Tim Murphy's 3 favorite reads in 2023

This book was like the tensest and most darkly compelling roller coaster ride that I could not get off until the devastating final page.

Emma Cline is so good at delineating the messy inner lives of young women. In this book, she charts with almost real-time microscopic detail the weeklong meltdown of one pretty, very lost young woman, Alexa, as she perpetrates fraud after fraud on members of a uberwealthy summer town in the Hamptons, as well as their staffers and servants.

I was agog at Alexa’s brazenness, horrified and touched by her obvious unwellness and chilled by her ever-increasing detachment from reality. I feared on every page that her jig would soon be up and beheld the conclusion, at a glittering outdoor party, the way one might stare dumbly at a slow-motion train wreck.

An incredible literary feat of holding the reader in absolute thrall to the narrative from the first to the very last page, with no let up whatsoever.

Andrew Holleran is my favorite gay writer, and one of my favorite writers overall, because his powers of description are so sumptuous and vivid that he can make even the most banal things, like what summertime dusk looks and feels like on a boring suburban street, transformatively beautiful, almost hallucinatory.

He has also taken autofiction to the highest levels of artistry, from his most famous book, Dancer from the Dance, about hedonistic and empty gay life in early 1970s NYC, to all the subsequent books, which chart the life cycle for a gay man without a partner or children.

As he nears 80, The Kingdom of Sand is an account of the waning years of life that is so bleak and spectral that it’s beautiful in its sheer rendering on the page. The book is about the almost eventless lives of gay men as they approach death, but, as in his other books, Holleran carves an almost sacred beauty out of unremarkable nothingness, such that a depiction of two old gay men watching old Hollywood movies together becomes a scene of heartbreaking depth and complexity.

This book dazzles on so many levels it’s almost head-spinning.

It’s the almost-real-time tale of a Black transgender woman, Carlotta Mercedes, who comes back to her Brooklyn family and neighborhood after 20 years in prison, to find, Rip Van Winkle-like, that almost everything has changed and that she feels like a ghost walking back into a world she recalls so differently.

Loosely based on Ulysses, it plays out entirely in one July Fourth weekend, with almost no jump cuts. In a feat I don’t think I’ve ever seen a novel pull off, the narration constantly toggles, even in the same sentence, between a close third on Carlotta and her own crazy, funny, and heartbreaking inner voice.

It manages to be an unflinching look at what poverty, racism, and transphobia look like in the life of one person, and yet to call Carlotta a victim, despite her humiliations, would be wrong, because ultimately the book is about an indomitable spirit and lust for life and freedom that cannot be broken.