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.
stories
Ananda Lima’s Mystical and Metafictional Dance with the Devil
Poet and translator Ananda Lima’s debut fiction, Craft, is an absorbing mystical and metafictional dance with the Devil.
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.
Margaret Atwood’s ‘Old Babes in the Wood’ Fears Nothing
Margaret Atwood’s Old Babes in the Wood brims with biting humor, precise detail, and incisive observations about life and aging.
A Life of False Positives: Jac Jemc’s ‘False Bingo’
The stories in Jac Jemc's False Bingo are wound tight, propelling the reader to ambiguous and nerve-wracking ends.
Cecelia Ahern’s ‘Roar’ Reinforces the Normativity It Attempts to Subvert
Roar's strength is found in its depiction of empowered women, yet Ahern mistakenly centralizes a normative vision of feminism while reiterating the patriarchal control that silences her female characters' voices.
Mangled Body and Depraved Soul: On the Corporeal and the Spiritual in the Works of Edgar Allan Poe
The soul projects meaning onto a world that resists it. This is the plight of existence for Edgar Allan Poe.
Award-winning ‘Walking the Rez Road’ 20th Anniversary Edition Still Haunts
At times humorous but also permeated with sadness, Walking the Rez Road illuminates those who have inherited generations of institutionalized oppression while adding their own layers of pain and dejection.
Take a Vacation from Despair with ‘The Dark and Other Love Stories’
Deborah Willis enchants and transports with 11 stories of adolescent friendship, Canada, and birds in The Dark and Other Love Stories.
Sameer Pandya Embraces the Children of Immigrants
Sameer Pandya’s The Blind Writer embraces the South Asian American experience and the things that bind us, especially for my generation.