The Best Books of 2024
PopMatters Best Books of 2024 include a broad range of nonfiction, many books on music, short fiction, a novel that turns a Mark Twain classic inside out, and much more.
literary criticism
Alice Munro’s Men
The late author Alice Munro’s work is criticized for its portrayal of men. But radically, not all her rejected male characters are mediocrities.
Christopher Hitchens and Fights Worth Having
You can smell the cigarette ash and Johnnie Walker Black Label on the pages of A Hitch in Time, a gleefully pugilistic posthumous Christopher Hitchens anthology.
Personal Canons: Peter Coviello on Prince, Pavement, and Parenthood
Blending personal experience with popular culture, Peter Coviello seeks to democratize how criticism is understood and practiced in Is There God after Prince?
Who Is the Monster in Claire Dederer’s ‘Monsters’?
In Monsters, Claire Dederer explores how fans’ “dumb love” of art can exist with “heartbreak” and unresolved feelings about monstrous artists.
‘The Wordhord’ Collects Fragments of the Oldest English
Medievalist Hana Videen’s The Wordhord relies on remaining fragments of documented Old English to conjure the daily life of Anglo-Saxons.
Hypochondria Sets the Rules for ‘Here Is a Game We Could Play’
Hypochondria, obsession, and confusion set the rules for a love affair in Jenny Bitner’s excellent debut novel, Here Is a Game We Could Play.
Dare You Enter Jennifer Egan’s Mind Palace ‘The Candy House’?
Jennifer Egan’s The Candy House is an EDM concert, a prestige drama, a mind palace – and a warning.
The Missing Chapter in Terry Eagleton’s Critical Revolutionaries
Terry Eagleton’s richly informed writing is enhanced by perspicacity, wit, and discrimination. Yet his focus on five writers in ‘Critical Revolutionaries’ is missing something.
How Can One Capture the Life and Mind of Elizabeth Hardwick?
Cathy Curtis has published four biographies in six years but her recent work on Elizabeth Hardwick is missing a strong point of view.
For Don DeLillo, ‘The Silence’ Is Deafening
In Don DeLillo’s The Silence, it is much like our post-pandemic life – everything changed but nothing happened. Are we listening?
Literary Scholar Andrew H. Miller On Solitude As a Common Bond
Andrew H. Miller’s On Not Being Someone Else considers how contemplating other possibilities for one’s life creates meaning in the life one leads.