Danez Smith.

It turns out that the books that top my reading list this year are, in one way or another, about intimacy. First, biography: Chris Kraus’s After Kathy Acker and Sam Stephenson’s Gene Smith’s Sink (which, full disclosure, I worked on as posts for the Daily). Kraus and Stephenson have written unconventional lives, approaching their subjects askance and with varying degrees of subjectivity. The lesson these books offer is twofold: no matter how much we nose around in another’s life, it is impossible to know that person fully; and the story of our lives is never really ours alone—the telling comes, in large part, through the words, observations, and experiences of those with whom we’ve shared time. Which brings me to Barbara Browning’s The Gift, a novel that incorporates discussions of music, dance, performance art, writing, and correspondence in order to describe collaboration, not just in the artistic sense but as a community of intimates—friends, family, acquaintances, and strangers. Browning’s prose is open and unpretentious; I read her book deliberately, soaking up the fullness of each sentence. Last, a book that knocked me over: Danez Smith’s Don’t Call Us Dead, a collection of poems about the deaths of black men and boys, about love and sex, about hope, and, above all, about bodies. The form each poem takes, particularly in the various ways the lines break (or don’t), creates an especial urgency, heightens the rhythm and emotion: “we say wats gud meaning i could love you until my jaw / is but memory, we say yo meaning let my body // be a falcon’s talon & your body be the soft innards of goats / but we mostly say nothing, just sip // some good brown trying to get drunk / with permission.” Another kind of recommendation: I’ve dog-eared nearly every page. —Nicole Rudick

I spent the last two years working retail, toiling away as an indie bookseller, and in that time I read plenty of books but learned the stories of many, many more. The business of bookselling requires its worker bees to stretch beyond the limits of their own preferences, to slot into place season after season of titles and authors and blurbs and buzz—and then to step back, assess the amassed galaxies of information, and zero in on which exact book best suits a particular customer. It’s a wonderful way to stay in the know, but it’s exhausting. I’ve been happy to spend most of 2017 letting the new books stream past me like schools of fish. It means I’ve been able to go back and nudge stones I haven’t touched yet: the mind-warping nightmares of Kenzaburo Oe; the haunting agony of Han Kang; Joy Williams’s dead-eyed, disquieting brushes with the beyond; and the peppy charm of Haruki Murakami (whose running memoir, to my doctor’s dismay, did not turn me into a pro athlete or even a casual jogger, but I’m getting there). And after all this buildup, I’m still going to tell you that the best thing I read this year is Lincoln in the Bardo, the hottest, tenderest ghost chorus I’ve ever witnessed. Relative unknown George Saunders knocks it out of the park with his debut novel, and then the park dissolves into ectoplasm and the pitching mound sings a shanty. Enough has been said already about Saunders’s latest; I don’t have much to add. I’ll just say that prior to reading Lincoln in the Bardo, I had left the contemporary novel for dead, and Saunders—with his characteristic heart and funny bone—showed me just how deeply wrong I was. Looking back at a strange, terrible year, that discovery is enough for me. —Brian Ransom

Read More