Year-End Lists

A hand-curated, browsable index of notable year-end lists. Follow the link for each list to see essential commentary from its author, at the source.
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Highlights

2018 Books

Time: Best Books of 2018

16 November 2018

The Mars Room - Rachel Kushner

Time Magazine: Best Fiction and Nonfiction Books of 2018

[see also The 10 Best Nonfiction Books of 2020 • The 10 Best Fiction Books of 2020 • The 100 Must-Read Books of 2020 • The 10 Best Fiction Books of the 2010s • The 10 Best Nonfiction Books of the 2010s • The 10 Best Nonfiction Books of 2019 • The 10 Best Fiction Books of 2019 • Top 20 Books of 2017]

Fiction

  1. The Mars Room
    Rachel Kushner
  2. Asymmetry
    Lisa Halliday
  3. An American Marriage
    Tayari Jones
  4. My Year of Rest and Relaxation
    Ottessa Moshfegh
  5. Circe
    Madeline Miller
  6. Washington Black
    Esi Edugyan
  7. There There
    Tommy Orange
  8. Gun Love
    Jennifer Clement
  9. Florida
    Lauren Groff
  10. The Overstory
    Richard Powers

Nonfiction

  1. Bad Blood
    Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup
    John Carreyrou
  2. Barracoon
    The Story of the Last “Black Cargo”
    Zora Neale Hurston
  3. Educated
    Tara Westover
  4. The Order of Time
    Carlo Rovelli
  5. How to Write an Autobiographical Novel
    Alexander Chee
  6. These Truths
    A History of the United States
    Jill Lepore
  7. Frederick Douglass
    Prophet of Freedom
    David W. Blight
  8. All You Can Ever Know
    Nicole Chung
  9. Ninth Street Women: Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters and the Movement That Changed Modern Art
    Mary Gabriel
  10. How Democracies Die
    Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt

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Year-end lists are fingerprints; aggregate statistics are smudges. Therefore, I make no tallies.