Nicole Krauss, Paul Auster Make New York Times List Of 2017’s Best Books

Image by Simone Padovani/Awakening/Getty Images

By Talya Zax November 22, 2017

Novels by Nicole Krauss, Paul Auster and David Grossman are among the 100 books named to The New York Times’s 2017 list of the year’s 100 most notable books.

Krauss’s “Forest Dark,” Auster’s “4 3 2 1” and Grossman’s “A Horse Walks Into a Bar,” which won this year’s Man Booker International Prize, won commendations for fiction and poetry alongside Ayelet Gundar-Goshen’s Negev-set thriller “Waking Lions,” Naomi Alderman’s “The Power,” which won this year’s Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction, and poet Jorie Graham’s “Fast.”

Among the nonfiction books awarded accolades were Masha Gessen’s “The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia,” which recently won the National Book Award for nonfiction, Trevor Noah’s memoir “Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood,” Richard Rothstein’s “The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America,” Lauren Elkin’s “Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London,” Wendy Lesser’s “You Say to Brick: The Life of Louis Kahn” and Alexander Hamilton biographer Ron Chernow’s “Grant.”

The Forward covered a number of the books on the list, with profiles of Krauss, Grossman and Gessen, a conversation with Lesser about an unusual threat to Kahn’s legacy — as well as a review of her biography of him — and our own summer and winter book recommendations.

Talya Zax is the Forward’s opinion editor. Contact her at zax@forward.com or on Twitter, @TalyaZax.

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