{"id":58448,"date":"2024-12-19T10:00:49","date_gmt":"2024-12-19T16:00:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.publicbooks.org\/?p=58448"},"modified":"2026-01-16T20:10:28","modified_gmt":"2026-01-17T02:10:28","slug":"public-picks-2024","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.publicbooks.org\/public-picks-2024\/","title":{"rendered":"Public Picks 2024"},"content":{"rendered":"

What were the books of 2024 that dazzled, challenged, and inspired us? For this, the 12th-annual edition of Public Picks, section editors for Global Black History<\/a>, Literary Fiction<\/a>, Borderlands<\/a>, Literature in Translation<\/a>, and Technology<\/a>;\u00a0series editors for Public Thinker<\/a> and B-Sides<\/a>; and our managing editor and one of our editors in chief tell us about their favorites. Take a look back on 2024 with one of these Public Books\u00a0<\/em>Public Picks!<\/p>\n

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B. R. Cohen<\/a><\/h4>\n
Public Thinker Series<\/h5>\n

The Problem with Solutions: Why Silicon Valley Can’t Hack the Future of Food<\/em><\/a> by Julie Guthman (University of California Press). I had been waiting for this book, one confronting the false premises and blinkered technocratic incursion on food and agriculture by the hacker class. Guthman is the one to write it. She has long been the leading voice at the intersection of science and technology studies and food studies, consistently articulating the ways political and cultural conditions shape fields and food markets alike. The gist of The Problem with Solutions<\/i> is well tipped by its subtitle, with Guthman giving us a book that tackles an especially insidious version of twenty-first century technosolutionism. The problem isn\u2019t with technology, it is with a culture of venture capital backed predatory digital capitalism\u2014forgive my clunky modifiers\u2014that I had hoped would somehow be taken down by the HBO satire Silicon Valley<\/i>\u00a0a decade ago (a reference Guthman makes too). Unfortunately, to my na\u00efve sensibility, satire doesn\u2019t defeat its subjects fully enough. But the clarity and insights of Guthman\u2019s writing will help. This is the most thoughtful and forceful account of problematic collisions between food and technology I\u2019ve read not just this year, but in a very long time.<\/p>\n\n

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<\/h4>\n

Megan cummins<\/a><\/h4>\n
managing editor<\/h5>\n

I Love You So Much It\u2019s Killing Us Both<\/em><\/a> by Mariah Stovall (Soft Skull). I was amazed by this debut novel. First person at its best, I Love You So Much It\u2019s Killing Us Both <\/em>tells the story of Khaki Oliver and her intense friendship\u2014and its even more intense unraveling\u2014with Fiona Davies. Stovall darts back and forth between 2007 and 2022, from high school to college to adulthood, giving us what feels like not just every one of Khaki\u2019s thoughts, but every twitching impulse, every hidden urge. This book is filled to the brim; it would be dizzying if it weren\u2019t so compelling. Fiona, and her eating disorder, is a constant in the book (her presence and absence both somehow ghostly); and so is the punk rock scene, where Khaki is often one of the only Black girls at every show she attends. The book is a delight (if an intense one) even for those of us who aren\u2019t <\/em>cool enough to get all the references. Not to worry, though\u2014there\u2019s recommended listening at the end. Oh, and did I mention the jaw-droppingly good lines? I returned my library copy and bought my own because the temptation to underline was too great.<\/p>\n

Wild Houses<\/em><\/a> by Colin Barrett (Grove). I\u2019m a devotee of Colin Barrett\u2019s short fiction, and his first novel is every bit as beautifully styled as his two collections, Young Skins<\/em><\/a> and Homesickness<\/a>.<\/em> Set in Ballina, County Mayo, Wild Houses<\/em> is kickstarted by the kidnapping of teenage Doll English, whose brother, Cillian, owes a hefty sum to people who are tired of waiting. Dev\u2014a loner on the periphery of those to whom money is owed\u2014finds himself forced to keep Doll at his home; and Nicky, Doll\u2019s girlfriend, becomes entangled in a chaotic scheme to bring him back. Beneath the swift and gripping plot, the book shimmers with reflection. \u201cBelieve it or not, I know what I\u2019m like,\u201d Cillian says to Nicky at one point. \u201cEvery so often, it dawns on me, in cold horror.\u201d And Dev, stunned in the aftermath of his participation in events, reflects, \u201cThat was what made it all so difficult. You couldn\u2019t do anything until you did another thing first.\u201d And that\u2019s true in so many ways in Wild Houses<\/em>: You might be able to see to a point in the future\u2014as Doll\u2019s kidnappers see a way to getting their money back, as Nicky can see a future beyond her life in Ballina\u2014but before you get there, there\u2019s all the other things that must be done first.<\/p>\n

Mystery Lights<\/em><\/a> by Lena Valencia (Tin House). There\u2019s horror at the edges of daily existence\u2014and the ten stories in Lena Valencia\u2019s gorgeous debut, Mystery Lights<\/em>, bring it front and center. Is the threat in the dorm the ghost of a 19th-century fur trapper, or the boy down the hall? Is it a bigger terror to see ghosts, or to lose your ability to see them? And when a mindfulness retreat drives you to the brink, is violence the only way to get your sanity back? Valencia breaks down the typical boundaries we hold ourselves within to show\u2014beautifully, menacingly\u2014that the supernatural might be closer than we think (and we might all be more unhinged than we believe). I was riveted from start to finish, and I welcomed a whole host of new characters into the world of my literary favorites.<\/p>\n\n

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Nicholas Dames<\/a><\/h4>\n
Editor in Chief<\/h5>\n

Quarterlife<\/em><\/a> by Devika Rege (Liveright). A remarkable debut novel that feels as if it had been lived with and thought through for years, its every choice deeply considered and yet also brave, risky\u2014it\u2019s got an assurance rare for first books. It\u2019s a group portrait of Indian 20-somethings right before, and then in the aftermath of, the 2014 election that inaugurated the Modi era; as such it\u2019s a historical novel of the very recent past, delicately attuned to the possibilities that 2014 negated and the compromises it necessitated. It\u2019s therefore a novel of tipping points, decisions from which there is no turning back, leavetakings. Most of all, though, it\u2019s alive with argumentation, fervent debate and roiling self-doubt, enacting the splendors and miseries of democracy in a deeply antidemocratic moment.<\/p>\n

The Ukraine<\/em><\/a> by Artem Chapeye, trans. Zenia Tompkins (Seven Stories). Pungent and (sometimes bleakly, sometimes spikily) comic character studies of a country that was on the eve of total war, the war that is the fruition and negation of all its innumerable complications and ambiguities. \u201cI\u2019m describing the moment at the bifurcation point,\u201d Chapeye writes in his introduction\u2014 \u201cwhen no one knows in which direction change will take us.\u201d There\u2019s novelistic irony and wit, sociological precision, and historical weight to each little world here, and all of it serves to produce something like a national \u201cimagined community\u201d that is totally disabused of any romance but also absolutely urgent. The title story, which brought Chapeye international attention when it was published in the\u00a0New Yorker<\/em> in 2022, is only a small sample of the book\u2019s spirit: a disillusioned, tenacious humanism.<\/p>\n

Herscht 07769<\/em><\/a> by L\u00e1szl\u00f3 Krasznahorkai, trans. Ottilie Mulzet (New Directions). Quantum theory, neo-Nazis, migrants, petroleum, forlorn hopes that centrist politicians will save the day: Krasznahorkai\u2019s latest is a step less mythic, a step more mimetically contemporary, than the novels like Satantango<\/em>, The Melancholy of Resistance<\/em>, or Baron Wenckheim\u2019s Homecoming<\/em> that made him a totemic (and even, in his forbidding way and to some of us, beloved) figure. Which isn\u2019t to say that it\u2019s all that<\/em> different. The novel\u2019s central figure fits within Krasznahorkai\u2019s gallery of obscurely damaged, eerily gentle innocents, and his signature apocalyptic atmosphere remains, if a bit more in the vein of a thriller than his usual ominous thrum of dread. In other words, an ever so slightly more \u201crealist\u201d Krasznahorkai. Or is it just that our world has gradually become more like Krasznahorkai\u2019s imagination? (And also: a one-sentence novel, more proof that we\u2019re living in the great era of one-sentence novels.)<\/p>\n\n

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Tao Leigh Goffe<\/a><\/h4>\n
Global Black History<\/h5>\n

Alt-Nature: Poems<\/em><\/a> by Saretta Morgan (Coffee House Press). Saretta Morgan begins her debut book of poetry with a map of desire. \u201cI want to wake every morning into love, where love is the question of\u00a0how I\u2019m going to help you get free<\/em>, where that means whatever it needs to mean.\u201d These powerful words set the stage for a series of poems that hug the US Southwest, where the author lived for an extended period, with a sense of longing.\u00a0 The scale of intimacy, Morgan lays forth in the pages of Alt-Nature<\/em>\u00a0broach timelines of militarism, genocide, and all that nature has archived in resistance to imperialism by exploring Black and Indigenous coalitions and frictions. Referencing lines by Aime Cesaire, Hortense Spillers, Cristina Rivera Garza, and Ruth Wilson Gilmore alongside words from members of her family, she presents a polyvocal reckoning with what and whom has been stolen from the land. She reflects on military service and what it means to be patriotic amidst the backdrop of Arizona\u2019s red dirt and roadrunners. Anchored by a series of interspersed poems titled \u201cConsequences upon arrival,\u201d the collection theorizes what it means for Black people to arrive in the Americas at \u201cthe lip of geologic faults.\u201d\u00a0Alt-Nature<\/em>\u00a0maps Afro-Indigenous desire and coalition as the antithesis of the violence wrought by European settler colonial desire.<\/p>\n\n

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tara K. menon<\/a><\/h4>\n
Literary fiction<\/h5>\n

Ilium<\/em><\/a> by Lea Carpenter (Knopf). \u201cThen the new style began.\u201d The epigraph to Lea Carpenter\u2019s\u00a0Ilium<\/em>\u00a0is from John Le Carre\u2019s\u00a0The Spy Who Came in from the Cold<\/em>. Carpenter\u2019s debts to the king of spies are clear, but her gripping third novel demonstrates her own mastery of the modern espionage thriller. Early in the novel, the unnamed British female narrator falls in love with a much older American man. She doesn\u2019t know it at first, but he means to recruit her. She\u2019s a perfect asset\u2014lonely, vulnerable, an orphan\u2014and, more importantly, the final, necessary piece in a years-long joint CIA-Mossad operation. (The novel is loosely based on the\u00a0real life killing of CIA station chief William Buckley and the decades-long campaign to avenge his death.)\u00a0After her husband-handler dies, the grieving newlywed is sent, in the guise of an art dealer, to the French house of a Russian oligarch. The action moves slowly, then all at once.\u00a0Ilium\u00a0<\/em>is mesmerizing\u2014at once a riveting thriller and a brilliant character study–and with it, Carpenter claims her place alongside Le Carre and Graham Greene.<\/p>\n

Consent<\/a><\/em> by Jill Ciment (Pantheon). When she was seventeen, Jill Ciment had an affair with Arnold Mesches, her 47 year old art teacher, who was married with two teenage children. Soon after their relationship began, Arnold left his wife and married Jill. The couple stayed together until Arnold\u2019s death in 2016, at 93. In her first memoir, Half a Life<\/em>, published in 1996, Ciment cast herself as a relentless seductress. In Consent<\/em>, her second attempt at narrating their life, she asks: But was I really? It would be too simple to say that Ciment is rewriting the story of her life after #MeToo, but she does use the paradigm shift to pose some tough questions. In Consent<\/em>, she doesn\u2019t just revise basic factual details of their courtship (she didn\u2019t kiss him first, he kissed her first; he didn\u2019t take much convincing; he made his desire clear), she also ruthlessly dissects the way she first told the story. She reprints whole passages from Half a Life<\/em> and exposes what she falsified, what she obscured, and what she left out completely. Then, she interrogates her motivations, as a wife, and as an artist: Why did I tell it that way? This is a radical experiment in revision, and it is deeply compelling.<\/p>\n

The Burrow<\/a> <\/em>by Melanie Cheng (Tin House). Grieving family adopts pet bunny during the pandemic lockdown. Who wants to read that? Not me, I thought. But because of my implicit faith in the taste of the booksellers at Three Lives in the West Village, I picked up Melanie Cheng\u2019s\u00a0The Burrow<\/em>\u00a0anyway. The novel begins some years after Jin and Amy, a married couple living in Melbourne, lose their baby daughter Ruby in an accidental drowning. (Amy\u2019s mother, Pauline, was bathing Ruby when she had a stroke.) Desperate to help their older daughter, Lucie, move forward, Jin decides to bring home a bunny. Soon after, Pauline is sent to live with the family after a short stint in the hospital. Every chapter, clearly marked by a name, is told from the perspective of Amy, Jin, Pauline or Lucie. In unsentimental prose, Cheng shows the four still living members of this small family, each still heavy with grief and guilt, trying to find a new way to live with each other. Another writer might have made the subject matter (baby dies on grandmother\u2019s watch) maudlin, but Cheng refuses every temptation. Instead, she gives us a quiet, subtle novel about how grief refashions the delicate rhythms of marriage and parenthood.<\/p>\n\n

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a. naomi paik<\/a><\/h4>\n
BORDERLANDS<\/h5>\n

The following books all give us insights and tools for confronting the anticipated state violence we\u2019ll be enduring.<\/p>\n

Unbuild Walls <\/em><\/a>by Silky Shah (Haymarket). In her book Unbuild Walls<\/em>, Silky Shah reflects on her decades of work as a migrant justice organizer in Grassroots Leadership and Detention Watch Network. She focuses on the feedback loop between mass incarceration and migrant criminalization that has swept away both citizens and migrants into its vortex. US imprisonment regimes \u201cmade immigrants a target\u201d and the system of jails and prisons enabled the deportation machine, while the criminalization of migrants has fed mass incarceration in turn, creating a migrant prison boom that only threatens to grow. Shah reflects on the evolution of organizing, as movements moved towards making increasingly radical demands. Rather than, for example, working to ameliorate the conditions of confinement or find alternatives to detention that would instead expand the carceral net, she and other organizers sought to address the root causes of migrant detention and deportation regimes and have continued to fight for the end of migrant detention altogether. Focusing on the years of sustained organizing as it unfolded and adapted to changing conditions, including changes wrought by their successful campaign, Shah calls on migrant justice organizers to adopt abolition as the most effective way to connect with other movements against state and capitalist violence and build power. This is the meaning of her title, Unbuild Walls<\/em>\u2014not only the walls of the carceral state as manifest in borders, prisons, and detention centers, but also the \u201cwalls between our movements for social change.\u201d We have no choice but to hear this message as clearly as possible, given the coming attacks on people and planet.<\/p>\n

Resisting Borders and Technologies of Violence<\/em><\/a>, edited by Mizue Aizeki, Matt Mahmoudi, & Coline Schupfer (Haymarket). Resisting Borders and Technologies of Violence<\/em> emerges out of decades of social justice organizing across North America and Europe against the everywhere border, whose expansion to all spaces of society is enabled by technologies enhancing surveillance and social control. As they show in their investigations of borders, policing, digital identification, and \u201csmart cities,\u201d technologies cast as \u201cneutral\u201d by their proponents instead \u201chard-code suspicion \u2026 and intolerance\u201d of already existing systems of power and oppression, like racist patriarchy, labor exploitation, and nationalism. Tech companies and states are innovating their wares against targeted peoples and places like migrants and Palestinians, layering new and old tools of state violence and control\u2014walls and surveillance towers, detention camps and ankle monitors, papers and biometrics, drones and bullets. Crucially, the book doesn\u2019t just offer analyses of the dystopian world such technologies are creating. It also highlights campaigns and organizations who have already been fighting and winning against such pervasive and yet unknown technologies of control. Like Unbuild Walls<\/em>, the book\u2019s analysis cannot be so easily dismissed as pie-in-the-sky idealism but gives material, actually existing examples of organizing that move us closer to an abolitionist future.<\/p>\n

Environmentalism from Below: How Global People’s Movements Are Leading the Fight for Our Planet<\/a><\/em> by Ashley Dawson (Haymarket). Ashley Dawson\u2019s Environmentalism from Below<\/em> shows us how climate change and environmental destruction are \u201cthe mother of all crises\u201d that brings together many \u201cthreads of injustice\u201d rooted in imperial, racial capitalism. It offers an unflinching assessment of planetary destruction from agriculture to cities to energy to the extinction crisis to migration. He offers multiple examples of \u201cfake fixes,\u201d like carbon offsetting or \u201cfortress\u201d approaches to conservation, whose solutions to environmental devastation are destined to fail because they work within capitalist structures to defeat them. They constitute what Ruth Wilson Gilmore describes as efforts of trying to use capitalism to save capitalism from capitalism. But, again, Dawson does not leave us with a catalogue of catastrophe. His book shows us what \u201cenvironmentalism from below\u201d looks like right now, under current conditions, supported by real world examples of successful campaigns organized by movements in the global South among those most directly affected by but least responsible for global environmental degradation. The numerous examples of environmentalism from below confront the structures of racial, imperial capitalism at the root of climate change and environmental destruction, which also explains why they are so intensely targeted by state violence\u2014from criminalization to outright assassination. And yet, as dire and existential as the climate and environmental crisis is, Dawson shows us the many ways people are fighting and winning struggles against capitalism for life itself.<\/p>\n

Bonus books: My bonus books are those of R. F. Kuang. After being blown away by Babel<\/em><\/a> (Harper Voyager) in 2023, I plowed through the Poppy War series<\/a> (which traumatized me) and Yellowface<\/em><\/a> and hope graduate school doesn\u2019t get in the way of her writing more fiction.<\/p>\n\n

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john plotz<\/a><\/h4>\n
B-Sides<\/h5>\n

Living on Earth<\/a><\/em> by Peter Godfrey-Smith (FSG). There is a Robert Frost poem about the oven-bird, which he finds touchingly un-musical.<\/p>\n

\n

The bird would cease and be as other birds<\/p>\n

But that he knows in singing not to sing.<\/p>\n

The question that he frames in all but words<\/p>\n

Is what to make of a diminished thing.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

While reading Peter Godfrey Smith\u2019s brilliant account of the lyre-bird\u2019s ability to copy virtually any sound\u2014and then go on to copy another lyre-bird copying that sound\u2014I couldn\u2019t get Frost out of my head. In Godfrey-Smith\u2019s telling lyre-birds copying one another may be \u201cthe oldest recording medium on earth,\u201d so Frost\u2019s \u201cdiminished thing\u201d is also emblematic of the amazing omnipresence and unfathomable age of communication between (any and perhaps all) living beings: \u201cSomething is done by one organism to be perceived by another, and done with the aim conscious or not of affecting the other\u2019s actions or responses in some way.\u201d Godfrey Smith\u2019s magnificent trilogy (I earlier raved about his 2017 Other Minds<\/em><\/a>) has always aimed at broadening our understanding of how many species belong to the chattering classes. This book helped me to see what follows, ethically as well as practically, from communication\u2019s omnipresence.<\/p>\n

No micro-review could do justice to the range of this book, which moves on from communication to culture, understood as the non-habitual, non-inherited forms of action passed on among cohabitating groups of animals. While specifying that humans have raised cultural transmission to a new level, Living on Earth <\/em>notes the forms of cultural transmission (including tool-use) that other species exhibit: life in water rather than on land makes that comparatively hard for dolphins, cephalopods and fish, but it\u2019s remarkable just how well they sometimes manage.<\/p>\n

Godfrey-Smith build a strong case for non-human individual experience\u2014not just sentience, but perception, cognition, self-awareness (in some ways the argument resonates with David Pena Guzman\u2019s compelling When Animals Dream<\/em><\/a> ). That lends an unprecedented depth to the ethical turn at the book\u2019s end\u2014which includes a compelling case against factory farming because it can never provide to farmed animals \u201ca life worth living.\u201d The book ends by invoking Walt Whitman\u2019s hope for life\u2019s ongoingness: \u201cLet not an atom be lost!\u201d It persuaded me to think of that atomic re-cycling as delightfully open-ended; songs, thoughts, habits and actions can endure, not diminished but ramified as they cross barrier after barrier.<\/p>\n\n

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B\u00c9CQUER SEGU\u00cdN<\/a><\/h4>\n
literature in translation<\/h5>\n
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Woodworm<\/i><\/a> by Layla Mart\u00ednez, translated from the Spanish by Sophie Hughes and Annie McDermott (Two Lines Press). Who knew one of the most tried and tired themes of modern literary history, the Spanish Civil War, could be reinvented? I certainly didn\u2019t think so. But that\u2019s exactly what Layla Mart\u00ednez has done with her debut novel, Woodworm<\/i>, which takes the war as a kind of a haunting background that has subsequently conditioned all aspects of village, family, and domestic life in rural Spain. For most readers outside Spain, the novel might call to mind films such as Guillermo del Toro\u2019s\u00a0Pan\u2019s Labyrinth<\/i>\u00a0or J. A. Bayona\u2019s\u00a0The Orphanage<\/i>. But unlike these and other celebrated works of modern fantasy and horror, Mart\u00ednez\u2019s novel puts class relations front and center. Indeed, it unsettlingly narrates in a quick one-hundred-and-something pages how class and gender violence reverberate, loudly, within the walls of a stately Victorian manor. In the novel, we follow two poor women protagonists, a granddaughter and grandmother, as they unearth generations of repressed pain and seek some kind of revenge over their wealthy neighbors. But they also tackle their own disquieting family history head-on. And like any good work of horror, watching their plan crescendo takes us all the way to the very end.<\/div>\n
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Mona sloane<\/a><\/h4>\n
technology<\/h5>\n

The Last Human Job<\/i><\/a> by Allison Pugh (Princeton University Press). Allegedly, we know so little about AI that the best way we can describe it is as a \u201cblack box\u201d. Deeply fascinated, if not obsessed, with this technical obscurity, we often forget the territory that truly remains obscure: \u201cthe social\u201d in the age of AI. Allison Pugh expertly and eloquently sheds light onto many corners of AI\u2019s terra incognita. She guides the reader through many years of her deeply sociological research on the inner workings of human connection. Following people whose job it is to relate to another human, Pugh carefully develops the concept of \u201cconnective labor\u201d: the work of seeing the other and making them feel seen. The stories she shares debunk AI\u2019s obscurity, because they demonstrated how it is put to work in the form of crude classification and prediction technologies that render genuine sociality and connective labor illegible to machines, and therefore less valuable in a world in which professions are increasingly standardized and metricized. It is hard to imagine a better book that can show us just how (anti)social AI can be, and how social we really are.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What were the books of 2024 that dazzled, challenged, and inspired us?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":31,"featured_media":58698,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2497],"tags":[1270,1208,1211,1091,1104,1243,1265,1075,196,1560,1510,1278,1617,1280],"pbpartner":[],"section":[],"pbseries":[],"class_list":["post-58448","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews","tag-farrar-straus-giroux","tag-grove-press","tag-haymarket","tag-knopf","tag-liveright","tag-new-directions","tag-pantheon","tag-princeton-university-press","tag-public-picks","tag-seven-stories","tag-soft-skull","tag-tin-house","tag-two-lines","tag-university-of-california-press"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nPublic Picks 2024 - Public Books<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"What were the books of 2024 that dazzled, challenged, and inspired us?\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.publicbooks.org\/public-picks-2024\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Public Picks 2024 - 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