The Best, Most Talked-About Books of 2024 (So Far)
This year is shaping up to be a good one for book lovers. There’s a posthumous printing of Nobel Prize-winning author Gabriel García Marquez’s languorous last novel, Until August, in which a happily married woman makes her annual trip to a waterfront town, where she takes a lover for the night; the first-ever biography of Andy Warhol star and queer icon Candy Darling (there’s also a biopic starring Hari Nef out later this year); All Fours, the first novel from actor and author Miranda July since 2015’s The First Bad Man; James, a radical reimagining of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of the enslaved Jim, by American Fiction writer Percival Everett; and the highly-anticipated memoir of Anna Marie Tendler, who recounts all the times throughout her life that men have called her—or, nearly driven her—“crazy.”
There’s also The House of Hidden Meanings, a juicy memoir from RuPaul that traces his life story from being an alienated young Black boy in 1960s San Diego to becoming the media mogul and gay icon he is today, an investigation into modern eating disorder culture from writer Emma Specter, philosopher Judith Butler’s latest contribution to the field of gender studies with the clear-eyed Who’s Afraid of Gender?, and several exciting debuts from writers and poets including Kaveh Akbar, Honor Levy, Ashleah Gonzales, and Liz Riggs. Whether you’re downloading a book to your device or heading to a brick-and-mortar bookshop, here are the best titles of the year to check out (so far):