I read fewer books this year than I usually do. Probably because instead of freelancing—living like an overgrown child—I was employed. Employed in a job where I read all day. For my December column I thought I’d go retrospective: a list of my 33 favorite first-time reads from the year. Thirty-three because I like the sound of it.

Many of the books are new releases. But some date back to the recent 20th century or the distant first century. This list is not orderly or unified; it catalogues books—whichever books struck my interest—in the sequence I read them, minus those which, alas, didn’t make the cut.

To make matters worse, I didn’t take notes as I read. I’ve also lent out a number of the books, further problematizing my ability to reference them. So if the list is idiosyncratic, the descriptions are moreso: fragmentary references I’m conjuring from gray matter fried by several-too-many holiday parties over the past couple weeks.

Maybe you’ll connect with one of these texts, too.

Liliana Colanzi, Our Dead World (Dalkey Archive, translator: Jessica Sequeira, 2017)

I love Colanzi’s writing—which I’ve reviewed in the Los Angeles Review of Books and also commissioned for Document—because it ciphers so many narratives in each jewel-box short prose piece. It’s not that individuals (that is, characters, but also, we readers) become important, but that all people and all agents are inescapably, if invisibly, linked. Sure, you could call some of this sci-fi (colonizing Mars, etc.) but what’s more real than our being together?

Diane Williams, I Hear You’re Rich (Soho, 2023)

There’s this story in this collection about a bird. Not even 100 words. One bird, wormless among birds chewing worms, whistles. The narrator whistles. The narrator pursues the bird, briefly thinks of it as “my creature.” “What I like best is taking pleasure alongside somebody I barely know in such spasms.”

There’s another story about a bird. A bit longer. The story, not the bird. The story is called “Tassel Rue,” which is not a bird but a wildflower that looks something like an anemic chamomile. The bird’s “passionate voice might have answered the question, ‘What am I living for?’—had there only been words to accompany it.”

Nora Treatbaby, Our Air (Nightboat, 2024)

This book has green text. Dark green, it’s easy on the eyes. One time I said to Nora, “I am an atheist but I just saw god rise in a landscape,” and she asked, “Were you at the Walmart in Hudson?” I had been. The sun cascaded mineral-like from an orange gape. Our Air swells with collective dreams at once dashed and found in hearts drawn in the fogged glass of a supermarket freezer, conditioned air we breathe together and so toxify together, the sensuous, herbal lick of revolution.

Petronius, The Satyricon (Oxford World’s Classics, translator: P.G. Walsh, 2009/circa 65 CE)

I already wrote about this book for The Whitney Review of New Writing so I won’t get into it all over again, but did you know that there was a fucked-up gay novel from 20 centuries ago?

Jennifer Croft, The Extinction of Irena Rey (Bloomsbury, 2024)

To quote myself in a little magazine called Document Journal, “The Extinction of Irena Rey complects and complicates the relationships between translation and border politics, art and nature, image and text, truth and myth. It is about not just the extinction of its demigod-like author, but, perhaps, all of us.”

Brandon Shimoda, Hydra Medusa (Nightboat, 2023)

“a father describing / in rattled yet procedural terms / the way his daughter flew / across the room / and stuck to the wall”

Aimé Césaire, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (Wesleyan, translator: Clayton Eshleman, 2001)

I forget why I borrowed this from the library. Something about pilgrimage had been on my mind. Oh, it was putting together this story—which doesn’t have much to do with Césaire but that’s the free association that sometimes comprises research. Free association might be relevant: this text—the first version of which was written in 1939—is in some sense surrealist, a journey of swerves and blockages that make facture of the fracture of the colonial condition. Lyric and unrelenting.

Sheila Heti, Alphabetical Diaries (Farar, Straus, and Giroux, 2024)

If you are a Fine Print devotee (I don’t look at my column’s metrics just like I don’t look at pictures of myself), you’ll have read of this book comprising lines of Heti’s diaries she’s alphabetized (thus the title): “The result is variously hallucinatory and hilarious and (appropriately) banal. Micro-stories nearly eddy but are quickly impinged upon by thoughts unconstrained by linear time or semantic space. Across chapters, organized by letter, “characters” (Lemons, Hanif, Pavel, Zadie Smith) reappear, but in no clarified relationship to their previous selves; their multiple timelines exist on the page at once. In prose, a conjunction is typically a connective sense-making apparatus, and when encountering them in Alphabetical Diaries I had to keep reminding myself to give up on the direct grammatical coordination sentence to sentence.”

Danielle Dutton, Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other (Coffee House Press, 2024)

A quadrangular collection. Essays on image-text; short stories; quotations that may comprise a story or an essay; much neither or between; grasslands.

Stacy Skolnik, The Ginny Suite (Montez Press, 2024)

In this debut novel, language itself is compromised: a syndrome is spreading rendering women aphasic. Distance and dissociation rule. Other forms—medical reports, news items, poems—accrue amid the non-linear narrative. As Stacy told me when I interviewed her this spring, “I was thinking a lot when writing this about the soft power inherent in the practice of writing. There’s power in just writing poems in your room or writing a letter to a friend.”

Hebe Uhart, A Question of Belonging (Archipelago, translator: Anna Vilner, 2024)

Fine Print readers will be familiar with this non-fiction collection as well. As I summarized in my column on crónicas: “She visits little towns, maybe only 90 kilometers away. She sleeps in locals’ houses because there are no hotels. She looks into clothing shops and considers the consumptionism of Perónists versus that of ex-communists. She catalogs local sayings and swears and creoles. She drops acid during group therapy.” Archipelago also sent me two more of Uhart’s books which I can’t wait to read. This was one of my absolute favorites of this year.

Teju Cole, Tremor (Random House, 2023)

One of those books that doesn’t leave you, that winds its way somewhere obscure and measureless, brewing and reasserting itself long after you’ve tucked it back on the shelf or lent it to someone else.

Rosalind Brown, Practice (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2024)

I read it in a day, spread on the couch in the sunlight as I was catsitting. A university student is trying to write an essay about Shakespeare; instead, she cannot escape her life.

Alvina Chamberland, Love the World or Get Killed Trying (Noemi, 2024)

Unafraid to risk sentiment, never too-cool-for-school. Not an outpouring but an overflowing.

McKenzie Wark, Love and Money, Sex and Death (Verso, 2023)

I interviewed McKenzie Wark this summer for another magazine I help edit, the Spain-based Many of Them. We were discussing this book—which I suppose we could call memoir (a memoir of being a child, of being a parent, of transition, of making art, of making money, of making and unmaking narrative)—and she told me, “With all my books, I try to make an object that passes into the world and into people’s hands in a certain way.” In my hands, many dogears.

Mohammed Zenia, Tel Aviv (Porosity, 2020)

Back in March or February I heard Zenia read from their then in-progress, now recently released manuscript BLK WTTGNSN (Tiger Bark, 2024). I was so floored I had to get whatever of theirs was available, which at that moment was Tel Aviv. The book mutates its namesake city through a variety of personal and world historical motifs, mapping and unhinging the sprawl of occupation.

Pedro Lemebel, A Last Supper of Queer Apostles (Penguin Classics, translator: Gwendolyn Harper, 2024)

Also appearing in my crónica column, this irascible, political, decadent, downtrodden, tragic, horny volume is at once rigorous and hilarious.

Fernanda Melchor, Hurricane Season (New Directions, translator: Sophie Hughes, 2020)

Why did it take me so long to read this book? Fully one of the best books I’ve ever read. A torrent of vitriol, abjection, sensuality, violence, and magic—sentences that pulse for pages, consciousnesses and registers interpenetrating.

The witch is dead. What happened? Who killed her? We flow through shifting focus onto a handful of characters as they live their enjambed lives, each chapter revealing a bit more of the fuller story composed by their interactions or avoidances, the necrosis of this town. The necropolitics of capital. The gasoline whiff of bad cocaine. The stench of blood. Yes, you do get the answer—the whodunnit—but, of course, casting light always casts a shadow.

m.s. RedCherries, Mother (Penguin, 2024)

Prose and poetry, prose-poetry, little lines, long paragraphs, a history of many histories, many entwined and irrepressible stories and histories visible and in-; put more plainly, Mother, per the PR copy, tells a story of “an Indigenous child who is adopted out of her tribe and raised by a non-Indian family. “brother / muted edge / who carries life / of war / what is / of ours…” What is it to find one’s way back?

Forrest Gander, Be With (New Directions, 2018)

Geoff got me this. I can’t remember if there was an occasion. He thought I’d appreciate its bi-/interlingual (English and Spanish) approach to a borderland ecopoetics. He was correct.

Rachel Kushner, Creation Lake (Scribner, 2024)

I asked Rachel Kushner if she’d write something for the magazine. She politely said she was too busy with the release of her new book, but wanted to know if I’d like to read said book. Obviously I did. The novel follows Sadie Smith, a freelance spy (welcome the precariat, secret agents!) infiltrating a left-wing commune while reading extended emails about Neanderthals by said commune’s vaunted forebearer, Bruno Lacombe. Creation Lake has proved polarizing in the press. (One writer temporarily left X following his review.) But I agree with Anahid Nersessian’s assessment in the New York Review of Books that Creation Lake furthers Kushner’s project in her previous novels of writing “about the ways individual lives are constrained by historical forces much too large for anyone to grasp completely.”

Mónica Ojeda, Nefando (Coffee House Press, translator: Sarah Booker, 2023)

Six 20-somethings share a flat in Barcelona. El Cuco hacks computers. Kiki Ortega writes Bataille spin-offs. Ívan Herrera tries to hack gender dysphoria through Mesoamerican myth. Then there are the three siblings, Irene, Emilio, and Cecilia. The book comprises Kiki’s book, police interviews, and other narratives from six viewpoints swapping, slowly working toward the secret of a cult dark-web-released video game which the siblings enlisted El Cuco to code.

Mariko Nagai, Irradiated Cities (Les Figues, 2023)

I cannot for the life of me figure out where I put this book. What I recall: the past that is the present—that of place, the collective that is neither lost nor alive—that of placeness, the unflinching.

Don DeLillo, Mao II (Penguin, 1992)

Somehow I’d never read Don DeLillo. Geoff told me to start with Mao II (Geoff’s book Mean Boys—which came out this spring, btw—only isn’t on this list because I read it as an ARC in 2023). I was like, How had I never read Don DeLillo?!

Johannes Göransson, Transgressive Circulation (Noemi, 2018)

I think I became aware of this because the writer and translator Fani Avramopoulou posted it on Instagram. Göransson questions how the US’s hegemonic definition of poetry excludes the transgression of translation, and in so doing promotes the nation’s efforts at global hegemony.

Mónica Ojeda, Jawbone (Coffee House Press, translator: Sarah Booker, 2022)

I read Nefando and was like, let me get this, Ojeda’s previous novel, which was nominated for a National Book Award. Boys versus girls, daughters versus mothers, educators versus students, memories versus realities. Although structurally distinct from Nefando, Jawbone likewise features shifting points of view. The greatest mystery—a startling feat—is how this narrative holds and reveals its shape. All its characters—“cockroaches in their heads”—brush against the structure of narrative even as they recapitulate it (anxious maternal attachments; Melville; creepypasta). Lesson?: Don’t accept the dare.

Funto Omojola, If I Gather Here and Shout (Nightboat, 2024)

I interviewed Funto for their photo exhibition this past winter, and edited another interview with them and Precious Okoyomon for Elephant this fall. I have heard this book percolate over the years as Funto has performed it and excerpted it and I am so happy to have it, to read it and re-read it. “what a silly thing it is to not really be able to shit!”

Jimin Seo, OSSIA (Changes, 2024)

Playful, tender, charismatic, intimate. Blends English and Korean. Beautifully designed.

Precious Okoyomon, But Did You Die? (Wonder and Serpentine, 2024)

“It’s a bummer nobody gets crucified anymore.”

Jon Fosse, Aliss at the Fire (Dalkey Archive, translator: Damion Searls, 2010)

I like a long sentence.

Dionne Brand, Salvage (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2024)

Brand’s book acts as “an” autobiography of a reader (“a reader like [her]”), tugging apart the British books she read as a youth—texts which worked to form affective affinities for protagonists, and thus form subjects. Texts that normalized and materialized the political economy of empire: “We attach these ascriptions to works many years after their creation, through the very long and insistent process of empire that causes them to arrive as objects of aesthetic value. Even more, there are social processes that assign aesthetic value to visual and textual objects, processes that have to do with systems of ruling.”

Amber Later, Special Moss (Roadkill Editions, 2024)

Oracular/earthen, wick-lit/precise, structured/expansive, I loved this collection of stories and poems. Interview with Amber out on Document soon.

Copi, The Queens’ Ball (Mercurial Editions, translator: Kit Schluter, 2024)

At its core, The Queens’ Ball is a love story between a writer-narrator, also named Copi, and the young Pietro Gentilhuomo, who transitions genders throughout the book—and by the time Copi’s begun writing, is already dead. Published in French in 1977, The Queens’ Ball follows the pair from Rome to Paris to New York’s Chelsea Hotel to Ibiza, in a milieu populated by a sinister Marilyn Monroe impersonator, sadistic porn producers, and an editor who all but begs the Copi to show him this novel he’s been working on about his “kind of stupid” paramour. Messy! Nasty! Silly! Yes!