Brian DeLeeuw, assistant editor at the magazine, has published his own debut novel this year. He’s been kind enough to weigh in on his favorites.

Obviously, five “best” is a bit of a misnomer, since I don’t claim to have read even a fraction of all the no-doubt excellent debut novels published in the ’00s.  But these are the five I have read that have stuck with me the most:

1. House of Leaves – Mark Z. Danielewski (Pantheon, 2000)
A Pandora’s box of a book, an unholy union of critical theory and pulp novels, the most perfect melding of (bizarre) form and (disturbing) content I’ve yet come across.  It’s the scariest thing I’ve ever read.

2. The Horned Man — James Lasdun (W.W. Norton, 2002)
Does it count as a “debut” if you’ve already published three collections of poetry and three more collections of short stories?  “First” novel might be more accurate, but in any case, this is a coolly brilliant work of paranoia and psychological shell-games, which also manages to deftly satirize the sexual politics of academia.

3. Sharp Objects — Gillian Flynn (Shaye Areheart, 2007)
Sometimes contemporary literary fiction can seem a bit precious.  Those are the times when you want to read a thriller about a self-mutilating journalist investigating two brutal murders in her hellish Missouri hometown.  It’s a nice bonus when that thriller is as well-written and expertly controlled as this one.

4. The Russian Debutante’s Handbook — Gary Shteyngart (Riverhead, 2002)
Bawdy, shambolic, and hilarious, this send-up of the mid-’90s Prague ex-pat scene earns every bit of its hype.  The laughs-per-page ratio is clearly the highest on this list, yet as with all the best comedies, at its heart is an affecting sadness.

5. Indecision — Benjamin Kunkel (Random House, 2005)
This novel prompted some strange responses when it was first published, including Michiko Kakutani’s review written from the point of Holden Caulfield and buckets of ad hominem vitriol from Gawker.  But if you ignore all the extra-curriculars, you’ll find a very funny first book, the greatest strength of which is its perfectly calibrated voice, stuck somewhere between a grad-school seminar and a Phish concert parking lot.