The Best Books to Elevate Your Reading List in 2020

In this razor-sharp book of cultural criticism spun off from her viral BuzzFeed article, journalist and academic Anne Helen Petersen explores the forces that have left a much-maligned generation feeling disempowered and dispossessed, from the gig economy to the monetization of hobbies to the identity-bending influence of social media. With blistering prose and all-too vivid reporting, Petersen lays bare the burnout and despair of millennials, while also charting a path to a world where members of her generation can feel as if the boot has been removed from their necks. 

The visionary writer of Citizen returns with Just Us, a lyric arrangement of poems, essays, and images asking how a historically divided nation might come together to dismantle white supremacy. In a far-ranging imagined conversation, a chorus of disparate voices engage in a call and response discussion, with each encounter rooted in a different corner of American life. In Citizen, Rankine redefined how we think about and understand race; in Just Us, she redefines how we might converse about race across divisions, making for a meditative, powerful rumination on the life-changing importance of hard conversations, even in the absence of answers.

A master of weaving political life and postmodern anxiety into fiction, Kunzru, the acclaimed author of White Tears, returns to form with Red Pill, a dazzling novel about an American writer abroad who falls down the rabbit hole of alt-right message boards and government conspiracies. Rarely has our contemporary animus been so nakedly illuminated on the page, with Kunzru spinning a dizzying allegory from the puzzling, paranoid mind of a narrator set adrift in unreality.

In Frazier’s explosive debut novel, our nameless narrator is eighteen, pregnant, and feeling adrift as she stumbles through her days as a Los Angeles pizza delivery driver, all the while grieving the death of her alcoholic father and avoiding the smothering ministrations of her loving mother and boyfriend. Everything changes when she delivers a peculiar order to a suburban housewife, who becomes the locus of a pyschosexual obsessesion with dangerous consequences. In just 193 wry, propulsive pages, Pizza Girl hurtles through the dark waters of obsession and addiction, as our dysfunctional Pizza Girl downs Miller Lites while studiously avoiding any semblance of forward motion. Yet at the same time, the novel bristles with biting wit and optimism, each page a feast of Cheeto-fingered heart, humor, and lyricism.

In Must I Go, Li captures a difficult woman nearing the end of her days. At age 88, after three husbands, five children, and seventeen grandchildren, Lilia Liska looks back on her uncompromising life from the numbing stasis of a nursing home, where she fills her hours annotating the newly published diaries of Roland Bouley, a deceased writer with whom she once had a fleeting affair. Though Lilia was merely a footnote in Roland’s life, she wars with his recollection of events, speculating about his two great loves while shading in the brutal details of her own long-buried personal history. She returns unendingly to the memory of her daughter Lucy, who took her own life at 27, and to the bottomless grief of losing a child to suicide. Li's greatest talent lies in her peerless experimentation with our language of human emotion—its insufficiencies, its dissatisfactions, its refusal to capture the depth and breadth of our feelings. Must I Go is another remarkable entry in Li’s decades-long tug-of-war with the English language, which, luckily for her devoted readers, shows no signs of abating anytime soon. 

When Max relocates from the cool reserve of Germany to the sweaty American south, he brings along a host of supernatural secrets. But as he’s embraced by his new football teammates, his red dirt Alabama surroundings, steeped in the past and unwaveringly Christian, make him question everything—from his faith and sexuality to the very nature of his desire. Hudson’s debut, written in undeniable, visceral prose, is downright ravishing. —Madison Vain

From one of our finest writers of climate fiction comes a harrowing novel of environmental dystopia, wherein a group of families summering together at a vacation home are stranded by the climate apocalypse. When the storm to end all storms descends on their remote rental, the teenagers conclude that their debauched parents are unfit to care for them and strike out on their own, only to encounter all manner of biblical calamities in the wilderness. In an age when the dispossessed young generation blames the pillaging older generation for their ravaged environmental inheritance, Millet’s work has never been more timely.

In this glittering debut, Zhang sets the scene in the dying days of the gold rush, where two orphaned children of Chinese immigrants roam the ravaged American west in search of a new home, only to meet hostility everywhere they go—not just from the unforgiving landscape, but from the racist and inhospitable locals. As these siblings form their nascent identities under the colossal weight of their loss, they reimagine their own history and their own heritage. This novel is at once a thrilling adventure, a tender coming-of-age story, an excavation of the corrosive mythmaking surrounding the American west, and the arrival of a major literary talent.

Not many rock memoirs begin on the grounds of an infamous American cult, but that’s just one of the things about the Airborne Toxic Event frontman’s personal tome that separates it from the droves. Cinematic in its recounting of his family’s exit from the Synanon commune in California, Jollet’s subsequent unraveling of the abuses that shaped his stolen childhood is piercing. His pain feels at once unknowable and universal, and his rhapsodic writing makes Hollywood Park impossible to put down. —Madison Vain

Entree into the ruling inner circle of Long Island’s elite Gold Coast Prep gets served up deliciously in this debut YA novel from Cosmopolitan senior editor Jessica Goodman. The chilling murder mystery is an irresistible hook, but it’s the careful building of each character’s fraught, internal conflicts that really digs in, elevating the work from a high society whodunit to a knowing mission to not just uncover one’s own identity, but to build it. —Madison Vain  

Dyson’s formidable twenty-third book sees its author hold a poignant conversation with Black Americans killed at the hands of police officers—a conversation that occurs “with them, about them, through them, sometimes to them and beyond them.” In five elegantly argued chapters, each framed as a wrenching letter to Black victims of racist terror from Breonna Taylor to Eric Garner, Dyson traces the abhorrent legacy of systemic racism, from centuries-ago slave ships to contemporary police violence. Together, the letters depict “the gallery of grief that grips the collective Black soul,” whether the grief takes root in police violence or in the quotidian daily assaults on Black personhood. Inspired by the colossal worldwide protests after the murder of George Floyd, Long Time Coming is at once a blistering chronicle of Black pain and a rousing call to arms, each chapter threaded through with an indefatigable hope for progress.

If all you know about Frida Kahlo is her visionary artwork, then you're long overdue for a re-education. Get your feet wet with Davis' luminous mediation on Kahlo's extraordinary life, where self-help meets biography in an inspiring narrative of what modern women can learn from one of the twentieth century's greatest artists. From Kahlo's brazen creativity to her unapologetic politics, her boldness in marriage to her lifelong battle with chronic illness, Davis explores the contemporary lessons we can mine from Kahlo's courageous way of life. 

From one of our finest novelists comes an ambitious new work of speculative fiction, set in a ravaged world where, in an event referred to as “The Arrest,” all electronics and appliances have spontaneously broken down. Sandy Duplessis, formerly a Hollywood script doctor, now assists the butcher and delivers groceries in rural Maine, where he reflects often on the high-flying years he spent working with Hollywood power broker Peter Todbaum. Sandy’s fragile peace is interrupted when Todbaum crashes into town behind the wheel of a nuclear-powered supervehicle, which he drove across the United States for suspect reasons, leaving a trail of destruction and dishonesty in his wake. In Sandy’s madcap adventure to stop his onetime partner, Lethem sends up our cultural obsession with post-apocalyptic stories, making for a wry, spirited novel that will linger in your imagination for years to come.

The acclaimed author of Lot returns with another dazzling foray into literary Houston, where he turns his lens to two complicated men: Benson, a Black daycare teacher, and Mike, a Japanese-American chef. Benson and Mike’s years-long live-in relationship is on the rocks, with each one of them too apathetic to rekindle their romance or to end it. Their companionable stasis is turned upside down when Mike receives news that his estranged father is dying in Japan just as his mother arrives on their doorstep, forcing Benson and Mitsuko to become unlikely roommates in Mike’s absence. With crackling dialogue and gimlet-eyed humor, Washington paints a vivid, poignant portrait of how love, romantic and familial, is weathered and ultimately deepened by time.

In this landmark volume, clocking in at a whopping 1170 pages, one of our most talented contemporary poets presents the most ambitious anthology of Black poetry ever published. Beginning in 1770 and culminating in the artistic outpouring emerging through the Black Lives Matter movement, Young spotlights 250 important poets, each situated in an incisive historical and literary framework. Young also takes care to spotlight poetic movements and writing collectives, tracing the influence of creatives on the development of other creatives. Together, these 250 voices, old and new, celebrated and neglected, form a dazzling symphony of talent across generations, making for a breathtaking, expansive canon.

In the ten years since Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self, readers have waited anxiously for Danielle Evans’ next outing; at last, The Office of Historical Corrections is here, and it exceeds all expectations. In seven sly, haunting stories, Evans reflects our madcap world back at us, delivering a dazzling dissection of our twisted attitudes about race, culture, history, and truth. In one memorable story, a white college student is desperate to reinvent herself after a photo of her in a Confederate bikini goes viral; in another, a historian works to uncover the truth of a long-past racist tragedy. Incisive, nuanced, and deliciously complex, each of these stories proves that Evans is a bravura talent.

In her sensational debut book of nonfiction, Nezhukumatathil, an award-winning poet, turns her attention to the natural world, with a lyrical and imagistic look at the minor daily miracles of life on Earth, visible to anyone who stops to bear witness. In thirty bewitching essays, Nezhukumatathil spotlights natural astonishments raining from monsoon season in India to clusters of fireflies in western New York, each one a microcosm of joy and amazement. With her ecstatic prose and her rapturous powers of insight, Nezhukumatathil proves herself a worthy spiritual successor to the likes of Mary Oliver and Annie Dillard, setting the bar high for a new generation of nature writers.

In the fourth installment of her towering Gilead cycle, Robinson returns as ever to the enchanting town of Gilead, Iowa, her playground for soulful contemplation of the American spirit. In this volume, Robinson introduces Jack, the prodigal son of the local minister, and Della, the schoolteacher and preacher’s daughter who captures his heart. Their interracial love is star-crossed, yet Robinson traces it to its bitter end, exploring how love, even when it’s painful, conveys salvation to both the faithful and the faithless. In Gilead, Robinson wrote, “This is an interesting planet. It deserves all the attention you can give it.” So too does Jack, another sublime, rapturous entry into a breathtaking series.

In Alam’s outstanding third novel, a white family’s getaway to a rented Hamptons home is disrupted by the midnight arrival of an older Black couple, who claim to own the home and ask to stay the night, as New York City has become shrouded in total darkness during an ominous blackout. With an apocalypse looming outside their walls, together the two families must endure an uncomfortable dark night of the soul, wrestling with their suspicions of one another while forming fragile bonds. Riveting and claustrophobic, Leave the World Behind invites us to sit with our discomfort and reflect on our own rushed judgments, delivering a dazzling and dark examination of family, race, class, and what matters most when the impossible becomes possible. 

In his first novel since 2012’s sensational Beautiful Ruins, Walter puts forth his most ambitious work yet, solidifying his place in the contemporary canon as one of our most gifted builders of fictional worlds. Set in the early twentieth century, The Cold Millions follows Gig and Rye Dolan, two orphaned brothers who hop freight trains through the American West in search of a living wage. Their travels take them to Spokane, Washington, where they find themselves swept up in the burgeoning labor rights movement and the free speech riots that rocked Spokane. It’s often said that a novel contains the world; Walter brings new meaning to this phrase, peopling The Cold Millions with vaudeville stars, hobos, suffragists, tycoons, union agitators, policemen, and dozens of other vibrant characters. Warm and deeply humane, this transporting novel is a staggering achievement from a landmark writer.