If ever there was a book deserving to be read in print, this is it. On the righthand pages of Rankine’s masterpiece are poems, stories, and images circling this year’s primal question—what is the real status of racism and difference in this world? On the lefthand side, Rankine offers a contrast: sidebar conversation, ephemera, and pieces of evidence that sometimes go counter to the opposite page. The book creates a live dialogue with itself and its eponymous us. Rankine is deservedly lauded as one of our major national poets and thinkers of the American and the Black experience, and in this gorgeous volume she pushes the boundaries of what a physical book can do while maintaining the intimacy and immediacy of her previous work. The admissions here feel confidential and active, as if Rankine were informing us of her struggles and doubts in real-time.

The subtitle is important: the reckoning lands in ways both personal and societal as Hong exposes her friendships and poetry career in order to explore the ways racism is internalized and enacted by Asian-Americans. One gets the sense that Hong is a poet who has been forced into an essay collection, having no other choice but be as direct as possible. Whereas Rankine employs form and structure to complicate her book’s ideas, Hong is utterly naked with her confessions and shameful moments, and her frankness leads to the book’s most Sedaris-like moments of gutting hilarity (her recounting of a school rivalry, especially). Both Rankine and Hong’s books are only secondarily instructive — the primary mode of both is the ecstasy of revelation: seeing one’s world clearly, no matter how ugly or self-incriminating.

The narrator of Kunzru’s ninth novel is a writer on fellowship at a literary center in Berlin, but of course cannot write. Instead he spends the precious time away from his family touring the gothic shadows of the town’s Nazi past and obsessively bingeing a police procedural that seems to be deploying subliminal alt-right messaging. This is a thrilling novel that bridges the real and the fictional, bringing the last four years of political strife under the guise of a fractured mystery. In a year where everyone is asking others to question their politics, Red Pill questions our very cores: the issue of the self and who controls it. Kunzru has stated that this is the middle volume of a loose trilogy about the arts—the first being his novel White Tears which took on music just as Red Pill takes on writing—and we look forward to the third, which will explore the visual arts.

This long awaited follow-up to Clark’s celebrated Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is a quieter, calmer fantasy novel with some wonderfully nasty surprises in its third act. Piranesi uses the trappings of the magic portal tradition of Narnia, but strips away the quaint aspects of the genre by playing out the violence of suddenly finding yourself in a strange new world without knowing how to return home. The world itself is extremely memorable — a landscape made of only interior hallways and marble statues, but also filled with water, clouds, and avian life. Piranesi begins as a dream of pure fantasy, and indeed perhaps as a pure novel, and slowly shows how both Eden and art will always be corrupted by human hands.

Minor Detail joins the pantheon of short political novels you can read in one sitting — 1984, Darkness at Noon, The Stranger. The novel begins in the early dog days of the Israel-Palestine conflict, and pivots into a new point of view that moves beyond a binary story of warfare. Translated from Arabic, the staid prose belies the characters’ deep well of loneliness and desire to make sense of the past. In a revolutionary year, it feels appropriate to celebrate Shibli’s book that features literal revolutionaries, especially those who seem too insignificant to even be noticed, those that the written record threatens to cross out and write over.

Evans’ second story collection is deadly and funny, with equal emphasis on both. There were so many fantastic contributions in African-American fiction this year, but Evans stands out with the way her barreling plots knock her characters off their feet, with barely enough time for the narrator to catch up and explain what happened. Evans is a genius at dramatizing the absurd comedic dance of racism, particularly in the book-capping novella. Can art serve as a corrective to history? Evans’ answer is surprising, inventive, and widens her own literary landscape. But it is worth noting that the stories that precede the novella are not simply preamble to the main event; they are each formidable visions of the fears produced by the disease of racism, and should be savored individually. Evans is a short story writer, a rare master of the form, and one should not sit waiting for her novel in order to begin reading her work.

What will we ultimately remember about this annus horribilis? Gabbert sets us up perfectly during this (hopefully) middle stage of the pandemic with her thorough explorations of how we collectively process and recall disasters. The individual essays use Chernobyl, the Titanic, climate change, and other instances of apocalypse, all of which Gabbert brings to new life by unearthing lost details and framing each event in terms of our recollection of them, not necessarily the events themselves. The collection threads together a treatise on human capacity for mis-remembering and how we go about protecting ourselves from suffering. At one point she wonders which is more true – whether emotions are ideas, or whether ideas are emotions — and these essays as a whole demonstrates that the two are symbiotic.

From Ezra Pound to Tracy K. Smith most recently, there exists a long tradition of western poets who translate Chinese poetry relying on their own internal poetic compass rather than knowing the source language. Translator David Hinton stands fundamentally opposed to that practice. His career has been slavishly devoted to Chinese classical poetry (which reads to modern Chinese readers as Middle English poetry does to us), not only translating it for grammatical and syntactical precision, but also with an eye for recreating in English the coherent worldview of that era and dynasty. (The book, in fact, was published alongside a separate and equally fascinating volume exploring the untranslatable aspects of Chinese cosmology and philosophy, Awakened Cosmos: The Mind of Classical Chinese Poetry). With the structure of his selection of Tu Fu’s works, Hinton also illuminates, perhaps for the first time for English readers, the biographical sweep of the poet’s writing — namely his constant dodging of civil war — and reveals the beloved nature poet as a chronicler of the refugee experience.

This poetry collection maps the extraordinary events of the author’s uterine tumor alongside the figure of Mary, with whom the speaker finds deep companionship, as if thousands of years do nothing to separate them or their experiences of patriarchy. Deluge refers to both the incessant bleeding that accompanies the tumor and, of course, the flood. Chatti’s world of faith is derived from the Qur’an, where Mary herself is explored in greater detail than in the Bible, and the book is often a twin portrait of the female body, in all its biology and also its historical contexts. “Because life is grotesque / and absurd, the doctor uses a fetal chart to track my tumor’s growth” is part of the same poem that includes “when Mary gives birth, it is not clinical. / The sun bearing down on / her like an animal, a thousand / puny suns running / like yolks in globules of sweat.” Chatti employs the language and rhythms of prayer and devotion to break open her suffering and illuminate the trajectory of her medical journey in ways that are heartbreaking and epic.

What happens when a poet of color finds a wide audience in the United States? The first page of this collection reveals a secret title, one which Smith did not want non-black people saying aloud. This is just one of this collection’s many charms, that it has at least two audiences in mind. The poems are equally adept at making gestures towards white literary respectability, and also knowing how to say fuck it with total aplomb. There is a thrilling sense that every line could at any moment turn from being a joke to being a takedown and back again without warning. Released prior to the pandemic, Homie is the best way to end this year. Everything that we need to hear about the necessity of friendship and joy in the face of bleakest loss and violence Homie already said when it was published in January. It is only fitting that Smith has the last word in 2020.