It’s been a crazy year. It feels like the world has turned upside down, right side up, and sideways…and as we compiled 2024’s most read issues from Recommended Reading, it became clear that you felt like that too. Of all 53 stories we published, these five have one thing in common—instability. They are stories about a world in flux. Sometimes that world is small, the size of one man’s ego as in the year’s most read piece, an excerpt from Jo Hamya’s novel about a father suddenly realizing his daughter knows far more about him than he thought.
At other times it’s enormous—the flicker of a lightbulb is enough for the protagonist of Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! to sell all his shit, buy a camel, and start over. Radical changes can be a sign of confidence, but they can also be a sign of desperation and fragility as we see in Elif Batuman’s “The Board,” a Kafka-eyed view of the modern real estate market.
In another top read by Brian Evenson, life itself becomes unstable when a man’s mother insists that the childhood he remembers didn’t really happen. At that point, reality begins to flicker and horror ensues.
As Recommended Reading closes out the year with an astounding 658 published issues, including 2024 contributions from the likes of Marie Helene Bertino, Sarah LaBrie, Laura van den Berg, K-Ming Chang, Ryan Chapman, Djuna Barnes, Juliet Escoria, and Lorrie Moore, it’s a good time to remember that all these stories are free and accessible to everyone. But the behind-the-scenes work isn’t free. Please consider making a donation to our year-end fundraising campaign. We need your support as Recommended Reading embarks on its 14th year of publication.—Willem Marx, Contributing Editor
The list starts with the most-read, continuing in descending order.
“Her Father’s Sex Life Is the Star of the Show” by Jo Hamya, recommended by David Nicholls
This excerpt from Jo Hamya’s The Hypocrite—which has landed on many of 2024’s most notable “best of” book lists—is Recommended Reading’s most read story of the year! Recommender David Nicholls describes tearing through it with “shoulders clenched” and it is indeed a nailbiter about love, sex, and the theatrical tragedy of family relationships. This excerpt follows a famous, self-satisfied author as he attends the opening of his daughter’s play—a performance which he quickly realizes—centers on his own sexual exploits. Slowly, it dawns on the man that his daughter “is aware of the possibility of his body existing unclothed, and that she has found it to be a problem in the world.” Moreover, “Sophia is aware he has a cock.”
“The Bedtime Story That Keeps Him Awake” by Brian Evenson, recommended by Eric LaRocca
“Good Night, Sleep Tight” is the titular, skin-crawling story from Brian Evenson’s latest collection. In it, a young father reflects on his mother’s disconcerting habit of scaring him as a child. Once in a while, without warning, she would tell him a terrifying story after dark. To this day, he can’t sleep in total darkness…and to this day she denies telling the stories. His nightmarish memories become more than an exercise in uncovering childhood trauma—although the man insists that “It hadn’t damaged him, he wasn’t traumatized, he didn’t need a therapist, he was ok, he was normal, he was”—when his mother requests that he, his wife, and his young son come to stay the night. As recommender Eric LaRocca puts it, the story’s disconcerting resonance comes from a penetrating question at its very heart: “Can we trust our loved ones? Moreover, should we trust our loved ones?”
“My Son’s Love Life Is None of My Business, Except It Is” by Yukiko Tominaga, recommended by Weike Wang
Teenagedom is the period when children break out of their family’s protective shell—as the fifteen year old boy in this story tells his mother, “My life is happening as we speak. It’s here and now. And it’s all mine.” Yukiko Tominaga’s gorgeous (and gorgeously titled) debut novel, See: Loss. See Also: Love, is about all that and more. Following a single, immigrant mother, it brings an enormous amount of heart and honesty to the complex relationship she has with her son in crushingly expensive San Francisco. As recommender Weike Wang puts it, “the most beautiful thing about this book, and this particular story, is how surrounded by love she nonetheless is. Her son loves her. Her housemates, neighbors, friends. They share in her woes and her joys. They keep her close to the pulse of life and, from a place of enormous care, remind her of universal truths: ‘Kyoko, you know, dead people don’t get hurt. Only alive ones do.’”
“Not All of His Problems Are a Performance” by Kaveh Akbar, recommended by Karen Russell
Provoking a deluge of acclaim, poet Kaveh Akbar’s National Book Award Finalist debut novel, Martyr!, follows Cyrus Shams, a recovering addict, an unpublished poet, a young man haunted by death, God, and the meaning (or meaninglessness) of life. Of the novel, recommender Karen Russel writes “Akbar’s work already means so much to so many of us, and now he’s written one of the best novels I’ve ever read…From the lightning bolt surprise of its title to its expansive, transcendent final pages, Akbar remakes the form with a playfulness and a seriousness that feel inextricable.” This excerpt begins with Cyrus receiving a dubious sign from God and ends in a hospital exam room years later as he tests the social skills of fledgling doctors by acting out the pain of others. Russel captures the book best when she says, “Lifeward is where Martyr! leads us.”
“The Board” by Elif Batuman, recommended by Alina Ştefănescu
Who better to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of Franz Kafka’s death than Elif Batuman? “The Board,” included in the Kafka-anniversary celebrating anthology A Cage Went in Search of a Bird, takes an unmistakably Kafkaesque bureaucratic hellscape and twists it into a modern story about setting down roots (or not-setting-down-roots…) in an overpriced city. It’s a story about the “forever renter,” shrub-like real estate agents, and opaque, stuffy, possibly insane coop-boards. The brilliant feat, as Alina Ştefănescu describes it, is in Batuman’s “capacity to contemporize the distancing syntax that Kafka employed to estrange humans from their own claims and statements of fact” and create a “wobbling world” in which prime real estate is six or seven stories down an iron ladder.