100 Best Books of the 21st Century - phần 1

Được bình chọn bởi 503 tiểu thuyết gia, nhà văn phi hư cấu, nhà thơ, nhà phê bình và những người yêu sách khác — với sự hỗ trợ của The New York Times Book Review.

100. Tree of Smoke, by Denis Johnson 2007

Like the project of the title — an intelligence report that the newly minted C.I.A. operative William “Skip” Sands comes to find both quixotic and useless — the Vietnam-era warfare of Johnson’s rueful, soulful novel lives in shadows, persions and half-truths. There are no heroes here among the lawless colonels, assassinated priests and faith-stricken NGO nurses; only villainy and vast indifference.

99. How to Be Both, by Ali Smith 2014

This elegant double helix of a novel entwines the stories of a fictional modern-day British girl and a real-life 15th-century Italian painter. A more conventional book might have explored the ways the past and present mirror each other, but Smith is after something much more radical. “How to Be Both” is a passionate, dialectical critique of the binaries that define and confine us. Not only male and female, but also real and imaginary, poetry and prose, living and dead. The way to be “both” is to recognize the extent to which everything already is. — A.O. Scott, critic at large for The Times

Link gốc: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/books/best-books-21st-century.html