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A Year in Reading: Jamel Brinkley
2017 has been another year of transition for me. After living in Madison, Wisc., for only a year, I moved out to California. It’s been strange and a little unsettling to move farther and farther away from my family and friends in New York. I’ve also felt anxious because teaching duties in Madison and Iowa City, a fairly demanding new job I’ve taken on to pay the bills, and edits for my forthcoming debut story collection have kept me from writing any new fiction. And then, of course, there’s been the nightmarish daily assault of Donald Trump, white supremacy, toxic masculinity, gun violence… The list goes on.
Thank goodness for independent bookstores! A Room of One’s Own, Skylight Books, Eso Won Books, and The Last Bookstore helped new cities feel more like home. Greenlight Bookstore and Prairie Lights Books have been priority stops whenever I dipped back to Brooklyn or Iowa City. Thank goodness for books. Here are some that have ushered me through a challenging year:
A People on the Cover by Glenn Ligon
The Mountain by Paul Yoon
Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward
In the Wake: On Blackness and Being by Christina Sharpe
Exit West by Mohsin Hamid
The Origin of Others by Toni Morrison
A Life of Adventure and Delight by Akhil Sharma
Simulacra by Airea D. Matthews
The King Is Always Above the People by Daniel Alarcón
The Education of Margot Sanchez by Lilliam Rivera
WHEREAS by Layli Long Soldier
Portrait of the Alcoholic by Kaveh Akbar
New People by Danzy Senna
Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life by Yiyun Li
Ordinary Beast by Nicole Sealey
Somebody with a Little Hammer by Mary Gaitskill
House of Lords and Commons by Ishion Hutchinson
The Changeling by Victor LaValle
What We Lose by Zinzi Clemmons
Afterland by Mai Der Vang
What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky by Lesley Nneka Arimah
The Hidden Machinery: Essays on Writing by Margot Livesey
Idaho by Emily Ruskovich
Unaccompanied by Javier Zamora
Imagine Wanting Only This by Kristen Radtke
Bestiary by Donika Kelly
Like a Beggar by Ellen Bass
Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado
Play Dead by francine j. harris
Insurrections by Rion Amilcar Scott
More from A Year in Reading 2017
Don’t miss: A Year in Reading 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005
A Year in Reading: Kaveh Akbar
It’s been a long 2017. So much of being a poet as I understand it is about maintaining a permeability to wonder, and that’s been difficult work in a year spent in the long shadow of a fascistic regime, a year in which the earth has grown increasingly desperate in its attempts to warn us about the damage we’re doing to it.
The (perhaps feeble ((but noble))) balm—a year of books, richer than any I can recall. It’s like the world of poetry knew we’d need it to rise up and carry us, to orient us toward our livable tomorrows. Poets are watchers, wonderers. And they have the magical ability to make us realer than we can make ourselves. Elizabeth Alexander writes: “We are of interest to one another, are we not?” I like thinking of poems as little empathy tablets, granting us access to (and compassion for) lived experiences unlike any we’ll ever know firsthand.
Here are some new books (mostly poetry, listed in no particular order) from the past year that have helped me wander and wonder from one day into the next:
Frank Bidart – Half-Light
Anaïs Duplan – Mount Carmel & the Blood of Parnassus
Marwa Helal – I Am Made to Leave I Am Made to Return
Traci Brimhall – Saudade
Layli Long Soldier – Whereas
Rachel McKibbens – blud
Sahar Muradi – [Gates]
Steph Burt – Advice from the Lights
Maggie Smith – Good Bones
Cait Weiss Orcutt – Valleyspeak
Nuar Alsadir – Fourth Person Singular
Nicole Tong – How to Prove a Theory
Craig Morgan Teicher – The Trembling Answers
Nicole Sealey – Ordinary Beast
Danez Smith – Don’t Call Us Dead
sam sax – Madness
Javier Zamora – Unaccompanied
Marcus Wicker – Silencer
Alex Dimitrov – Together and By Ourselves
Ruth Awad – Set to Music a Wildfire
Bill Knott – Selected Poems
William Brewer – I Know Your Kind
Morgan Parker – There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé
Carl Phillips – Wild Is the Wind
Marie Howe – Magdalene
Ghayath Almadhoun – Adrenalin
Patricia Smith – Incendiary Arts
Tyree Daye – River Hymns
Gabrielle Calvocoressi – Rocket Fantastic
Mai Der Vang – Afterland
Sarah Browning – Killing Summer
Alessandra Lynch – Daylily Called it a Dangerous Moment
Chen Chen – When I Grow Up I Want to Be A List of Further Possibilities
Adrian Matejka – Map to the Stars
Finn Menzies – Brilliant Odyssey Don’t Yearn
Eve L. Ewing – Electric Arches
Shane McCrae – In the Language of My Captor
Ghassan Zaqtan (trans. by Fady Joudah) – The Silence that Remains
Franny Choi – Death By Sex Machine
Laura Kasischke – Where Now: New and Selected Poems
Subject to Change: Trans Poetry & Conversation
Megan Stielstra – The Wrong Way to Save Your Life
Hanif Abdurraqib – They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us
Melissa Febos – Abandon Me
Ta-Nehisi Coates – We Were Eight Years in Power
Alissa Nutting – Made for Love
Roxane Gay – Hunger
Kevin Young – Bunk
Wendy Xu – Phrasis
More from A Year in Reading 2017
Don’t miss: A Year in Reading 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005
2017 National Book Award Longlists Unveiled
Book award season enters high gear as the National Book Award finalists have been released in a series of four longlists consisting of ten books apiece. Five finalists in each category will be announced on October 4, and winners will be announced in New York City on November 15.
The fiction list includes an eclectic mix and features eight women, including Jennifer Egan for her long-awaited new novel.
You read about nearly all of the books on the Fiction longlist here first, of course, as they appeared in our indispensable first-half and second-half previews.
Here’s a list of the finalists in all four categories with bonus links and excerpts where available:
Fiction:
Dark at the Crossing by Elliot Ackerman(excerpt)
The King Is Always Above the People: Stories by Daniel Alarcón
Miss Burma by Charmaine Craig (excerpt)
Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan (Egan’s Year in Reading)
The Leavers by Lisa Ko (excerpt)
Pachinko by Min Jin Lee (People Without a Home: On Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko)
Her Body and Other Parties: Stories by Carmen Maria Machado
A Kind of Freedom by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton (excerpt)
Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward (“Haunted by Ghosts: The Millions Interviews Jesmyn Ward“, “Literature’s Inherited Trauma: On Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing“)
Barren Island by Carol Zoref
Nonfiction:
Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge by Erica Armstrong Dunbar (excerpt)
The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America by Frances FitzGerald (excerpt)
Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America by James Forman, Jr. (excerpt)
The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia by Masha Gessen (read our interview with Gessen)
Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the F.B.I. by David Grann (excerpt)
No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need by Naomi Klein (excerpt)
Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America by Nancy MacLean (read our interview with MacLean)
The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein (excerpt)
The Blood of Emmett Till by Timothy B. Tyson (excerpt)
Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News by Kevin Young
Poetry:
Half-Light: Collected Poems 1965-2016 by Frank Bidart
When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities by Chen Chen
The Book of Endings by Leslie Harrison
Magdalene by Marie Howe
Where Now: New and Selected Poems by Laura Kasischke
Whereas by Layli Long Soldier (Nick Ripatrazone on Layli Long Soldier)
In the Language of My Captor by Shane McCrae
Square Inch Hours by Sherod Santos
Don’t Call Us Dead by Danez Smith (Nick Ripatrazone on Danez Smith; excerpt)
Afterland by Mai Der Vang
Young People’s Literature:
What Girls Are Made Of by Elana K. Arnold
Far from the Tree by Robin Benway
All the Wind in the World by Samantha Mabry
You Bring the Distant Near by Mitali Perkins
Long Way Down by Jason Reynolds
I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter by Erika L. Sánchez
Orphan Island by Laurel Snyder
The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas (excerpt)
Clayton Byrd Goes Underground by Rita Williams-Garcia
American Street by Ibi Zoboi