An Incomplete List of the Writers, Editors, and Great
Literary Minds We Lost This Year
December 18, 2020
The year is at an end, and I think I speak for pretty much everyone when I say: good riddance. (While we don’t have any guarantee that 2021 will be an improvement, it seems like it would have to be.) Among the many unhappinesses of this year, we lost what seems like an unusually large number of members of the literary community, from poets to novelists to editors to critics to publishers to booksellers. To them, we say a last thank you, and goodbye. They will be missed.
Our contributors, from across our quarterly print issues and our website, read as widely and wildly as they write. Here, they tell us about the books that moved them most in this strange year.Â
Itâs a privilege, of course, to spend time thinking and writing about some of my favorite books that were published during this most absurd and solitaryâmost mendacious, violent, Americanâof years, but Iâm grateful to the following artists, among others, for sustaining my spirit. Iâve come to realize how important, even more crucial than usual, short forms have been for me in a time defined by so much precarity. The idea of reading a story or a poem, simply that, has felt attainable, and the act has reliably provided me with nourishment. Danielle Evansâs second book of stories,