Levy, who cries on escalators, doesn’t hate her children. She doesn’t hate her soon-to-be-ex-husband. Rather, she hates that a woman must extend herself to assume a domestic role and become a stranger to the person she once was.

The more the French view me as part of their country, the more I see myself as belonging here with them. With my blonde hair and daily scarves, I look the part. It’s easier to accept superficial validation such as compliments on my accent and cultural ease from the French than it is to reconcile my fading American patriotism.

Having read, last year, with a certain stringent intensity, I tried to be more omnivorous and relaxed about my choices in 2019. Perhaps because of this, I’m not sure which books were the best.

It’s that time of year again. The late capitalist clusterfuck some call the holiday season. Or, as literary folks know it, “Best Of” Hell.

I began reading Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn, as Told by a Friend (1947), in mid-2016, casually. I’d bought the book by mistake several years prior, thinking it was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s version—that is, the seminal German Faust. I am not the first to have confused the two authors.

There are few if any American writers who can vocalize the crushing despair of late capitalist malaise in a mere five sentences.