I asked a host of writers, editors, publishers to send me a list of their favorite books published in 2020. Scroll down below to see the finalist list as well as a compilation of honorable mentions. The winner of the 2020 Big Other Readers’ Choice award will be announced April 8, 2021 at 7:00 p.m. at the 2020 Big Other Book Awards Ceremony.
All the books are linked to their respective pages at Bookshop. I also set up a Big Other Shop there, where you can find the finalist list in its entirety.
Big thanks to the following people (many of whom are Big Other contributors) for their lists:
Kurt Baumeister, Dan Beachy-Quick, Charles Bernstein, Jesi Buell, Maxine Chernoff, Jane Ciabattari, Laura Cronk, Vincent Czyz, Raymond de Borja, Rikki Ducornet, Elaine Equi, Joan Frank, Forrest Gander, Erika Goldman, Johannes Göransson, Jefferson Hansen, Alissa Hattman, Hillary Leftwich, Laura Ellen Joyce, Roy Kesey, Micheline Aharonian Marcom, Rob McLennan, Joe Milazzo, David Naimon, Urayoán Noel, Aimee Parkison, D. A. Powell, Dawn Raffel, Martha Ronk, Jim Ruland, Rone Shavers, Stephanie Strickland, Ben Tanzer, Roberto J. Tejada, J. A. Tyler, Rosmarie Waldrop, Dan Wickett, Tyrone Williams, and Angela Woodward.
Stayed tuned for announcements of the longlists for the 2020 Big Other Book Awards in fiction, nonfiction, and translation! (We’ve already announced the poetry longlist.) In the meantime, here’s the list of finalists for the 2020 Big Other Readers’ Choice Award:
Finalists:
George Abraham’s Birthright (Button Poetry)
Ayad Akhtar’s Homeland Elegies (Little Brown and Company)
Rae Armantrout’s Conjure (Wesleyan)
Sasha Banks’s america, MINE (co•im•press)
Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s A Treatise on Stars (New Directions)
Tommye Blount’s Fantasia for the Man in Blue (Four Way Books)
Carmen Boullosa’s The Book of Anna (Coffee House Press), translated by Samantha Schnee
Anna Burns’s Little Constructions (Graywolf Press)
Teresa Carmody’s The Reconception of Marie (Spuyten Duyvil)
Tobias Carroll’s Political Sign (Bloomsbury Academic)
Jerome Charyn’s Cesare (Bellevue Literary Press)
Christina Chiu’s Beauty (2040 Books)
Don Mee Choi’s DMZ Colony (Wave Books)
Lucille Clifton’s How to Carry Water: Selected Poems, edited by Aracelis Girmay (BOA Editions)
Wanda Coleman’s Wicked Enchantment: Selected Poems (Black Sparrow Press), edited by Terrance Hayes
Eduardo C. Corral’s Guillotine (Graywolf)
Laura Cronk’s Ghost Hour (Persea)
Cynthia Cruz’s Guidebooks for the Dead (Four Way Books)
Moyra Davey’s Index Cards (New Directions), edited by Nicolas Linnert
Adam O. Davis’s Index of Haunted Houses (Sarabande Books)
Natalie Diaz’s Postcolonial Love Poem (Graywolf)
Debra Di Blasi’s Selling the Farm (C&R Press)
Rebecca A. Durham’s Half-Life of Empathy (New Rivers Press)
Danielle Evans’s The Office of Historical Corrections (Riverhead Books)
Percival Everett’s Telephone (Graywolf)
Carolyn Forché’s In the Lateness of the World (Penguin Press)
Aricka Foreman’s Salt Body Shimmer (YesYes Books)
Johannes Göransson’s Poetry Against All: A Diary (Tarpaulin Sky Press)
Jorie Graham’s Runaway (Ecco Press)
Ted Greenwald and Charles Bernstein’s The Course (Roof Books)
Garth Greenwell’s Cleanness (FSG)
Rachel Eliza Griffiths’s Seeing the Body (W. W. Norton & Company)
Roy G. Guzmán’s Catrachos (Graywolf)
Tina May Hall’s The Snow Collectors (Dzanc Books)
francine j. harris’s Here Is the Sweet Hand (FSG)
Yona Harvey’s You Don’t Have to Go to Mars for Love (Four Way Books)
Fowzia Karimi’s Above Us the Milky Way (Deep Vellum)
Andrew Krivak’s The Bear (Bellevue Literary Press)
Andrea Clark Libin’s Orphan of the Moon (Wet Cement Press)
Norman Lock’s American Follies (Bellevue Literary Press)
Joyelle McSweeney’s Toxicon and Arachne (Nightboat)
Cris Mazza’s Yet to Come (Blazevox Books)
Albert Mobilio’s Same Faces (Black Square Editions)
John Murillo’s Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry (Four Way Books)
Sawako Nakayasu’s Some Girls Walk Into the Country They Are From (Wave Books)
Deb Olin Unferth’s Barn 8 (Graywolf)
Lance Olsen’s My Red Heaven (Dzanc Books)
Lisa Olstein’s Pain Studies (Bellevue Literary Press)
Tracy O’Neill’s Quotients (Soho)
Caryl Pagel’s Out of Nowhere Into Nothing (FC2)
Claudia Rankine’s Just Us (Graywolf)
Joan Retallack’s Bosch’d (Litmus)
Legna Rodríguez Iglesias’s Title/Título (Kenning Editions), translated by Katherine M. Hedeen
Lauren Russell’s Descent (Tarpaulin Sky Press)
Loie Rawding’s Tight Little Vocal Cords (Kernpunkt)
Rone Shavers’s Silverfish (Clash Books)
Jason Teal’s We Were Called Specimens (Kernpunkt)
Gale Marie Thompson’s Helen or My Hunger (YesYes Books)
Lidia Yuknavitch’s Verge (Riverhead Books)
Micah Zevin’s Metal, Heavy (Olena Jennings)
The Big Book of Modern Fantasy (Vintage), edited by Ann VanderMeer and Jeff VanderMeer
Black Imagination: Black Voices on Black Futures (McSweeney’s), edited by Natasha Marin
Poetics for the More-Than-Human World: An Anthology of Poetry and Commentary (Dispatches Editions), edited by Mary Newell, Bernard Quetchenbach, and Sarah Nolan
Honorable Mentions:
Kaouther Adimi’s Our Riches (New Directions), translated by Chris Andrews
Sulaiman Addonia’s Silence Is My Mother Tongue (Graywolf)
Kimberly Alidio’s : once teeth bones coral : ( Belladonna*)
Andrew Altschul’s The Gringa
Maryanne Amacher’s Selected Writings and Interviews
Amang’s Raise by Wolves, translated by Steve Bradbury
Kimberly Q Andrews’s A Brief History of Fruit
Kiik Araki-Kawaguchi’s The Book of Kane and Margaret (FC2)
Jose Vicente Araya’s Hikuri (Peyote), translated by Joshua Pollock
Nina Renata Aron’s Good Morning Destroyer of Men’s Souls
Rick Barot’s The Galleons (Milkweed Editions)
Jazmina Barrera’s On Lighthouses, translated by Christina MacSweeney
Dan Beachy-Quick’s Variations on Dawn and Dusk (Omnidawn)
Jan Beatty’s Body Wars
Cal Bedient’s The Breathing Place (OmniDawn)
Marie Helene Bertino’s Parakeet
Eula Biss’s Having and Being Had
Cicely Belle Blain’s Burning Sugar (Arsenal Pulp Press)
Jenny Bhatt’s Each of Us Killer
Breka Blakeslee’s Probably It Will Not Be Okay (Fellow Travelers/Publication Studio)
Hanne Blank’s Fat
Julie Bloch’s The Sacramento of Desire
Naomi Booth’s Exit Management
Eleanor Boudreau’s Earnest, Earnest
Susan Briante’s Defacing the Monument (Noemi)
Ashleigh Bryant Phillips’s Sleepovers
Marie Buck’s Unsolved Mysteries (Roof)
Amina Cain’s Indelicacy
Jennifer Calkins’s Fugitive Assemblage
Peter Cameron’s What Happens at Night
J’Lyn Chapman’s To Limn / Lying In ([PANK] Books)
Victoria Chang’s Obit
Alan Chazaro’s Pinata Theory
Peter Cherches’s Whistler’s Mother’s Son and Other Curiosities
Margaret Christakos’s charger (Talonbooks)
Morgan Christie’s These Bodies (Tolsun Books)
Anthony Cody’s Borderland Apocrypha (Omnidawn)
Katharine Coldiron’s Ceremonials (Kernpunkt)
Nandi Comer’s Tapping Out
Diane Cook’s The New Wilderness
Joseph Allen Costa’s Comets
Claire Cronin’s Blue Light of the Screen
John Crowley’s And Go Like This
Paul Cunningham’s House of the Tree of Sores
Piper J. Daniels’s Ladies Lazarus
Michael DeForge’s Familiar Face (Drawn & Quarterly)
Mónica de la Torre’s Repetition Nineteen (Nightboat)
Anne de Marcken’s The Accident: An Account
Alex DiFrancesco’s All City
Javad Djavahery’s My Part of Her (Restless), translated by Emma Ramadan
Sharon Dolin’s Hitchcock Blonde
François Dominique’s Aseroë (Bellevue Literary Press), translated by Richard Sieburth & Howard Limoli
Hunter Dukes’s Signature
Ben Ehrenreich’s Desert Notebooks
Jenny Erpenbeck’s Not a Novel
Joshua Escobar’s Bareback Nightfall (Noemi)
Melissa Faliveno’s Tomboyland
Kali Farjardo-Anstine’s Sabrina & Corina
Jen Fawkes’s Mannequin and Wife
Thalia Field and Abigail Lang’s Leave to Remain (Legends of Janus)
Nikky Finney’s Love Child’s Hotbed of Occasional Poetry
Lisa Fishman’s Mad World, Mad Kings, Mad Composition (Wave Books)
Colin Fleming’s Meatheads Say the Realest Things
Brad Fox’s To Remain Nameless (Rescue Press)
Ariel Francisco’s A Sinking Ship is Still a Ship (Burrow Press), translated by José Nicolás Cabrera-Schneider
Joan Frank’s Where You’re All Going
Joan Frank’s Try to Get Lost
Jon Frankel’s Isle of Dogs (Whiskey Tit)
Krista Franklin’s Too Much Midnight (Haymarket Books)
Elisa Gabbert’s The Unreality of Memory
Kenning Jean-Paul Garcia’s Of (What Place Meant) (West Vine Press)
Kate Gaskin’s Forever War (YesYes)
Ross Gay’s Be Holding
Dean Gessie’s Anthropocene
Marie-Andrée Gill Spawn, translated by Kristen Renee Miller (Book*hug)
Madleine Gins’s The Saddest Thing Is That I Have Had to Use Words: A Madeline Gins Reader (Siglio Press), edited by Lucy Ives
Peter Gizzi’s Now It’s Dark
Robert Glick’s Two Californias
Regan Good’s The Needle
Leah Naomi Green’s The More Extravagant Feast
Kendra Greene’s The Museum of Whales You Will Never See
Rolf Halden’s Environment
lukas ray hall’s loudest when startled
Meredith Hall’s Beneficence
Chris Haven’s Nesting Habits of Flightless Birds
Julián Herbert’s Bring Me the Head of Quentin Tarantino: Stories, translated by Christina MacSweeney
Ninso John High’s Without Dragons Even the Emperor Would be Lonely (Wet Cement Press)
David Hollander’s Anthropica
Randall Horton’s {#289-128}
Fanny Howe’s Night Philosophy (Divided Publishing)
Valerie Hsiung’s You & Me Forever (Action Books)
Wayne Holloway Smith’s Love Minus Love
Erica Hunt’s Jump the Clock
Lee Hyemi’s Unexpected Vanilla, translated by So J. Lee
Rita Indiana’s Made in Saturn
Nancy Jensen’s In Our Midst (Dzanc Books)
Stephen Graham Jones’s The Only Good Indians
Pergentino Jose’s Red Ants, translated by Thomas Bunstead
Zeyn Joukhadar’s The Thirty Names of Night
Kafka: The Lost Writings (New Directions)
Fabienne Kanor’s Humus (University of Virginia Press), translated by Lynn E. Palermo
Bhanu Kapil’s How to Wash a Heart
Genevieve Kaplan’s (aviary) (Veliz Books)
Kapka Kassabova’s To the Lake: A Balkan Journey of War and Peace
Vincent Katz’s Broadway for Paul
Tsipi Keller’s And Yes She Was
James Ross Kelly’s And the Fires We Talked About (UnCollected Press)
Karla Kelsey’s Blood Feather (Tupelo)
The Best Poems of Jane Kenyon (Graywolf)
Mohammed Khair-Eddine’s Agadir (Dialogos / Lavender Ink), translated by Pierre Joris & Jake Syersak
Paul Kingsnorth’s Alexandria
Iris Kiya’s Reconstruction of the Father and Other Writings (Dulzorada), translated by Reina Jara Barrientos
Noelle Kocot’s God’s Green Earth (Wave Books)
E.J. Koh’s The Magical Language of Others
Samantha Kolber’s Birth of a Daughter
Ramiza Shamoun Koya’s The Royal Abduls
Nicole Krauss’s To Be a Man
Talia Lavin’s Culture Warlords
Nathalie Leger’s Exposition, translated by Natasha Lehrer
Yi Lei’s My Name Will Grow Wide Like a Tree: Selected Poems
Sheila Liming’s Office
Christopher Linforth’s Directory (Otis Books/Seismicity Editions)
Paul Lisicky’s Later: My Life at the Edge of the World
Wendy Liu’s Abolish Silicon Valley: How to Liberate Technology from Capitalism (Repeater Books)
Margot Livesey’s The Boy in the Field
Rachel Long’s My Darling from the Lions
George Looney’s The Worst May Be Over (Elixir Press)
Audre Lorde’s Dream of Europe: Selected Seminars and Interviews: 1984-1992 (Kenning Editions), edited by Mayra Rodríguez Castro
Eirann Lorsung’s The Century
Tom Lutz’s Born Slippy (Repeater Books)
Nguyễn Phan Quế Ma’s The Mountains Sing
Robert Macfarlane, Stanley Donwood, Dan Richards’s Ghostways
Aditi Machado’s Emporium (Nightboat Books)
Deborah Madison’s An Onion in my Pocket: My Life with Vegetables
Melissa Maerz’s Alright, Alright, Alright: The Oral History of Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused
Jill Magi’s Speech
Greg Mania’s Born to Be Public (Clash Books)
David Masciotra’s I Am Somebody: Why Jesse Jackson Matters
Bobbie Ann Mason’s Dear Ann
Khaled Mattawa’s Fugitive Atlas
Bernadette Mayer’s Memory
Sadiqa de Meijer’s alfabet/ alphabet: a memoir of a first language
Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season (New Directions), translated by Sophie Hughes
Ellen Michaelson’s The Care of Strangers
Lydia Millet’s The Children’s Bible
Shonna Milliken Humphrey’s Gin
Sarah Minor’s Bright Archive (Rescue Press)
Andriana Minou’s The Fabulous Dead (Kernpunkt)
Marie Mutsuki Mockett’s American Harvest: God, Country, and Farming in the Heartland (Graywolf)
Klaus Modick’s Moss
Ander Monson’s Gnome Stories (Graywolf)
Ander Monson’s I Will Take the Answer (Graywolf)
Susan Montez’s Teaching Shakespeare (Astoria Press)
Wayétu Moore’s The Dragons, the Giant, and the Women (Graywolf)
- L. Morin’s Loveoid
Ellen Birkett Morris’s Lost Girls
Scholastique Mukasonga’s Ifigu
Gris Munoz’s Coatlicue Girl (FlowerSong Press)
Robin Myrick’s I Am This State Of Emergency (Surveyor Books)
Chris Nealon’s The Shore (Wave Books)
Susan Neville’s The Town of Whispering Dolls (FC2)
Mark Nowak’s Social Poetics (Coffee House Press)
Víctor Rodríguez Núñez’s from a red barn, translated by Katherine M. Hedeen
Laurence O’Dwyer The Lighthouse Journal
Eva Kristina Olssons’s Mirjams resa hennes klänning
Mat Osman’s The Ruins (Repeater Books)
Alice Oswald’s Nobody: Hymn to the Sea (Norton)
Danielle Pafunda’s Spite
Deborah Paredez’s Year of the Dog (BOA Editions)
Scudder Parke’s Safe as Lightning
Alan Pelaez Lopez’s Intergalactic Travels: Poems from a Fugitive Alien (The Operating System)
Fernando Pessoa’s The Complete Works of Alberto Caeiro (New Directions), translated by Margaret Jull Costa
Kiki Petrosino’s White Blood: A Lyric of Virginia (Sarabande Books)
Meg Pokrass’s Alice in Wonderland Syndrome (V. Press)
Chana Porter’s The Seep
Meghan Privitello’s One God at a Time (YesYes)
Khadijah Queen’s Anodyne (Tin House)
Peter Ramos’s Lord Baltimore (Ravenna Press)
C.F. Ramuz’s Jean-Luc Persecuted, translated by Olivia Baes
Margaret Randall’s My Life in 100 Objects (NYU)
Srikanth Reddy’s Underworld Lit (Wave Books)
Ted Rees’s Thanksgiving: A Poem by (Golias Books)
Linda Reising’s The Keeping
Marieke Lucas Rijneveld’s The Discomfort of Evening (Graywolf)
Cristina Rivera Garza’s Grieving
Lisa Robertson’s The Baudelaire Fractal (Coach House)
Matthew Rohrer’s The Sky Contains the Plans (Wave Books)
Kenneth R. Rosen’s Bulletproof Vest
David Rothenberg’s The Possibility of Reddish Green (Terra Nova)
Tatiana Ryckman’s The Ancestry of Objects
Matthew Salesses’s Disappear Doppelgänger Disappear
Yi Sang: Selected Works (Wave Books)
Simone Savannah’s Uses of My Body
Kathryn Scanlan’s The Dominant Animal
Jason Schneiderman’s Hold Me Tight
Emily Schultz’s little threats
Robert Scotellaro’s What Are the Chances?
Pierre Senges’s Studies of Silhouettes (Sublunary Editions), translated by Jacob Siefring
Namwali Serpell’s Stranger Faces
Vijay Seshadri’s That Was Now, This Is Then
Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangles Life
Wu Sheng’s My Village: Selected Poems 1972-2014, translated by John Balcom
Ya Shi’s Floral Mutter: Poems, translated by Nick Admussen
Danez Smith’s Homie
Maggie Smith’s Keep Moving
S*an D. Henry-Smith’s Wild Peach (Futurepoem Books)
Mike Soto’s A Grave Is Given Supper (Deep Vellum)
Mary South’s You Will Never Be Forgotten
Rosamund Stanhope’s So I Looked Down to Camelot (Flood Editions)
Gerald Stern’s Blessed As We Were
Geoffrey Strachan’s Tropic of Violence
Lana Swartz’s New Money: How Payment Became Social Media (Yale UP)
Rachel Swearingen’s How to Walk on Water and Other Stories
Marcin Świetlicki’s Night Truck Driver, translated by Elżbieta Wójcik-Leese
Souvankham Thammavongsa’s How to Pronounce Knife
Kelly Grace Thomas’s Boat Burned (YesYes)
Natasha Tretheway’s Memorial Drive
Elsa Valmidiano’s We Are No Longer Babaylan (New Rivers Press)
Laura Van Den Berg’s I Hold a Wolf by the Ears
Blanca Varela’s Rough Song, translated by Carlos Lara (The Song Cave)
Danielle Vogel’s Edges & Fray
Shola von Reinhold’s Lote
Laura Waddell’s Exit
Fred Wah’s Music at the Heart of Thinking (Talonbooks)
Kawai Strong Washburn’s Sharks in the Time of Saviors
David Heska Wanbli Weiden’s Winter Counts
Philip Whalen’s Scenes of Life at the Capital (Wave Books)
Isabelle Wilkerson’s Caste
Eliot Weinberger’s Angels and Saints (New Directions)
Allison Benis White’s The Wendys
Artress Bethany White’s Survivor’s Guilt: Essays on Race and American Identity (New Rivers Press)
Adam Wilson’s Sensation Machines
Lia Woodall’s Remove to Play
Amy Woolard’s Neck of the Woods
Erica Wright’s Snake
Frank Wynne’s The Fallen
Can Xue’s I Live in the Slums
Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown
Pam Zhang’s How Much of These Hills is Gold
American Gun: A Poem by 100 Chicagoans, edited by Chris Green
Dispatches from the Republic of Letters: 50 Years of the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, edited by Daniel Simon
F Letter: New Feminist Russian Poetry, edited by by Galina Rymbu, Eugene Ostashevsky, and Ainsley Morse