I think I say it every year, but it doesn’t stop being true — 2024 has been a wild year. Despite the chaos around the world and in our own lives, the SRB editorial staff spent a lot of time celebrating books in our work here, and even managed to read a few on our own! Here are the top books and movies our editors enjoyed over the last year.
Amy Martin
Liars is a searing indictment of heterosexual marriage and the patriarchy. Jane is a writer, then a wife, then a mother. John, a narcissist, is her husband. And their marriage is a domestic noir, both horrifying and shockingly familiar. As the story progresses, John abdicates his responsibilities, undermines and mistreats his wife in ways both large and small, cheats on her, and eventually abandons her. Told entirely from Jane’s point-of-view in fragments or vignettes, without chapter breaks, Manguso’s story practically vibrates with rage as it hurtles along.
I had only a vague idea of what to expect when I sat down to watch the psychological thriller Blink Twice. I knew that Channing Tatum plays a tech billionaire, that there is a tropical island, and that something nefarious happens. Little did I know that the film would be as savage and as stylish as it was, or as socially and politically relevant — because, at its heart, Kravitz’ debut is an unsubtle takedown of sexual violence and misogyny, particularly that which characterizes toxic tech bro culture.
When server Frida (Naomi Ackie) accepts an invitation from Slater King (Tatum) to vacation with him and his friends on his private island, she thinks she won an all-expenses-paid trip to paradise. But as time wears on, strange things start to happen, and Frida begins to suspect something is deeply awry. I was rooting for Frida to uncover the truth and to serve up some accountability, and I wasn’t disappointed.
In her debut poetry collection, Self-Mythology, Saba Keramati asks, again and again, in prose poems, haibuns, self-portraits, invocations, dreams, nocturnes, and ghazals: what is my heritage? What words belong to me? How do I make myself interpretable and known? She bumps up against and stares into the eyes of her Iranian father and Chinese mother, the imagined figures of her parents as young people, as people fearing old age, as well as her racialized American self, testing what feels right, what feels true, whether her grasping for the words to describe her reality is self-caricature, or maybe a ghost story. The answer lies in the title: these poems create a mythology of the self greater than anything definitively true.
Self Mythology
Saba Keramati
University of Arkansas Press
The fact is that most books do not change your life. It’s a great marketing technique, but often, people just mean a book touched them, made them feel something strongly, or that they will think of it fondly. Not true for Hospicing Modernity: this book radically reoriented my perception of my internal and external reality, and gently, yet seriously, asks readers to consider a myriad of new ways forward for a dying planet and this capitalist, imperialist society — what we call “modernity.” This encompasses the philosophies of progress, individualism, and human hierarchies that are anathema to natural life — De Oliveira reminds us both that there are other, better ways for us to live, and that it will take concentrated effort, communities of care, and decentralizing deeply ingrained Western frameworks to find them.
Searing, deeply affecting, and profoundly moving, Vanessa Angélica Villarreal’s essay collection, Magical/Realism: Essays on Music, Memory, Fantasy, and Borders, explores everything from Kurt Cobain, Selena, and Game of Thrones to video games such as The Witcher, Baldur’s Gate 3, and Dragon Age: Inquisition. Villarreal uses fantasy as a cipher through which to make sense of the echoes of colonial violence, border violence, gender and partner violence, and the impacts of remembrance and erasure on personal and familial history. The future-dreaming and re-worlding that Villarreal enacts across her genre-bending chapters, quite frankly, opens new worlds of healing both for herself and for readers.
The Great State of West Florida initially attracted me because of the neon-pink cover design and the seeming promise of a place-based and Westernized narrative. It kept me around with its creative myth-making and its absurdist, at times, humorous narration of violence. The balance between reality and speculation, seriousness and levity that Wascom achieves is quite the feat and kept me wanting to see not just what would happen next, but how. A deeply entertaining read that, in this balance, ultimately reveals the power and ephemerality of place, myth, and place-making, which reimagines the Gulf Coast region in irreverent and startlingly unexpected ways. The Great State of West Florida is a must-read for fans of William Faulkner, Cormac McCarthy, and Flannery O’Connor.
I only read one book published this year, but I sure picked a good one. Jamie Quatro’s Two-Step Devil is both powerful and imaginative as it tells the story of the Prophet atop Lookout Mountain (spanning Alabama, Georgia, and Tennessee) and his misguided but well-intentioned rescue/kidnapping of a young girl. This book sticks with me because it’s not afraid to sit with ambiguity — and it makes its readers do the same.
I read some excellent short story collections this year from folks like Alice Munro, Denis Johnson, and Larry Brown, but my favorite was the unexpected 1968 collection Bloodline by Ernest J. Gaines that I stumbled across at the Chattanooga Public Library Foundation’s book sale. This collection, set in rural Louisiana, is packed with brave and complicated characters all seeking to make the best out of the life they’ve been given. Oddly, this book from a half-century ago finds a peculiar resonance in this year marked by division and cruelty.
For me, 2024 was a year of female rage, and the content I consumed simply fueled the fire. I read Maggie O’Farrell’s The Marriage Portrait, set in 14th-century Italy and loosely based on the story of a real girl forced to marry a much older Duke. He is suspected to have poisoned and killed her at just 16. The novel itself is stunning and hopeful, but also infuriatingly relevant considering reports that the most dangerous place for women is their home.
I love how O’Farrell’s male characters take a back seat in her stories – her female protagonists fill the space (e.g. her novel Hamnet based on the life of Shakespeare never once mentions his name). The Marriage Portrait is no exception as it vividly builds and expands on the incandescent teenage girl, Lucrezia, her potential, and her fight to live.
I also listened to the podcast Death of an Artist, which shares a similar theme about a Cuban artist and her utterly unfair death. Learning about her death and her husband’s murder trial was (again) infuriating. Learning about her art, life, and passion — incredibly inspiring.
When a Palestinian woman becomes fixated on a ‘minor detail’ of history she reads in the paper, she ventures to uncover the full story. Based on a true story, Minor Detail is a first-person experience of what it means to live under occupation and brings current events into perspective.
Minor Detail
Adania Shibli, translated by Elisabeth Jaquette
New Directions
Lifelong friends Sal and Noor are high school seniors attempting to make their way into adulthood after a relationship-shattering fight, but societal life in the Mojave Desert region of California is as treacherous as the elements for two teenagers largely on their own. Sal’s mother dies, leaving him to save the family home and business as his father sinks deeper into alcoholism, and Noor works hard to hide her struggles, until she can’t. When it all comes crashing down, the depths of love, loyalty, and forgiveness are tested, redefining what happily ever after really means.
I love literary family dramas, and Khong’s multigenerational novel, Real Americans, does not disappoint. If you, like me, have ever wondered about your immigrant family member’s silences, and whether you really want to know their stories (or have a right to know them), this book’s for you. This was my favorite read this year, and the audiobook version is great.
I actually watched this 2018 film on Netflix last holiday season (post-staff picks for the SRB!). I stayed up late one night by myself one night and couldn’t wait to rewatch Feast of the Seven Fishes with my husband and also recommend it to my parents. Similar to my enthusiasm for Real Americans, this film features intriguing family dynamics (but with way more humor than drama), and its complexities make for an intergenerational crowd-pleaser.
I’ve spent a good chunk of my life working in flower shops, so I was immediately excited to read The Weeds. The cover! The plants! The Colosseum! This novel features a dual timeline with two women cataloguing plants in the Roman Colosseum in 1854 and the present. It takes us through a list of plants and the various ways they can be used while moving through the details of the women’s lives. It’s full of longing, seething rage, and defiance — and women remaking the world for themselves.
If I had to describe Nonbinary Bird of Paradise in just a couple of words, I would choose intimate and liberating. Many of the pieces in the collection let us in on the speaker’s quiet, interior, secret moments without feeling voyeuristic. “The Queerness of Eve” series was both crushing and somehow empowering, with a universality in images like “I twisted the talon / into my hair to hold it out / of my eyes, focused now” — how many of us put our hair up when we’re ready to get shit done? Much of the collection draws from biblical imagery, examining the violence in many of the stories and highlighting voices or perspectives that aren’t afforded space in the Bible.
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