Mark Binelli is the author of Sacco and Vanzetti Must Die! and a contributing editor at Rolling Stone. He lives in New York and is currently working on a second novel.
I didn’t read so many new books this year, but three I loved were Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Senselessness (probably my favorite final sentence of the year), Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland (expected to hate it but all of the effusive praise totally deserved) and Liao Yiwu’s The Corpse Walker (deranged, Terkel-esque Q&A’s with the bottom rungs of Chinese society.)
New (to me), and highly recommendable: Geoff Dyer’s self-described “method biography” of D.H. Lawrence, Out of Sheer Rage, which I loved despite having never read any Lawrence aside from a couple of short stories; James Merrill’s Divine Comedies, specifically the long poem “The Book of Ephraim,” which JM claimed to have written with the use of a ouija board (!); Lydia Davis’ great first collection, Break It Down; and William Gass’ Omensetter’s Luck, a perfect novel, and the best thing I’ve read in a very long time.
