Great reads from the Book Review

On our cover this year was our review of Ben Lerner’s latest, “The Topeka School.” The novel — which was one of our 10 Best Books of the year — is a deeply intellectual examination of a Midwestern family, and evokes the era of Bill Clinton, Trapper Keepers and Tupac.

Julie Yip-Williams, who died at 42 of cancer, wrote an exhortation to life in her memoir, “The Unwinding of the Miracle.” Our reviewer called her book “eloquent, gutting and at times disarmingly funny.”

There’s plenty beyond reviews, of course. The essayist Leslie Jamison wrote about the lasting appeal of the literary sad woman. You know the type: “a woman contoured and whittled by her suffering, self-destructive and utterly destroyed.”

Seeking inspiration for her next novel, a thriller writer visited the body farm, a research center devoted to the study of death. Even for someone who invented death for a living, she was startled by what she found.

What have tweets and emojis done to the novel? According to the writer Charles Finch, the digital age has ushered in new ways of reading — and revived old ones (the scroll and the ideogram). But could it also explain the rise of autofiction?