Gary Shteyngart—novelist, Twitterer, and illiteracy advocate—reads “What, of This Goldfish, Would You Wish?” from Keret’s collection Suddenly, A Knock on The Door. Should you find yourself inspired by Keret’s words (or, for that matter, Shteyngart’s voice), I recommend Something Out of Something, our design contest with BOMB Magazine.

See Also:

“Creative Writing,” The New Yorker, Jan. 2nd, 2012

Girl Scouts are inexhaustible creatures, and so it shouldn’t have surprised me to find precisely the advice I needed today in my friend Rory Dawn’s tired old copy of the Girl Scout Handbook. An entire section detailing “How to Introduce Your Friends” waved at me from the Handbook’s index, and I breathed a sigh of relief.

Friend, I’d like you to meet someone.

“That’s very forward,” you might think, “we’ve only just met. I don’t even know how to pronounce your name!” And to yourself, because you are invariably polite, “What is a Tupelo?”

But we are now acquainted, via our mutual friends and hosts, Farrar, Straus and Giroux. You’ve caught me wondering where I’m meant to deposit the sword-handled toothpicks at the hors d’oeuvres table at this monthly cocktail party that is the Work in Progress. I’ve admired your wrinkle-free ease in conversation and put down my growing collection of petite plastic swords to shake your hand. We’ve shared the awkward “let’s be alone at the party together” moment that has birthed many a friendship, and in that spirit, I’d like to introduce you to Rory Dawn.

Rory Dawn Hendrix is a young girl growing up on the Calle, a desert town outside of Reno where the main drag runs in a circle and church services are performed at the local bar. Rory’s lonely but literate and finds her best company in books, chief among them an old copy of the Girl Scout Handbook.

It might be surprising that the Scouts would include the lifesaving “How to Introduce Your Friends” section under the broader category of “Homemaking,” or that its sister sections are “Table Manners” and “Wrapping Packages.” In this instance, it makes perfect sense because Rory Dawn is making her new home with you.

Rory knows the value of companionship stumbled on between pages, and she’ll be the first to tell you that these surprise companions need us, too. Without us, Heidi’s skylight opens to the starless dark of a book’s closed covers, Milo never meets Tock in that tricky land Beyond Expectations, and Charlie’s genius never blooms and withers alongside Algernon’s. Without the Girl Scout Handbook, Rory’s aspirations, tangled as they might become later with the Scouts’ love of domestication, echo in the empty library. Without your company, Rory remains alone in that Troop of One she swears her allegiance to, her scarred salute lost in a mirror flat as a page.

The Scouts advise me to introduce people using various methods, some of which I’ve dispensed with here (younger to older, for example; male to female) and some of which I’ve followed (getting me that much closer to earning the highly coveted Homemaker Patch). These include adding a bit of information with the introduction, speaking the name clearly, and I hope you can hear the “slightly rising inflection” the Scouts suggest I employ when I say, “May I present, Rory Dawn Hendrix. She’d love for you to join her Troop of One.”

Read an excerpt from Girlchild on Scribd.

See Also:
Visit Tupelo Hassman on Facebook

You have a tremendous academic record and this is something of a departure from your studies. How and why did you come to write this novel?

When I was in the early stages of writing Sound (2005 to 2008), I was bouncing around a lot, basically moving from one school and one academic program to the next. I was working very hard trying to “find” something (I’m still not quite sure what) and learning a lot, but I still felt like I was missing something (again, I’m not sure exactly what). At the time—and I still think this is true—fiction seemed like a more versatile, and maybe more productive, way to explore ideas that my academic work kept kicking up but that academic methods didn’t seem flexible enough to address. These were all questions of experience, I guess: what it feels like to be human, how our minds work, how we relate to other people, what it’s like to be answer-oriented in a world that’s chaotic and doesn’t yield answers all that readily.

I’m pretty convinced that there are about as many ways of writing and thinking about things as there are things to think and write about; fiction just seems to give me another way of thinking and writing. It’s not the ultimate way; it’s just one. But it can help me get closer to things that otherwise would be totally beyond my reach. I’m still not always able to grab these things, but I can get closer.

Even if fiction is an alternative to academic approaches to questions, it would have been hard for me to come up with the ideas for Sound if I hadn’t studied the pragmatists or the Frankfurt School, or if I’d never read W. E. B. DuBois’s Souls of Black Folk or Alasdair Gray’s 1982, Janine, or if I’d never been asked to do transect walks of city neighborhoods. All of those things have influenced what I think it is important to talk about and how I think we can talk about it: you are, in no small part, what you read and study and write about. So while Sound might be different in mode from a lot of the other things I’ve done in the past, it’s rooted in all those things, too.

The story has a unique design. Why did you write the book in that style?

Initially, the form just seemed like an interesting idea. I’d been rushing through a stationery store, trying to pick up a new notebook for course notes right before class, when I saw a small composer’s notebook filled with blank sheets of staff paper. It looked cool, so I bought it and tucked it away. I then went to class—a lecture course on postmodern theory and literature, somewhat ironically—and started taking notes. But somewhere in the middle of the lecture, the basic idea—using a musical form to illustrate things happening simultaneously—started spooling out in the back of my head. After that morning, I was hooked.

The form has its obvious limits—and others I’m sure I don’t understand right now—but it’s helped me get closer to things I like to see fiction do and would like to see fiction do more of: delve into the nitty-gritty of how we put thoughts together; square up to the fact that we frequently think multiple, contradictory things at once; capture more of the liveliness and volume of life; build out the expressive potential of form. Plus, I’m obsessed with music, so anything that helps draw music and writing together is something I’m down for.

Also, I’d be remiss if I didn’t note that the final product you’re reading isn’t something that sprang completely from my own head. The manuscript for Sound was written in landscape in an old version of Microsoft Word and it wasn’t particularly pretty (to put it nicely). I had abstract ideas for how the finished version should look, but Jeff Clark from Quemadura was the one who figured out how make the ratty manuscript into a real book—which, if you’ve seen the manuscript, was not an easy task (trust me on this one). Jeff, for his part, would probably credit Wu-Tang’s 36 Chambers and Avital Ronell’s The Telephone Book for inspiration, but that’s just hearsay.

Since you brought up music, how did that shape the book?

Okay, the first thing you need to know about me is that I listen to music constantly. Mainly hip-hop and soul, although my listening has spread out and gotten more catholic over time. Music’s been fundamental to how I think about and experience things, so of course it’s going to bleed heavily into my writing.

While I was working on Sound, I envisioned it as a kind of hip-hop novel. I say “hip-hop” not in the sense that the book was going to try to translate stories from hip-hop songs into fiction, or that it was going to present a story through rhyme, but rather that it was going to take its formal cues from hip-hop compositional approaches: I wanted the book to have layers; I wanted those layers to be bassed-up, to have a lot activity beneath the vocal surface that would punch through that surface; I wanted to mix harmony and dissonance; I wanted it to have flow; and I wanted it to loop, basically taking earlier parts of itself, remixing them, and spitting them out again. That’s what the producers I admire—RZA, Premier, Pete Rock, J Dilla—do and what makes their music so powerful to me. I think you can see those ideas not just in the “multitracking” (the portions of layered dialogue, thought, and sound that are written on the gray-lined sections of the book) or in the lyric samples but also in the mix of multitracking and more standard prose passages, as well as in the way that the plot plays out. You can be the judge of whether I succeeded in doing that, but that was one of the big ideas behind the book.

As I built the book out, I also became interested in music notation more generally as a kind of form. Cambridge has a great music library, and that’s where I was able to see Krzysztof Penderecki’s and Earle Brown’s work for the first time. That’s also where I dredged up John Cage’s Notations, which is a really interesting collection of unconventional compositions he collected in the 1960s from composer friends of his. All those things influenced my understanding of how I could deploy words on the page.

The location is so much a part of Sound. Would you consider the Jersey Shore another character?

Initially at least, I think the attention to setting in the proto-versions of Sound was prompted by homesickness. Although I got the formal idea for Sound while I was still in college in the U.S., I started developing the story itself while I was living in the U.K. I enjoyed my time there, and the time I spent traveling other places, but there was something comforting about going back to my apartment at night and trying to write about home. Over time, as I understood better where the story needed to go, it seemed only right to give the Shore itself more of a role: it grows and changes over the course of the story, looping back through its past in a lot of the same ways that Cincy picks through his childhood, shambling forward in the same ways he does, with all that baggage and without much of a sense of where it’s headed. The Shore, in the book, is also something I created rather than found, strictly speaking. There isn’t a city exactly like the one in Sound at the Shore; it’s a geographic and historical remix of a lot of different places that either exist today or did exist within the last hundred or hundred and fifty years.

Obligated to ask—what do you think of the show?

I won’t lie—those establishing shots of Seaside Heights give me a thrill every time I watch Jersey Shore. That’s my boardwalk! And the show can have its moments, whether you’re ironically into it or genuinely into it (or both). But I lament the really narrow view of the Jersey Shore you get from watching the show: things are simultaneously more complicated and more beautiful down there than the show lets on. And, at the risk of coming off like a real homey, I’d say the Shore is one of the more interesting parts of the country (I mean, it’s not like I’ve traveled all over the country, but I’ve been places and seen things): there’s a mix of old small cities, capital S suburbs, farms, and seashore resorts, great old architecture, and lots of different kinds of people. It’s not New York City, but I think we should be thankful for that. (Sorry, that’s my obligatory shot at New York. It’s part of the Jersey Code.)

What have you been listening to recently?

My listening’s been all over the place recently, but here’s a sample of songs (new and old) that have been crowding onto my playlists:

Elzhi, “Detroit State of Mind” (from the Elmatic mixtape): It’s really hard to improve on Nas’s “N.Y. State of Mind,” but Elzhi came pretty close. It probably helps that he’s a total machine: his rhyme patterns are (and have long been) about as complex as they can get while still having flow. He also manages to pack a ton of descriptive detail into just a few bars (“Many are stressed / Off the Henny or stress / Maybe b’cause the city’s built above where Indians rest / In peace / Police found deceased / It’s hair-raising like Kelis / D-boys, high and workin’ their fleece / Or bubble geese.”)

Gravediggaz, “Nowhere to Run, Nowhere to Hide” (from 6 Feet Deep): This popped up on my iPod for a few days while I was walking across the New Haven Green. I couldn’t believe I’d completely forgotten about it. The energy the MCs bring to this track is incredible; it’s like the exact opposite of the tranq’d-out styles that seem to have become more popular over the past few years and even fresher for it.

Battles, “Africastle”: I’m a sucker for syncretic music like this, stuff that doesn’t have one clear stylistic touchstone and just jumps out of the speakers with tons of ideas and styles. This album has been kind of hard for me to process, but it’s been fun to tackle (to the extent you can do that with your ears).

Harold Melvin and The Blue Notes, “You Know How to Make Me Feel So Good” (featuring Sharon Paige): There are few things better on a cold winter day than some airy, expansive, beautiful classic soul. Do yourself a favor and just listen. You can thank me later.

Curren$y X Alchemist, “Blood Sweat and Gears” (featuring Fiend, from the Covert Coup mixtape): Over the past two years or so, I’ve had some album or mixtape by Curren$y on repeat. Every time I think he’d benefit from some time off, he drops a project like Covert Coup that’s basically an end-to-end five-star album. Alchemist’s darker, knottier production seemed to bring out a little more aggression than I’m used to hearing from Curren$y. Meanwhile, Fiend stepped up and dropped a bluesy, morose verse that’s been stuck in my head for months.

See Also:

A Spotify playist of the music mentioned above, plus tracks by J Dilla, Gang Starr, and more.

As always, three teams of three will compete for glory and prizes in a very familiar game show setting. Therein we’ll test everyone’s knowledge of literature and pop culture; even audience members will have the chance to win prizes.

If you’d like to compete, bring two friends, give your team a name, and drop it in the hat at the beginning of the night. We’ll select three teams at random. Everyone else can sit back, heckle, and enjoy the wine. Competing teams may also enjoy the wine.

Hosted by Ryan Chapman

FSG’s Work in Progress presents Nerd Jeopardy
McNally Jackson | 52 Prince St, NYC
Wednesday, Jan. 18th, 7pm

Facebook Event Details (including clues from the last Nerd Jeopardy)

• “King of the Hyperpolyglots,” The Morning News
• “Why Authors Tweet,” The New York Times Book Review
• “Why Does Art Have to Be Mainstream to Be Significant? An Interview with Jonathan Galassi,” The Economist‘s Prospero Blog
• “The Most Anticipated Books of 2012,” The Millions
• “Flavorpill’s Most Anticipated Books of 2012,” Flavorpill
  
• “Concept Art from the Film Adaptation of Cloud Atlas,” io9
• “The Channeling of the Novel,” The New York Times Book Review
  

• “Late Bloomers” by Alina Simone, in BOMB
• “In Gold We Trust” by Wells Tower, in GQ
• “Creative Writing” by Etgar Keret, in The New Yorker

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:

Mitzi Angel

Jesse Bering

David Bezmozgis

Frank Bill

Daniel Chamovitz

Ryan Chapman

Jesse Coleman

Anthony Giardina

Amelia Gray

Sheila Heti

Paul La Farge

David Levithan

Bill Loehfelm

Sean McDonald

Andrés Neuman

Daniel Orozco

James Renner

Caleb Scharf

Justin Taylor

Christopher Tilghman

Héctor Tobar

Ellen Ullman

Amy Waldman

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.

All Authors’ and Editors’ Favorite Reads of 2011

The Introduction

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.

For Most Perplexing Novel of 2011, the award goes to Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84, especially the last third, when all the main characters are sitting in their rooms, waiting for something to happen. The award for Hardest Novel to Put Down goes to Karl Marlantes’s Matterhorn, which, at 575 big pages, is also hard to pick up. The award for Best Sex Scene Involving a Teenager goes to Rebecca Wolff for The Beginners, which has changed the way I think about New England. Now I’m thinking, yikes. The award for Most Thinking in the Fewest Pages goes to Anselm Berrigan for Notes from Irrelevance, which is about everything I know and many things I don’t. And finally, the award for Most Shocking Rhythm Change near the End of a Long Novel goes to Marcel Proust for Le Côté de Guermantes, in which the narrator, having done more or less nothing for many hundreds of pages, finally, in a fit of rage, stomps on the Baron de Charlus’s hat.

All Authors’ and Editors’ Favorite Reads of 2011

The Introduction

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.

The other book I liked a great deal this year was Joshua Rubenstein’s smart and concise biography Leon Trotsky. Trotsky remains a compelling and romantic figure. Rubenstein does a fantastic job of exploring the contradictions that accounted for the swiftness of the man’s rise and fall.

All Authors’ and Editors’ Favorite Reads of 2011

The Introduction

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.

Say Her Name by Francisco Goldman
I tried to break my list into fiction and nonfiction but this book blew that up. It seems like a book that should be unbearably sad, and it sort of is—a novel closely based on the death of the author’s young wife. I can’t imagine the pain of writing the book, but it’s shot through with humor and joy and obvious love, and ultimately makes something intensely beautiful and vibrant out of a devastating accident.

That Is All by John Hodgman
In the fiction/nonfiction breakdown, this was going to go under “other.” And maybe it’s a little shady for me to include this because I worked with John on earlier books—but not this one, so I can be completely objective. And I do firmly believe that anytime anyone completes a three-volume compendium of Complete World Knowledge, it’s an achievement we should all take a moment to recognize. But this is more than just any old conclusion to Complete World Knowledge: It’s brilliant (and brilliantly designed, inside and out, by Sam Potts) in the way of one of those impossible wooden puzzles or mind-twisting Escher drawings—there’s no way to satisfyingly finish this project, and yet somehow Hodgman pulls it off. It’s weirdly, unexpectedly heartbreaking to witness Hodgman (author, narrator, and protagonist), now morphed into a mustachioed Deranged Millionaire, spending much of this final volume contemplating the imminent apocalypse. And—assuming Hodgman’s joking—it’s all unfailingly hilarious, funnier page by page until it’s over.

All Authors’ and Editors’ Favorite Reads of 2011

The Introduction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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