Five Books We Missed in 2015

“So many worthy books, so little space.”

I type those words all too often, as I wrote in this space last year when the list-making season arrived—and of course it’s true again this year. I send them to publicists who fill my inbox with plugs for one title after another on publishers’ lists. I send them to reviewers eager to offer their thoughts on this or that author’s latest effort. I send them to authors themselves—you might be surprised how many—who come right out and ask: Can they hope for any attention in the pages of The Atlantic? The phrase is sometimes a white lie, yet always the truth, too: In the print magazine, we generally have room for only 30 or so book pieces a year in the Culture File. That means an awful lot of notable books go unnoticed by us.

In the holiday spirit, now is a moment to mention an array of 2015 books across the non-fiction and fiction spectrum I wish we hadn’t missed—including two that my colleague Sophie Gilbert had hoped to write about in the Culture File. (So many worthy books, so little time!) We’ve asked their authors to pay it forward, and single out a few books themselves. What recent work has caught their expert eye? What book, however old, helped them write the one they’ve been busy promoting? —Ann Hulbert

Memoir

The epistolary format has long been fertile terrain for love letters, as everyone from Napoleon to Johnny Cash can testify. But in the hands of the actress is a series of letters to men who’ve appeared at one point or another in Parker’s life, some in recurring roles, and some in fleeting—yet indelible— glimpses. In vivid prose, she recalls a man who catches her eye at a party “who had a foot in another era: pressed shirts, oiled loafers and aftershave, but an old-fashioned, distinctly masculine smell.” She addresses a lover who was “the worst of those whom I called darling,” and a teacher who humiliated her for failing to learn to juggle, and a taxi driver who happened to pick her up in a moment that was “much worse and more necessary than I would be willing to reveal.” Parker’s stories are rich, funny, sharp, and heartbreaking, and proof that she’s a truly gifted writer, turning even the most transient encounters into things of beauty.