Year-end lists are always subjective and incomplete, but they are especially tricky for books. A dedicated film critic can watch every wide release film and a theater critic can go to most every play, but the book critic is faced with an insurmountable mountain of books each year. The sheer number of books is inspiring as a reader, but it can make “best of” lists laughably subjective when the critic has only read a fraction of the hundreds of thousands of books published each year.

With that in mind, I decided to crowd source Electric Literature’s year-end lists. On Tuesday, we published our 25 Best Novels of 2014. Today, we are publishing our 25 favorite story collections. To get the list, I asked sixteen Electric Literature contributors and friends to pick their favorite collection published in 2014 to write about, and then asked them to send me a short list of other collections they loved. The books that got the most mentions have been included with everyone’s top picks. Our hope was to have an eclectic list of books that included more than just the obvious names, and I think you will find at least a few books here that you hadn’t heard of. Our list also includes two collections of prose poems and one collection of comic stories. Keeping in mind that if I’d asked a different set of writers and critics we would have a different list, here are the definite 100% objective best story collections of 2014:

Man V. Nature by Diane Cook

Cook’s collection dips and dives between the real and the refreshingly unreal, with a perfect balance of imagination and morbidity. Man V. Nature is a breathtaking standout and perfect introduction to a future literary force of nature.

– Michael Seidlinger, author of The Face of Any Other and other books

[Read a short story from Man V. Nature and our interview with Diane Cook]

Elegy on Kinderklavier by Arna Bontemps Hemenway

An intricate, ambitious, and thoroughly devastating collection. This is Hemenway’s debut and it is stunning.

– Laura Van Den Berg, author of The Isle of Youth and other books

Praying Drunk by Kyle Minor

Kyle Minor’s second collection of short fiction abounds with stories that come at life from all sides. Questions are raised of faith, sexuality, and family; they channel the grittiest of realism and feature magnificent surrealism, depending on the occasion. What they share is a haunting quality, and the ability to remain locked on to a reader.

– Tobias Carroll, managing editor of Vol.1 Brooklyn

[Read our review of Praying Drunk]

Internal Medicine: A Doctor’s Stories by Terrence Holt

Holt should be a household name. He’s an unbelievably talented prose stylist and inventive writer — see his excellent first short story collection, In the Valley of the Kings. And…he also happens to be a doctor. This collection is a gorgeous, melancholy, thoughtful group of stories loosely based on his time in residency. And if you happen to be — like me — obsessed with work, illness, death, and the body, then you need to put this on your list immediately.

– Amber Sparks, author of May We Shed These Human Bodies

Natural Histories by Guadalupe Nettel

It’s been a really great year for short story collections. I really enjoyed dipping into Snow In May by Kseniya Melnik, The Corpse Exhibition by Hassan Blasim, The Emerald Light in the Air by Donald Antrim, J. Robert Lennon’s See You In Paradise, and Ben Marcus’s Leaving The Sea. One that stood out for me in particular among these very good books is Natural Histories by Guadalupe Nettel, translated by J. T. Lichtenstein. Nettel is a wonderful Mexican writer, and each of the stories in this slim collection, published by Seven Stories, takes a wry philosophical look at the relationship between people and the creatures they live with — whether a pair of pet fish or an infestation of cockroaches.

– Jonathan Lee, Associate Editor of A Public Space and author of the forthcoming novel High Dive

American Innovations by Rivka Galchen

Rivka Galchen’s fictional world, no matter how fantastical, remains our world. Regardless of its walking furniture and time travel paradoxes. Her commitment to a kind of scientific dream logic always delivers me to some true place I’ve never been or imagined. Or as she says in one of her stories: “Surely our world obeys rules still alien to our imaginations.” I could say the same of this uncannily beautiful collection.

– Scott Cheshire, author of High as the Horses’ Bridles

Redeployment by Phil Klay

I’m biased here: in 2012, we published Phil Klay in Recommended Reading, and he just became a 5 Under 35 Honoree and National Book Award Winner. Fortunately, in making lists of the best book of the year, objectivity isn’t top priority. And, in any case, Redeployment isn’t just an important book for 2014 (it focuses on the experiences of Marines in Iraq and how to reconcile a return to civilian life), but it’s also a remarkably written book that handles language, psychology, and narrative reliability in ways that I’ve never seen before.

– Benjamin Samuel, co-founder of Recommended Reading and Program Manager at National Book Foundation

[Read a short story from Redeployment]

The Wilds by Julia Elliott

Although a lot of collections these days are said to be “beyond genre,” Julia Elliot’s stories truly are — I can’t think of anyone they wouldn’t appeal to. By turns terrifying, anxious, delicate and fantastic, Elliott has a Bowie-esque range (and sometimes similar subject matter). Free of the irony that can spoil a good tale of killer dogs, robotic grandmas or recreational brain surgery, Elliot, more than anyone else writing today, is the heir to the bedroom kingdoms and true-to-life fairy tales of Angela Carter, Barry Hannah and Ballard.

– JW McCormack, a writer, editor, and teacher

The UnAmericans by Molly Antopol

I grew up with this idea that there was always going to be an abundance of great Jewish fiction out there since I came of age in the shadow of all the Roths, Bellows, Ozicks, etc. And yes, there are plenty of great Jewish writers, from Michael Chabon to Jami Attenberg, who give us books with unforgettable Jewish characters, and very Jewish problems. But an entire collection? That would seem tough, like everything has been done before and getting a handful of original tales would be nearly impossible. But not for Antopol. This is a book filled with Jewish characters and stories, sure, but anybody from any walk of life will find the greatest of pleasures in its reading.

– Jason Diamond, associate editor of Mensjournal.com and founder of Vol 1 Brooklyn

Fullblood Arabian by Osama Alomar

Brief, imaginative, and wonderfully subversive, Fullblood Arabian is Syrian writer Osama Alomar’s first collection of very short stories and parables to appear in English. These are stories in which a clock on the wall might enviously regard a bucket in the sink as a rival clock, stories in which we might be asked to reimagine the act of applause — from the hand’s point of view. Drawing from influences such as Khalil Gibran, Aesop, and Kafka — and championed by America’s resident short-prose master Lydia Davis — Alomar takes aim at the absurdities of political and social status quos, joyously upending them with humor, wit, and élan in stories as short as a single sentence.

– James Yeh, co-editor and publisher of Gigantic

New York 1 Tel Aviv 0 by Shelly Oria

Read Shelly Oria’ debut short story collection if only because her dialogue is either scarily reminiscent of your own life, or, at turns, better than real life.

– Ryan Britt, author of the forthcoming book Luke Skywalker Can’t Read: A New Geek Manifesto

[Read a story from New York 1 Tel Aviv 0 and our review of the collection]

How To Be Happy by Eleanor Davis

In a year chock full of gorgeous story collections, one that stood out for me was, gasp, illustrated. (Which is perhaps less shocking given Roz Chast’s inclusion on the National Book Awards short list this year.) Eleanor Davis reminds us in her introduction that How To Be Happy is not about how to be happy. Instead these deeply imaginative and beautifully rendered stories show us the quiet struggles (and loveliness) of the everyday, no matter how wild the premise of the story. Each of the stories included here is entirely its own — moving from a lonely man’s failed attempt to create a present-day utopia, the simple beauty of a teenage summer love affair or a relationship failing, to an exploration of a dystopian future. Davis’ voice is entirely original, her range exceptionally broad, her artwork stunning and flexible, and her storytelling elegant and moving.

– Lisa Lucas, publisher of Guernica

Flings by Justin Taylor

Not much to say about Flings that I haven’t already declaimed from a barstool throne: This book is Da Bomb! But it’s also a bomb, a small explosive device that will destroy you if you get too close. I dare anyone to tell me your heart’s still in tact after reading “Adon Olam”, a modern tale of drugs, Jewish summer camp, and bromance gone bad that sucker-punches at the end with its deep emotional resonance. I dare anyone to tell me you didn’t explode with laughter after reading the mushroom-suit monologue that opens “Sungold”. I dare anyone to finish this book and not be blown away.

– Adam Wilson, author of Flatscreen and What’s Important Is Feeling

[Read our review of Flings]

Leaving the Sea by Ben Marcus

I’ll always have a special place in my heart for “Watching Mysteries With My Mother,” the story that opened Recommended Reading over two years ago. “I don’t think my mother will die today,” it begins, and by the story’s conclusion the underlying fear of that statement has been thoroughly excavated. I like that word, “excavated,” to describe Marcus’ writing, because many of his stories have a burrowing quality, the way they lodge themselves in the base of your brain and continue to work. Other tremendous stories in the collection include “I Can Say Many Nice Things,” about teaching writing on a cruise ship, and “What Have You Done?”, about the time-travel that is returning to childhood hometowns.

[Read a short story from Leaving the Sea]

– Halimah Marcus, editorial director of Electric Literature and editor-in-chief of Recommended Reading

Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine

We need to have a better conversation about race and I want Claudia Rankine at the head of the table. I want her to read us the stories and poems in Citizen, with its micro-aggressions, its pain, its wisdom, and its invitation to empathy and the right anger. This book is powerful and unsettling. I’ve read it three times and I think everyone in the country should too and then we should have that conversation.

– Kenneth Coble, bookseller at Elliot Bay Book Co.

Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours by Luke B. Goebel

Written in a gonzo-style cadence which mixes prose poetry with outlaw confession, Luke B. Goebel’s stunning debut, Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours, just may be the irascible yet heartfelt contemporary of Hunter S. Thompson’s Songs of The Doomed. As Goebel’s teacher — Gordon Lish — once said, the role of fiction is “To displace the other, yes. […] Delusion, the will, yes. Project your voice louder than the other, sure. Have the loudest voice. Wasn’t that the title of Grace Paley’s story? ‘The Loudest Voice’?” Goebel’s voice in 14 Stories is not only loud, it is in turns brave and endearing and self-critical. It reminds us that indeed the sentence need not be a “lonely place” — and recalls many masters of the form. I’m thinking here of Mark Richard (his story “Strays” from his collection The Ice At the Bottom of the World.) And of course I’m thinking too of writers like Denis Johnson and Barry Hannah. What I admire most about Goebel’s work as a piece of fiction is its attention to the story as an organic body — a rhythmic, fractured, irreverent and yet irretrievably whole vessel.

– Ann DeWitt, writer, critic and essayist

[Read a short story from Fourteen Stories and our review of the collection.]

Karate Chop by Dorthe Nors

Karate Chop is a slim little knife of a book, and the collection that has stayed with me the most this year. Nors’s stories are compacted gems that don’t try to hide the inclusions of life. As I said in an earlier list, “The fifteen short stories are realist stories, but realist in the bent way of Diane Williams, Lish-edited Raymond Carver, or Amy Hempel. Nors keeps readers on their toes and isn’t afraid to be a bit nasty with her characters. Highly recommended for fans of very short, minimalist fiction.”

– Lincoln Michel, online editor of Electric Literature and co-editor of Gigantic

NOTE: the following novels received the most votes from the panelists.

Paper Lantern: Love Stories by Stuart Dybek

Stuart Dybek is a writer’s writer, so no surprise his latest collection of gorgeous stories made our list. Donna Seaman at the Chicago Tribune said, “Dybek summons up the wonder of the unexpected and the improbable, he achieves a low-key form of magical realism that places him in a constellation of writers that includes Joyce in ‘The Dubliners,’ Italo Calvino, Gabriel García Marquez and Chicago’s own Leon Forrest.” -LM

Bark by Lorrie Moore

This is why I read Lorrie Moore: “If you were alone when you were born, alone when you were dying, really absolutely alone when you were dead, why ‘learn to be alone’ in between? If you had forgotten, it would quickly come back to you. Aloneness was like riding a bike. At gunpoint. With the gun in your own hand.” That piece of depressive wisdom is from “Thank You for Having Me,” the story that anchors Bark, Lorrie Moore’s first collection of new stories in 16 years. If you followed her work during that time in places like The Paris Review, Granta, and The New Yorker, the stories found in Bark are old friends, which is also how I often think of Moore’s characters. Invigorating and enraging, with quick tongues and slow hearts, pro-nuke pacifists, selfish do-gooders, over-indulgers, poor wedding guests, and mortally offended by rat-kings. For new readers and for old fans, Bark was definitely worth the wait. — HM

[Read our review of Bark]

See You in Paradise by J. Robert Lennon

The mind of J. Robert Lennon holds a seemingly endless supply of extraordinary fiction, full of darkness, magic, and intelligence. “Hibachi,” which originally appeared in the fifth issue of Electric Literature’s now retired quarterly anthology, “unleashes the unexpected cathartic power of a hibachi grill on a paralyzed marriage.” “A Stormy Evening at the Buck Snort Restaurant,” which originally appeared in A Public Space, takes what might have been an innocuous diner, and makes it the center of the terrifying universe. Graywolf Press continues to publish excellent short story collections, and See You In Paradise is yet another feather in their festooned cap. — HM

A Different Bed Every Time by Jac Jemc

Jac Jemc’s follow-up to her PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize finalist debut novel has been called “an emotional, catastrophe-strewn story collection” by the Chicago Tribune and “bright, sharp, mysterious gifts, designed to enchant and unsettle” by author Laura van den Berg. -LM

What’s Important Is Feeling by Adam Wilson

Adam Wilson’s shot stories are easily some of the funniest and most heartfelt around. Wilson was called “one of our best young writers” by Flavorwire and The New York Times Book Review said, “The buoyant comedy and insight of Wilson’s prose carries these stories farther and farther past taboo, into sensitive and complicated territory.” -LM

[Read a story from Adam Wilson]

White Tiger on Snow Mountain by David Gordon

David Gordon’s White Tiger on Snow Mountain is named after a behemoth of a short story seething with bondage, chat rooms, impotence, and long jogs along the Westside Highway. Gordon himself is a runner, and other ordinary aspects of the author’s life are also featured, distorted by noir overtones and extraordinary encounters. In “What I Have Been Trying to Do All This Time,” a writer, also named David Gordon, is the subject of an Argentinian grad student’s thesis because he was thanked in the liner notes of a Bad Religion record. The grad student sleeps with him because he was a character in a Rivka Galchen story, seducing him with the line, “Please, I have never met a real fictional character before.” That overlay of extraordinary on ordinary is what makes Gordon’s stories such a pleasure to read; it’s a familiar world, but with more (sexual) possibility. — HM

Thunderstruck & Other Stories by Elizabeth McCracken

Elizabeth McCracken’s first story collection in 20 years was called “delightful and destructive, packed with electricity, fascinating to watch unfold from the safe harbor of a comfortable chair” by Salon. The New York Times Book Review said, “Elizabeth McCracken knows how loss can melt reality, forever altering a person’s sense of time” and called Thunderstruck a “restorative, unforgettable collection.” -LM

The Emerald Light in the Air by Donald Antrim

Antrim’s fifth book is his first story collection, but our panelists agree he’s as brilliant at the short form as he is at the long. Lydia Kiesling at The Millions called it “a landmark, almost cartographic document, showing a profound recalibration of style, voice, and form” and noted that “we should always say yes to genius, yes to that emerald light in the air.” -LM

Year-end lists are always subjective and incomplete, but they are especially tricky for books. A dedicated film critic can watch every wide release film and a theater critic can go to most every play, but the book critic is faced with an insurmountable mountain of books each year. The sheer number of books is inspiring as a reader, but it can make “best of” lists laughably subjective when the critic has only read a fraction of the hundreds of thousands of novels published each year.

With that in mind, I decided to crowd source Electric Literature’s year-end lists. First up: novels. (Best story collections, best graphic novels, and more to come.) I asked sixteen Electric Literature contributors and friends to pick their favorite novel published in 2014 to write about, and then asked them to send me a short list of other novels they loved. The novels that got the most mentions have been included with everyone’s top picks. My hope was to have an eclectic list of books that included more than just the obvious names. I think we succeeded here with a list of 25 excellent novels that should include at least a few that you haven’t read yet. (Indeed, the lack of household names like Murakami and Denis Johnson is more evidence that 2014 was the year of the debut.) Keeping in mind that if I’d asked a different set of writers and critics we would have a different list, here are the definite 100% objective best novels of 2014:

Boy, Snow, Bird by Helen Oyeyemi

The bulk of my 2014 was spent transfixed by Helen Oyeyemi’s fifth novel. Although I could see how the book’s structure could throw some readers off, I’d caution them to keep going to the end because they’ll see that Oyeyemi is undoubtedly one of our great storytellers who is able to weave a complex story into something that you think is magical, and just might actually be.

– Jason Diamond, associate editor of Mensjournal.com and founder of Vol 1 Brooklyn

Nobody Is Ever Missing by Catherine Lacey

I’m not a fan of the picaresque. Even the most classic examples of the form often feel tedious and without direction. But Catherine Lacey’s novel defies the conventions of her chosen genre. Her character Elyria is undoubtedly lost, an American in New Zealand who can go home anytime she wants, but doesn’t, and doesn’t know why. And it’s that not knowing that envelops us. We don’t know when or if she’ll go home, and, in a way, we don’t care. Lacey brings Elyria’s experience so close that the reader feels just as rudderless and just as liberated as she does. Just like Elyria, we feel like we want to be set adrift and get lost in an adventure, although, as we continue, we become painfully aware that getting lost cannot be an act of will.

– John Dermot Woods, author of The Baltimore Atrocities and other books

[Read our review of Nobody Is Ever Missing and our interview with Catherine Lacey]

Faces in the Crowd by Valeria Luiselli

This novel is a mysterious wonder, a jigsaw of identity and ghosts and storytelling, and unlike anything else I read this year.

– Laura Van Den Berg, author of The Isle of Youth and other books

[Read our review of Faces in the Crowd and our interview with Valeria Luiselli]

Kinder Than Solitude by Yiyun Li

One of my favorite novels of 2014 was Yiyun Li’s Kinder Than Solitude. I understand she’s a fan of William Trevor, and maybe I like her work for the same reasons I like his: the smooth elegance to the sentences and the willingness to explore intense feelings. It takes courage to do that; she takes risks. Also: one thing her work rarely gets credit for is being funny. There’s a great humor shimmering under so many of her sentences, sometimes wry and sometimes beautifully vicious.

– Jonathan Lee, Associate Editor of A Public Space and author of the forthcoming novel High Dive

Preparation for the Next Life by Atticus Lish

Here’s the kind of book that shows up, if we’re lucky, every five, maybe ten years. It’s a book that masterfully anchors itself in the literary “novel” form while going leaps and bounds over a dozen of its kin in its authenticity, Lish’s command of the sentence capturing a dizzyingly accurate worldview from street level and up.

– Michael Seidlinger, author of The Face of Any Other and other books

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

Emily St. John Mandel’s fourth novel is, flat-out, one of the best things I’ve read on the ability of art to endure in a good long while. It’s about the ways that civilization is kept alive in a world devastated by a plague, sure, but it’s also about the way artists live, about the way people live, about flawed relationships and creative pursuits and how the unlikeliest of connections can bring transcendence.

– Tobias Carroll, managing editor of Vol.1 Brooklyn

[Read our review of Station Eleven]

300,000,000 by Blake Butler

This is the book we needed in 2014 — this monstrous year of continued economic, physical, and structural assault, of consumerism and indifference, of power grabs and surveillance and empty, gilded decadence. We needed this book to cut open the corpse of America and expose the full extent of the rot inside. Butler’s book is not an easy read — intellectually or emotionally. But it’s a necessary one, because it’s the rare book that comes along and tells us something essential about who we are — and even rarer that a writer does so in an experimental yet accessible text that works, because it mirrors our own 21 century media-fried brains.

– Amber Sparks, author of May We Shed These Human Bodies

[Read our review of 300,000,000]

Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill

It’s no secret how much I loved Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation. I even wrote about it (among other things) for Electric Literature here. Not sure what I love more about it — that it’s so lovely and unique and, dare I say, experimental a book, or that mainstream contemporary publishing embraced it the way they did. All around a real highpoint in book culture and one of the most assured and impassioned novels of the year.

– Scott Cheshire, author of High as the Horses’ Bridles

A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James

An absolutely unique and necessary novel of diaspora, bloodshed, reggae, drug addiction and corruption centered loosely around the attempted assassination of Bob Marley in 1976, A Brief History of Seven Killings spans countries, languages and color barriers, taking us from the slums of Kingston to the heyday of crack cocaine in 80’s New York — the story that emerges from the cracks in both cultures is not only a definitive novel of Jamaica but probably the best novel to address recent history (70s through the 90s) to be released in the 21st Century. For fans of Delillo, Vollmann, Pynchon et al.

– JW McCormack, a writer, editor, and teacher

Love Me Back by Merritt Tierce

Books that make us uncomfortable, that make us confront drug abuse, sex, and violence — especially without glamorizing them — are often praised as fearless, unflinching. Those terms, however, are a judgment, a reader acknowledging that there are parts of us we ought to be afraid of, be ashamed of, parts of life we must conceal. But it’s not that there is absence of regret or accountability in Love Me Back. Merritt Tierce’s narrator is anything but naive. This novel is not confessional, it’s not brave, it’s not post-bravery, it’s honest, it’s vulnerable, it’s necessary.

– Benjamin Samuel, co-founder of Recommended Reading and Program Manager at National Book Foundation

The Word Exchange by Alena Graedon

I can’t believe more people didn’t talk about or love this book. In the swirling concern over what all our little gadgets are doing to our minds, Alena Graedon’s novel about a sci-fi “word flu” sweeping the Earth was about as timely as it gets. This book was practically screaming for people who love reading — and view reading as our salvation — to love it. In the novel, reading is literally our salvation, which means reading The Word Exchange is an obvious meta-experience of the themes Gradeon is trying to convey. The Word Exchange made me feel guilty for my failing memory and over-reliance on search engines and online-info depositories, and the only thing I could do with that guilt was to hope the story I was reading would get better. And it did. Underrated doesn’t begin to cover how great this novel was and how much it should mean to hardcore readers everywhere. Alena Graedon turned the jokes of Super Sad True Love Story into frighteningly cautionary, and serious, science fiction. Oh, and it’s her first book.

– Ryan Britt, author of the forthcoming book Luke Skywalker Can’t Read: A New Geek Manifesto

Your Face in Mine by Jess Row

Jess Row’s Your Face in Mine boldly begins with an epigraph from James Baldwin: “And I suggest this: that in order to learn your name, you are going to have to learn mine.” This invocation of Baldwin let’s us know what we are about to encounter some real talk about race, and Row deftly navigates this space with the wild tale of Kelly Thorndike, a widower and public radio executive, who reconnects with a childhood friend who has undergone “racial reassignment” surgery and then signs up to document the story of how a white man from Baltimore comes to make the decision to elect for plastic surgery that will allow him to live as a black man. On a sentence by sentence level, Row is a beautiful writer and deeply engaging storyteller, capturing the voices and complexities of his characters over time, across countries, and across racial divides. On a political level, Row manages to speak frankly and elegantly about race and identity in America at a time where reading about race, across race, couldn’t possibly be more urgent.

– Lisa Lucas, publisher of Guernica

10:04 by Ben Lerner

The events that concern 10:04, which is bookended by Hurricanes Irene and Sandy, are still so vivid that reading this novel gave me the experience of life being simultaneously narrated. It was fitting, for a novel concerned with “multiple futures,” to feel that my present had multiplied. Particularly for New Yorkers, 10:04 is thrillingly sentient. Though nearly two years have passed, I still believe that, if I hurry, I can go see Christian Marclay’s The Clock (the work that gives 10:04 its title) at MoMA before the exhibit closes. Also recognizable from “real life” is Ben Lerner’s story, “The Golden Vanity,” which was published in The New Yorker in 2012 and becomes a central plot point of the novel (the story is reprinted verbatim). Which is all to say, the boundaries between 10:04 and real life are porous, and it’s exciting. But none of that would matter if it weren’t for Lerner’s excellent prose, which is galloping yet precise, his humorous, complex scene-settings (including one of the best extended party scenes I have ever read), his charming obsessions, and poignant world-view.

– Halimah Marcus, editorial director of Electric Literature and editor-in-chief of Recommended Reading

[Read our review of 10:04]

Two Serious Ladies by Jane Bowles

Finally — rightfully — Jane Bowles’s criminally underknown 1943 masterpiece Two Serious Ladies is back in print. Uproarious and mesmerizing on the sentence-by-sentence level, Two Serious Ladies is a rare and marvelously twisted comedy of contradictory characters and unpredictable behavior and speech that, almost inexplicably, manages to convince and delight as it also eludes.

– James Yeh, co-editor and publisher of Gigantic

Women by Chloe Caldwell

I am nothing like the characters in Chloe Caldwell’s fiery and honest novella of women in love. These are not my affairs, my mistakes, or my love-drunk disasters. Also, I am not a woman. Yet, Women is my biography. I am in these words. I felt every word, every storm, and every heartbreak in my throat, my bones. This book tore apart my internal organs. I am still recovering. I am hoping I never recover.

– Kenny Coble, bookseller at Elliot Bay Book Co.

Sister Golden Hair by Darcey Steinke

Darcey Steinke’s work has always been deeply engaged with perception — the perception of religion, the body, and the text as a kind of spiritual reservoir which must capture a sense of authenticity through struggles with form. Set in the 1970’s in a decade of “devolution,” where one could count “ten Nixon signs on the highway as they passed,” in her new novel, Sister Golden Hair, Steinke’s work branches out and engages with the physical presence of a decade and those crises which defined it — feminism and the crisis of self-fulfillment; the “throbbing amazingness of a round full female body;” spiritual “Devolution;” Grandness and An Unconstant God; and the architecture of physical place.

– Ann DeWitt, writer, critic and essayist

[Read our interview with Darcey Steinke]

A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing by Eimear McBride

I’ve heard it said that great novels teach you how to read them, and that is certainly true of McBride’s brilliant debut. A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing is a difficult book, but a very rewarding one. In an era when so many people look down on fiction that takes any effort, it is heartening to see McBride’s debut not only be published, but get great acclaim and win several awards.

– Lincoln Michel, online editor of Electric Literature and co-editor of Gigantic

NOTE: the following novels received the most votes from the panelists.

Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer

Annihilation was the first 2014 book I read that blew me away, so I’m thrilled to see it make the cut here. The novel was book one of the Southern Reach trilogy, all three of which were published in 2014 and then collected as the hardcover omnibus Area X. Here’s what I wrote when I interviewed VanderMeer back in March: “VanderMeer writes in taught, atmospheric prose filled with mysteries and uncanny unease. Fans of speculative fiction — especially the subgenre of weird fiction — and great writing should put this at the top of their to-read list.”

[Read our interview with Jeff VanderMeer and VanderMeer’s own list of favorite 2014 books]

McGlue by Ottessa Moshfegh

Ottessa Moshfegh is a writer that everyone will be talking about soon. She’s been publishing brilliant fiction in The Paris Review and elsewhere, and her novella, McGlue, was chosen by Rivka Galchen for the Fence Modern Prize in Prose. We published an excerpt of the brilliant sea-faring story in Recommended Reading, so go give it a try and then rush out and buy the novella.

Green Girl by Kate Zambreno

Green Girl is a novel so good that it had to be published twice. Initially published by Emergency Press in 2011, it was republished this year by Harper Perennial to plenty of acclaim. Here’s what our reviewer had to say: “Zambreno touches on a subset of society — a girl, in particular — and makes her universal and individual at the same time. Ruth is all contrasts and costumes and limbs. Zambreno invites us in to her life as a voyeur, but we finish the book with the feeling that she is our own creation.”

The Last Illusion by Porochista Khakpour

Porochista Khakpour’s sophomore novel has been racking up year-end acclaim (Kirkus, Buzzfeed, NPR, etc.) and for good reason. The Last Illusion is a gorgeously-written fable about a feral Iranian boy raised as a bird who moves to NYC. Part gritty fable, part coming-of-age-story, The Last Illusion is a one of a kind.

The Baltimore Atrocities by John Dermot Woods

Full disclosure: I collaborate with John Dermot Woods on some projects, so I am very happy to see The Baltimore Atrocities get enough votes for this list. The novel is composed of over 100 vignettes and illustrations woven together with an overall narrative. As such, the book is a form-bending combination of novel, flash fiction collection, and graphic novel.

Ugly Girls by Lindsay Hunter

Ugly Girls is another novel making a lot of year-end lists. Here’s what Luke Goebel had to say when he interviewed Lindsay Hunter for our site: “Kind of book everyone will want to read. Mass appeal, all that, killer speed book, craft out of the top of the head, with all the best prose anyone could want, plus the big story, mindblower, like at times I’m reading something written so good I think it’s As I Lay Dying only it’s 2014 or ’15 or ’16 and it’s Ugly Girls and it’s set in this trailer park — other times I’m clearly reading Lindsay Hunter and it’s still set in that trailer park — but it’s like one of those great books you read in school as a kid (though this one isn’t going to be taught in any kids’ schools anytime soon I doubt, not with some of these scenes!) and thought, HOW THE HELL DID THIS WRITER DO THIS?”

A Brave Man Seven Storeys Tall by Will Chancellor

Chancellor’s debut novel got rave reviews, but flew a little under the radar with readers. Hopefully, it’s inclusion on year-end lists will encourage readers to give this gorgeous novel a try. John Warner of The Chicago Tribune said, “it is a novel that could only be written by one person, at one particular time…the most ‘alive’ book I’ve read this year.” BookPage said, “Chancellor writes in the established tradition of the American absurd, from Pynchon and Gaddis to DeLillo and Foster Wallace. Chancellor may be swinging for the former pair, but lands firmly, and thereby accessibly, in the latter.”

The Wallcreeper by Nell Zink

The Wallcreeper is a book that everyone I know has been raving about. Jeff VanderMeer included it on his list of favorite books, praising it’s “utterly fearless writing.” It was voted one of the top indie books of the year in our survey. And here is what our reviewer had to say: “It’s rare that a debut novel so offbeat, and with such sharp little teeth, is also a page-turner. Rarer still does one like this get past the gatekeepers of the publishing world. It’s exciting that The Wallcreeper did.” We excerpted The Wallcreeper in Recommended Reading.

My year in reading was a chaotic and joyous one. There was nothing scientific or complete or logical about it, and I was glad I didn’t have to care about any of that. I was on the road exactly five months, two weeks, and three days. I grabbed what I could when I could and discarded anything that didn’t keep my attention in an airport, on a plane, in a cab, in a hotel room, in a cave, on horseback, talking to owls, at the end of a bar, dancing with lemurs, through a looking glass, back home for a couple of days.

So, in that context, it’s surprising what stuck and what didn’t. I lugged Richard House’s thousand-page hardcover The Kills around with me all over — undaunted by the fact that it was not built for shoving into an airplane seat-back pocket. It was the tome I could not put down, and it captured me so utterly that I begged off meal invites and bar get-togethers to finish it. I resented gigs because if I was reading my own work I wasn’t reading The Kills.

The borders of my reading in 2014 were porous and for this reason you will find a few titles from before 2014, like Submergence and Pym. I am not the kind of reader to begrudge a book its inclusion based on some arbitrary human calendar. (This will frustrate some of you; I apologize in advance.) Still, even I have some limits. I have not included “ancient” books that I read and loved this year — like Margaret Atwood’s Oryx & Crake and Robert Walser’s The Tanners. I also have stopped myself from adding the astonishing Thrown by Kerry Howley, “creative nonfiction” about MMA fighters that should appeal to any fiction reader due to its unique approach.

Throughout the year, whether they have books on this particular list or not, the publishers who made me happiest were, in no particular order, Two Dollar Radio, Coffee House, Melville, Milkweed, Dorothy Project, New York Review of Books Classics, Sarabande, Dedalus, Drawn & Quarterly, Subterranean Press, Europa Editions (and Picador generally), Tin House, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and New Directions.

Here, then, are my carefully curated favorite reads of the year. I have divided this list into the following rigid genre categories: fiction.

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City of Stairs by Robert Jackson Bennett (Broadway Books)

Author of the highly recommended American Elsewhere, Bennett returns with a fantasy novel that will appeal to a wide range of general readers. This novel has everything. Set in a fantasy world with dead gods, City of Stairs can be read as a spy novel infused with political intrigue. But Bennett also tackles colonialism, religious fanaticism, economics, the environment, and gender issues. On top of that, this layered and complex novel throws in magic, credible action-adventure, long-held family secrets, and a fresh take on mythology. All related from the point of view of Shara Thivani, who has been tasked with solving a murder. A murder? Why yes, it’s also a crime drama.

The Corpse Exhibition and Other Stories of Iraq by Hassan Blasim, translated by Jonathan Wright (Penguin)

Redeployment by Phil Kay has been juxtaposed, in some reviews, with The Corpse Exhibition as if allied by being on opposite sides of the mirror, or allied by a shared subset of geography, boots on the ground or of the mind. But I’d like to break that link here and say they aren’t allies. One is something we’ve seen before, even if done well. The other, The Corpse Exhibition, isn’t something we’ve seen before. There’s a welcome unchecked and unruly strain of surreal horror running through this collection, one that serves as a delivery system for a matter-of-fact grotesquery and absurdity. These stories do not support a comfortable view of the human condition. They do not support the status quo. These sophisticated and layered narratives chronicle how reality can seem like a dark dream, and how you have to live within that reality or that dream. We may be living in times where mimetic realism in fiction isn’t up to the task of describing the intra-dimensionality of experience.

Idiopathy by Sam Byers (Faber & Faber)

What do you get when you combine self-absorbed people, a cattle epidemic, rehab, a bio-dome, pregnancy, and a barbed writing style? Idiopathy. Since this novel skewers everyone and everything in modern consumer society, it’s no surprise that the Amazon reviews are dire. The more formal reviews were hit or miss, too. It’s not nice to be told that everything you value is for shit. Not nice! Not nice! Oh well. I guess we’ll have to live with it. Anyway, Idiopathy is a deeply hilarious and absurd novel full of unlikeable characters and inventive set pieces. A misunderstood book that deserved better than it got on this side of the Atlantic.

The Investigation by Philippe Claudel (Quercus)

Why be Kafkaesque when you can just be Kafka, returned from the dead? Claudel prefers stealing to borrowing — and it works due to a cringe-worthy beautiful unease. An Investigator is sent to a far-distant town to find out why so many people at an anonymous company are committing suicide. But the Investigator doesn’t even get to the company until several chapters in, such are the vagaries and disturbances of modern life. From weird hotel owners to strange rituals, The Investigation contains more than a hint of Robert Aickman, especially his story “The Hospice.” The Investigator is stymied not just by the people he encounters but the systems that have created the ridiculous words that spill out of their mouths. Surreal, hilarious, and disturbing, this is the novel about the modern world that Kafka didn’t live to write.

can’t and won’t by Lydia Davis (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

I think of this collection as a series of personal diary entries, probably not by the same person, that I get the privilege of reading through even though I’m not part of the family. Because of Davis’ reputation I’m happy to wrestle with a three-line short-short that seems banal; I don’t care what spark or stance reveals to me the resonance. So I read this collection in an odd state of dueling boredom and deep interest. I must admit I like the longer pieces best, but there’s a kind of hypnotic hold exhibited by the shorter stories that I can’t quite explain. Even when ennui took over it was a kind of active ennui and I couldn’t stop reading.

The Wilds by Julia Elliott (Tin House)

My favorite collection of the year by a writer whose first novel comes out in 2015. The stories in The Wilds adhere to a nominally realistic view of the world, but there’s also a strong sense of the absurd running through them. Sometimes it’s overt and sometimes it’s sly. The randomness and spontaneity of the world often manifest through the dialogue. It’s an incredibly rare gift to make speech sound both off-the-cuff and essential to the story rather than just random. “The Wilds,” “Feral,” and “The Whipping” are three personal favorites, with a Southern flare that doesn’t degenerate into stereotype. But Elliott’s also doing really interesting and unique things with stories like “Regeneration at Mukti,” which is science fiction. These stories don’t owe anything to any writer, but sometimes there are glints and glimmers of Shirley Jackson and Kelly Link.

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler (G.P. Putnam’s Sons)

I read this novel by Fowler on the plane, next to someone who I hadn’t spoken to all flight. So I imagine the person was surprised when I burst into tears just as we started our descent. I’d reached the end of the novel. I’m not a sentimental person, but somehow Fowler’s tale of an unusual family, a terrible scientific secret, and the inequities of animal research got past all of my defenses.

Cat Town by Sakutarō Hagiwara, translated by Hiroaki Sato (NYRB Press)

A Japanese writer considered one of the foremost poets of the Taishō and early Showa periods, Sakutarō was interested in exploring madness, hallucinations, and obsession in his works. To do so, he largely rejected naturalism and used colloquial language, impressionistic images, a sense of personal intimacy, and modern subject matter. The classic “The Town of Cats” (1935) or, as here “Cat Town,” is the poet’s only short story and explores themes of disorientation and the illusory nature of reality. It depicts a surreal urban journey that presages the work of Haruki Murakami. But this lovely collection includes potent evidence as well of the author’s gift for poetry. “Signs of crimes and sins appear in heaven, appear on piling snow, glitter out of treetops…shining beyond midwinter.”

Fourth of July Creek by Smith Henderson (Ecco)

This debut is just flat-out brilliant from beginning to end. Set in Montana around 1979, it chronicles the conflict between a dysfunctional social worker and a crackpot preacher who has become a dangerous survivalist. As I wrote in The Guardian, “Henderson is committed to showing us unhappy and unstable people existing at the edges of any safety net. But they’re also people struggling to find a kind of truth, and they’re portrayed with compassion and humanity, in a voice that crackles and lurches with the intensity of a Tom Waits song. Here, at the beginning of his career, Henderson has come within shouting distance of writing a great American novel.” This one deserved all the prizes.

With My Dog Eyes by Hilda Hilst, translated by Adam Morris (Melville House)

As more and more Latin American women writers are translated into English, we begin to have a better sense of the true range of the surreal, irreal, and fantastical. This expansion is as yet incomplete and there is much, much more to come — many writers from the past whose fiction has yet to appear beyond single story translations in literary journals. But Hilst helps, especially with its disdain for literary tradition and for middle class mores. It’s scatological, merrily sexual, and not interested in telling a conventional story. A slim but potent text, this one will sear your brain. Translator Morris’s introduction provides great context and suggests treasures yet to come.

The Kills by Richard House (Picador U.S.)

This long novel split into four self-contained, interlocking parts is probably my favorite read of 2014. The basic set-up involves embezzled money, predatory military contractors, and illegal U.S. waste burning sites in the Iraqi desert. From there, The Kills metastasizes and transforms, continually shedding its skin. You can also think of this novel as a mimic with a through-line of exploring every ramifications of the decisions explored in part one. There are definite traces of Le Carre and other espionage writers but also war reportage, horror fiction, theater of the absurd, and much more. Moreover, The Kills is a sustained examination of the lies and myths we tell about ourselves. Comparisons to Bolano’s 2666, Catch 22, and Thomas Pynchon all make sense to me, even if The Kills is a unique creation. For this reason — this sense of encountering something unique — I found every page captivating in some way, but the shape of the story didn’t become clear until the last pages. At which point everything locks in place with impressive power; brilliant and brutal. I would suggest that The Kills and The Corpse Exhibition share a certain resonance. I see both books as harbingers of a paradigm shift — that, for example, what has baffled some critics about the sometimes brutal The Kills is exactly what makes the novel more relevant to and reflective of our times than a dozen more lauded books. There’s no escapism here, and nothing juvenile or nostalgic.

Safari Honeymoon by Jesse Jacobs (Koyama Press)

I read this graphic novel or it read me. I’m not quite sure which. A demented exploration of unfamiliar wilderness, Jacobs’ absurdist horror story deftly comments on and sends up invasive species and Western explorers alike. Jacobs has a gifted eye for the plant or animal detail that resonates and seems true despite ignoring the fidelity of biological illustration. As the two lovers on their honeymoon encounter an increasingly phantasmagorical ecology, their guide demonstrates hidden depths of both devotion and perfidy. Meanwhile, swarms of weird centipedes and other creatures look on, wide-eyed and innocent. (Or are they?) The adventures are surreal, creepily informed by a good working knowledge of parasites, and come with an underlying message: Intruders either succumb to bad ends or become assimilated…and sometimes being assimilated ain’t so bad.

Pym by Mat Johnson (Spiegel & Grau)

The oldest title on this list (from 2011), Pym was absolutely one of my top five reading experiences this year. This exploration of race and fiction through a modern riff on Poe’s classic yet at times problematic The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket is laugh-out-loud funny but also deadly serious. It’s beautifully layered and deep. The novel manages, somehow, to seem at times like the best essay on Poe ever written, without this in any way diluting its authority as fiction. It also reads like the best expedition story to the Antarctic, too. Somehow Johnson has managed to successfully wed the conventions of literary criticism, historical fiction, adventure fiction, literary fiction, and weird fiction. I loved it.

The Woman Who Borrowed Memories: Selected Stories of Tove Jansson translated by Thomas Teal and Silvester Mazzarella (NYBR Classics)

One unfortunate thing about the popularity of Jansson’s wonderful Moomin comics and stories is that her so-called “adult” fiction has seemed for decades to play second-fiddle, at least in English translation. New York Review of Books has done a fine job of rectifying this situation. The latest salvo is the selected stories of Jansson, with a useful introduction by Lauren Groff. The curation helps quite a bit because Jansson’s short stories have always seemed like the most hit-or-miss category in her creative output. This omnibus gives readers the best possible experience. I must also use this anchor to put in a plug for Jansson novels, in case you have not yet encountered them. The Summer Book is an elegant and wise exploration of the relationship between a granddaughter and her grandmother on a Finnish Island. The True Deceiver is a sharp knife between the shoulder blades, a clinical and unsentimental look at art and real-life relationships.

Nobody Is Ever Missing by Catherine Lacey (FSG Originals)

This uncompromising novel, in which a woman recounts leaving her husband and traveling through New Zealand is a brave, often darkly funny story about trying to find or lose your self while coping with loss and dysfunctional societal norms. It’s also a damn fine road novel. More than anything else, though, I admire how Nobody Is Ever Missing commits to the eccentricities of its narrator through its use of language. The spiraling, long sentences that I love so much. The returning to certain ideas or phrases, as a way of testing the walls of a prison. It threatens a repetition that could be tiresome but escapes the trap. The ending is just as fraught and messy as the beginning and middle. Nothing will ever be the same. Thankfully so.

Submergence by J.M. Ledgard (Coffee House Press, 2013)

A staggering accomplishment, with twinned narratives that join in the middle and are genuinely moving, ecstatic, terrifying, and profound. This story of a hostage and a woman who studies the deep ocean contains more interesting ideas about science and philosophy than any science-fiction novel I’ve read in the past decade. I was astounded by the layered compression, how the narrative manages to achieve so much in such a short span. I’ve never encountered anything quite like Submergence and I am rendered largely speechless and wordless by it. Thus, I guide you to Matthew Cheney’s marvelous review, for a more articulate reaction.

The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing by Nicholas Rombes (Two Dollar Radio)

I very much enjoyed this weird, disturbing, sometimes effed-up novel about strange films, lost films, and the fragile faith in the difference between our fictions and our realities. A journalist and film buff interviews an eccentric filmmaker/professor. It is profitable for the reader’s entry point into the novel to think of it as consisting of a series of loosely interlocking short stories, in the form of film descriptions. The section involving a quest by an engineer to repair an abandoned well is particularly stunning. An image of dark drones so thick across the sky it becomes night is incredible. One passage in particular had a truth to it that I cannot forget: “The end of the world is really a reactionary fantasy, the dream of thin-blooded tyrants, spun into popular narrative by writers and artists and movie makers. The landscape around her — the broken roads and disfigured buildings and polluted rivers — is not some dystopian fantasy of the slate-wiped-clean but something far more dangerous: things as they are. The present is always the present, even when it seems like the future.”

Lesabendio: An Asteroid Novel by Paul Scheerbart, translated by Christina Svendsen (Wakefield Press)

First published in 1913, this German novel is credited with helping found “German SF” as well as serving as an influence on German Dada and Expressionist writings. Its surrealism and fantasy pushed back against the dominant realism of the era. Episodic and hypnotic, the novel describes life on the planetoid Pallas where “rubbery suction-footed life forms with telescopic eyes smoke bubble-weed in mushroom meadows under violet skies and green stars.” There’s definitely an early ecological theme here, a sense of trying to create a new perspective. Intriguingly, the writer and painter Alfred Kubin created illustrations for the novel — yet another link between Scheerbart and the weird. (Kubin’s own classic novel, The Other Side, was reissued this year by Dedalus and if you haven’t read it you must run out and buy it immediately.)

All the Birds, Singing by Evie Wyld (Pantheon)

In All the Birds, Singing Wyld creates an unforgettable character in Jake Whyte, a woman with a troubled past who, in the present, lives on a farm she owns on a remote British island. The story of her encounters with a strange beast and neighbors she wants nothing to do with is interwoven with a narrative about the past that gradually delves farther and farther back in time. Wyld’s also not afraid to just give the reader the blunt, brutal truth. There are aspects of Whyte’s past — because of what’s been done to her and what she herself has done — that you get full-on, in detail. To describe them here would be spoilery, in that the life of the novel is in the moment and in the particulars of sometimes fairly brief scenes. But my point is that we begin the novel with a mystery about Whyte — who she is and why she’s now on the island — and on some level the rest of All the Birds, Singing is nothing but exploration of her character, a kind of clear-seeing that creates empathy even through the most disturbing sequences. The truly exceptional prose is supported by a vision for the novel’s structure that has both clarity and substance.

The Wallcreeper by Nell Zink (Dorothy Project)

Frank is not a proper noun in The Wallcreeper; it’s a way of life. But so is an inventive and layered approach to narrative. As this story of a woman, her husband, and encroaching commitments to other people and to environmental causes progressed, I marked so many pages because of an original turn of phrase or some stark assertion some other writer would have circled around…that I had to stop. For that reason, too, I’m not going to share any quotes because a huge part of the pleasure of the novel is encountering the surprises at the sentence level. Even as The Wallcreeper can be cynical, arch, and satirical about its eco-pushing characters, it contains a useful critique of certain approaches to environmentalism. A lot of what’s on display is utterly fearless writing.

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photo by Kyle Cassidy

Jeff VanderMeer’s The Southern Reach Trilogy made Entertainment Weekly’s list of the Top 10 Fiction of 2014, in addition to the best-of lists of the Los Angeles Times, Buzzfeed, and many others.