Taffy Brodesser-Akner, author of “Fleishman Is in Trouble.” Image by Erik Tanner

By PJ Grisar November 26, 2019

Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s debut novel, Megan Twohey and Jodi Kantor’s account of their Pulitzer-winning reporting on Harvey Weinstein and a collection of stories by Peter Orner are among The New York Times’s 100 Notable Books of 2019.

Brodesser-Akner’s “Fleishman Is in Trouble” is one of a number of significant works of fiction on the list, including Cathleen Schine’s “The Grammarians;” “The Heavens” by Sandra Newman; the Booker Prize-nominated “The Man Who Saw Everything” by Deborah Levy;“Mrs. Everything,” by Jennifer Weiner; Peter Orner’s “Maggie Brown & Others;” and Binnie Kirshenbaum’s “Rabbits for Food.”

On the nonfiction list is Shoshana Zuboff’s “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power,” which has a natural companion in New Yorker staff writer Andrew Marantz’s “Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation.” Times TV critic James Poniwozik’s “Audience of One: Donald Trump, Television, and the Fracturing of America” made the list alongside his Times colleagues Kantor and Twohey, included for “She Said: Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story That Helped Ignite a Movement.”

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Rounding out the list are Katherine Eban’s “Bottle of Lies: The Inside Story of the Generic Drug Boom;” “The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America From 1890 to Present” by David Treuer; “The Guarded Gate: Bigotry, Eugenics, and the Law That Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians, and Other European Immigrants Out of America” by Daniel Okrent; George Packer’s “Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century;” and “Separate: The Story of Plessy v. Ferguson, and America’s Journey From Slavery to Segregation.” by Steve Luxenberg.

Ilya Kaminsky is one of three poets to receive a spot on the list for his collection “Deaf Republic: Poems,” which is structured like a two-act play and informed by Kaminsky’s Ukrainian childhood.

Finally, while Mira Jacobs is not Jewish, her husband, Jed Rothstein, is. Her graphic memoir, “Good Talk,” one of two volumes in The Times’s “comics/graphics” category chronicles discussions she has with her biracial son, her Jewish in-laws and her husband about race in Trump’s America.

Correction, November 26, 4:16 p.m.: [An earlier version of this article accidentally omitted Steve Luxenberg as the author of “Separate: The Story of Plessy v. Ferguson, and America’s Journey From Slavery to Segregation.”]

PJ Grisar is the Forward’s culture fellow. He can be reached at [email protected]

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