Happy new year from all of us at The Masters Review! 2024 was a wonderful year for us in many ways and 2025 is already shaping up to be another stellar year. Our 2024-2025 Winter Short Story Award for New Writers, judged by Bret Anthony Johnston, is open for submissions through February 2. And for those of you fiction writers who’ve not yet been published, we have an exciting new opportunity for you in our Debut Fiction Prize, sponsored by Duotrope, opening for submissions on February 5. But first, it’s time for one of my favorite traditions. Let’s look over the very best our team read in 2024!
In 2024, I resumed a book club with some friends that had been on pause for the better part of 2023. We read some of my familiar favorites—Vonnegut’s The Sirens of Titan and Breakfast of Champions—and after reading Oryx and Crake, we turned to another Atwood novel. For all of us, it was the first time reading The Handmaid’s Tale. Unfortunately, it was also the week before the election, and so it ended up being a pretty miserable experience that none of us much wanted to talk about. The book was good. I should read it another time, under less inauspicious circumstances. Fortunately, someone in the group suggested we chase the book with something lighter, and that was how I happened into reading The Princess Bride for the first time. It’s a film I’ve loved my whole life and I knew bits about the novel—that it’s supposedly abridged, for one thing, and that every year readers would seek out the original Morgenstern—but almost nothing about its writer, William Goldman. I didn’t know, for instance, that he Goldman was an accomplished screenwriter in addition to being a novelist (with Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Stepford Wives and All the President’s Men under his belt before The Princess Bride’s film version). Nor did I know how involved he was in the production of the movie. I don’t know if there’s a more faithful and direct adaptation from book to screen. As I was reading, I could hear Cary Elwes, Robin Wright, Wallace Shawn narrating back to me—and how fortunate are we that Andre the Giant lived at the same time as this film was being produced. It was as if these roles were written for these actors, even though the book was published nearly fifteen years before the film.
I read many other terrific books and stories and essays this year, but I think the circumstances around me finding my way to The Princess Bride really solidified it as the book that stands out to me the most this year.
Cole Meyer
2024 was a light year, reading-wise, for me. I managed only eighty-two books, which is down from one hundred in 2023. This year was also a bit heavy on duds—some reads by my favorite authors weren’t as good as I’d hoped.
That said, I read a few books that I now recommend all the time. Among the standouts were Child of My Heart by Alice McDermott, The Art Thief by Michael Finkel, James by Percival Everett, The Most by Jessica Anthony, God of the Woods by Liz Moore, and Loved and Missed by Susie Boyt. I also really liked Out by Natsuo Kirino but I hardly ever recommend it because it’s super dark and creepy (but do read it if you’re into that kind of thing!).
My absolute favorite of 2024, and probably in the top ten of my favorite books ever, is Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino. This is really a coming-of-age story dressed up with an alien as the main character (or, at least she believes herself to be an alien). It sounds weird, right? But it’s not. Adina may or may not be from another planet, but her sense of loneliness and isolation is so incredibly visceral and tangible that I found the book breathtaking. Plus, she faxes her observations about humanity back to her home planet, which is just such a stunning literary move I want to steal it, but I know I can’t pull it off with subtle wittiness like Bertino does. I’m floored by this book, and I can’t stop thinking about it and talking about it.
Jen Dupree
The Glutton by A. K. Blakemore startled and delighted and broke my heart in so many ways I didn’t expect from a fictionalized account of a boy, “The Great Tarare,” who can’t stop eating. Set in eighteenth-century France, it’s very loosely based on an actual street performer with an inordinate appetite and a palate for things food and not-food, living and not living, but instead of casting him as a spectacle, Blakemore’s characterization of Tarare is written with tenderness. Maybe it’s the language (some descriptions of even the most ordinary things–seasons changing, a yellow dress—are written in a way that challenges their ordinariness) or the premise of a hunger so bottomless that made this work read like magical realism, but it only teases the supernatural. It’s the realness of it all—Tarare’s experiences of love and longing, grief and betrayal–that made it actually wrenching.
On the topic of yearning, Briefly, A Delicious Life by Nell Stevens, about a fourteen-year-old ghost girl pining for George Sand in a Mallorca monastery in the 1830s, wrecked me with the line, “What is desire, without a body to have it in?” And best fungal eco-horror goes to T. Kingfisher’s What Moves the Dead, an unsettling take on Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” with impressively creepy reanimated rabbits in a short, devourable novella.
Abbie Lahmers
The best of 2024 was Doctor John, historical fiction on the life of Dr. John McLoughlin of Fort Vancouver in Washington State. That should come as no surprise since I wrote the book.
As for a less prejudicial outlook, I was surprised, even shocked, at how good James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was. I hadn’t read it since college and my assessments of Joyce as a braggart and a barfly had colored my opinion of him. Joyce was a terrific writer! Humble pie tastes good at such times.
Next was the late Denae Veselits’s Birds of Passage about a father who abused all of his numerous daughters. Her writing was to the point and colorful, though the thoughts of her siblings were perhaps a bit superfluous.
Last but not least were the writings of all the people who contributed to The Masters Review. They left an indelible impression on my mind. The good, the bad, and the ugly all played a role, and I had to admire the aspirations of the people who submitted them. Hats off to all of you. May you live long and prosper.
Jim Kjeldsen
TJ Klune’s In the Lives of Puppets. A beautiful and heart-breaking story for my last reading for my MFA at Pacific University. Described as a retelling of Pinocchio, but also includes The Wizard of Oz in characterization and plot. This Pinocchio is the last human on earth, and his robotic companions are warm and funny. He finds love with a former soldier and reclaims his father’s humanity. This work impressed me with its artifice but also its desire to say something about love and connection and sex. There’s a bonus operating manual, similar to a story I wrote as an operating manual for imaginary software, and an extra story about an android robot permitted one week of vacation every ten years. The author uses the robot characters to show us how to see like newbies or children, and to show us what parts of human existence to treasure.
Jill Bronfman
Last year I was drawn to contemporary Iranian artists, writers, and poets reflecting on their connections to the country. Kaveh Akbar’s 2024 novel Martyr! functions as a kind of elegy to Iran Air’s civilian flight 655, downed by the US Navy in 1988. Martyr! follows Cyrus Shams, the son of a woman killed on that flight. Cyrus, barely managing to turn his existential crises into material for a work on martyrdom, is drawn to the Brooklyn Museum, where a terminally ill Iranian artist has opened an exhibition on her impending death. There was so much to admire in Poupeh Missaghi’s Sound Museum (2024), which brings the hypocrisy of penal—as well as cultural—institutions into a brutal close-up by way of her sinister narrator: an Iranian museum curator and prison torturer. I was also moved by the Persian/Roma poet Eve Esfandiari-Denney’s approach to the “logic” of her identity in the poetic series “Nearly White Girl Girling on Behalf of Sonic Fluency” in Granta, 166 (2024).
As a submissions reader, I have loved discovering works from talented and daring voices across the world. As a writer, I know how daunting it is to send out work. Most of us are filled with doubt—and a kind of affected embarrassment from laying ourselves open. Osamu Dazai’s timeless Beggar Student (in a 2024 English translation by Sam Bett) invites us to take a walk of shame with its protagonist, a writer who has just submitted his manuscript to his publisher and who happens to share Dazai’s name. Cringe along if you like—there’s safety in numbers! And, if Beggar Student cuts too close to the bone, chase it with the 2024 Booker-winning Orbital by Samantha Harvey, which will post you above Earth where you’ll see with its contemplative cast of characters just how trivial (and, if you’re feeling the weight of your literary emergence, freeing) our roles in the universe are.
Zara Karschay
In 2024, I chose authors whom I had not read in a while. I read eight books. Of these, two stood out for me. I was thrilled to find the audiobook for Bel Kaufman’s Up the Down Staircase. When I first read this as a postgraduate student, I was impressed by its narrative technique. Using teacher-to-teacher notes, administration-to-teacher memos, and student-teacher responses (both verbal and written), Kaufman chronicles her experiences as a public school English teacher, with a big dose of humor. The reader is taken through a whole gamut of emotions ranging from idealism and hope to anguish and frustration. While I admired Kaufman’s storytelling technique, I was enchanted by the imagery in Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. For example, in the chapter from the perspective of Darl, the reflection of a star in the night sky is depicted in a bucket of water at the Bundren home. When a dipper is used to scoop water from the bucket, it seems to scoop up the star as well; for, the reflection slips into the dipper from the bucket. The reach of Faulkner’s imagination here is truly admirable.
Meera Parasuraman
Reality was so crushing in 2024 I chose to dive deep into fiction—as in hardcover physical book fiction without any possible intrusion by updates or notifications. My favorite unusual and surprising read of the year was Bear by Julia Phillips. Set on an island off the coast of Washington State, two sisters work odd hours to help pay their mother’s hefty medical bills. The younger sister, Sam, gets through long days working at the concessions stand on the ferry by fantasizing about getting away from the island once she and her sister save enough money to leave. A strange encounter with a bear that seems to be attached to her older sister poses an unexpected threat to these plans and forces a confrontation between the sisters. God of the Woods by Liz Moore is one of those novels I was so ready to hate because I kept hearing people praise it. Believe the hype! It’s that good: family secrets, intrigue, and a murderer on the loose plus a family estate called Self Reliance. I might need to read it again. I also loved The Most by Jessica Anthony. It’s like a blend of Mad Men and Revolutionary Road without the stereotypes.
Amy Armstrong