The first half of 2013 delighted us with new books by the likes of
George Saunders,
Karen Russell, and
Colum McCann, among many others. And if the last six months had many delights on offer for book lovers, the second half of the year can only be described as an invitation to gluttony. In the next six months, you'll see new books by
Jhumpa Lahiri, Margaret Atwood, Donna Tartt, Marisha Pessl, Norman Rush, Jonathan Lethem, and none other than
Thomas Pynchon. And beyond those headliners there are many other tantalizing titles in the wings, including some from overseas and others from intriguing newcomers.
The list that follows isn’t exhaustive – no book preview could be – but, at 9,000 words strong and encompassing 86 titles, this is the only second-half 2013 book preview you will ever need. Scroll down and get started.
July:
Visitation Street by
Ivy Pochoda: Crime writer
Dennis Lehane chose Pochoda’s lyrical and atmospheric second novel for his eponymous imprint at Ecco/Harper, calling it “gritty and magical.” Pitched as a literary thriller about the diverse inhabitants of Red Hook, Brooklyn,
Visitation Street has already received starred reviews from
Publisher’s Weekly,
Kirkus Reviews, and
Library Journal.
Lionel Shriver says, “I loved it,” and
Deborah Harkness calls it “marvelous.” (Edan)
Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish by
David Rakoff: Rakoff was the author of three books of essays, the winner of the Thurber Prize for American Humor, and a beloved regular on
This American Life who died last year shortly after finishing this book. A novel written entirely in verse (a form in which he was masterful, as evidenced
here), its characters range across the 20th century, each connected to the next by an act of generosity or cruelty. (Janet)
The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. by
Adelle Waldman: Waldman recently
weighed in for us on the centuries-old Richardson vs. Fielding debate. Now, in her first novel, she expertly plays the former's psychological penetration off the latter's civic vision. The titular Nathaniel, one of Brooklyn's sad young literary men, seeks to navigate between his public ambitions and his private compulsions in a series of romantic encounters. Those without 718 area codes shouldn't let the milieu scare them off; questions of whether Nate can heed the difficult imperatives of the conscience—and of how Waldman will pull off a whole book from the man's point of view—keep the pages turning, while generating volumes of quotable insight, in the manner of
The Marriage Plot. (Garth)
Fin & Lady by
Cathleen Schine: A country mouse moves to the city in Cathleen Schine’s ninth novel. The mouse is Fin, an orphaned eleven-year old boy, and the city is Greenwich Village in the 1960s. Under the guardianship of his glamorous half-sister, Lady, Fin gets to know both the city and his wild sister, and encounters situations that are a far cry from his Connecticut dairy farm upbringing. As with many of Schine’s previous novels,
Fin & Lady explores changing definitions of family. (Hannah)
My Education by
Susan Choi: Reflect upon your sordid graduate school days with a novel of the perverse master-student relationship and adulterous sex triangle. Professor Brodeur is evidently the kind of man whose name is scrawled on restroom walls by vengeful English majors—rather than end up in the sack with him, Choi’s protagonist Regina instead starts up an affair with his wife. Later in the novel and in time, Regina reflects on this period in her life and the changes wrought by the intervening 15 years. Choi was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for her second novel,
American Woman. (Lydia)
Five Star Billionaire by
Tash Aw: The third novel from the winner of the 2005 Whitbread First Novel Award follows the lives and business ventures of five characters in Shanghai, each representing various—and at times dichotomous—social strata. There’s Phoebe, the poor and unsophisticated migrant worker from Malaysia; and there’s Yinghui, the rich and ambitious businesswoman. There’s Gary, the waylaid pop star; and there’s Justin, the scion of a wealthy real estate family. Lastly there’s Walter, the eponymous billionaire, who meddles behind the scenes with the lives of almost everybody. Altogether, their multi-layered, intersecting lives contribute to make “Shanghai itself [into] the book’s real main character,”
writes Jill Baker in the
Asian Review of Books. It’s a city “luring in people hoping for a second chance or … any chance at all.” (Nick)
Lotería by
Mario Alberto Zambrano: It’s a rare first novel that can appeal to partisans of both
S.E. Hinton and
Julio Cortázar, but
Lotería does just that. The story 11-year-old Luz Maria Castillo begins telling us from her room in a state institution is deceptively plainspoken: Here’s how I got here. But as the story proceeds in fragments, keyed not to chronology but to a deck of cards from
Lotería (a kind of Mexican bingo), things get shiftier. Color reproductions of the cards introduce each chapter, making the book, if not exactly
Kindle-proof, then at least uncommonly handsome. (Garth)
The Unknowns by
Gabriel Roth: Gabriel Roth’s debut novel follows Eric Muller from his lonely high school days as a computer geek to his millionaire success in Silicon Valley as a computer geek. Slightly disoriented by his newfound abilities to make money and bed women, Muller wryly observes his life as if he is that same awkward teenager trapped in a dream life. When he falls in love with Maya, a beautiful woman with a mysterious past, he must choose between the desire to emotionally (and literally) hack into it, or to trust his good fortune. (Janet)
The Hare by
César Aira: A recent
bit of contrarianism in
The New Republic blamed the exhaustive posthumous marketing of
Roberto Bolaño for crowding other Latin American writers out of the U.S. marketplace. If anything, it seems to me, it’s the opposite: the success of
The Savage Detectives helped publishers realize there was a market for
Daniel Sada, Horacio Castellanos Moya, and the fascinating Argentine
César Aira. The past few years have seen seven of Aira’s many novels translated into English. Some of them, like
Ghosts, are transcendently good, but none has been a breakout hit. Maybe the reissue of
The Hare, which appeared in the U.K. in 1998, will be it. At the very least, it’s the longest Aira to appear in English: a picaresque about a naturalist’s voyage into the Argentinean pampas. (Garth)
August:
Night Film by
Marisha Pessl: Pessl’s first novel since
Special Topics in Calamity Physics, her celebrated 2006 debut, concerns a
David Lynchish filmmaker whose daughter has died in Lower Manhattan under suspicious circumstances. Soon, reporter Scott McGrath has launched an investigation that will take him to the heart of the auteur’s secretive empire: his cult following, his whacked-out body of work, and his near impenetrable upstate compound. With interpolated web pages and documents and
Vanity Fair articles, the novel’s a hot pop mess, but in the special way of a latter-day
Kanye West album or a movie co-directed by
Charlie Kaufman and
Michael Bay, and the climax alone—a 65-page haunted-house
tour-de-force—is worth the price of admission. (Garth)
Cannonball by
Joseph McElroy: McElroy was writing the lights out in the ‘70s and early ‘80s, and in the last few years has been rediscovered by a younger generation of readers, who justly class him with
Thomas Pynchon—a writer of a wildly different sensibility, but a similar, world-devouring ambition. Hell, he even did a
Year in Reading. If 2011’s
Night Soul is any indication, McElroy’s can still intrigue, baffle, and stop the heart, often all at once. This, his first novel in many a moon, concerns the Iraq War, among other things, and it’s hard to think of an author more suited to reimagining the subject. (Garth)
Claire of the Sea Light by
Edwidge Danticat: The author of a string of heartbreaking novels about the strife-torn Caribbean nation of Haiti, including
The Farming of Bones and
The Dew Breaker, Danticat here tells the story of a young motherless girl whose poverty-stricken father considers giving her away a wealthier family. Hailed by
Publishers Weekly as “magical as a folk tale and as effective and devastating as a newsreel,” the novel paints a stark portrait of village life in Haiti. (Michael)
Remember How I Told You I Loved You? by
Gillian Linden: Gillian Linden’s debut collection of linked stories follows a young woman through college, careers, love affairs and marriages— “from delayed adolescence to (delayed) adulthood.” The publisher, Little A (Amazon’s new literary fiction imprint), describes the collection as “a sharp and intimate take on romance and infidelity, trust and betrayal,” written in a “deadpan narrative, cool and precise.” Linden’s story “
Pests” was recently published in
The Paris Review. Linden will join the ranks of several talented literary writers that Little A has published since its launch in March — including
A.L. Kennedy,
Shawn Vestal, and
Jenny Davidson. (Sonya)
The Infatuations by
Javier Marias: Marias’s only competitor for the title of Spain’s Most Important Living Writer may be
Enrique Vila-Matas. Each of his last few books with New Directions, translated by
Margaret Jull Costa, set a new high-water mark—most recently, the mammoth trilogy
Your Face Tomorrow. Now he’s made the jump to Knopf, which means you’re about to hear a lot about him. And deservedly so, it would seem:
The Infatuations has already been called "great literature" in Spain and "perhaps his best novel" in the U.K. Is there any reason on earth you wouldn’t want to read the greatest novel of Spain’s greatest living writer? Of course there isn’t. Now get thee to a bookshop! (Garth)
The Color Master by
Aimee Bender: Ogres, tiger-mending and playing at prostitution—yep, it’s time for Aimee Bender to once again enchant us with her whimsical and magical fiction. Her next story collection comes out just three years after the publication of her bestselling novel
The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, and it looks like the book is a return to form for Bender.
Publishers Weekly says that even the tales that resemble children’s storybooks “are haunted by a taut, sardonic melancholy,” noting that her “mood pieces” about female friendship are the strongest of the bunch. (Edan)
Elect H. Mouse State Judge by
Nelly Reifler: To
Kafka’s “Josephine, the Mouse-Singer” and
Bolaño’s “Police Rat” and Mrs. Frisby and that one
A.M. Homes story where the kid gets it on with a Barbie doll, we must now add Nelly Reifler’s first novel. It’s a fast-paced caper—politician’s kids get abducted, private eyes go searching—but with a major twist: H. Mouse is a mouse, and both perps and dicks are dolls. Shrewdly, Reifler serves this concoction neat; what could have been cheap thrills give way to weirder and more surprising effects. (Garth)
The Rathbones by
Janice Clark:
The Rathbones is the most
sui generis debut you’re likely to encounter this year. Think
Moby-Dick directed by
David Lynch from a screenplay by
Gabriel Garcia Marquez...with
Charles Addams doing the set design and
The Decembrists supplying the chanteys. Initially the story of the last surviving member of an eccentric 19th-Century whaling dynasty, it becomes the story of that dynasty itself. I should also say that this was the single most exciting thing I read in manuscript in graduate school, where the author and I studied together. Clark writes a beautiful prose line, and the story, like the ocean, get deeper, richer, and stranger the farther out you go. (Garth)
A Schoolboy’s Diary and Other Stories by
Robert Walser: For a long time, Walser addicts—which is to say, pretty much anyone who has come into contact with this intoxicating writer—had to make do with the novel
Jakob van Gunten (but what a novel!) and a slim edition of selected stories. But, half a century after his death, the Swiss master of smallness and obscurity is finally getting the treatment he deserves.
Microscripts was one of the best books I read in 2012. The tireless
Susan Bernofsky has also given us versions of
The Tanners,
The Assistant, and a collection of
Berlin Stories. In this volume,
Damion Searls translates a group of stories about school life—also the engine of much of
Jakob van Gunten’s exquisite comedy. (Garth)
Necessary Errors by
Caleb Crain: Lately, it's seemed that the “literary” first novel had become a genre unto itself: a certain page-limit, a certain definition of scope, a certain set of problems, modestly conceived and modestly transcended. If so, Crain’s stately, wry, and generous first novel breaks the mold. Certainly, there’s a classic coming-of-age narrative here. But as the back-cover blurbs attest, the adventures of American Jacob Putnam in Czechoslovakia right after the Iron Curtain’s fall recall
Henry James as much as they do
Ben Lerner. Crain’s broad social canvas and his deep interest in the lives of other people are marks of distinction. (Garth)
The Novel: An Alternative History (1600-1800) by
Steven Moore: The
first volume of Moore’s magisterial survey advanced a theory of the novel as inherently experimental and multicultural, and much older than is generally acknowledged. It’s not that
Jane Austen moves to the margins and
Gertrude Stein to the center, but that Austen and Stein become recognizably part of the same story. And though Moore hews closer, necessarily, to synopsis than to close-reading, his project is an invaluable desk reference for the catholic reader. In volume 2, he turns his sights to the era that inspired the argument in the first place, a period that begins with
Don Quixote. (Garth)
The Sound of Things Falling by
Juan Gabriel Vásquez: At
The Age,
Cameron Woodhead writes: “With
The Sound of Things Falling, Colombian novelist Juan Gabriel Vásquez has created a story that can be appreciated purely for the dramatic way it dives into the black hole of his country's past—the drug cartels and paramilitaries that scarred a generation—although the supple thought-weave of the prose won't be lost on anyone with a taste for more reflective fiction.” Woodhead also compares Vasquez to
Graham Greene,
W.G. Sebald, and
Robert Bolaño—all writers who give us an expansive sense of a country’s history and legacy through the lives of compelling individuals. The protagonist is a Colombian lawyer named Antonio whose memory takes him back to a long-ago acquaintance with the ex-pilot Ricardo LaVerde and a series of mysterious (and yes, violent) occurrences. Vásquez, who is 40, has published four previous novels, but prefers to not count the first two, which he wrote in his early 20s; so “officially,”
Sound is his third novel. (Sonya)
The Virgins by
Pamela Erens: This smart, unsettling novel is narrated by a middle-aged man obsessed by the star-crossed love affair of two classmates at his boarding school thirty years ago. Erens, author of one previous novel,
The Understory, displays an uncanny gift for writing honestly about pot-toking, hormone-addled adolescents while granting them the full range of human emotion one expects from a novel for adults. The novel is from indie press Tin House Books, a spinoff of the well-known literary magazine that has quietly built a reputation as a home for first-rate literary fiction. (Michael)
The Wicked Girls by
Alex Marwood: Alex Marwood is the pseudonym of British journalist Serena Mackesy, and
The Wicked Girls is her dark and beautifully executed first novel. In the mid-eighties, two eleven-year-old girls meet for the first time and become friends. By the end of the day, a younger child has died at their hands. Twenty-five years later, with new lives and changed identities, the two women encounter one another in a seaside town where a serial killer is active. A haunting meditation on crime and punishment. (Emily)
The Affairs of Others by
Amy Grace Loyd: Loyd, formerly the fiction editor at
Playboy, moves to the other side of the desk with a first novel of elegant intensity. A young widow in Brooklyn has bought her apartment building, and so become an accidental landlord. Or do people still say landlady? At any rate, her straitened existence is challenged by the arrival of a fascinating new tenant, with emotional transformation the ultimate issue. Loyd’s burnished, spare sentences conceal hidden volumes of emotion, and in its different moods, the book may put readers in mind of
Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland or of a more hopeful version of
Claire Messud’s recent
The Woman Upstairs. (Garth)
Brief Encounters with the Enemy by
Saïd Sayrafiezadeh: Sayrafiezadeh’s acclaimed memoir,
When Skateboards Will Be Free, chronicled a childhood being raised by an Iranian father and American Jewish mother united by an extreme devotion to the Socialist Workers Party. Three years later, Sayrafiezadeh, whose fiction has appeared in
Granta,
The New Yorker, and
The Paris Review, among other places, publishes his first short story collection. The everyday trials of his characters, some of them grappling with the rippling effects of a nameless war (“this could be any war, or perhaps the next war,” Sayrafiezadeh
told The New Yorker) “are transformed into storytelling that is both universally resonant and wonderfully strange.” (Elizabeth)
The Hypothetic Girl by
Elizabeth Cohen: From Other Press, a collection of stories that “captures all the mystery, misery, and magic of the eternal search for human connection” via tales about the bizarre and inarguably ubiquitous world of online dating. Says Amazon: “With levity and high style, Cohen takes her readers into a world where screen and keyboard meet the heart, with consequences that range from wonderful to weird.” For anyone who’s been submerged in this wonderful weird search, these stories are likely to ring a therapeutic bell. Or, in some cases perhaps, a gong. Look out for an essay from Cohen in July, and an excerpt in early August, at
Bloom. (Sonya)
September:
MaddAddam by
Margaret Atwood:
MaddAddam concludes the dystopian trilogy that Atwood began ten years ago with
Oryx and Crake and continued in 2009 with
The Year of the Flood. Booklist calls
MaddAddam a “coruscating finale in an ingenious, cautionary trilogy of hubris, fortitude, wisdom, love, and life’s grand obstinacy.” (Emily)
Bleeding Edge by
Thomas Pynchon: Since his 1997 comeback, Pynchon’s been uncommonly productive...and, more characteristically, all over the map. I thought
Mason & Dixon his best book;
Against the Day vastly underrated; and
Inherent Vice fun but disposable. Proximity to the present moment can be a telling index of the quality of a Pynchon project, so the setting here—New York’s Silicon Alley on the eve of the dot-com crash—gives one pause. But Pynchon’s ability to “think the present historically” in his last two books was the best thing about them, so maybe he still has much to tell us about the way we live now. (Garth)
Doctor Sleep by
Stephen King:
Thirty-six years later, it’s here: a sequel to
The Shining. Dan Torrance, the tricycle peddling protagonist of the original horror classic, is now middle-age and working in a nursing home in New Hampshire where he uses his ebbing mental powers to comfort the dying. The story picks up when Dan tries to save Abra Stone, a twelve-year-old girl with gifts like the ones he used to have, who is in danger from a group called The True Knot, which travels the country consuming children with the gift of The Shining. (Kevin)
The Lowland by
Jhumpa Lahiri: Lahiri’s second novel (and fourth book) comes heaped with expectations and describes the relationship between two formerly inseparable brothers born in mid-century Calcutta. The first, Udayan, is drawn into revolutionary politics; the second, Subash, leaves his native country to make a better life for himself as a scientist in the United States. But tragedy strikes Udayan and Subash returns home where he gets to know Udayan’s former wife and reconnects with childhood memories. (Kevin)
Someone by
Alice McDermott: An excerpt of Alice McDermott’s new novel,
Someone, appeared in the
New Yorker as a story of the same name. The story is about Marie, who is seventeen years old in 1937, when a boy from her Brooklyn neighborhood turns her head, fondles her breast, promises marriage, and then spurns her for a better-looking girl. In the story, the titular Someone is the person who, Marie's brother promises, will one day love her. McDermott
told The New Yorker's
Deborah Treisman that the novel is the story of “one unremarkable woman,” because “novels about unremarkable women, especially those written by unremarkable women, seem a thing of the past.” Who you calling “unremarkable,” Alice McDermott? (Lydia)
Seiobo There Below by
László Krasznahorkai: In the last few years, American readers have rapidly awakened to Krasznahorkai’s important place in the republic of world letters. He is one of few working novelists who still aspires to mastery, in the Modernist sense, and each of the three previous novels translated into English has been a masterpiece. Those books were set in Europe and New York.
Seiobo, published in Hungarian in 2009, reveals a different side of the Krasznahorkai oeuvre: his decades-long engagement with East Asia. It’s a major feat of editing and translating, and the publication date been pushed back. Those who can’t wait should check out the excerpt in
Music & Literature. (Garth)
Enon by
Paul Harding: Harding’s 2009 debut,
Tinkers, won him the Pulitzer Prize and instant acclaim as one of the most profound writers of our time.
Enon follows Charlie Crosby, the grandson of
Tinkers protagonist George Washington Crosby, through a year of his life after a devastating loss. Inhabiting the same New England landscape so intricately rendered in
Tinkers (Enon is the town where George Crosby died),
Enon is a story about small moment and big questions. (Janet)
John Updike: The Collected Stories by
John Updike:
This two-volume collection spans the arc of a life’s work. One hundred and eighty-six stories are presented in their final versions and in definitive order of composition, established for the first time by archival research: from “Ace in the Hole” (1953), written when Updike was still a student at Harvard, to “The Full Glass” from 2008, the final year of his life. In his poem “Spirit of ’76,” written during his final illness and published in
The New Yorker three months after his death, Updike wrote:
I see clear through to the ultimate page,
the silence I dared break for my small time.
No piece was easy, but each fell finished,
in its shroud of print, into a book-shaped hole. (Emily)
Nine Inches by
Tom Perrotta: American fiction’s favorite lighthearted chronicler of suburban angst delivers his first collection of short stories since
Bad Haircut, his first book, nineteen years ago. In
Nine Inches, Perrotta, the author of the Hollywood-friendly novels
Little Children and
The Leftovers (currently under development as a HBO series), returns to familiar themes of fractured families and the undercurrent of disappointment that lurks just below the placid surface of suburban life. Perrotta knows his way around a punch line, so expect some chuckles to go along with your quiet desperation. (Michael)
The Childhood of Jesus by
J.M. Coetzee: When it came out in the UK and Ireland this Spring, Coetzee’s new novel was received with an even more potent combination of admiration and confusion than his work is normally met with. Reviewing the book in the
Telegraph,
Michael Preston asked whether it was “possible to be deeply affected by a book without really knowing what it’s about?” (The fairly obvious answer: yes.) A man and a five year old boy arrive in a sort of refugee camp, where they are assigned new names and ages. The boy speaks in riddles and claims to be able to perform miracles. Together, they search for the boy’s mother, and endure a series of odd bureaucratic encounters. The inscrutable spirit of
Kafka has often flickered across Coetzee’s pages, and that spirit seems to loom large here. (Mark)
The Maid’s Version by
Daniel Woodrell: Daniel Woodrell, a master of “country noir” fiction, makes rare use of autobiography in his new novel,
The Maid’s Version. While growing up in West Plains, Missouri, Woodrell listened to stories his grandmother told about a mysterious dance hall explosion in town in 1928 that killed 39 people. In the novel, a grandmother tells her grandson about working as a maid for the family that was implicated in the blast but never held responsible. The novel is “very lyrical and not completely chronological,” Woodrell told an interviewer, “because it
’s the story of a family and the after-effects on the family and the grandmother trying to get justice or revenge.” (Bill)
Levels of Life by
Julian Barnes: Julian Barnes’s
new book is not a novel, and not a memoir, and not a collection of essays, although it appears to contain elements of all three. The collection begins with a brief history of hot air ballooning and the characters involved in its development and lured by its attractions. Part two is an imagined romance between
Sarah Bernhardt, who was in life one of the people from the latter category, and
Colonel Frederick Burnaby, intrepid ballooner (who is, incidentally, documented on the delightful website “
Great British Nutters”). In the third part of his new book, Barnes ties these curious introductory portions into a memoir of his profound grief following the loss of
Pat Kavanagh, his wife of 30 years. (Lydia)
Traveling Sprinkler by
Nicholson Baker: Last year,
Nicholson Baker treated the Internet to a cluster of peculiar, melancholy protest songs about
Bradley Manning and the
Obama administration’s drone assassination program. The venture was out of character in a way that was, weirdly, entirely characteristic of Baker. The songs appear to have been, at least in part, an aspect of a method writing exercise for his new novel,
Traveling Sprinkler—a sort of sequel to 2009’s
The Anthologist, in which Paul Chowder sat around having a lot of thoughts about poetry while failing to write the introduction to a poetry anthology. In the new novel, Chowder sits around trying to write protest songs. Very few writers are as interesting as Baker on the theme of men sitting (or standing) around, so this looks promising. (Mark)
Dissident Gardens by
Jonathan Lethem: Of the greats of his generation, Lethem is one of the few who’s gotten steadily better, novel by novel.
Fortress of Solitude is a better book than
Motherless Brooklyn, and in my read,
Chronic City is even better than that—the highs less high, but the consistency more consistent. It’s also worth noting that Lethem’s always been a political writer (science-fiction being among other things a way of thinking about the possible) and has been more so lately. Expectations for
Dissident Gardens, then—a generation-spanning saga centered around Leftists from Sunnyside Queens—should be very, very high. (Garth)
Mood Indigo by
Boris Vian: Few of Vian’s novels have been translated, but
L’Ecume des Jours is appearing in English for the third time, with a third title (
Mood Indigo, Froth on the Daydream, Foam of the Daze, take your pick). Still, we should be grateful for what we are given—
Le Monde named
L’Ecume number 10 on the 100 best books of the century.
Vian (d. 1959), published under his own name and the pseudonym
Vernon Sullivan. He was a trumpeter in the Hot Club de France, devotee of
Duke Ellington, ingester of peyote, consort of
Sartre (until Sartre consorted with his wife). Written in 1947,
L’Ecume is a sad, fanciful love story (which, the
Harvard Crimson wrote in 1969, read like “perceptions at a stoned-soul picnic,” in a good way).
Mood Indigo received the
Michel Gondry film treatment last spring. (Lydia)
Subtle Bodies by
Norman Rush: The decade-in-the-making follow-up to
Mortals (one of our
Best Novels of the Millennium) is also a departure. The first of Rush’s books not set in Botswana, it’s shorter by half than either of his previous novels, and when I got a galley in the mail, the jacket copy—comfortable fortysomethings at a
Big Chill-style reunion near the start of the Iraq War—made me even more nervous. Was the Rush magic still there? Then my wife started reading it, then started putting it down to laugh, and finally began forcing me to listen to her read whole passages aloud for the sheer pleasure of the phrases. Note to Mr. Rush: You had me at “berserk industry.” (Garth)
His Wife Leaves Him by
Stephen Dixon: A 600-page depiction of a jilted lover’s interior thoughts might not be your idea of an enjoyable book, but in the hands of a writer as talented as Stephen Dixon, it’s certainly one worth reading. In his own description of the novel,
he’s noted that it’s about “a bunch of nouns” such as “love, guilt, sickness, death, remorse, loss, family, matrimony, sex, children, parenting, aging, mistakes, incidents, minutiae, birth, music, writing, jobs, affairs, memory, remembering, reminiscences, forgetting, repression, dreams, reverie, nightmares, meeting, dating, conceiving, imagining, delaying, loving.” Indeed these words convey the complexity of a life rendered whole, of a relationship’s threads and effects laid bare, and of honest memories enlivened by an acute and unrelenting ache. When a relationship dies, all that remains are remembered details, and in the words of
Jim Harrison, “death steals everything except our stories.” (Nick)
Local Souls by
Allan Gurganus: For his first book in a decade, Allan Gurganus returns to the imagined town of Falls, N.C., where he set his first and best-known novel,
Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All. His new book,
Local Souls, which owes more to
Flannery O’Connor than to
Nikolai Gogol, is three linked novellas set in the contemporary New South, with its air-conditioning and improved telecommunications, its freer sexuality and looser family ties. However, some old habits prove hard to break—including adultery, incest and obsession—in these tales that unfold in a Dixiefied version of Winesburg, Ohio. (Bill)
Between Friends by
Amos Oz: Born in Jerusalem in 1939, Amos Oz spent three decades living on a kibbutz because city life was not “radical” enough for him and, as he puts it in his new book of stories,
Between Friends, he wanted to live among “people with patience and doubts and compassion.” These eight stories, set in the imaginary Kibbutz Yikhat during the 1950s of Oz’s youth, spin around the shortcomings of idealism and the fragility of all utopias. In the end, the stories affirm Oz’s long-held belief that both on the kibbutz and throughout the larger Middle East, the only hope lies not in conflict, but in compromise. (Bill)
The Brunist Day by
Robert Coover: Aside from being a terrific year for first novels, 2013 may be remembered for its efflorescence of major work from the
eminences grises of postmodernism. So far, we’ve gotten
Gass’s Middle C,
Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge, and
McElroy’s Cannonball. Now Coover, author of a couple of the great postwar novels (e.g.,
The Public Burning), returns with a thousand-page sequel to his very first book,
The Origin of the Brunists. I haven’t been this excited to read new Coover...well, since I started reading Coover. The folks at Dzanc Books should be commended. (Garth)
Hawthorn & Child by
Keith Ridgway: This isn’t the story of a family business, à la Dombey & Son, but rather a buddy-cop detective vehicle—except the cops aren’t exactly buddies, and most of what gets detected is random violence and existential unease. Ridgway is a brilliant stylist from Ireland, and the early word from the U.K. is that he’s hit his stride here, in a kind of deadpan avant-pop tour of contemporary London. (Garth)
Duplex by
Kathryn Davis: Davis’s earlier novel,
The Thin Place, is set in a place where the membrane between the real world and the spirit world is extremely thin. Most of her work, which includes six previous novels, sits at this same juncture, combining real and imagined worlds.
Duplex is the story of Mary and Eddie, two children growing up in a duplex outside time, while “adulthood”—a world of sorcerers, robots, and slaves—looms ahead. (Janet)
Goat Mountain by
David Vann: In his writing across a variety of forms—short stories, novels, memoir, and reportage—David Vann has returned repeatedly to the same deep well of themes: nature, thwarted masculinity, family, and violence. In his third novel
Goat Mountain, an eleven-year-old boy goes on a deer-hunt with his father and grandfather, and things, as they tend to do this writer’s work, take a devastating turn. There’s a rawness and obsessional urgency to Vann’s writing that makes this ongoing project of recasting and development among the most compelling in contemporary literature. (Mark)
At the Bottom of Everything by
Ben Dolnick: Dolnick’s third novel is about a dark secret that tears apart a boyhood friendship and how the two are brought back together as adults to reckon with what happened long ago. The jacket copy calls it “a tale of spiritual reckoning, of search and escape, of longing and reaching for redemption—a tale of near hallucinatory power.” Dolnick, who writes for NPR and the
New York Times, has also written a Kindle single called
Shelf-Love, about his fanaticism for
Alice Munro. (Edan)
The Traymore Rooms by
Norm Sibum: Poet Norm Sibum’s 700-pager should be on the radar of all the maximalism-starved readers who landed
A Naked Singularity on our Top 10 list in 2012—though the book might more rightly be likened to something by
William Gass or
Alexander Theroux. Plot isn’t Sibum’s thing, exactly, but his erudition (considerable), sense of character (eccentric), and mood (quietly splenetic) more than compensate. The novel concerns a group of aging friends who share haunts in downtown Montreal. They talk, fight, love, and try to make sense of a historical moment that has disappointed their youthful hopes. And apart from an overreliance on that contemporary workhorse, the absolute phrase, the prose is a consistent pleasure. (Garth)
October:
The Goldfinch by
Donna Tartt:
In a 2002 interview with
The Guardian, Tartt said she couldn’t “think of anything worse than having to turn out a book every year. It would be hell.” She seems to have settled into a pattern of turning out a book every ten or eleven years instead. In her third novel,
The Goldfinch, a young boy named Theo Decker survives an accident that kills his mother. In the years that follow, he finds himself drawn to things that remind him of her, including a painting that draws him eventually into the art underworld. (Emily)
Identical by
Scott Turow: Every three years, with metronome-like regularity, bestselling lawyer-author Scott Turow comes out with another well-turned legal thriller set in corruption-rife Kindle County. Three years after 2010’s
Innocent, Turow is right on schedule with a new thriller focusing on a pair of identical twins, one a candidate for mayor in Kindle County, the other a convicted murderer just released from prison after serving 25 years for killing his girlfriend. This is Turow country, so nothing is as it seems and the plot turns on a re-investigation of the decades-old murder that sent one of the brothers to prison. (Michael)
The Signature of All Things by
Elizabeth Gilbert: Elizabeth Gilbert’s return to fiction (she wrote that little-known memoir called
Eat Pray Love) is a sprawling historical novel about
Alma Whittaker, the daughter of a botanical explorer, and talented scientist in her own right, and her relationship with Utopian artist
Ambrose Pike. As the jacket copy says, “Alma Whittaker is a witness to history, as well as maker of history herself.” The book spans the globe and two centuries, and it sounds like a big and exciting artistic departure for Gilbert. (Edan)
Solo (James Bond) by
William Boyd: At this year’s London Book Fair, venerated author William Boyd announced the one-word title of his forthcoming James Bond novel, which reflects the spy’s solitary and unauthorized mission. The book is an authorized sequel to
Jeffery Deaver’s novel,
Carte Blanche, published in 2011. At the Book Fair, Boyd said that key action takes place in Africa, the US and Europe, and remarked that Bond “goes on a real mission to real countries and the world he’s in is absolutely 1969. There are no gimmicks, it’s a real spy story.” (Edan)
Dirty Love by
Andre Dubus III: The four interlocking stories within Andre Dubus III’s sixth book explore the “bottomless needs and stubborn weaknesses of people seeking gratification in food and sex, work and love.” These highs and lows are depicted by Mark, a Massachusetts man who’s recently discovered his wife’s infidelity; by Marla, an overweight young woman who’s just found a lover; by Robert, who’s just betrayed his pregnant wife; and by Devon, a teenager terrorized by a dirty picture she’s posted online, and whose story comprises the collection’s titular novella. (Nick)
Cartwheel by
Jennifer DuBois: Jennifer DuBois follows her decorated first novel,
A Partial History of Lost Causes, with
Cartwheel, a novel with loud echoes of the recent murder trial, conviction and eventual acquittal of
Amanda Knox.
Cartwheel’s protagonist, Lily Hayes, is an American arriving in Buenos Aires for a semester abroad. Five weeks later she’s the prime suspect in her roommate's brutal murder. Questions arise. Is Lily guilty? More importantly, exactly who is Lily Hayes? “
Cartwheel will keep you guessing until the final page,” the publisher promises, “and its questions about how much we really know about ourselves will linger well beyond.” (Bill)
The Hired Man by
Aminatta Forna: Aminatta Forna made her name with
The Devil That Danced on the Water, her memoir about her father’s execution for treason in Sierra Leone. In her new novel,
The Hired Man, a naive middle-class Englishwoman named Laura arrives with her two teenage children in the Croatian town of Gost, planning to renovate an old house. She enlists the help of an introspective handyman named Duro, and before long the haunted memories of the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s come bubbling up from the past. Ill-equipped to understand the dark local history, Laura will come to see that there is great power in overcoming the thirst for revenge. (Bill)
Heart of Darkness (Illustrated) by
Matt Kish: In October 2011, Tin House books published Matt Kish’s
Moby Dick in Pictures, with artwork for each page of text taken from the Signet Classic Paperback. Now,
Heart of Darkness will get similar treatment, although this project has 100 illustrations to
Moby Dick’s 552.
The New York Post showcased some wonderful images from the upcoming publication. Matt Kish, a librarian by day, prefers “illustrator” to “artist,” he
says, “There's a lot of artists out there, they’re real assholes, and if you haven’t gone to art school, if you haven’t had an MFA, if you haven’t had a gallery show, if you cant put together some rambling artist statement, you’re not worthy of that term.” Looks like art to me. (Lydia)
Quiet Dell by
Jayne Anne Phillips: The creepy-sounding plot of Jayne Anne Phillips’s fifth novel is based on a true-life 1930s story of a con man who insinuated himself into the life of a young, impoverished widow only to murder her and her three children. Like Phillips’s previous novel,
Lark & Termite (a 2009 National Book Award Finalist), parts of the story are set in rural West Virginia, where Phillips herself is from. With a reporter protagonist who sets out to investigate the crime after the fact, there are shades of
In Cold Blood. (Hannah)
At Night We Walk in Circles by
Daniel Alarcón: Peruvian native Daniel Alarcón’s stories thrive on equal parts revolution and spectacle, as evidenced in his first collection,
War by Candlelight, as well as in his first novel,
Lost City Radio, where the emcee of a popular radio show reunites loved ones separated during a recent civil war. In
At Night We Walk in Circles, the Whiting Award-winning Best Young American Novelist draws inspiration from stories told to him by prisoners jailed in Lima’s largest prison. Alarcón again situates his novel in a South American state, where the protagonist flounders until he’s cast in a revival of touring play penned the leader of a guerilla theatre troupe. (Anne)
The Last Animal by
Abby Geni: This debut collection of short stories is thematically linked by characters who “use the interface between the human and the natural world to contend with their modern challenges in love, loss and family life.” Geni, who is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a winner of the Glimmer Train Fiction Open, has received early praise from
Dan Chaon, who says, “These are sharp, incisive, thoughtful, and utterly original stories” and from
Jim Gavin, who calls these stories “Haunting and beautiful.” (Edan)
Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books by
Claudia Roth Pierpont: Is it strange that an author many wouldn’t hesitate to call the greatest living American writer has yet to be the subject of a major critical work? Pierpont remedies this with a book described as “not a biography…but something more rewarding: an attempt to understand a great writer through his art.” The
New Yorker staff writer should prove a fascinating non-biographer: her previous book was
Passionate Minds: Women Rewriting the World, and while her current subject has been accused of sexism many times throughout his long career,
David Remnick reported that at a celebration of Roth’s eightieth birthday in March, Pierpont “took it upon herself to survey the variety, depth, and complexity of Roth’s female characters — a strong, and convincing, rebuke to years of criticism that the books are misogynistic.” (Elizabeth)
How to Read a Novelist by
John Freeman: Former
Granta editor John Freeman’s first book,
The Tyranny of Email, considered the ways that email collapsed great distances between us. In it he argues for a more nuanced and discerning form of communication through conversation—an art form that he showcases in his latest book,
How to Read a Novelist. In more than fifty interviews and author profiles of literary titans such as
Haruki Murakami,
Philip Roth,
David Foster Wallace, and
Doris Lessing, Freeman’s conversations and observations uncover these authors’ obsessions, quirks, and nuances of character as if they’re characters themselves. According to Freeman, a novelist requires observational distance, something to be considered in light of the subject of his first book: “it’s the miraculous distance that I think makes the writers who they are.” (Anne)
The Karl Kraus Project by
Jonathan Franzen:
Karl Kraus, as immortalized in
Walter Benjamin’s essay of the same name, was an incendiary aphorist and, in his one-man journal
Die Fackel (
The Torch), a critic who rivaled
Nietzche for implacability. His influence on the culture of pre- and interwar Austria and Germany can’t be overstated; writers from
Broch to
Canetti are in his debt. Yet aphorisms are notoriously hard to translate, and to date, no really good volume of Kraus has been available to lay readers in English. Jonathan Franzen’s decision to attempt one is as likely to provoke grousing as most everything he does, but I, for one, salute his berserk industry. (Garth)
The Most of Nora Ephron by
Nora Ephron:
Ephron died a year ago and this fall Random House is bringing out a wide-ranging collection of her writing edited by
Robert Gottlieb. The screenplay to
When Harry Met Sally will be in there, as will her famous piece on being flat-chested, blog posts on politics and dying, and the screenplay to her last work,
Lucky Guy. (Kevin)
The Pure Gold Baby by
Margaret Drabble: Drabble’s eighteenth novel—her first since 2006—is set in 1960s London. It centers on Jessica, an anthropology student who, after becoming pregnant during an affair with a married professor, is forced to raise a daughter alone, her own life’s trajectory fracturing as a result. “One thing I have never been very good at is creating ‘good’ mothers,” Drabble said in a 1978
The Paris Review interview. “I’d written books and books before someone pointed out that I was perpetually producing these ‘bad’ mothers.” The “prismatic” novel is told from the perspectives of “the mothers who surround Jess,” examining “unexpected transformations at the heart of motherhood.” (Elizabeth)
Half the Kingdom by
Lore Segal: Lore Segal is a treasure-house of wit and a power-house of style.
Lucinella, reissued as part of Melville House’s Art of the Novella Series, was one of the
best books I read in 2009. Now Melville House returns to the well for her first novel since the Pulitzer finalist
Shakespeare’s Kitchen. The plot involves a suspicious surge in the incidence of Alzheimer’s Disease among patients (characters from previous Segal novels among them) at a Manhattan emergency room in the period after September 11. Even the catalog copy brims with insight: “terrorist paranoia and end-of-the-world hysteria masks deeper fears about mortality.” You’re welcome, America. (Garth)
The Night Guest by
Fiona MacFarlane: Penguin Australia is calling Macfarlane “a new voice” and “a writer who comes to us fully formed.” It’s true that
The Night Guest, which will be published in October, is Macfarlane’s debut novel; but she’s been publishing stories for some time now, and here you can read
a Q&A about her story “Art Appreciation,” published in
The New Yorker this past May.
The Night Guest centers around the mysterious arrival of Frida at the isolated beach house of Ruth, a widow, but “soars above its own suspense to tell us, with exceptional grace and beauty, about ageing, love, trust, dependence, and fear; about processes of colonization; and about things (and people) in places they shouldn’t be.” (Sonya)
Every Short Story: 1951-2012 by
Alasdair Gray: Exactly what it says on the tin: the comprehensive volume (nearly 1,000 pages!) offers up more than half a century of the Scottish fantasist’s short fiction, including sixteen stories published here for the first time. Known for his dark humor and wild imagination, the stories span the broad range of his fascinating career. Whimsical drawings are interspersed throughout, the stories as much visual works as literary ones. “Illustration and typography play a major part in his work,” says
The Guardian. “He doesn’t just write books, he creates them.” It’s probably worth noting, too, that
The Guardian has also
described Gray as a “a glorious one-man band, the dirty old man of Scottish letters.” (Elizabeth)
Personae by
Sergio de la Pava: In the wake of
A Naked Singularity’s success, the University of Chicago Press is likewise reissuing de la Pava’s self-published second novel,
Personae. In most ways, it’s as different from its predecessor as grits from greens—a
Cloud Atlas-y series of nested genre pieces covering the whodunit, the interior monologue, and the theater of the absurd. But fans of the earlier book will recognize de la Pava’s fearlessness and wild ambition, along with the ventriloquistic range that made the Jalen Kingg letters so moving. An
excerpt is available at
The Quarterly Conversation. (Garth)
The Daylight Gate by
Jeanette Winterson:
Winterson’s new novella, published to critical acclaim in the UK last year, takes on the trial of the Lancashire Witches in 1612, when a group of destitute outcasts, mostly women, were put on trial for witchcraft. “What is clear amid the poverty and brutality here,” the critic
Arifa Akbar wrote in
The Independent, “is that other-worldy evil is far outweighed by the harm that human beings inflict.” (Emily)
The Luminaries by
Eleanor Catton:
The author of the critically acclaimed debut novel
The Rehearsal returns with a literary mystery set in 19th century New Zealand. When Walter Moody arrives on the coast of New Zealand, hoping to strike it rich in the gold fields, he stumbles upon a gathering of men who have met in secret to discuss a number of apparently coincidental recent events: on the day when a prostitute was arrested, a rich man disappeared, a down-on-his-luck alcoholic died, and a ship’s captain canceled all of his appointments and fled. The prostitute is connected to all three men, and Moody finds himself drawn into their interlinked lives and fates. (Emily)
November:
A Prayer Journal by
Flannery O’Connor: When Flannery O’Connor was in her early 20s and a student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she kept a journal which focused on her relationship with her faith. Recently discovered, this journal should be a fascinating prospect for anyone with an interest in O’Connor’s writing, inseparable as it is from her Catholic belief in sin and redemption. It dates from 1946-47, around the time she was writing the stories that would converge into her debut novel
Wise Blood. It looks to have been an exercise in bringing herself closer to her God through the act of writing: “I do not mean to deny the traditional prayers I have said all my life; but I have been saying them and not feeling them. My attention is always fugitive. This way I have it every instant.” (Mark)
Death of the Black-Haired Girl by
Robert Stone: Steven Brookman is a brilliant professor at an elite college in New England. Maud Stack is his promising and alluring young student. You know where this is going. Unfortunately, however, Professor Brookman is a married man, and Maud Stack’s passions are “not easily contained or curtailed.” In this tale of infidelity and its affects on human relationships—as well as on the institutions in which they reside—Robert Stone makes clear that almost nothing is black and white, and that when it comes to “the allure of youth” and “the promise of absolution,” all roads may lead to madness. (Nick)
A Permanent Member of the Family by
Russell Banks: Russell Banks—the author of
The Sweet Hereafter and
The Darling (among many others) and an acknowledged master chronicler of the tragedies of American life—will publish his first collection of short stories in fifteen years. The book is composed of twelve stories, six of which appear for the first time. The two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist’s last novel,
Lost Memory of Skin, documented the straitened lives of a group of sex offenders living under a Florida causeway. (Lydia)
Report from the Interior by
Paul Auster: Last year Auster released
Winter Journal, a personal history of the author’s own body. This fall he will publish a companion piece of sorts that depicts the world as he saw it as a child growing up in New Jersey in the 1950s. (Kevin)
The Isle of Youth by
Laura van den Berg: Laura van den Berg brings her mystical touch to her second collection of short stories, following her highly praised first collection,
What The World Will Look Like When All The Water Leaves Us, which was shortlisted for The Frank O’Connor International Award. From a writer who professes to “freaking love coming up with zany plots,”
The Isle of Youth delivers with stories of magicians, private detectives, and identity-trading twins. (Hannah)
Hild by
Nicola Griffith: Nicola Griffith, British novelist and former poster child for the woes of American immigration policy (in 1998,
The Wall Street Journal called her “a lesbian science-fiction writer,” like it's a bad thing). Her newest novel
Hild takes place in seventh-century Britain in the Synod of Whitby, where the people were deciding what kind of Christians to be. The name “Hild” refers to the person we now know as
St. Hilda, who presided over the conference during which the Synod debated the relative merits of Celtic and Roman Christianity. In an interview with her editor, Griffith
reported that the source material on St. Hilda is basically limited to five pages in the Venerable Bede’s
Ecclesiastical History of the English People, so she was compelled to do a ferocious amount of research to recreate the world and customs, if not the life, of this early English figure. (Lydia)
Collected Stories by
Stefan Zweig: Pushkin Press anointed 2013 as “The Year of Stefan Zweig,” in order to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the famed Austrian author’s death by a wartime suicide pact. Zweig’s fictions are oft fueled by seduction, desire, and affairs of the heart, mettle which helped make him an author of international renown during his tumultuous lifetime. Pushkin is singlehandedly attempting to reinvigorate Zweig’s reputation by issuing a series of rereleases and a handful of new translations of his works. An ideal introduction for the unacquainted comes in the form of Zweig’s
Collected Stories, featuring twenty-three stories translated by
Anthea Bell. (Anne)
Beyond:
Andrew’s Brain by
E.L. Doctorow: Speaking of
eminences grises... From
The March to
Homer & Langley to that
cover version of
Hawthorne’s “Wakefield” that ran in
The New Yorker a few years back, Doctorow just keeps swinging. The product description on Amazon is sketchy, but the talk of a main character “speaking from an unknown place and to an unknown interlocutor [about] the circumstances that have led him to commit a mysterious act” sound downright
Beckett-y, while the title makes me secretly hope Doctorow’s returning to science fiction (after suppressing his previous effort,
Big as Life). (Garth)
A Place in the Country by
W.G. Sebald: W.G. Sebald’s collection of six essays was originally published in German in 1998, three years before his untimely death. The collection is an homage to six writers and artists (“colleagues,” he calls them, and “Alemmanic”), all of whom meant something to Sebald:
Johann Peter Hebel, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Eduard Mörike, Gottfried Keller, Robert Walser, and
Jan Peter Tripp. Already out in the United Kingdom, the essays are apparently solidly in the Sebald tradition—which, as I understand it, defies attribution of stolid nouns like “criticism,” “fiction,” or “biography,” rejoicing instead in the patterns and echoes of what one critic called “half-reality.” (Lydia)
Silence Once Begun by
Jesse Ball: Chronically saddled with the designation of “experimental author,” Jesse Ball has written three novels, including
The Way Through Doors, a book of poems and flash fiction, and a co-written prose poem, each work demonstrating a gift for quiet, powerful prose and a loose relationship with realism. His first hardcover release,
Silence Once Begun, tells the story of a man who confesses to a string of crimes in writing, then never speaks during his arrest or interrogation, and the journalist who becomes obsessed with his case. (Janet)
On Such a Full Sea by
Chang-rae Lee: Best known for his haunting stories of Korean history and American immigrant life, Korean-American novelist Chang-rae Lee tries his hand at speculative fiction, setting his new novel in a dystopian future in which America is in steep decline and urban neighborhoods have been turned into walled labor colonies that provide fresh produce and fish for the surrounding villages where the elite live. In the novel, Fan, a woman laborer, sets out in search of a vanished lover and finds herself crossing the lawless Open Counties, where the government exerts little control and crime is rampant. (Michael)
Perfect by
Rachel Joyce: Rachel Joyce’s first novel,
The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, was a national bestseller and was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Her highly anticipated second novel has two narratives, one about two boys in the early 1970s and their obsession with the two seconds added to clock time to balance with the movement of the earth, and one about a present-day man who is debilitated by his obsessive-compulsive routines. Blogger
Kate Neilan loved it,
saying, “Rachel Joyce should be praised from the rooftops for
Perfect; there’s not a thing I’d change about it.”
Leaving the Sea by
Ben Marcus: “With Ben Marcus, as with
Beckett, such disruptions are signs of literature itself being stretched and tensed, pressed to express the process of a writer testing his limits,” says
David Winters in his
Millions review of Marcus’s recent novel
The Flame Alphabet. Marcus has long been a champion of experimental writing and innovative uses of language, as demonstrated by the stories he selected for the unmatched
Anchor Book of New American Short Stories. His forthcoming
Leaving the Sea is the first collection of Marcus’s short stories. Expect nothing except more boundary pushing and an exquisite sense of the unexpected. (Anne)
On my old shelves, my books were organized into four broad genres: fiction, nonfiction, plays, and poetry. Fiction was arranged by date published, nonfiction by subject area, and plays and poetry were not in any particular order. On my new shelf, I stuck with my broad genres, and within each one, I kept things simple and organized everything alphabetically. Boring, but effective. But part of the fun of reorganizing your books is considering all your options, so here are 10 organizational strategies for the next time you find yourself in the throes of moving, decluttering, or, if you’re anything like me, procrastinating.
I’ve seen this in design magazines and once when I was visiting a fancy Nolita loft, where tall stacks of art books were arranged in uneven piles on a long bench. It reminded me—not unpleasantly—of the scene in The Great Gatsby when Nick Carraway visits Gatsby’s library and discovers that none of the pages of the books have been cut for reading. So if you have a lot of beautiful books that are just for show, artful piles might be the way to go.
Credit for this idea must be given to the film High Fidelity (based on the Nick Hornby’s novel by the same name). Post break-up, a lovelorn record store owner, Rob, decides to reorganize his record collection autobiographically. He arranges his records in an order that only he can understand, the key to which are his life experiences and personal obsessions. He explains to a friend, “If I want to find the song “Landslide,” by Fleetwood Mac, I have to remember that I bought it for someone in the fall of 1983 pile, but didn’t give it to them for personal reasons.”
Sadly, after my last move, and then rearranging and redecorating my tiny house, my couple thousand books have no system of organisation. The best I can do is separate fiction from nonfiction, although I do have a couple shelves for short story collections. Also, my Willa Cather and Somerset Maugham enjoy pride of place on the on their own shelf. Luckily, like a good hoarder of books I seem to know where everything is!
I have too many books to arrange them in any way. It would take more room than I have in my apartment to take them off shelves and put them back again.
I read a lot of classics, and I keep those first divided by century, then alphabetically by author. Popular fiction alphabetized by author. Nonfiction has no particular organization.
I arranged by the size of the books.
Good and useful paper, thanks to the author! In general I think that functionality should be the leading consideration in organizing your bookshelf, followed by aesthetic or other considerations.
I have a bilingual library/bookshelf, roughly 60% of my books are in Hungarian, 40% in English-and I keep them separated.
The Hungarian portion has much more nonfiction, a lot of poetry , and is subdivided also in Transylvanian Hungarian(where I am original from) and General Hungarian literature, along with fiction I have works of history, cultural studies, art books, albums.
The English portion has professional(medical) subset, reference books, dictionaries/thesauruses/vocabularies separated, along with fiction( not much poetry…), and a lot of history-general and cultural, social history(American and universal), politics, albums ,and art books. I am running out of space, and I have double-spaced shelves already , I have to start trimming my collection.
I think we should mention also our “digital bookshelves” too, with our iBooks and Kindle collections. They are organized by the programs-according to topics, subjects (iBooks), or alphabetically by author, or date of purchase(Kindle).Initially I used these to by quality thrillers,light reading , but soon I went into quality fiction and nonfiction too with same interest and written in English -only. So, along my cca 2,000 hardcopy books I have cca 300 electronic ones, easier to keep, not in need for dusting,but also in need of organizing&updating…
My library used to be arranged by language (popular fiction) and nonfiction: art books, dictionaries and language study books, work related books on separate shelves. So far that is the best system for me.
Now I tried a more fun way for the collection of fictional books as they are now in my living room and arranged them by color.. Definitely more visually pleasing, but harder to find a specific book if required..
I organize my bookcases by book heights. OCD or what?! LOL!
I arrange mine geographically – although I don’t go so far as organising it by regions, more by countries. So I have a section on French literature (both in French and in translation, plus biographies of French people, plus non-fiction etc.), another on German-speaking countries (Germany, Austria, Switzerland) and so on. The Latin Americans and Spanish/Portuguese authors are all together, because I don’t have that many, but if I did, I would start separating them by countries.
By category, which differ widely. Bibles, prayer books, and historical family treasures; Gardening; Photo albums; classics; first editions; fiction and non-; travel; etc. Most prominent? The most beautiful, like the Waverly Classics and Roses. And within them, by decreasing height, pulled neatly to the shelves’ edges. Hey! I volunteered in my junior high library, where an inspirational librarian taught kids to love and respect precious books. My author office bookshelf is arranged by what I used last–like books on craft, poisons, police procedurals. It’s a mess that spills onto the floor!
DDC 20
The fallout of having completed a PhD in English Lit is that I reallt do have thousands of books. Most of them are in the basement. The vast collection of fiction stacked against one wall. My 20th century British authors whose work I collect (Tolkien, A.S. Byatt, Margaret Drabble, Salman Rushdie, among others are on the bookshelves in the basement. The bookshelves in the living room contain mostly contemporary fiction, some poetry – all on its own shelf – and a smattering of drama. The one bookcase in the dining room contains grammars, anthologies and dictionaries because I used to tutor students in my home and liked to have reference books close to hand. Within each of thise bookshelves I do often organize books by the colors of their spines simply to minimize visual distraction. The master bedroom and upstairs hall contains my husband’s books with no apparent organizational scheme.
Mine are arranged geographically as well, but like Marina, only by country or larger region, depending how many I have in each group. As far as authors associated with more than one location, I base it on the location I most associate them with.
I organize by author. If the writer has a series, the books are shelved in publication date order. Although I have more than 2,000 books, a lot of them are represented by a few authors, so the shelves look neat to me. I also organize by subject, where it is more likely that the books will be by a variety of authors. Non-fiction is on higher shelves, as I re-read those books less frequently. My favorite books are shelved at eye-level. When I decide to re-read the work of a writer, whether that work includes series or stand-alones or both, I read them in publication date order so I can follow the growth of the author. The only exceptions in shelving are for oversized books, like the Complete Sherlock Holmes, the Annotated Alice in Wonderland, and similar compilations.
I’m old school, lol. I used the Dewey decimal system on the non-fiction. And alphabetical for the fiction. With the exception of x rated books that are on the top shelf, away from little hands. And the kids section, bottom shelf.
Hey Hannah,
Great ideas. I really think ordering books by color and size works best for me. Last week, I spent half a day in reworking my floating bookshelf. I think people really care about the first impression rather than convenience(being pretentious :))In the first row, I’ve placed red color, green and yellow in the second row, white and black in the 3rd row, and kind of similar color combinations in the following rows. Previously, it was arranged based on genre . To be honest, after this simple rework, I got great appreciations. I cannot upload an image here, or else I would have posted one .
Other than finally achieving independence, my favourite part of moving into my first apartment was setting up my brick and wood bookshelves. Thirty-six years, one apartment, and two houses later I’m still seeking the perfect arrangement. I have bookcases in my upstairs study and downstairs rec room (the latter which has a framed sign on the wall saying “This Library is My Mancave”.) I’ve yet to sort everything perfectly, but I enjoy the ongoing project.
Anyway, my novels tend to be sorted alphabetically by author, and if I have more than one book by a writer they’re sorted alphabetically by title. I have a lot of non-fiction books, especially history. Those are “sub-sorted” by subject matter (e.g.-WWII, Vietnam, India, the Tudors etc.).
You can save space by laying groups of books (for instance, all my John Irving novels) in horizontal stacks. Maybe it’s just me, but I also think it’s aesthetically pleasing.
Because of space Issues my romance, fiction, mystery’s are arranged in alphabetical order with colored tabs on the spine so I know which books to check when I am looking for a certain genre. I have a shelf in my garage which has a cover in front of it for my cook books, they are arrange by sets, Southern Living, Taste of Home, etc, I also have table top books in my living room. The only down fall is even though I used my Kindle I am still buying books sand the space is becoming less, and less.