Library Journal: Best Literary Fiction of 2019

[see also 2017, 2016, 2012, 2011]

• Night Boat to Tangier
  Kevin Barry
• The Water Dancer
  Ta-Nehisi Coates
• Boy Swallows Universe
  Trent Dalton
• The Shadow King
  Maaza Mengiste
• Inland
  Téa Obreht
• Disappearing Earth
  Julia Phillips
• On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
  Ocean Vuong
• The Nickel Boys
  Colson Whitehead
• Frankissstein: A Love Story
  Jeanette Winterson
• Red at the Bone
  Jacqueline Woodson

Michael Silverblatt: Best Books of 2019, as posted by KCRW

Three books by Eve Babitz

• Eve's Hollywood
  Eve Babitz
• Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, The Flesh, and L.A.
  Eve Babitz
• I Used to Be Charming: The Rest of Eve Babitz
  Eve Babitz

• American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin
  Terrance Hayes
• Making Comics
  Lynda Barry
• Where Reasons End
  Yiyun Li
• A Sand Book
  Ariana Reines
• Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming
  László Krasznahorkai
• Dunce
  Mary Ruefle
• Black Leopard, Red Wolf
  Marlon James
• A Wonderful Stroke of Luck
  Ann Beattie

Two books by Dave Eggers

• The Parade
  Dave Eggers
• The Captain and the Glory
  Dave Eggers

Christopher Borrelli: The 10 Best Books of 2019, as published by The Chicago Tribune

[see also 2018]

Fiction

• Ducks, Newburyport
  Lucy Ellmann
• Lost Children Archive
  Valeria Luiselli
• The Memory Police
  Yoko Ogawa
• Growing Things
  Paul Tremblay
• American Spy
  Lauren Wilkinson

Nonfiction

• Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest
  Hanif Abdurraqib
• The Yellow House
  Sarah M. Broom
• How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States
  Daniel Immerwahr
• Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations
  Mira Jacob
• Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland
  Patrick Radden Keefe

And 15 almost top-10s, well worth your time

• The Peanuts Papers: Writers and Cartoonists on Charlie Brown, Snoopy & the Gang, and the Meaning of Life
  Andrew Blauner (editor)
• Exhalation
  Ted Chiang
• Trust Exercise
  Susan Choi
• Thick: And Other Essays
  Tressie McMillan Cottom
• Me
  Elton John
• The Very Best of Caitlín R. Kiernan
  Caitlín R. Kiernan
• The Institute
  Stephen King
• The Topeka School
  Ben Lerner
• Underland: A Deep Time Journey
  Robert Macfarlane
• Savage Appetites: Four True Stories of Women, Crime, and Obsession
  Rachel Monroe
• I Like to Watch: Arguing My Way Through the TV Revolution
  Emily Nussbaum
• Disappearing Earth
  Julia Phillips
• Audience of One: Donald Trump, Television, and the Fracturing of America
  James Poniewozik
• Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion
  Jia Tolentino
• One Day: The Extraordinary Story of an Ordinary 24 Hours in America
  Gene Weingarten

Molly Young: The Best Books of 2019, as published by New York Magazine’s Vulture

1. The Topeka School
   Ben Lerner
2. In the Dream House
   Carmen Maria Machado
3. Stay and Fight
   Madeline ffitch
4. The Book of X
   Sarah Rose Etter
5. Oval
   Elvia Wilk
6. Vernon Subutex One
   Virginie Despentes
7. Trust Exercise
   Susan Choi
8. How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
   Jenny Odell
9. Machines Like Me
   Ian McEwan
10. Doxology
    Nell Zink

Laura Miller: The 10 Best Books of 2019, as published by Slate

[see also 2018, 2017]

Fiction

• Trust Exercise
  Susan Choi
• Gingerbread
  Helen Oyeyemi
• Normal People
  Sally Rooney
• Fall; or, Dodge in Hell
  Neal Stephenson
• The Nickel Boys
  Colson Whitehead

Nonfiction

• The Yellow House
  Sarah M. Broom
• Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval
  Saidiya Hartman
• Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland
  Patrick Radden Keefe
• Underland: A Deep Time Journey
  Robert Macfarlane
• Audience of One: Donald Trump, Television, and the Fracturing of America
  James Poniewozik

Dan Kois: The 10 Best Books of 2019, as published by Slate

Nonfiction

• Wild Game: My Mother, Her Lover, and Me
  Adrienne Brodeur
• We Can Make A Life
  Chessie Henry
• Limbo
  Dan Fox

Fiction, Comics, and Poetry

• Deaf Republic
  Ilya Kaminsky
• Women Talking
  Miriam Toews
• Late in the Day
  Tessa Hadley
• The Raven Tower
  Ann Leckie
• The Hard Tomorrow
  Eleanor Davis
• A Mistake
  Carl Shuker
• Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl
  Andrea Lawlor

Maureen Corrigan: Favorite Books of 2019, as aired on NPR’s Fresh Air

[see also 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2011]

Fiction

• The Nickel Boys
  Colson Whitehead
• Trust Exercise
  Susan Choi
• The Dutch House
  Ann Patchett
• Lost and Wanted
  Nell Freudenberger
• Orange World and Other Stories
  Karen Russell
• On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
  Ocean Vuong

Nonfiction

• Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland
  Patrick Radden Keefe
• The Yellow House
  Sarah M. Broom
• Black Is the Body: Stories from My Grandmother's Time, My Mother's Time, and Mine
  Emily Bernard
• How We Fight for Our Lives
  Saeed Jones

Katy Waldman: The Best Books of 2019, as published by The New Yorker

[see also 2018, 2017]

• Mostly Dead Things
  Kristen Arnett
• The Divers' Game
  Jesse Ball
• Trust Exercise
  Susan Choi
• Ducks, Newburyport
  Lucy Ellmann
• Girl, Woman, Other
  Bernardine Evaristo
• How We Fight for Our Lives
  Saeed Jones
• In the Dream House
  Carmen Maria Machado
• Valerie: or, The Faculty of Dreams
  Sara Stridsberg
• Axiomatic
  Maria Tumarkin
• On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
  Ocean Vuong

Smithsonian: Favorite Books of 2019, as selected individually by Smithsonian scholars

[see also 2018]

• Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil War’s Most Persistent Myth
  Kevin M. Levin
• The Greatest Beach: A History of the Cape Cod National Seashore
  Ethan Carr
• Peary's Arctic Quest: Untold Stories from Robert E. Peary’s North Pole Expeditions
  Susan Kaplan and Genevieve LeMoine
• Solitary
  Albert Woodfox
• Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia
  Christina Thompson
• With the Fire on High
  Elizabeth Acevedo
• Illusions of Emancipation: The Pursuit of Freedom and Equality in the Twilight of Slavery
  Joseph P. Reidy
• Extinct Monsters to Deep Time: Conflict, Compromise, and the Making of Smithsonian's Fossil Halls
  Diana E. Marsh
• We Return Fighting: World War I and the Shaping of Modern Black Identity
  Kinshasha Holman Conwill (editor)
• Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century
  Charles King
• The Collected Schizophrenias
  Esmé Weijun Wang
• Zora and Langston: A Story of Friendship and Betrayal
  Yuval Taylor
• The Only Woman in the Room
  Marie Benedict
• The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming
  David Wallace-Wells
• Empire's Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad
  Manu Karuka

Time Magazine: The 10 Best Nonfiction Books of 2019

[see also The 10 Best Fiction Books of 2019, Best Books of 2018, Top 20 Books of 2017, The 10 Best Fiction Books of the 2010s, The 10 Best Nonfiction Books of the 2010s]

1. Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland
   Patrick Radden Keefe
2. Know My Name
   Chanel Miller
3. The Yellow House
   Sarah M. Broom
4. Underland: A Deep Time Journey
   Robert Macfarlane
5. In the Dream House
   Carmen Maria Machado
6. Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee
   Casey Cep
7. The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present
   David Treuer
8. The Collected Schizophrenias
   Esmé Weijun Wang
9. Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster
   Adam Higginbotham
10. This Land Is Our Land: An Immigrant's Manifesto
    Suketu Mehta