Authors, including Jennifer Egan, George Saunders, Ali Smith, and our own Chigozie Obioma, chose their Best Books of 2017 in a two-part series for The Guardian. If you enjoyed that list, make sure to check out our Year in Reading: 2017 series all throughout December.
The Best of the Best
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The New Fiction of Solitude
“If we are now relentlessly connected, every marginal identity gaining collective recognition, becoming assimilated, ever more rapidly? If that is where we stand, then something like a stubbornly solitary voice may be welcome, even necessary, telling us that what it means to be human—and what may keep us human—is to feel alone in a strange room, with our seclusion the thing that defines and can save us.” On bearing witness to the spectacle of aloneness and the fiction of empathy.
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“That city in the backseat.”
Recommended Reading: Isle of Youth author Laura van den Berg’s story, “Where Will All the Buildings Go?”
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On The (Separate) Road
"I always had the sneaking and sinking suspicion that there would have been no place for me ... there were no Scarlett O’Haras in the Beat world. There were women, certainly, but they felt like cardboard cut-outs, something to move around, admire, shift gently out of the way when necessary. In fact, the only women Kerouac and Ginsberg seemed to genuinely respect were their mothers." Lynette Lounsbury at The Guardian on falling in love with the Beat generation, which may or may not have loved her back.
An Experiment In Crowdsourced Development
Palgrave Macmillan is posting sample chapters from book proposals online, inviting comment “from anyone who feels they can contribute to the development of the works in question.” The trial will continue for the next six weeks.
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“Fat guy. They knew.”
Recommended Reading: Ray Shea's essay at Hobart "Fat Guy." "I want to say that I shrunk into my shoes and disappeared, but when somebody throws 'fat guy' at you, you don't shrink, you grow. You bloat."
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