There’s a good chance we skipped over your most prized book. But great fiction comes in many forms: James Baldwin’s American in Paris, Cormac McCarthy’s depiction of the violent American southwest, or Patricia Highsmith’s peculiar serial killer. Here is a list of novels (plus a handful of short-story collections) we know are great — every one of them a potential favorite.
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Contributors include:
Sloane Crosley, New York Times best-selling author of I Was Told There’d Be Cake and the upcoming novel The Clasp (FSG, 2015); Paul Beatty, author of four novels, including The Sellout; Christian Rudder, president and co-founder of OkCupid and the author of Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One Is Looking) (Crown, 2014); Jennifer Weiner, the New York Times best-selling author of 12 books, including All Fall Down (Atria, 2014) and Who Do You Love (Atria, 2015); James Franco, actor, director, screenwriter, artist, and author of several books including Directing Herbert White (Graywolf, 2014); John Wray, author of four novels, including Lowboy and the upcoming The Lost Time Accidents (FSG, 2016); Molly Antopol, award-winning author of The UnAmericans: Stories (W.W. Norton, 2014); Alexander Chee, author of Edinburgh and the upcoming Queen of the Night (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016); Summer Brennan, author of The Oyster War: The True Story of a Small Farm, Big Politics, and the Future of Wilderness in America (Counterpoint, 2015); Lisa Lucas, publisher of Guernica magazine; Sarah Weinman, editor of Women Crime Writers: Eight Suspense Novels of the 1940s & '50s (Library of America) and Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives (Penguin); Will Chancellor, author of A Brave Man Seven Storeys Tall (Harper, 2014); Adelle Waldman, author of The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.; Ben Greenman, New York Times best-selling author of three novels, including The Slippage (Harper Perennial, 2013); Karolina Waclawiak, author of How to Get Into the Twin Palms and The Invaders (Reagan Arts, 2015); Chigozie Obioma, author of The Fishermen (Little, Brown and Company, 2014); J. Ryan Stradal, author of Kitchens of the Great Midwest (Viking/Pamela Dornan, 2015); Mitchell S. Jackson, author of The Residue Years (Bloomsbury, 2014); Elisa Albert, author of three books, including After Birth (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015); Lev Grossman, book critic for Time magazine and author of The Magicians trilogy, which is slated to be a SyFy television series in 2016; Charles Yu, the author of several books, including the novel How to Live Safely in a Science-Fictional Universe (Pantheon, 2010); Laura Dave, best-selling author of four novels, including Eight Hundred Grapes (Simon and Schuster, 2015); Lindsay Hunter, author of several books, including Ugly Girls (FSG, 2014); Anna North, author of America Pacifica and The Life and Death of Sophie Stark (Blue Rider Press, 2015); Mira Jacob, author of The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing (Random House, 2014); and Patrick Hoffman, author of The White Van (Grove, 2014).
