The next five
White Girls by Hilton Als (McSweeney’s); The Fun Parts by Sam Lipsyte (Farrar, Straus and Giroux); Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Knopf); The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. by Adelle Waldman (Henry Holt and Co.); The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer (Riverhead)
Best reissue
Speedboat by Renata Adler (NYRB) Adler’s champions, David Shields and the New York Review Books team, were smart to recognize the strengths of her wickedly postmodern tales, and how they might play in 2013. Her knotty, satirical, vaguely memoiristic and altogether fictional packets of prose blurred stylistic lines in the ’70s, with an immediacy that many of today’s genre-bending writers lack.