For simplicity’s sake, say there are two types of readers: 1) the ones who will read anything and everything; 2) the selective readers, the ones who read by genre, or get obsessed with books from a certain era, or who want to read only the best literary fiction has to offer. This list has something for everybody, but it is especially designed for people who fall into these latter categories. Specifically, readers who want the best 21st-century fiction out there.
It’s a difficult stack of books to curate. The “best books” conversation tends to be dominated by a set of familiar titles. Some of those are included here, and hopefully a convincing case is made for each of them. At the same time, there are selections that might be surprising, or unexpected, but which feel like locks to stand the test of time as 21st-century classics.
One more note before getting started: for the sake of streamlining the selection process, this list focuses on literary fiction. Genres like pageturner crime thrillers and science fiction, with its many subgenres, and fantasy all merit their own specified lists. This list doesn’t go so far as to name a Stephen King novel the best of the century so far. But it does include some overlooked modern classics and some new books that will hold up as all-time greats.
In composing this list, the goal wasn’t just to think of the best books of the 21st-century from a 2026 perspective, but from a 2100 perspective; what novels and short story collections released in the first quarter of the century will people still be talking about then?
White Teeth
Written By Zadie Smith; Published In 2000
Zadie Smith was just 25 years old when she dropped her debut novel, White Teeth, at the turn of the century. The book chronicles the intertwined lives of two London families, one English and one Bangladeshi, over roughly the course of Smith’s lifetime up to that point: 1975 to 2000. Just over a quarter-century later, White Teeth is no less of a joy to read.
The novel crackles with energy, and though Smith is a few years older than the oldest millennials, her tone and style in White Teeth were on the cutting edge of what millennial art would come to be recognized as. White Teeth is a stellar work of fiction that interrogates race, class, family, friendship, love, and all the major themes that dominate contemporary fiction.
The Amazing Adventures Of Kavalier And Clay
Written By Michael Chabon; Published In 2000
If we could go back and relitigate the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, Zadie Smith’s White Teeth would probably be a finalist. (Novels by Joyce Carol Oates and Joy Williams were the runners-up that year.) But whether it might win is a much tougher thing to debate, because that year’s winner was Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.
Kavalier and Clay is a fictional retelling of American pop culture history, following two comic book creators, amalgamations of the greats of the industry like Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, Superman’s creators, Batman’s creators, and more. Through this lens, Chabon crafts a story that examines American storytelling, but also Jewish identity, queer identity, and the 20th-century American experience as a whole.
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay is a long read, but an extremely satisfying one that will leave readers intellectually satisfied and emotionally spent.
The Known World
Written By Edward P. Jones; Published In 2003
Many things make a great novel, and The Known World by Edward P. Jones does just about all of them. Jones’ Pulitzer Prize-winning book is morally complex and narratively complicated, but it isn’t a difficult read. Challenging, yes, but the text isn’t hard. No, The Known World is haunting, and moving, evocative, whatever it wants to be on any given page, because that’s how much control the author has.
The Known World is set a decade prior to the Civil War, and revolves around the death of Henry Townsend, a freed former slave who became a slave owner following his emancipation. In the novel, Jones weaves together stories from Townsend’s life with the stories of characters facing the consequences of his death.
Jones’ novel is a classic that is underserved in modern literary discourse. For anyone looking to read all the greatest books of the 21st century so far, that project isn’t complete without The Known World.
2666
Written By Roberto Bolaño; Published In 2004 (Spanish), 2008 (English Translation)
2666 is a mystery novel unlike any written before or since. That is because it is not about the mystery, but rather about the people, and the other mysteries, caught up in its orbit. 2666 is about a series of gruesome murders, but it is also about a clique of academics obsessed with a reclusive author, about raising a daughter in a world that is especially dangerous for women, and about a thousand other things that Roberto Bolaño packs into the book.
Bolaño was a master of literary digression, and in the most wonderful sense, readers can never quite predict where 2666 is going to go next. The novel is also a masterclass in the lack of resolution, or at least the undermining of it. Answers to 2666’s major questions do come, but only very late in the book, and offhandedly, as if to make a point of the answers not being the point.
2666 probably should have won the Pulitzer Prize; it did win the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2008 for its English translation. In any case, 2666 is rightly held up as a dense, dazzling, and practically flawless 21st-century literary achievement.
Oblivion
Written By David Foster Wallace; Published In 2004
The literary conversation about David Foster Wallace tends to be drawn to 1996’s Infinite Jest, his massive lightning rod of a postmodern novel, and The Pale King, the unfinished novel he was working on at the time of his death in 2008, published posthumously in 2011. But that leads people to overlook Wallace’s best work, the short story collection Oblivion.
Oblivion is Wallace’s apex, stylistically and thematically. If readers want to understand DFW, and get a sense of why he’s held in such high regard, Oblivion is the better book to turn to than Infinite Jest. The stories in Oblivion are dense and diabolically complex, high-level examples of the literary “stunt pilotry” their author decried but couldn’t escape.
The operative word in Oblivion is layers. Everything in the book is layer on top of layer on top of twenty more layers. The book’s title story is the best example; “Oblivion” is a dream-within-a-nightmare-within-a-dream that puts Christopher Nolan’s Inception to shame, one readers will still be scratching their heads about after multiple reads.
Half Of A Yellow Sun
Written By Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie; Published In 2006
Truth be told, most of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novels warrant inclusion on this list. Narrowing it down to just one is tough, but Half of a Yellow Sun has the edge because of its cast of characters. Yellow Sun is set amidst the Nigerian Civil War, a devastating conflict with lasting consequences for postcolonial Africa.
The novel is told non-chronologically, a style Adichie employs flawlessly. The book is impeccable historical fiction, but also a story of personal trauma and perseverance in which its protagonists represent generations of people, including Adichie herself, who lived through the historical events depicted in Half of a Yellow Sun and their aftermath.
Half of a Yellow Sun is a novel that shouldn’t languish unread on people’s shelves or Goodreads “to read” lists. It’s worth picking up now, especially for the next generation of writers, who can learn a lot from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s work.
A Mercy
Written By Toni Morrison; Published In 2008
Toni Morrison is one of the greatest American writers of all time. At least five of her books have a case for the Great American Novel, and one of them is A Mercy. When it was released in 2008, A Mercy reminded readers that Morrison was an undisputed genius at writing historical fiction.
A Mercy juggles multiple POV characters, and several interweaving storylines, from the enslaved woman Flora to her owner, Jacob Vaark, his wife Rebekka, and more. A Mercy sounds complex, and it is, but the true testament to Toni Morrison’s brilliance is that it is also short. A Mercy is under 200 pages. It can easily be read in a day, although the brevity of the prose is balanced out by an amazing emotional depth, which might require some breaks from the book to process.
Salvage The Bones
Written By Jesmyn Ward; Published In 2011
Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones is a modern masterpiece. It won the National Book Award for Fiction the year it came out, and should have been in the conversation for the Pulitzer as well. (The 2012 Pulitzer, awarded to the best fiction published in 2011, was a weird year. It was the last time there was no award given.) Salvage the Bones is a novel about the ongoing trauma caused by Hurricane Katrina, which Ward didn’t want readers to forget.
The book is set in the lead up to Katrina, extending through its immediate aftermath, and follows the Batistes, a black Mississippi family. Salvage the Bones is a crushing story that lyrically handles the reality of being a family that struggles to make ends meet on an average day, who are suddenly thrust into the middle of a generational crisis.
The World Doesn’t Require You: Stories
Written By Rion Amilcar Scott; Published In 2019
The World Doesn’t Require You is Rion Amilcar Scott’s second short story collection, following his 2016 debut Insurrections. Both books are set in the same fictional town, Cross River; in Scott’s version of history, Cross River was the site of the only successful slave uprising in U.S. history, and its population are still predominantly the descendents of the original insurrectionists.
The World Doesn’t Require You expands the scope of Cross River, and the world outside of it. The book includes elements of magical realism and science fiction. The astounding first story, “David Sherman, the Last Son of God,” tells the story of the Almighty himself living in Cross River for a time, and the kids he had there. “The Electric Joy of Service” is about robots.
At the same time, Rion Amilcar Scott’s characters are often academics and scholars, like in the stunning concluding novella in the book, “Special Topics in Lonliness Studies.” The World Doesn’t Require You flew under the literary radar for too many readers when it was released, but it deserves to be held up as one of the great works of the century.
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
Written By Ocean Vuong; Published In 2019
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is polarizing for some readers, but it hard to argue with its status as a great work of contemporary literatury. The book is beautiful and genre-transcending; it’s a poetic epistolary novel, with a nonlinear narrative, which reads like autobiography. In other words, it is ambitious, and challenging, and a work of singular voice from a young author.
Briefly Gorgeous was Ocean Vuong’s debut novel. It earned Vuong a MacArthur Grant, often called the “genius grant,” and a slew of awards and nominations. The novel was a literary phenomenon, crossing over into the mainstream pop culture consciousness in a way that it has become increasingly hard for non-genre fiction to do.
Ocean Vuong’s novel has been a target of critics and censors for its queer content; expect it to show up on the American Library Association’s most-challenged books list for the 2020s. Still, it’s a modern classic-in-the-making, and a must-read for anyone looking for deeply evocative, deeply personal fiction.