The 10 Best Books of 2021

 

Illustratio by Jonathan Wolstenhome

The 10 Best Books of 2021

Editors at The Times Book Review choose the best fiction and nonfiction titles this year.

How Beautiful We Were

By Imbolo Mbue

Imbolo Mbue / 'With every inch, the challenge multiplies': me and my afro

Behold the Dreamers by Imbolo Mbue review / An impressive debut

Following her 2016 debut, “Behold the Dreamers,” Mbue’s sweeping and quietly devastating second novel begins in 1980 in the fictional African village of Kosawa, where representatives from an American oil company have come to meet with the locals, whose children are dying because of the environmental havoc (fallow fields, poisoned water) wreaked by its drilling and pipelines. This decades-spanning fable of power and corruption turns out to be something much less clear-cut than the familiar David-and-Goliath tale of a sociopathic corporation and the lives it steamrolls. Through the eyes of Kosawa’s citizens young and old, Mbue constructs a nuanced exploration of self-interest, of what it means to want in the age of capitalism and colonialism — these machines of malicious, insatiable wanting.

Random House. $28.

Intimacies

By Katie Kitamura

Katie Kitamura / ‘I still feel incapable of processing what’s happening’

Intimacies by Katie Kitamura review / Difficulties of interpretation

In Kitamura’s fourth novel, an unnamed court translator in The Hague is tasked with intimately vanishing into the voices and stories of war criminals whom she alone can communicate with; falling meanwhile into a tumultuous entanglement with a man whose marriage may or may not be over for good. Kitamura’s sleek and spare prose elegantly breaks grammatical convention, mirroring the book’s concern with the bleeding lines between intimacies — especially between the sincere and the coercive. Like her previous novel, “A Separation,” “Intimacies” scrutinizes the knowability of those around us, not as an end in itself but as a lens on grand social issues from gentrification to colonialism to feminism. The path a life cuts through the world, this book seems to say, has its greatest significance in the effect it has on others.

Riverhead Books. $26.

The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois

By Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

A Triumphant Debut Novel on Black History and Coming of Age in the South

“The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois,” the first novel by Jeffers, a celebrated poet, is many things at once: a moving coming-of-age saga, an examination of race and an excavation of American history. It cuts back and forth between the tale of Ailey Pearl Garfield, a Black girl growing up at the end of the 20th century, and the “songs” of her ancestors, Native Americans and enslaved African Americans who lived through the formation of the United States. As their stories converge, “Love Songs” creates an unforgettable portrait of Black life that reveals how the past still reverberates today.

Harper/HarperCollins. $28.99.

No One Is Talking About This

By Patricia Lockwood

No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood review / Richly tragicomic debut novel

No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood review / Life in the Twittersphere

Patricia Lockwood / Priestdaddy: A Memoir / An Excerpt

Lockwood first found acclaim as a poet on the internet, with gloriously inventive and ribald verse — sexts elevated to virtuosity. In “Priestdaddy,” her indelible 2017 memoir about growing up in rectories across the Midwest presided over by her gun-loving, guitar-playing father, a Catholic priest, she called tweeting “an art form, like sculpture, or honking the national anthem under your armpit.” Here, in her first novel, she distills the pleasures and deprivations of life split between online and flesh-and-blood interactions, transfiguring the dissonance into art. The result is a book that reads like a prose poem, at once sublime, profane, intimate, philosophical, hilarious and, eventually, deeply moving.

Riverhead Books. $25.

When We Cease to Understand the World

By Benjamín Labatut. Translated by Adrian Nathan West.

When we cease to understand the world by Benjamin Labatut / Review

When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut review / The dark side of science

Labatut expertly stitches together the stories of the 20th century’s greatest thinkers to explore both the ecstasy and agony of scientific breakthroughs: their immense gains for society as well as their steep human costs. His journey to the outermost edges of knowledge — guided by the mathematician Alexander Grothendieck, the physicist Werner Heisenberg and the chemist Fritz Haber, among others — offers glimpses of a universe with limitless potential underlying the observable world, a “dark nucleus at the heart of things” that some of its witnesses decide is better left alone. This extraordinary hybrid of fiction and nonfiction also provokes the frisson of an extended true-or-false test: The further we read, the blurrier the line gets between fact and fabulism.

New York Review Books. Paper, $17.95.

The Copenhagen Trilogy: Childhood; Youth; Dependency

By Tove Ditlevsen. 

Translated by Tiina Nunnally and Michael Favala Goldman.

The Copenhagen Trilogy by Tove Ditlevsen / A masterpiece

Tove Ditlevsen’s Art of Estrangement

Childhood/Youth/Dependency review / Memoirs of art and addiction

Beyond the Cruel Facts of Her Life Are Truths That Cut Deep

Ditlevsen’s gorgeous memoirs, first published in Denmark in the 1960s and ’70s and collected here in a single volume, detail her hardscrabble upbringing, career path and merciless addictions: a powerful account of the struggle to reconcile art and life. She joined the working ranks at 14, became a renowned poet by her early 20s, and found herself, after two failed marriages, wedded to a psychopathic doctor and hopelessly dependent on opioids by her 30s. Yet for all the dramatic twists of her life, these books together project a stunning clarity, humor and candidness, casting light not just on the world’s harsh realities but on the inexplicable impulses of our secret selves.

Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $30.

How America Remembers— and Distorts — Its Slavery Past

'How The Word Is Passed' Teaches The Importance Of Reckoning With History

How the Word is Passed review / After Tulsa, other forgotten atrocities

How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America
By Clint Smith

For this timely and thought-provoking book, Smith, a poet and journalist, toured sites key to the history of slavery and its present-day legacy, including Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello; Angola, the Louisiana State Penitentiary; and a Confederate cemetery. Interspersing interviews with the tourists, guides, activists and local historians he meets along the way with close readings of scholarship and poignant personal reflection, Smith holds up a mirror to America’s fraught relationship with its past, capturing a potent mixture of good intentions, earnest corrective, willful ignorance and blatant distortion.

Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival and Hope in an American City

By Andrea Elliott

Image

Dasani Showed Us What It’s Like to Grow Up Homeless / She’s Still Struggling

To expand on her acclaimed 2013 series for The Times about Dasani Coates, a homeless New York schoolgirl, and her family, Elliott spent years following her subjects in their daily lives, through shelters, schools, courtrooms and welfare offices. The book she has produced — intimately reported, elegantly written and suffused with the fierce love and savvy observations of Dasani and her mother — is a searing account of one family’s struggle with poverty, homelessness and addiction in a city and country that have failed to address these issues with efficacy or compassion.

Random House. $30. 

On Juneteenth

By Annette Gordon-Reed

Annette Gordon-Reed on Texas history and growing up there in the ’60s and ’70s

'On Juneteenth' Historian Examines The 'Hope' And 'Hostility' Toward Emancipation

Annette Gordon-Reed’s ‘On Juneteenth’ complicates notions of Black history

This book weaves together history and memoir into a short volume that is insightful, touching and courageous. Exploring the racial and social complexities of Texas, her home state, Gordon-Reed asks readers to step back from the current heated debates and take a more nuanced look at history and the surprises it can offer. Such a perspective comes easy to her because she was a part of history — the first Black child to integrate her East Texas school. On several occasions, she found herself shunned by whites and Blacks alike, learning at an early age that breaking the color line can be threatening to both races.

Liveright Publishing. $15.95.

Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath

By Heather Clark

Shifting the Focus From Sylvia Plath’s Tragic Death to Her Brilliant Life

How do we tell the story of Sylvia Plath?

Heather Clark’s ‘Red Comet’ is an exhaustively researched, often brilliant biography of Sylvia Plath

It’s daring to undertake a new biography of Plath, whose life, and death by suicide at 30 in 1963, have been thoroughly picked over by scholars. Yet this meticulously researched and, at more than 1,000 pages, unexpectedly riveting portrait is a monumental achievement. Determined to rescue the poet from posthumous caricature as a doomed madwoman and “reposition her as one of the most important American writers of the 20th century,” Clark, a professor of poetry in England, delivers a transporting account of a rare literary talent and the familial and intellectual milieu that both thwarted and encouraged her, enlivened throughout by quotations from Plath’s letters, diaries, poetry and prose.

Alfred A. Knopf. $40.

THE NEW YORK TIMES

 

Clint Smith

'How The Word Is Passed' Teaches The Importance Of Reckoning With History

The 10 Best Books of 2021

How America Remembers— and Distorts — Its Slavery Past

How the Word is Passed review / After Tulsa, other forgotten atrocities

Hope Wabuke
June 2, 2021

One hundred years ago, from May 31 through June 1, 1921, a group of white police officers organized white citizens in an attack on the Black residents of Tulsa, Okla., with both aircraft and ground forces. As many as 300 Black Americans were killed, many more were injured, and 35 blocks of the city were destroyed, with damages amounting to what would be more than $20 million today.

How America Remembers— and Distorts — Its Slavery Past

How America Remembers— and Distorts — Its Slavery Past

The 10 Best Books of 2021

'How The Word Is Passed' Teaches The Importance Of Reckoning With History

How the Word is Passed review / After Tulsa, other forgotten atrocities

HOW THE WORD IS PASSED
A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America
By Clint Smith

By Julian Lucas
Published June 1, 2021Updated Nov. 30, 2021

Where are we, exactly, in the great American slavery reckoning? Like a poorly written series watched only on random weeknights, it’s beginning to lose coherence, even — or maybe even especially — when you pay attention. In one episode, protesters are tearing down Confederate statues and the nation is on the cusp of reparations; by the next, the federal government has condemned basic education about slavery as a form of totalitarian brainwashing. The Harriet Tubman 20 flutters from season to season like an unresolved subplot. Are we in the backlash, the whitelash, or the backlash to the whitelash, and when will white liberals lose interest? It’s enough to give anybody whiplash, especially those of us who, as descendants of the enslaved, can’t safely stop watching the interminable show.

A recreated slave cabin at Thomas Jefferson’s plantation in Charlottesville, Virginia. 
Photograph: Andrew Lichtenstein

How the Word is Passed review: After Tulsa, other forgotten atrocities

In his Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America, Clint Smith delivers a corrective both necessary and poetic

The 10 Best Books of 2021

How America Remembers— and Distorts — Its Slavery Past

'How The Word Is Passed' Teaches The Importance Of Reckoning With History

Michael Henry Adams
Sun 13 Jun 2021 13.04 BST

In fewer than 400 pages, Clint Smith’s debut work of non-fiction is an intrepid trek covering lots of ground.

Engaging our nation’s “curious institution” – “our un-atoned original sin” – the book purports to examine just eight sites.

New Orleans, the poet-author’s home town; Jefferson’s Monticello; the revisionist tourist attraction at the Whitney Plantation; the infamous maximum security prison at the 16,000-acre Angola Plantation; Blandford Cemetery, a Confederate shrine with Tiffany windows; Galveston Island, commemorating Juneteenth; New York City, enriched by slave-based enterprise; and Gorée Island, with its gate of no return, in Senegal.

All are stops on Smith’s pilgrimage. But because of his scholarly curiosity and zeal, his quest includes many more.

This is an elegiac discourse, sometimes a trifle overwrought. No matter. It answers the title’s question with often elegant emphasis. In a time when youth of color, despairing of the elusive American Dream, seek Wakanda instead – with many whites afraid to acknowledge either privilege or disparity and the role, since the beginning, slavery has played in both – the way “the word” about our history has been passed is with half-truths and delusion, but most of all through denial.

Smith “had never been taught that the largest slave rebellion in US history happened just miles from the city that had raised me … that the Louisiana Purchase was a direct result of the Haitian Revolution”.

Colossal, sculpted to endow Robert E Lee with an appearance of valor no captioning could rectify, the ignoble commander’s New Orleans monument is gone now. But noting that “at least a hundred streets, statues, parks, and schools named after Confederate figures, slaveholders, and defenders of slavery remain”, Smith suggests the task of eliminating symbols which hurt and humiliate is only just beginning.

Thomas Jefferson’s aerie at Monticello, Virginia, attests to how those so invested in maintaining Confederate memorials might consider that even antebellum architecture or old silver can be imbued with the taint of slavery’s oppression.

Persisting in keeping his wife pregnant though aware how pregnancy, which ultimately killed her, had put her life at risk, what sort of man was our third president? He demeaned African Americans as inferior and defamed black women as unattractive even to black men. Yet Jefferson maintained a decades-long relationship with an enslaved girl, begun when she was 13 and he was 43.

Enslaving 600 people, this was the man who proclaimed that all men are created equal, that: “Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that his justice cannot sleep forever … these people are to be free.”

Though he denied the intelligence and ability of all black people, Jefferson would have had very little without them. Relying on testaments from former slaves, Smith tells of one man who stated, to Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration in the 1930s, how he knew better than the libel of men like Jefferson.

We thought we was goin’ to be richer than the white folks, ’cause we was stronger and knowed how to work, and the whites didn’t and they didn’t have us to work for them anymore … We soon found out that freedom could make [black] folks proud but it didn’t make ’em rich.”

All save one of the rudimentary slave cabins and workshops along Mulberry Row that supported the luxury of Monticello have vanished. The Whitney Plantation, in Louisiana, presents a different story. To Smith, “It is a hammer attempting to unbend four centuries of crooked nails. It is a place asking the question, ‘How do you tell a story that has been told the wrong way for so long?’”

Whitney is as much a series of memorials to slaves as an exhibition about slave life. Some find it lacking in historical integrity. This is due to augmentations. One is an 1890s Queen Anne-style shingled black Baptist church, with lifelike statues of abandoned black children. There are prison cells from the early 1900s, salvaged from Pennsylvania. Smith qualifies these embellishments as perhaps “a necessary, even if imperfect, corrective against a history that has been misrepresented or ignored for so long, a place that does far more good than harm”.

Referring to the penitentiary at Angola and its history of horrors, Smith laments, “If in Germany today there were a prison built on top of a former concentration camp, and that prison disproportionately incarcerated Jewish people, it would rightly provoke outrage throughout the world.

“… White supremacy … numbs a whole country – black and white – to what would in any other context provoke our moral indignation.”

Caskets hand-made in Ghana move up Broadway towards their final resting place in New York – in October 2003. Photograph: Chip East/Reuters

Smith’s closing segment in Africa, where he discovers schoolgirls more knowledgable about the trade than most Americans, offers real hope.

Conversely, in New York his explorations inspire disappointment. He begins at the African Burial Ground, which segregated blacks outside the city walls starting in the 18th century. “These bones belong to us,” opined the chair of the landmarks commission in 1991, after the remains were unearthed.

But Smith’s visit to the site of Seneca Village, once a rustic Manhattan hamlet of 225 residents, 150 of African descent, is of more ambiguous merit. In 1860, 10 of those blacks owned their houses and so could vote: 10 of approximately 12,000 black New Yorkers, out of 813,669 inhabitants in total. Was it worth it to lose Seneca Village and gain Central Park?

Even knowing that some of those 10 black men were compensated at a rate below the true value of their property, I think so. More troubling by far is gentrification and displacement today. It has made the Treme, Washington and Harlem, with all the attainment and history each embodies, today’s Seneca Village. These were communities of color far richer than Greenwood’s Black Wall Street. Bloodless, their evisceration is no less thorough than the result of Tulsa’s race massacre.

As one knows better through this welcome work, that is how the word is passed.

• How the Word is Passed is published in the US and in the UK by Little, Brown

THE GUARDIAN