Compilation of Best Books / The Endless Bookshelf ‘Book of the Year’

2023 — Joanne McNeil. Wrong Way. MCD x FSG Originals, [2023]

2022 — Robert Freeman Wexler. The Silverberg Business. Small Beer Press, [2022].

2021 — Brendan C. Byrne. Accelerate. [Moonachie, New Jersey: 3 November 2021]. E-booke: Neotext, 2021.

2020 — Susanna Clarke. Piranesi. Bloomsbury, [2020].

2019 — Tim Maughan. Infinite Detail. MCD x FSG Originals, [5 March 2019].

2018 — Ng Yi-Sheng. Lion City. Stories. [Singapore] : Epigram, [2018].

2017 — Selma Miriam and Noel Furie. Our Daily Lives Have to Be a Satisfaction in Themselves. 40 Years of Bloodroot. Essays by Selma Miriam & Noel Furie. Photographs by Noel Furie. Bridgeport : Alder & Frankia, 2017.

2016 — Ingrid Burrington. Networks of New York. An Illustrated Field Guide to Urban Internet Infrastructure. Melville House, 2016.

2015 — Christopher Brown. Tropic of Kansas. Unpublished novel, read in typescript. Published : Harper Voyager, 2017.

2014 — George Koppelman & Daniel Wechsler. Shakespeare’s Beehive. An Annotated Elizabethan Dictionary Comes to Light. Axletree Books, 2014.

2013 — Greer Gilman. Cry Murder! in a Small Voice. Small Beer Press, [2013].

2012 — Lord Dunsany. Lost Tales. Vol I. [Introduction by Michael Swanwick]. Pegana Press, 2012.

2011 — Reggie Oliver. Mrs Midnight and other stories. With illustrations by the author. Tartarus Press, [2011].

2010 — Robert Walser. Microscripts. Translated from the German and with an Introduction by Susan Bernofsky. Afterword by Walter Benjamin. New Directions/Christine Burgin, [2010].

2009 — Mark Valentine. The Nightfarers. Bucharest : Ex Occidente Press, 2009.

  • 2008 — Cory Doctorow. Little Brother. Tor, [2008].

The sole criterion was a subjective one, the best new book I read in a given year: that is, a book published in the calendar year (or, in one case, an unpublished book). Books published by Temporary Culture are excluded. There were many other good books in every year, some I read long enough after publication that I could only wonder, why had I not heard of it sooner?