As the end of 2024 draws near, we highlight some of the most important fiction books released this year…
Although some of these fiction books will appear on our Advent calendar of 2024’s Best Books, we won’t say that these are the 12 BEST fiction books — just that they are important ones that should be widely read and discussed…
We feature our novel of the year first, and after that the remaining book are in alphabetical order by the author’s last name….
View all our fiction award winners
as an Amazon list
Concerning the Future of Souls: Stories
Joy Williams
(Tin House)
“Quite possibly America’s best living writer of short stories.”—NPR“Williams is a writer for our both visionary and caustic, knowing yet also full of wonder.”—Catherine Taylor, The Financial Times
Returning to her legendary short stories, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist Joy Williams offers a much-anticipated follow-up to Ninety-Nine Stories of God, which The New York Times Book Review called a “treasure trove of bafflements and tiny masterpieces.” Concerning the Future of Souls balances the extraordinary and the humble, the bizarre and the beatific, as Azrael—transporter of souls and the most troubled and thoughtful of the angels—confronts the holy impossibility of his task, his uneasy relationship with Death, and his friendship with the Devil.Over the course of these ninety-nine illuminations, a collection of connected and disparate beings—ranging from ordinary folk to grand, known figures, such as Jung, Nietzsche, Pythagoras, Bach, and Rilke; to mountains, oceans, dogs, birds, whales, horses, butterflies, a sixty-year-old tortoise, and a chimp named Washoe—experience the varying fate of the soul as each encounters the darkness of transcendence in this era of extinction. A brilliant crash course in philosophy, religion, literature, and culture, Concerning the Future of Souls is an absolution and an indictment, sorrowful and ecstatic. Williams will leave you wonderstruck, pondering the morality of being mortal.
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C. Christopher Smith is the founding editor of The Englewood Review of Books. He is also author of a number of books, including most recently How the Body of Christ Talks: Recovering the Practice of Conversation in the Church (Brazos Press, 2019). Connect with him online at: C-Christopher-Smith.com
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