100 Notable Books of 2009
The Book Review has made these selections from books reviewed since Dec. 7, 2008, when we published our previous Notables list. It was not easy picking the winners, and we doubtless made mistakes. To the authors who made the list: congratulations. To the equally deserving ones who did not: our apologies.
The ever expanding literary universe resists generalizing, but one heartening development has been the resurgence of the short story — and of the short-story writer. Twelve collections made our fiction list, and four biographies of short-story masters are on the nonfiction list.
This list will appear in print on Dec. 6, 2009. —The Editors
Previous Years: 2008 | 2007 | 2006 | 2005 | 2004 | 2003 | 2002 | 2001 | 2000 | 1999
The ever expanding literary universe resists generalizing, but one heartening development has been the resurgence of the short story — and of the short-story writer. Twelve collections made our fiction list, and four biographies of short-story masters are on the nonfiction list.
This list will appear in print on Dec. 6, 2009. —The Editors
Previous Years: 2008 | 2007 | 2006 | 2005 | 2004 | 2003 | 2002 | 2001 | 2000 | 1999
FICTION AND POETRY
'Amateur Barbarians'
By ROBERT COHENCohen’s middle-aged protagonist heads to Africa, leaving his wife back home in New England with a younger rival. (Scribner, $27.)
'American Rust'
By PHILIPP MEYERMeyer’s crime novel/road novel hybrid also manages to chronicle life in a dying mill town. (Spiegel & Grau, $24.95.)
'The Anthologist'
By NICHOLSON BAKERBaker’s ardent novel about poetry — with its hero trying, and mostly failing, to write an anthology introduction — actually does justice to poetry. (Simon & Schuster, $25.)
'The Art Student’s War'
By BRAD LEITHAUSERIn midcentury Detroit, a young woman searches for authenticity and passion in art and in love. (Knopf, $28.95.)
'Asterios Polyp'
Written and illustrated by DAVID MAZZUCCHELLIA graphic novel 10 years in the making combines a modernist style, a formalist structure and a story about a bristly academic. (Pantheon, $29.95.)
'Await Your Reply'
By DAN CHAONThree essentially separate story lines, with morbidly alienated main characters, link up at the end of Chaon’s unremittingly dark and provocative novel. (Ballantine, $25.)
'Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It'
By MAILE MELOYMeloy’s calm, intelligent prose renders her stories’ self-sabotaging characters — lawyers, unfaithful spouses, eccentric older women, Montanans — eminently understandable. (Riverhead, $25.95.)
'The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein'
By PETER ACKROYDThis clever novel’s Frankenstein hobnobs with the Shelleys. (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, $26.95.)
'Chronic City'
By JONATHAN LETHEMBeneath the gaudy makeup of this dancing showgirl of a novel, set in an alternate-reality Manhattan, is the girl next door: a traditional bildungsroman with a strong moral compass. (Doubleday, $27.95.)
'The Confessions of Edward Day'
By VALERIE MARTINAn actor, saved from drowning by an unsavory rival, learns that gratitude never follows humiliation. (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, $25.)
'Dearest Creature'
By AMY GERSTLERGerstler’s poems — skillful in every kind of comedy, yet deeply serious — show a fondness for animals without sentimentalizing them. (Penguin Poets, paper, $18.)
'Do Not Deny Me: Stories'
By JEAN THOMPSONThe woes dramatized here are no less painful for being unexceptional. (Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, $14.)
'Don’t Cry: Stories'
By MARY GAITSKILLGaitskill implicates the reader in what feels like a violation of her own characters, whose lives are more often broken than in any way admirable. (Pantheon, $23.95.)
'Every Man Dies Alone'
By HANS FALLADA; translated by MICHAEL HOFMANNThis is the first English version of Fallada’s 1947 novel, based on a real-life German couple who mounted modest but suicidal resistance against Hitler. (Melville House, $27.)
'Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned'
By WELLS TOWERThis polished story collection takes its sustenance from class conflict, rough men and strong women, and the intersection between hotheads and cool customers. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $24.)
'Family Album'
By PENELOPE LIVELYIt’s the slow, inexorable way everyone comes to acknowledge the suppressed event at the heart of this domestic novel that makes it quietly devastating. (Viking, $25.95.)
'Follow Me'
By JOANNA SCOTTA heroine bent on reinvention is at the center of this densely stitched crazy quilt of a novel, which spans six decades and a wealth of genres while evoking a quintessential American mythology. (Little, Brown, $24.99.)
'A Gate at the Stairs'
By LORRIE MOOREMoore’s latest novel, about a Midwestern college student who hires on as a nanny for a brainy couple on the eve of adoption, brandishes some big material — war, racism — in a resolutely insouciant key. (Knopf, $25.95.)
'Generosity: An Enhancement'
By RICHARD POWERSThis novel’s central figure is a woman ostensibly afflicted with hyperthymia — an excess of happiness. (Frances Coady/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25.)
'Half Broke Horses: A True-Life Novel'
By JEANNETTE WALLSAssuming her maternal grandmother’s voice, Walls, the author of “The Glass Castle,” recreates an adrenaline-charged existence on the rough-and-tumble Southwest frontier. (Scribner, $26.)
'How it Ended: New and Collected Stories'
By JAY McINERNEYThis collection, from a career now reaching nearly three decades, reminds us how broad McInerney’s scope has been and how confidently he has ranged across our national experience. (Knopf, $25.95.)
'In Other Rooms, Other Wonders'
By DANIYAL MUEENUDDINThe eight linked stories here follow the scheming of a rich and powerful Pakistani family and their employees. (Norton, $23.95.)
'Invisible'
By PAUL AUSTERThe student-hero of Auster’s masterly novel learns about love from several characters, but an affair with his sister permanently defines his personality. (Frances Coady/Holt, $25.)
'Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi'
By GEOFF DYERThis haunting novel is like a rough guide to transformation: moving from scenes of erotic decadence to scenes of squalor, the death it describes is that of craving, of intention, even of self. (Pantheon, $24.)
'The Lacuna'
By BARBARA KINGSOLVERThis novel, about a boy’s memorable bonds with Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo and Leon Trotsky, is a call to conscience and connection. (Harper/HarperCollins, $26.99.)
'Lark and Termite'
By JAYNE ANNE PHILLIPSPhillips’s inspired novel, with its Faulknerian echoes, revolves around a loyal sister and her impaired brother, who sees what others don’t. (Knopf, $24.)
'Let the Great World Spin'
By COLUM McCANNPhilippe Petit’s 1974 high-wire walk between the twin towers is pivotal to all the lives in this deeply affecting New York novel. (Random House, $25.)
'The Little Stranger'
By SARAH WATERSIn Waters’s novel of postwar anxiety, members of a decaying upper-crust English family start to come to sticky ends in their creepy mansion. (Riverhead, $26.95.)
'Love and Obstacles: Stories'
By ALEKSANDAR HEMONThe worldly eccentric who narrates these tales declares a specialty in “those brainy postmodern setups” somehow tied to identity. (Riverhead, $25.95.)
'Love and Summer'
By WILLIAM TREVORA heartbreaking and satisfying novel about the relationship between a restless amateur photographer and a shy young Irish farm wife. (Viking, $25.95.)
'The Museum of Innocence'
By ORHAN PAMUK; translated by MAUREEN FREELYThe city of Istanbul is on exhibit in Pamuk’s novel of first love painfully sustained over a lifetime. (Knopf, $28.95.)
'My Father’s Tears: And Other Stories'
By JOHN UPDIKEIn his final collection of new fiction, Updike relives the matter of a lifetime and grapples with the effects of aging, disease and death. (Knopf, $25.95.)
'Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall'
By KAZUO ISHIGUROFirst-person tales of human emotion in the waning hours of light. (Knopf, $25.)
'Nothing Right: Short Stories'
By ANTONYA NELSONNelson is drawn to the damage that results when strong women foolishly trust weak men. (Bloomsbury, $25.)
'Once the Shore: Stories'
By PAUL YOONElemental tales of lives on a South Korean island, in spare and beautiful prose. (Sarabande, paper, $15.95.)
'One D.O.A., One on the Way'
By MARY ROBISONAn angry heroine is thrust into the volatile world of her dying husband’s family, which includes his “utterly identical” twin. (Counterpoint, $23.)
'Sag Harbor'
By COLSON WHITEHEADBenji, the well-off 15-year-old black hero of Whitehead’s memoiristic fourth novel, lives in a world where life doesn’t assault him but rather affords him the time to figure out who he wants to be. (Doubleday, $24.95.)
'A Short History of Women'
By KATE WALBERTImprobably, this spare and wrenching novel lives up to its name, hopscotching through time and alternating among the lives of a British suffragist and her descendants. (Scribner, $24.)
'The Sky Below'
By STACEY D’ERASMOIt’s hard not to be seduced by D’Erasmo’s selfish hero, an artist whose hunger for expression, for a father and for a home embodies a sense of entrapment that could make anyone behave badly. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $24.)
'The Song Is You'
By ARTHUR PHILLIPSPhillips turns the notion of the artistic muse on its head and gives it a spin, delineating a pas de deux between a young singer-songwriter and the older man who actively, obsessively inspires her. (Random House, $25.)
'Too Much Happiness'
By ALICE MUNROMunro’s stories take on pulp fiction’s sensational subjects. But episodes of murder, suicide and adultery turn out to be just anterooms to an echo chamber filled with subtle and far-reaching thematic reverberations. (Knopf, $25.95.)
'Typhoon'
By CHARLES CUMMINGBritish and American spies clash in the buildup to the Beijing Olympics. (St. Martin’s, $25.99.)
'A Village Life'
By LOUISE GLÜCKIn a stylistic departure, Glück’s poems use the village as a lens to examine the lives within, which counterpoint the memories of her life without. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $23.)
'Wolf Hall'
By HILARY MANTELTolerant, passionate and humane, Thomas Cromwell is cast as the picaresque hero of this Man Booker Prize-winning novel of Henry VIII’s turbulent court. (John Macrae/Holt, $27.)
'The Year of the Flood'
By MARGARET ATWOODThrough other mouths, Atwood has brilliantly retold her 2003 novel “Oryx and Crake,” showing how the kids Glenn and Jimmy became Crake and the Snowman. (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, $26.95.)
NONFICTION
'The Age of Entanglement: When Quantum Physics Was Reborn'
By LOUISA GILDERGilder’s book brings the reader into a mix of ideas and personalities, which she handles with verve. (Knopf, $27.50.)
'The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science'
By RICHARD HOLMESThe twin energies of scientific curiosity and poetic invention pulsate through this study of “the second scientific revolution.” (Pantheon, $40.)
'Ayn Rand and the World She Made'
By ANNE C. HELLERHeller maintains critical perspective while conveying the conviction and odd charisma of Rand, whose angry message resonates today among the anti-Obama right. (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, $35.)
'Born Round: The Secret History of a Full-Time Eater'
By FRANK BRUNIA memoir by The Times’s former restaurant critic, who writes of food, family, friendship and being fat. (Penguin Press, $25.)
'The Case for God'
By KAREN ARMSTRONGArmstrong, a former nun, wants to rescue the idea of the Deity from its cultured despisers and its more literal-minded adherents alike. (Knopf, $27.95.)
'Cheever: A Life'
By BLAKE BAILEYThis detailed biography follows John Cheever’s path step by stumbling step, disclosing the addictive urges and bawling self-pity to which he subjected himself and those in his household. (Knopf, $35.)
'City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and ’70s'
By EDMUND WHITEFriends and sheer perseverance got the novelist through his years of desire, poverty and thwarted ambition. (Bloomsbury, $26.)
'Closing Time: A Memoir'
By JOE QUEENANIn Queenan’s account of his life, the belligerent priests, the poverty, the girls and the music all pale beside the rages of his drunken, violently abusive father. (Viking, $26.95.)
'Cold: Adventures in the World’s Frozen Places'
By BILL STREEVERFrom the physics of absolute zero to the cold-resistant gluttony of small birds, Streever reports on the extreme regions of low temperatures and the scientists who love them. (Little, Brown, $24.99.)
'Columbine'
By DAVE CULLENCullen’s nuanced account anatomizes the massacre, showing how readily truth was obscured by myth. (Twelve, $26.99.)
'A Country of Vast Designs: James K. Polk, the Mexican War, and the Conquest of the American Continent'
By ROBERT W. MERRYHow the 1840s paved the way to the Civil War. (Simon & Schuster, $30.)
'Cowboys Full: The Story of Poker'
By JAMES McMANUSThis copious, lively history treats the game, and the qualities it demands, as characteristically American. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $30.)
'Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression'
By MORRIS DICKSTEINDickstein demonstrates how glorious entertainments thrived in a decade of crisis. (Norton, $29.95.)
'Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits'
By LINDA GORDONAn absorbing, well-researched and highly political biography of a transformative figure in modern photojournalism. (Norton, $35.)
'Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815'
By GORDON S. WOODA grand, fascinating account of America’s first quarter-century, presented with great insight and scholarship. (Oxford University, $35.)
'The Evolution of God'
By ROBERT WRIGHTIn his careful yet provocative contemplation of religious history, Wright sees continuous positive moral change over time but denies the specialness of any individual faith. (Little, Brown, $25.99.)
'A Fiery Peace in a Cold War: Bernard Schriever and the Ultimate Weapon'
By NEIL SHEEHANSheehan fully sets Schriever, a crucial figure behind the creation of America’s ICBM force, in the context of the cold war’s early years. (Random House, $32.)
'The Fires of Vesuvius: Pompeii Lost and Found'
By MARY BEARDA Cambridge classics professor leads a fine tour, turning up surprises around every corner. (Belknap/Harvard University, $26.95.)
'The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt'
By T. J. STILESStiles writes with care and panache about the quintessential “robber baron,” a man widely revered as well as hated. (Knopf, $37.50.)
'Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor'
By BRAD GOOCHWitty, obsessed and almost inhumanly brave, O’Connor was peculiar, her work even more so. But Gooch strives to make it all quite normal. (Little, Brown, $30.)
'Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City'
By GREG GRANDINFord tried and failed to build an ideal American society on an Amazonian rubber plantation. (Metropolitan/Holt, $27.50.)
'The Good Soldiers'
By DAVID FINKELFinkel’s harrowing chronicle of modern combat is based on the eight months he spent with an Army battalion in Iraq. (Sarah Crichton/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26.)
'The Ground Truth: The Untold Story of America Under Attack on 9/11'
By JOHN FARMERA senior counsel to the 9/11 Commission assails the Bush administration’s depiction of the event as so much public relations flimflam. (Riverhead, $26.95.)
'Hiding Man: A Biography of Donald Barthelme'
By TRACY DAUGHERTYNot dwelling on Barthelme’s dark soul or his uneven work, Daugherty has created a convincing narrative from a life that was engaged, passionate and maybe even fulfilled. (St. Martin’s, $35.)
'Horse Soldiers: The Extraordinary Story of a Band of U.S. Soldiers Who Rode to Victory in Afghanistan'
By DOUG STANTONAn uplifting account of how Special Forces soldiers joined with mounted local militias to beat back the Taliban in 2001. (Scribner, $28.)
'In Fed We Trust: Ben Bernanke’s War on the Great Panic'
By DAVID WESSELA hair-raising tale of the race to stave off a depression. (Crown Business, $26.99.)
'The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America'
By STEVEN JOHNSONA satisfying genre-blending consideration of Joseph Priestley and his fertile ideas. (Riverhead, $25.95.)
'The Last Empress: Madame Chiang Kai-shek and the Birth of Modern China'
By HANNAH PAKULAPakula’s often absorbing biography presents Madame Chiang as far more complicated, awful and brilliant than we had imagined. (Simon & Schuster, $35.)
'Lit: A Memoir'
By MARY KARRDespite the deep seriousness of the topics here — motherhood, disintegrating marriage, alcoholism, depression, God — nothing can keep Karr from being funny. (Harper/HarperCollins, $25.99.)
'Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World'
By LIAQUAT AHAMEDIn a sweeping narrative built around four powerful central bankers, Ahamed describes the cascading series of events that led to the Great Depression. (Penguin Press, $32.95.)
'Losing Mum and Pup: A Memoir'
By CHRISTOPHER BUCKLEYIn its moments of real ambivalence, this loving and funny filial memoir of Bill and Pat Buckley is surprisingly strong drink. (Twelve, $24.99.)
'The Lost Child: A Mother’s Story'
By JULIE MYERSONMyerson interweaves powerful scenes of her son’s drug addiction with the story of a young consumptive who died in 1838. (Bloomsbury, $26.)
'The Lost City Of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon'
By DAVID GRANNGrann follows the trail of the English adventurer/explorer Percy Fawcett, who disappeared in 1925. (Doubleday, $27.50.)
'Lost in the Meritocracy: The Undereducation of an Overachiever'
By WALTER KIRNThe witty, self-castigating story of how Kirn’s schooling left him “not so much educated as wised up.” (Doubleday, $24.95.)
'Louis D. Brandeis: A Life'
By MELVIN I. UROFSKYAn admiring biography of the Supreme Court justice as a reformer and legal innovator. (Pantheon, $40.)
'The Mercy Papers: A Memoir of Three Weeks'
By ROBIN ROMMRomm’s fury over her mother’s cancer is magnetic, with the power to both repel and attract, and here it is transformed into an instrument for pursuing truth. (Scribner, $22.)
'Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town'
By NICK REDINGIn his unnerving portrait of Oelwein, Iowa, Reding depicts a catastrophe of Chernobylish dimensions, precipitated by the loss of jobs and the rise of methamphetamines. (Bloomsbury, $25.)
'My Paper Chase: True Stories of Vanished Times'
By HAROLD EVANSEvans was a large part of the era of British newspapers he describes, when journalists were literate buccaneers. (Little, Brown, $27.99.)
'The Myth of the Rational Market: A History of Risk, Reward, and Delusion on Wall Street'
By JUSTIN FOXIn this essential account, Fox zeroes in on the academics whose efficient-market theories enabled abuses. (Harper Business/HarperCollins, $27.99.)
'Open: An Autobiography'
By ANDRE AGASSIBracingly devoid of triumphalist homily, Agassi’s is one of the most passionately anti-sports books ever written by a superstar athlete. (Knopf, $28.95.)
'A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster'
By REBECCA SOLNITA powerful work that offers an impassioned challenge to the social meaning of disasters. (Viking, $27.95.)
'Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life'
By CAROL SKLENICKASklenicka’s biography is invaluable as a chronicle of Carver’s growth as a writer, particularly in its account of his difficult, ultimately poisonous relationship with the editor Gordon Lish. (Scribner, $35.)
'Satchel: The Life and Times of an American Legend'
By LARRY TYEAlong with athletic ability, showmanship helped make Satchel Paige the most lasting symbol of black baseball. (Random House, $26.)
'Securing the City: Inside America’s Best Counterterror Force — the NYPD'
By CHRISTOPHER DICKEYMuch credit for success goes to Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly. (Simon & Schuster, $26.)
'Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work'
By MATTHEW B. CRAWFORDAn encomium to manual skills, by a political philosophy Ph.D. who can rebuild VW engines. (Penguin Press, $25.95.)
'The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom'
By GRAHAM FARMELOThe quantum pioneer had an almost miraculous apprehension of the physical world, coupled with an innocent incomprehension of other people. (Basic Books, $29.95.)
'Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original'
By ROBIN D. G. KELLEYA superbly textured, compassionate biography. (Free Press, $30.)
'The Third Reich at War'
By RICHARD J. EVANSThis riveting final volume to Evans’s magisterial trilogy illuminates the endless human capacity for evil and self-justification. (Penguin Press, $40.)
'The Weight of a Mustard Seed: The Intimate Story of an Iraqi General and His Family During Thirty Years of Tyranny'
By WENDELL STEAVENSONThis elegantly told story weaves together the Iraqi past and present. (Collins/HarperCollins, $24.99.)
'When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women From 1960 to the Present'
By GAIL COLLINSA Times columnist’s thorough, smart and often wry account of American women’s strides and the hurdles they still face. (Little, Brown, $27.99.)
'Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector'
By BENJAMIN MOSERThe Brazilian writer was born to remorse, shaken by trauma and imbued with a deep sense of alienation. (Oxford University, $29.95.)
'The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America'
By DOUGLAS BRINKLEYRoosevelt, as shown in this vast, energetic book, saw conservation as crucial to America’s military and moral standing. (Harper/HarperCollins, $34.99.)
'Worse Than War: Genocide, Eliminationism, and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity'
By DANIEL JONAH GOLDHAGENA sense of urgency runs through this disturbing exploration of the motives and actions that have led to mass murder. (PublicAffairs, $29.95.)
'Yours Ever: People and Their Letters'
By THOMAS MALLONMallon’s fine meditation on the art of letter-writing embraces old friends — Flaubert, Freud, the Mitfords — and plenty of unknowns as well. (Pantheon, $26.95.)
'Zeitoun'
By DAVE EGGERSThis suspenseful nonfiction account of what happened to a Syrian-American man and his family after Hurricane Katrina is a powerful indictment of Bush-era policies. (McSweeney’s, $24.)
