Our Favorite Books of 2023

Millions of new books appear every year, from big publishing houses, from independent publishers, from authors self-publishing, in every language in the diaspora of humanity. And every year, BFG reviews about 50 of them. It’s beyond impossible to cover the vastness of the global publishing enterprise. But we play catch-up each December. Four of our esteemed book critics offer up their favorites from the year that was. Please pay a visit to your local library or, better yet, your local independent bookstore.

Art Edwards

The Librarianist by Patrick de Witt. Dewitt is the novelist upon whom I rest my faith that contemporary literature is not entirely beholden to the customer. He takes his time unravelling the story of Bob Comet and never gives in to the idea that his work should be about getting the reader through plot points to satisfy some craving that really only makes you crave more. The plot’s there, but who cares? DeWitt’s work always reminds me to focus on what makes literary novels great in the first place: the mystery of good style.

The King of Good Intentions III  by John Andrew Fredrick. Fredrick is into finishing things, and this third installment concludes rock musician John’s navigation of his complicated love life, his life in indie rock music, and Los Angeles—a city that in the end might be all he has left. If you think a novelist’s style should aspire to something more lyrical than barely fictionalized journalism, then you should try Fredrick.

Sonic Life  by Thurston Moore. Why did Moore choose to make noise? His early experiences with “Louie, Louie” started him on a decades-long quest to fuck up every three-chord structure that ever crossed his path. His prose style, however, sticks close to journalistic rails—here’s what happened, here’s how I felt about it, here’s what happened next. In this realm, Moore’s not trying to fuck anything up, and he doesn’t.

Fire in the Canyon by Daniel Gumbiner. The idea of apocalyptic fiction used to repel me until Gumbiner rendered in this title a forest fire or two that threatens to upend a segment of American culture. One in eight of us is going to be a climate refugee by 2050. Why did I not want to know what it would look like? Because I’m a coward. Gumbiner gives us the big, scary truth lingering behind our insatiable drive toward human fulfillment. It’s only fair we understand, viscerally, the stakes.

The Ballad of Buttery Cake Ass by Aug Stone. Stone surprises everyone with the best novel about rock music fandom since High Fidelity. He sends his vinyl collector protagonist along with his best friend on a quest to find Buttery Cake Ass’s Live in Hungaria album, which—whether it exists or not—holds all of the magic of rock music itself. As the bread crumbs fall, it’s clear the duo is just looking for an excuse to indulge their musical obsession. Stone sentence-by-sentence wordplay becomes a new kind of literary comedy.

Chris Farnsworth

The Deluge by Stephen Markley—There are many, many books wallowing in the end of the world. As we move into a century that looks more and more like William Gibson’s cyberpunk future, novelists are doing their best to keep up. Markley is one of the few who succeeds. He creates living, breathing characters, each with a distinctive voice, to witness the sudden and terrible unraveling of everything we know. Governments and economies and nations collapse in The Deluge, but it always feels personal, especially the story of one young man plunging deeper into poverty and addiction as things fall apart. A remarkable book that takes the job of a novel seriously, to illuminate the dark and imagine the unthinkable.

Titanium Noir by Nick Harkaway — Harkaway, the author of Gnomon and other trips into alternate realities, imagines the perfect metaphor for the people who rule our current world. In his novel, the wealthy have access to a drug that defeats aging and death, but also makes them literally larger than life — superhuman Titans who tower over the lesser mortals beneath them. When one of these Titans is murdered, Cal Sounder, a PI who specializes in erasing their scandals, is called in to find the killer. The result is a fascinating sci-fi noir that takes place in the shadows cast by giants.

The Circumference of the World by Lavie Tidhar—A true tour de force from Tidhar, who can move effortlessly between genres in all his works. The novel is the story of an apocryphal missing novel by a science fiction writer that may hold the key to the secrets of the universe, and the people who try to find it. It’s either a defense against the entities that view our existence as entertainment and food, or it’s a cynical ploy to get rich by exploiting people dumb enough to believe in such things. Or maybe it’s both. Like a particle in quantum physics, the very act of seeking the book seems to change it, and the story keeps mutating all the way to the end.

Gangsters Don’t Die by Tod Goldberg—The final volume in Goldberg’s Gangsterland trilogy about a Chicago hitman who hides out from the feds as a rabbi in Las Vegas. Sal Cupertine, AKA David Cohen, lives on a knife’s edge between good and evil — helping people in genuine need while recycling the bodies of murder victims into the lucrative organ and body trade. The plotting alone is impressive as Cupertine and Cohen’s lives merge into one again, but Goldberg’s real skill is to explore morality and justice as his protagonist struggles to escape the consequences of his actions and his family’s bloody history.

The Future by Naomi Alderman–Like Markley, Alderman writes about the end of the world. But unlike in The Deluge, Alderman steers into the absurdity and adventure of a planet skidding out of control. There is more deadpan humor and more action as a group of multi-billionaires plot to escape the consequences of the civilizational collapse they’ve helped trigger with their sprawling monopolies. Along for the ride is an influencer who somehow got a copy of the app that will guide them through the mounting disasters to their island hideaway. Stacked with as many levels and reveals as a great video game, it’s a pitch-perfect mockery of the megawealthy who believe they can hide out in New Zealand until the world is ready to be exploited again.

Sharyn Vane

Yellowface, by R.F. Kuang–If you appreciated The Other Black Girl’s skewering of racism in publishing, Yellowface is for you. If you enjoy recoiling in horror as someone makes a series of poor choices and then unfathomably compounds them, Yellowface is also for you. June purloins her dead friend’s unfinished manuscript about Chinese workers in World War I, and launches her cosplay as an Asian author. The novel unpacks the murky motives of industry veterans, as well as the social-media flaying that so often greets the fallen. It’s a deliciously cringy way to contemplate which writers get to tell a community’s stories.

Cutting Teeth, by Chandler Baker–Baker (The Husbands) has a knack for interrogating societal expectations in her thrillers. Her newest plumbs early motherhood’s distinct blend of exhaustion and desperation in a frame that includes a dead body and preschoolers with a taste for blood. Baker nails how new moms pressure themselves to child-rear correctly, no matter how outlandish the task. Mix in humor that bites as much as the toddlers and it’s a wild ride of a murder mystery.

I Have Some Questions For You, by Rebecca Makkai –Dark academia is my love language, and Makkai’s newest is that and more. L.A. podcaster Bodie returns to the New Hampshire boarding school of her youth to teach. A student’s project gets her digging into the messy history of the drowning murder of Bodie’s roommate, Thalia. There is the expected showcase of bright young things impossibly sure of themselves, but Makkai also digs into shifting perceptions of truth,#MeToo, racism, online pillory, and more. The book could have been an overwhelming mishmash, but Makkai’s prodigious skill in both plotting and prose renders this a gorgeously intricate (and absorbing) tale.

Michael Washburn

Stories, by William Faulkner–Readers interested in Faulkner’s short fiction will thank the Library of America for the release in November of its weighty sixth volume of his writings. It is a work that not all publishers would have dared to put out in this day and age. Faulkner writes about a real place—or rather that synthesis of settings he named Yoknapatawpha County—during an actual period of history. In doing so, he does not shy away from presenting the ugly attitudes of some denizens of Deep South during and after Reconstruction.

Midnight Rambles: H.P. Lovecraft in Gotham–by David J. Goodwin. Not everyone knows that Lovecraft’s worldwide fame was entirely posthumous and he was poor and miserable for much of his brief life. The few bright spots were his short-lived marriage to Sonia H. Greene and the times he spent courting her in New York and walking all over the city with friends who shared an interest in the history and architecture of various neighborhoods. Goodwin raises a question that will haunt students of literature and Lovecraft scholars everywhere: If Lovecraft had settled down in New York for the long haul, as his smart and dedicated romantic interest Sonia H. Greene wished quite badly, would he have gotten a high-caliber literary agent, landed remunerative book deals, and escaped obscurity and the suffocating attentions of his two aunts in Providence? We will never know. Throughout the narrative, Goodwin juxtaposes accounts of Lovecraft’s anti-Semitic bigotry—including some hair-raising statements—with his tenderness toward and love for a Jewish woman.

Hollywood and the Movies of the Fifties–by Foster Hirsch. The studios, and their bosses, were as callous and brutal in the fifties as they are today. Hirsch’s Exhibit A is Jack Warner, head of what was then, as it is today, one of the most powerful corporations in America, who did not hesitate to penalize stars with suspensions and blacklistings if they dared to assert their rights. Few books present such a fascinating account of the human and organizational apparatus that sprang up around the creative arts, and the struggles and drama behind the glitzy façade of Tinseltown. That that’s a cliché does not make it any less true or this book even a bit less riveting.