The Best Books of 2021: Nonfiction
/You too can be pleasantly surprised by the odd choices and risky innovations so many writers make in the books on this list.
Read MoreYou too can be pleasantly surprised by the odd choices and risky innovations so many writers make in the books on this list.
Read More2017 was another outstanding year for fiction. Even the mediocre novels were sounder and smarter than in most years, and the terrific novels were correspondingly even more terrific – so much so, in fact, that many of the year's best novels achieved that status despite committing venial and mortal sins against their own genre: things like pandering topicality, chasing buzzwords, and avoiding plot, things that would ordinarily torpedo a novel, were in 2017 transformed by sheer talent into working parts of the performance. And those performances included some mighty fine works – these were the best of them:
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