300 Arguments by Sarah Manguso

Don’t worry about defining Manguso’s latest work. Graywolf (2017), the publisher of Manguso’s seventh book, describes the book as a “foray into the frontier of contemporary non-fiction.” Broken into three hundred pieces—sometimes sentences, sometimes a paragraph—each part of this book builds on another, often in unexpected and surprising ways, often several pages after the reader has last considered the idea that Manguso broached. There’s a narrative structure here that any reader will feel, even if not articulate it, and subjects such as desire, happiness, failure, and dread are tackled with a range from serious playfulness to existential dread. This is a book you will need, and want, to read more than once to fully appreciate. —Michael Nye

The Orchard by Brigit Pegeen Kelly

One of our greatest poets, Brigit Pegeen Kelly died last year, which as death often does, sent me back to the writer’s work. Though all her books are gems, The Orchard (American Poets Continuum, 2004), for me, stands supreme for the delicate dance it performs on the high wire between the conscious and the unconscious mind, its language and imagery opening, always opening for us that dark “river of blood” that leads deep into the beauty and terror of being alive. “I saw the dog in a dream,” she says in the title poem, and the dog becomes a horse, then a dog again, then a man, and ultimately the dreamer herself, reminding us, as she says in yet another poem, “words can even destroy in their saying the very things for which they stand.” —Peter Grandbois

The Life and Times of Michael K by J.M. Coetzee

J.M. Coetzee once said of his own writing that instead of creating characters he personified ideas. He’d intended to identify a shortcoming, but The Life and Times of Michael K (Secker & Warburg, 1983) is as good as it is because it makes human some of the thorniest and most interesting human ideas. Set against the backdrop of a fictional Apartheid-era South African civil war, the intellectually slow and ever-earnest Michael K wants no part of the upheaval around him. But it won’t let him be. The novel, which won the Booker Prize in 1983, is a two hundred page mediation on the impossibility of being separate from the times you live in. An idea both timely and timeless. —Ryan Krull

Our Souls at Night by Kent Haruf

Three years ago the terrific American novelist Kent Haruf passed away, but not before completing his final novel, Our Souls at Night (Knopf, 2015), which is an elegant swan song/love story worthy not only of its creator, but of its touching, senior-citizen couple—Louis and Addie, who now enjoy the cinematic afterlife of being portrayed by Robert Redford and Jane Fonda in the film version released on Netflix last month. Haruf is perhaps best known for his best-selling novel Plainsong (1999), which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and for creating Holt, Colorado, a small town on the high plains in the eastern part of the state, of which he once said, “It’s not pretty, but it’s beautiful.” I knew Kent as a soft-spoken, kind gentleman, and one of our great contemporary Western writers. —William J. Cobb

But What if We’re Wrong? by Chuck Klosterman

I teach college English, and in my rhetoric courses, I encourage skepticism about almost everything students face in their daily lives: claims made by politicians, religious beliefs, even the ideas presented in classrooms by smug professors. Chuck Klosterman’s But What if We’re Wrong? (Blue Rider Press, 2016) takes this notion much further by questioning things most consider beyond reproach, like the concept of gravity. One section imagines the writer that future generations will regard as the literary genius that defines our era. Will it be a current favorite like Roth or Franzen, or will it be a Kafkaesque unknown who’s currently sharing his work on the dark web?  Klosterman’s views are interesting and worth considering. —René Martínez

Pachinko by Min Jin Lee

To be Korean living in Japan was to be in identity limbo. Min Jin Lee softly examines the absurd impossibility of assimilation in her latest novel, Pachinko (Grand Central Publishing, 2017), which follows four generations of a Korean family from the end of one world war to the other. Though I could recommend the novel as a history lesson or a sad parallel to modern immigrants’ circumstances, I’d rather focus on the dynamite perspective changes and the way Lee ends her chapters with beautifully subtle turns that compelled me to continue reading on and on and on. –Jessica Rogen