As 2021 comes hobbling to an end, we ask four book critics to pick their favorites from a very fruitful year (at least where books are concerned). Here are five books that Jessica Ferri loved.

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By Patricia Lockwood Riverhead: 224 pages, $25

My mom has an expression: Im laughing to keep from crying, and that could very well describe my reaction to this brilliant novel. After the past two years, it felt so good to laugh out loud at her portrayal of the utter insanity of social media. The second section tells of a family tragedy thats the to keep from crying part. Had the book ended halfway through, it still wouldve been one of my favorite novels of the last 10 years. But Lockwood goes further. Thank God.

By Gail CrowtherGallery: 304 pages, $28

Were all just poor suckers starving to death at the banquet of Plath Studies, and 2021 was a banner year. Beneath the blazing tail of Heather Clarks biography, Red Comet, sailed this fascinating book about Plath and her contemporary Anne Sexton. Inspired by the boozy afternoons the two spent together after Robert Lowells poetry seminar, Crowther delves into the archive to humanize two monolithic icons of poetry and feminism.

By Joy WilliamsKnopf: 224 pages, $26

I had never read Williams before, and Im not sure I completely understand the ending of Harrow, but perhaps thats the point. For those interested in plot, it has to do with the end of the world, though it feels terrifyingly familiar. This book shimmers like an oil slick. Williams has the weird ability to write about minor characters in such detail, its like catching a glimpse of someone and wondering Whats their story? Her writing feels like someone walking over your grave.

By Maggie NelsonGraywolf: 288 pages, $27

Nelson, quite simply one of the best writers and thinkers weve got, explores the title concept through four spheres: art, drugs, sex and climate. But at its heart this is a book about abolition more specifically the abolition of the policing of our own minds. Nothing could be more radical, as we navigate the last two years of continued racial violence and a pandemic, than her idea that no one is disposable.

By Katie KitamuraRiverhead: 240 pages, $26

Kitamuras last novel, A Separation, frustrated readers with its reluctance to tie its narrative up in a neat bow. Intimacies, about a woman who works as a translator in the Hague, is similarly demanding. But the authors choice to leave her stories suspended in a gelatinous stew of human behavior is exactly what keeps her fiction so sticky; we cant shake it off. Intimacies makes you wonder just how much is lost in the most basic translation from one mind to another.

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The 5 best books of 2021 according to Jessica Ferri - Los Angeles Times