Times — and The Times — have changed since the first Festival of Books was held in 1996. What hasn’t is our commitment to this vibrant community of readers and writers, with the annual spring ritual continuing to shape, and be shaped by, the books we love (and love to argue over). So, after building our Ultimate L.A. and Hollywood bookshelves, we decided to mark the 30th edition of the festival by shifting the frame of this year’s special issue from “place” to “time,” and choose the best books published since the event’s inauguration.
Below, you’ll find our list of essential works of fiction published in the U.S. from 1996 to the present, culled from a survey of authors, editors, critics, scholars and other experts in the field. (There’s also a list for nonfiction.) Plus, don’t miss our reporting on one of the era’s most influential poetry organizations, a first-person essay on YA literature’s rise and decline and a tribute to those who were so prolific their many works split the vote.
Whether you agree or disagree with the inclusions (and, yes, exclusions), one thing remains true after 30 go-rounds: There’s nothing better than getting together to talk about books.
‘Cloud Atlas’
David Mitchell, 2004
This ambitious, gorgeously written novel covers 1,000 years and a few continents, and if that weren’t enough, it broke structure in half. Its first section, set in the 19th century around New Zealand, ends midsentence. It was entirely thrilling. “Wait,” I thought turning the page, “is this a misprint? It’s not?” The next section starts in Europe decades later, new characters; just go with it. Four new stories and characters and eras arrive, then each conclude, in unwinding order. This construction allows each to inform the others in unexpected ways: love, concern, betrayal and exploitation echo across centuries. An incomparable book (too bad about the movie). —Carolyn Kellogg
‘Milkman’
Anna Burns, 2018
Burns’ chilling Booker Prize winner, inspired partly by growing up during the Troubles in Belfast, Northern Ireland, centers a teenage narrator who is stalked by a 40-something paramilitary trailing her in his white van. Burns’ cyclical, sardonic prose underscores the unnamed narrator’s defenselessness against neighborhood gossip that marks the Milkman’s unwanted attentions as consensual. The narrator, a reader with siblings and a penchant for run-on sentences, brings a modernist sensibility to the texture of her daily life. “Milkman” expertly exposes the alienation and paranoia of living in a city already riven by violence and the banality of gendered harm when there has been a larger societal breakdown. —Iman Sultan
‘Interpreter of Maladies’
Jhumpa Lahiri, 1999
Lahiri’s debut, a rare short story collection to win the Pulitzer Prize, exemplified the wave of South Asian writers who commanded much of the literary landscape in the late ’90s and early aughts. Its nine stories concern the complicated Bengali families in India and America, and Lahiri’s elegant, observant prose is constantly alert to the ways that lore and folkways shape or abrade relationships. Folk cures don’t work; false accusations fly; temples disappoint; so do people. Beyond the granularity of Lahiri’s storytelling, it’s her sheer command that’s endured, rich in sound, taste and melancholy. —Mark Athitakis
‘Mason & Dixon’
Thomas Pynchon, 1997
Pynchon gives substance to the ’60s, and all its revolutions, by presenting it in impeccable, enduring 18th century prose worthy of Samuel Johnson, and he extends the canon by writing in a classic voice of all the brand-new possibilities that came to life when he was young. The writing is as beautiful and the thinking as original as in any work I know.
— Pico Iyer, recipient of the L.A. Times’ 2024 Robert Kirsch Award
‘Underworld’
Don DeLillo, 1997
Everything DeLillo wrote before “Underworld” served as preparation for this magnum opus, which gathers up his favorite themes: paranoia, sports, technology, conspiracy, God and (especially) the fragility of the American experiment. Ostensibly concerning the life and times of Nick Shay, a waste-management executive, the 827-page novel encompasses mob hits, CIA schemes, the machinations of the art world and much more. Also, magically, baseball: “Pafko at the Wall,” the novella that opens the novel, turns on Bobby Thompson’s pennant-winning 1951 homer for the New York Giants, capturing the boisterous crowd while symbolizing the drama to come. It’s DeLillo’s densest book (which is saying something) but also his most lyrical, never better than the closing sequence of Catholic nuns trying to forestall a human tragedy. —M.A.
‘All the Light We Cannot See’
Anthony Doerr, 2014
A novel with such popular appeal that you might find yourself questioning its literary bona fides. Don’t make that mistake. This is a different kind of World War II love story, about a hidden jewel and the power of radio waves and the mysterious ways in which human decency can survive even the cruelest circumstances. Marie-Laure, a blind girl hiding from the Nazis in a walled French citadel, and Werner, a young German radio expert, find themselves connecting without even knowing it. Doerr, meanwhile, creates a tender kind of suspense, alive and surprising and hopeful without careening into schmaltz. —Chris Vognar
‘The Hunger Games’
Suzanne Collins, 2008
I picked up “The Hunger Games” on a whim when it was still a single copy spine-out at the bookstore, knowing nothing about it other than that it had a curious title. Even now, I remember the tingle down my spine as I read it, and my immediate thought afterward: This is going to shake the world. And then it did.
— Marie Lu, author of the “Legend” series
‘Bel Canto’
Ann Patchett, 2001
In “Bel Canto,” Patchett concocts an almost fantastical scenario: What would happen if in the course of a months-long hostage crisis, the militants and civilians broke bread and sought comfort in each other? Loosely inspired by a prolonged hostage crisis at the Japanese Embassy in Peru in the 1990s, Patchett sets hers in a fictional South American nation. There, Japanese businessmen, local officials, an opera star, a translator, diplomats and revolutionary captors become unlikely companions. With her careful, considered prose and deft characterization, Patchett reveals the poetic fragility of human life. —I.S.
‘Stories of Your Life and Others’
Ted Chiang, 2002
The centerpiece of Chiang’s 2002 collection is “Story of Your Life,” a time-bending tale of alien intelligence and linguistic idiosyncrasies that was adapted into the atmospheric 2016 film “Arrival.” But the whole book is a wondrous exploration of the extremities of existence. How high can we build? How far can our intelligence go? Is there such a thing as being too beautiful? Is there a reality that exists on the other side of mathematics? Chiang’s storytelling is rooted in age-old tropes and references — the Old Testament, golems, Victoriana, high school algebra. But it’s also agile and inventive, unraveling our assumptions about those themes. A delightfully mind-warping classic. —M.A.
‘Pachinko’
Min Jin Lee, 2017
Lee’s novel of a 20th century Korean family exposes the fault lines in relationships and borders that are not drawn on a map. After an arranged marriage takes a young Korean woman to Japan, she and those who follow her experience violent xenophobia. Bonds forged from necessity create a family network that allows its members to survive World War II, only to struggle with excess when their pachinko parlors become highly successful. The world of “Pachinko” is as complex as a Tolstoy novel, in which the fortunes of a family and the country where they struggle for love and money are tied in exhilarating ways. —L.B.
‘American Pastoral’
Philip Roth, 1997
Other Roth novels, particularly “The Plot Against America” (2004), could stake their claim here. But “American Pastoral” gets the nod with its tragic resonance. It uncannily turns a specific milieu — Jewish strivers of New Jersey in the second half of the 20th century — into something universal. It’s the tale of Seymour “Swede” Levov, glove manufacturer and American success story, who is destroyed when his daughter becomes a domestic terrorist. It is shattering, sincere, yet also somehow sardonic, as Roth renders Swede as an average, even boring man brought low by the furies of the times. —C.V.
‘The Corrections’
Jonathan Franzen, 2001
“The Corrections” remains the great American novel about family dynamics in the early 21st century; Franzen so perfectly captures all the angst and dysfunction and striving that’s passed from generation to generation. This book is brutal and unsparing in its portrayal of its characters, with the growing dread palpable as the book drives forward, even as it’s incredibly big-hearted and leaves you emotionally eviscerated by the end.
— Janelle Brown, author of “Pretty Things”
‘Salvage the Bones’
Jesmyn Ward, 2011
Ward had been on the verge of giving up writing when her first novel, “Where the Line Bleeds,” was published. Just three years later, her second, “Salvage the Bones,” was nominated for — and won — the 2011 National Book Award for fiction. This haunting novel follows a Black family in a rural, impoverished part of Mississippi. Esch, the 15-year-old narrator, has recently learned she is pregnant. Ward sharply exposes the visceral contradictions of girlhood and motherhood: Esch’s mother died giving birth to her youngest brother, and the family’s pit bull, China, a recent mother to a litter of puppies, is a source of joy and grief. Hurricane Katrina is waiting in the wings. —I.S.
‘A Visit From the Goon Squad’
Jennifer Egan, 2010
Egan hit the big-time (was awarded the Pulitzer Prize) with this whirlwind of a rock ’n’ roll novel. A series of seemingly disconnected stories featuring vivid characters cohere into a brilliant and fractured narrative. Sun-soaked, punk rock ’70s California, a fraught family safari in Africa, a frustrated has-been and a digital future portrayed in a PowerPoint presentation show how disparate lives can affect each other. Art and its flawed creators and fans, time and family and failure all resonate, darkly funny and heartbreaking. It’s a dazzling book. —C.K.
‘Wolf Hall’
Hilary Mantel, 2009
Aside from being surprisingly funny and beautifully written and making a story British schoolkids know off by heart newly fascinating, in Cromwell, Mantel has created one of the most real fictional (albeit also historical) characters I’ve ever had the pleasure of spending time with. I miss him still.
— Nicola Twilley, author of “Frostbite” and co-host of “Gastropod”
‘Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow’
Gabrielle Zevin, 2022
Zevin’s entrancing story of a gamer boy and a gamer girl building a video game empire from scratch is a romantic bildungsroman. In what is simultaneously a love story and a tale of ambition, estranged childhood friends Sam and Sadie unexpectedly reunite in their college years and decide to produce a video game together. Traversing death, failure, pregnancy, irrevocable life changes and skyrocketing success, Zevin’s novel spotlights a complex friendship and the entanglements of love when a relationship is bound by a higher passion. “True collaborators in this life are rare,” says Sadie. —I.S.
‘The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao’
Junot Diaz, 2007
Profane, sexy and colloquial, big of scale and heart, this is the Great Dominican American Novel. It blooms as the pages turn, like a prickly flower, beginning with the story of the corpulent, nerdy, sci-fi-obsessed title character growing up in Paterson, N.J. Then it becomes a chronicle of life under the tyranny of Rafael Trujillo’s Dominican Republic. As the multigenerational strands connect, Diaz’s spry narrative voice remains a constant, a propulsive mix of English, Spanish and Spanglish, an urban bouillabaisse of flavor and purpose. It makes the past prologue and the political personal, without ever breaking a sweat. —C.V.
‘Demon Copperhead’
Barbara Kingsolver, 2022
Driven by a strong, distinctive raconteur, “Demon Copperhead” paints a nuanced picture of an Appalachia disparaged by others in America. Starting in the late 1980s in western Virginia, Kingsolver’s reimagining of “David Copperfield” by Charles Dickens combines a rebuke of the modern foster care system with the devastating effects of the opioid epidemic. This Pulitzer Prize-winning novel brings nuance to communities that have been ravaged by extractive capitalism and then shamed for their victimization. Kingsolver’s empathetic portrait reminds us of the strength and resilience, and often defiance, of these communities. —Edward Banchs
‘Never Let Me Go’
Kazuo Ishiguro, 2005
Kathy, Ruth and Tommy are three students at an elite British boarding school in the 1990s. As they come of age, they form tight bonds of friendship and romance while being schooled in traditional academics and art. The school also has a strong emphasis on maintaining a healthy body. As Ishiguro slowly reveals, the trio are unknowing participants in a nightmarish government scientific and social program. Their lives will be cut short. The creeping horror at the center of Ishiguro’s science fiction is surrounded by the tensions of growing up in this literary page-turner. —Lorraine Berry
‘Middlesex’
Jeffrey Eugenides, 2002
This novel is a big, Bellovian bellow about the complex life of Cal Stephanides, an intersex person who grows up in midcentury Detroit during its boom years. Cal’s gender identity, along with the setting, gives Eugenides a broad canvas to discuss a host of social issues — immigration, work, city and suburban life, bigotry and the ways Detroit’s auto industry provided opportunities and mechanized society into a false sense of order. Which is to say that it’s a big novel about how Americans become who they are. To that end, the mythological references are meaningful, speaking to the archetypes we’re often locked into, and the defiant types like Cal who make their escape. —M.A.
‘The Underground Railroad’
Colson Whitehead, 2016
Whitehead’s sixth novel is the culmination of a career spent both exploring race and indulging a lifelong love of speculative fiction. The story is rooted in chilling and realistic descriptions of slavery on a Georgia plantation, but here the famed path to freedom is a literal underground railroad. Riding those subterranean rails is Cora, a headstrong enslaved woman determined to find her freedom in the North and learn the fate of her disappeared mother. What follows is a surreal adventure complete with harrowing eugenics experiments and lynchings, hair’s-breadth escapes and unlikely alliances. Whitehead’s straightforward style blurs the line between fact and fiction when it comes to the history of slavery, but he’s always alert to the essential tragedy of the institution, delivering a powerful allegory for today’s divisions. —M.A.
‘The Sympathizer’
Viet Thanh Nguyen, 2015
Nguyen’s thrilling study of a stateless, nameless spy is unlike any other novel rooted in the Vietnam War. Framed as a confession by the child of a Frenchman and a Vietnamese woman, the narrator is a double agent with an unforgettable voice recalling Graham Greene and Vladimir Nabokov. In moving his antihero between Vietnam and 1970s California, home of self-obsessed good vibrations, conflicted refugees and rabid anti-communist reactionaries, Nguyen reveals a series of rich dichotomies. All link back to an endless war and a homeland as fragmented as the narrator’s consciousness and soul. It’s a bitterly funny book that switches from humor to horror and back at a pace that would be frenzied were the author not so firmly in control. —C.V.
‘Lincoln in the Bardo’
George Saunders, 2017
Saunders, a master of the short story, published this, his first full-length novel, a book experimental in form and poignant on the page. When Willie Lincoln, the third son of President Lincoln, died at age 11 of typhoid fever, he was interred in a mausoleum in Oak Hill Cemetery. The historical record indicates that Lincoln spent two nights sitting outside his son’s resting place. It was 1862, the middle of the Civil War, and Saunders’ fictional, despairing Lincoln considers the nation’s suffering. In Tibetan Buddhism, the bardo is the transitional state between death and rebirth. Saunders imagines a space in which the devastated father and son might still communicate with the multiple spirits of the cemetery’s dead similarly waiting to be reborn. —L.B.
‘My Brilliant Friend’
Elena Ferrante, 2012
A roving, sumptuous narrative entrenched in the labyrinthine relationships of a small southern Italian town, “My Brilliant Friend” follows Lila and Elena, schoolgirls growing up in postwar Naples. It kicks off Ferrante’s Neapolitan series, following the intimate and complicated friendship that is also a commentary on class and womanhood. Elena holds her headstrong, intellectually gifted friend Lila in reverent admiration, but the girls’ paths diverge when Lila, who cannot afford to continue her education, marries an abusive man, while Elena goes to university and becomes a writer. The international bestselling series shows not only how the twin forces of poverty and patriarchy affect women; it’s also a tale of the highs and lows of a lifelong best friend. —I.S.
‘The Sellout’
Paul Beatty, 2015
I still remember the exhilarating thrill bordering on giddy fear I felt my first time through Beatty’s howlingly funny fourth novel. Is this book allowed? Are the authorities going to bust down my door and rip it from my hands? Beatty’s scabrous satire follows a Black man who decides to reinstate slavery in his rural Los Angeles enclave, a crime for which he finds himself in the hallowed halls of the Supreme Court. There he gets the serious stink eye from Clarence Thomas and sparks up a fragrant bowl of weed. Beatty’s cascading, relentless prose conjures a world in which the ridiculousness of race as a social construct leads to high absurdity. —C.V.
‘The Overstory’
Richard Powers, 2018
The scientific findings of Suzanne Simard that trees are linked into vast underground networks inform Powers’ novel about white settlement of the American continent. As each generation of several families comes of age in parts of various ecosystems, characters’ actions have accumulating impacts on the communal life of forests, but also the ties that can bind or break human communities. Whether chronicling the tragic history of the American chestnut, or the anger of contemporary activists confronting climate change, Powers’ concentric plots spin. He retools the perspective to give readers access to the trees’ deep time, through which human life is possible. —L.B.
‘The Goldfinch’
Donna Tartt, 2013
“I add my own love to the history of people who have loved beautiful things,” says protagonist Theo at the end of his tale, finding moments of joy amid despair. An adolescent whose life is fractured after he survives an attack in a museum that took his mother, Theo is raised into Manhattan wealth but brokenhearted. His fateful choice that day — rescuing, or some might say stealing, a precious painting of a goldfinch — brings him solace. The secret is so precious that he goes for long periods when he is afraid to look at it. Tartt’s detailed, enveloping prose and the winding twists of Theo’s life connect not just to a piece of art but to human emotions and a sense of beauty that stretches across time. —E.B.
‘The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay’
Michael Chabon, 2000
Perhaps a controversial choice — Chabon’s novel about Jewish creators of comic books in the 20th century is not some prophetic warning of American collapse (“The Plot Against America”) or technological dystopia (“Never Let Me Go”), but it’s the best story I remember reading over the last 30 years. So much of the way fiction has evolved — the increasing appropriation of genres, the rendering of history as present-tense action — was here in the very early part of this century.
— Boris Kachka, senior editor for the Atlantic
‘James’
Percival Everett, 2024
Jim, an enslaved Black man accompanying Huck in Mark Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” becomes James, reader of John Locke and Voltaire, in Percival Everett’s majestic inversion of the classic. With Huck and other white people, James uses a “slave filter” vernacular; apart from them, he can be his articulate self. Reading “James” is like reading Frantz Fanon’s “The Wretched of the Earth” or watching “Get Out” for the first time — thrilling, eye-opening and gut-wrenching. “Which would frighten you more? A slave who is crazy or a slave who is sane and sees you clearly?” James asks the white man who intended to sell him in this instant canon-changer. —I.S.
‘2666’
Roberto Bolaño, 2008
How to capture the horror of a woman’s murder? How to sear into a reader’s brain the profound calamity of a dozen savage killings? What about more than a hundred? Roberto Bolaño aimed for immortality with a staggering five-part opus about cruelty and survival in this swirling, sly, relentless novel set in a Mexican border town. What makes the experience of grinding through all 900-plus pages is the way the author weaves together rumor, history, innuendo, mystery, outrage, heartache and ecstasy. There’s a Chilean professor, a lover named Rosa, the work of an American journalist, 112 brutally murdered women and a mysterious German writer called Archimboldi. Translated by Natasha Wimmer, the bleak and pure “2666” is a sprawling masterpiece. —Nathan Deuel
