Three thousand two hundred sixty-seven. That’s how many science fiction and fantasy audiobooks were added to Audible.com’s US listings alone in 2014, and the larger number of new speculative fiction audiobooks — which include GraphicAudio, independent (for example The Maze of Games and Eric Flint’s “Islands”), and other titles not available at Audible (for example Cory Doctorow’s Homeland and Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free), physical-only releases, podiobooks, and English-language audiobooks released in other countries, to name a few, not to mention the many sf/f titles shelved under “Fiction” or “Mysteries and Thrillers” or of course young adult and young reader titles — is nearly impossible to catalog. (I tried, as usual, this year with the release week coverage, but even so missed quite a lot.) And, of course, while The AudioBookaneers focuses on science fiction and fantasy, there were quite a few fantastic books without dragons or spaceships in them this year, too.

First, a warning. This article is a long over-wrought mess. Second, before I get to those “most missing in audio” books which came out last year and did not make it into audio at all, I’ll start with highlighting a few that actually did come to audio, albeit overseas:

A Man Lies Dreaming by Lavie Tidhar, narrated by Andrew Wincott (Hodder & Stoughton, October) — “Deep in the heart of history’s most infamous concentration camp, a man lies dreaming. His name is Shomer, and before the war he was a pulp fiction author. Now, to escape the brutal reality of life in Auschwitz, Shomer spends his nights imagining another world – a world where a disgraced former dictator now known only as Wolf ekes out a miserable existence as a low-rent PI in London’s grimiest streets. An extraordinary story of revenge and redemption, A Man Lies Dreaming is the unforgettable testament to the power of imagination.” — available at Audible UK but sadly not (yet!?) in the US store — fantastically reviewed at Tor.com as “a sort of Holocaust noir or pulp that is at once as riveting as it is disturbing” among many, many other strong recommendations.

THE TEN MOST MISSING POETRY COLLECTIONS of 2014

Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals by Patricia Lockwood (Penguin, May) — “Colloquial and incantatory, the poems in Patricia Lockwood’s second collection address the most urgent questions of our time, like: what if a deer did porn? Is America going down on Canada? What happens when Niagara Falls gets drunk at a wedding? Is it legal to marry a stuffed owl exhibit? What would Walt Whitman’s tit-pics look like? Why isn’t anyone named Gary anymore? Did the Hatfield and McCoy babies ever fall in love? The steep tilt of Lockwood’s lines sends the reader snowballing downhill, accumulating pieces of the scenery with every turn. The poems’ subject is the natural world, but their images would never occur in nature. This book is serious and funny at the same time, like a big grave with a clown lying in it.”

Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine (Graywolf Press, October) — Via Roxanne Gay, NPR, on and on, finalist for the National Book Award, … “Claudia Rankine’s bold new book recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media. Some of these encounters are slights, seeming slips of the tongue, and some are intentional offensives in the classroom, at the supermarket, at home, on the tennis court with Serena Williams and the soccer field with Zinedine Zidane, online, on TV—everywhere, all the time. The accumulative stresses come to bear on a person’s ability to speak, perform, and stay alive. Our addressability is tied to the state of our belonging, Rankine argues, as are our assumptions and expectations of citizenship. In essay, image, and poetry, Citizen is a powerful testament to the individual and collective effects of racism in our contemporary, often named “post-race” society.”

The Haunted Girl by Lisa Bradley (Aqueduct Press, September) — “The supernatural, the animal, and the deadly often find each other in Lisa M. Bradley’s landscapes, tame or wild. Vampires, either restless or filled with ennui; shape-shifters and skin-walkers; demigoddesses of evil and lust; haunted girls and dying fairies—the characters in this collection inhabit worlds of danger, decay, and, sometimes, rebirth. Often rooted in issues of family, ritual, and belonging, the poems and short stories in The Haunted Girl display Bradley’s loving mastery of language, which grants us myriad moments of impish wit and startling beauty.”

Prelude to Bruise by Saeed Jones (Coffee House Press, August) — “This is a glittering collection of poems that move across the page with the fierce grace of a corseted dancer. Saeed Jones’ sharp rhythms and powerful images are choreographed to perfection, telling the story of Boy, a queer African-American growing up in the South, and his experiences with family, gender and desire. Smoke, booze, music and sex are all stitched together into a fabulously controlled performance.” —Amal El-Mohtar, book critic for NPR

The Memory of Planets by Ryan W. Bradley (Artistically Declined Press, April 22) — “Ryan W. Bradley’s third full-length poetry collection finds a fresh combination of muses from his first two. Whether about love or concussions, his poems arrive with confidence, taking everyday moments and spinning them for the reader to experience from a unique vantage point.”

Heteronomy by Chris Nealon (Edge Books, September) — via Ben Lerner for The Millions, who said it “has been supporting me all fall. Nealon taps into the energies of popular culture without condescension or self-congratulation or (easy) irony; his poems are at once totally well-wrought and unaffectedly conversational; he is clear-eyed about the catastrophe of the present but refuses to descend into mere melancholy; he has no illusions about poetry’s practical power but he is not in love with — or particularly tortured by — its marginality; Nealon — an accomplished literary critic — neither disavows his learning or retreats into it. Please read this book with me because everybody who reads it gets to enter a meadow where we can dance and die together.”

Bone River by Benjamin Lowenkron (Ampersand Books, January 2014) — “Sundown. Bone River. A hatchet and a cassock. Where do we go when the spirit leaves us in the moonlight at the crossroads? How many steps before we realize that we cannot escape them, that we will carry the crossroads with us forever? When the waters rise and breach the levee; when the sun fills the land with blood; when your dreams are baptized in the current; when the chorus on the far bank sings out your name; when everything around you rises from the grave, Bone River will take us, as Bone River does.” A soundtrack to the book is in the works as well.

Ghost Box by Emerson Whitney (Timeless, Infinite Light) — via Mairead Case for Vol. 1 Brooklyn: “Humans are lucky that Emerson Whitney finished his first book of poems and that Oakland-based Timeless, Infinite Light (see also: emji spero’s Almost Any Shit Will Do) published it so we can read it. The main characters are Whitney himself, Emily-who-might-be-a-ghost, and an abandoned Home Depot parking-lot-cum-bird-sanctuary in downtown Los Angeles. Everything is shifting, some of it might be dying.”

Gephyromania by TC Tolbert (Ahsahta Press) — another via Case: “Gephyromania, its name rooted in the Latin for bridge, is a very important hot-orange book of poems about gender and the body and love, using words evolving and ornamented, read both hot-dog and hamburger-style. I’ve always loved some of these poems individually but fell hard for the whole once I heard Tolbert read “The Palinode” after an incredibly generous, funny, smart conversation at the University of Denver this fall.”

The Feel Trio by Fred Moten (Letter Machine Editions) — one more! via Case: I return to this book once a week, to read or re-read a poem and learn something new from it. As CM Burroughs wrote in Lana Turner Journal on the day Maya Angelou died, “Moten’s verse references the lived and the living right now… the stakes being matters personal and political (and the political become the personal).” These poems witness, feel, clang harmony, and are sometimes very funny too. “how do we read this?” writes Moten. “this is what it’s for. To claim catastrophe.””

APPENDICES

More from PopMatters Best of 2014: Elyse Friedman’s The Answer to Everything; Thomas Kyro’s The Beggar and the Hare; Saadan Hassan Manto’s Bombay Stories; David Grossman’s Falling Out of Time; Jon Fosse’s Melancholy II; and John Warner’s Tough Day for the Army: Stories

More from SciFiChick’s Best of 2014: Witches In Red by Barb Hendee and Abracadaver by Laura Resnick

More from Roxanne Gay for The Toast: Man vs Nature by Diane Cook; Scarecrone by Melissa Broder; Bedrock Faith by Eric Charles May; Quesadillas by Juan Pablo Villalobos; Man Alive by Thomas Page McBee; Once I Was Cool by Megan Stielstra; and The Winter Lord by Jaye Edgerton

More from The Spark: Brian Hart’s The Bully of Order; Tom Williams’ Don’t Start Me Talkin’; Courtney Moreno’s In Case of Emergency; Aaron Burch’s Backswing; Kristina Marie Darling’s Fortress; Kevin Shamel’s Bigfoot Cop; Pete Fromm’s If Not for This; and Taylor Brown’s In the Season of Blood & Gold

More from Strange Horizons: Of Things Gone Astray by Janina Matthewson; Kirsty Logan’s The Rental Heart and Other Fairytales; Tom Pollock’s Our Lady of the Streets; Ghalib Islam’s Fire in the Unnameable Country ; Stephanie Feldman’s The Angel of Losses ; Zen Cho’s Spirits Abroad; Greg Bechtel’s Boundary Problems; and Megan Milks’s Kill Marguerite and Other Stories

More from Salon.com’s Authors’ favorite books: Mount Terminus by David Grand; Of Sea and Cloud by Jon Keller; Piano Stories by Felisberto Hernandez; The Coming Swarm: DDOS Actions, Hacktivism, and Civil Disobedience on the Internet by Molly Sauter; and In the Course of Human Events by Mike Harvkey

More from Slate.com: The Brunist Day of Wrath by Robert Coover; Black Dance by Nancy Huston; The Empathy Exams by Leslie Jamison; Poking a Dead Frog: Conversations with Today’s Top Comedy Writers by Mike Sacks; and The Witch and Other Tales Retold by Jean Thompson

More from Publishers Weekly: Highfell Grimoires by Langley Hyde; Coldbrook by Tim Lebbon; and Our Lady of the Nile by Scholastique Mukasonga, trans. from the French by Melanie Mauthner

More noir from the LA Review of Books: The Death Instinct by Jacques Mesrine (Tam Tam); Brainquake by Samuel Fuller (Hard Case Crime); Of Cops and Robbers by Mike Nicol (Old Street); The Mad and the Bad by Jean-Patrick Manchette (NYRB Classics); Futures by John Barker (PM Press); Third Rail by Rory Flynn (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt); and The Whitehall Mandarin by Edward Wilson (Arcadia Books)

More via Mairead Case for Vol. 1 Brooklyn: Mothernism by Lise Haller Baggesen (Green Lantern Press/Poor Farm Press); The Corpse Washer by Sinan Antoon, translated by Sinan Antoon (Yale University Press); You Animal Machine (The Golden Greek) by Eleni Sikelianos (Coffee House Press); Teresa, My Love by Julia Kristeva (Columbia University Press); Drift by Caroline Bergvall (Nightboat Books); New Organism: Essais by Andrea Rexilius (Letter Machine Editions)

More via Scalzi’s Big Idea: Guardian (A Veiled Worlds Novel) by Jo Anderton (FableCroft, June); Watt O’Hugh Underground by Steven S. Drachman

More via Paul Kincaid: Nest of Worlds by Marek S. Huberath and [[there]] by Lance Olsen

Among the many other lists consulted: SF Gate; SF Signal; Wall Street Journal; Kobo Books; LitReactor Part I and Part II; the NY Times; TIME; NPR; Gawker; The Millions; Tor.com; and Jeff VanderMeer’s Best of 2014 Lists Galore