Anna Holmes:

Sometimes a “best” book is just “a book that spoke to me in a certain moment.” I finally read Nora Ephron’s “Heartburn” at the urging of a friend who felt I needed some cheering up. I don’t move about the world with the same ease or wit as Ephron, but what can I say? Finding humor in grief is difficult, if not impossible, and I’ll take what I can get.

Leslie Jamison:

“Loitering,” by Charles D’Ambrosio, gets something deeply right about being uncertain, being in-between, being human. Its essays refuse the violence of imposing too much resolution on the world. This praise might sound abstract, but it’s more like a kind of closed-eye, clenched-fist gratitude: Thank you. These essays help me believe in what’s holy in the mess.

Adam Kirsch:

Joshua Mehigan is well known to readers who follow contemporary poets, but his “Accepting the Disaster” is the rare poetry book that could bring a lot of pleasure to a much broader audience. Although Mehigan is a master of formal elements, his poems also display a deep human understanding — of work, of small-town life, of mortality and suffering — that makes them feel not just impressive but trustworthy.

Thomas Mallon:

The parliamentary career of John Profumo melted into the hot type of Britain’s tabloids after his early-1960s entanglement with Christine Keeler. In “Bringing the House Down” (2006), Profumo’s son, David, offers a “family memoir” of his parents and their disaster. Marked by a piercing wit and vertiginous vocabulary, the book is a feat of emotional dexterity, shrewdly dispassionate and carefully felt.

Ayana Mathis:

It’s awfully hard to say anything remotely adequate about Isaac Babel and his “Collected Stories.” Goodness knows I don’t want to write bad sentences about a man who never wrote one himself. I’ll just say this: In his work is the whole of life — humor and sorrow, beauty and pathos. And his sentences, well, they’ll just split you in two.