[ satire ]

Baratunde Thurston’s memoir/instruction manual How to Be Black (released in January) includes the two elements most essential to writing a readable book about race in America: humor and bluntness. Readers will rightly laugh as much as they bristle at this comedian/Onion veteran/black man’s unpredictable world view and biting wit, and at the end they’ll all be black people, too. —Patrick Rapa

[ literature ]

After a moment of battlefield heroism is caught on tape, the surviving soldiers of Bravo Squad are shipped back from Afghanistan for a whirlwind, morale-inflating tour of the U.S.A. in Ben Fountain’s biting debut novel, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk (released in May). What they find is a country full of people they no longer understand: the well-meaning citizens who express gratitude via Fox News buzzwords, the pro athletes who envy the soldiers’ license to kill, the business-casual patriots who want to co-opt their story. Beyoncé’s in there, too. Like Slaughterhouse 5, Billy points the finger at a culture willing to send kids off to war so long as we can change the channel when the news is bad. —Patrick Rapa      

[ essays/journalism ]

Wriggling into the crawl-spaces where people keep their gut-beliefs, Jon Ronson’s compendium of essays Lost at Sea (released in October) finds the mysteries at the heart of motivations. We learn of the students in the Christmas-every-day town of North Pole, Alaska, who planned to shoot up their school, and end with the parents who suspect a cover-up in the way their daughter disappeared from a Disney cruise. His matter-of-factness is not like other observers’: No clinical assessments here in the unknotting of each puzzling set of events, but a warm, eyebrows-raised welcome for every tangle and kink. —Juliet Fletcher

[ thriller ]

Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl (released in June) is the story of a crime and how the media reacts, and an examination of what’s worse: prison or marriage. A young wife goes missing on the morning of her fifth wedding anniversary. Her husband Nick is the obvious suspect. We see everything through Nick’s eyes and Amy’s diary entries, but soon discover both are unreliable (albeit incredibly entertaining). Thrillers are not usually this witty, but then, Gone Girl is not your usual foray into noir. —Kristin McGonigle