The Best Books of 2013

Shouts out to the people commuting to work on public transportation who still lug books. This labor of love is for you. Staying up on the latest movies and TV eats up enough time—carving out a space for the many hours of concentration required to read a novel is another thing entirely. The even harder thing is finding the right books. There are far fewer movie and TV shows released in a given year as compared to books. Finding good books, the ones that stick with you for years, is a full-time job that requires, duh, lots of reading and, in most cases, a social network of other readers to keep you abreast of anything great.

By no means is this list meant to take the place of the hours spent looking for new books in journals and bookstores. It can't take the place of a group of friends who read and recommend. But there's some incredible, life-changing stuff here. These are the best books of 2013.

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Author: Brett Martin
Publisher: Penguin Press
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We're living in what could very well go down in history as television's brightest golden age. And now, there's a defining book for this era.

Superbly written and reported by GQ correspondent Brett Martin, Difficult Men is a vibrant, revealing, and highly structured look at how showrunners like David Chase (The Sopranos), David Simon (The Wire), and Matthew Weiner (Mad Men) changed the game by rewriting all of the rules. In their own unique, daring ways, these men shifted television into an era where complicated antiheroes (e.g., Tony Soprano, Don Draper) became likable protagonists.

As the quotes from said showrunners that Martin gained via countless interviews reveal, the men who created them are just as fascinating and unconventional. —Matt Barone

Author: Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson and Ben Greenman
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
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Imagine having an extensive, candid conversation with The Roots drummer, and all-around music expert, Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson that when transcribed is 282 pages long. That's Mo' Meta Blues in a nutshell, and it's a true delight.

Co-written by New Yorker editor Ben Greeman, Questlove's hugely entertaining memoir is an all-access pass into the acclaimed musician's brain, complete with every humorous anecdote (there's a Prince encounter that rivals Chappelle's Show's Charlie Murphy segment), revealing backstory (he pulls no punches in recounting how he met Black Thought and the rest of The Roots), and painful memory (he refers to the 1995 Source Awards as "hip-hop's funeral"). —Matt Barone

Author: Joe Hill
Publisher: William Morrow Paperbacks
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Like he did with his excellent genre-tweaking novel Horns, Joe Hill—yes, son of Stephen King—has given horror fiction fans something original, bold, and unclassifiable in NOS4A2, his most ambitious book to date.

Not exactly a vampire story, NOS4A2 (whose title cleverly evokes F.W. Murnau's classic silent film Nosferatu) uses some of the traditional vamp storytelling tropes to create a new horror villain extraordinaire named Charles Manx, a slithery creeper who drives a 1938 Rolls Royce, abducts children, and brings them to a nightmarish fantasy world known as "Christmasland." Trust, he's no Jolly Old St. Nick. —Matt Barone

Author: Chris Nashawaty
Publisher: Harry N. Abrams
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Roger Corman is known as the "king of the B-movie" for a good reason: He's the all-time greatest at making low-budget genre films that are high-level entertainment. Assuming, of course, that you're the type of movie fan who appreciates crab monsters, "she gods of shark reef," viking women, prehistorical planets, and wasp women. A tireless producer and director, Corman has been releasing campy, lovably cheesy romps since the 1950s, and at their best, Corman pictures are schlocky parties on screen.

You'd think it'd be impossible for any writer to put together a Roger Corman biography that's anywhere near as fun as his movies, but Entertainment Weekly writer/critic Chris Nashawaty has done just that, to a magnificent degree. Crab Monsters, Teenage Cavemen, and Teenage Nurses covers Mr. Corman's colorful career in oral history form, with Nashawaty having interviewed dozens of the man's closest big-name friends and former collaborators (including Martin Scorsese, James Cameron, Francis Ford Coppola, and Jack Nicholson, all of whom got their industry starts as Corman acolytes) to get lively and insightful anecdotes from on his sets and off. —Matt Barone

Author: Jeff Guinn
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
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Jeff Guinn and his publishers couldn't have picked a better image for the cover of his excellent Charles Manson biography, simply titled Manson. Just look at that kid in the photo—he looks like every mother's dream come true, not someone who'd grow up to become the deranged lunatic/cult leader who destroyed the 1960s free-love and good-time culture through ritualistic mass murder.

Guinn, through a boatload of original interviews and meticulous research, attempts to provide personal context to the nightmare that was, and still is, Charles Manson. Stories from his childhood reveal the early seeds of familial drama and societal anguish that would eventually sprout into hysteria and homicide. Anecdotes from Manson's time spent in a state penitentiary and his first interactions with Black Panthers are the source of the madman's racial hatred. Interviews with Manson's brainwashed minions—his followers who carried out the murders he ordered, including that of Roman Polanski's wife, Sharon Tate—exhibit the ways in which Manson was able to manipulate and puppet-master impressionable minds.

By Manson's end, you won't empathize with America's most infamous serial killer anymore than you previously had. What should result, though, is a deeper understanding about how real-life monsters are created. —Matt Barone

Author: Alan Sepinwall
Publisher: Touchstone
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Since day one, renown TV critic/blogger Alan Sepinwall has been covering the "Golden Age of television" phenomenon, popularizing the per-episode recap format that's currently in vogue and conducting exclusive interviews with the likes of Chase, Lindelof, David Simon (The Wire). His years of expertise led to The Revolution Was Televised, Sepinwall's in-depth, compelling dissection of the 12 drama programs most responsible for this sea change: Oz, The Sopranos, The Wire, The Shield, Deadwood, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Battlestar Galactica, Friday Night Lights, 24, Lost, Mad Men, and Breaking Bad.

The Revolution Was Televised was initially self-published in November 2012, creating a groundswell of online support that resulted in a glowing New York Times review and a formal deal with the Touchstone publishing company, and it's easy to understand why. Through a mixture of archival quotes, fresh interviews with network executives and the aforementioned showrunners, and in-depth research and analysis, Sepinwall's book is a vivid, fast-paced, and highly entertaining read. It's also essential for anyone whose DVR gets a regular work out. —Matt Barone

Author: Robert Kolker
Publisher: Harper
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Sometimes, you just want to feel bad, and at times like that there are books like Lost Girls: An Unsolved American Murder. It's a heart-chilling non-fiction tour-de-force about a Long Island killer who's still yet to be caught. Kolker's terrifying and intensely reported book isn't just about a true life murderer, though—the "lost girls" in question are Internet prostitutes who use websites like Craigslist to attract clients, one of whom is the still-at-large killer. Lost Girls exposes an online community and phenomenon that's so far gone largely unpublicized. —Matt Barone

Author: Dave Bry
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
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Full disclosure—I read Dave Bry's Public Apology because I work with him and he just wouldn't shut up about this book. Every day with this guy, just going on about how I had to read it, and then apologizing to me for all the strong-arming.

Kidding aside, Public Apology changed my relationship with Dave. Now I know all this stuff about him. Like, more than you expect to know about a co-worker. This series of letters to friends, family, strangers, and Jon Bon Jovi that Dave wronged at some point in his life, arranged chronologically so that it reads like a kind of memoir, is hilarious and poignant.

Each letter is an act of apology, and so, to pay homage, I'll apologize to you, Dave, for exaggerating the conversations you had with me about your book. You mentioned it to me once. I just played it up for the purpose of this blurb. I'm sorry.

Your friend,

—Ross Scarano

Author: Stephen King
Publisher: Hard Case Crime
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Stephen King's 2013 kicked into overdrive in September, when his long-awaited sequel to The Shining, titled Dr. Sleep, hit bookstores nationwide and, like all his other novels, topped all best-seller lists.

But earlier in the year, the literary titan quietly dropped a propulsive little coming-of-age novel, Joyland, about a college student who starts working in an amusement park that was once the site of a murder. Joyland's supernatural possibilities are only its hooks, though-it's really a poignant tale of friendship and self-discovery. King saved the big scares for Dr. Sleep, but Joyland is ultimately superior. —Matt Barone

Author: Lauren Beukes
Publisher: Mulholland Books
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Novels and movies about serial killers rarely offer anything new or creative, outside of the occasional inventive death scene. Lauren Beukes' The Shining Girls, however, is as ambitious as it is original.

In 1930s Chicago, Harper Curtis is a homicidal maniac, but he's also reserved, patient, and the beneficiary of a special gift-the house in which he broke into can inexplicably send him traveling into the future. Which comes in handy, since all of his "shining girls" (the explanation behind that distinction is best left for you to read) haven't even been born yet. One of them is Kirby, a bright, plucky girl who gets her investigative Lisbeth Salander on after she barely survives Harper's efforts to brutally kill her.

Beukes owes as much to Thomas Harris' The Silence of the Lambs as she does to Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tatto. With The Shining Girls, she's done both of those authors justice. —Matt Barone

Author: Joyce Carol Oates
Publisher: Ecco
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One of contemporary fiction's most prolific authors, Joyce Carol Oates got super dark in her latest dumbbell/novel, The Accursed. It's a period drama set between 1905 and 1906 in and around Princeton University (where Oates teaches). Historian M.W. van Dyck II is working through an intense amount of research materials in order to unravel the mystery of "The Curse," a plague that turned townsfolk into everything from zombies to vampires and, in one baby's case, some kind of snake-human monstrosity.

Oates has conceived a dizzying horror novel that doubles as a historical epic, a Gothic creepshow that's massive in scope but intimate in its terror. —Matt Barone

Author: Colum McCann
Publisher: Random House
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Colum McCann's follow-up to Let the Great World Spin, his novel of the 1974 tightrope walk between the World Trade Center towers, takes as its subject trips across the Atlantic Ocean between America and Ireland. Again, McCann uses history to create the kind of human drama that makes it feel all right to be alive. British pilots John Alcock and Arthur Brown, abolitionist Frederick Douglass, and U.S. Senator George Mitchell, who worked on the 1998 Good Friday peace agreement in Northern Ireland, all make appearances in the sweeping novel. —Ross Scarano

Author: Benjamin Pearcy
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
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Admit it, True Blood sucks these days, and its biggest offender is the werewolf storyline, with its lame transformations, one-dimensional characters, and Alcide's unconvincing alpha-male antics. Lycanthropes deserve much better.

And now they have something to be proud of in Benjamin Pearcy's novel Red Moon. Set in an America that resembles our own, except for the citizens that are secretly werewolves (a minor difference, of course), Red Moon isn't a horror story a la The Wolf Man. Rather, it's a socially conscious and politically minded thriller, in which a pair of young protagonists-one is a female lycan whose family has been slaughtered by government-sanctioned soldiers, the other the sole survivor of a lycan rampage on an airplane-provide gateways into Pearcy's inventive world that oppose one another (pro- and anti-lycan) but are equally sympathetic. —Matt Barone

Author: Owen King
Publisher: Scribner
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Since Owen King is the son of Stephen King and brother of Joe Hill, it's worth noting, right off the bat, that his debut novel, Double Feature, has nothing to do with horror. For that, it's an admirable and, frankly, ballsy move, one that has undoubtedly pissed a few Stephen King loyalists off, expecting something like Joe Hill's Horns and getting a literary dramedy.

Abandon those genre preconceptions, though, and you'll discover one of the year's best debuts. Double Feature follows young Sam Dolan, an aspiring movie director whose first film gets disastrously reshaped into an X-rated romp about a well-endowed janitor who has sex with trees by its producers and gives his father, a B-movie star, more ammo to use against his son, with whom he doesn't exactly have a cuddly rapport. Sam's path to redemption features run-ins and relationships with a large ensemble of colorful characters, the most interesting of whom work in the independent film community.

Owen King's novel may not be frightening like his father's best works, but there is one parallel to be made: Whereas Stephen King is great at scaring his readers, Owen's a pro at making them laugh. Seriously, Double Feature is funnier than any movie to come out this year not titled This Is the End. —Matt Barone

Author: Matt Zoller Seitz
Publisher: Abrams
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Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Chabon's first short story collection is titled A Model World. The title works in two directions. With one glance it means an ideal world, one to be imitated. But shift your perspective and the title comes to mean a three-dimensional representation of a world, a little papier mâché planet hanging in a child's bedroom.

Keep this in mind when reading film and TV critic Matt Zoller Seitz's first book, The Wes Anderson Collection, for which Chabon penned the introduction. A labor of love drawing on years of studying Anderson's movies and speaking with the director himself about his work, Seitz's study of one of the most idiosyncratic American filmmakers is a small world unto itself. Original illustrations and bright collections of behind-the-scenes photos and ephemera fill the pages of this hardbound book-cum-art-object. The Wes Anderson Collection is divided into seven chapters, one for each of the director's films. Every chapter contains a small essay from Seitz, and then a longer interview between the critic and director.

Reading the book, you feel as if you're disappearing into the miniature world of Anderson's movies, like you're playing around in the files and fastidiously kept dossiers assembled for each project. In this way, the book mimics the work. It's smart, informative, and looks beautiful. In other words, it's the perfect gift. —Ross Scarano

Author: Marisha Pessl
Publisher: Random House
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After dropping the massive smash Special Topics in Calamity Physics, Marisha Pessl kept the world waiting seven years for the follow-up. Reading Night Film, you can only assume she spent those years plotting out the intricate mystery, turning her office into a Post-It note disaster.

Night Film's protagonist is Scott McGrath, a disgraced reporter whose past obsession with enigmatic horror filmmaker Stanislas Cordova gets rekindled once Cordova's daughter, a mentally disturbed Carnegie Hall pianist, commits suicide. McGrath forms a motley crew of investigators with two younger characters with their own shrouded connections to Ashley, and together McGrath's team fall deeper and deeper down the Cordova rabbit hole, a labyrinth of occultism, death, and cult-like fans.

Pessl tends to overwrite at times, especially with her overbearing use of italics, but she's able to rectify those faults through imagination and ingenuity. Night Film often feels like a literal cyber thriller—it's an interactive experience packed with fake website pages, faux message board threads, newspaper clippings, magazine interviews with Stanislas, and other visual evidence (i.e., photographs of a flesh-and-blood Ashley) that are given full-page treatments. The overall effect is both exhilarating and unnerving. —Matt Barone

Author: George Saunders
Publisher: Random House
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If you're familiar with George Saunders, there's no real work this text here needs to do for you. You know that each new book from the satirist is an event occasioned by mountains of hyperbolic praise. Tenth of December, his latest short story collection, mines contemporary America for the bleak jokes Saunders trades in. Our heir to short-story master Donald Barthelme, Saunders illuminates the dark with more darkness. Only it's funny darkness. Like in "Victory Lap," where a young girl is kidnapped and her neighbor decides whether to intervene. Or "Puppy," a story that animal lovers should avoid, unless they want to be haunted by images of dead puppies and kittens.

If you're not a devotee, Tenth of December will change that. —Ross Scarano

Author: Susan Steinberg
Publisher: Graywolf Press
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One of the nice things about Spectacle is that it’s not experimental in any silly ways. For instance, the page layout is normal. The spacing isn’t unusual.

No, what makes Susan Steinberg’s story collection so refreshing is how concentrated the prose feels. Every sentence feels loaded, almost like a line of poetry. The stories in her collection, all narrated by women, draw on a mix of events both small and large, from plane crashes to vandalism, to get at the kinds of emotions that leave the characters shaking. —Ross Scarano

Author: Rachel Kushner
Publisher: Scribner
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No book has lit up the literary fiction scene this year quite like Rachel Kushner's second novel, The Flamethrowers. The unnamed narrator of this brisk, brainy novel moves from the American West to New York in the 1970s, pursuing her love of conceptual art and experimental filmmaking. After falling in with a group of artists, she becomes romantically involved with Sandro Valera, son of a wealthy Italian business magnate T.P. Valera.

Kushner alternates between the woman's story and the tale of T.P.'s youth, when he fought in the first World War and participated in the Futurist art movement. At the intersection of art and politics, speed and romance, revolution and self-realization, The Flamethrowers will transport you to a grim New York awaiting a blackout and an Italy on the brink of massive upheaval. —Ross Scarano

Author: Bennett Sims
Publisher: Two Dollar Radio
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All hail Two Dollar Radio, one of the best indie presses publishing young novelists. And bless Bennett Sims, the 27-year-old Baton Rouge-native who gave us a zombie novel worth reading.

Part of what makes A Questionable Shape great is how little its greatness has to do with zombies. In fact, there are very few zombies in the novel. (Most of them spend the book locked up on barges floating off the coast of Louisiana—ominous, as hurricane season is approaching.) A Questionable Shape is more like a Nicholson Baker novel, full of magic observations and descriptions of things you’ve long stopped noticing. (Just wait until the zombie apocalypse is upon us, though—then you’ll notice).

Narrated by Michael Vermaelen, a philosophy student who divides his time between hanging out with his girlfriend, convincing her to practice defamiliarization strategies with him so that they can take each other out if the time comes, and helping his friend search for his undead dad. Sims is more interested in the bigger questions raised by the idea of a zombie, and his book is all the better for it. —Ross Scarano

Author: Lucas Mann
Publisher: Pantheon
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In 2010, Lucas Mann posted up in the town of Clinton, Iowa to chronicle a single season on the life of the Clinton LumberKings, a farm team for the Seattle Mariners. A life-long baseball lover and wellspring of self-doubt, Mann produced a book from the experience, and it's as much about America in 2013 as it is about baseball. But because of Mann's heightened sense of his own predilections and the difficulties of making sweeping pronouncements, Class A never becomes too ambitious in its pronouncements. Instead, Mann observes this small town and the young men who have traveled from across the country or, in some cases, from South America, to play baseball there.

You'll laugh, you'll cry, but more importantly you'll think harder about sports and what it means to believe in something. —Ross Scarano

Author: Jesmyn Ward
Publisher: Bloomsbury
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Forget that Jesmyn Ward wrote Salvage the Bones, the National Book Award-winning story of a down-on-their-luck Mississippi family who face insurmountable odds in the days leading to Hurricane Katrina. Forget that it is perhaps one of the most important novels to be released in the last ten years, and that Ward is a fierce talent: sharp-toothed and affecting, her words cut deep and often stay with you even after you’ve finished the book. It's a kind of prose that chronicles the human condition in a bleak and beautiful way, not unlike ZZ Packer who unraveled a world of innocence and loss and strong-fisted love in Drinking Coffee Elsewhere, her debut short story collection.

You can imagine, then, that Ward’s 2013 release, Men We Reaped, about five men in her life that die within a four-year time span, one of whom is her younger brother, is a book that demands your attention. Roger, Demond, C.J., Ronald, and Joshua: these are the names, the men, the lives deserving of a story.

Part memoir, half of the book details Ward’s formative, teen, and post-college years, which helps provide greater context to what ultimately contributes to each man’s eventual demise. As it is for most people, her relationship with home (DeLisle, MS) is a complicated one, and only becomes more fraught in the wake of each man’s sudden passing. “How could I know then that this would be my life,” Ward writes, “yearning to leave the South and doing so again and again, but perpetually called back to home by a love so thick it choked me?”

If William Faulkner, often considered Mississipi’s foremost writer, was able to create disjointed realities and vivid characters with sinewy prose, then Ward has accomplished the exact opposite to similar effect: These are stories populated by people on the margins, black and brown young men and women who have, as Alice Walker so plainly put it once, “fought and kicked and fasted and prayed and cursed and cried” themselves to the point of existing. These are stories about the forgotten, the poor, the abandoned. Where Faulkner created out of the abstract, Ward creates out of the definite. “This is before Ronald, before C.J,” she writes in the book’s final chapters, “This is before Demond, before Rog. This is where my two stories come together. This is the summer of the year 2000. This is the last summer that I will spend with my brother. This is the heart. This is. Every day, this is.”

Laid bare, this is a book of deep-rooted affirmations. These men lived. These men were loved. These men were hated. These men did bad things to good people. These men were proud. These men were flawed. These men were not always men. These men were ugly. These men were beautiful. This is their story. —Jason Parham

Author: Tao Lin
Publisher: Vintage
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An excerpt from one of Taipei’s most notable negative reviews: “When I began to read Taipei on my morning commute, I wondered if I had been lobotomized in the night.”

In the context of that review, the lobotomy comment is meant as disrespect. Which is amusing because it’s actually a great articulation of Taipei’s strength. The book does rewire your brain. Tao Lin’s prose, which has been derided as “affectless,” is just as styled as any great author’s, only Lin’s is crafted to deaden the senses, to lull you into a kind of sad trance that mirrors the mind state of the novel's narrator, Paul.

Paul is a young man living in New York. He’s a writer. He does lots of drugs. His relationship with his parents, who live in Taipei, is strained. His romantic relationships are just as complicated. There isn’t so much in the way of a plot; instead, Lin’s language is the lure that drags you deeper into the dead zone that is this novel.

It’s an obnoxious thing to say, that a piece of art captures how we live now. (Who is the “we,” after all?) But for city-dwelling children of the Internet, this is it. This is right now. Maybe you don’t like what you see, but you can’t deny its power.

And if you don't believe a hipster like me, take Zadie Smith's word for it. —Ross Scarano

Author: Karl Ove Knausgaard
Publisher: Archipelago
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It's maybe insane to make the case to someone that you don't know personally that he or she should begin reading a 3,500-page memoir from a sour Norwegian, but here goes nothing.

Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle, of which A Man in Love is the second part, is the most addictive series expressly concerned with how to live. (Zadie Smith likened it to crack.) It obsessively pursues the question: How should one live? It pursues it through boredom, death, children's birthday parties. It asks that you examine your own life and how you find satisfaction and happiness, and it does it without being schmaltzy or phony or cheap or self-help-y.

The first volume, subtitled A Death in the Family, follows Karl Ove Knausgaard as he deals with the death of his alcoholic father. Within that story, there is a long detour to talk about the time he expended much energy and brain power trying to get beer for a New Year's Eve party when he was a teenager. It tracks day-to-day life and memory with such doggedness, you won't believe you aren't bored. (That must sound like a back-handed compliment, but it's just the most accurate summary of the experience.)

The latest volume to be translated into English is A Man in Love, and it mainly deals with Knausgaard meeting the mother of his children and the realities of raising a family. You've never read so much real talk about the indignities of being a parent. Or about anything, really. Karl Ove Knausgaard is the realest shit walking.

And that's the best case I can make. —Ross Scarano

Author: Hilton Als
Publisher: McSweeney's
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Junot Diaz hailed it as "the read of the year," and he wasn't kidding. In a year where so much of the pop cultural conversation has revolved around race, representations of black men and women, and what constitutes appropriation, Hilton Als' essay collection is beyond essential. Als writes about a variety of subjects, from Richard Pyror to Eminem, silent film stars to romance in the AIDS-riddled New York of the 1980s, but the through line is race and gender in America, and how they are performances both put on and inflicted upon us. What does it mean to be a white girl? Or a gay man of color? And is it possible to be one and then the other, or everything all at once?

White Girls, in addition to having the prettiest prose of the year, astounds because of how it asks the reader to work. You learn to read it as you go. You get on Als' level. And in the process, you find that your vision has been altered, and there's no seeing race or gender or sexuality the same way again. —Ross Scarano