Archive for the ‘Favorite Reads from 2011’ Category

Jesse Bering's Bookshelf

With more and more books published every year, it’s increasingly difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff. Does this increase the usefulness of all the annual “Best of” lists? Perhaps. It’s irresistible when a critic distills a year of reading into a simple hierarchy, especially if her tastes match your own. It’s just so efficient. I tend to eschew those books awarded the most (or loudest) hosannas in favor of the previously unknown novels that slipped past me at publication. (This year it’s Ben Lerner’s excellent Leaving the Atocha Station.)

Sites like Salon, The Millions, and The Guardian go straight to the authors for their recommendations. I decided to do the same, canvassing our writers and editors. With a couple caveats: First, the editors couldn’t choose their own titles; Second, one’s choices didn’t need to be published in 2011, just read in 2011. Old classics and novels from 2010 and 2009 are all welcome.

Some submitted a straightforward list, while others penned brief summaries. (The Spanish-Argentinian novelist Andrés Neuman even separated his list by language.) I hope you’ll find your next favorite book among them.

Favorite Reads from 2011: (more…)

David Levithan is the author of The Lover’s Dictionary and of many acclaimed young-adult novels, including the New York Times bestselling Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist (with Rachel Cohn). He is also the editorial director at Scholastic and the founding editor of the PUSH imprint. The Lover’s Dictionary continues on Twitter @loversdiction.

So many of my friends are finally reading Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games and then immediately asking me what to read next. To which I reply: Start with M. T. Anderson’s Feed, which is a different kind of dystopia but just as scary in its own way. I read it for the eighth or ninth time this year, and the future it portrays keeps getting closer and closer. Then there’s Maggie Stiefvater’s The Scorpio Races, which has such a singular, compelling vision that it’s hard to adequately describe. Just let yourself be taken away by it, as you’re taken away by The Hunger Games. (Full disclosure: I was an editor on both books.) Finally, be on the lookout next year for Jennifer Nielsen’s The False Prince, which I’ve already read twice now. (more…)

Paul La Farge is the author of three novels: The Artist of the Missing (FSG, 1999), Haussmann, or the Distinction (FSG, 2001), and Luminous Airplanes (FSG, 2011); and a book of imaginary dreams, The Facts of Winter. His short stories have appeared in McSweeney’s, Harper’s Magazine, Fence, Conjunctions, and elsewhere. His nonfiction appears in The Believer, Bookforum, Playboy, and Cabinet. He lives in upstate New York.

Summer camp is on my mind for some reason—maybe things have got so bad, finally, that I miss it—and so my list of favorite 2011 books takes the form of an end-of-camp awards ceremony. Please step up to the campfire when I call your name. (more…)

David Bezmozgis was born in Riga, Latvia, in 1973. His first book, Natasha and Other Stories, won a regional Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and was a 2004 New York Times Notable Book. His second book, The Free World, was published by FSG in March 2011. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow and a Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library. In 2010, he was named one of The New Yorker’s “20 Under 40.” You can follow him on Twitter @dbezmozgis.

I’ve written elsewhere about my admiration for Hervé Le Tellier’s Enough About Love and Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams. Both were among my favorite books of 2011. But I’d forgotten to mention two wonderful essay collections. One is by FSG’s own John Jeremiah Sullivan. I’ve been a fan of his since his Blood Horses came out in 2004. I remember getting an advance copy of it and reading it on a transatlantic flight from Rome to Los Angeles and not only admiring it tremendously but also being moved to tears by some of the writing. Since then, I’ve tried to keep up with some of Sullivan’s output in GQ and The Paris Review. It’s great to see so many of those pieces collected in Pulphead and to see the book get the attention it deserves. But there was another terrific essay collection in 2011 by another of my favorite American essayists, Arthur Krystal. The collection, Except When I Write, gathers many of the reviews and essays Krystal has published over the last several years, mostly from The New Yorker and Harper’s. These essays are different from Sullivan’s because Krystal’s are more strictly reviews of other books—though to say that doesn’t give the essays their due. Krystal manages to do what the best literary critics do, which is both to engage with the texts and to say something larger about the culture and, implicitly, about the critic. There are few people who do this with the intelligence, erudition, and wit of Krystal. (more…)

Sean McDonald is the executive editor and director of paperback publishing at FSG.

To be clear, I agree with everyone else: The three best books of 2011 are Frank Bill’s Crimes in Southern Indiana, John Jeremiah Sullivan’s Pulphead, and Héctor Tobar’s Barbarian Nurseries.

But you want me to think beyond the walls of FSG. That makes my head hurt, but here goes.

1Q84 by Haruki Murakami
I’m obsessed with Tokyo and a bit of a Murakami nut, so maybe I’m not to be trusted on this one. It’s a crazier book than most are letting on, but I like that about it. It may have its problems, but they mostly reflect falling short while taking impossible risks. Maybe because Murakami seems to keep having so much fun, the failings never (for me) got in the way of enjoying the reading and admiring the fireworks.

Reamde by Neal Stephenson
It’s a giant, pulpy techno-thriller, and as entertaining and implausible as that suggests. But it’s an extremely smart and insightful giant, pulpy techno-thriller in which the implausible characters doing implausible things feel whole and human, engaged with a world that’s undeniably ours, just presented in a way that reveals a series of new, exhilarating perspectives.

The Information by James Gleick
As if my fiction choices weren’t nerdy (and impossibly long) enough . . . This, for me, was probably the book of the year—erudite, urgent, definitive, beautiful. (more…)

Caleb Scharf is the director of the Astrobiology Center at Columbia University, and his book, Gravity’s Engines, will be published in August 2012 under the Scientific American / Farrar, Straus and Giroux imprint. Scharf’s blog Life, Unbounded was named one of the “hottest science blogs” by The Guardian. He has written for New Scientist, Science, Nature, and more. Follow him @Caleb_Scharf.

Measuring the World by Daniel Kehlmann
This novel imagines the explorer and naturalist Alexander von Humboldt and the mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss as strangely intertwined souls in the 1800s. It’s funny, a little crazy, and very entertaining.

Explorers of the New Century by Magnus Mills
No one is, to my mind, a better observer of the witty yet Kafkaesque side of the British soul than Magnus Mills. Explorers takes ridiculous stoicism, social order, prejudice, and an insane sense of duty to a new level that is both brilliantly entertaining and immensely sinister.

A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599 by James Shapiro
The flowing and vivid writing of this tour de force of historical research quickly takes any lingering silliness about the “real Shakespeare” and consigns it to the trash heap. Here he is, alive and part of a fascinating, alien, yet familiar world. Best Shakespeare history. Ever.

Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space by Carl Sagan
Every few years I end up rereading this classic. It’s Carl Sagan at his best, a firsthand tale of real solar system exploration. The scientific endeavors are amazing, and Sagan brings his deeply humanist view to bear on them. It’s a heady mix.

Crow Country by Mark Cocker
This charming and engrossing description of the author’s corvid obsession is like an updated version of the writings of the great nineteenth-century naturalists. I’ll never look at a crow the same way again, nor at my own motivations in science.

The Algebraist by Iain M. Banks
It’s all alien, deeply, madly, wonderfully so. This is such a refreshingly unabashed riot of imaginative, scientifically robust, envelope-pushing science fiction that one simply can’t be ashamed of enjoying it. Turn the dial to eleven.

All Authors’ and Editors’ Favorite Reads of 2011

The Introduction

Jesse Coleman is an associate editor at FSG.

For me, 2011 was the year of rereading, and my favorite reads of the year were books that I have read before:

Mating by Norman Rush

The Bathroom by Jean-Philippe Toussaint

Erasure by Percival Everett

The Laughing Policeman by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö

All Authors’ and Editors’ Favorite Reads of 2011

The Introduction

Anthony Giardina is the author of four previous novels, most recently White Guys, and one collection of stories. His novel Norumbega Park will be published by FSG in January 2012. His short fiction and essays have appeared in Harper’s Magazine, Esquire, GQ, and The New York Times Magazine, and his plays have been widely produced. He is a regular visiting professor at the Michener Center of the University of Texas. He lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.

I read only two new books in 2011: Stephen Harrigan’s Remember Ben Clayton, as smooth and satisfying as an old George Stevens movie, and Charles Baxter’s Gryphon, which contains at least one killer story, “Kiss Away.” The best novel I read this year is fifty years old, The Judges of the Secret Court by David Stacton, newly republished by New York Review Books. Subtitled “A Novel about John Wilkes Booth,” it’s actually a meditation on guilt, playacting, and the endless judgments that dog us always. Brilliant all the way.

All Authors’ and Editors’ Favorite Reads of 2011

The Introduction

Ellen Ullman is the author of a novel, The Bug, a New York Times Notable Book and runner-up for the PEN/Hemingway Award, and the cult classic memoir Close to the Machine, based on her years as a rare female computer programmer in the early years of the personal computer era. Her novel By Blood will be published by FSG in February 2012. She lives in San Francisco.

The Death of the Adversary by Hans Keilson, translated by Ivo Jarosy
A disturbing book that explores the interior relationship between an unnamed narrator—presumably a German Jew—and his mortal adversary, named B., but surely Hitler.

Keilson describes hatred as “voluptuous,” an animating force, a “powerful will to live that is rooted in the will to suffer.” He both longs for and dreads the death of B., saying, “Who can break the community that secretly establishes itself between the persecutors and their victims?”

Ill Fares the Land by Tony Judt
Judt died last year. He wrote his last works while paralyzed by Lou Gehrig’s disease. This sad yet inspiring book mourns the loss of “social democracy,” the slow death of the idea that we are all in this together. His voice will be missed.

Train Dreams by Denis Johnson
The novel takes place in 1920, amid loggers, carters, train-track layers, men who go from job to job with the seasons. The main character, Robert Grainier, has lost his wife, child, home—everything he cares about—to a huge forest fire. Beautiful, spare prose. Emotion portrayed through the smallest gesture and turn of phrase.

Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart
Hilarious and scary. The most accurate description of the near future I have read, a time of perpetual connectivity via tiny, handheld devices, where the overwhelmingly common activity is digital shopping.

Room by Emma Donoghue
In this novel about a woman kept locked in a room for several years by a sexual predator, told from the viewpoint of the boy born as a result the woman’s having been raped by her captor, what seems improbable—that the story can be told through the eyes of a five-year-old whose entire life has been spent in one room—becomes an almost hallucinatory description of an entire world his mother helped him create.

The Great Reflation by J. Anthony Boeckh
Written as a guide to investors, this book is nonetheless a frightening description of a twenty-five-year expansion of credit, the “false prosperity” created by a capitalist world gluttonous for borrowing.

March by Geraldine Brooks
A retelling of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women but from the viewpoint of the family’s father, who leaves to serve as a chaplain in the Civil War. The writing is luminous. Just one of the many sentences I have underlined: “The heat of the late afternoon closed in around us like an animate thing; you could feel it on your skin, warm and moist, like a great beast panting.” And one of the metaphors I wish I could have written: “A rat’s tooth of an uneasiness gnawed at me . . .”

All Authors’ and Editors’ Favorite Reads of 2011

The Introduction

Christopher Tilghman is the author of two short-story collections, In a Father’s Place and The Way People Run, and two novels, Mason’s Retreat and Roads of the Heart. His next novel, The Right-Hand Shore, will be published by FSG in May 2012. Currently the director of the MFA program at the University of Virginia, he lives with his wife, the writer Caroline Preston, in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Ten Thousand Saints by Eleanor Henderson
The story of lost souls, especially a sixteen-year-old named Jude, wandering through the punk and straight-edge scene of the late 1980s. Beautifully and relentlessly written.

The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach
Along with Henderson’s Ten Thousand Saints, one of the debuts of the year, and deservedly so. A ruminative and gracefully told novel of small colleges and baseball.

1861: The Civil War Awakening by Adam Goodheart
A series of extended vignettes about some of the players at the opening of the war. Rather spookily redolent of our own era: intransigent ideologies, dysfunctional Congress, absurd tragical thinking.

Eat the Document by Dana Spiotta
Very much the best retelling of the lives of ’70s radicals, in this case, two misguided bombers who have successfully gone underground and whose reward is to live in a very much unchanged America.

Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson
Read it in 2011 and felt like a fool to have missed it when it came out. In my mind, the masterwork on the Vietnam era.

Paradise Lost by John Milton
In college I majored in French literature under the airy assumption that I would read all of English literature on my own. It took forty-five years, but I have finally followed through with Milton. A page-turner! Why didn’t anybody tell me that?

All Authors’ and Editors’ Favorite Reads of 2011

The Introduction

Ryan Chapman is the online marketing manager at FSG, and produces this very site.

Pulphead by John Jeremiah Sullivan

Hark! A Vagrant by Kate Beaton

The Road to Somewhere by James Reeves

The Chairs Are Where the People Go: How to Live, Work, and Play in the City by Misha Glouberman and Sheila Heti

Otherwise Known as the Human Condition by Geoff Dyer

Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age by Bohumil Hrabal

The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes

Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides

A Feast of Snakes by Harry Crews

Suicide by Édouard Levé

All Authors’ and Editors’ Favorite Reads of 2011

The Introduction

Andrés Neuman was born in 1977 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He has a degree in Spanish philology from the University of Granada. Neuman was selected as one of Granta’s Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists and was elected to the Bogotá-39 list. Traveler of the Century, which will be published by FSG in March, was the winner of the Alfaguara Prize and the National Critics Prize, Spain’s two most prestigious literary awards.

In French:

Un assassin blanc comme neige (A Murderer So White as Snow) by ­Christian Bobin
Can a novelist be a poet? Is it possible to narrate nothing and try to say everything? Bobin usually manages it.

In Spanish (or translated into):

Elsa Drucaroff, Los prisioneros de la torre. Política, relatos y jóvenes en la postdictadura (The Prisoners in the Tower: Politics, Stories, and Young Writers After the Dictatorship) by Elsa Drucaroff
An impressive research on how Argentinian dictatorship and 70’s political commitment affected to the following generations of writers, who (apparently) started to work on democracy.

El espía (The Spy) by Justo Navarro
Was Ezra Pound a double agent during the Second World War? Was he a character of himself? This novel imagines and thinks about an answer.

La mano invisible (The Invisible Hand) by Isaac Rosa
What is work for? Are we workers part of a sort of exploitative reality show? With a little of Kafka’s help, the present novel develops these and other unpleasant questions.

Fenómenos de circo (Circus Phenomena) by Ana María Shua
Another witty series, between the astonishment and the circus, by this contemporary master of micro-fiction.

Deshielo a mediodía (Midday Thaw) by Tomas Tranströmer
Third book translated into Spanish of this outstanding poet. What is the point of such a thing as a Nobel Prize? Maybe to (re)discover these kind of authors. Charles Simic is waiting too.

Fronteras del lenguaje (Language Borders) by Uljana Wolf
First book ever published in Spanish by this young and brilliant German poet, always able to mix emotion and experiment.

In English:

Pulse by Julian Barnes
We don’t know if this is his finest book, but what the hell: his short stories are great too, and we still remember Flaubert’s Parrot, and he definitely deserved a Booker.

The Pale King by David Foster Wallace
No, he didn’t finish it, ok. But in fact all his jests were infinite! I wish I didn’t read Girl with Curious Hair, so I could read it again for the first time.

The Letters of Samuel Beckett: Volume 2, 1941-1956 edited by George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, and Dan Gunn
What happens with our mother tongue when we begin to write in a foreign language? Beckett knew it well–and revealed it beautifully to his friends.

All Authors’ and Editors’ Favorite Reads of 2011

The Introduction

Daniel Chamovitz is a biologist and the director of the Manna Center for Plant Biosciences at Tel Aviv University. You can find Chamovitz’s website here and follow him @DanielChamovitz. His book What a Plant Knows: A Field Guide to the Senses will be published in June 2012 under the Scientific American / Farrar, Straus and Giroux imprint.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
True and respectful to the science, sensitive to the history and fluid cultural norms of the time, and excellent presentation. I especially loved the intermingling of first-person storytelling.

Makers by Cory Doctorow
A slight tweak of the present makes for great science fiction with excellent hacker technology and Disney as the Evil Empire.

The Man from Beijing by Henning Mankell
Excellent well-researched, intelligent murder mystery that spans continents and centuries.

A Jane Austen Education: How Six Novels Taught Me About Love, Friendship, and the Things That Really Matter by William Deresiewicz
Can literature really be transformative? Apparently yes, at least for Deresiewicz, who uses Jane Austen to reassess and rebuild his stagnant life. Great mix of memoir and CliffsNotes of Austen’s works.

Married to Bhutan: How One Woman Got Lost, Said “I Do,” and Found Bliss by Linda Leaming
Having traveled in Nepal and India, I was always fascinated by the closed-off Bhutan. This lovely book is a sensitive and compelling tale of life in this mountain paradise.

All Authors’ and Editors’ Favorite Reads of 2011

The Introduction

Jesse Bering is a scholar in residence at Wells College. He is a regular columnist at scientificamerican.com and a frequent contributor to Slate, and he has appeared on NPR, Playboy Radio, and more. He is the author of The Belief Instinct and Why Is the Penis Shaped Like That? And Other Reflections on Being Human, which will be published in July 2012 under the Scientific American / Farrar, Straus and Giroux imprint. He lives in Ithaca, New York. Follow him @JesseBering.

This has been a year filled with lewd and licentious readings because I’m working on a new book about the science of sexual deviance and human psychology, particularly our preoccupation with normalcy and the dread of being outcasts when it comes to what secretly arouses us. One of the more important aspects of this nonfiction project is being able to ground the scientific discussion in clear literary or narrative moments. It’s usually not deliberate on the part of fiction authors, but often their stories are complementary to actual science, or at least they map onto recurring findings that arise in controlled laboratory studies. Many of the classic works of fiction that I’ve read this year, alongside the many dry empirical articles, articulate rather complex scientific ideas in stunningly intimate language. Here are a handful of my favorites.

Confessions of a Mask by Yukio Mishima
Published in 1948, twenty-two years before Mishima died infamously by seppuku during a failed coup attempt in Tokyo, many scholars believe that this coming-of-age tale about growing up gay in early twentieth-century Japan is largely autobiographical. Mishima’s portrayal of a teenage boy’s dawning awareness of his sexual attraction to other males in a society that not only forbids him from expressing these desires but also forces him to overtly mask his true self behind a heterosexual veneer is an extraordinary and nuanced analysis of many adolescents’ experience even today. The protagonist also finds himself reflecting on the origins of his specific homosexual fetishes, such as his attraction to men’s blood and gore—and especially their armpits.

Story of the Eye by Georges Bataille
The Marquis de Sade has nothing on Bataille; this book is scandalous even for our so-called Rule 34 society. “That was the period when Simone developed a mania for breaking eggs with her ass,” the protagonist recalls fondly of his first love. The final scene involves the lasciviously homicidal Simone luring a priest into a decadent violation of his celibacy vows. “His body erect, and yelling like a pig being slaughtered, he spurted his come on the host in the ciborium, which Simone held in front of him while jerking him off.” But you’d have to be a fool to brush aside this little masterpiece as vintage pornography; psychoanalysts have long considered it a rare glimpse at the hidden carnal spirit of man. The surrealistic writing is exquisite but the tone is bleak and the shame palpable, so be prepared to be mildly traumatized.

The Balcony by Jean Genet
I’ve been crazy about Genet ever since reading Jean-Paul Sartre’s existential homage Saint Genet (a beatifying tome about a living writer that many critics say destroyed Genet’s creative genius) and have devoured most of his works. But I’m embarrassed to say that it’s only this year that I got around to reading one of his most famous plays, The Balcony, which centers on the affairs of a brothel catering to a colorful array of government officials in a town on the brink of war. Run by a philosophically astute madam named Irma, the whorehouse serves as a protective womb in which people are free to nourish their true libidinal selves, selves that must be drained regularly for their public personas to go on with the business of being “normal” people. “When it’s over, their minds are clear,” reflects Irma after these men visit her establishment. “I can tell from their eyes. Suddenly they understand mathematics. They love their children and their country.” With his singular grasp on the many unspoken links between human sexuality, politics, and hypocrisy, The Balcony is Genet at his finest.

The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter
Carter’s prose, most of which trades in the intense psychosexual conflicts inherent to clever women’s relation to ravening men, is both irreverent and spectacularly clear. She draws on the classic feminist themes of male objectification, but she does it so fluidly and convincingly that her fiction exposes the undeniably sordid, dehumanizing blackness that can fuel male lust for mindless flesh. In making male readers—at least, this male reader—feel so vividly like the woman in her stories, Carter has no need to appeal to the sort of bristling outrage that so often undermines feminist writings. I also took considerable pleasure in knowing that, while most people this year were getting the sanitized Dreamworks’ version of that charismatic pussy, I was privileged enough to have stumbled onto Carter’s own deliciously risqué take on Puss in Boots.

Vita Sexualis by Ogai Mori
Another Japanese classic, and one handpicked for censor by Japan’s vice minister of war, is Mori’s portrayal of a passionless, “abnormally frigid” philosophy professor in Japan named Mr. Kanai. Sensing that most other people are “erotomaniacs” without any useful insight into the origins or causes of their overly excitable sexual natures, the professor seeks to understand what the fuss is all about. Vita Sexualis is so effective because the protagonist is relentlessly logical and the narrative voided of even the slightest emotional charge. “Mr. Kanai had never carefully thought about the way his sexual desires had germinated or the way they had developed,” Mori explains matter-of-factly. “Might he not probe these desires and write about them?” In examining, without apology or hesitation, those parts of himself that most people refuse to acknowledge exist, we’re all the better for Kanai’s soberly erotic self-analysis.

All Authors’ and Editors’ Favorite Reads of 2011

The Introduction

Héctor Tobar, now a weekly columnist for the Los Angeles Times, is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and a novelist. He is the author of Translation Nation, The Tattooed Soldier, and most recently, The Barbarian Nurseries. The son of Guatemalan immigrants, he is a native of Los Angeles, where he lives with his wife and three children.

I loved the drama, the scope and the ideas in Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve, about the renaissance book-hunter whose discovery of an ancient poem helped kick off the Enlightenment. Oscar Hijuelos’s memoir, Thoughts Without Cigarettes, appealed to me for its portrait of mid-century New York—and of the private struggles and family stories that helped set off the late-century boom in Latino literature in the United States. In fiction, there was so much tenderness and wisdom in Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending. Also, 2011 was the year I caught up with and rediscovered a couple of gems from the recent past: W. G. Sebald’s painful, Proustian epic Austerlitz, and the canonical stories in Jorge Luis Borges’s Collected Fictions, wonderfully translated by Andrew Hurley.

All Authors’ and Editors’ Favorite Reads of 2011

The Introduction

Mitzi Angel is the publisher of Faber and Faber.

The House in Paris by Elizabeth Bowen

The Stories of John Cheever by John Cheever

Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner

Patriotic Gore by Edmund Wilson

All Authors’ and Editors’ Favorite Reads of 2011

The Introduction

Amy Waldman was co-chief of the South Asia bureau of The New York Times. Her fiction has appeared in The Atlantic and the Boston Review and is anthologized in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2010. She lives with her family in Brooklyn. The Submission, her first novel, was published in August by FSG. You can read her reading picks elsewhere at The Millions and Salon and follow her on Twitter @AmyWaldman.

Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
Jude the Obscure will stay with me longer than any book I read this year. Its opening scenes, in which the poor country boy becomes obsessed with the fictional city of Christminster, shimmering in the distance, promising the elevations of knowledge, are as engraved in my mind as the harrowing final ones. Tragedy is what the reader sees waiting in the distance for Jude, yet the unpredictability of the route there makes the novel compelling. The plot is full, especially near the end, of excessive twists, absurd coincidences, and an occasional staginess. It doesn’t matter. Jude is a page-turner that made me think harder about the conventions of marriage, the meaning of morality, and the permutations of faith than any recent contemporary novel. It’s a story—a fable, almost—of passion and ideas, and both figure in the ill-fated relationship between the cousins Jude and Sue. Jude is doomed as much by his best qualities—his desire to find something admirable (a university, a woman) to anchor himself to; his noble aspirations, so discordant with his class; his refusal to conform; an overly tender heart—as by his ostensible worst, said to be his love of drink and women. Sue, mystifying, mercurial, and modern until she isn’t, manages to be convincing as both Jude’s soul mate and his ruin. It’s awe-inspiring to think how bold Thomas Hardy was for his time.

Say Her Name by Francisco Goldman
In constructing a “novel”—mostly memoir—about the death, in a freak body-surfing accident, of his young wife, Goldman (who is a friend) writes in a style that’s both jagged and rich, tumbling from his mournful present to his past with Aura to her life before him, in a manner that somehow reminded me of the Internet—link-link-link, until you’re so deep in his chasm of grief you can’t climb out. He re-creates his wife as she was, and creates her as he would have us see her. Everything—from her melancholy childhood to his own lifetime of loneliness to ominous portents recognized only in hindsight—make her death seem as inevitable as it was shocking.

The Convert by Deborah Baker
A strange, almost surreal, but fascinating book—one writer’s attempt to understand the tension between Islam and the West through a biography of a subject who proves elusive and maddening, not least because she’s not, as Baker initially thought, dead. Maryam Jameelah, raised Jewish in a New York suburb, migrated to Pakistan as the prized convert and protégée of the influential fundamentalist Mawlana Mawdudi. He discovered—much as Baker later did—that Jameelah was not just a misfit, but likely schizophrenic too. That makes the book less the examination of the magnetism and danger of extremist Islam that Baker set out to write than a heart-rending portrayal of mental illness, from the inside; of shabby exile; and of Baker’s own fumbling efforts to grapple with September 11.

The Maid: A Novel of Joan of Arc by Kimberly Cutter
For some reason Baker’s book keeps resonating in strange ways with a novel I read this year, The Maid, also by a friend, Kimberly Cutter. It’s a fictionalized telling of the life of Joan of Arc—full of gripping war scenes, and a great sense of the addictive power of battle. It would seem to have little in common with a book about a twentieth century convert to Islam—and yet the religious fervor of the two women, and the blurry line between that fervor and mental illness, have kept them clanging against each another in my head.

The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad
A political thriller; a highly dysfunctional family drama; a savvy précis of Europe’s frustration at England’s hospitality to ideologues (much as it is now criticized for being too welcoming to Islamists.) The vividness of the anarchists. The effectiveness of the melodrama. The placid way Conrad uses Verloc’s amiable indolence to camouflage his monstrosity. And Conrad’s writing.

Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie: A Tale of Love and Fallout by Lauren Redniss
I have come late in life to graphic novels; this one is stunning. With gorgeous illustrations, Redniss cuts between the lives of Marie and Pierre Curie, scraps of history and reporting about nuclear power and waste, testimonies from atomic bomb survivors, and more.

Open City by Teju Cole
Beautiful, unusual, elliptical.

Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage: Stories by Alice Munro
Among Munro’s many, many gifts, I was fascinated by the way the ends of her stories always manage to simultaneously wrap things up and further unravel them.

All Authors’ and Editors’ Favorite Reads of 2011

The Introduction

Justin Taylor is the author of The Gospel of Anarchy and Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever. Check him out at http://www.justindtaylor.net

These next books are mostly titles published this year, but also a few things that I finally got around to.

The Bigger World by Noelle Kocot
A wonderful, bizarre, epiphanic collection. Each poem is a little blast of well-bent wisdom—and fun, too! Some good points of comparison from the fiction world might be Lydia Davis, Diane Williams, and Lou Beach, but really it’s its own awesome thing.

Nobody Ever Gets Lost by Jess Row
A finely wrought collection of short stories linked by theme and moment rather than by character or place. Enormous empathy and scope. I praised it to the skies in Bookforum: http://bookforum.com/review/8374.

And the Heart Says Whatever by Emily Gould
I liked the episodic structure and I loved the voice—not overly self-assured, not affectedly blasé, but alert from within a calm. It reads like a nonfiction novel (maybe a novel-in-stories). I thought of Tao Lin’s Shoplifting from American Apparel, Eileen Myles’s Inferno, Barry Hannah’s Boomerang.

The Marbled Swarm by Dennis Cooper
Finally, a new Dennis Cooper novel! Just gonna quote my own blurb here, because I meant it when I said it: “The Marbled Swarm is a mind-bending masterpiece from one of my all-time favorite writers. It is vivid, slippery, ferocious, and rich with secrets. Nobody else could have written this novel and nothing else like it exists.”

Humboldt’s Gift, Herzog, and Collected Stories by Saul Bellow
This was my year for discovering Bellow. I mean yes, I knew about him before, but this was the year I really got him—and then couldn’t get enough of him. Such intelligence! Such style! Such vitality! Such heart!

Ten More:

The Shadow of a Great Rock by Harold Bloom

The Professor and Other Writings by Terry Castle

The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories by Don DeLillo

Disaster Was My God by Bruce Duffy

Train Dreams by Denis Johnson

Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner

Coeur de Lion by Ariana Reines

Jeremy Schmall and the Cult of Comfort by Jeremy Schmall

You Think That’s Bad by Jim Shepard

The Beginners by Rebecca Wolff

All Authors’ and Editors’ Favorite Reads of 2011

The Introduction

Amelia Gray grew up in Tucson, Arizona. Her first collection of stories, AM/PM, was published in 2009. Her second collection, Museum of the Weird, was awarded the Ronald Sukenick/American Book Review Innovative Fiction Prize. She lives in Los Angeles. THREATS (FSG, March 2012) is her first novel.

I’m going to do this the selfish way and write about books I discovered this year, and so they might as well have been published in 2011 because that’s when I found them and I’m the boss, applesauce.

Knockemstiff by Donald Ray Pollock
“My father showed me how to hurt a man one August night at the Torch Drive-in when I was seven years old.”

The stories in this collection were sickening, hilarious, and riveting throughout. Where else on your bookshelf are you going to find a man who eats a whole chicken raw, guts and all, and tells the story while smoking a block of mildewed Lebanese hash? This is the kind of collection that folks mimic when they’re looking for an authentic voice.

If ’n Oof by Brian Chippendale
“HAH! I would be Lost without you dear Water!”

I like to read a handful of graphic novels every year. It tickles a different part of the brain and is a good palate cleanser to get back to writing, particularly after some of the amazing voice-driven books on this list. This one is a brick of a book, a collection of intertwined travels featuring the eponymous main characters. It’s sweet and terrifying, like a candy apple full of rat poison.

Paris Trance: A Romance by Geoff Dyer
“Luke arrived in Paris at one of the worst possible times, in mid-July, when the city was preparing to close down for August.”

Dyer makes a little Fitzgerald reference at the opening of this book and I think Gatsby is an apt comparison for the wandering tone of friends and lovers in Paris. This one’s great for its unique shifting point of view that made me think about how to control a narrator’s voice.

The Weather Stations by Ryan Call
“Finally the weather withdrew its hostile presence, and we emerged from the damp caves and tunnels of our age of refuge to celebrate the miracle above our heads.”

Quiet and restrained and very pretty, but dangerous. I think of this one as a fine tablecloth covering an anthill. Call’s prose is spot-on in this indie release from Caketrain. He’s one to watch, and this collection is one to read, savor, and gift to your coolest friend.

Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster by Svetlana Alexievich, translated by Keith Gessen
“I don’t know what I should talk about—about death or about love? Or are they the same? Which one should I talk about?”

A devastating book. I group this one with Cormac McCarthy’s The Road on the short-list of Books That Ruined Me for a Number of Months. The fact that this one is a personal oral history (translated beautifully by Gessen) gives it even more of a gut-punch. This book gut-punches you in the back alley behind an industrial history museum.

Ghosts by César Aira, translated by Chris Andrews
“Perched on their high heels, the ladies were climbing the dusty stairs scattered with pieces of rubble; since the banisters had not yet been fitted, they had to be especially careful.”

The passage above captures how I felt about this whole short book—precarious, balanced on the edge of a precipice. This is a fine-tuned novella that follows a handful of families into their new apartment building as they interact casually with the ghosts who already live there.

The Literary Conference by César Aira, translated by Katherine Silver
“It doesn’t matter what you know about a famous object—being in its presence is altogether a different story.”

A few genre-mixers on my list this year! Here’s another one, mixing a healthy dose of sci-fi into the literary novella. This is the funnier companion to Ghosts (though Ghosts has some funny bits too). Makes me think of Don Quixote as a matter modulator. Seriously though, what do I need to do to make you start your Aira collection? Do I need to do a backflip? Because that will kill me, friend.

New York Tyrant 8 (Vol. 3, No. 2), Various
“He got out and watched as she drove away. Then he went inside the house and put his hands to his face.”

Too much good stuff to detail from this great issue of NYT. (The above is from Brandon Hobson’s “Downtown,” maybe my favorite in the issue.) Excellent work also from Luke Goebel, Ken Baumann, Czar Gutierrez, Noy Holland, Sean Kilpatrick, and more.

All Authors’ and Editors’ Favorite Reads of 2011

The Introduction

Daniel Orozco’s stories have appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Mystery Stories, The Best American Essays, and the Pushcart Prize anthology, as well as in publications such as Harper’s Magazine, Zoetrope: All-Story, McSweeney’s, Ecotone, and StoryQuarterly. He was awarded a 2006 NEA Fellowship in fiction and was a finalist for a 2006 National Magazine Award in fiction. A former Stegner Fellow and Jones Lecturer at Stanford, he teaches creative writing at the University of Idaho. His collection Orientation and Other Stories was published by Faber and Faber in May 2011.

The Pugilist at Rest and Sonny Liston Was a Friend of Mine by Thom Jones
I needed a new story collection for a creative writing class I teach, and at the last minute settled on Thom Jones. I’d read a story or two from The Pugilist at Rest years ago and remembered being frankly not crazy about that hyperkinetic voice, and so I thought a “problematic” text would be fruitful for students. Revisiting Jones was a revelation. These narrators talk and think too much all right, and it’s all in service to the Struggle—to understand, to live right in the world. They are profane and funny, and they often fail spectacularly, and their efforts are very sad and very affecting. “I Want to Live!” is one of the most wrenching and honest stories I’ve ever read. Post-Pugilist, I was . . . well, jonesing for more Jones, and so I picked up Sonny Liston. A tour de force is literally a “feat of strength” and connotes an impressive achievement that’s pulled off only once. Yet Jones kind of tour de forces again and again.

Unpacking the Boxes by Donald Hall
This Is Not the Ivy League by Mary Clearman Blew
Hall reflects on his writerly life with a warmth and affection that is nonetheless elegiac. Blew’s retrospection is much cooler, hard-edged, and at times regretful. I don’t read much memoir and I’ve always been leery of memoirs by writers looking back on how they became writers—I mean, who cares, right? I accidentally read these two books back to back, and . . . well, more revelation! These memoirs are writers not just transcribing what they remember—my idiot definition of “memoir”—but contending with it on the page. The Struggle, once again!

All Authors’ and Editors’ Favorite Reads of 2011

The Introduction