Amazon | IndieBound

Alexis Kanter, Accessories Editor, Vanity Fair

ABCs of Art by Sabrina Hahn (Sky Pony)

ABCs of Art is a surprisingly fresh take on the classic children's ABCs book. In lieu of zoo animals, vegetables, and fruit, the book references various elements of iconic paintings to teach children the alphabet through the lens of fine art. Among others, Van Gogh's Starry Night and Gustav Klimt's The Kiss make an appearance, helping to mold your child into the budding art sophisticate of your dreams. I gifted this book to my energetic nephew, and its short witty rhymes have proved both easily digestible and a sufficient distraction from mom's smartphone.

Richard Lawson, Chief Critic, VF.com

Red, White & Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston (Griffin)

Casey McQuiston’s bright, buoyant, goofily romantic Red, White & Royal Blue does something surprising. It’s got all the makings of chaste, YA-adjacent fanfic: the hot son of the first U.S. woman president falls in love with the hot grandson of the Queen of England. The story bounces along sweetly and engagingly, if a bit predictably. But then there’s also, well, a lot of sex in the book, something that’s rather rare for mainstream books featuring gay characters. McQuiston’s novel isn’t tawdry, but it certainly gets the blood up—that it’s been such a hit while still getting a bit naughty feels like some kind of minor revolution.

Dan Adler, Staff Writer, VF.com

Dapper Dan: Made in Harlem: A Memoir by Daniel R. Day (Random House)

In the two years since Gucci backed the reopening of his influential Harlem atelier, Dapper Dan’s designs have dotted countless red carpets. His memoir, Made in Harlem, co-written with Mikael Awake, is hardly about any of that, and it doesn’t dwell too long on the period when the boutique first opened either. Instead, as the title suggests, it’s about the making of the person. It’s spiritually probing, propulsive, and resists easy answers to questions about personal history. Its treatment of a parallel gambling career is richly textured and constitutes its own narrative arc. There are plenty of anecdotes here for fans of hip-hop and fashion, but there may be more to be learned about how we arrive at a style of self-inquiry. Amazon | IndieBound

Claire Landsbaum, Senior Editor, The Hive

Mostly Dead Things by Kristen Arnett (Tin House)

Packed with dead peacocks, the unending anguish of lost love, and more Florida than you can possibly imagine, Mostly Dead Things might be the best book I read this year. Back in May, I spoke to author Kristen Arnett about taxidermy as a queer art form, and how she conceived of a love triangle that left me feeling empty and full at the same time.

Amazon | IndieBound

High School by Tegan Quin and Sara Quin (MCD)

Tegan and Sara Quin’s memoir was released in September in conjunction with a new album—a reworking of songs they wrote as teenagers. When I read it, I felt as if a candy-striped cane had extended from the wings of my life and yanked me back to my own high school era. Before the book’s release, Tegan and Sara talked to me about their writing process, what it felt like to revisit being closeted, and all the acid they dropped.

Lot: Stories by Bryan Washington (Riverhead)

I didn’t know anything about Bryan Washington’s debut short-story collection when I picked it up, except that people generally thought it was good. When I discovered it was set in Houston, where I grew up, and that its protagonist was gay, which I am, it felt like fate. Washington’s stories wind through the city; the book opens from the perspective of its narrator, Nicolás, a young half-black Latinx exploring his queerness amid the slow splintering of his family, and is interspersed with chapters from new characters. But always, Houston is the centerpiece. Washington’s writing is blunt yet beautiful, peppered with Spanish, a true exploration of what it means to be from and of a place and yet always other.

Anderson Tepper, Copy Production Director, Vanity Fair

Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli (Knopf)

The American novel is being reimagined, its map and scope redrawn by a new generation of writers. Two of the most gifted—both were awarded MacArthur “genius” grants this year—are Valeria Luiselli and Ocean Vuong. Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive (which I talked to her about earlier this year) is a brilliantly layered voyage through America’s heartland, a haunting meditation on mass deportations, historical amnesia, and marital rift.

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong (Penguin Press)

Vuong’s debut novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, burns with a fierce poetic intensity as it follows a Vietnamese-American son’s struggle to find himself in the darker corners of Hartford, Connecticut. (Read my interview with Vuong here.)

The Remainder by Alia Trabucco Zerán, translated by Sophie Hughes (Coffee House Press)

“The literature of the children” is how author Alejandro Zambra has described the novels written by his generation of Chileans who grew up in the 1970s and ‘80s under the Pinochet dictatorship. (His own book, Ways of Going Home, is a classic of the genre.) As the violent protests in Chile made clear this fall, the shadow of that era still haunts the country. Alia Trabucco Zerán’s The Remainder creates an eery vision of modern-day Santiago, where the ghosts of the past linger in the streets. When three friends speed across the Andes to retrieve a wayward corpse, the action turns both madcap and melancholy, unearthing painful secrets of their parents’ lives during the years of repression.

Space Invaders by Nona Fernández, translated by Natasha Wimmer (Graywolf)

Nona Fernández’s Space Invaders also considers how Chile’s dictatorship was perceived—or blindly felt—by the children of the time. Stitching together the experiences of a group of students who years later wonder about the fate of a former classmate, Fernández’s short, hypnotic novel plays with ideas of history and powerlessness, memory and forgetting. What did they think of their mysteriously missing friend? How much did they actually understand of her disappearance and her father’s connection to the regime? In impressionistic snippets of dreams, letter fragments, and the blinking imagery of video games they re-create a portrait of a generation’s lost childhood.

Gun Island by Amitav Ghosh (FSG)

Gun Island, the latest work by acclaimed Indian author Amitav Ghosh, is everything you’d expect of a Ghosh book: an erudite thriller steeped in history that moves swiftly around the globe while tackling some of the world’s most pressing issues. Returning to the territory of his earlier novel The Hungry Tide, Ghosh is again concerned with the devastating effects of environmental change in the Sundarbans region (bordering India and Bangladesh), weaving together a plot that includes a Brooklyn bookseller obsessed with Bengali folklore, an Italian scholar of the Inquisition, and Bangladeshi migrant workers in Venice. Ghosh’s polymathic intelligence and restless conscience make every word he writes feel urgent and compelling.

A Tall History of Sugar by Curdella Forbes (Akashic)

Curdella Forbes’s A Tall History of Sugar is the most recent in an impressive new wave of novels by Jamaican writers—from Marlon James’s Booker Prize–winning A Brief History of Seven Killings to Kei Miller’s Augustown, Marcia Douglas’s The Marvelous Equations of the Dread, and Nicole Dennis-Benn’s Patsy, among others. Forbes provides an eclectic, feverish vision of Jamaican “history” from the 1950s to the present glimpsed through the experiences of an abandoned mystic-child named Moshe, whose translucent skin and mismatched eyes defy racial category. Who he is and who he becomes—like the country itself—is a riddle that unfolds in episodic bursts and linguistic flourishes.

Caitlin Brody, Entertainment Editor, Vanity Fair

Three Women by Lisa Taddeo (Avid Reader Press)

Three Women is a masterpiece of exemplary journalism. Writer Lisa Taddeo spent eight years immersed in the romantic, sexual, and emotional lives of three women: Lina, who tries to distract herself from her lackluster marriage by embarking on an affair with a high school flame; Maggie, a high school student who has a relationship with her married English teacher; and Sloane, a restaurateur in an open marriage. This nonfiction work delves into desire, heartbreak, intimacy, and self-worth, lifting the veil on subjects that are often taboo—but no doubt, you'll find parts of yourself in these women.

City of Girls by Elizabeth Gilbert (Riverhead)

I lugged around this hardcover everywhere I went, because if I had even 30 seconds to spare—in an elevator, waiting in line at the coffee shop—sticking my nose in my copy of City of Girls was exactly how I wanted to spend it. Elizabeth Gilbert's novel swirls with booze, cigarettes, and sequins in the 1940s coming-of-age tale centered on 19-year-old Vivian, who is kicked out of Vassar and heads to New York City, where she moves in with her eccentric and fabulous (is there any better combo?) aunt Peg, who owns a decrepit theater. With City of Girls's high energy, theatrical backdrop and unforgettable cast of characters, it's no wonder the swirling novel has already been optioned for the big screen.

Olive, Again by Elizabeth Strout (Random House)

It's been 11 years since Elizabeth Strout gave us the Pulitzer Prize–winning Olive Kitteridge and its titular, cantankerous protagonist living in Crosby, Maine; it's been five years since Frances McDormand portrayed Olive in the award-winning HBO miniseries. With Strout's follow-up, Olive, Again, readers are enveloped back into Strout's beautiful prose, with fly-on-the-wall glimpses into the everyday, intersecting lives of the somehow lovable Olive and her various neighbors—some of whom she reluctantly enjoys, and others who she barks at. Olive, Again is a perfect example of finding the extraordinary in the ordinary.

Mary Alice Miller, Associate Editor, Vanity Fair

Vanity Fair's Women on Women edited by Radhika Jones With David Friend (Penguin Press)

Whenever there is a rare down moment in the office, I like to dig into the Vanity Fair archives for inspiration. For years, this exercise took place in our dusty back-issues closet, and occasionally, in the Condé Nast library where the cracking bound volumes of the magazine live in all of their old-book smell and yellowed-paper glory. This year, Vanity Fair digitized its archives. It's all there—every issue from 1913 to now. Also this year: We published a book based on some very specific archival content: the best of the magazine's writing about women by female contributors. Vanity Fair's Women on Women is an anthology of 30 profiles, essays, and columns from the ‘80s, ‘90s, aughts, and today. Gail Sheehy on Hillary Clinton. Ingrid Sischy on Nicole Kidman, Jacqueline Woodson on Lena Waithe. It's the kind of stuff I used to have to dig deep for, issue by issue, in our library. Now it's all in one place. Women on Women is a veritable time capsule and a study of how the ways we write about women have evolved over the last three decades. Perhaps I'm biased (having worked on this book for two years, I most certainly am), but Vanity Fair's Women on Women, edited by Radhika Jones with David Friend, is a treat.

This post has been updated.

More Great Stories from Vanity Fair

— Diddy’s 50th birthday party brought out Beyoncé, Jay-Z, and his new Kerry James Marshall painting

— The next phase of the Prince Andrew scandal

— Meet Natasha Lyonne, the spellbindingly eccentric Russian Doll star redefining fame

— Why Meghan Markle’s royal sabbatical has become a working vacation

— Huey Lewis on going deaf, overcoming dark thoughts—and his (final?) new album

— From the Archive: Lee Radziwill looks back at her and Jacqueline Kennedy’s deeply intertwined lives

Looking for more? Sign up for our daily newsletter and never miss a story.