Best of Last 10 Years

This wing is a bet. Nobody knows which of these will still be read in fifty years, and that makes it the liveliest room in the library. I can tell you The Overstory made a thousand readers plant trees and a thousand critics roll their eyes; that Lincoln in the Bardo should not work at all and does; that Normal People is either a masterpiece of intimacy or a very long text thread, depending on the week you ask me. One promise: nothing landed on this shelf for being talked about. It landed for surviving a second read. Come argue with the present. The past can wait; it has had practice.

Read the opening section, eight compressed novellas as good as anything Powers has written, and feel the next four hundred pages decompress. Once the characters converge on the activist plot, they thin into delivery systems for dendrology, and the lectures arrive on schedule. Trees get the best writing. Humans get the homework.

— against The Overstory

Four years of misery that one honest conversation in any chapter would dissolve; Rooney runs the same misunderstanding on a loop and asks you to read it as fate. The flat declarative prose without quotation marks is either elegance or affectation, depending on your patience. Connell and Marianne discuss Marxism between scholarships and country houses; the politics stay decorative.

— against Normal People

Vollman's enormous swollen member is a running gag in a book about a dead child, and the tonal whiplash between vaudeville ghosts and presidential grief never fully resolves. The collage format mixes real and invented citations without telling you which is which, and reading hundreds of attributed fragments feels like assembling the novel yourself.

— against Lincoln in the Bardo