Here are our 35 favorite books of the year, including Garth Greenwell, Han Kang, Annie Proulx, Leopoldine Core, and more.

"How does one navigate being a writer? I whine like a big fucking bald baby and pretend, like everyone else, that I’m not typing morality lectures into devices built by slaves in China. But of course I am."

Chelsea Hodson interviews Jarett Kobek on hating the internet, mansplaining, and many more 21st-century diseases.

Lori Jakiela on the time she was confused with Miss America for her book signing at Sam's Club. With special appearances from George Eliot and 300-count bags of roasted pig-ear dog treats.

"White writers often begin from a place where transcendence is a given—one already has access to all, one already is permitted to inhabit all, to address all. The crisis comes when one’s access is questioned. For writers of color, transcendence can feel like a distant and elusive thing, because writers of color often begin from the place of being addressed, and accessed."

When writers go wrong in imagining the lives of others.

"I hasten to add that I don’t think I’m injured by these guys at this point in my life, and I don’t feel sorry for myself. I just goggle in amazement at the batshit that comes out of them."

Rebecca Solnit on the power art has to make or break us.

"But here I am: a large black man in one of the whitest places in the state, sitting on the side of the road with binoculars pointed toward a house with the Confederate flag proudly displayed."

J. Drew Lanham on birding while black.

When Werner Herzog isn't learning about Pokemon-Go, he's talking to Paul Holdengräber. Listen in on their conversation, featuring YouTube, Mexican literature, and his surprising North Korean fanbase.

"Joyce Carol Oates has been a perennial contender for the Nobel; she is, at the very least, a lesser titan of American letters. Then she started tweeting."

Eric Thurm on gaffes, cats, and his obsession with JCO's Twitter feed.

"As much as we like Edward Snowden, we don’t want to be pigeon-holed as a “Snowden journal” because a large part of our point is that Tor can (and should) be used for ordinary things by ordinary people—not just intelligence whistleblowers."

An interview with the editors of The Torist, the Dark Web's first literary magazine.

"This is why I carry so many books in my duffle: I want to feel as connected as I possibly can to the world around me."

Yahdon Israel on the irreplaceable magic of tactility.

"James was referring frankly to an uncomfortable truth about the literary world and about the novel as an inherited cultural artifact: that it is foundationally born out of interlocking systems of oppression, which we must work very, very hard not to reproduce."

"So let’s start by considering a list of masterly American women writers in a tradition in which we can now situate Lucia Berlin, in the hope that they—and she—might more often grace the book jackets and catalogue descriptions of the future."

On the literary genealogy of Lucia Berlin.

"There has always been this ingrained idea in people’s minds that books are there to teach you how to live, that they create ideals for you to uphold. Especially in the Soviet times, when they were actually remaking a human being, remaking a person, literature was there as a major tool of support."

A conversation between Nobel Prize winner Svetlana Alexievich and John Freeman.

"It’s a little embarrassing to me when anarchists embrace me. Because—so long as they are my kind, pacifist—I love them, but I am a bourgeois housewife, I don’t practise anarchism."

The legendary Ursula K. Le Guin on racism, Utopian societies, and anarchy.

Sarah Schulman on the books that opened the doors to her imagination, including Audre Lorde, Jean Genet, Claudia Rankine, Rabih Alameddine, Kathy Acker, and more.