In early December 1938, the critic and editor Malcolm Cowley set out to compile a form of end-of-year list for The New Republic. He and the other editors wrote to their friends seeking to compile a list of recent “Books That Changed Our Minds.” They didn’t debate what it would mean to call their choices the best. The books simply needed to have made them think in a new way. Eighty-five years later, we’re attempting something similar with our list of books of the year. We drew this list from the
Louise Glück, the former US Poet Laureate and 2020 Nobel Prize awardee whose poems considered and revealed truths about love, loss and survival, has died at 80.