Several months ago, I asked a host of writers, editors, and publishers to send me a list of their favorite books published in 2021. Scroll down below to see the finalist list as well as a compilation of honorable mentions. The winner of the 2021 Big Other Readers’ Choice award will be announced at the 2021 Big Other Book Awards Ceremony (date and time for the virtual event tbd).

Big thanks to the following writers, editors, and/or publishers (many of whom are Big Other contributors) for their lists:

Stayed tuned for announcements of the longlists for the 2021 Big Other Book Awards in fiction, nonfiction, and translation! In the meantime, here’s the list of finalists for the 2020 Big Other Readers’ Choice Award:

Will Alexander’s Refractive Africa: Ballet of the Forgotten (New Directions)

Jesi Bender’s Kinderkrankenhaus (Sagging Meniscus Press)

Gabriel Blackwell’s Corrections (Rescue Press)

Matthew Burnside’s Wiki of Infinite Sorrows (Kernpunkt Press)

Jeff Bursey’s An Impalpable Certain Rest (Corona/Samizdat)

Magda Carneci’s FEM (Deep Vellum), translated by Sean Cotter

Susan Daitch’s Siege of Comedians (Dzanc Books)

John Domini’s The Archeology of a Good Ragù: Discovering Naples, My Father, and Myself

Rikki Ducornet’s Trafik (Coffee House Press)

Brian Evenson’s The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell (Coffee House Press)

Thalia Field’s Personhood (New Directions)

Forrest Gander’s Twice Alive (New Directions)

Brandon Hobson’s The Removed (Ecco)

The Essential June Jordan (Copper Canyon Press) edited by Jan Heller Levi, Christoph Keller

Rosamond S. King’s All the Rage (Nightboat Books)

Joshua Kornreich’s Cavanaugh (Sagging Meniscus Press)

Harold Jaffe’s BRUT: Writings on Art & Artists (Anti-Oedipus Press)

Jana Larson’s Reel Bay: A Cinematic Essay, (Coffee House Press)

Janice Lee’s Imagine a Death (Texas Review Press)

Eugene Lim’s Search History (Coffee House Press)

Gordon Lish’s Death and So Forth (Dzanc Books)

Nathaniel Mackey’s Double Trio (New Directions)

Miranda Mellis’s Demystifications (Solid Objects)

Urayoán Noel’s Transversal (University of Arizona Press)

Lance Olsen’s Skin Elegies (Dzanc Books)

Aimee Parkison’s Sister Séance (Kernpunkt)

Richard Powers’s Bewilderment (W. W. Norton)

John Reed’s The Family Dolls (Outpost19)

Marc Anthony Richardson’s Messiahs (FC2)

Pierre Reverdy’s Georges Braque: A Methodical Adventure (Black Square Editions), translated by Andrew Joron with Rose Vekony

Diane Seuss’s Frank: Sonnets (Graywolf)

Elisabeth Sheffield’s Ire Land (A Faery Tale) (Spuyten Duyvil)

Jack Skelley’s Dennis Wilson and Charles Manson (Fred & Barney Press)

Terese Svoboda’s Theatrix (Anhinga Press)

Arthur Sze’s The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems

Edwin Torres’s Quanundrum: [I Will Be Your Many Angled Thing] (Roof Books)

Tony Trigilio’s Proof Something Happened (Marsh Hawk Press)

G. C. Waldrep‘s The Earliest Witnesses (Tupelo Press)

Rosmarie Waldrop’s The Nick of Time (New Directions)

Marjorie Welish’s A Complex Sentence (Coffee House Press)

Joy Williams’s Harrow (Knopf)

John Yau’s Genghis Chan on Drums (Omnidawn)

A Forest on Many Stems: Essays on the Poet’s Novel, edited Laynie Browne

Best Microfiction 2021 (Pelekinesis), edited by Gary Fincke, Meg Pokrass, and Amber Sparks

Honorable Mentions:

Cathedral, by Ben Hopkins (Europa Editions)

Capitalism, Technology, Labor: A Socialist Register Reader, Vol. 2, edited by Greg Albo, Leo Panitch, and Alan Zuege (Haymarket Books)

Consequences of Capitalism: Manufacturing Discontent and Resistance, by Noam Chomsky and Marv Waterstone (Haymarket Books)

Vibratory Milieu, by Carrie Hunter (Nightboat Books)

Art Is Everything, by Yxta Maya Murray (Northwestern University Press)

The Adventures and Misadventures of the Extraordinary and Admirable Joan Orpí, Conquistador and Founder of New Catalonia, by Max Besora, translated by Mara Faye Lethem (Open Letter Books)

The Schrödinger Girl (Akashic Books)

How to Blow Up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire, by Andreas Malm (Verso Books)

The Care Crisis: What Caused It and How Can We End It?, by Emma Dowling (Verso Books)

Red Rover Red Rover, by Bob Hicok (Copper Canyon Press)

Salvador Puig Antich: Collected Writings on Repression and Resistance in Franco’s Spain, translated by Peter Gelderloos (AK Press)

The Experience Society: Consumer Capitalism Rebooted, by Steven Miles (Pluto Books)

Vineland Reread, by Peter Coviello (Columbia University Press)

Suzanne Ahn’s Heading for Bilbao (Center for Basque Studies)

Histories of Racial Capitalism, edited by Destin Jenkins and Justin Leroy (Columbia University Press):

N. Katherine Hayles’s Postprint: Books and Becoming Computational (Columbia University Press)

Sushma Subramanian’s How to Feel: The Science and Meaning of Touch (Columbia University Press)

Alex Dimitrov’s Love and Other Poems (Copper Canyon Press)

Natalie Shapero’s Popular Longing (Copper Canyon Press)

Cécile Coulon’s A Beast in Paradise, translated by Tina Kover (Europa Editions)

Angela Buck’s Horses Dream of Money (FC2)

Dorthe Nors’s Wild Swims, translated by Misha Hoekstra (Graywolf Press)

Jackie Wang’s Spell To Save Us from the Void (Nightboat Books)

Asiya Wadud’s No Knowledge Is Complete Until It Passes Through My Body (Nightboat Books)

Maria Stepanova’s In Memory of Memory, translated by Sasha Dugdale (New Directions)

Georges Perec’s Ellis Island, translated by Harry Mathews (New Directions)

Manuela Draeger’s Eleven Sooty Dreams, translated by J. T. Mahany (Open Letter Books)

Olga Tokarczuk’s The Lost Soul, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, andIllustrated by Joanna Concejo (Seven Stories Press)

Human Rights Watch’s World Report 2021: Events of 2020 (Seven Stories Press)

Rainer Maria Rilke’s The Voices & Other Poems, translated by Kristofor Minta (Sublunary Editions)

María José Ferrada’s How to Order the Universe, translated by Elizabeth Bryer (Tin House)

Nancy Folbre’s The Rise and Decline of Patriarchal Systems: An Intersectional Political Economy (Verso Books)

There Is Nothing So Whole as a Broken Heart: Mending the World as Jewish Anarchists, edited by Cindy Milstein (AK Press)

Creatures of Passage, by Morowa Yejidé (Akashic Books)

Barriers Down: How American Power and Free-Flow Policies Shaped Global Media, by Diana Lemberg (Columbia University Press)

Knowledge Worlds: Media, Materiality, and the Making of the Modern University, by Reinhold Martin (Columbia University Press)

Arriving in a Thick Fog, by Jung Young Moon, translated by Mah Eunji and Jeffrey Karvonen (Deep Vellum)

Call It Horses, by Jessie van Eerden (Dzanc Books)

Abundance, by Jakob Guanzon (Graywolf Press)

Active Reception, by Noah Ross (Nightboat Books)

The Gentle Barbarian, by Bohumil Hrabal, translated from the Czech by Paul Wilson (New Directions)

Antonio, by Beatriz Bracher, translated by Adam Morris (New Directions)

On Time and Water, by Andri Snær Magnason, translated by Lytton Smith (Open Letter Books)

Augmented Exploitation: Artificial Intelligence, Automation, and Work, edited by Phoebe Moore and Jamie Woodcock (Pluto Books)

Capital Hates Everyone: Fascism or Revolution, by Maurizio Lazzarato, translated by Robert Hurley (Semiotexte)

The Posthumous Works of Thomas Pilaster, by Éric Chevillard, translated by Chris Clarke (Sublunary Editions)

The Perseverance, by Raymond Antrobus (Tin House)

Eclogues in a Mustard Seed Garden, by Glenn Mott (Turtle Point Press)

Breaking Things at Work: The Luddites Are Right About Why You Hate Your Job, by Gavin Mueller (Verso Books)

Absentees: On Variously Missing Persons, by Daniel Heller-Roazen (Zone Books)

Shane Burley’s Why We Fight: Essays on Fascism, Resistance, and Surviving the Apocalypse (AK Press)

Courttia Newland’s A River Called Time (Akashic Books)

Alexei Remizov’s The Little Devil and Other Stories, translated by Antonina W. Bouis (Columbia University Press)

Howard Chiang’s Transtopia in the Sinophone Pacific (Columbia University Press)

Yury Tynyanov’s The Death of Vazir-Mukhtar, translated by Anna Kurkina Rush and Christopher Rush (Columbia University Press)

Anne Garréta’s In Concrete, translated from the French by Emma Ramadan (Deep Vellum)

Threa Almontaser’s The Wild Fox of Yemen (Graywolf Press)

J. Robert Lennon’s Subdivision (Graywolf Press)

J. Robert Lennon’s Let Me Think (Graywolf Press)

Oparah‘s Thick Skin (Kernpunkt Press)

Divya Victor’s Curb (Nightboat Books)

Allison Cobb’s Plastic: An Autobiography (Nightboat Books)

Nathaniel Tarn’s The Hölderliniae (New Directions)

Clarice Lispector’s An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures, translated by Stefan Tobler (New Directions)

Lee Soho’s Catcalling, translated by Soje (Open Letter Books)

Donatella Di Cesare’s Immunodemocracy: Capitalist Asphyxia, translated by David Broder (Semiotexte)

Cecilia Pavón‘s Little Joy: Selected Stories, translated by Jacob Steinberg (Semiotexte)

Elissa Washuta’s White Magic (Tin House)

Eric Laursen’s The Operating System: An Anarchist Theory of the Modern State (AK Press)

Heller Levinson’s Lurk (Black Widow Press)

Lucy Alford’s Forms of Poetic Attention (Columbia University Press)

Information: A Reader, edited by Eric Hayot, Anatoly Detwyler, and Lea Pao (Columbia University Press)

Ethel Rohan’s In the Event of Contact (Dzanc Books)

Donika Kelly’s The Renunciations (Graywolf Press)

Lina Meruane’s Nervous System, translated by Megan McDowell (Graywolf Press)

Tsitsi Dangarembga’s The Book of Not (Graywolf Press)

Anjali Enjeti’s The Parted Earth (Hub City Press)

K. M. English’s Wave Says (Kore Press)

Michael Palmer’s Little Elegies for Sister Satan (New Directions)

Muriel Leung’s Imagine Us, The Swarm (Nightboat Books)

Rosie Stockton’s Permanent Volta (Nightboat Books)

(Judy Grahn’s Eruptions of Inanna: Justice, Gender, and Erotic Power (Nightboat Books)

Seb Doubinsky’s Fragments of a Revolution (Stalking Horse Press)

S. D. Chrostowska’s A Cage for Every Child (Sublunary Editions)

Claire Fuller’s Unsettled Ground (Tin House)

Roger Deakin’s Waterlog: A Swimmer’s Journey through Britain (Tin House)

Lee Sharkey’s I Will Not Name It Except to Say (Tupelo Press)

Intersectional Class Struggle: Theory and Practice, by Michael Beyea Reagan (AK Press)

Damaged Like Me: Essays on Love, Harm, and Transformation, by Kimberly Dark (AK Press)

In the Night Field, by Cameron McGill (Augury Books)

Before Stonewall, by Edward M. Cohen (Awst Press)

HOMES, by Moheb Soliman (Coffee House Press)

Unsettling Utopia: The Making and Unmaking of French India, by Jessica Namakkal (Columbia University Press)

To Write as If Already Dead, by Kate Zambreno (Columbia University Press)

Daybook from Sheep Meadow: The Notebooks of Tallis Martinson, by Peter Dimock (Deep Vellum)

Bright Specimen, by Julie Poole (Deep Vellum)

And Then the Gray Heaven, by RE Katz (Dzanc Books)

Il Vagabondo: An Urban Opera: A Tale of Gusto and Enchantment, Adaptation, Loss, and Preserving the Old Ways of Making a Life, by Glenn Carley (Guernica World Editions)

Walking on Cowrie Shells, by Nana Nkweti (Graywolf Press)

Exhalations, by Aaron M. Moe (Middle Creek Publishing)

The Divorce, by César Aira, translated by Chris Andrews (New Directions)

Sevastopol, by Emilio Fraia, translated by Zoë Perry (New Directions)

Honey Mine, by Camille Roy, edited by Lauren Levin and Eric Sneathen (Nightboat Books)

Foucault in Warsaw, by Remigiusz Ryziński, translated by Sean Gasper Bye (Open Letter Books)

Unsilencing Gaza: Reflections on Resistance, by Sara Roy (Pluto Books)

Lost in Work: Escaping Capitalism, by Amelia Horgan (Pluto Books)

Lifting Stones, by Doug Stanfield (Rootstock Publishing)

Morsel May Sleep, by Ellen Dillon (Sublunary Editions)

Culture Strike: Art and Museums in an Age of Protest, by Laura Raicovich (Verso Books)

Leopoldo Bonafulla’s The July Revolution: Barcelona 1909, translated by Slava Faybysh (AK Press)

Jacques Lesage de La Haye’s The Abolition of Prison, translated by Scott Branson (AK Press)

Damian Dressick’s Fables of the Deconstruction (Clash Books)

Brad Evans’s Ecce Humanitas: Beholding the Pain of Humanity (Columbia University Press)

Michel Foucault’s Sexuality: The 1964 Clermont-Ferrand and 1969 Vincennes Lectures) (Columbia University Press)

Jeanne Liedtka, Karen Hold, and Jessica Eldridge’s Experiencing Design: The Innovator’s Journey (Columbia University Press)

Recognition and Ambivalence, edited by Heikki Ikäheimo, Kristina Lepold, and Titus Stahl (Columbia University Press)

Suncranes and Other Stories: Modern Mongolian: Short Fiction, translated by Simon Wickhamsmith (Columbia University Press)

Claudia Ulloa Donoso’s Little Bird, translated by Lily Meyer (Deep Vellum)

Fiston Mwanza Mujila’s The River in the Belly, translated by J. Bret Maney (Deep Vellum)

Anne Serre’s The Beginners, translated by Mark Hutchinson (New Directions)

Osip Mandelstam’s Black Earth, translated from the Russian by Peter France (New Directions)

Keith Ridgway’s A Shock (New Directions)

Mac Gay’s Our Fatherlessness (The Orchard Street Press)

Subimal Misra’s Wild Animals Prohibited: Stories/Anti-stories, translated by V. Ramaswamy (Open Letter Books)

Ralf Ruckus’s The Communist Road to Capitalism: How Social Unrest and Containment Have Pushed China’s (R)evolution since 1949 (PM Press)

Magda Isanos’s Homecoming, translated by Christina Tudor-Sideri (Sublunary Editions)

Jonardon Ganeri’s Inwardness: An Outsider’s Guide (Columbia University Press)

Aubrey Clayton’s Bernoulli’s Fallacy: Statistical Illogic and the Crisis of Modern Science (Columbia University Press)

Jung Young Moon’s Arriving in a Thick Fog (Deep Vellum)

Monica Huerta’s Magical Habits (Duke University)

Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint’s Names for Light: A Family History (Graywolf Press)

Kaveh Akbar’s Pilgrim Bell (Graywolf Press)

Nataliya Deleva’s Four Minutes, translated Izidora Angel (Open Letter Books)

Silvia Federici’s Patriarchy of the Wage: Notes on Marx, Gender, and Feminism (PM Press)

Rebecca Subar’s When to Talk and When to Fight: The Strategic Choice between Dialogue and Resistance (PM Press)

Paul B. Preciado’s Can the Monster Speak?: Report to an Academy of Psychoanalysts, translated by Frank Wynne (Semiotext(e))

William C. Anderson’s The Nation on No Map: Black Anarchism and Abolition (AK Press)

D. Harlan Wilson’s Jackanape and the Fingermen (Anti-Oedipus Press)

Aisha Sabatini Sloan’s Borealis (Coffee House Press)

Emmanuel Alloa’s Looking Through Images: A Phenomenology of Visual Media, translated by Nils F. Schott (Columbia University Press)

Dean Caivano and Sarah Naumes’s The Sublime of the Political: Narrative and Autoethnography as Theory (Columbia University Press)

Julia Kristeva’s Dostoyevsky, or The Flood of Language, translated by Jody Gladding (Columbia University Press)

Matthew Calarco’s The Boundaries of Human Nature: The Philosophical Animal from Plato to Haraway (Columbia University Press)

Radna Fabias’s Habitus, translated by David Colmer (Deep Vellum)

Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s The New Adventures of Helen, translated by Jane Bugaeva  (Deep Vellum)

Gil Z. Hochberg’s Becoming Palestine: Toward an Archival Imagination of the Future (Duke University)

David Boarder Giles’s A Mass Conspiracy to Feed People: Food Not Bombs and the World-Class Waste of Global Cities (Duke University)

Jason A. Hoelscher’s Art as Information Ecology: Artworks, Artworlds, and Complex Systems Aesthetics (Duke University)

Assembly Codes: The Logistics of Media, edited by Matthew Hockenberry, Nicole Starosielski, and Susan Zieger (Duke University)

Bharat Jayram Venkat’s At the Limits of Cure (Duke University)

Eric A. Stanley’s Atmospheres of Violence: Structuring Antagonism and the Trans/Queer Ungovernable (Duke University)

Mai Der Vang’s Yellow Rain (Graywolf Press)

Maggie Nelson’s On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint (Graywolf Press)

Khadija Abdalla Bajaber’s The House of Rust (Graywolf Press)

Selva Almada’s Brickmakers, translated by Annie McDermott (Graywolf Press)

Javier Serena’s Last Words on Earth, translated by Katie Whittemore (Open Letter Books)

Rafael Chirbes’s Cremation, translated by Valerie Miles (New Directions)

László Krasznahorkai’s Chasing Homer, translated by John Batki (New Directions)

Peter Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid: An Illuminated Factor of Evolution, Illustrated by N.O. Bonzo (PM Press)

Sean Avery Medlin’s 808s & Otherworlds (Two Dollar Radio)

JoAnna Novak’s Meaningful Work (FC2)

Yannick Murphy’s By the Time You Read This (FC2)

Ron Burch’s JDP (BlazeVox)

Alexander Cheves’s My Love Is a Beast: Confessions (Unbound Editions)

Carlo Matos’s We Prefer the Damned (Unbound Editions)

Sophia Anfinn Tonnessen’s Ecologia (Unbound Editions)

James Cameron’s What Happens at Night

Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This

Oshetsky’s Chouette

Katie Kitamura’s Intimacies

Essays Two, by Lydia Davis

The Complete Poems by Jim Harrsion (Copper Canyon Press)

Gun/Shy by Jim Daniels (Wayne State University Press)

Savage Tongues by Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi

Real Estate by Deborah Levy

White on White by Ayşegül Savaş

Winter in Sokcho by Elisa Shua Dusapin

Empty Wardrobes by Maria Judite de Carvalho (tr. by Margaret Jull Costa)

Flora Yin-Wong’s Liturgy

Helen Marten’s The Boiled In Between

Nikki Wallschaeger’s Waterbaby

Alina Stefenescu’s Dor

Mark Leidner’s Returning the Sword to the Stone

Doug Kearney’s Sho

Pattie McCarthy’s Wifthing

Elle Nash’s Nudes

Mike Corrao’s Rituals Performed in the Absence of Ganymede

Kate Durbin’s Hoarders

Proof of Stake: An Elegy by Charles Valle

Scott Rettberg’s Electronic Literature

Big Dark Hole by Jeffrey Ford (Small Beer)

When Things Get Dark, Ellen Datlow (ed) (Titan Books)

Josh Russell’s King of the Animals (LSU Press)

Joanna Fuhrman’s To a New Era (Hanging Loose Press)

Robert Calasso’s The Book of All Books

Diamond Forde’s Mother Body (Saturnalia)

Jennifer Moxley’s For the Good of All, Do Not Destroy the Birds (Flood Editions)

Jan Beatty’s American Bastard (Red Hen)

Amish Trivedi’s FuturePanic (co•im•press)

Jackson Bliss’s Counter-Factual Love Stories & Other Experiments (Noemi Press)

Where the Sky Meets the Ocean and the Air Tastes Like Metal and the Birds Don’t Make a Sound, by Mike Kleine & Dan Hoy

She Was Found in a Guitar Case, by David James Keaton

Reunion of the Good Weather Suicide Cult, by Kyle McCord

The Eggplant Curse and the Warp Zone, by Shawn Rubenfeld

Castle Faggot, by Derek McCormack

I Love You But…, by Claire Vaye Watkins

Springer Mountain, by Wyatt Williams

The Apology, by Christian TeBordo

Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These

Latanya Mcqueen’s When the Reckoning Comes

Gabriela Garcia’s Of Women and Salt

Matt Bell’s Appleseed

Kristen Arnett’s With Teeth

Melissa Broder’s Milkfed

Liv Stratman’s Cheat Day

Ashley Ford’s Somebody’s Daughter

Julia Fine’s The Upstairs House

Tom McCarthy’s The Making of Incarnation

Damon Galgut’s The Promise

ELADATL: A History of the East Los Angeles Dirigible Air Transport Lines by Sesshu Foster & Arturo Ernesto Romo (City Lights)

Rationalism by Douglas Luman (Sublunary Editions)

Are You Borg Now? By Said Shaiye (@rlysrslit)

Days by Simone Kearney (Belladonna*)

Sousveillance Pageant by Emily Abendroth (Radiator Press)

The Delivery by Peter Mendelsund (FSG)

Forget Thee by Ian Dreiblatt (Ugly Duckling)

Ghost Geographies by Tamas Dobozy

Blue Swan Black Swan by Stephanie Dickinson

Donald Edem Quist’s to Those Bounded (Awst Press)

Andrea Bajani’s If You Kept a Record of Sins, translated by Elizabeth Harris (Archipelago)

Mariana Dimópulos – Imminence, translated by Alice Whitemore (Transit)

Lina Meruane – Nervous System, translated by Megan McDowell (Graywolf)

Seema Yasmin – If God is a Virus: Poems (Haymarket)

I Wished by Dennis Cooper

Lucy Corin’s The Swank Hotel

Nona Fernández’s Twilight Zone

Awake by Harald Voetmann (New Directions)

From the Caves by Thea Prieto (Red Hen Press)

The Vegas Dilemma by Vi Khi Nao (11:11 Press)

When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut (NYRB)

The Verso Book of Feminism, edited by Jessie Kindig (Verso Books)

Assembly, by Natasha Brown

Maria Headley’s Beowulf

CA Conrad’s Amanda Paradise

Gina Frangello’s Blow Your House Down

Leesa Cross-Smith’s This Close to Okay

Matthew Specktor’s Always Crashing in the Same Car

Avner Landes’s Meiselman: The Lean Years

James Tate Hill’s Blind Man’s Bluff

Emilly Prado’s Funeral for Flaca (Future Tense Books)

Suzi Q. Smith’s A Gospel of Bones (Alternating Current Press)

Chiyuma Elliott’s Blue in Green

Peter Gizzi’s Now It’s Dark

George Schehade’s Poetries

Cody-Rose Clevidence’s Aux/Arc Triptych