Somehow I waited two months to take a look at the “best of 2003” column from my favorite book critic Jonathan Yardley. For him 17 rather interesting books make the cut, and his two picks for best of the year are The Known World by Edward P. Jones and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s memoir Living to Tell the Tale. Both of these are on the reading queue, and I’m very much looking forward to reading them. Here is Yardley’s column.
One Last Best of 2003
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Yael van der Wouden Wants to Touch Everything
"The moment the sex turns gratuitous you lose the tension, and therein the emotional investment of your readers."
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Want to Write Better Fiction? Become a Translator
For K.E. Semmel, Jenny Croft, Idra Novey, and Bruna Dantas Lobato, translation was a crucial training ground for writing fiction.
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Becca Rothfeld’s Exuberant Ode to the Risks of Rapture
There is no experience of longing that is not, at the same time, an ethical revelation.
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Elias Canetti’s Words Against Death
The marks on the page are the opposite of the marks on the tombstone.
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