The Best Books of 2021: Mystery!
/Will the grim news out in the real world sap the enjoyment from the pages of invented murder and mayhem? Not with these Best Mysteries of 2021!
Read MoreWill the grim news out in the real world sap the enjoyment from the pages of invented murder and mayhem? Not with these Best Mysteries of 2021!
Read MoreTurning to romance novels for some consequence-free enjoyment will not disappoint, especially if you choose one of these Best Romances of 2021.
Read MoreThis year’s list of best translations includes new voices in contemporary fiction from around the world, as well as established classics re-rendered for today’s readers.
Read MoreWhat happens when every author in the world gets the endless amounts of free time they're always whining about? Some great debut fiction!
Read More2021 had an encouragingly wide array of interesting reprints. Steve points you to the best of them.
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:
I've come to expect a certain amount of variety in the books that manage the near-impossible feat of making their way from galley-and-first-reading to finished-copy-and-second-reading to critical appraisal/mauling to cold reconsideration and then ultimately to this year-end list. But even so, the best works of what I think of as 'general nonfiction' in 2017 are more varied than usual, ranging from the whimsical to the terrifying to the tragic and back. I went into the year with clear expectations of where my favor would lie, and as usual, I was constantly being surprised right out of my certainties. Here are the best nonfiction works from a year of upset:
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