ibeh’s debut is set in modern-day Nigeria, where the country’s criminalisation of same-sex marriage has created a hostile atmosphere for the LGBTQ+ population. After an intimate moment with the family apprentice, Obiefuna is sent to a Christian boarding school by his father. So begins a process of self-discovery. Blessings is told from Obiefuna and his mother’s perspective, a dynamic which has plenty of potential for the profound.
After author Katherine Min’s death, her daughter, Kayla, found a manuscript in her late mother’s drawer. Katherine had been working on a project, and that book turns The Fetishist, her first posthumous publication, a revenge story about musicians. Young and angry punk singer Kyoko blames violinist Daniel for her mother’s death. Daniel and Kyoko’s mother, Emi, had been part of the same orchestra. If we learned anything from Tar, it’s that we need more stories dedicated to obsession and revenge in the music world.
This is the first book Salman Rushdie has written since he was stabbed onstage at an event in New York state (his novel Victory City was published after the attack, but written beforehand). In Knife, Rushdie writes about the attempt on his life and what happened afterwards: a testament to endurance and the power of writing.
Nathan Newman’s debut brings together a pleasingly weird bunch of people: a dentist who longs to be an artist (he cannot stop creating pictures of mouths!), a romantically-troubled Imam, a teenager whose nudes have leaked. And then there is 23-year-old Natwest, who is waiting for an embarrassing package to arrive before heading off for university. An ambitious title.
Every few years, we must read a novel about London during an unbearably hot summer. This time, it’s Oisín McKenna’s turn. It’s 2019, the hottest June on record, and we’re about to head into a highly-charged weekend between four characters. There’s Maggie, pregnant and down-on-her-luck, and Ed, the bike courier who hopes to make a life with her. Then there’s Ed’s best friend, Phil, who has a secret past with Maggie. Meanwhile, Phil’s mother is travelling to London to tell her son about her cancer diagnosis.
June marks a hundred years since Franz Kafka’s death (the author died from starvation as a result of tuberculosis at the age of 40). To mark that century, ten authors—including Ali Smith, Elif Batuman and Charlie Kaufman—have penned ten short stories which are deemed Kafaesque. If anything will speak to the general weirdness of our times, this collection, with its AI architects to bureaucratic nightmares, will be it. Though, perhaps, what we shall learn is that all times are a little weird.
