It’s Best Books of Year season, and the New York Times has just put out their contribution: 100 Notable Books of 2023. These are the books selected by the staff of The New York Times Book Review as the standouts among thousands of new books that they received this year.
The list is split into Fiction and Nonfiction, with each book within getting a more specific label, like Family Saga for The Bee Sting by Paul Murray, Experimental Fiction for Biography of X by Catherine Lacey, Literary Dystopia for Chain Gang All Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, and Climate Fiction for Land of Milk and Honey by C Pam Zhang.
There are a lot of literary fiction picks on the list, but also genre titles like Holly by Stephen King (“Horror-Tinged Thriller”), Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries by Heather Fawcett (Fantasy), and We Could Be So Good by Cat Sebastian (Romance).
Other categories include Poetry (From From by Monica Youn), Satire (Yellowface by R. F. Kuang), Science (Cobalt Red by Siddharth Kara), Politics (Doppelganger by Naomi Klein, Memoir (Pageboy by Elliot Page), and many more.