The best-written recent literary and speculative fiction
Links to three new picks.
Coming soon for paid subscribers: the best-written book of the month.
Many readers who completed our survey said they were finding our posts too long. That’s why we’ve split the picks into separate pages.
Recent literary fiction
—‘Vuong may have joined the ranks of an elite few great novelists’-Los Angeles Times‘; ‘Heartbreaking, heartwarming yet unsentimental, and savagely comic all at the same time'-Guardian
‘The hardest thing in the world is to live only once… But it’s beautiful here, even the ghosts agree. Mornings, when the light rinses this place the shade of oatmeal, they rise as mist over the rye across the tracks and stumble toward the black-spired pines searching for their names, names that no longer live in any living thing’s mouth.’
—'A major new talent announces himself’ Attica Locke
‘In the beginning was the Word, but before the Word spoke there was the Devil, and he was hell-bent on sowing unrest and upheaval among the angels in heaven. You see, the Devil loved nothing so much as stirring shit up, inciting seraphim to fisticuffs — Jophiel and Michael all but threw hands when the Devil doused the former’s flaming sword and blamed the latter — and, worst of all, confounding that tall, not terribly bright archangel Gabriel’s mind with questions like: How does God expect us to reconcile free will with Providence Divine?’
Recent speculative fiction
‘The sky turned to night as I walked through the city, and the streets emptied in the blue dusk. I imagined the way the other women might walk as they headed toward this pharmacy, a casual, but brisk stride, and I tried to walk as they did, but with care; I did not want anyone to notice me. I was joining the great crowds of women in the country who needed the words.’
At the above links you’ll find:
The opening pages of our picks. Make up your own mind about the quality of the prose.
The full list of the books we considered.
Information about submitting to Auraist. If we publish your work, we’ll invite you to answer our questions on prose style. Your answers will be considered for inclusion in the published collection of these answers by many of the world’s best writers.
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Best-written books of the century
Half my life ago, I killed a girl… I had just turned eighteen, and when you drive in new post-adolescence, you drive with friends. We were headed to shoot a few rounds of putt-putt. It was May 1988. The breeze did its open-window work on the hair behind my neck and ears. We had a month before high-school graduation. I was at the wheel. Up ahead, on the right shoulder, a pair of tiny bicyclists bent over their handlebars. The horizon was just my town’s modest skyline done in watercolors. We all shared a four-lane road; the bicycles traveled in the same direction as my car. Bare legs pedaling under a long sky. I think I fiddled with the radio. Hey what song is this? So turn it up.
Many readers who no longer buy novels cite their inability to fully immerse themselves in fiction, to suspend their disbelief in the events and characters. How important are voice and style to casting the fictional spell that helps such immersion?
Samantha Harvey
It’s interesting; I hear some people say that too. Maybe this is in part a question of realism vs. reality. What is it to immerse yourself in fiction? Why go to the effort of suspending disbelief when there’s this chimp break-dancing to K-pop in a paddling pool on TikTok? Our fascination with stories that are believably made up has lately been a bit Top-Trumped by those that are unbelievably real. Real and yet new and bizarre and which ask nothing of us.
So in part this inability (or just reluctance?) to immerse in the world of a novel reflects a cultural moment, and is born of humanity’s current love affair with the ever-more-stupendously ‘real’. There are people who, at least for now, aren’t going to get as far as the first page of a novel because why bother? There’s not only this chimp but also some seals playing volleyball and the whole of Succession and also this amazing Substack about literary style.
But if a person does get to the first page of a novel, then how important are voice and style to this idea of immersion? For me, as a reader, they’re everything. For some readers, not so much. For some readers, the spell is cast by plot. How does person A overcome thing B to get to place X and achieve thing Y? That a novel is spellbinding is its universal measure of success. How it does that is particular. And in many ways I find it all the more impressive that novels that don’t depend on voice and musicality and the gorgeousness of a precisely hewn phrase – that is, novels that depend on story and plot – can still be spellbinding. Novels are made of words, nothing else. As such they’re very low-tech. A novel that suspends primarily through dramatic turns of plot has, just like a literary novel, only words. Yet it can be as thrilling and tense as an action movie that has a hundred million dollar budget. To me, that’s extraordinary.
Read on here»
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Sam Kahn
Yeah, there’s a very interesting theoretical discussion at the moment about whether, as a society, we have lost the ability to be immersed in storytelling and can be captivated only by non-fiction. David Shields made this point in Reality Hunger and then Benjamin Labatut provided the creative answer to Shields with his invention of the ‘non-fiction novel’ in When We Cease To Understand The World.
Personally, I don’t think that literary fiction, or literary realism, is dead. I think there’s plenty of room to use fiction to understand the inner life of our era – and most of my writing is pretty straightforward realism.
However, I’m aware that the collective unconscious is moving in a different direction. Exactly as Shields predicted, people are losing interest in fictional worlds – people’s imaginations can be bought off with a budget of $10 million or so for elevated production values, but it seems to be very difficult for people to construct imaginatively in their minds, as is a cinch for other cultures.
And I’m the same way – something in me goes dead the moment I even glance at a New Yorker short story. I am trying to adjust to this and to write in a way that takes in more of ‘reality.’ My novel Melody Nelson is full of ‘real’ people – Humphrey Bogart, Philip Roth, Serge Gainsbourg, etc, etc – whom I am entirely manipulating as I would fictional characters. And I think in general this is a direction that I am pushing in.
Read on here»
Recommended
Coming soon we have the best-written recent releases, and more authors answer our questions on prose technique. Plus more selections from our subscribers’ submissions.
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Sean McNulty
