The Best Books of 2024
Here are my seventeen favorite books published in 2024, just a small snippet of the year's amazing offerings.
I tried a special kind of reading challenge this year: the majority of what I read was published in 2024, so I could try and get as representative of a temporal sample as possible. Obviously this is a self-selected list since I generally know what kinds of books I like, but there are a range and I can attest first hand that when you limit your pool to just one year you end up honing in on books that might not have made any list before. That said, this was still difficult and there are a ton of amazing books that did not make it onto this relatively short list of seventeen. I also published a list of the ten best Jewish books of the year (though I cheated and it's actually eleven), and keep an eye out for the best horror and best comic book lists to come.
The Rebel's Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon - Adam Shatz
It’s strange timing for Adam Shatz’ biography of Frantz Fanon to be released considering Fanon’s work has become one of the primary lenses to understand, or misunderstand, Hamas’ attack in Israel on October 7th. Shatz’ is known for much of his critical work on Israel, and this stood out when he wrote one of the most discussed articles in the weeks after October 7th that also drew directly on his work studying Fanon. The Rebel’s Clinic is simultaneously sympathetic and unflinching in its look at Fanon, choosing to outline his actual life rather than repeat ideological dictums or theoretical didacticism. We end up with an understandably complex story of both Fanon’s political and personal development, but also how the world changed and swirled around, and past, Fanon during and after his life. The book concludes by discussing how Fanon has been mobilized to support different types of resistance movements, including some he may have had reservations about, and the way he has been lost to much of Algeria’s current self-conception. A deep, and dense, book that helps as many as any recent volume to help us understand the complicated road of anti-colonial struggle.
Rainbow Black is unrealistic, unrelatable, hyperbolic, sometimes saccharine, and completely beyond reasonable, and, nonetheless, I read it in nearly one setting and have thought about it almost daily for the last year. Thrash, known previously for her young adult work, chronicles the Satanic Panic, a moment when the world believed we were beset by Satanic pedophiles (which now seems oddly familiar), and illustrates the worst possible impact of this kind of frenzy on a young woman and her later adult self. The book’s incredible leaps of logic actually help rather than hinder the book, it allows us to drop any sense of factual history and legal likelihood and instead live out the emotional fantasies of horror, loss, and perseverance. And in doing so, there sits a story about frightening love that stuck with me in a way that, as I stared in disbelief at each plot leap on the page, I simply would not have guessed. This is likely to be the most controversial book on my list for the year and yet, if I am honest, it must remain.
With an academic precision and an accessible tone, Jeanelle Hope and Bill Mullen’s history of the Black Antifascist Tradition, a coherent and timely lineage of thought and action against the far-right, helps to cohere one of the least studied and yet most historically relevant traditions in left-wing activism. The book emerges, in part, from Hope’s essay in my 2022 anthology No Pasaran and Mullen’s co-edited (with Chris Vitale) volume The Anti-Fascist Reader, which itself focuses on much of the canon of the Black Antifascist Tradition. Here they weave together a political position that stands distinct from much of the white and European focused antifascist canon, a viewpoint that sees fascism as baked into the Western structures of settler colonialism and white supremacy. We trace through the years of fighting lynchings and the Klan, the creation of self-defense squads in the 1950s and 1960s, the Black Panther Party and the Unite Against Fascist conference, Black anarchism of the 1970s-1980s, all the way to Black Lives Matter and antifascist organizing today. If any book on antifascism was missing, this was it.
The Hammer: Power, Inequality, and the Struggle for the Soul of Labor - Hamilton Nolan
Nolan’s book on the American labor movement, the best since Kim Kelly’s Fight Like Hell, tells the story of where unions lost their hold on power and the steps they can make, and sometimes are making, to bring that organizing back to the shop floor. Nolan’s chapters take on different episodes in recent labor history such as the Nabisco strike of 2021 or the campaign to organize California childcare workers that took nearly 20 years before coming to fruition in 2018 (and which I worked on for one, very long, week). The structure is then pinned together with the biography of flight attendant union leader Sarah Nelson, who’s radical, direct action, and socialist vision has provided the alternative to that offered by the old class of AFL-CIO leaders. While she ultimately lost in her campaign to become the next AFL-CIO President after Richard Trumka, her spirit is alive in the growth of the rank-and-file and independent labor movement and the mass organizing we are seeing in places like Amazon and Starbucks. The Hammer is the perfect read for those who are thinking not just about forming a union, but what it means to put power back into the hands of workers.
Tremblay remains a master of horror storytelling and this is on display in his effort to create such a quiet subtlety that we are able to fill his gaps in description with the most astounding horrors imaginable. This is exactly the silence that makes Horror Movie such a profound experience: we can begin to understand exactly how we can become monsters, in how we can perform violence and terror, without ever acknowledging what is taking place and what we are actually participating in. Ostensibly the book is about an independent horror film being made and the consequences of its horrible mistakes decades later, but the plotting allows us to follow both timelines seamlessly while adapting to the increasing dread that comes with each page. I will also say that it is a perfectly paced movie horror, dripping with the world of online film fandom, and hits almost every note you want from a popular horror novel.
Three-Way Fight: Revolutionary Politics and Antifascism - Ed. Xtn Alexander and Matthew N. Lyons
I was surprised at how hard this multitudinous volume hit me when it came out this year, which is mostly a collection of essays originally published at the essential antifascist webzine, Three-Way Fight. The selections are a mix of deep dives into the underlying political analysis that modern antifascism should rest on, as well as quite a lot of writing taken directly from organizers in the midst of doing the work. The Three-Way Fight concept is essential for understanding contemporary issues like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the fall of Assad, Israel’s genocide and fight with both Hamas and Hezbollah, the “working class” populism of Trump and his allies, and a whole range of political struggles where the far-right is attempting to erode the ground the left has traditionally stood on. What you end up with are essays that cut through political complexity in a way that you simply will not get from the majority of political writing. This book offers a more thorough, intersectional, and revolutionary politic from movements claiming to resist oppression, and it does so by handing the mic to as many voices as possible. It’s also worth noting that the work of the Sojourner Truth Organization (STO), and Don Hammerquist in particular, sits heavily over this book. A reminder that a collection of Hammerquist’s more recent writing was also published this year by Kersblebedeb (who co-published Three-Way Fight) and is also worth a read.
In a year that is full of Jewish books set, at least in part, during World War II, Leela Corman’s virtuoso effort Victory Parade offers something incredibly new and with characters who are as relatable as any I’ve encountered in years. The story focuses on German-Jewish emigres to the U.S., women working while one’s husband is away fighting and the other grows increasingly restless with thoughts of what is happening to her family back at home. We get interlocking stories of an affair, a marriage dissolving from war trauma, the complex intersections of female employment before and after the war, and a woman who dominates in the professional wrestling ring by imitating the accent of those who forced her to flee her home country. Heartbreaking in one moment and hysterical in another, Victory Parade stands out as how to avoid the trappings of Jewish period pieces by refusing to simply retell the lachrymose story and instead allowing a sense of triumph to permeate instead.
I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom - Jason Pargin
In this latest book from comedy-writer-turned-TikToker Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About this Black Box of Doom uses a rather easy plot about a mysterious package looking for a driver to talk about the crisis of anxiety most of us are living through as the Internet spirals our darkest thoughts into our objective reality. The book intermixes a number of characters’ into something that feels akin to a detective thriller, yet serves as the infrastructure to engage in a multi-sided conversation about the flipside of our contemporary media sphere. Pargin uses the format of online social media platforms like Twitch and Reddit to his advantage (he is conversant enough himself in this social media trap that he can easily replicate its tension on the page) and this allows is accelerating pace to feel just as one of the major stories we often inject ourselves into as they develop across our news feeds. The book is funny and relatable and, since it is not part of a series (yet), it is the easiest way to jump into Pargin’s work. Best not to think too deeply as to why each of these characters feel so familiar…
Pay the Piper - George A. Romero and Daniel Kraus
This is the second of Romero’s books that novelist Daniel Kraus found when curating Romero’s archive, except this strayed far enough from the world of zombies that it stood out as a completely unique work that paralleled nothing else in Romero’s career. In what Kraus expertly finishes, we get an incredibly involved look at cajun life in the South Bajou of Louisiana, a crumbling of rural community as oil companies decimate the land, which itself is just an echo of its pirate past. What underskirts this is a cosmic horror story about monsters in the swamp, though this is only a background pretext for the haunting memories, mistakes, and failed relationships of those who inhabit the shanties in one of the poorest parts of the country. This is a brilliant portrait of daily life, compassionate and delicate while also containing some of the most ferocious characters I’ve encountered in modern horror.
For Times Such as These: A Radical Guide for the Jewish Year - Ariana Katz and Jessica Rosenberg
While so many have focused on the anti-Zionism of authors Ariana Katz and Jessica Rosenberg, that is really just a minor starting point for what becomes one of the most important books ever written attempting to take Judaism past Zionism. Both rabbis take a deeply Reconstructionist approach to the Jewish calendar, bringing together history, activism, profound spirituality and mysticism, and an approach that is equal parts traditional and innovative, with the hope of helping deliver Jewish education and access to those who so often felt left behind by the mainstream Jewish world. For Times Such as These is such a nourishing well that those who have a long background in the Jewish classroom will still be challenged to renew the meaning of our rituals and it will likely become a starting point for those building up Diasporist Jewish communities and minyanim, something that is happening at an astounding pace since October 7th. One of the best books on the Jewish year ever written and a clarion call for the Jewish renewal that is already taking place.
This Skin Was Once Mine and Other Disturbances - Eric LaRocca (Titan Books)
Eric LaRocca has made it onto my “best of” list for the past three years partially because his unrelenting output never ceases to break every expectation, and moral taboo, you could hold for it. The Skin Was Once Mine is another one of his collections, which always feel as one consistent volume that was meant to be read start to finish despite being composed of different organs each seeded in different places at different moments. It is horrifying, yes, and queer in the dangerous way we used to whisper that word, but it also exists with its whole heart in a fashion that honors the sacrifice readers make to jump into this level of literary self-immolation. There is also a profound simplicity to his writing, an economy of words that never allows the reader to feel disrespected for even a moment, not one syllable is more than necessary. This is a deeply uncomfortable book (it warns you at the start), and yet there is not one story I could have done without. LaRocca’s next novel comes out in the first quarter of 2025 and I recommend pre-ordering it just as a vote of confidence.
This latest book by Black Hole cartoonist and writer Charles Burns came onto the market rather quietly, but this is probably a fitting introduction for a book whose perspective sits at exactly the silent screams so many of us live with. The story swirls around student filmmakers Jimmy and Brian and their attempt to head into the mountain to create a truly spectacular science fiction film. But what we find is a complicated narrative about unrequited passions, the sneaking fear that our love is not what we believed it would be, and the experience of living on a different wavelength than seemingly everyone we are surrounded with. An incredible character portrait, Final Cut shares Burns’ penchant for mixing fact and fantasy, the internal emotional lives of our characters and the conflicted way these perceptions mix with the material world.
From the Ashes: Grief and Revolution in a World on Fire - Sarah Jaffe
Every moment of Jaffe’s latest oeuvre is a gut punch. Starting with the death of her father, a thread that connects her to each of the sites of grieving she moves to throughout the book, Jaffe sits with the idea that grief may be the operative concept of political action today. From acknowledging the cosmic threat of climate change to the deaths that precipitate the mass confrontations against police violence to the growing number of dead and missing in Gaza, she takes on this sadness as both the starting point and the kindling for a fire that could consume the past. Grief is not just something beautiful and healing, “it will unmake you,” something so obvious to the grieving and so often missed by literally every witness, until they are likewise torn to pieces. The pain of the book is so relatable (and unmistakably Jewish) that it is sometimes hard to take, and that is exactly what makes it hit with the kind of aplomb necessary to experience any form of healing from literature.
The second of Cory Doctorow’s series about a forensic accountant investigating the subterranean escapades of some of the ruling class’s most pernicious perpetrators, The Bezzle is one of the most entertaining books of the year. The Bezzle is a term used to describe the operative function of an embezzlement, or a scam, where the person running the con knows they have just made a killing and those having their money stolen still believe they are coming out on top. The book begins with a localized pyramid scheme involving microwavable hamburgers, but ends up as an indictment of the entire private prison system and, by tandem, the absolute conspiracy of our entire economy.
Wild Faith: How the Christian Right is Taking Over America - Talia Lavin
Lavin is once again back with one of the best books of the year, this time chronicling the history and threatening present of American Christian nationalism. Lavin breaks this story down into two parts, first chronicling its malicious spread on society and politics, before drilling into how it has harmed each constituent part of the family. This is why the book hits with aplomb, the reader never loses sight of the emotional reality of the abuse these ideas have inflicted. This concludes with an especially glaring and upsetting portrayal of violence as used against evangelical children, and how Christian parenting books have helped to solidify generational trauma through thousands, or perhaps millions, of homes.
When the Clock Broke: Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s - John Ganz
While one of the few name Substackers doing interesting (and still controversial) work, Ganz’ deep dive into the origins of the contemporary American Right is as rich and narrative as it is politically astute. By no means is Ganz the only recent writer to come at this subject, with other notable examples being Nicole Hemmer, John S. Huntington, and George Hawley, but this may be the most colorful, temporal, and overtly necessary, and certainly the one that brings together everything from the LA riots to John Gotti to the unending legacy of Ross Perot. What’s perhaps most important about When the Clock Broke is Ganz's insightful look at figures like white nationalist Sam Francis and not only his effect on the American Right, but his powerful predictions as to where middle America would be radicalized. Pat Buchanan also plays a central role as a man likely ahead of his time, or as a political innovator waiting for a television personality to pick up his mantle. The last ten years have seen a flood of books on the right (my own included), but Ganz is amongst the most entertaining and with a widened scope. This is a must read to understand how we arrived where none of us want to live.
What is so astounding about Toby Lloyd’s novel Fervour is not just how it intermixes Jewish religious and secular ideas, or how it overlaps narratives both invented and timeless, or even how it melds genre writing with deeply personal familial strife, but that he does it in such a structurally brilliant way that it’s hard to believe this is his first effort. This is not only my favorite book of the year, it may be the best book I’ve read so far this decade, and it’s hard for me to consider any moment of this book a misstep or anything other than pitch perfect Jewish storytelling. Narrating the life of an Orthodox British family in various states of undress, while simultaneously allowing material and mythic strands of explanation for their dissolving relationships, Lloyd creates an uncommon kind of unity, between the spiritual and the historical, that is necessary for Jewish literature. Instead of a divide between the secular and religious we end up with a decidedly Jewish narrative, one that rejects the bifurcation so universalized in the Western canon and often projected onto Jewish authors. Instead, Lloyd plums a type of Yiddish consciousness in his work, one where the entire history of Jewish storytelling and debate hangs over every page, and where astute readers may just realize that there has been someone watching their journey since the first page. It’s just unclear who that someone is.