The Atlantic
The Atlantic Best Books of the Year 2021
The Atlantic Best Books of the Year 2021 names 20 books. 13 of them also won or were shortlisted for an award.
- Afterpartiessource (opens in a new tab)
- All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsakesource (opens in a new tab)
- Always Crashing in the Same Car: On Art, Crisis, and Los Angeles, Californiasource (opens in a new tab)
- Assemblysource (opens in a new tab)
- Being a Humansource (opens in a new tab)
- Crying in H Martsource (opens in a new tab)
- Detransition, Babysource (opens in a new tab)
- Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynastysource (opens in a new tab)
- Excavate!: The Wonderful and Frightening World of The Fallsource (opens in a new tab)
- Harrowsource (opens in a new tab)
- Intimaciessource (opens in a new tab)
- Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American Citysource (opens in a new tab)
- Klara and the Sunsource (opens in a new tab)
- Milk Blood Heatsource (opens in a new tab)
- Nervous Systemsource (opens in a new tab)
- No One Is Talking About Thissource (opens in a new tab)
- The Book of Difficult Fruit: Arguments for the Tart, Tender, and Unruly (With Recipes)source (opens in a new tab)
- The Life of the Mindsource (opens in a new tab)
- The Right to Sexsource (opens in a new tab)
- What Noise Against the Canesource (opens in a new tab)
About the The Atlantic Best Books of the Year
The Atlantic's own year-end best-books list. 2018-2025: the Culture Desk's list (The 19/15/20 Best Books of the year for 2018-2021; The Atlantic 10 from 2022). 2006-2012: the December magazine's Books of the Year, picked by literary editor Benjamin Schwarz. It is a single critic's list, kept because it is The Atlantic's only best-of-year list in those years. Only the picks printed as the year's top books are included: the 2009 page's 22 runners-up and the web-only runners-up posts for 2010-2012 are left out. No list for 2007 (no Books of the Year in the December 2007 issue) or 2013-2017: those years ran only staff 'best book I read this year' pieces, which mix in older books, so they are left out (as is the 2010 one). Also left out: genre and food side-lists, 'books we missed' pieces, and reader picks. Pages were read through the Wayback Machine because theatlantic.com blocks direct fetches. 2006-2012 picks were typed from the archived page text; later years were parsed from the page HTML. No list is ranked.
Organization: The Atlantic. Official site (opens in a new tab)