The Best Books of 2019
You’ve seen their covers throughout the year on the subway or on your friend’s Instagram or at your favorite coffee shop. It’s time for our top books of 2019.
Our picks this year deal across cultures in themes of self-discovery and observation in an increasingly banal and absurd world. The seemingly mutually exclusive directions in which our lives are pulled more each day and the feeling that the center cannot hold. Offering up lyrical prose and wonderful storytelling, the women of Passerbuys’ choices also confront head-on the realities of everyday life.
1. Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino
recommended by Erin Allweiss, Nada Alic and Verena Michelitsch
Jia Tolentino’s meteoric rise to literary fame was capped off by the triumphant publication of her first collection of essays. The millennials’ first public intellectual dissects topics with elegiac precision whether its reality television, the wedding industrial complex, evangelical Christianity, women in literature, men in rape culture and a multitude of others in these dazzling essays that completely reorient your perspective on the peculiar world we live in.
Read Trick Mirror
2. The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Recommended by Jasmyn Story, Fatima Jones and Folasade Adeoso
The Water Dancer came with massive expectations as Ta-Nehisi Coates’ fiction debut and it did not disappoint. The book tracks Hiram Walker, a young Virginia slave who finds out that his memories trigger the power of teleportation and then uses it to help slaves flee the South. Coates’ writing has the ability to transcend the act of reading where your eyes are no longer transmitting the words to your brain but rather the flow of his prose reaches through your body and draws in the deepest focus possible. Do you need Oprah to tell you to read it? If so then she thinks you should.
Read The Water Dancer
3. Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls by T Kira Madden
recommended by Courtney Preiss and Fatima Jones
This stunning memoir documents the author’s coming of age as a queer bi-racial teenager in the wealthy swamplands of Boca Raton, Florida. Though externally her life was the picture of the modern American dream—horses, gaudy luxury cars and private school—internally Madden was dealing with addict parents, an environment that she found exclusionary and limiting and an identity she struggled to make sense of.
4. Sleeveless by Natasha Stagg
recommended by Nat Guevara and Caitlin McMullen
Stagg skillfully weaves through essays and fiction related to her life in New York during this most recent decade documenting a way of life at once incommunicable and instantly recognizable in our modern monoculture. The experimental bent of the book along with the incisively told social and professional realities establish Stagg as the modern inheritor of the long standing tradition of Renata Adler and Eve Babitz.
Read Sleeveless
5. On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong
recommended by dasha faires and beverly nguyen
Ocean Vuong’s debut novel is a logical continuation of his years of gorgeous poetry. The story of protagonist Little Dog’s family and their complicated, traumatic, beautiful lives in Vietnam and America carried Vuong to late-night-TV guest levels of fame and it is entirely deserved.
6. Three Women by Lisa Taddeo
recommended by Dasha Faires and Lyndsey Butler
Female desire is still, somewhat shockingly, a taboo topic in many corners. Lisa Taddeo explodes the notions of conventional conversations around desire and shines a light on the massively underserved nuances around women and sex. Over the course of years Taddeo tracks three women all with widely varying life experiences across the arc of their relationships in a feat of literary journalism documenting the ramifications of a student-teacher sexual relationship, a woman in a loveless marriage seeking to recapture high school romance and an accomplished woman whose husband wants her to have sex with other men.
Read Three Women
Words by Eric Margulies