We’ve saved the best for last, folks. After a week of rounding up the Best Reviewed Books Books of 2018—drawn from over 150 different review publications, in the sub categories of (deep breath): Memoir & Biography, Sci-Fi & Fantasy, Essay Collections, Short Story Collections, Graphic Literature, Literature in Translation, Mystery & Crime, and Poetry—it’s now time for us to announce the Top Ten Best Reviewed Fiction & Nonfiction Books of the Year.
You can check out the Nonfiction list here, but first: it’s Fiction time.
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1. The Largesse of the Sea Maiden by Denis Johnson
31 Rave • 6 Positive • 1 Mixed
“Denis Johnson, in all his work, aimed to locate the hidden, actual face of things. But the new stories build without those miraculous balls of hail, and their truths are necessarily deeper, and more precise, true as you would true a wheel … It feels like the paced vision of a writer who has been made to understand that life is fairly rude and somewhat short, but that the world contains an uneven distribution of grace, and that wisdom lies in recognizing where it—such grace—has presented itself. The stories are about death and immortality, art and its reach, and they ask elemental questions about fiction, not as a literary genre but as a human tendency … These stories ask you to step into the room and listen closely. They are not showy anthems, and in many cases, they have dispensed with hindsight altogether.”
–Rachel Kushner (Bookforum)
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2. My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh
19 Rave • 19 Positive • 3 Mixed • 1 Pan
“Ottessa Moshfegh is easily the most interesting contemporary American writer on the subject of being alive when being alive feels terrible. She has a freaky and pure way of accessing existential alienation, as if her mind were tapped directly into the sap of some gnarled, secret tree … Watching Moshfegh turn her withering attention to the gleaming absurdities of pre-9/11 New York City, an environment where everyone except the narrator seems beset with delusional optimism, horrifically carefree, feels like eating bright, slick candy—candy that might also poison you … There is something in this liberatory solipsism that feels akin to what is commonly peddled today as wellness. It also resembles a form of cognitive interaction induced by social media, which positions the user as the center of the universe and everything else—current events, other people’s feelings—as ephemeral, increasingly meaningless stimuli.”
–Jia Tolentino (The New Yorker)
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3. Kudos by Rachel Cusk
27 Rave • 4 Positive • 2 Mixed
“That Cusk has constructed her novels in this radical manner seems both perverse and inventive and has caught the attention of many other writers. Despite comparisons, her work is not the autofiction of Karl Ove Knausgaard and Sheila Heti, whose own voices and personalities cram their pages; nor is it the meditative flâneurie of W.G. Sebald or Teju Cole; it is something more peculiar and thrilling and Cusk’s own … The concentrated, flinty nature of Cusk’s mind (a fellow admirer and I often refer to her, in pseudo-jazz-intimacy, simply as ‘Rachel,’ though we have never met her and haven’t the flimsiest intention of trying to do so) ensures that authorial intelligence is burned into the syntax of every line … What runs through her trilogy is a coolly abstracted consciousness organizing all the stories … It is like reading the best kind of philosophy—steely, searching, brisk.”
–Lorrie Moore (The New York Review of Books)
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4. The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner
22 Rave • 8 Positive • 5 Mixed
“…a gorgeous, contemplative slow ride … The slow torque of the book embodies the limited range of the imprisoned being multiplied by the infinity of a life sentence. The Mars Room uses a handful of years behind bars as the fixed hub of the present, and Romy’s memories become the spokes … When the short emotional cables of family and granular physical detail combine, The Mars Room sings … The cadence of The Mars Room is fluid throughout, as intense as the dense circuitry of The Flamethrowers, just cooler.”
–Sasha Frere-Jones (Bookforum)
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5. Asymmetry by Lisa Halliday
20 Rave • 9 Positive • 1 Mixed
“Halliday’s novel is so strange and startlingly smart that its mere existence seems like commentary on the state of fiction. One finishes Asymmetry for the first or second (or like this reader, third) time and is left wondering what other writers are not doing with their freedom … Halliday’s prose is clean and lean, almost reportorial in the style of W. G. Sebald, and like the murmurings of a shy person at a cocktail party, often comic only in single clauses. It’s a first novel that reads like the work of an author who has published many books over many years … Halliday has written, somehow all at once, a transgressive roman à clef, a novel of ideas and a politically engaged work of metafiction. Asymmetry is extraordinary, and the timing of its publication seems almost like a feat of civics.”
–Alice Gregory (The New York Times Book Review)
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6. Florida by Lauren Groff
18 Rave • 11 Positive • 3 Mixed
“Despite its departures from Groff’s earlier work, the collection still conjures that feeling of when the floor falls out from under you; as in Fates and Furies, familiar, everyday life dangles by a thin string … Taken together, the stories have the feel of autobiography, although, as in a Salvador Dali painting, their emotional disclosures are encrypted in phantasmagoria. Fates and Furies spelunked into characters’ psyches, while Groff’s short fiction projects psychology outward, externalizing dread, pleasure, and innocence in feral cats, jasmine, and cygnets … Groff has always been a sentence-level writer, and the sentences indigenous to Florida are gorgeously weird and limber … The author practices a kind of alchemical noticing that destabilizes reality and brings the outside world into alignment with characters’ inner lives.”
–Katy Waldman (The New Yorker)
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7. The Incendiaries by RO Kwon
18 Rave • 8 Positive • 5 Mixed
“The intertwined currents of violence and beauty run through the novel, a striking debut by R.O. Kwon that deals with faith, extremism, love, and loss … Kwon’s prose sizzles. Her sentences are deft, short, crackling. Her portrait of undergraduate life at Edwards is masterful. She captures the constant haze of alcohol, the courtyards and costume parties and clubs with drinking rules, the push and pull of attraction. She writes the erotic well … At times, though, the writing can be overwrought. There are moments of exposition where omission might have worked better … The book is propulsive, especially in later chapters, and I read with dread and hunger … This novel is overrun with collisions of all kinds: of faith and doubt, of loss and love, of Will’s yearning and Phoebe’s resistance. In Kwon’s luminous prose, these collisions are not quiet. They are explosive.”
–Sophie Haigney (The Boston Globe)
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8. There There by Tommy Orange
19 Rave • 3 Positive
“Tommy Orange’s There There is one of those remarkable debuts that doesn’t come around too often: a groundbreaker. It’s a furious, eloquent, propulsive, multi-voiced portrait … among Orange’s achievements in this powerful, polyphonic, ‘hella sad’ novel is to locate the missing ‘there’ — by painting a disturbing but compassionate picture of how historical displacement has reverberated in the lives of a group of descendents of indigenous Americans in contemporary Oakland … With There There, Tommy Orange has certainly done his bit, not only keeping history alive but adding a significant new chapter to Native American literature.”
–Heller McAlpin (The Barnes & Noble Review)
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9. Winter by Ali Smith
14 Rave • 9 Positive • 2 Mixed
“This is not a continuation of Autumn, at least not in terms of plots and characters, but the books converse vociferously as they revise each other’s signs and symbols … Protest is one of the novel’s great subjects. CND songs are its tune as much as the old Christmas numbers. It celebrates those who have thought in terms of society rather than self, who have had nightmares (of nuclear winter, of silent spring) and taken them seriously in every living daylight hour … Little is resolved at the end, but the novel works through correspondences that jump across bounds and make accord between unlike things. Leaping, laughing, sad, generous and winter-wise, this is a thing of grace.”
–Alexandra Harris (The Guardian)
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10. Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi
16 Rave • 5 Positive
“The novel is based in many of the realities of the writer’s life, but the prose is infused with imaginative lyricism and tone. In the end, this coming-of-age novel also has one foot on the other side, held between the open gates — a young woman of many nations and many souls. The journey undertaken in the novel is swirling and vivid, vicious and painful, and rendered by Emezi in shards as sharp and glittering as those with which Ada cuts her forearms and thighs, in blood offering to Asughara … Emezi’s lyrical writing, her alliterative and symmetrical prose, explores the deep questions of otherness, of a single heart and soul hovering between, the gates open, fighting for peace.”
–Susan Straight (The Los Angeles Times)
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Our System: RAVE = 5 points, POSITIVE = 3 points, MIXED = 1 point, PAN = -5 points
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Editor’s note: Tommy Orange’s There There was omitted from an earlier version of this post.
