This brisk season, all I want is stories - rich, sharp, enigmatic stories. I want stories that are totally unpredictable in their waves and turns. Stories that keep me turning the pages in hope of catching up to the author's intelligence and wit. I want wisdom that rings honest. Voices that speak true on longing and rejecting. I want drama without convention. I want these worlds to say something about our own in startling ways. 

All the books below do this in their own particular ways.

As the saying goes, one person's utopia is another person's apocalypse. In these looming dooming days, there have been numerous books coming in store about the near-end of times and how inhabitants cope (or don't). Seasonal Associate tracks the temporary employment of a writer/translator at one of Amazon's warehouses, replete with the patronizing humiliation's that come along. Heike Geissler starts the book in first person, and quickly informs the reader she is switching to second-person. You are then put in her work-boot shoes, walking the Amazon warehouse floors, and feeling the bite of distrust, misogyny, and condescension. 

In The Emissary, by the luminously inscrutable Yoko Tawada, we find a post-Fukushima Japan where children are born weak and the elderly grow strong. In a world that could read so bleak and wrenching, the book is lighthearted and joyous.

Same goes for N.K. Jemisin's first exhilarating collection of short fiction, How Long 'Til Black Future Month?. Especially agile in pushing speculative sci-fi and fantasy boundaries, Jemisin also plays with tropes and fantastical myths to enter into unknown narrative zones of desire. 

Anna Burns' Milkman goes back in time to The Troubles in 1970s North Belfast where paramilitary forces were the norm and violence wasn't blinked at. Written in challenging prose, the novel is told with the stops and starts and deviation in thought. It's a read that will reward the deep attention it requires.

I'm always pleased when stories of womanhood don't fall within the historically traditional ideas of what womanhood is and how it is experienced. With joy and relief, I've read a number of books did just that with aplomb, including Julie Doucet's inimitable Dirty Plotte comics. Compiled by Drawn & Quarterly in this super deluxe edition, the complete comics, interviews , essays, and photographs show off Doucet's extra special coolness, attitude, and wits. 

As a novelist, playwright, scholar, screenwriter, and historian, Sarah Schulman is jaw-droppingly accomplished and one of my all-time literary crushes. The thing is, she knows precisely how to imbed her socially-driven research into rich, penetrating stories. Maggie Terry is a detective novel that is bittersweet to the max - deep sorrow under a brimming sunset. 

This large, door-stopper of a book was a true delight. Twenty years in the making, this is a graphic novel in all senses of the word - in scope, in ambition, in form.  Following journalists and artists, communists and fascists, the hopeful and the resigned, Berlin is a poly-vocal look at the titular city undergoing rapid, severe, recognizable change during the Weimar era.

With oomph, confidence, and clear-eyed perceptive attention, this collection of graphic short stories held me in tight from story to story. Speculative like Jillian Tamaki, wacky like Michael Deforge, and quiet like Adrian Tomine, Carolyn Nowak's work was a revelation. 

Deborah Levy's two living biographies swooped me away far from the present. It's rare that a book makes me forget about the world around me when I'm reading, even when reading a book I adore, but Levy's work is so immersive that I didn't know what hit me. She hit me, and now I'm swooning. 

Following up her comic collections Powdered Milk and Sunburning, Roberts continues to touch on themes of motherhood, the absurdity of children, and life as an artist with poignant vigor in this new collection. Only now, she goes deeper and darker into the turns life can take without losing her refreshing droll spirit. 

Here is a collection of poems that charts the limbo space where a spirit lingers between death and reincarnation - a poem for each of the 49 days. Hailed as Korea’s most important living poet, Hyesoon chronicles Korea’s contemporary violent history with intimate strange precision.  

Dionne Brand’s work and scope make me swoon - she is wise, cool, funny, and sexy. In my personal canon, she is big in bold with her poetry, stories, novels, essays, and documentary films. Theory narrates the story of an ambitious grad student to wants to write a revolutionary thesis, only to be made completely impressionable by their intimate relationships.

And here are some books I'm looking forward to reading over the holidays and into the new year. If you need me, I'll be under my blanket covers trying to embark on some kind winter reading hibernation.