Ordinary Disasters: How I Stopped Being a Model Minority (Pantheon), by Professor of English Anne Cheng, is included in Hyperallergic's The 30 Best Art Books of 2024 and in Washington Independent Review of Books' 51 favorite books of 2024. Independent reviewer Alice Stephens writes, “[T]his collection goes well beyond the personal as Cheng stitches her witness testimony into the broader tapestries of Asian American history and culture, the immigrant experience, and American womanhood.”

Circle of Hope: A Reckoning with Love, Power, and Justice in an American Church (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), by Eliza Griswold, is included in The New Yorker's Best Books of 2024, The New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2024, The Washington Post's 50 Notable Works of Nonfiction from 2024, NPR's Books We Love 2024 and Publishers Weekly's Best Books of 2024: Religion, among many others. Publishers Weekly writes: “Pulitzer winner Griswold paints an indelible portrait of the interpersonal tensions, internal biases, and gaps between utopian ideals and messy reality that unraveled a progressive Philadelphia church in 2023.” Griswold is a Ferris Professor of Journalism and director of the Program in Journalism.

• Read a Humanities Council Q&A with Griswold about Circle of Hope. 

Shakespeare’s Tragic Art (Princeton University Press) by Rhodri Lewis is included in The New Yorker's Best Books of 2024. The New Yorker writes, “This engaging study seeks to understand the ‘engine’ driving Shakespeare’s tragedies. …Ultimately, Lewis writes, the aim of Shakespeare’s tragedies is not to moralize or to pronounce but to make audiences reflect on ‘human thought as an ineradicably emotional phenomenon.’” Lewis is a senior research scholar and lecturer with the rank of professor in English and Freshman Seminars.

Adapted for the Department of English from the University homepage article cited below. — Sarah Malone, Department of English

For a full list of books by Princeton professors selected for at least one 2024 year-end “best of” list, in alphabetical order by author, including novels, memoir, history, poetry, biography, essays and nonfiction, see the Princeton University homepage article: