Continuing with our series of “Best of 2016″ lists curated by the entire CCM-Entropy community, we present some of our favorite selections as nominated by the diverse staff and team here at Entropy, as well as nominations from our readers.
This list brings together some of our favorite novels & books of fiction published in 2016.
In no particular order:
1. The Vegetarian by Han Kang (trans. Deborah Smith) (Hogarth)
Ferocious…[Han Kang] has been rightfully celebrated as a visionary in South Korea… Han’s glorious treatments of agency, personal choice, submission and subversion find form in the parable. There is something about short literary forms – this novel is under 200 pages – in which the allegorical and the violent gain special potency from their small packages… Ultimately, though, how could we not go back to Kafka? More than ‘The Metamorphosis,’ Kafka’s journals and ‘A Hunger Artist’ haunt this text. —Porochista Khakpour, New York Times Book Review
2. The Girls by Emma Cline (Random House)
Spellbinding . . . A seductive and arresting coming-of-age story hinged on Charles Manson, told in sentences at times so finely wrought they could almost be worn as jewelry . . . [Emma] Cline gorgeously maps the topography of one loneliness-ravaged adolescent heart. She gives us the fictional truth of a girl chasing danger beyond her comprehension, in a Summer of Longing and Loss. —The New York Times Book Review
3. Blackass by A. Igoni Barrett (Graywolf Press)
[Blackass] vividly captures the frenetic energy of one of the world’s fastest-growing cities and provides a perceptive and engaging meditation on the mutability — and the stubborn persistence — of identity. —The New York Times Book Review
4. Problems by Jade Sharma (Coffee House Press)
Jade Sharma is the appalling, hilarious love child of Denis Johnson and Maggie Estep, and Problems is as unrepentant and transgressive a novel as they come. Every coming of age story except this one is a lie. —Elisa Albert
5. What Belongs to You by Garth Greenwell (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
A rich, important debut, an instant classic to be savored by all lovers of serious fiction because of, not despite, its subject: a gay man’s endeavor to fathom his own heart. ―Aaron Hamburger, The New York Times Book Review
6. The Wangs Vs. the World by Jade Chang (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
Jade Chang is unendingly clever in her generous debut novel….As much as THE WANGS VS. THE WORLD is about Asian-American identity, it is also a sprawling family adventure compressed into a road trip novel. The result is a manic, consistently funny book of alternating perspectives as the Wangs make various cross-country stopovers in their 80s station wagon…[A] compassionate and bright-eyed novel. —New York Times Book Review
7. Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi (Knopf)
Gyasi’s characters are so fully realized, so elegantly carved—very often I found myself longing to hear more. Craft is essential given the task Gyasi sets for herself—drawing not just a lineage of two sisters, but two related peoples. Gyasi is deeply concerned with the sin of selling humans on Africans, not Europeans. But she does not scold. She does not excuse. And she does not romanticize. The black Americans she follows are not overly virtuous victims. Sin comes in all forms, from selling people to abandoning children. I think I needed to read a book like this to remember what is possible. I think I needed to remember what happens when you pair a gifted literary mind to an epic task. Homegoing is an inspiration. —Ta-Nehisi Coates
8. Reel by Tobias Carroll (Rare Bird Books)
Carroll is one of those rare authors that combines a fine eye for detail and an understanding of what makes people tick with an admirable command of language and a lyricism that makes some passages tread very close to poetry. The sum of those elements adds up to a debut novel that reads like the latest effort from a veteran author who has already figured out how to deliver a rich, satisfying narrative in less than 200 pages. – Gabino Iglesias, LitReactor
9. Another Brooklyn by Jacqueline Woodson (Amistad)
Another Brooklyn joins the tradition of studying female friendships and the families we create when our own isn’t enough, like that of Toni Morrison’s Sula, Tayari Jones’ Silver Sparrow and Zami: A New Spelling of My Name by Audre Lorde. Woodson uses her expertise at portraying the lives of children to explore the power of memory, death and friendship. – Los Angeles Times Book Review
10. The Reactive by Masande Ntshanga (Two Dollar Radio)
[The Reactive is] a searing, gorgeously written account of life, love, illness, and death in South Africa. With exquisite prose, formal innovation, and a masterful command of storytelling, Ntshanga illustrates how some young people navigated the dusk that followed the dawn of freedom in South Africa and humanizes the casualties of the Mbeki government’s fatal policies on HIV & AIDS. —Naomi Jackson, Poets & Writers
11. So Much for that Winter by Dorthe Nors (trans. Misha Hoekstra) (Graywolf Press)
Nors’ writing is by turns witty, gut wrenching, stark and lyrical. Her characters seesaw between longing for human connection and the space in which to lick their wounds. That she achieves all this while experimenting with form is something of an impossible feat. . . . Nors has created an exciting and artful literary diptych. —Los Angeles Times
12. Dog Years by Melissa Yancy (University of Pittsburgh Press)
Melissa Yancy’s stories make me swoon with recognition. They’re funny and sad in the same breath; they’re incredibly well-executed; they’re about the endlessly fascinating machinery of relationships, about the weird intersections of medical technology and human dignity, and about the ways time catches up with everyone in the end. I’ve been waiting a long time for Yancy’s stories to be collected in a book; Dog Years is cause for celebration. —Anthony Doerr
13. On the Edge by Rafael Chirbes (trans. Margaret Jull Costa) (New Directions)
This is the great novel of the crisis. The corrosive voice of Rafael Chirbes in On the Edge paints a portrait of a universe of unemployment and disappointment— the long hangover that follows the party of corruption. —El Pais
14. Suite For Barbara Loden by Nathalie Léger (trans. Natasha Lehrer & Cécile Menon) (Dorothy, A Publishing Project)
Inventive and affecting, it takes both the novel and the biography to new and interesting places. —Eimear McBride
15. Black Deutschland by Darryl Pinckney (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Without a hint of sloganeering, Pinckney evokes in these scenes a melancholia that transcends his narrator, achieving something rare in fiction—an honestly-come-by sense of cultural and political sadness. . . . a significant contribution. —Adam Haslett, The New York Times
16. 99 Stories of God by Joy Williams (Tin House Books)
From “quite possibly America’s best living writer of short stories” (NPR), Ninety-Nine Stories of God finds Joy Williams reeling between the sublime and the surreal, knocking down the barriers between the workaday and the divine.
17. The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead (Doubleday)
[A] potent, almost hallucinatory novel… It possesses the chilling matter-of-fact power of the slave narratives collected by the Federal Writers’ Project in the 1930s, with echoes of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, and brush strokes borrowed from Jorge Luis Borges, Franz Kafka and Jonathan Swift…He has told a story essential to our understanding of the American past and the American present. —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
18. Neon Green by Margaret Wappler (Unnamed Press)
Part historical novel, part alternative history, NEON GREEN captures the suburban-American experience at the cusp of the Internet Age, and asks its readers to consider what unites–and what threatens–a family. Strange yet accessible, goofy yet also, somehow, heartbreaking, this wonderfully original novel made me see everything around me in a new beguiling light: from my own family to the big unknowable sky above me. A debut to be reckoned with. —Edan Lepucki
19. The Queen of the Night by Alexander Chee (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
The Queen of the Night is an astonishing universe into which its lucky readers can dissolve completely, metamorphosing alongside its shapeshifting protagonist. Lilliet Berne steals her name from a gravestone and launches into a life of full-throated song; her voice is an intoxicant, and this book is a glorious performance. Chee s enveloping, seductive prose is perfectly matched to the circus world of the opera. —Karen Russell, New York Times
20. Swing Time by Zadie Smith (Penguin Press)
Smith’s most affecting novel in a decade, one that brings a piercing focus to her favorite theme: the struggle to weave disparate threads of experience into a coherent story of a self…As the book progresses, she interleaves chapters set in the present with ones that deal with memories of college, of home, of Tracey. It is a graceful technique, this metronomic swinging back and forth in time…The novel’s structure feels true to the effect of memory, the way we use the past as ballast for the present. And it feels true, too, to the mutable structure of identity, that complex, composite ‘we,’ liable to shift and break and reshape itself as we recall certain pieces of our earlier lives and suppress others. —Alexandra Schwartz, The New Yorker
21. The Book of Endless Sleepovers by Henry Hoke (Civil Coping Mechanisms)
I love how Henry Hoke plays fast and loose with autobiography and genre. The Book of Endless Sleepovers is wry and finely-wrought, a philosophical fever dream studded with the pleasure of proper names and surprising turns of phrase, a lyric page-turner. —Maggie Nelson
22. Private Citizens by Tony Tulathimutte (William Morrow Paperbacks)
Tony Tulathimutte’s brilliant debut novel is hilarious and heartbreaking all at once–a spot-on, satifical portrait of modern San Francisco and the privilege that inhabits it…Brimming with wit and heart, Private Citizens is an impressive debut from a sharp new voice. —Buzzfeed
23. Here Lies Memory by Doug Rice (Black Scat Books)
How does memory write us? What fictions haunt our bodies and lives, and what truths do we construct to carry the weight of our selves? Doug Rice designs a brutally beautiful helix from dual narratives woven by and through love and loss. Between blindness and insight there live characters who, like all of us, story a way to go on in the face of buildings decaying, cities disappearing, hearts and bodies slipping toward ghost. Mother, sister, wife, grandfather, grandson, girl, boy…all identities move through desire, love, memory, and language in a place called Pittsburgh. Reading this book made my skin sing, my heart wail, a secular hymn of the body. —Lidia Yuknavitch
24. Grace by Natashia Deon (Counterpoint)
Grace is a swirling wild ride into the sheer terror of slavery and the aftermath, a deep travel into the inexhaustible spirit of survival of her characters, and an eye into fields and forests which remain unforgettable. The women and men in this novel transcend all notions of what we’ve read before, and their bravery is tempered with a melancholy so deep it remains long after the last page. —Susan Straight
25. The Last Wolf & Herman by László Krasznahorkai (New Directions)
László Krasznahorkai is a visionary writer of extraordinary intensity and vocal range who captures the texture of present-day existence in scenes that are terrifying, strange, appallingly comic, and often shatteringly beautiful: magnificent works of deep imagination and complex passions, in which the human comedy verges painfully onto transcendence. — Marina Warner
26. Fish in Exile by Vi Khi Nao (Coffee House Press)
Here I was allowed to forget for a while that that is what books aspire to tell, so taken was I by more enthralling and mysterious pleasures. —Carole Maso
27. The Story of a Brief Marriage by Anuk Arudpragasam (Flatiron Books)
Brave…Brilliant…This is a book that makes one kneel before the elegance of the human spirit and the yearning that is at the essence of every life. —The New York Times Book Review
28. Here Comes the Sun by Nicole Dennis-Benn (Liveright)
{A] lithe, artfully-plotted debut….Margot is one of the reasons to read this book. She is a startling, deeply memorable character. All of Ms. Dennis-Benn’s women are. The author has a gift for creating chiaroscuro portraits, capturing both light and dark….Here Comes the Sun is deceptively well-constructed, with slow and painful reveals right through the end. — Jennifer Senior, The New York Times
29. Where We Go When All We Were Is Gone by Sequoia Nagamatsu (Black Lawrence Press)
Sequoia Nagamatsu’s universe is one in which modern Japan and its ancient folklore play in the same delightful puddle. Creepy, unnerving, and full of heart, these tales of love and demons, death and Godzilla, loss and possibility, will creep into your dreams and enchant your imagination. —Kelly Luce
30. Margaret The First by Danielle Dutton (Catapult)
The duchess herself would be delighted at her resurrection in Margaret the First…. Dutton expertly captures the pathos of a woman whose happiness is furrowed with the anxiety of underacknowledgment. —Katharine Grant, The New York Times Book Review
31. I’m Thinking of Ending Things by Iain Reid (Simon and Schuster)
In a novel this engaging, bizarre, and twisted, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that its ending is even stranger than the narrative route that takes us there…but it does. Reid’s novel is a road trip to the heart of creepyness. – Sjón
32. The Gloaming by Melanie Finn (Two Dollar Radio)
Deeply satisfying. Finn is a remarkably confident and supple storyteller. [The Gloaming] deserves major attention. —John Williams, New York Times
33. United States of Japan Book by Peter Tieryas (Angry Robot Books)
Mind-twisting and fiercely imaginative; Tieryas fuses classic sci-fi tradition with his own powerful vision. – Jay Posey
34. The Veins of the Ocean by Patricia Engel (Grove Press)
Engel has an eye for detail. She knows how to drown the reader in a sense of enchantment . . . She writes exquisite moments. —Roxane Gay
35. Potted Meat by Steven Dunn (Tarpaulin Sky)
Steven Dunn’s Potted Meat is full of wonder and silence and beauty and strangeness and ugliness and sadness and truth and hope. I am so happy it is in the world. This book needs to be read. — Laird Hunt
36. Man and Wife by Katie Chase (A Strange Object)
With sharp, confident consideration of what it takes to survive in the world as a woman, MAN AND WIFE introduces an important new literary voice. —Danielle Evans
37. Novi Sad by Jeff Jackson (Kiddie Punk)
This book will make you consider the power of our shadows, and of their dangers, too. The places of our imaginations, Jackson reminds us, are often so much more than real. — D. Foy
38. The Babysitter At Rest by Jen George (Dorothy, A Publishing Project)
Her stories are at once poignant and disciplined in their abstraction, and hilarious in their inappropriate and reckless abandon. —Matthew Barney
39. Letters to Kevin by Stephen Dixon (Fantagraphics)
In this fictional prose novel, reminiscent of Scorsese’s After Hours, a New York man goes on a nightmare-logic adventure when he tries place a phone call.
40. Leaving Lucy Pear by Anna Solomon (Viking)
Solomon’s strong prose and fleet pacing consistently provide the essential pleasures of a good story well told. . . . This is a book governed…by earnest empathy, a desire to give each character opportunities for growth and betterment, bravery and openness. —Maggie Shipstead, The New York Times Book Review
41. Falter Kingdom by Michael J. Seidlinger (Unnamed Press)
Seidlinger continues his quest to become a literary chameleon, diving into new genres and remixing them into something wholly his own. His is a kingdom without borders. —Joshua Mohr
42. Of This New World by Allegra Hyde (University of Iowa Press)
These extraordinary stories illuminate our hunger for utopias both earthly and transcendent, and the sometimes dangerous lure of love. In Of This New World, Allegra Hyde writes with a genius scientist’s impassioned inquiry, and a poet’s lyrical, exquisite precision. —Tara Ison
43. Seeing Red by Lina Meruane (trans. Megan McDowell) (Deep Vellum)
A penetrating autobiographical novel, and for English-language readers this work serves as a stunning introduction to a remarkable author. — Publishers Weekly
44. Gaijin by Jordan Okumura (Civil Coping Mechanisms)
And what is the measure of self inside grief? Jordan Okumura’s novel Gaijin is a body song. By weaving stories of loss and myth, Okumura brings an identity to life, half real, half imagined. I was mesmerized from start to finish. —Lidia Yuknavitch
45. Patricide by D. Foy (Stalking Horse Press)
Patricide is a brooding, painful, and beautifully written book about being raised into damage by a damaged man. D. Foy has given us a how-to guide for the excision of the father and—just barely—the survival of it. —Brian Evenson
46. Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of Your Fist by Sunil Yapa (Lee Boudreaux Books)
A fantastic debut novel…. What is so enthralling about this novel is its syncopated riff of empathy as the perspective jumps around these participants–some peaceful, some violent, some determined, some incredulous… Yapa creates a fluid sense of the riot as it washes over the city. Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist ultimately does for WTO protests what Norman Mailer’s Armies of the Night did for the 1967 March on the Pentagon, gathering that confrontation in competing visions of what happened and what it meant. —Ron Charles
47. Whiskey, Etc. by Sherrie Flick (Queens’s Ferry Press)
Whiskey, Etc. by Sherrie Flick is a sharp–edged, intelligent, brilliantly written collection of short shorts by a writer at the very top of her game. One finds glimpses of Joy Williams here, but this is unmistakably Flick’s world, inhabited as it is with dogs & songs & whiskey & lovers. Of grace & undoing. The remembered & the remembering. This book took my every last breath away. —Kathy Fish
48. The Ugly by Alexander Boldizar (Brooklyn Arts Press)
A picaresque novel about mountain people, Harvard lawyers, the heft of rocks, and the power of words. THE UGLY brims with intelligence and humor. –Laila Lalami
49. Eleven Hours by Pamela Erens (Tin House Books)
Written with incredible clarity, the third novel from Erens (The Virgins) is a wonder, shifting between two protagonists with ease to tell a deeply personal narrative of childbirth, complete with tension, horror, and deep mature emotion. This novel does not sentimentalize the delivery of a child, but rather examines the surprise — mental and physical — that accompanies it. Labor stories are as old as time, but Erens’s novel feels incredibly fresh and vivid. An outstanding accomplishment.” —Publishers Weekly
50. Shelter in Place by Alexander Maksik (Europa Editions)
Alexander Maksik is a sorcerer of the first order, and Shelter in Place is a sharp, dark, jagged music conjured out of poetry, pain and ecstatic bursts of beauty. This is a powerful book. —Lauren Groff
51. Cities I’ve Never Lived In by Sara Majka (Graywolf Press)
I still can’t get some of [Majka’s] perfect assessments of the human condition out of my head. Her writing is matter-of-fact (thought very beautiful), and her characters are sad, occasionally desperate. . . . She’s incredibly effective. ―The Cut
52. Wonderland by Sam Ligon (Art by Stephen Knezovich) (Lost Horse Press)
Wonderland is a fantastic collection of stories. Sam Ligon has mastered the art of capturing the sweet derangement of love. His characters are drunk with desire and reckless in all the right ways, and his prose is incandescent, absurd, wickedly funny and, in the end, achingly true. —Steve Almond
53. Girls on Fire by Robin Wasserman (Harper)
Explores the line where close female friendships can blur into obsession and self-obliteration….At the heart of the dark story is an intoxicating and all-consuming friendship between two teenage girls. —New York Times
54. We Eat Our Own by Kea Wilson (Scribner)
The jungle is alive and everywhere in Kea Wilson’s remarkable debut novel, gorgeous and indifferent, it’s ravening appetite the very real horror unleashed by human heedlessness and hubris. Denied all explanation of motivation by his Kurtz-like director, a young American actor finds himself on a harrowing journey, taking us with him—spellbound, resistless—into ‘one of the dark places of the earth.’ —Kathryn Davis
55. A Tree Or a Person Or a Wall: Stories by Matt Bell (Soho Press)
Matt Bell has become a force in American literature and this is in no small part due to his flexibility in style… A Tree or a Person or a Wall is perhaps the most comprehensive example of his stylistic diversity.” —Vol. 1 Brooklyn
56. Among Strange Victims by Daniel Saldaña París (trans. Christina MacSweeney) (Coffee House Press)
Great fun are the jabs at academia, Mexico City and the dusty town where the action, or inaction, moves after Rodrigo meets Marcelo, a Spanish cretin with a Ph.D. in aesthetics. These flameless flâneurs humph and hump, personifying urban malaise. —New York Times Sunday Book Review
57. Square Wave by Mark de Silva (Two Dollar Radio)
Square Wave is an experimental paean to process, to our oscillations between extremes, to the revolutions that come and go and the worlds they leave behind in the ping-ponging between the poles that lie at the hinterlands of human experience. —Tyler Malone, Los Angeles Times
58. Surveys by Natasha Stagg (MIT Press)
Stagg’s slim novel deftly explores the shifting landscape of celebrity through the story of a young woman’s rise from obscurity to Internet stardom—the “low numbers” to the “high ones”—after an online flirtation with a semifamous social media personality.—New York Times Book Review
59. Memoirs of a Polar Bear by Yoko Tawada (trans. Susan Bernofsky) (New Directions)
In ‘Memoirs,’ when a polar bear walks into a bookstore or a grocery store, there are no troubles stemming from a lack of opposable thumbs. As with Kafka’s animal characters, we are freed to dislike them in the special way we usually reserve only for ourselves. —Rivka Galchen
60. Every Kind of Wanting by Gina Frangello (Counterpoint)
[A] charming novel… She has subverted the old-fashioned suburban narrative, and filled it with a constellation of quirky characters… Frangello threads conflicts over ethnicity, class, and sexuality into the novel, and injects a smart topicality that gives it special resonance.—National Book Review
61. A Collapse of Horses: Stories by Brian Evenson (Coffeehouse Press)
Some of the stories here evoke Kafka, some Poe, some Beckett, some Roald Dahl, and one, a demonic teddy-bear chiller called “BearHeart™,” even Stephen King, but Evenson’s deadpan style always estranges them a bit from their models: He tells his odd tales oddly, as if his mouth were dry and the words won’t come out right. —New York Time Sunday Book Review
62. The Gardens of Consolation by Parisa Reza (trans. by Adriana Hunter) (Europa)
an absorbing debut novel. Reza…succeeds in imbuing the Amir’s story with stirring sociopolitical importance…Talla is formidable, hard-to-forget heroine. —Publisher’s Weekly
63. Dahlia Cassandra by Nathaniel Kressen (Second Skin Books)
The most wonderful thing about the way Kressen writes is that he’s direct–digestible to many while still remaining literary. He has the classic skill of Salinger in this way. – PANK
64. Abahn Sabana David by Marguerite Duras (trans. Kazim Ali) (Open Letter Books)
Duras’s language and writing shine like crystals. —New Yorker
65. Commonwealth by Ann Patchett (Harper)
Patchett brings humanity, humor, and a disarming affection to lovable, struggling characters… Irresistible. (Library Journal)
66. The Birds by Tarjei Vesaas (Re-issue) (Archipelago Books)
Mattis, the protagonist of … The Birds, surely deserves a place among the cadre of unforgettable characters in modern literature… Vesaas’s prose, spare and straightforward, soars with a poignancy of feeling… Mattis’s disability is the pivot upon which the novel unfolds and also serves to amplify the ways that “normal” people, too, are “handicapped.” Vesaas allows us see that without Mattis’s sensitivity, perceptivity, and honesty, we, too, are impaired, limited from living a full life. — Lori Feathers, World Literature Today
67. Defiant Pose by Stewart Home (Re-issue) (Penny-Ante Press)
Defiant Pose simultaneously serves as both glorification and critique of this style of counter-culture, aggressively exposing itself and its subjects to the reader, to shock and satirize…The text is a kind of mimetic, fun-house mirror, intentionally distorting and objectifying but still ultimately showing a glaring reflection of a society with deep-seeded, otherwise ignored flaws. — Angel City Review
68. The Sleeping World by Gabrielle Lucille Fuentes (Touchstone)
A searing, beautifully written novel that captures the exhilaration and dangers of 1970s post-Franco Spain. Mosca, a bitterly jaded young woman, goes on a harrowing search for her missing brother—and the history that destroyed their lives. Violent, heartbreaking, unforgettable, The Sleeping World is a stunning debut.” — Cristina Garcia
69. The Story of Hong Gildong (translated from the Korean by Minsoo Kang) (Penguin)
[A] marvel-filled swashbuckler…Besides being half fairy tale, half social protest novel, The Story of Hong Gildong possesses a profound resonance for modern Koreans.” —Michael Dirda, The Washington Post
70. Experimental Animals (A Reality Fiction) by Thalia Field (Solid Objects)
Advancing what she started twenty years ago with her earliest explorations of essayistic fiction, Thalia Field has now composed what very well might be her life’s work—a tragic, comical, and utterly fascinating tale of a marriage that vividly encapsulates not only the origins of experimental medicine, but an entire age that spirited experiments in literature, science, engineering, film, etc. It’s nothing less than a history—gorgeously fictional, purposefully essayistic—of how we got where we are. —John D’Agata
