Year-end best-of lists can make for predictable reading. Does anyone not know that Jonathan Franzen wrote the big novel of 2010? Instead, we’ve asked the authors of our favorites to tell us what they liked reading this year. Here’s what they had to say. —Eds.

TERRY CASTLE, The Professor (essays)

Four women who should be in the Library of America: Jill Johnston Lesbian Nation (1973). Gasped when I came across Johnston’s obit in September. I still remember shaking with embarrassment when purchasing this once-infamous item at the University of Washington bookstore in 1973. But it saved my personal

Desire is a question to which there is no answer, yet much of the time it’s the only question that matters. “Love . . . makes one little room, an everywhere,” wrote John Donne. Death, in its not-so-different way, does the same. The place of one’s final heartbeat is immense, or so it seemed to me at age eight when I inadvertently became sole witness to a murder.

I was throwing a rubber ball against a cracked beach wall on my dead-end street in Rockaway, an improbable spit of coastland on the eastern edge of New York City. It was November 1961, and Rockaway was still in a state of ruin two months

For a certain swath of American female thirty-somethings, the literary thriller comes with an odd set of associations. In addition to the windswept heaths of Wuthering Heights and Manderley, such books will likely conjure the pine-lined hiking trails of New Mexico, the fiercely policed social boundaries of classrooms and high school cafeterias, and beachy redoubts where teenagers would do well to avoid slippery black rocks.

As for the cast of characters, these readers won’t tarry with either hockey-masked predators or moody Heathcliffs with a past. Instead, they will knowingly recognize boys

Seattle is among the unlikelier American cities to be settling its accounts of racial strife. After all, the home of grunge, Starbucks, and the Space Needle prides itself on a certain shaggy, do-it-yourself civic sensibility. It’s the town of Frasier, Bill Gates, and Jimi Hendrix, not Bull Connor, Orval Faubus, or Martin Luther King Jr. Still, as journalist Doug Merlino makes clear in The Hustle, the overcast capital has plenty of its own unresolved racial legacies—and like virtually all major American cities, these come refracted through patterns of class segregation, Chamber of Commerce–sanctioned

Since the 2007–2009 “WACK!” exhibition in Los Angeles and New York, there has been a passionate reinvestigation of feminist art. Amelia Jones, to give just one example, wonders in a recent X-Tra magazine essay whether feminist artists have regressed to a desire to “make money out of the bodies (and the bodies-of-work) of women.” What better time, then, to publish Correspondence Course? This letter collection offers insights from many of the artists who started these debates in the first place, Carolee Schneemann in particular. Since the late ’50s, her paintings, installations, and films have

A rubbery lump, the human brain swirling in a specimen jar is an unimposing sight—more an overgrown mushroom than the seat of consciousness. The old gray matter is just that: gray. But when depicted by skilled anatomists or subjected to microscopes, MRIs, and electroencephalographs by neuroscientists, the brain and its parts can offer up visually bracing displays that call to mind an array of painters—from Motherwell and Kline to Julie Mehretu and Fred Tomaselli. Portraits of the Mind begins with a sketch of the nervous system done in eleventh-century Cairo that ably represents the movement of

Like a lot of good adventure stories, Charles Burns’s graphic novel X’ed Out begins in the dark. Alternating color fields give way to black, and then our first image: the silhouetted head of Tintin, the character created by the classic cartoon artist Herge. A panel later it becomes clear that it’s not Tintin we’re looking at, but a character named Nitnit, who wakes up and follows his black cat, Inky (Tintin’s white dog was named Snowy), through more darkness: this time into a hole in a brick wall that leads to a sand-hued landscape worthy of Herge himself. A few pages later, Nitnit fades out.