The Best Things We Read In 2024

This is what the Defector staff enjoyed reading in 2024.

The Stadium, by Frank Andre Guridy

A historical and contemporary view of the stadium as America’s latest version of the public square for good, ill, joy, evil, and plaintively stupid in that uniquely American way. Guridy, a professor at Columbia, delivers on a lofty promise to look at the stadium as concept more than execution, spending blessedly little time on concourse width and parking and far more time on all the ways that the stadium is a driver in our obsession with entertainment as our leading export and social drug of choice. And when we say drugs, we include the drug of making rich people richer at our own cost so that we can build structures that fewer and fewer people can afford to ever visit, and then judge each other by how long it has been since we invested in a new version of the thing we just completed. Guridy’s case is more than that, though, and shows how it helped create avenues for protest and societal change simply by being a handy place for lessons to be offered before large numbers of people, so like everything else American, it is more a tool that relies on those wielding it. The next time someone explains why their local stadium is outdated and needs replacing regardless of the level of public expense, make them read this so they can understand what exactly it is they are advocating. – Ray Ratto

The Mill on the Floss, by George Eliot

At some point, I will write my screed against first-person fiction. Today is not that day, but nothing affirmed my opinion more than reading George Eliot’s 1860 novel The Mill on the Floss. It’s a gorgeous family drama that follows one of my favorite plots: What if your previously comfortable family lost all its money and you all turned on each other? It has an exciting sibling dynamic, terrible aunts, a crush on the bad boy, and the best foreshadowing you’ve ever read. There is a constant predestination to the story that ebbs and flows throughout. But the real brilliance of this book, to me, is Eliot’s narration.

The book is written in third person. The pleasure of third person is that it always feels like you are really being told a story. The danger is that in the hands of a less capable storyteller, you feel adrift and unsupported. But Eliot would never allow this. Though there is a central character (Maggie) around whom the book rotates, it is not written in her voice. It is written firmly, beautifully, in Eliot’s sure and careful hands. There are moments throughout where she breaks, where as an authorial voice her opinion or her ideation of a problem comes into the narration, and it feels so fresh and so rare that each time I was delighted. I’ve already forced so many of my friends to read this book, and I cannot wait until I have spent far enough away from it that I can return, ready to be told this story again. – Kelsey McKinney

A Coffin for Dimitrios, by Eric Ambler

The short answer to this is Moby Dick, as it would be every year. But I am not a big re-reader, and while I did re-read an unusually large number of books this year, all of that was more or less for work. In the time that I do have to read for pleasure, I tend to seek out treats. Not junk, but treats.

This is why I am bringing Eric Ambler’s book Epitaph for a Spy with me to Maine over Christmas, and why I’m recommending A Coffin for Dimitrios as my favorite thing I read this year, recreational/first-time-reading division. A lucky few dollars spent at a thrift store years ago introduced me to Ambler, who more or less invented the political suspense novel back in the 1930s. That claim—it’s in the little bio on the back of the paperback, just below Graham Greene praising Ambler as “our greatest thriller writer,” so it has to be true—and the Black Lizard/Vintage Crime logo on the spine was enough for me to try Cause for Alarm, and the book knocked me out. That one, written in 1938, is set mostly in fascist Italy just before the beginning of the second World War, and pairs the urgency and flavor of having been written in that queasy moment with some classic spy thriller sneaking-and-evading and a rather shockingly prescient political perspective. I’ve been trying to complete the set ever since.

A Coffin for Dimitrios, from 1939, is Ambler’s best-known book, and while I don’t know what that means in 2024—I sure hadn’t heard of him—it is as good an entry point and was as delightful a summer read as I can imagine. The book rockets around the woozy, fractious, multiply corrupt Europe of that moment in telling the story of a British thriller writer who, in attempting to run down the story of a notorious and (supposedly) deceased smuggler/murderer/pimp, finds himself entangled in said creep’s network of ex-accomplices and other associated crooks. It is swift, funny, and colorful, with hardly any of the dated stuff that I figured would bring me up short. If anything, the brusque and amused clarity with which Ambler understands his characters—the various puffed-up goofs in uniform, grandiose deluded crooks, and actual sociopaths, but also the main character, who is never as overmatched as he seems but not quite as savvy as he thinks—feels startlingly contemporary.  

Given that Ambler was inventing them more or less in real time, the tropes of it don’t really feel very trope-y at all. The ironic kick of the ending doesn’t just feel fresh; it actually is. The book’s cool and unsentimental perspective—on which people and systems can and cannot be trusted, and why—feels bracingly clear-eyed. All the romance and tragedy would come later; as it turned out, it would get there quite soon. Ambler didn’t know what was coming, of course, but the briskness and brutality with which he dispatches various polite social fictions in telling this story suggests that he knew something wasn’t really cooking right. A Coffin for Dimitrios moves forward, more quickly and lightly than I expected, on that invisible current of unease. It’s a blast. – David Roth

Wolf Hall, by Hilary Mantel 

Among my most self-destructive flaws is a reflexive distaste for anything that gets acclaimed too much, too loudly. I assume that a thing can’t possibly be as good as everyone says it is, and so skip the thing, thereby proving some point to nobody and hurting only myself. I have tried to consciously overcome this instinct, and one instance of this was finally sitting down to read Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel’s praised-to-the-heavens historical fiction about Thomas Cromwell’s rise to power in Tudor England.

I went into it still skeptical (it’s not a historical period I had much interest in or knowledge of; for the longest time I thought it was about Oliver Cromwell) and was won over by the close of the first chapter. This is a book whose beauty lies not necessarily with its plot or its characters or even with its ideas, but in the very bones of its construction. On that granular level, the masterwork forms. Not a word or a punctuation feels out of place; every sentence oozes care and artistry. “Over the city lies the sweet, rotting odor of yesterday’s unrecollected sins.” “It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires.” It makes me want to throw up, the knowledge that I’ll never write a sentence as good as one of Mantel’s that’s overshadowed by a dozen even better examples on the same page. 

This is something a book offers that other mediums cannot: the opportunity to witness and take part in their construction, piece by piece, line by line, until the whole is something like an impossibility. You cannot watch Yves Klein layer on another coat of blue, or know what the hunk of marble looked like before Michelangelo carved David’s expression. But you do know the state of your own life before you have read “You think you cannot keep breathing, but your ribcage has other ideas, rising and falling, emitting sighs,” and after. And you are not the same. So I read this, then rest of the Cromwell trilogy—Bring Up the Bodies, and The Mirror & the Light—and then Mantel’s French Revolution novel for good measure, all in quick succession, and it was two contiguous months of my life spent utterly transported—to a different time and place, but also a different plane. – Barry Petchesky

Why I Write, by George Orwell

Late this year, I finally committed to reading short books when I traveled. Where before I had been an ambitious travel reader—Pachinko in Korea! The Fatal Shore in Australia!—I decided at last to become a realist, partly because both of those previous experiments ended poorly. Traveling is a good time to revisit the novella or short story collection, because between the jet lag and planned activities, and a heavy dose of the unexpected, there just isn’t that much down time. Besides, you may forget half of a large book anyway (see: jet lag) and need to read it a second time. 

This is one factor that led me to read George Orwell’s Why I Write. At 120 pages, you can finish it in one sitting. The other reason I read it is because I spotted it and thought, Don’t lots of writers I admire cite this book? Shouldn’t I read it too? It turns out they cite it for good reason. It contains several excellent essays but the most famous, and quoted, is Orwell’s clarion call to speak clearly, concisely, and directly, because the alternative is political language “designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” They ring truer today amid the AI slop, email spam, and pig-butchering text messages than ever. So I will heed Orwell’s words and keep this recommendation tight: It’s a fabulous book. Go read it. – Diana Moskovitz

Incidents Around the House, by Josh Malerman

I’m not sure what it says about me that for the second year in a row, the best thing I read concerns the interactions between a protagonist and the supernatural entity that wants to take possession of them. Probably nothing more alarming than that we write these blogs in December and I can’t remember farther back than October, when I typically read scary stuff around Halloween. Yeah, that’s the ticket. After all, I do have all the memory powers of a raindrop.

In any event, Incidents Around the House is a fun, very stressful, vicious little novel about an 8-year-old girl named Bela, who lives with her parents, Mommy and Daddo, and also Other Mommy, a sinister being that has been around for as long as Bela can remember, and which emerges from her closet regularly when nobody else is around to ask her, “Can I go inside your heart?” So much of the novel’s fiendishness comes from telling its story only and entirely from Bela’s first-person perspective, with all the limits implied by that: Like any young kid, Bela isn’t so good at contextualizing the deeply frightening things that happen around her, or understanding grownup interactions between her parents as they fumble their efforts to figure out what is going on with her, or making decisions about how to handle the malevolent shapeshifting monster that wants to go inside her heart. The effect is diabolical, making you, the reader, hyper-aware of the gaps between what you know and what Bela knows, and between what Bela knows and what her parents know, and between what Bela and her parents know and what they will reveal to other people who get swept into their situation. 

At a certain point in the novel, after shit has started to go badly sideways for Bela and her parents, and it has become clear that Other Mommy will eventually catch up to Bela wherever they go, they flee in the night to the cavernous home of an elderly family friend. What follows is an exercise in mounting dread as Bela’s parents, for the moment free from immediate danger but stressed beyond their limits, gradually drink themselves into a stupor. Bela doesn’t grasp that this is what’s happening—to her, they’re just acting funnier and funnier—so she’s not aware of them getting gradually less able to protect her when the inevitable terrifying thing happens. But you, the reader, are. You can feel the family’s flimsy safety fraying, moment by moment, like the fibers of a rope giving way one by one as Bela dangles cluelessly from the end of it. The experience of reading this portion of the novel made me think about what it’d be like to have to try to defuse a time bomb with boxing gloves duct-taped onto your hands. I had to put the book down.

I fucking love it when an author works to draw genuine terror out of the imperfect connections between people, out of mismatched perspectives and the isolating experience of having something—a knowledge, an emotional state, Pazuzu—inside of you that you cannot convey or communicate to anyone else. Out of the simple fact of having a mind and being trapped inside it. This is the best use of spooky supernatural shit in storytelling: not merely that the spirit or whatever is scary in and of itself, but that it also functions as an agent of deeper, more primal terrors, inherent to being alive. – Albert Burneko

Malazan Book of the Fallen, by Steven Erikson

I’m pretty impressionable when it comes to music, movies, and television. If I see someone post online positively about any of those three things, I will probably check it out. Whether I like it or not depends on the content, but all it takes is seeing something in passing to get me interested. This is not also true of books, though—not because I am more discerning, but because I am infinitely lazier. I went to college in part for an English major, so I’ve gotten most of my reading done already, and now only really read novels when they truly pique my curiosity. Even then, they’re usually whatever middlebrow book is buzzing around.

This is all to say that it was a minor miracle that a few tweets from my friend got me to lock into Steven Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen series. At the beginning of 2024, I was searching for something that would keep me occupied for a chunk of time as winter turned into spring, plus something to read on the beach once summer rolled around. A 10-book fantasy series with millions of words and seemingly as many characters felt like it could satisfy that urge, but I had no idea what I was getting myself into.

Malazan is a sprawling epic, spanning multiple continents, dozens of stories, and so much killing and violence. It jumps backward and forward through time. At its core is the Malazan Empire, which has waged war across the planet, and which serves as the grounding narrative force throughout the 10 books (plus additional books that I haven’t even begun to think about reading). The main characters, insofar as there are any given the wide scope of the series, usually work as soldiers, commanders, assassins, thieves, and all sorts of other professions within the setting of the empire. 

Also, there are gods, magic and a “deck” that controls the fate of the cosmos, or something like that. Confusion is a key feature of the Malazan series, starting with the opening book Gardens of the Moon, which drops you into the siege of a city called Pale with little explanation of who anyone is or how they can do magic. To read Malazan is to commit to not understanding much until you understand everything all at once, and those moments are as thrilling as anything I’ve read in my life.

There are ebbs and flows throughout the series in quality and excitement, as Erikson does so much world building in between massive character and plot moments. An example: The first two books, the aforementioned Gardens of the Moon and then Deadhouse Gates, both have plenty of exhilarating moments, but they both serve to lay out the landscape of the two main continents for the series. Then Erikson smacks you in the face with Memories of Ice, definitely the best of the six books of the series that I’ve read so far, a thousand-page masterclass in pacing, intricate storytelling, and breathtaking plot decisions that had me zooming through its many chapters. The final part of Memories of Ice pays off three books’ worth of character development in brutal, heart-rending fashion.

And that’s just Book 3 of 10! The fourth book, House of Chains, eschews the world-hopping, POV-shifting nature of the rest of the series in order to give problematic fave Karsa Orlong an entire chunk of the book to flesh out his character and story arc. Book 5, Midnight Tides, takes us back in time to a different set of warring empires, and introduces Tehol Beddict, a truly delightful character. The last book I’ve finished, The Bonehunters, has some of the gnarliest mass death scenes I’ve ever read. 

Malazan can often feel overwhelming, but when it clicks, it feels like the real world slips away, and there is only Ganoes Paran and Fiddler and Bottle and Trull Sengar, and all of the other characters that have made this a hell of a ride. (The series ends up having about 450 point-of-view characters, and that’s not including the hundreds who never get their POV sections.) While I’ll probably fail my goal to finish the entire 10-book series in a year—I don’t think I can read the remaining four books in about four months—I can say that I’m glad that my brain registered my friend’s posts about Malazan. This series has defined my 2024, and judging by what I have left in store, it might just define my 2025 as well. – Luis Paez-Pumar

Any Other City, by Hazel Jane Plante

Hazel Jane Plante has a remarkable ability to make you forget you’re reading fiction. In her debut novel, Little Blue Encyclopedia, and now in Any Other City, she peppers her characters’ internal musings with references to both real and imagined pop culture, and she’s invented so much incredible, believable art that never lived that on several occasions she has sent me fruitlessly googling something that doesn’t actually exist.

Little Blue explored a relationship through one side’s intricate knowledge of a TV show, but Any Other City takes the artifice up a notch, presenting itself as a memoir by Tracy St. Cyr, written with Plante’s assistance. St. Cyr is a trans punk-rock frontwoman with a superficial resemblance to Laura Jane Grace—though that’s mostly a reflection of how few other trans women there are in this space to compare her to—and her story is told in two distinct parts, each a visit to one unnamed city that hides entrancing intimacies within its labyrinthine alleys. The first half is St. Cyr falling into an art scene while still figuring herself out, and the second is her returning, much later, to build up a new circle of relationships after a traumatic event.

Thanks to Plante’s commitment (there’s an intro where she as herself “explains” how the book came together, for example) and Tracy’s conversational, kinetic voice as she narrates new rooms and new lovers and the creation of new music, it is startlingly easy to buy into our narrator as a person with whom we the readers share our world. Any Other City contains a mastery of the memoir form, an enticing glimpse into the thought process of a talented musician, and a beautiful portrayal of the connections queer people make with each other. I wish I could hear the songs, engage with the art, touch the streets that it describes. But I have to settle for getting as many people as possible to open this book and share in what I’ve been able to see.

I wrote the above in the Defector newsletter back in March. Here’s a bit from the book that I snapped a photo of right around then.

It’s pretty fucking good. You should read it. – Lauren Theisen

Long Division, by Kiese Laymon

I read this in the spring, more than a decade after it was originally published. It was re-published in 2021, and if you haven’t heard the story about how Laymon bought back the rights to his books for revision, it’s worth checking out. There was so much to love about Long Division, which plays with the physical form of the book to play with ideas of history, antecedents, and time travel. As soon as I finished it, I wanted to flip back to the beginning and start it over. – Alex Sujong Laughlin

The Last Samurai, by Helen DeWitt

Helen DeWitt repeats it like a mantra throughout The Last Samurai: “A good samurai will parry the blow.” It can be read in a number of ways: as a blunt reminder of the omnipresent condition of struggle; as an advancement of the notion that perfection is something that must be trained; or as an homage to The Seven Samurai, not so much to the film itself but rather to what it represents. It’s a beautiful little koan, one whose repetition is part of what made The Last Samurai the best book I read this year.

DeWitt’s doorstopper novel was published in 2000, which puts it in conversation with other hulking works of literary fiction from that era like White Teeth and Infinite Jest. Unlike the former, it is ambitious and challenging enough to actually earn its length; unlike the latter, its heft never renders it unwieldy. The novel tells the story of Sibylla and her son Ludo, as they cultivate and struggle under the weight of genius. Sibylla is someone who grew up in the wreckage of two lives derailed: the daughter of a mother who should have been allowed to nurture her musical genius at Juilliard, and a father who should have gone to Harvard as a young teenager. Determined not to let Ludo’s own brilliance fade out, Sibylla nurtures his preternatural talent, and by age four, he is conversant in Latin, Hebrew, Arabic, and Finnish, has an advanced understanding of math and physics, and is reading Homer in the original ancient Greek.

What gives stakes to Sibylla and Ludo’s story is their material destitution. Sibylla scrapes by as a typist, scratching out a peripheral existence and riding the London underground in circles in the winter because she can’t afford to turn the heat on in their small home. Ludo spends most of the book in search of his father, though the definition of that word is in contest, as he does not accept that he could have been born to the dipshit biological father his mother hooked up with. Instead, he’s seeking someone worthy of his own intelligence, as a means of explanation and connection.

Sibylla sees this as foolhardy, and her reasoning gets at what makes the book so special: She believes with her whole heart that everyone has in themselves the capacity for genius. There’s something meaningfully radical about her refusal to accept the limits of human possibility. DeWitt’s novel is a provocation; as she told Christian Lorentzen, the novel is her attempt to show readers “that they can learn things that they might have thought beyond their grasp.” It is never easy, never so simple as having the “right” father, but to her, it is always possible. I find that notion extremely moving, and I find DeWitt’s utter conviction to the idea that the outer limits of what we can know and create and express to be beautiful in a way that doesn’t feel trite. Something wholly new is there to be had for everyone, no matter what life throws at them. A good samurai will parry the blow. – Patrick Redford

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, by Annie Dillard

I am almost ashamed to say it, but before this year I had never read a full book by Annie Dillard despite having long considered her one of my favorite nature writers. I’d read many excerpts in college, most famously her essays on the dying moth or a total eclipse, which both feature some of the most unabashedly rapturous prose I’ve ever encountered. I’d read most of her slim craft book, The Writing Life. But this year, I finally read Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, her 1974 narrative about living outside the Blue Ridge Mountains. It’s a simply structured book, with daily accounts of her going on walks to see the various wildlife living at the creek by her home and musing on the changing of the seasons. But this description feels like the equivalent of describing something as miraculous as a watermelon as a seed-bearing ovary. I had a highlighter with the intention to highlight any line that made me pause or shiver, and I was highlighting too many lines. I realized I’d always thought of Dillard as a nature writer, because my favorite of her pieces concerned the Earth and the many creatures living on it. I learned that Dillard actually rejected the label of “nature writer,” instead considering Pilgrim a book of theology (I suppose the title should have tipped me off). But whether you are concerned with God or not, Dillard’s attention to all that she sees as holy around her makes every scene molten. Now, whenever I am on a wee stroll, whether that be in a verdant forest or sidewalk, I try to look at the world through Dillard’s eyes and see what is holy around me, whatever that means. I recommend it! – Sabrina Imbler

An Elemental Thing, by Eliot Weinberger

I found An Elemental Thing in Point Reyes Books, a tiny bookstore in California with a wonderfully curated selection, some of which I haven’t seen elsewhere. An Elemental Thing is loosely a collection of connected essays, if essays were composed entirely of New Yorker Eurosteps. Each essay stitches together anything—animal facts, accounts and quotes from primary sources, biographies and names—and manages to say something surprising and moving through its form. And that’s without getting into the pleasure of seeing how the essays connect to each other.

The book is remarkable in its scope and sourcing; it’s inspiring to imagine someone who is so broadly read, and has these sorts of references at his disposal. The sources section of the book is satisfying on its own, especially as the essays themselves lack any form of in-text citation. (After much deliberation, I think I like that.) I’ve never been in a position of not wanting to spoil an essay collection before, but when I say “surprising,” I mean it. But like a Dickens book, it’s still fun to read the table of contents. An incomplete and arbitrary list of pieces to look forward to in An Elemental Thing: “The Wind,” “Changs,” “Wrens,” “Giuseppe,” “The Tree of Flowers,” “Where the Kaluli Live,” “Tigers,” “Anecdotal Evidence,” “The Vortex,” “Louis-August Blanqui as Copied Out by Walter Benjamin,” “In the Wu-t’ai Mountains,” and “The Tree of Flowers, continued.” – Kathryn Xu

Laura, by Vera Caspary

Originally published in 1943, Laura tells the story of a gruesome murder in a New York City apartment, and its investigation led by a detective named Mark McPherson. It’s a very fun detective story featuring a very good detective. McPherson is not too hard-boiled—none of the sulphurous taint that sometimes makes you want to take a break from Raymond Chandler and cleanse your palate—but there’s a familiar noirish set to his jaw. In the movie adaptation—also very good—director Otto Preminger gave McPherson a weird hobby to make an interesting character out of a businesslike operator who affects at all times a grim and serious demeanor. Caspary has no such limitations, and gives herself freedom to roam around inside her detective’s mind—various suspects and confederates may not ever know what McPherson is thinking, but the reader has unfettered access.

McPherson has to figure out who murdered the very talented and dynamic Laura Hunt, and why. Suspects include Hunt’s fiancé, a charming philanderer who is possibly too dumb to keep his story straight and also too dumb to have done the deed, and Waldo Lydecker, an obnoxious middle-aged writer of prodigious talent who applies fanatically high standards to all things, as a way of holding himself superior to all other people. McPherson’s job becomes even more complicated when he finds himself falling in love with the Laura that is described to him by other people, developing a protective reflex and allowing resentments on her behalf to worry his judgment. Falling in love is normal; falling in love with a person who you know to be dead is, well, deeply unfortunate. 

The story is narrated in first person by multiple characters, and the twists are worth discovering on your own. The writing is taut but not too taut to enjoy the idiosyncrasies of the characters, and some of the best passages in the book take place when Lydecker and McPherson are humoring one another semi-socially, from dispositions approximately as opposed as is possible within a shared culture. Caspary’s talent screams off the page. You sense she had as much fun imagining the interior life of a hardened detective as she did that of the soaringly arrogant aesthete, and savored the chance to articulate the complex pressures experienced by Hunt, a dynamic and independent woman working to chart her own path through a demanding professional life while delicately managing the wounded egos of various suitors and self-appointed father figures.

For extra fun, after you’ve read the book, seek out the Lux Radio Theater production. It features the same actors from the movie—Gene Tierney as Laura, a young Vincent Price as Shelby, the incredibly great Clifton Webb as Waldo—but the story is carved down to 55 minutes and told entirely via dialogue, much of which is taken verbatim from the book. And the host is Lionel Barrymore, whose voice will be instantly familiar to anyone who has watched It’s a Wonderful Life this holiday season. How many stories are so good that they make great books, great radio, and a great movie? – Chris Thompson

Fire Season, by Gary Indiana

Acclaimed novelist, critic, and artist Gary Indiana died this year at the age of 74. But it was only in this year that I became fully acquainted with his work. His collection of essays, Fire Season, had been a mainstay in my apartment for a while thanks to my roommate, and I finally took the time to read them. They were as brilliant as expected, but more than that they harkened back to the halcyon days of writers who took the role of cultural critic as an art form in and of itself. His essays on Oliver Stone’s JFK and the works of Pier Paolo Pasolini are as urgent and full of insight as the works themselves. Beyond that, there are also brilliant passages on politics, world affairs, and cultural happenings of the time period between 1984 and 2021. Not only is Indiana a smart, evocative writer, he carries an essence of New York East Village artist bohemia, a sort of artsy coolness and spirit that is alluring and nostalgic. He’s both style and substance, bringing a unique voice to criticism that was purely his own. His work as a novelist is still one that I have only begun to wrestle with, but I look forward to becoming just as engrossed. – Israel Daramola

Enter Ghost, by Isabella Hammad

The British-Palestinian writer Isabella Hammad’s work often considers the potential (and limits) of art to enact resistance. Her second novel, Enter Ghost, does so head on. Sonia, an actress visiting her sister in Haifa, has agreed to play Gertrude in a production of Hamlet staged in the West Bank. In scenes formatted like scripts, Sonia and her castmates wrestle with the play and its setting. One night, the show’s director, Mariam, saddles Sonia with “her theory … that when you read a novel about the occupation and feel understood, or watch a film and feel seen, your anger which is like a wound, is dressed for a brief time and you can go on enduring, a bit more easily.” But Hammad, inclined to see her art and her ideology in concert, is more optimistic. Theater can be its own site of awakening, she reminds us; and politics, like Hamlet, ask that we reckon with our ghosts. Enter Ghost was the first book I read in 2024, so all year I felt grateful for the complexity of Hammad’s work and for the new layers she found in my favorite play. – Maitreyi Anantharaman