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A Year in Reading: 2024
Welcome to the 20th (!) installment of The Millions' annual Year in Reading series, which gathers together some of today's most exciting writers and thinkers to share the books that shaped their year. YIR is not a collection of yearend best-of lists; think of it, perhaps, as an assemblage of annotated bibliographies. We've invited contributors to reflect on the books they read this year—an intentionally vague prompt—and encouraged them to approach the assignment however they choose.
In writing about our reading lives, as YIR contributors are asked to do, we inevitably write about our personal lives, our inner lives. This year, a number of contributors read their way through profound grief and serious illness, through new parenthood and cross-country moves. Some found escape in frothy romances, mooring in works of theology, comfort in ancient epic poetry. More than one turned to the wisdom of Ursula K. Le Guin. Many describe a book finding them just when they needed it.
Interpretations of the assignment were wonderfully varied. One contributor, a music critic, considered the musical analogs to the books she read, while another mapped her reads from this year onto constellations. Most people's reading was guided purely by pleasure, or else a desire to better understand events unfolding in their lives or larger the world. Yet others centered their reading around a certain sense of duty: this year one contributor committed to finishing the six Philip Roth novels he had yet to read, an undertaking that he likens to “eating a six-pack of paper towels.” (Lucky for us, he included in his essay his final ranking of Roth's oeuvre.)
The books that populate these essays range widely, though the most commonly noted title this year was Tony Tulathimutte’s story collection Rejection. The work of newly minted National Book Award winner Percival Everett, particularly his acclaimed novel James, was also widely read and written about. And as the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza enters its second year, many contributors sought out Isabella Hammad’s searing, clear-eyed essay Recognizing the Stranger.
Like so many endeavors in our chronically under-resourced literary community, Year in Reading is a labor of love. The Millions is a one-person editorial operation (with an invaluable assist from SEO maven Dani Fishman), and producing YIR—and witnessing the joy it brings contributors and readers alike—has been the highlight of my tenure as editor. I’m profoundly grateful for the generosity of this year’s contributors, whose names and entries will be revealed below over the next three weeks, concluding on Wednesday, December 18. Be sure to subscribe to The Millions’ free newsletter to get the week’s entries sent straight to your inbox each Friday.
—Sophia Stewart, editor
Becca Rothfeld, author of All Things Are Too Small
Carvell Wallace, author of Another Word for Love
Charlotte Shane, author of An Honest Woman
Brianna Di Monda, writer and editor
Nell Irvin Painter, author of I Just Keep Talking
Carrie Courogen, author of Miss May Does Not Exist
Ayşegül Savaş, author of The Anthropologists
Zachary Issenberg, writer
Tony Tulathimutte, author of Rejection
Ann Powers, author of Traveling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell
Lidia Yuknavitch, author of Reading the Waves
Nicholas Russell, writer and critic
Daniel Saldaña París, author of Planes Flying Over a Monster
Lili Anolik, author of Didion and Babitz
Deborah Ghim, editor
Emily Witt, author of Health and Safety
Nathan Thrall, author of A Day in the Life of Abed Salama
Lena Moses-Schmitt, author of True Mistakes
Jeremy Gordon, author of See Friendship
John Lee Clark, author of Touch the Future
Ellen Wayland-Smith, author of The Science of Last Things
Edwin Frank, publisher and author of Stranger Than Fiction
Sophia Stewart, editor of The Millions
A Year in Reading Archives: 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005
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: Isabella Hammad
This year felt like a year in which I read poorly. Or at least my reading felt inconsistent, and punctuated by long passages in which I was unable to read at all. But now that I have drawn up a list, I seem to have read exactly 50 books, which isn’t too bad.
Some highlights:
I read Family Lexicon by Natalia Ginzburg this summer inside a hot, nearly uninhabitable farmhouse on a couch frequented by ants, while everyone else was sitting outside being sociable and eating melon. Ginzburg narrates the rise of fascism in Italy with a dry simplicity that I found extraordinary and very affecting. Perhaps predictably, the book also made me reflect on some of the bizarre sayings that have remained current in my own family over the years. I read Ginzburg’s The Little Virtues a few weeks ago. This one came into my hands with perfect timing, particularly the essay “Human Relationships.”
I inhaled Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise when ill with flu one weekend this spring, mostly while lying on my pink sofa. (Apparently I do a lot of reading on sofas.) Enthralling plot, delicious prose, marked by surprising, instinctual metaphors. Also delicious prose: Penelope Fitzgerald’s At Freddie’s. Both Trust Exercise and At Freddie’s follow a theatrical theme. Trust Exercise (which just won the National Book Award) is set, at least first, at an American performing arts high school. At Freddie’s follows a children’s theatre school running into financial difficulties, although like all Fitzgerald novels its plot winds whimsically out of your hands so that when you reach the end you feel a little uncertain about what just happened, while the afterimages of the characters are so strong they stay with you for ages. I’ll have to start spacing my Fitzgerald novels out every two years or I will run through them too quickly. At Freddie’s is also hysterically funny. I read it in Spain.
I read three Etel Adnan books in quick succession: In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country, Sitt Marie Rose, and Of Cities & Women. She is a wonderful person to spend time with, writing with great wisdom of war, womanhood, exile, wandering, the weather.
I read three Etel Adnan books in quick succession: In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country, Sitt Marie Rose, and Of Cities & Women. She is a wonderful person to spend time with, writing with great wisdom of war, womanhood, exile, wandering, the weather.
I started José Saramago’s A Year of the Death of Ricardo Reís in Madrid and finished it on a series of hallucinatory morning bus journeys to the British Library in London. I read Raja Shehadeh’s Going Home while in Palestine, in Ramallah, which is the main subject of his ruminations as he walks the city’s streets, recounting its inhabitants, insurgencies, and repressions with vividness and insight. This is also where I read The Years by Annie Ernaux, a memoir mostly in the third person and a masterpiece of granular history-telling, mingling the large and the small, the private and the public, with great beauty. I thought her descriptions of consumerism were amazing. My only regret was that I didn’t have my own copy, so I couldn’t underline everything. Two people in the space of a week mentioned they had just read it, and I somehow ended up with both copies on loan, one of which had a couple of bougainvillea flowers pressed separately inside; I asked the friend who lent that copy if the location of the flowers signified anything, but they did not, disappointingly.
In London, I reread Beloved by Toni Morrison, which made me cry like I cried when I was 16. It reminded me of another rereading, of a very different book—Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady. Only when I returned to Portrait a few years ago did I realize how formative it must have been when I first read it as a teenager: it seemed to have left a permanent imprint on my brain which, reread, it slotted into. I felt the same way about Beloved.
Some other memorable reads this year: Passing by Nella Larsen, The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell, Soul by Andrey Platonov, Your Duck Is My Duck by Deborah Eisenberg, All The Battles by Maan Abu Taleb, Children of the Ghetto by Elias Khoury, The Twenty-Ninth Year by Hala Alyan, The Body Artist by Don DeLillo, The Art of Cruelty by Maggie Nelson, The Sand Child by Tahar Ben Jelloun.
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A Heightened State of Emotion: The Millions Interviews Mary Gaitskill
Mary Gaitskill’s singular ability to create characters that are rigid and vulnerable, complex and demanding, has earned her a devoted readership, along with a National Book Award nomination, a Guggenheim fellowship, and a PEN/Faulkner nomination. Her new novel, The Mare, is softer in many ways than her previous books. The characters are easier to root for, but at the same time, Gaitskill delivers the same hard edges; it’s a compelling book, but it's not easy reading.
The Mare tells the story of an 11-year-old Dominican-American girl named Velvet who lives in Crown Heights, N.Y. She joins a summer program called Fresh Air, where city kids live upstate for a few weeks with a sponsor family. Through Fresh Air, she meets Ginger, a middle-aged woman with no children, and the two form a bond during their summers together, filled with both love and struggle. Perhaps more important for Velvet than her relationship with Ginger, however, is a deep connection she develops with an abused horse named Fiery Girl. The novel follows Velvet through several years of school, vacations, and home life, and because it’s a Gaitskill novel, it’s not just a book about a girl and a horse, but a meditation on abuse, betrayal, self-defeat, self-discovery, and ultimately, love.
I talked to Gaitskill over the phone about The Mare, about listening to the story within, and about her life as a writer.
The Millions: Can you talk about your writing habits? What does your daily schedule look like?
Mary Gaitskill: That really varies. I'm not consistent like some people seem to be. Sometimes I don’t write at all. If I'm not really working on anything, I might go for quite a while without writing. I've never kept a record of it, but I could guess the longest time I went without writing anything was probably two months. Then at other times, I've written, but it was just magazine articles. It wasn’t heavy lifting. But if I am working on something, I usually do work every day. The pattern is usually, starting sometime in the morning after eating, working for maybe two hours, stopping, doing errands, eating lunch, coming back, working for another two to four hours, going to the gym maybe. Eating dinner. Working for another period of two hours. It’s usually a two to four hour block of time. Sometimes it gets up to six. That’s unusual, but it does happen.
I've never worked over six hours, which I'm sorry to admit because you do read about great writers working 10 hours at a stretch. I've never done that, but six has happened. If I'm really into the piece, I'll start before I eat in the morning. I'll wake up, have coffee, and start writing. If I'm really, really excited, I can write wherever I am. When I'm really interested in something, I've written at airport restaurants. That’s if I'm really, really into it. But, I usually have to have a quiet place, and really spend some time sitting, without any distractions, and then I get into a frame of mind where I really focus. That’s more normal.
TM: Do you find that you still read while you're working? I hear many writers say, "I can’t read any fiction while I'm writing a novel. I only read nonfiction" -- but I find that I'm the opposite. I have to be constantly reading.
MG: I don’t stop reading fiction when I'm writing. I make a half-conscious attempt to read things that I think might be inspiring, but it’s not necessarily a direct thing, like I'm looking specifically for influence or anything like that. But I sometimes do that, try to think of something that's going to be helpful somehow.
TM: Let's talk about The Mare, or really, about another piece I think might be connected. You published a nonfiction piece in Granta, titled "Lost Cat," that discussed, among other things, your personal experience fostering two inner-city kids during a summer program. There are some obvious parallels, so I wanted to ask you what relation that essay has to The Mare.
MG: Not very much really. You’re right, that the character Velvet is inspired by the girl in "Lost Cat," but the circumstances are really different. She’s got a different character, different personality, and her life is different, things that happen are different. So, there’s not really very many parallels in the sense of action.
TM: Both pieces also have an animal or animals as central figures, so in "Lost Cat," it’s your runaway kitten Gattino and in The Mare, it’s an abused horse named Fiery Girl. In both cases, there’s a relationship between the human woman and the non-human animal that seems primal and nonverbal, or pre-verbal, and you say in "Lost Cat," "Gattino was attuned to me. I think he could feel me even from far away. I think feeling fear from me further unmoored him." Then in The Mare, Velvet also mentions repeatedly that “the horses feel her thoughts.”
MG: I wouldn’t stand behind that statement in any argumentative way. I definitely can’t. It’s not something I can prove at all, and I may have felt that way because I was really upset. It could be that people imagine things like that when they’re in a heightened state of emotion or they want to believe it, or they’re thinking so powerfully about the animal that they imagine the animal feels them. I do think it’s possible. I think animals have highly developed senses. That the senses that we know about in them may be beyond what we can understand. So it wouldn’t surprise me if it actually was true. I wouldn’t try to convince anyone of that though, if they didn’t believe it.
TM: Were you worried at all about writing a novel about a horse?
MG: In what way? You mean, could I do it?
TM: I mean...I was very touched by the piece "Lost Cat" because I lost a dog two years ago, and it was devastating, completely devastating. But other people found it really unserious.
MG: Yeah. Oh, people totally make fun of "Lost Cat." People just utterly laughed at it. I think people who don’t...It’s difficult to understand somebody’s grief, actually, even when it’s about a human being. I remember when my father died, I was so utterly wrapped up in grief, and really stunned by it, and yet maybe a year later, someone told me his mother had died and I realized I wasn’t taking it in. I had no memory anymore of how it had felt. I could remember it, and then deleted it. I couldn’t really remember what that feeling was like, and he told me in an email. I started to answer his email kind of briefly, and then I realized, wait a minute, he just told you his mother died. It's hard to connect with those feelings even if it’s actually about a person. So if it’s about an animal, and you’re not a person who really has ever had that kind of relationship with a pet, of course it looks utterly ridiculous and sentimental and histrionic and just absurd. So I'm not surprised if people react like that.
TM: The beginning of The Mare moves back and forth between just two points of view, the two main characters, Velvet and Ginger, giving each of them alternating first person chapters. But then starting on page 61, we first get Ginger’s husband Paul’s perspective and then eventually get Velvet’s mother, Silvia, and then one of the horse trainers, and even Velvet’s brother. Why and how did you decide to open up the narrative in that way?
MG: Those choices were mostly intuitive, and I really resisted making Silvia a point-of-view character. She was a character that I did not intend to go into. I originally just meant to keep it Ginger and Velvet, and then Paul seemed like...That was a very natural decision because he was somebody who could describe the situation in a way that Ginger never would. He could create a perspective that I felt was important. But Silvia, at first I thought, I can’t do this. I can’t understand her well enough and I won’t do her justice.
My editor, even, when she saw a first draft, said, "I don’t know about this. I loved all that but I don’t know about this." And yet, it kept coming to me almost like a physical feeling. At a certain point, I really wanted to hear what she had to say, even though that's a silly way to put it because I'm inventing her, but she seemed like she had to be there at certain times, so I kept doing it. I'm not sure how successful it is, because she really was the character who I had the most difficulty...Not understanding her on a really basic level but on a more detailed level, on a more intimate level.
I don’t know what it would be like to be her. Velvet was hard too, but she is somebody who was born in this country, so she’s maybe half Dominican, but she’s American. She is very attuned to American culture far more than she would be to Dominican culture. She’s never been to the DR. So I felt more familiar with her, but Silvia was really hard. I hope I did her justice. I couldn’t keep her out of it though, finally.
TM: As you were saying, Silvia is an immigrant. She doesn’t have a lot of money. She’s abusive. She has a traumatic emotional background in terms of Velvet’s father. So you’re writing across race, and then obviously Velvet is so young. I couldn’t think of another character who is a teenager in your work. I could be wrong about that, but I thought she was the first one.
MG: There was a character in my second book of short stories, a teenage girl named Elise. The girl was 16 years old, which is older than Velvet. Then the girl in “Secretary” actually, I never gave her age. I pictured her being about 17. But Velvet is much younger. At the beginning she’s 11, and that was really, really hard because I think kids of that age, and younger even, are incredibly perceptive about what’s going on around them. They don’t even have to be especially intelligent, which Velvet, in my mind, is, but they don’t even have to be. I think even kids with average intelligence are very, very aware of what they’re looking at, but they don’t have the vocabulary to describe it.
I remember when I was young, looking at people and taking in a tremendous amount of information about them, but I would never have been able to say in words even to myself what it was I was looking at. I think adults have that experience too, even very articulate adults, but for children it’s just constant.
So the challenge was to create this girl who would be very, very perceptive about everything she’s seeing, and particularly vigilant because in her own neighborhood it’s a tough environment. Then when she’s upstate, she’s surrounded by people who don’t quite understand what’s going on. So she’s looking much more closely than somebody who lived there would look. But, at the same time, she’s not going to have a sophisticated vocabulary with which to describe any of it. You do have a little leeway with fictional characters. You can make them speak in a more sophisticated way than they really would, but you should be somewhat true to life. So that was a challenge.
And then when writing across race, that was also really a challenge because I don’t know what it would be like to be non-white. I can guess at it. I can feel my way into some of it, but at the end of the day, I don’t really know. So I found that very challenging. When I first had the idea of the book, my first thought was, "I can’t do that.” I didn’t sit down confidently and go, “Oh, wow, that’s great idea," and then sit down to write it. My first thought was, "No, you can’t do that."
I’d had the idea in 2007, and I just thought, "No," and yet it kept coming to me. This has never happened before, actually. Scenes would come into my mind when I wasn’t even thinking about it. I’d be just like in an airport or just walking down the street or waking up in the morning, and I would get these images and scenes. One of the first scenes that came to me like that was the scene of Velvet riding the horse bareback when she’s angry at Beverly for mistreating a different horse. That scene came into my mind back in 2007, I think, when I thought I wasn’t going to write it. It kept happening, and so I thought, "well, I'm going to try this." I was so strongly compelled that I went against my better judgement in a way and thought, I'll try.
I also was working on another book, so I didn’t really have any need to start another novel right then. But I sat down, and I wrote maybe 50 pages. I showed it to my editor, and she really liked it. So that’s how it happened. But I never had a feeling of confidence about what I was doing in any of it really. The whole project of writing, trying to write people who are not only of a different ethnicity, but also I don’t know what it would be like to be that color. They’re also very poor. They’re even poor for the people around them. Velvet has less than the other girls in her school. So that’s a very, very heavy and particular experience.
TM: Setting seems incredibly important for the novel. It’s as if Ginger’s house and Velvet’s apartment are different planets altogether. I found the train travel really interesting between the two places. It allows the characters to transition, but there’s also a lot of waiting. There are a lot of missed meetings.
MG: I don’t know if I've got anything interesting to say about that. It’s an interesting observation, and I think you’re right that I do spend time covering the distance between the two places. It is like a passage going somewhere else. I didn’t really think about it other than it would literally be the case that they'd be spending time on this train.
It’s a dreamy place because, in a way, I really underplay the influence of phones and devices. The timing, I believe, I set it 2006 to 2009. I don’t remember exactly, but that was before phones completely exploded and people were just staring at their phone non-stop. Velvet actually, believe it or not, as poor as they are, she doesn’t even have a phone until fairly late in the book. So there isn’t anything to do but either talk, or read a magazine, or look out the window. She does listen to music sometimes. So it’s a dreamy state, and it’s a state where there’s a lot of nature. They’re not in the city, and they’re not in the cultured world of upstate either. There’s just trees and water around them.
TM: Did you set it during that time period on purpose so you wouldn’t have to deal with the distraction of characters texting each other, or did it just seem natural for the novel?
MG: It did seem natural, partly because, I hate to admit it, I don’t feel like I understand the world I'm living in very well at this point. Whereas at that point, I still did. I felt very connected to the culture. I've never been a person who’s super culturally connected. People sometimes have talked about me as if I’m a cultural analyst, and I am not.
This culture is like a chimera before which I stand agog. I've never really felt like I understood it, but during that time period I did feel more tuned in. I think that’s probably an unconscious reason I set it during that time.
TM: There’s so much about riding in this book. Do you ride horses at all?
MG: Well, I never did. When you asked me earlier, "Did I feel worried about writing about a horse," actually yes. I didn’t see it as about the horse at first, because I was so focused on the girl. I didn’t understand going into it how complicated the horse world is, how many different facets it has, and also riding itself and the relationship between people and horses.
There’s a lot there, and I didn’t know how to ride. I actually was dumb enough to think that I could learn about it by asking people questions. I went into the stable with my notebook and pen was like, "Have you ever had a real connection with a horse? What did it feel like?" I actually asked that question. But I realized, and very quickly, that this wasn’t going to work, that I had to do it myself.
I didn’t want to because I was somewhat afraid of horses. I wasn’t phobic or anything, but I had no draw to them the way some girls do when they’re little. I thought they were nice. I don’t dislike any animal, but when it came to handling them and being on top of them, I was afraid. So it was hard.
I ended up spending three years with them. I didn’t ride for all that time because I was just so honestly uncomfortable doing it, and that made the horses uncomfortable. They’re extraordinarily sensitive, and if they feel you are uncomfortable, especially if they feel you’re actually frightened, they don’t enjoy having you on top of them at all.
If it’s a lesson horse, they’re used to it. But they don’t like it, and it’s a horrible feedback loop that gets started. Even when I was just tacking a horse and getting it ready. If it did any normal horse-like thing like toss its head or paw at the ground, I would flinch, and then the horse would flinch, and I would flinch even more and it would just...It was terrible. Then I fell off of a horse at a certain point. Fortunately, I didn’t get hurt. It didn’t throw me off or anything, but I just fell off. I was bareback so it’s pretty easy to slide off.
I was too afraid to get back on, and I just decided I would groom them and clean out their stalls instead of riding, and I did that for a few months. But the weird thing was I became very comfortable with them because of handling, and they became comfortable with me because I was very predictable. I did a good job. I liked grooming them. I learned where they liked to be scratched and touched, and I was very thorough and they came to feel comfortable with me. So one day realized I'm not afraid of them right now. I decided I had to start riding again so I did, and it was a really interesting experience. I fell in love with one of them actually.
With horses especially, they’re looking at you to be in charge, to be the confident person who is going to guide them through whatever it is you’re going to do and sometimes it’s more of a partnership, but mostly they’re looking at you to be the boss. If you’re not, if you’re frightened, they’re going, what’s happening? Why is she doing this? Why is she afraid? It makes them nervous.
TM: What have you been reading lately?
MG: Right now, I'm reading something called Soul by a Russian writer named Andrey Platonov. I don’t have it with me right now, but it’s really good. I just started it. And before that, I was reading Brian Boyd’s biography of Vladimir Nabokov. And before that, I was really into the book called The Orientalist by Tom Reiss.
TM: What are you working on right now, if anything?
MG: I'm not really working on anything right now, but I've got a book that I stopped writing in order to write The Mare that I hope to return to. I'm also working on a book of essays that will be published in a year or so.
A Year in Reading: Garth Risk Hallberg
Last summer, several sheets to the wind, a novelist friend of mine and I found ourselves waxing nostalgic about 1997 - the year when Underworld, American Pastoral, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and Mason & Dixon came out. (It was also probably the year both of us finished working our way through Infinite Jest, which had been published a year earlier.) Ah, sweet 1997. I was tempted to say that times like those wouldn't come around again.
This year, however, Pisces must have been in Aquarius, or vice versa, or something. The number of novelists with a plausible claim to having published major work forms a kind of alphabet: Aira, Amis, Bolaño, Boyd, Carey, Cohen, Cunningam, Donoghue, Flaubert (by way of Davis), Grossman, Krauss, Krilanovich, Lee, Lipsyte, Marlantes, McCarthy, Mitchell, Moody, Ozick, Shriver, Shteyngart, Udall, Valtat, Yamashita... A career-defining omnibus appeared from Deborah Eisenberg, and also from Ann Beattie. Philip Roth, if the reviews are to believed, got his groove back. It even feels like I'm forgetting someone. Oh, well, it will come to me, I'm sure. In the meantime, you get the point. 2010 was a really good year for fiction.
Among the most enjoyable new novels I read were a couple that had affinities: Paul Murray's Skippy Dies and Adam Levin's The Instructions. (Disclosure: Adam Levin once rewired a ceiling fan for me. (Disclosure: not really.)) Each of these huge and hugely ambitious books has some notable flaws, and I wanted to resist them both, having developed an allergy to hyperintelligent junior high students. But each finds a way to reconnect the hermetic world of the 'tween with the wider world our hopes eventually run up against. Murray and Levin are writers of great promise, and, more importantly, deep feeling, and their average age is something like 34, which means there's likely more good stuff to come.
Another book I admired this year was Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad, but since everybody else did, too, you can read about it elsewhere in this series. Let me instead direct your attention to Matthew Sharpe's more modestly pyrotechnic You Were Wrong. Here Sharpe trains his considerable narrative brio on the most mundane of worlds - Long Island - with illuminating, and disconcerting, results. You Were Wrong, unlike The Instructions et al, also has the virtue of being short. As does Bolaño's incendiary Antwerp (or any of the several great stories in The Return). Or Cesar Aira's wonderful Ghosts, which I finally got around to. Hey, maybe 2010 was actually the year of the short novel, I began to think, right after I finished a piece arguing exactly the opposite.
Then, late in the year, when I thought I had my reading nailed down, the translation of Mathias Énard's Zone arrived like a bomb in my mailbox. The synopsis makes it sounds like rough sledding - a 500-page run-on sentence about a guy on a train - but don't be fooled. Zone turns out to be vital and moving and vast in its scope, like W.G. Sebald at his most anxious, or Graham Greene at his most urgent, or (why not) James Joyce at his most earthy, only all at the same time.
Notwithstanding which, the best new novel I read this year was...what was that title again? Oh, right. Freedom.
When it came to nonfiction, three books stood out for me, each of them a bit older. The first was Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach, an utterly unclassifiable, conspicuously brilliant, and criminally entertaining magnum opus about consciousness, brains, and formal systems that has been blowing minds for several generations now. The second was Alberto Manguel's 2008 essay collection, The Library at Night. No better argument for the book qua book exists, not so much because of what Manguel says here, but because the manner in which he says it - ruminative, learned, patient, just - embodies its greatest virtues. And the third was The Magician's Doubts, a searching look at Nabokov by Michael Wood, who is surely one of our best critics.
Speaking of Nabokov: as great a year as 2010 was for new fiction, it was also the year in which I read Ada, and so a year when the best books I read were classics. In this, it was like any other year. I loved Christina Stead's The Man Who Loved Children for its language. I loved Andrey Platonov's Soul for its intimate comedy and its tragic sensibility. I loved that Chekhov's story "The Duel" was secretly a novel. I loved the Pevear/Volokhonsky production The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories for making a third fat Tolstoy masterpiece to lose myself in. About A House for Mr. Biswas, I loved Mr. Biswas.
And then there were my three favorite reading experiences of the year: Péter Esterházy's Celestial Harmonies, a book about the chains of history and paternity and politics that reads like pure freedom; Dr. Faustus, which I loved less than I did The Magic Mountain, but admired more, if that's even possible; and The Age of Innocence. Our own Lydia Kiesling has said pretty much everything I want to say about the latter, but let me just add that it's about as close to perfection as you'd want that imperfect beast, the novel, to come. She was wild in her way, Edith Wharton, a secret sensualist, and still as scrupulous as her great friend Henry James. Like his, her understanding of what makes people tick remains utterly up-to-the-minute, and is likely to remain so in 2015, and 2035... by which time we may know about which of the many fine books that came out this year we can say the same thing. Ah, sweet 2010, we hardly knew ye.
More from a Year in Reading 2010
Don't miss: A Year in Reading 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005
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A Year in Reading: Stephen Dodson (Languagehat)
It's always a fraught moment when you sit down with a book you've been meaning to read for many years. It's exciting, of course, but you're aware that the book is not likely to live up to your expectations, and most of the time it doesn't. Sometimes it does. Marshall Berman's All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity was first published in 1982; even back then I was a fan of Berman's idiosyncratic blend of leftist politics with cultural and literary history, but I was too broke to buy new books, and somehow I never got my hands on it in the intervening decades. This year a friend gave me the beautiful Penguin edition, and it lived up to its promise, moving in dizzying, exhilarating fashion from Goethe to Marx to Baudelaire to Petersburg ("The Real and Unreal City") to "Some Notes on Modernism in New York." That probably makes it sound off-puttingly formidable, so I'll repeat Robert Christgau's words, leading off the review that first made me want the book: what's most important about it is that it's a good read. Anyone can toss a bunch of cultural touchstones into a blender and come up with a dense text; very few can make anyone but grad students want to read it. At the beginning of his introduction, Berman says "To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world – and, at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are." That's what the book is about, and that sense of adventure, joy, and danger is carried through triumphantly. To give one small example of its effect, I had never been particularly interested in Goethe's Faust, regarding it as one of those sacred monsters of two centuries ago that inexplicably got everyone excited; now I actually want to read it. And I expect to be rereading Berman every few years from now on.
The most exciting literary discovery I made this past year was Andrey Platonov, who died in obscurity the year I was born. His major works were first published in the '80s, and reliable texts only appeared in the '90s; since then his reputation has grown to the point that he is frequently considered the greatest Russian prose writer of the twentieth century. His masterpiece is The Foundation Pit, which boils all the utopianism and horror of the forced collectivization and industrialization of the early 1930s into 150 tightly written pages about a laid-off worker, a bear, and a little girl, among other unforgettable characters. (You can read more about the book at Languagehat.) English-speaking readers are lucky to have the superb translation by Robert Chandler and Olga Meerson, published last year by New York Review Books; the novel was so important to Chandler that he translated it twice, this NYRB version superseding a 1996 one he did for Harvill Press. Platonov's other major novel is Chevengur, a sprawling work (three times as long as The Foundation Pit) whose inherent tragedy is leavened by picaresque humor; I'm happy to report Chandler and Meerson are working on a translation of that as well, and I look forward to reading it when it appears. Platonov's brilliant short works can be sampled in the collection Soul, also published by NYRB.
Anyone interested in the Soviet Union of the 1950s and '60s should read Zhivago's Children: The Last Russian Intelligentsia, by Vladislav Zubok, which is, like Berman's, one of the best works of cultural history I've read in many years. After I finished it, I felt as if I'd been reading a great, tragic novel; Zubok's work is thoroughly reliable (every paragraph has several footnotes referencing histories, diaries, and other sources) but gripping and full of the kind of human insight you don't usually get from academic history. Michael Scammell, in his review, complained that Zubok slighted dissident heroes like Solzhenitsyn, Brodsky, Sinyavsky, and Daniel, but their stories are so familiar it's hard to see what yet another account could provide; the people Zubok writes about were hoping to create an intellectual and artistic renaissance within a country whose leadership turned out to be unwilling to countenance it, so that it all dissipated into the stagnation of the Brezhnev years. For a while, though, it seemed as if anything was possible.
More from a Year in Reading 2010
Don't miss: A Year in Reading 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005
The good stuff: The Millions' Notable articles
The motherlode: The Millions' Books and Reviews
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Staff Picks: Andrey Platonov’s Soul
Pasternak may be more celebrated, Babel more influential, Grossman more expansive, and Solzhenitsyn more heroic, but for my money, Andrey Platonov might be the finest Russian-language fiction writer of the Soviet era. It's yet another black mark against Stalinism that "there is probably no twentieth-century writer of [his] stature who is so little known in the English-speaking world," as Platonov's translator Robert Chandler has put it. But with this volume, Chandler goes a long way toward rectifying the injustice. Soul and Other Stories reveals Platonov as an incomparable stylist and an utterly singular sensibility. Indeed, as in only the greatest art, the two form a perfect unity.
The Sufi-inflected novel from which the collection takes its title echoes the plot of several other Platonov works, including The Foundation Pit (one of my favorite books of 2009): An idealistic young man sets out to bring the fruits of the revolution to impoverished hinterlands. It would seem that this story can only end in one of two ways: propaganda (the revolution arrives), or dissent (the revolution is a fraud). The miracle of Platonov's writing, however, is that the depredations it records somehow make his Utopian yearning burn brighter. As Soul's Mosaic protagonist, Nazar Chagataev, leads his ragtag "nation" across the deserts of Uzbekistan, he comes to see the ineffable...well, soul that blazes in every camel and turtle and tumbleweed, and, by extension, in every person. Of a "savage, enfeebled" mongrel, Platonov writes:
The dog lay down obediently; it was trembling from exhaustion - old, bewildered, lacking the strength to cease living the life that tormented it, yet still convinced of the perfect bliss of its existence, because in its very endurance, in its thin trembling body, there was something good.
Soul is as visionary as any of Cormac McCarthy's Westerns - which it often resembles - but Platonov is looking in exactly the opposite direction. In Paul Eluard's formulation: "There is another world, but it is in this one." The seven short stories that follow are, if possible, even better, transplanting Soul's huge-heartedness into more recognizably domestic settings. The tender irony with which Platonov observes his proletarian characters' outward movements is balanced against sudden, startling forays into the interior. "Among Animals and Plants," "Fro," "The River Potudan," "The Cow," and "The Return" are, simply put, some of the best short stories of the 20th Century. ("Fro" is a good place to start, if you want to ease your way in.)
Soul also represents a correction, of sorts, to a previous NYRB Classics edition, The Fierce and Beautiful World, based on earlier Platonov scholarship. Such is the difficulty of bringing to American readers a writer whose work was, at various points, suppressed, bowdlerized, and destroyed. But now that Platonov's fierce and beautiful humanism has infected me, I have dreams of seeing his other novels and collected stories translated and in print in the next decade. In the meantime, we can be grateful for the present collection, which can stand alongside the works of Svevo and Walser - and indeed, as Edwin Frank has suggested, those of Kafka and Beckett - as a modernist masterwork.
Millions Quiz: Out of Print Gems
So that you may get to know us better, it’s The Millions Quiz, yet another occasionally appearing series. Here, as conceived of by our contributor Emily, we answer questions about our reading habits and interests, the small details of life that like-minded folks may find illuminating, and we ask you to join us by providing your own answers in the comments or on your own blogs.
Today's Question: In honor of the 10th anniversary of NYRB Classics: What out-of-print book would you like to see become an NYRB Classic?
Emily: With presses like Dover, Everyman, the Library of America, Broadview, NYRB, and the Persephone Press (not to mention Oxford and Penguin classics series) doing excellent rediscovery and reprinting work of all kinds, I don't often find myself longing for a new edition. The one great—nay, I would go so far as to say glaring—exception is the work of Ogden Nash, perhaps best know for epigrams like "Candy/Is dandy/But liquor/Is quicker" and "The Cow": "The cow is of the bovine ilk;/One end is moo, the other, milk." Yes, there is a "best of" anthology arranged by Nash's daughters and printed by Ivan R. Dee, and, yes, he's in Library of America's American Wits: An Anthology of Light Verse, but what I long for is a chronological, scholarly "complete works" volume: I want America's great comic poet to be taken seriously.
Those who've only encountered "Custard the Dragon" or Nash's epigrams (my favorite, which he composed with Dorothy Parker: "Hoggamus higgamus,/ Man is polygamous,/ Higgamus hoggamus,/ Women monogamus"), might question whether Nash is a serious artist deserving of such attention, but if you've read poems like "Don't Look Now, But Your Noblesse Oblige Is Showing," "Curl Up And Diet," "Don't Wait, Hit Me Now!", or "Bankers Are Just Like Anybody Else, Except Richer", you know that Nash is a keen social observer with a satirical edge (an edge sharpened by the Great Depression), and an approachable, conversational stylist reminiscent of Frank O'Hara (think "Ave Maria"). Nash's conversational style sometimes obscures his sparkling wordplay (Cole Porter-ish), his deft, innovative use of meter, and his subtle allusiveness, but look again at poems like "Pastoral" or "Portrait of the Artist as a Prematurely Old Man" or "Columbus."
Garth: This year, a panel at the PEN World Voices festival prompted me to explore the work of an author who was barely on my radar: Andrey Platonov. I devoured The Foundation Pit in one gulp, on a plane, intoxicated by the discovery of a sensibility as potent, distinctive, and hard to describe as Kafka's. I've since moved on to the stories in Soul, in an impressive translation by Robert & Elizabeth Chandler and Olga Meerson. A certain novelist friend of mine, who's also a reputable critic, assured me that Platonov's other major novel Chevengur, is even better than The Foundation Pit, and that a Chandler translation already exists...in the U.K. Apparently, the unreconstructed character of Platonov's socialism makes Chevengur a tough sell for U.S. audiences. His response to Stalinism was not to abandon utopia, but to turn it into an organizing principle for his art. Still, this is one of the major stylists of his age. We deserve to have his work in print domestically, no matter how undomesticated it may be.
Max: I was introduced to Vasily Aksyonov via his epic Generations of Winter. Here is the twentieth-century Russian analog of the multi-generational epic, tracking the Gradov family through the tragic and tumultuous decades spanning 1925 to 1945. It is a historical period deserving of the weightiness of the once exiled Aksyonov's novel, and yet the book is not widely known or read. But at least it is still in print. The rest of Aksyonov's books are unavailable in the U.S.
While Generations of Winter was published after the fall of the Soviet Union (it became a mini-series on Russian television), his dissident novels, originally banned from the Soviet Union, may be more important. The New York Times this year called The Burn and The Island of Crimea "increasingly phantasmagoric and outspoken in their dissidence." The Burn, the Times said "is a surreal, jazz-inspired riff on the plight of intellectuals under Communism, and Island of Crimea imagines what life would have been like on the Black Sea peninsula if the White Army had staved off the Bolsheviks there during the Russian Civil War and their descendants had flourished." See also: Vasily Aksyonov, Giant of Russian Literature, Dies at 76; Sonya's recent championing of another hard-to-find contemporary Russian author.
Let us know what out-of-print books you'd like to see returned to print.
PEN World Voices Report: The Strange Beauty of Andrey Platonov
It was raining last Thursday (because it is always raining in New York) when I went to the CUNY Graduate Center to hear a panel called "Language in New Forms: The Work of Andrey Platonov." I'm glad I braved the weather, however. The panel featured four of the most mellifluous voices in Anglo-American letters - Michael Ondaatje, Francine Prose, Threepenny Review editor Wendy Lesser, and intellectual historian T.J. Clark. I could listen to Ondaatje read the phone book. Even more remarkable, though, was Platonov himself. Indeed, this Russian writer of the Soviet epoch turned out to be my big discovery of this year's festival.Edwin Frank, whose NYRB Classics imprint has brought Platonov's fiction back into print, opened the proceedings. Reminding the audience to turn off cellphones, Frank had a kind of Woody Allenish mien, but he waxed eloquent as soon as he began discussing Platonov's complicated publishing history. Platonov's "pressurized, contorted. . . lyrical" style made him "the most inventive writer of the revolutionary era," Frank suggested - a Slavic peer of Beckett and Kafka, only with a desire "to bind up [the world's] wounds" in addition to probing them. His admirers and champions included Yevtuschenko and Gorky, and like the latter, Platonov truly believed in the revolution. He had the utopian spirit. And yet, perhaps detecting the negative capability that is always hostile to ideology, Stalin's functionaries suppressed Platonov's best writing.After this fulsome introduction, the panelists let Platonov's work speak for itself. Ondaatje read from an early short story. Then Lesser undertook a mash-up, reading half of "Fro" from the recently retranslated collection Soul and half from the "barbaric" older translation (which NYRB published in 2000 as The Fierce and Beautiful World). Apparently, publishing complications have followed Platonov even into English, and Lesser's reading made clear why. Platonov is an intensely unusual stylist, blending modernist subjectivity with futurist, revolutionary diction and visionary mysticism. Francine Prose's reading from "his finest story," the eponymous "Soul," revealed an animist sympathy with trees and rocks and buildings. "After reading him for a while," she said, nodding toward her bottle of Aquafina, "you start to wonder what the water bottle might think of this evening's proceedings."The most spirited performer of the night, however, turned out to be T.J. Clark, who read a remarkable excerpt from the newly reissued novel, The Foundation Pit. Clark "did all the voices," as the third-graders I used to teach would say, and drew the audience into a story remarkable, above all, for its sensibility: passionate, tender, absurd, and tragic. It's a sensibility I look forward to reading much more of in the coming weeks.
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