Joshua Ferris’ debut novel, Then We Came to the End – one of The Millions’ Most Anticipated Books of 2007 – was a finalist for this year’s National Book Award. It’s due out in paperback this spring. Mr. Ferris’ shorter fiction has appeared in the Best New American Voices series and the New Stories from the South series, and in The Iowa Review and Prairie Schooner. He lives in Brooklyn.
The Ambassadors by Henry James is every bit as melancholy and masterful as it is exasperating and windy. You need one determined machete to make it through and at times the style is so overwrought and unnecessarily filigreed that I nearly gave up. But James is fiction’s paradigm for the satisfaction of fighting the good fight, as by the end of The Ambassadors the entire world has been hauled into that thicket. I chose The Ambassadors as opposed to the other James I read this year because its subject is one of my favorites: life not lived to its fullest, squandered life, the search for how best to live. I also read Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays for the first time, a gift from my friend Ravi, for which I’ll always been thankful. And Lost in the City by Edward P. Jones, the collection that includes “An Orange Line Train to Ballston,” a story as deeply affecting as any I’ve encountered.
