Frieze Editors Select Their Favourite Books of 2024

On the Calculation of Volume, Books 1 and 2 | Solvej Balle

Supposedly in development for 40 years and still incomplete in its original Danish, this planned seven-part opus is an anguishing look at a rare-books dealer who finds herself reliving the same rainy day in November. New Directions in the US has just published English translations of the first two taut yet rich volumes, whose hypnotic prose propels you through the mundane into the sublime. (A UK edition is forthcoming in April 2025 from Faber.) The novel’s protagonist and narrator, Tara Selter, whose business is the inspection of books for their quality and value, uses sensuousness as a phenomenological guide to her quiet, country home, from its sounds and feelings to the trains she takes through Europe. It’s superb, and I eagerly await the next volumes.

—MARKO GLUHAICH, Associate Editor

Salvage: Readings From The Wreck | Dionne Brand

I always seek out Dionne Brand’s writing to help me make sense of a turbulent, unjust and often-unkind world. Her latest book, Salvage: Readings From The Wreck, explores the ‘shipwrecks’ of our time by exploring the ‘slippages’ in literary cultures and in historical representations of Blackness. Through close readings of canonical books, such as Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814) and Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), Brand charts a tumultuous journey from the 17th century to the wreckage of our sociopolitical present. To read with, and alongside, Brand is to be changed by her close, attentive work of seeking to right historical wrongs in the shadow of empire. I doubt I will read a book in the same way again. 

—VANESSA PETERSON, Associate Editor

Ruin, Blossom | John Burnside

Not long before he died this May, I got a late-night email from the poet John Burnside, confirming our meeting the next day. No such meeting had been arranged, but I turned up to his office anyway. I brought along his latest book, Ruin, Blossom, about which he asked only one question: ‘Do you like the cover?’ I didn’t, and still don’t, but the poems inside do their fair share of heavy lifting. I keep coming back to one, ‘Prayer’, which opens with a simple plea: ‘Deliver me from nothing, save the thrill / of perish’. Erudite, compact and sharp-witted, these poems are full of wide-eyed wonder at the world and everything in it. Burnside is constantly picking up some small thing of interest, turning it on its head, then putting it back down again; it’s a strange, rare and beautiful thing to bear witness to.

—LOU SELFRIDGE, Assistant Editor (interim)

Wrong Norma | Anne Carson

As a long-time fan of Anne Carson’s unrestrained poetry, I was particularly excited for the release of Wrong Norma, her first book of original writings in eight years. The collection testifies to Carson’s masterful reconstruction of language, seeing her move swiftly between diaristic narration, collage, lyric stanza and dialogue. In her signature mixture of sharp observation and mercurial flow of consciousness, Carson meditates on the small things that make up a life. Her poems delve into translation, parental relationships, Saturday nights, foxes and philosophy, among other topics. Despite its inherent spontaneity, the narrative voice is supported by a rich foundation of literary reference, ranging from the philosophical works of ancient Greek writers to the poetics of Paul Celan and Friedrich Hölderlin. Carson successfully pinpoints our collective fears and ambitions, revelling in the universality that bind us.

—IVANA CHOLAKOVA, Assistant Editor

The Use of Photography | Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie

Beautifully translated by Alison T. Strayer, Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie’s The Use of Photography – an excerpt of which appeared in this magazine earlier this year – will remain a reading experience that lingers well after the year ends. With precision, vulnerability and tenderness, Ernaux and Marie contemplate the meaning of mortality, and how desire functions a core tenet of what it means to live. Sentences jotted down in notebooks have remained with me, while the task of writing in photographs also helped me reconsider the medium’s relationship with ‘aliveness’ through capturing one moment in time: clothes scattered on the floor, light illuminating a room. Through the interplay of word and image, the everyday is given the weight of the monumental. 

—VANESSA PETERSON, Associate Editor

My Lesbian Novel | Renee Gladman

You don’t so much read Renee Gladman’s lines as find yourself borne along by their strange currents. In her latest offering, My Lesbian Novel, passages from an autofictional interview between ‘I’ and ‘R’ – a Gladman avatar who has studied lesbian novels and is penning her own – are intercut with scenes of the voluptuous if amnestic romance between characters June and Thena. The discussion of the developing project shapes the plot as it unfolds, reflecting the dialogic ways in which stories (and relationships) often find their forms. Gladman imbues the movement and materiality of language with a sensual charge, making ‘the lesbian novel’ fizz with creative and erotic possibility. You can read Rainer Diana Hamilton’s review of the book in frieze.

—CASSIE PACKARD, Assistant Editor

A Book About Ray | Ellen Levy

A biography of the great mail artist Ray Johnson, who died in 1995, was never going to be easy – or straightforward. Called ‘the most famous unknown artist in New York’ by The New York Times in 1965, Johnson was delightfully averse to straightforward narratives and left behind an archive – of paintings, collages, drawings, letters and notebooks – cluttered with gorgeous diversions and visual cues which point to the truth and away from it, too. Who was Johnson? This engaging and handsomely illustrated biography, the first of its kind on the artist, puzzles through his art and life in search of answers.

—ANDREW DURBIN, Editor-in-Chief

Spent Light | Lara Pawson

I loved Lara Pawson’s brilliant Spent Light, an exploration of life, history and the multiple (often violent) entanglements between everyday household objects, including toasters and a pepper grinder. Pawson’s writing, which feels museological in scope, implores us never to consider simple purpose alone but, rather, the ways and various complicated means by which these objects reach us.

—VANESSA PETERSON, Associate Editor

The Lodgers | Holly Pester

When I was in my mid-20s, I lived in a house where it rained inside. A broken socket on the bathroom wall had been painted over, giving gentle electric shocks when touched. There was a person-sized hole in the kitchen ceiling, from which the upstairs bathtub was semi-visible. I remembered the strange, sad feeling of living in that house when I read The Lodgers by Holly Pester, a beautifully written tale – reviewed by Matthew Turner in frieze earlier this year – about two tenants, one perhaps more real than the other, navigating precarious living situations. Pester captures precisely that uncanny liminality so familiar to millennials, whose home lives are so often stifled by financial limitations, decrepit and/or soulless rentals, the awkward dance of house-sharing. A must-read for anyone who’s ever feared the consequences of making holes in walls.

—CLAUDIA KENSANI, Publishing and Events Manager