“New York Times” Most Notable of 2020

The editors of the New York Times Book Review compiled the most notable fiction, poetry, and nonfiction for 2020 and Carl Safina ’77 (environmental science) and Garth Greenwell ’01 (literature) both wrote books appearing on the list of “100 Most Notable Books of 2020.”

Safina’s nonfiction work Becoming Wild: How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace makes “a convincing argument that animals learn from one another and pass down culture in a way that will feel very familiar to us,” writes the Times Book Review.

Cleanness by Greenwell is a work of fiction. “Greenwell’s narrator is a gay American teacher in Sofia, Bulgaria, who has a series of encounters that are sexually frank and psychologically complicated; the book achieves an unusual depth of accuracy about both physical activity and emotional undercurrent,” writes the Times Book Review.