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The Great Fall 2024 Book Preview
With the arrival of autumn comes a deluge of great books. Here you'll find a sampling of new and forthcoming titles that caught our eye here at The Millions, and that we think might catch yours, too. Some we’ve already perused in galley form; others we’re eager to devour based on their authors, plots, or subject matters. We hope your next fall read is among them.
—Sophia Stewart, editor
October
Season of the Swamp by Yuri Herrera, tr. Lisa Dillman [F]
What it is: An epic, speculative account of the 18 months that Benito Juárez spent in New Orleans in 1853-54, years before he became the first and only Indigenous president of Mexico.
Who it's for: Fans of speculative history; readers who appreciate the magic that swirls around any novel set in New Orleans. —Claire Kirch
The Black Utopians by Aaron Robertson [NF]
What it is: An exploration of Black Americans' pursuit and visions of utopia—both ideological and physical—that spans the Reconstruction era to the present day and combines history, memoir, and reportage.
Who it's for: Fans of Saidiya Hartman's Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments and Kristen R. Ghodsee's Everyday Utopia. —Sophia M. Stewart
The Third Realm by Karl Ove Knausgaard, tr. Martin Aitken [F]
What it is: The third installment in Knausgaard's Morning Star series, centered on the appearance of a mysterious new star in the skies above Norway.
Who it's for: Real Knausgaard heads only—The Wolves of Eternity and Morning Star are required reading for this one. —SMS
Brown Women Have Everything by Sayantani Dasgupta [NF]
What it is: Essays on the contradictions and complexities of life as an Indian woman in America, probing everything from hair to family to the joys of travel.
Who it's for: Readers of Durga Chew-Bose, Erika L. Sánchez, and Tajja Isen. —SMS
The Plot Against Native America by Bill Vaughn [F]
What it is: The first narrative history of Native American boarding schools— which aimed "civilize" Indigenous children by violently severing them from their culture— and their enduring, horrifying legacy.
Who it's for: Readers of Ned Blackhawk and Kathleen DuVal. —SMS
The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich [F]
What it is: Erdrich's latest novel set in North Dakota's Red River Valley is a tale of the intertwined lives of ordinary people striving to survive and even thrive in their rural community, despite environmental upheavals, the 2008 financial crisis, and other obstacles.
Who it's for: Readers of cli-fi; fans of Linda LeGarde Grover and William Faulkner. —CK
The Position of Spoons by Deborah Levy [NF]
What it is: The second book from Levy in as many years, diverging from a recent streak of surrealist fiction with a collection of essays marked by exceptional observance and style.
Who it's for: Close lookers and the perennially curious. —John H. Maher
The Bog Wife by Kay Chronister [F]
What it's about: The Haddesley family has lived on the same West Virginia bog for centuries, making a supernatural bargain with the land—a generational blood sacrifice—in order to do so—until an uncovered secret changes everything.
Who it's for: Readers of Karen Russell and Jeff VanderMeer; anyone who has ever used the phrase "girl moss." —SMS
The Great When by Alan Moore [F]
What it's about: When an 18-year old book reseller comes across a copy of a book that shouldn’t exist, it threatens to upend not just an already post-war-torn London, but reality as we know it.
Who it's for: Anyone looking for a Sherlock Holmes-style mystery dipped in thaumaturgical psychedelia. —Daniella Fishman
The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates [NF]
What it's about: One of our sharpest critical thinkers on social justice returns to nonfiction, nearly a decade after Between the World and Me, visiting Dakar, to contemplate enslavement and the Middle Passage; Columbia, S.C., as a backdrop for his thoughts on Jim Crow and book bans; and the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where he sees contemporary segregation in the treatment of Palestinians.
Who it’s for: Fans of James Baldwin, George Orwell, and Angela Y. Davis; readers of Nikole Hannah-Jones’s The 1619 Project and Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste, to name just a few engagements with national and racial identity. —Nathalie op de Beeck
Abortion by Jessica Valenti [NF]
What it is: Columnist and memoirist Valenti, who tracks pro-choice advocacy and attacks on the right to choose in her Substack, channels feminist rage into a guide for freedom of choice advocacy.
Who it’s for: Readers of Robin Marty’s The New Handbook for a Post-Roe America, #ShoutYourAbortion proponents, and followers of Jennifer Baumgartner’s [I Had an Abortion] project. —NodB
Gifted by Suzuki Suzumi, tr. Allison Markin Powell [F]
What it's about: A young sex worker in Tokyo's red-light district muses on her life and recounts her abusive mother's final days, in what is Suzuki's first novel to be translated into English.
Who it's for: Readers of Susan Boyt and Mieko Kanai; fans of moody, introspective fiction; anyone with a fraught relationship to their mother. —SMS
Childish Literature by Alejandro Zambra, tr. Megan McDowell [F]
What it is: A wide-ranging collection of stories, essays, and poems that explore childhood, fatherhood, and family.
Who it's for: Fans of dad lit (see: Lucas Mann's Attachments, Keith Gessen's Raising Raffi, Karl Ove Knausgaard's seasons quartet, et al). —SMS
Books Are Made Out of Books ed. Michael Lynn Crews [NF]
What it is: A mining of the archives of the late Cormac McCarthy with a focus on the famously tight-lipped author's literary influences.
Who it's for: Anyone whose commonplace book contains the words "arquebus," "cordillera," or "vinegaroon." —JHM
Slaveroad by John Edgar Wideman [F]
What it is: A blend of memoir, fiction, and history that charts the "slaveroad" that runs through American history, spanning the Atlantic slave trade to the criminal justice system, from the celebrated author of Brothers and Keepers.
Who it's for: Fans of Clint Smith and Ta-Nehisi Coates. —SMS
Linguaphile by Julie Sedivy [NF]
What it's about: Linguist Sedivy reflects on a life spent loving language—its beauty, its mystery, and the essential role it plays in human existence.
Who it's for: Amateur (or professional) linguists; fans of the podcast A Way with Words (me). —SMS
An Image of My Name Enters America by Lucy Ives [NF]
What it is: A collection of interrelated essays that connect moments from Ives's life to larger questions of history, identity, and national fantasy,
Who it's for: Fans of Ives, one of our weirdest and most wondrous living writers—duh; anyone with a passing interest in My Little Pony, Cold War–era musicals, or The Three Body Problem, all of which are mined here for great effect. —SMS
Women's Hotel by Daniel Lavery [F]
What it is: A novel set in 1960s New York City, about the adventures of the residents of a hotel providing housing for young women that is very much evocative of the real-life legendary Barbizon Hotel.
Who it's for: Readers of Mary McCarthy's The Group and Rona Jaffe's The Best of Everything. —CK
The World in Books by Kenneth C. Davis [NF]
What it is: A guide to 52 of the most influential works of nonfiction ever published, spanning works from Plato to Ida B. Wells, bell hooks to Barbara Ehrenreich, and Sun Tzu to Joan Didion.
Who it's for: Lovers of nonfiction looking to cover their canonical bases. —SMS
Blue Light Hours by Bruna Dantas Lobato [F]
What it's about: Through the emanating blue-glow of their computer screens, a mother and daughter, four-thousand miles apart, find solace and loneliness in their nightly Skype chats in this heartstring-pulling debut.
Who it's for: Someone who needs to be reminded to CALL YOUR MOTHER! —DF
Riding Like the Wind by Iris Jamahl Dunkle [NF]
What it is: The biography of Sanora Babb, a contemporary of John Steinbeck's whose field notes and interviews with Dust Bowl migrants Steinbeck relied upon to write The Grapes of Wrath.
Who it's for: Steinbeck fans and haters alike; readers of Kristin Hannah's The Four Winds and the New York Times Overlooked column; anyone interested in learning more about the Dust Bowl migrants who fled to California hoping for a better life. —CK
Innie Shadows by Olivia M. Coetzee [F]
What it is: a work of crime fiction set on the outskirts of Cape Town, where a community marred by violence seeks justice and connection; also the first novel to be translated from Kaaps, a dialect of Afrikaans that was until recently only a spoken language.
Who it's for: fans of sprawling, socioeconomically-attuned crime dramas a la The Wire. —SMS
Dorothy Parker in Hollywood by Gail Crowther [NF]
What it is: A history of the famous wit—and famous New Yorker—in her L.A. era, post–Algonquin Round Table and mid–Red Scare.
Who it's for: Owners of a stack of hopelessly dog-eared Joan Didion paperbacks. —JHM
The Myth of American Idealism by Noam Chomsky and Nathan J. Robinson [NF]
What it is: A potent critique of the ideology behind America's foreign interventions and its status as a global power, and an treatise on how the nation's hubristic pursuit of "spreading democracy" threatens not only the delicate balance of global peace, but the already-declining health of our planet.
Who it's for: Chomskyites; policy wonks and casual critics of American recklessness alike. —DF
Mysticism by Simon Critchley [NF]
What it is: A study of mysticism—defined as an experience, rather than religious practice—by the great British philosopher Critchley, who mines music, poetry, and literature along the way.
Who it's for: Readers of John Gray, Jorge Luis Borges, and Simone Weil. —SMS
Q&A by Adrian Tomine [NF]
What it is: The Japanese American creator of the Optic Nerve comic book series for D&Q, and of many a New Yorker cover, shares his personal history and his creative process in this illustrated unburdening.
Who it’s for: Readers of Tomine’s melancholic, sometimes cringey, and occasionally brutal collections of comics short stories including Summer Blonde, Shortcomings, and Killing and Dying. —NodB
Sonny Boy by Al Pacino [NF]
What it is: Al Pacino's memoir—end of description.
Who it's for: Cinephiles; anyone curious how he's gonna spin fumbling Diane Keaton. —SMS
Seeing Baya by Alice Kaplan [NF]
What it is: The first biography of the enigmatic and largely-forgotten Algerian artist Baya Mahieddine, who first enchanted midcentury Paris as a teenager.
Who it's for: Admirers of Leonora Carrington, Hilma af Klint, Frida Kahlo, and other belatedly-celebrated women painters. —SMS
Absolution by Jeff VanderMeer [F]
What it is: A surprise return to the Area X, the stretch of unforbidding and uncanny coastline in the hit Southern Reach trilogy.
Who it's for: Anyone who's heard this song and got the reference without Googling it. —JHM
The Four Horsemen by Nick Curtola [NF]
What it is: The much-anticipated cookbook from the team behind Brooklyn's hottest restaurant (which also happens to be co-owned by James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem).
Who it's for: Oenophiles; thirty-somethings who live in north Williamsburg (derogatory). —SMS
Seeing Further by Esther Kinsky, tr. Caroline Schmidt [F]
What it's about: An unnamed German woman embarks on the colossal task of reviving a cinema in a small Hungarian village.
Who it's for: Fans of Jenny Erpenbeck; anyone charmed by Cinema Paradiso (not derogatory!). —SMS
Ripcord by Nate Lippens [NF]
What it's about: A novel of class, sex, friendship, and queer intimacy, written in delicious prose and narrated by a gay man adrift in Milwaukee.
Who it's for: Fans of Brontez Purnell, Garth Greenwell, Alexander Chee, and Wayne Koestenbaum. —SMS
The Use of Photography by Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie, tr. Alison L. Strayer [NF]
What it's about: Ernaux's love affair with Marie, a journalist, while she was undergoing treatment for cancer, and their joint project to document their romance.
Who it's for: The Ernaux hive, obviously; readers of Sontag's On Photography and Janet Malcolm's Still Pictures. —SMS
Nora Ephron at the Movies by Ilana Kaplan [NF]
What it is: Kaplan revisits Nora Ephron's cinematic watersheds—Silkwood, Heartburn, When Harry Met Sally, You've Got Mail, and Sleepless in Seattle—in this illustrated book. Have these iconic stories, and Ephron’s humor, weathered more than 40 years?
Who it’s for: Film history buffs who don’t mind a heteronormative HEA; listeners of the Hot and Bothered podcast; your coastal grandma. —NodB
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The Philosophy of Translation by Damion Searls [NF]
What it is: A meditation on the act and art of translation by one of today's most acclaimed practitioners, best known for his translations of Fosse, Proust, et al.
Who it's for: Regular readers of Words Without Borders and Asymptote; professional and amateur literary translators alike. —SMS
Salvage by Dionne Brand
What it is: A penetrating reevaluation of the British literary canon and the tropes once shaped Brand's reading life and sense of self—and Brand’s first major work of nonfiction since her landmark A Map to the Door of No Return.
Who it's for: Readers of Christina Sharpe's Ordinary Notes and Elizabeth Hardwick's Seduction and Betrayal. —SMS
Masquerade by Mike Fu [F]
What it's about: Housesitting for an artist friend in present-day New York, Meadow Liu stumbles on a novel whose author shares his name—the first of many strange, haunting happenings that lead up to the mysterious disappearance of Meadow's friend.
Who it's for: fans of Ed Park and Alexander Chee. —SMS
November
The Beggar Student by Osamu Dazai, tr. Sam Bett [F]
What it is: A novella in the moody vein of Dazai’s acclaimed No Longer Human, following the 30-something “fictional” Dazai into another misadventure spawned from a hubristic spat with a high schooler.
Who it's for: Longtime readers of Dazai, or new fans who discovered the midcentury Japanese novelist via TikTok and the Bungo Stray Dogs anime. —DF
In Thrall by Jane DeLynn [F]
What it is: A landmark lesbian bildungsroman about 16-year-old Lynn's love affair with her English teacher, originally published in 1982.
Who it's for: Fans of Joanna Russ's On Strike Against God and Edmund White's A Boy's Own Story —SMS
Washita Love Child by Douglas Kent Miller [NF]
What it is: The story of Jesse Ed Davis, the Indigenous musician who became on of the most sought after guitarists of the late '60s and '70s, playing alongside B.B. King, Bob Dylan, John Lennon, and more.
Who it's for: readers of music history and/or Indigenous history; fans of Joy Harjo, who wrote the foreword. —SMS
Set My Heart on Fire by Izumi Suzuki, tr. Helen O'Horan [F]
What it is: Gritty, sexy, and wholly rock ’n’ roll, Suzuki’s first novel translated into English (following her story collection, Hit Parade of Tears) follows 20-year-old Izumi navigating life, love, and music in the underground scene in '70s Japan.
Who it's for: Fans of Meiko Kawakami, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Marlowe Granados's Happy Hour. —DF
Didion & Babitz by Lili Anolik [NF]
What it is: A dual portrait of Joan Didion and Eve Babitz, who are so often compared to—and pitted against—each other on the basis of their mutual Los Angeles milieu.
Who it's for: Fans or haters of either writer (the book is fairly pro-Babitz, often at Didion's expense); anyone who has the Lit Hub Didion tote bag. —SMS
The Endless Refrain by David Rowell [NF]
What it's about: How the rise of music streaming, demonitizing of artist revenue, and industry tendency toward nostalgia have laid waste to the musical landscape, and the future of music culture.
Who it's for: Fans of Kyle Chayka, Spence Kornhaber, and Lindsay Zoladz. —SMS
Every Arc Bends Its Radian by Sergio De La Pava [F]
What it is: A mind- and genre-bending detective story set in Cali, Colombia, that blends high-stakes suspense with rigorous philosophy.
Who it's for: Readers of Raymond Chandler, Thomas Pynchon, and Jules Verne. —SMS
Something Close to Nothing by Tom Pyun [F]
What it’s about: At the airport with his white husband Jared, awaiting a flight to Cambodia to meet the surrogate mother carrying their adoptive child-to-be, Korean American Wynn decides parenthood isn't for him, and bad behavior ensues.
Who it’s for: Pyun’s debut is calculated to cut through saccharine depictions of queer parenthood—could pair well with Torrey Peters’s Detransition, Baby. —NodB
Rosenfeld by Maya Kessler [F]
What it is: Kessler's debut—rated R for Rosenfeld—follows one Noa Simmons through the tumultuous and ultimately profound power play that is courting (and having a lot of sex with) the titular older man who soon becomes her boss.
Who it's for: Fans of Sex and the City, Raven Leilani’s Luster, and Coco Mellor’s Cleopatra and Frankenstein. —DF
Lazarus Man by Richard Price [F]
What it is: The former The Wire writer offers yet another astute chronicle of urban life, this time of an ever-changing Harlem.
Who it's for: Fans of Colson Whitehead's Crook Manifesto and Paul Murray's The Bee Sting—and, of course, The Wire. —SMS
Stranger Than Fiction by Edwin Frank [NF]
What it is: An astute curveball of a read on the development and many manifestations of the novel throughout the tumultuous 20th century.
Who it's for: Readers who look at a book's colophon before its title. —JHM
Letters to His Neighbor by Marcel Proust, tr. Lydia Davis
What it is: A collection of Proust’s tormented—and frequently hilarious—letters to his noisy neighbor which, in a diligent translation from Davis, stand the test of time.
Who it's for: Proust lovers; people who live below heavy-steppers. —DF
Context Collapse by Ryan Ruby [NF]
What it is: A self-proclaimed "poem containing a history of poetry," from ancient Greece to the Iowa Workshop, from your favorite literary critic's favorite literary critic.
Who it's for: Anyone who read and admired Ruby's titanic 2022 essay on The Waste Land; lovers of poetry looking for a challenge. —SMS
How Sondheim Can Change Your Life by Richard Schoch [NF]
What it's about: Drama professor Schoch's tribute to Stephen Sondheim and the life lessons to be gleaned from his music.
Who it's for: Sondheim heads, former theater kids, end of list. —SMS
The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer [NF]
What it is: 2022 MacArthur fellow and botanist Kimmerer, an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, (re)introduces audiences to a flowering, fruiting native plant beloved of foragers and gardeners.
Who it’s for: The restoration ecologist in your life, along with anyone who loved Braiding Sweetgrass and needs a nature-themed holiday gift. —NodB
My Heart Belongs in an Empty Big Mac Container Buried Beneath the Ocean Floor by Homeless [F]
What it is: A pseudonymous, tenderly comic novel of blue whales and Golden Arches, mental illness and recovery.
Who it's for: Anyone who finds Thomas Pynchon a bit too staid. —JHM
Yoke and Feather by Jessie van Eerden [NF]
What it's about: Van Eerden's braided essays explore the "everyday sacred" to tease out connections between ancient myth and contemporary life.
Who it's for: Readers of Courtney Zoffness's Spilt Milk and Jeanna Kadlec's Heretic. —SMS
Camp Jeff by Tova Reich [F]
What it's about: A "reeducation" center for sex pests in the Catskills, founded by one Jeffery Epstein (no, not that one), where the dual phenomena of #MeToo and therapyspeak collide.
Who it's for: Fans of Philip Roth and Nathan Englander; cancel culture skeptics. —SMS
Selected Amazon Reviews by Kevin Killian [NF]
What it is: A collection of 16 years of Killian’s funniest, wittiest, and most poetic Amazon reviews, the sheer number of which helped him earn the rarefied “Top 100” and “Hall of Fame” status on the site.
Who it's for: Fans of Wayne Koestenbaum and Dodie Bellamy, who wrote introduction and afterword, respectively; people who actually leave Amazon reviews. —DF
Cher by Cher [NF]
What it is: The first in a two-volume memoir, telling the story of Cher's early life and ascendent career as only she can tell it.
Who it's for: Anyone looking to fill the My Name Is Barbra–sized hole in their heart, or looking for something to tide them over until the Liza memoir drops. —SMS
The City and Its Uncertain Walls by Haruki Murakami, tr. Philip Gabriel [F]
What it is: Murakami’s first novel in over six years returns to the high-walled city from his 1985 story "Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World" with one man's search for his lost love—and, simultaneously, an ode to libraries and literature itself.
Who it's for: Murakami fans who have long awaited his return to fiction. —DF
American Bulk by Emily Mester [NF]
What it's about: Reflecting on what it means to "live life to the fullest," Mester explores the cultural and personal impacts of America’s culture of overconsumption, from Costco hauls to hoarding to diet culture—oh my!
Who it's for: Lovers of sustainability; haters of excess; skeptics of the title essay of Becca Rothfeld's All Things Are Too Small. —DF
The Icon and the Idealist by Stephanie Gorton [NF]
What it is: A compelling look at the rivalry between Margaret Sanger, of Planned Parenthood fame, and Mary Ware Dennett, who each held radically different visions for the future of birth control.
Who it's for: Readers of Amy Sohn's The Man Who Hated Women and Katherine Turk's The Women of NOW; anyone interested in the history of reproductive rights. —SMS
December
Rental House by Weike Wang [F]
What it's about: Married college sweethearts invite their drastically different families on a Cape Code vacation, raising questions about marriage, intimacy, and kinship.
Who it's for: Fans of Wang's trademark wit and sly humor (see: Joan Is Okay and Chemistry); anyone with an in-law problem.
Woo Woo by Ella Baxter [F]
What it's about: A neurotic conceptual artist loses her shit in the months leading up to an exhibition that she hopes will be her big breakout, poking fun at the tropes of the "art monster" and the "woman of the verge" in one fell, stylish swoop.
Who it's for: Readers of Sheena Patel's I'm a Fan and Chris Kraus's I Love Dick; any woman who is grateful to but now also sort of begrudges Jenny Offil for introducing "art monster" into the lexicon (me). —SMS
Berlin Atomized by Julia Kornberg, tr. Jack Rockwell and Julia Kornberg [F]
What it's about: Spanning 2001 to 2034, three Jewish and downwardly mobile siblings come of age in various corners of the world against the backdrop of global crisis.
Who it's for: Fans of Catherine Lacey's Biography of X and Joshua Cohen's The Netanyahus. —SMS
Sand-Catcher by Omar Khalifah, tr. Barbara Romaine [F]
What it is: A suspenseful, dark satire of memory and nation, in which four young Palestinian journalists at a Jordanian newspaper are assigned to interview an elderly witness to the Nakba, the violent 1948 expulsion of native Palestinians from Israel—but to their surprise, the survivor doesn’t want to rehash his trauma for the media.
Who it’s for: Anyone looking insight—tinged with grim humor—into the years leading up to the present political crisis in the Middle East and the decades-long goal of Palestinian autonomy. —NodB
The Shutouts by Gabrielle Korn [F]
What it's about: In the dystopian future, mysteriously connected women fight to survive on the margins of society amid worsening climate collapse.
Who it's for: Fans of Korn's Yours for the Taking, which takes place in the same universe; readers of Becky Chambers and queer-inflected sci-fi. —SMS
What in Me Is Dark by Orlando Reade [NF]
What it's about: The enduring, evolving influence of Milton's Paradise Lost on political history—and particularly on the work of 12 revolutionary readers, including Malcom X and Hannah Arendt.
Who it's for: English majors and fans of Ryan Ruby and Sarah Bakewell—but I repeat myself. —SMS
The Afterlife Is Letting Go by Brandon Shimoda [NF]
What it's about: Shimoda researches the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during WWII, and speaks with descendants of those imprisoned, for this essay collection about the “afterlife” of cruelty and xenophobia in the U.S.
Who it’s for: Anyone to ever visit a monument, museum, or designated site of hallowed ground where traumatic events have taken place. —NodB
No Place to Bury the Dead by Karina Sainz Borgo, tr. Elizabeth Bryer [F]
What it's about: When Angustias Romero loses both her children while fleeing a mysterious disease in her unnamed Latin American country, she finds herself in a surreal, purgatorial borderland where she's soon caught in a power struggle.
Who it's for: Fans of Maríana Enriquez and Mohsin Hamid. —SMS
The Rest Is Silence by Augusto Monterroso, tr. Aaron Kerner [F]
What it is: The author of some of the shortest, and tightest, stories in Latin American literature goes long with a metafictional skewering of literary criticism in his only novel.
Who it's for: Anyone who prefers the term "palm-of-the-hand stories" to "flash fiction." —JHM
Tali Girls by Siamak Herawi, tr. Sara Khalili [F]
What it is: An intimate, harrowing, and vital look at the lives of girls and women in an Afghan mountain village under Taliban rule, based on true stories.
Who it's for: Readers of Nadia Hashimi, Akwaeke Emezi, and Maria Stepanova. —SMS
Sun City by Tove Jansson, tr. Thomas Teal [F]
What it's about: During her travels through the U.S. in the 1970s, Jansson became interested in the retirement home as a peculiarly American institution—here, she imagines the tightly knit community within one of them.
Who it's for: Fans of Jansson's other fiction for adults, much of which explores the lives of elderly folks; anyone who watched that documentary about The Villages in Florida. —SMS
Editor's note: We're always looking to make our seasonal book previews more useful to the readers, writers, and critics they're meant to serve. Got an idea for how we can improve our coverage? Tell me about it at sophia@themillions.com.
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A Year in Reading: Jayne Anne Phillips
I’ve loved a lot of books this year, relatively recent discoveries I’ve finally had time to dive into, or books I’ve re-read, like Jo Ann Beard’s In Zanesville, Barry Gifford’s The Roy Stories, Christa Parravani’s haunting memoir, Her. Reviewing a new biography of Stephen Crane (Paul Sorrentino’s Stephen Crane: A Life of Fire) sent me back to Crane’s poetry (“Because it is bitter/ and because it is my heart”) and prose. The Red Badge of Courage and his gorgeous stories remain immortal. The pulsing synesthesia that marked his writing emanates, controlled and rhythmic, in every graph.
I’ve needed books this year, as the world and the Republic shudder and seem to devolve. Books can be visionary arcs of narration that soar beyond our time, even by penetrating the past. Alchemy and transformation are on my mind: the magic of character, the wonder of the sentence on the page, the spiritual ascendance of books that bear witness. James Agee’s A Death In The Family, with its searing gaze into the heart of identity, remains my Bible. My pantheon includes They Came Like Swallows, by William Maxwell, Katherine Anne Porter’s “Pale Horse, Pale Rider,” William Kotzwinkle’s Swimmer in The Secret Sea, and Irene McKinney’s collected poems, Unthinkable. I love her single volumes: Vivid Companion, tightly bound as a silken correspondence, and her posthumous, Have You Had Enough Darkness Yet? Each of these books moves through death as though it were a mere worm hole in a celestial galaxy; each decodes a personal survival that made writing the work a necessity for the writer. History, personal or national, may tell us the facts, but literature tells us the story, and stories are immortal. Poetry is full of story. Louise Gluck’s Faithful And Virtuous Night is its own soaring novel; Brenda Shaughnessy’s Our Andromeda imagines an adjacent constellation; “rows of ghosts come forth to sing” in Rigoberto Gonzalez’s Unpeopled Eden. Poems can break character into glittering shards and let us see it whole: Adrian Matejka’s The Big Smoke “sees” bigger-than-life boxer Jack Johnson; Van Jordan’s M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A imagines the life of 13-year-old MacNolia Cox, the first African American contestant in a '30s-era national spelling bee, disqualified by Southern judges with an unofficial word: “nemesis.” If character is destiny, memorize Leonard Gardner’s masterpiece, Fat City: a perfect novel about “allegiance to fate” in late-'50s Stockton, Calif. If you’re a reader who looks askance at the writer of the moment, don’t let that wariness warn you off Penelope Fitzgerald, suddenly awarded the attention we wish she’d had when she was nearly destitute, raising three children in a drafty houseboat on the Thames. She saw it all through to The Blue Flower, her own masterpiece, a book I read every year for sheer pleasure, with depthless thanks.
More from A Year in Reading 2014
Don't miss: A Year in Reading 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005
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End Zones: On Football, Sports Scandals, and Don DeLillo
1.
I teach a course on sports literature and culture at Rutgers-Newark, and we will have a lot to talk about this summer. Unfortunately, our subject will be close to home. The continuing debacle at the New Brunswick campus saddens me. I have stopped revising my syllabus: I simply cannot keep up with the hourly developments. A school that is home to Nobel laureates, National Book Award winners, dedicated faculty, talented students, and nationally recognized programs has become a punchline. The Providence Journal's Jim Donaldson quips that we are rightfully the Scarlet Knights, since we should be “red-faced with embarrassment.” NBC Sports calls our athletic department a “disaster.” Even Inside Higher Education, a publication devoted to the academic and administrative sides of university life, calls the recent developments “downright shocking.”
Yet former governor Tom Kean says politicians should “shut up” about Rutgers. Governor Chris Christie claims “absolute confidence” in Rutgers President Robert Barchi, who in turn assures that Julie Hermann, the controversial incoming athletic director, is the right person for the job. They all need to watch a replay. The recent athletic drama has been nearly Shakespearean: Mike Rice, the basketball coach with an abusive style, was merely suspended rather than fired. That is, until video of his actions were televised on ESPN. Athletic director Tim Pernetti resigned, but is now championed to return by loyal supporters. Replacement basketball coach Eddie Jordan, advertised as a Rutgers alumnus, did not actually graduate from the university. And Julie Hermann is haunted by her own coaching style, which caused her entire volleyball team to write a scathing letter of criticism. That letter led to her resignation from her position at the University of Tennessee.
That would be enough for the final scene of Hamlet, but not Rutgers.
Members of the search committee for the new athletic director have voiced their concern with the rushed process, which included a $70,000 background check that failed to check Hermann’s background. They missed her role in a 2008 sex discrimination lawsuit during her tenure as a senior athletics administrator at the University of Louisville. Now the university has spent $150,000 on crisis communications to deal with this mess, and Hermann arrives at campus this week. Rutgers is set to join the Big Ten conference, the final step in a decade-long ascension to the national athletic scene. More importantly, the university is in the midst of the largest merger in the history of American higher education, as Rutgers joins with the University of Medicine and Dentistry in New Jersey. And yet Dick Vitale is right: we have become a national “soap opera.” I certainly will not claim that I predicted this, but I think Don DeLillo did.
2.
“Hit somebody, hit somebody, hit somebody”: a refrain spoken by Emmett Creed, head coach of the Logos College football team in End Zone. Don DeLillo’s metafictive, surreal novel has always been the central text of my sports literature course. It is a wild story, with an overzealous, abusive coach who leads his team to victory at all costs. As I re-read passages in the cement-walled classroom of Conklin Hall, my Rutgers students know that I love this book. There is a tension in loving and writing about sports, and football exploits those opposing pulls, particularly in the hands of a stylist like DeLillo. His prose pops with the terse language of the gridiron, and these words are blasted through a bullhorn from a tower high above the practice field. Other coaches, and even the linguistic-majoring players, appropriate Creed’s words and cadence. His influence is not surprising. An archetypal leader in the tradition of Amos Alonzo Stagg and a former B-27 pilot, Creed was born “in either a log cabin or a manger.” After a brief career with the Chicago Bears, Creed coached at another college before he broke the jaw of a second-string quarterback who “said or did something he didn’t like.” He was famous, though, for “creating order out of chaos”; for resurrecting programs and careers.
End Zone is a metafictional satire in the DeLillo tradition. Absurd scenes are paused with parenthetical asides. Americana is skewered, and DeLillo, even in 1972, recognized that football had replaced baseball as our nation’s metonymic sport. Yet for all his sarcastic snipes, DeLillo sounds in love with the “autumnal rhythms” of football. He prefaces the reader with a critique of extended game sequences in fiction before devoting nearly 30 pages of End Zone to a play-by-play of a game against rival Centrex. Such self-awareness is certainly a hallmark of metafiction in the style of John Barth, but it is done so lovingly. DeLillo, it seems, wants it both ways.
As do I. One of my goals in teaching the sports literature course is to help students unpack the culture of sports in America. Reading DeLillo helps them examine the economic inequalities within Leonard Gardner’s Fat City, which in turn causes them to reconsider how the bodies of collegiate and professional athletes are owned by their coaches and institutions. Yet DeLillo’s novel shows why sports are so complicated: it is easy to bemoan and simultaneously enjoy the world of athletic decadence.
Coach Creed cancels a Friday workout before his team’s all-important game against rival Centrex. He “suggested” that the captains lead a “beer party” that night, with simple parameters: “no coaches, no females, no time limit.” DeLilllo eschews even a paragraph break before documenting that night’s action. Beer pounding led to fights, “mass vomiting,” and group singing. A defensive end punches his way through a door while others compete in a “pissing contest,” going “not for distance but for altitude.” Men wrestle, jump, spit at each other’s shoes, eat hamburgers, and chug ketchup. Gary Harkness, the novel’s sarcastic, self-aware narrator, admits the party “was the most disgusting, ridiculous and adolescent night I had ever spent.”
Yet such debauchery was decreed by the team’s patriarch. End Zone is a hyperbolic novel written with the care of a writer in love with elements of football, yet who clearly sees that culture’s surreal moments. The party was a night of male bonding without female distraction; women can be cheerleaders, they can be conquests for postgame parties, but football is a man’s world. DeLillo gives a window into this absurd boys’ club, but fogs the glass with his metafictional prose.
Another, later scene also appears soaked in hyperbole, but actually reveals DeLillo’s care in representing the minutiae of pregame pageantry. The Centrex game is now a reality. Nervous players feel out the Centrex stadium during an easy morning workout. They have an early meal of beef consommé, steak, and eggs before returning to the stadium. They warm up, mimicking the short and controlled bursts they will later employ in the game, and then convene in the locker room. The players smack each other on the helmets, grunting “Awright” and repeating mantras: “We hit, we hit.”
The chants are broken by a request for silence, and Coach Creed, arms crossed over chest, hand solemnly holding a baseball cap, avoids a long pregame speech. He instead delivers a single sentence: “I want the maximal effort.” The team explodes out of the tunnel, making “hard fast rhythmic sounds” as they are born to the audience: “Americans on a Saturday night.” The fans, the band, the cheerleaders, the uniformed young men on opposing sides, the football waiting to be kicked: they all compliment and channel the charged moment. Helmeted, these players are anonymous, yet dynamic members of a honed, single unit. I might smirk at DeLillo’s metafiction, but I am right there with him, with them, ready for this war.
3.
I have never played football, but I have lived football. My father was an All-American in high school and a running back for Holy Cross, playing against Jim Brown; my brother Mark was a fullback for the University of Delaware, and my brother Mike was recruited by Syracuse and Yale before an injury sidelined his career. They were never the type to volunteer replays drenched in nostalgia, but I asked to hear stories about long August double sessions with no water, blocking drills where they pushed players into the ground while churning their own cleats into the grass, and Gatorade-dumps on shocked coaches.
My father was the apex of all this football folklore. People in northern New Jersey know my surname because of my father, and still remember his rushing accolades at Dover High School in the early 1950s. Middle school janitors asked him, already a fully-grown man, to help move furniture; in high school he was the unofficial bouncer at our family’s bar and restaurant. He was fast, strong, and played both sides of the gridiron.
Yet my father has never fit any of the stereotypes about tough male athletes. He is caring and compassionate, and never once pushed any of his children to play sports, although he supported us every moment we participated. Now in his 70s, his biceps are still like rocks, but he is a gentle soul, more interested in building a ramp for my shed than bragging about past touchdowns.
By not playing football, but instead experiencing it through story and observation, I was able to cultivate a personal mythology of the sport without seeing the darker sides. I ran post patterns in my backyard, diving to catch Mike’s well-timed passes. I rushed into an imagined end zone bordered by bushes. I created notebooks full of imagined Saturday afternoon collegiate results. But I never played a second on the football field. My brothers attended a local Catholic school, but I went to a public school, where soccer was king. The football team struggled. The main draw of our Pep Rally was the soccer team’s shutout streak, not the football team. I’d seen photographs from my sister’s years at the school, when Pep Rally ended with a bonfire that smoked to the clouds, the football players flexing in front of the flames. That past seemed so distant it felt fake. I wonder if it felt the same way even then.
4.
Most would not consider what is happening at Rutgers a “football” scandal, but it is football that has driven Rutgers to pine for national athletic glory. Former Rutgers coach Greg Schiano was our savior, but when the NFL’s Tampa Bay Buccaneers poached him for the big time, we thought Rutgers athletics would survive. It was our time. We would become national power at football, but the exposure and money would seep into other sports and programs, and, God forbid, our academic departments.
On the surface, the Rutgers scandal is certainly different than the sexual abuse nightmare at Penn State. Yet the subject of the scandal is not often the key to understanding: rather, hyperbole is endemic to top-tier collegiate sports. In the world of Division I athletics, the unreal becomes real. Football is the center, the epitome of this world. Football is a sport centered on masculine bodies: the collision of those bodies, the dynamic movements of those forms. Football is men -- often large men -- moving at high speeds, making quick cuts, threading passes between the outstretched hands of cornerbacks, kicking long field goals under incredible pressure. Regardless of the tongue-in-cheek attempts of NFL Films and their slow-motion, Sam Spence scored game panoramas, football is a game grounded in control.
The coaches at Logos College want nightly prayer sessions, but Gary realizes that “people don’t go to football games to see pass patterns run by theologians.” These attempts at emotional control are only in service one endgame: victory. In DeLillo’s novel, Logos College loses handily to their rival, Centrex. The next day, the university hires an energetic sports information director, Wally Pippich, who admits that he doesn’t “know squat about football.” But he claims to know about entertainment, and about money. Pippich tells the novel’s troubled narrator that he’ll stick up for him, no matter his mistakes, because “next season we make it big.” No athletic sin is without the penance of victory. Although Logos College is full of brilliant students, sports are king on that campus. I wish this was fiction; instead, the novel is a microcosm of Division I college athletics at their worst.
I can poke fun at Pippich. I can note how Gary Harkness describes the man’s voice as “an animated cartoon,” a fake whose “mouth seemed to invent the words as well as speak them.” But the machine of college football, of American athletics as a whole, would not exist without people like me: people who complain about the world of sports, but who still play. People like me, who forgive the sins, who forget the scandals, because of innocence, ignorance, or both.
5.
My wife and I run at a local trail system. Running together has been a tradition since we met on the Susquehanna University track team. We usually wait until evening, but the summer sun still heats the air. We part after stretching: she runs distance for speed, and staying with her would be a miracle. I go to sprint. After a short warmup, I stretch again and ready myself for accelerations or hill repeats. A middle distance runner in high school and college, I don’t have the mental endurance for distance. I like short bursts, knowing that rest and recovery are near.
I love running in the heat. My muscles warm quickly, unlike those miles in cold where I feel stiff. I run myself drenched, and then I do a cooldown along a shaded, cinder trail that leads to the parking lot, where I am again baked in sun. I take a towel to the treeline and do push-ups and sit-ups until my stomach and shoulders tighten, and then I sit for a few minutes until my wife finishes her run.
I do this to stay healthy, but some days, especially the hottest ones, when my mind is massaged into imagination rather than reality, I think about playing football. After a sectional race in 1999, on the long bus ride home, one of the high school football coaches asked if I wanted to play wide receiver for the team the next year. A throwing coach, he didn’t realize I was a senior. He shrugged, but I was more disappointed: I wanted to play football. Not for wins or cheerleaders or other short-lived glories, but because my father and brothers played, because I ran down-and-out patterns against imaginary cornerbacks. Even then, I had compartmentalized football into manageable, safe parts. I like a good hit, but I love an open field run, a pattern cut to perfection, or a quarterback’s decision to leave the safety of the pocket. I can do that, because I remain on the outside of the sport. If I am so fascinated by a sport, a game, a culture of which I am an ancillary member, what of those who train and play it?
I don’t want to re-enroll in high school and play football. Something else is happening: the ritual of football culture, of athletics, has settled into my soul. I am a 32-year-old man sprinting down the hot roadway of a state park, and I have safely appropriated elements of football into my own mythology. I might do this with my idiosyncratic Catholicism; I suspect everyone does it with some element of their lives. We mold our beliefs into palpable forms, knowing that we fear their uneven shapes. I think about this now, but under the heat that weighs on my shoulders, I am thinking of sneakers pounding on asphalt, of some athletic burst that exists in a world where sport is pure and pain is temporary. It is only afterward, walking back to my car while sweat cools me under the wind, do I wonder if we are all fooled into racing toward our own end zones.
Image Credit: Wikipedia
Knockout Reading
This month's David and Goliath championship bout between Manny Pacquiao and Antonio Margarito may have brought boxing some new fans. Watching Pacquiao, outweighed some sixteen pounds, dazzlingly wallop the villainous but courageous Margarito, was nothing short of spectacular if not epic. Margarito, who had mocked Pacquiao trainer's Parkinsons just before the match, met poetic justice for the first time in Cowboys Stadium.
It's no wonder boxing has fascinated so many writers. The late Budd Schulberg, author of the novel and screenplay On the Waterfront, traces literature’s affair with pugilism back to Epeius and Euryalus' fist-fight during the siege of Troy in The Iliad. He also describes Lord Byron fancying the sixty-round bare-knuckled fighting popular in his day. In the 20th century, A.J. Liebling in the New Yorker famously set the bar high for boxing journalism, employing obscured latinate words between steak and whiskey dinners in West Side dives. In fact, his haughty tones and smart aleck descriptions can even sound condescending to the world he described. (Joyce Carol Oates has gone as far as to say his boxing writing is racist.) Boxing was clearly a serious matter for manly men, a tradition followed by the new journalists, who seemed to have viewed the boxing piece as a rite of passage. Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer, Hunter Thompson and Gay Talese, all wrote extensively about pugilism, but none of these portrayals of real life boxers nurse a bookworm’s dream of being a toughened fighter like fiction.
Ernest Hemingway was a master of fiction and a master of fictional boxing, a self-proclaimed boxing expert in Paris, who despite his lack of experience, trained poet Ezra Pound and coached the Spanish painter Juan Miro on his jab; unfortunately, his sparring matches with real boxers like Canadian Morley Callaghan got Hemingway pummeled. And yet despite his lack of talent, Hemingway continued following and writing about boxing. His stories “Fifty Grand” and “The Battler” are both based on pugilists, as is Robert Cohn from The Sun Also Rises.
There is plenty of bad boxing fiction, mostly old, mostly clichéd, mostly rotting away in used bins, or library sales racks, but then there are the gems, the ones that endure. In the last couple of years I’ve come across a few that are not just good boxing fiction but good fiction. They all inexplicably take place in California (where both Pacquiao and Margarito both trained before their match).
Fat City by Leonard Gardner is one of the best novellas I've read this year. It's a noir novel without really trying to be one. No detectives, city nights, or hyperbolically dark dialogue, instead we have subtle descriptions, hazy characters; some of its patiently rendered urban landscape descriptions almost slip by, as the reader enters 1950s Stockton, on the beat street motels, between hot pans and dirty sheets. When not working odd jobs, the book’s protagonist Billy Tulley (a name vaguely reminiscent of late champ Gene Tunney) is boxing or being an alcoholic, a combination which you can imagine must be horribly painful, not to mention high unlikely. Still, Tulley sweats out his shakes at Ludo's Gym where a sign reads: “PLEASE DON'T SPIT ON THE FLOOR GET UP AND SPIT IN THE TOILET BOWL” and where dialogue like this can be overheard in the changing room:
“You want to know what (sic) make a good fighter?”
“What's that?”
“It's believing in yourself. That the will to win. The rest condition. You want to kick ass, you kick ass.”
When not training, Tulley is sopping up booze into bars, where sometimes people even recognize him as the promising fighter he once was. But then, he gets into a tangle with a malevolent female — a must in any noir novel — something like a trashier version of Holy Golightly from Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Somehow, despite the archetypal characters, the story, thanks to its effortlessly sleek story, manages to move. Tulley’s struggle to make himself ¨kick ass¨ in the face of alcoholism and loneliness is tragic, and perhaps tragically outdated in this era of athletic competitiveness, but is told in such a way that the reader can’t help but want to save Tulley from one punishment or another. I was only disappointed when I found out Gardner hadn't written any other novels.
Gardners‘s gruesome tell-it-like-it-is portrait of working class in California reminded me of another book that brims with fisticuffs, Ham on Rye. I should preface my description of the novel by saying that I’ve never been a Bukowksi lover. Since high school I thought his old man alcoholic misogyny was kind of boring, but this book is different from his others: his fictional self is only a pre-teen , plagued by acne, no chance at being cool, but angry enough so he isn’t the catch of the day for his belligerent friends who endlessly pull at their crotches, compare wieners, and fantasize about every female near them. Bukwoski writes:
Each afternoon after school there would be a fight between two of the older boys. It was always out by the back fence were there was never a teacher about. And the fights were never even; it was always a large boy against a smaller boy and the larger boy would beat the smaller boy with his fists, backing him into the fence. The smaller boy would attempt to fight back but it was useless. Soon his face was bloody, the blood running down into his shirt.
What I think makes this particular pointdexter protagonist so interesting is that he’s tougher than a stale piece of jerky, as are all the other kids. In this world, “even the sissies took their beatings quietly.” Zealously narrated kiddy fight scenes run like well told bar stories:
They squared off. Wagner had some good moves. He bobbed, he weaved, he shuffled his feet, he moved in and out, and he made little hissing sounds. He was impressive. He caught Moscowitz with three straight left jabs. Moscowitz just stood there with his hands at his sides. He didn’t know anything about boxing. Then Wagner cracked Moscowitz with a right on the jaw.
The interchange continues until Moscowitz turns the fight around:
Moscowitz was a puncher. He dug a left to that pot belly. Wagner grasped and dropped. He fell to both knees. His face was cut and bleeding. His chin was on his chest and he looked sick.
Paradoxically these school fights, although bloody, are nothing compared to the beatings Bukowski gets from his dad. In fact, these fights seem almost cathartic, a good thing in comparison to the much more serious and scary adult world that surrounds them.
Nearly everyone’s seen the Clint Eastwood movie Million Dollar Baby starring Hillary Swank as a female boxer from the sticks, but not everyone knows it’s based on a short story by F.X. Toole. A fledgling writer most of his life, Toole was a cut man by trade, the guy in the corner who swabs and smears Vaseline on a fighter’s face, after having been told he was too old for a career in boxing. Although the stories in Rope Burns can be a bit repetitive (how many more down and out kids do we have to hear about) and sometimes cliché (see previous parenthetical remark), they have a lot of heart.
“Fightin Philly” describes a manager and his talented but injured light heavyweight fighter Mookie facing a title fight against a hardened Ugandan fighter in Philadelphia. Unfortunately, Mookie has a leg injury. Like Yuri Foreman's bout against Miguel Cotto in Yankee Stadium earlier this year — Foreman bravely, perhaps foolishly fought through two rounds wobbling — Mookie must fight his injury as much as his opponent. The match ends up even by the tenth round, or at least his corner man Con thinks. So, late in the fight – thanks to Con’s advice – Mookie manages to frazzle his opponent with a flurry attack that includes a low blow to frighten him. Afterward “he nailed him with big left hands and combinations to the head, which began to swell and make [the Ugandan] looked like a zombie.” Sadly, it isn’t enough and Mookie’s courage, training, and will aren’t enough. Maybe this story gets at me because I know someone like Mookie with 10-10 a professional record who insists on continuing to fight professionally.
Writers and boxers actually have something in common: nearly impossible odds at ever making it big; of course, it goes without saying that boxers get real bruises rather than just bruised egos. Toole definitely got this about boxing and literature, which is perhaps why he kept it up for so long. Unfortunately, he died before the movie adaptation of his book ever came out. Since his death, a posthumous novel Pound for Pound was published. I guess some guys just never go down.
A Year in Reading: Jesse Ball
Luckily, I have been keeping a list. I began the year with Tom Hodgkinson's lovely How to be Idle, which is a very very good way to begin a year of reading. Immediately then to The Twelve Terrors of Christmas (Updike / Gorey). Thereafter, Kicking the Leaves, an old favorite. This is in my opinion, Donald Hall's best volume of poetry. I have read it dozens of times. Then a short travel with a writer I had never read, Gyula Krudy, whose Sunflower, courtesy of NYRB was enormously pleasing and atmospheric. Then Botvinnik: 100 Selected Games, for those of you who read chess-notation with joy and pleasure. That old Soviet master had a fearsome will. Then Last Days by Brian Evenson, Scorch Atlas by Blake Butler, Life of Johnson by Boswell (wonderful -- even the ambition of reading it and carrying it about with one is wonderful). Then Fowles, The Collector, and Out by the very resourceful Matsuo Kirino. Read Out if you, like myself and also the previously mentioned Evenson, spend time thinking about how bodies ought to be disposed of. At this point, I went to another old favorite, Robert Walser's Selected Stories. If you must read something, please forget about what anyone else has to say and read Walser's selected stories. There's a lot of posturing about contemporary writing, but the truth is -- most of it isn't any good. That's where Walser comes in, from the first quarter of the last century, riding the wagon from his Swiss sanatorium. He'll fix your modern day ills with ease.
I went to Leonard Gardner next, and his Fat City, which I read in one sitting. Delicious! Do you like prize-fighting? I do. Then Zen Antics courtesy of Cleary, and Lolita while on a train to Michigan, and Hass's Field Guide (not an actual field guide).
At this point we are partway through the year, and I am considering the class I will teach in the fall, a class on derive, which sends us into: Society of the Spectacle by Debord, Revolution of Everyday Life by Vaneigem, Nadja by Breton, The Character of Physical Law by Feynman, A Pattern Language by Alexander, Ishikawa, Silverstein, and Koolhaus's Delirious New York.
I will leave you then, there with me in the summertime. Of later books, I will mention but one:
Bears: A Brief History by Brunner (a remarkable book). Do you like bears?
More from A Year in Reading
A Year in Reading: Richard Lange
Richard Lange is the author of the critically acclaimed collection of stories Dead Boys. He lives in Los Angeles. Read more about him at www.richlange.comMy favorite book of the year was Fat City, by Leonard Gardner. It's a novel about a couple of small-time boxers in Stockton, CA in the late '50s. We follow these fighters as they train in ratty gyms, drink in skid row bars, chase women they don't love, and work through their hangovers in dusty onion fields. Gardener finds harsh beauty in the bleakness and constructs sad poems out of broken dreams. These men want so much and get so little, and all of a sudden, BAM, you're sitting there trying to read with tears in your eyes.Another book I liked was Winter's Bone, by Daniel Woodrell. Sixteen-year-old Ree Dolly's dad has jumped bail on a meth charge, and it's up to Ree to care for her two younger brothers and overmedicated mom. Her quest to track down her father before the bond company snatches the family's house puts her in conflict with an unsavory branch of her extended clan and leads to some harrowing scrapes. You'll shiver during Woodrell's descriptions of the icy Ozarks, flinch at the sudden violence and come to love the indomitable Ree. It's a simple tale made momentous by Woodrell's quiet insistence that these poor folks and their hardscrabble lives deserve our respectful attention. I have to put in an Elmore Leonard, too, The Switch, from 1978. A kidnapping plot spins out of control in a shaky moral landscape where everybody's guilty of something. I'm a fool for Leonard's casual yet tightly controlled style and peerless dialogue. There's also a lot of humor here, as he skewers the '70s suburban country club lifestyle and makes sure that all the bad guys (and girls) get what's coming to them.More from A Year in Reading 2007
More from the Left Coast
Rodger Jacobs, author of the book Christopher Walken and the Tuna Fish Sandwich and Other L.A. Stories, shares with us the best books he read this year.Best books I've read this year? Well, I'm still going to stand behind Michelle Huneven's Jamesland even though I had some minor quibbles with it. Next to that I would have to go with the stunning debut novel by Canadian journalist Robert Hough, The Final Confession of Mabel Stark. I can think of no other contemporary writer -- with the obvious exception of Ron Hansen with Hitler's Niece and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford -- who has mastered the historical novel in such a vibrant and highly engrossing style. It's a lengthy tome (440 pages) and by the time you have read the last page you feel that you have lived Mabel Stark's life side-by-side with this amazing yet deeply troubled woman. The book is so evocative that I still -- almost a year after having read it -- have sense memories attached to the novel, the scents attached to circus life, the wet hay during sudden storm bursts, the kerosene lamp in Mabel's railroad car. This was such a master work that I am anxious to see if Hough can follow it up or if, sadly, it's a once-in-a-lifetime book like Leonard Gardner's Fat City or Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird. The book is that damn good.Thanks for that. That bit about "once-in-a-lifetime books" at the end made me think. Many a VH1 special is devoted to the musical one-hit wonder, but what about the literary variety? Who's on that list? And what do these authors have in common? Hmmm... food for thought.
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