The Best Books Of 2019 BuzzFeed

评语：In his latest collection, Brown tackles history and trauma both private and public, personal and narrative — especially blackness and anti-blackness, queerness and anti-queerness. Brown is experimental in format — often its playfulness acts in contrast to its heavy themes — and his rumination on desire, violence, loss, and faith is resonant. —A.R.

评语：I felt like there was a moment in every poem within Scenters-Zapico’s sophomore collection that made me gasp from its sheer beauty. These poems meditate on all manner of borders — not only the literal boundary between the US and Mexico and the effects of those dueling places in the immigrant experience, but also the spaces between desire and sacrifice, sex and violence, masculinity and femininity. Scenters-Zapico's writing is lyrical, sensual, and often painful; it will linger in your brain for a long time. —A.R.

评语：From the trials and tribulations of dating white boys to imagining what Diana Ross was thinking in that famous photo where she licks her fingers after eating a pair of ribs, Parker’s third poetry collection is a beautiful ode to black womanhood in all its messy glory. Imbued with her signature wry humor and caustic honesty, it’s a reminder that Parker is one of the most exciting young poets working today. —T.O.

评语：Rollins' debut poetry collection probes the idea of the body as an archive — an accounting of tragedy and trauma, yes, but also of love and grace. Rollins explores the ways in which we store our personal and cultural histories and how they act upon us, in language so immediate and evocative it's sure to bring about some tears while reading. —A.R.

评语：An incredible story, Davis introduces us to her mother, a no-nonsense woman who grew up in the Jim Crow South and catapulted her burgeoning young family to middle-class wealth by running the numbers — the lottery operation that was banned for most of the 20th century until the US government realized there was money to be made in it. A source of indulgence, entertainment, and superstition for many working-class black families throughout the country, The World According to Fannie Davis offers a fascinating glimpse of how it all worked, set against the backdrop of a thriving Detroit and then a blighted one. —T.O.

评语：Croft’s memoir is impressionistic and inventive — through brief, nonchronological chapters written in the third person (and giving her younger self a different name) she recounts a childhood derailed by her little sister’s terrifying seizure disorder. Interspersed among these chapters are Croft’s own photographs, connected by captions that read as one long, deeply loving letter to her sister. As a whole, Croft has created a near-perfect way to bring her childhood experience to life, mitigating her unavoidable alienation from the past with the distance of third-person narration, and exploring the shifting roles of language, empathy, and identity in her relationship with her sister. —A.R.

评语：A formally innovative memoir about an under-covered subject — an abusive relationship between two women — Machado’s second book is a thought-provoking stunner and proof that the praise heaped on her for her debut short story collection Her Body and Other Parties, was well deserved. Writing in short discursive chapters, occasionally stopping to address some aspect of queer theory or list her favorite Disney villains, Machado weaves a captivating tale of a romance gone sour and the deep scars that emotional and verbal abuse can leave. —T.O.

评语：Full disclosure, Saeed Jones used to work at BuzzFeed News, so we’re biased. But his book really is good, an absorbing coming-of-age story about growing up young, black, and gay in Texas. —T.O.

评语：As far as bananas plot twists go, it’s hard to think of what can top this memoir about a twisted family affair. When Brodeur is 14, her mother wakes her up one night to tell her she just kissed their family friend and to ask if she wouldn’t mind helping them facilitate an affair. The plot only thickens from there. This was the kind of immediately readable story that made me miss my subway stop, made all the more juicy by the fact that it’s all true. —T.O.

评语：In this frank, thoughtful collection, Wang considers the weight of a schizoaffective disorder diagnosis. She documents her first experiences with hallucinations, her humiliating experiences being held involuntarily in psychiatric wards, and the devastating effect of having what she’s convinced is the controversial late-stage Lyme disease. Throughout her writing, she risks easy sentiment and shows us how pop culture depictions and history have contributed to so much misunderstanding around mental illness. It’s an engaging, important read. —T.O.

评语：The ultimate rejoinder to those asinine roundups about how to talk to your conservative family members about politics, Jacob’s graphic memoir is a charming, moving account of what it’s like raising a brown child with Trump-voting in-laws, of growing up as a dark-skinned Indian American in a white town, and of self-discovery and growth. —T.O.

评语：Levin provides an exhaustive and thoughtful account of Linda Taylor, the prolific criminal whose notoriety gave rise to the trope of the “welfare queen.” By digging into Taylor’s history — which, there is no doubt, is riddled with fraud, theft, and possibly wrongful death — Levin sheds light on the systemic anti-blackness throughout the US that allowed politicians to so easily turn a woman into a caricature and then use that caricature as justification for maligning, at once, black Americans and the welfare system. It’s a tale of racism and greed — consider, Levin asks, why the cops who worked so tirelessly on outing Taylor’s manipulation of the welfare system would suddenly lose interest when a black woman in her care died of unknown cause — and a fascinating piece of true crime. —A.R.

评语：The “survival math” of Jackson’s memoir refers to the necessary calculations he and his family made daily to ensure their safety in their small black neighborhood in Portland, Oregon — one of the country’s whitest cities, a city whose anti-blackness was written into its constitution — that was plagued by gang violence and ignored by the government. Interspersed with "survivor files" recounting the stories of his male relatives, Survival Math explores issues like sex, violence, addiction, community, and the toll this takes on a person’s life. It’s an extensively researched and illuminating look at the city of his childhood, at turns hopeful and heartbreaking. —A.R.

评语：Where was Jean McConville, mother of 10, recently widowed, taken one winter night in Belfast in 1972? Part mystery and part (riveting) history lesson, this deeply reported book reads like an expertly plotted novel. New Yorker staff writer Patrick Radden Keefe spent four years researching this definitive account about the Troubles, the period between 1969 and 1998 when skirmishes between Protestant loyalists, who want the predominantly Protestant Northern Ireland to stay a part of the UK, and Catholic Republicans, who yearn for a united Ireland, reached a troubling, violent fever pitch. Charting the rise, and in some cases ignoble fall, of some of the Provos IRA’s most famous leaders, while also following up with the McConville children years later, Keefe contextualizes a fascinating moment of world history, while making clear the human cost and psychic toll of decades-long war. —T.O.

评语：Exquisitely written and incredibly self-aware, Broom’s tribute to her family and the house she grew up in, located in New Orleans East, an often- neglected part of the city devastated by Hurricane Katrina, feels canonical. Broom, the youngest of 12 children, uses her journalist training to excavate her family history, relying on interviews and historical records to create a compelling story about a black working-class family struggling to make ends meet. When Hurricane Katrina, or the Water, as she refers to it, hits, she paints a harrowing picture of those anxious days waiting to hear from her family members. She also places her family’s story within the larger history of New Orleans, stripping the city of its mythos and thus making this memoir more ambitious, more definitive than most memoirs typically are. An extraordinary achievement. —T.O.

评语：It's impossible not to fall in love with Azalea "Knot" Centre, the star of In West Mills, whom we meet as a hotheaded 27-year-old bachelorette in North Carolina in 1941. Her boyfriend keeps proposing, and her well-meaning neighbor Otis Lee begs her to accept, but Knot is more interested in working, drinking, and enjoying her own company. Knot's sense of independence and identity is rattled, though, when a hookup leads to a baby she doesn't want — and the aftermath resonates for decades. In West Mills follows Knot, Otis Lee, their families, friends, and neighbors, from 1941 to 1987, exploring the bonds of friendship, the weight of secrets, and all the sacrifices we make in our attempts to live a self-determined life. —A.R

评语：In many ways, 2019 was a year of fiction that kept us on our toes, full of ambiguous narratives, unexpected formats, and narrators ranging from coy to downright misleading. In The Man Who Saw Everything, Levy drops hints that this story might not be as straightforward as it initially seems. It begins in 1988, when 28-year-old British historian Saul Adler is hit by a car while waiting to take a photo at the iconic crossing on Abbey Road. The photo is meant to be a gift to the German family he’ll be staying with on his upcoming trip to East Berlin, as part of his research into fascism and its opposition. Saul can be a grating protagonist — dismissive of those who care for him, myopic, and unforgiving. This is the irony, of course, of the title: He can’t see much beyond himself, and understands little of his own desires. But by revealing just how much Saul doesn’t know, Levy is able to explode narrow ideas of sexuality, morality, and even time, exploring the vast possibilities of the human experience. — A.R.

评语：Washington’s debut short story collection is an ode to Houston and a vibrant portrait of the myriad people who call it home. The stories circle around a young boy figuring out his sexual identity while holding down a job at his family’s restaurant; around him, a city of creators, survivors, and hustlers vibrates with life. Washington’s effervescent prose draws the reader into the fold — his use of first person, especially plural first, can read like a generous inclusion — as his characters explore family, community, new freedoms, and love. —A.R.

评语：Lerner’s highly anticipated third novel is a nuanced but damning portrayal of masculinity and whiteness in the US, built around Midwestern teen (and debate champion) Adam in 1997, his last year of high school. The story radiates around him, jumping around time, perspective, and even narrative format. Adam’s parents are, like the parents of most of his best friends, therapists at a local psychiatric institute called The Foundation, and each person’s understanding of themselves is colored by the rhetoric of psychoanalysis as well as its failures: A person can learn how to identify and articulate the underpinnings of their rage and still act on it anyway; at worst a person can weaponize the very language meant to broaden understanding. Dealing with themes of abuse, betrayal, and prejudice, The Topeka School is at once a personal and national reckoning, and impossible to put down. —A.R.

评语：A family that isn’t exactly devastated by the death of their patriarch is an intriguing family indeed in Attenberg’s latest novel, set in New Orleans. An easy-to-read book about a complicated family — Attenberg’s area of expertise. —T.O.

评语：Chung, a former math major at the University of Chicago, leans on her own real-life aptitude for math in her sophomore novel about a talented mathematician named Katherine whose attempt to solve the Riemann hypothesis uncovers secrets about her family's past. Nearing the end of her life, Katherine looks back at all she's been through, beginning as one of the few women graduate students at MIT in the 1960s, meeting and befriending some of the world's greatest scientific minds, but never being able to shed her role as an outsider amid the boys club. Woven throughout her professional research, though, are Katherine's inquiries into her own history as she discovers that her parents might not be who they seem to be. It's an interrogation of truth and its value — of secrets, sacrifice, and identity. —A.R.

评语：Pinsker's debut short story collection is speculative and strange, exploring such wide-ranging scenarios as a young man receiving a prosthetic arm with its own sense of identity, a family welcoming an AI replicate of their late Bubbe into their home, and an 18th-century seaport town trying to survive a visit by a pair of sirens — all while connecting them in a book that feels cohesive. The stories are insightful, funny, and imaginative, diving into the ways humans might invite technology into their relationships. —A.R.

评语：Keret’s stories range from dark to downright silly — there’s the child in the title story who misunderstands the intentions of a man standing on the roof of a tall building, the strangers who meet up daily after work to share a joint on the beach, the increasingly absurd email exchange between a man desperate to bring his mother to an escape room that is unfortunately closed, and the owner of said escape room with a pretty big secret to hide. Each is beautifully wrought and rife with meaning — and slightly maddening in its ambiguity. —A.R.

评语：Known primarily for her mystery novels, Cha uses a real-life event — the murder of 15-year-old Latasha Harlins at the hands of a Korean store clerk, and a precipitating cause of the 1992 LA Riots — as an impetus for an exploration of the lives of two families, one Korean and one black, who are still reeling from a similar incident that happened decades ago. Cha’s characters feel convincingly real. You ache for their pain and hope for their closure. —T.O.