{"id":106099,"date":"2016-12-22T16:55:14","date_gmt":"2016-12-22T21:55:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=106099"},"modified":"2016-12-22T16:55:14","modified_gmt":"2016-12-22T21:55:14","slug":"staff-picks-our-favorite-reads-of-2016","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/12\/22\/staff-picks-our-favorite-reads-of-2016\/","title":{"rendered":"Staff Picks: Our Favorite Reads of 2016"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

From Gone with the Mind<\/i>.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

So many of our contributors brought out new books this year\u2014Amie Barrodale, Emma Cline, Peter Cole, Rachel Cusk, Kristin Dombek, Garth Greenwell, Benjamin Hale, Fanny Howe, Ishion Hutchinson, Alexandra Kleeman, Karl Ove Knausgaard, April Ayers Lawson, Nathalie L\u00e9ger, Ben Lerner, Jonathan Lethem, Mark Leyner, Sarah Manguso, Luke Mogelson, Mary Ruefle, David Salle, Brenda Shaughnessy, Zadie Smith, Karen Solie, David Szalay \u2026 I worry I\u2019m forgetting some, but these are the ones on my shelf. After these, my favorite new books of 2016 were probably a couple of reissues from New York Review Classics. First there was Henry Green\u2019s masterpiece, Loving<\/em><\/a>, about servants on an Irish estate during World War II; then there was Sybille Bedford\u2019s multigenerational saga,\u00a0A Legacy<\/em><\/a>.\u00a0First published in 1956, this is the story of two German families\u2014one, rich Berlin Jews; the other, country aristocrats\u2014whose fates intertwine in the years before World War I. If you like any two of the following\u2014The Radetzky March<\/em>, The Hare With Amber Eyes<\/em>, or Love in a Cold Climate<\/em>\u2014then A Legacy <\/em>should be on your short list. Things get a tiny bit slow at the very end, only because Bedford seems to lose interest in the plot. What she cares about is scenes, character, and atmosphere. She is also very good at food: \u201cThe sea-urchins came heaped in a great armorial pile, sable and violet, tiered on their burnished quills, like the unexplained detail on the hill by the thistles and the hermitage of a quattrocento background, exposing now inside each severed shell the pattern of a tender sea-star.\u201d And that\u2019s just the first course. \u2014Lorin Stein<\/strong><\/p>\n

With such wildness going on around us, it\u2019s beginning to feel like an even more difficult task than usual to make writing equal to the gargantuan thing we keep melancholically calling\u00a0reality<\/em>. The essays by Mark Greif in\u00a0Against Everything<\/em><\/a>\u00a0are a rare example of patient, complicated clarity; while I hope someone is translating\u00a0Nous<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>by the French novelist and philosopher Tristan Garcia, a\u00a0book\u00a0that brilliantly examines what we mean when we use that pernicious and inescapable word\u00a0we<\/em>. I guess in the end it just comes down to some kind of accuracy of voice, like the disillusioned, festive thinking on display, in very different ways, in Frederick Seidel\u2019s\u00a0Widening Income Inequality<\/em><\/a>\u00a0and Maureen McLane\u2019s\u00a0Mz N: the Serial<\/em><\/a>. Or maybe there\u2019s no need to expect the contemporary to be equal to the contemporary \u2026 The woozy inventions on display in Clarice Lispector\u2019s\u00a0Complete Stories<\/em><\/a>\u00a0(I know it came out last\u00a0year, but still\u00a0\u2026) seem more and more alarming and persuasive. \u2014Adam Thirlwell\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I find making year-end selections especially daunting when I consider all the books I haven\u2019t<\/i>\u00a0read this year. I also can\u2019t possibly choose just one. With that in mind, the book I\u2019ve talked about and recommended the most this year is Garth Greenwell\u2019s\u00a0What Belongs to You<\/i><\/a>, a three-part novel about a young American cruising for sex in Bulgaria and becoming entangled with an alluring hustler named Mitko. But it\u2019s the novel\u2019s middle section, about the protagonist\u2019s youth and budding sexuality\u2014written as a single, tense, unstoppable paragraph\u2014that bowled me over. Coincidentally, I also loved L\u00e1szl\u00f3 Krasznahorkai\u2019s single-sentence novella The Last Wolf<\/i><\/a>, about an unnamed, washed-up philosopher who is ferried to Extremadura, Spain, to write something\u2014anything\u2014on the unremarkable city. It\u2019s Krasznahorkai, so nothing happens, in a big way, which keeps me coming back for more. There\u2019s also Julie Doucet\u2019s Carpet Sweeper Tales<\/i><\/a>, another formally risky and brilliantly executed book. Doucet snipped pictures, letters, and phrases from sixties Italian fumetti to create nonsense narratives about gender and language. If Kurt Schwitters and Aleksei Kruchenykh made feminist comics, they would look like Carpet Sweeper<\/i>. Last, Kima Jones\u2019s \u201cHomegoing AD,\u201d from Jesmyn Ward\u2019s anthology\u00a0The Fire This Time<\/i><\/a>, a hard gem of a story and one that\u2019s so short it\u2019s over almost as soon as it begins. I haven\u2019t been able to stop thinking about it: \u201cAnd we smile cuz his hand is on our hip and it\u2019s hot out and he smell good and it\u2019s the darkest Charleston has ever been.\u201d \u2014Nicole Rudick<\/strong><\/p>\n

Mark Leyner\u2019s Gone with the Mind<\/em><\/a> stands out as the most inventive, vibrant novel I read in 2016\u2014and, in its oblique way, the most poignant. Yes, it is, on the surface, the story of a loser writer who gives a reading at a mall food court in New Jersey, attended only by his mother and two employees from Panda Express and Sbarro. And yes, the entirety of the novel comprises his spoken introduction to this \u201creading.\u201d But it\u2019s so much more than that. I sometimes worry that literary readers resist comic novels for their air of high-concept shtick, as if from hearing the premise you should think, Well, I know how that plays out, and it just sounds silly<\/em>. But you don\u2019t know a fraction of what\u00a0happens\u00a0in Gone with the Mind<\/em>, and (you\u2019ll just have to trust me on this) its silliness is a conduit to some of the most profound, humane concerns a writer can have. If it\u2019s about anything, Gone with Mind <\/em>is a study of a mother and a son, a look at \u201chow intimates make audiences of each other<\/a>,\u201d as Leyner put it. In its imagery and its preoccupation with fascism, it also anticipated the aesthetics of Trump rallies. In fact, I\u2019d argue that it reclaims those aesthetics: here is one man on stage alone, rambling, free-associating, but in ways that seek to affirm life rather than to deny it. Paul Beatty\u2019s The<\/em> Sellout<\/em><\/a>\u00a0<\/em>has been rightly celebrated for its originality and its incisive wit. If you liked that book, you\u2019ll find a lot to enjoy in Gone with the Mind<\/em>. Both are propelled by a compulsive energy; both are urgent reminders that the comic novel can go places that no other medium can, and that writers would do best to\u00a0hold\u00a0their idiosyncrasies up to the light\u00a0instead of\u00a0ironing them out. \u2014Dan Piepenbring<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

From Hariton Pushwagner\u2019s Soft City<\/i>.<\/p><\/div>\n

I\u2019ve\u00a0marveled over the late Argentine poet Alejandra Pizarnik\u00a0before<\/a>, but I\u2019ve kept the latest and most extensive collection of her poems,\u00a0Extracting the Stone of Madness<\/a><\/em>, close until now. While Octavio Paz, Roberto Bola\u00f1o, Julio Cort\u00e1zar, and other Latin American writers have long touted her oeuvre, Pizarnik\u2014a \u201cwoman of torments,\u201d to borrow from her poem \u201cScene\u201d\u2014remains startling obscure in the U.S. Behold Extracting<\/em>, which compiles work from 1962 through 1972, the year the poet took her own life. Pizarnik\u2019s is a harrowing poetry; nearly every line heaves with an intense longing to die. And yet, it\u2019s poised, too, as if death is something to lust over rather than cower from. What\u2019s most arresting, though, is the way she knits subtle enchantments in, like the tiny woman who lives in the heart of a bird, or the man who hangs dead from a tree only to slip through an opened window with the wind. Here are my favorite lines from the title piece: \u201cHe smiles, and I become a tiny marionette, pink with a pale blue umbrella, and I enter through that smile I build my little house on his tongue I inhabit the palm of his hand closing his fingers a gold powder a bit of blood and then goodbye, my love, goodbye.\u201d \u2014Caitlin Youngquist<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Many of my favorite books from 2016 were released by our friends at New York Review Books, who had a banner year\u2014three Henry Greens (Caught<\/em><\/a>,\u00a0Loving<\/a><\/em>,\u00a0Back<\/a><\/em>),\u00a0Slow Days, Fast Company<\/em><\/a> by Eve Babitz, and the stupendous small novel by Ge Fei,\u00a0The Invisibility Cloak<\/em><\/a>. The release that had the most impression on me, though, is from New York Review Comics: Hariton Pushwagner\u2019s dystopic masterpiece,\u00a0Soft City<\/em><\/a>. This graphic novel is about a single day in Soft City, where citizens wake up, take a pill, read the paper, eat breakfast, drive to work, grind away, trek home, have dinner, watch TV, take a pill, and go to bed. Pushwagner creates his story in plain black ink, outlining a world manic with repetition\u2014streets are crowded with cars, massive apartment buildings stretch off the page, offices are stacked with hundreds of desks (an image that reminds me very much of Joseph K.\u2019s office in Orson Welles\u2019s 1962\u00a0The Trial<\/em>). Dystopia reveals itself first in the maddening cheerfulness with which these workers serve their absence purposes, which are to work and consume media. A Big Brother figure watches everyone\u2019s movements. Martin Herbert says in the afterword<\/a> that Pushwagner\u2019s world \u201cis at once pleasurable to lose oneself in, fearsome in its amphetamine energy, frightening as an idea of reality, and comically scathing: an intricate no-way-out design in which even the sun is a spy.\u201d \u2014Caitlin Love<\/strong><\/p>\n

To anyone who\u2019s asked, and to so many who haven\u2019t, I\u2019ve made it no secret that my favorite book from 2016 is Samantha Hunt\u2019s\u00a0Mr. Splitfoot<\/em><\/a>. The premise is convoluted: two orphans, Ruth and Nat, travel along the Hudson River Valley pretending to be mediums, until they mysteriously vanish.\u00a0Fourteen years later, a very different Ruth\u2014older, haggard-looking, mute\u2014appears in the bedroom of her pregnant niece, Cora, and the two women embark on a grueling journey, again along the Hudson. Cora doesn\u2019t know what the reason for this adventure is; she just follows. Ruth, after all, can\u2019t talk, and therein lies the mystery. Hunt\u2019s writing is beautiful and sharp and quiet; her Hudson Valley\u2014a historically spiritual landscape\u2014is fever-dreamy and gothic. The standout moments are delightfully spectacular: a gathering of meteorite-worshipping cultists snorting rails of Comet; a ghostly farce in which Captain Ahab, Huck Finn, and Lord Nelson engage each other in naval warfare at twilight on the Eerie Canal. It\u2019s a book about spirits who so fiercely want to be seen, and about the gauntlet between pregnancy and motherhood. Mostly, it\u2019s about the folly in our kneejerk quickness to explain away our ghosts. And so,\u00a0Mr. Splitfoot<\/em>\u00a0continues to tap on my shoulder\u2014oddly, sweetly. It\u2019s insistent like that. I get the sense not only that its story will long linger with me, but also that perhaps\u2014not unlike the phantoms that haunt its pages\u2014it\u00a0hopes<\/em>\u00a0to remain there, dogging my thoughts. \u2014Daniel Johnson<\/strong><\/p>\n

I read several artful and surprising works of fiction in 2016, but as the year wore on I found myself turning to journalism and criticism instead. The fiction I was reading seemed to skirt the most urgent questions, failing to account for the swelling calamity and lacking consequential ideas about my own place within it. The summer issue of\u00a0The Point\u00a0<\/em>included an editors\u2019 note entitled \u201cOn Political Fiction<\/a>,\u201d which calls to account the contemporary American political novel for failing to disturb its liberal readership\u2019s own troublesome ethics and assumptions, in part because of a simplistic insistence that the \u201cbasest and most violent elements in our society\u201d are \u201calien and marginal\u201d to normal American political life. The essay is a powerful argument for writers like George Saunders and Claudia Rankine, whose work is personal without being inbent and political without being righteous. \u201cThe political value\u00a0of the imaginative writer,\u201d the editors of\u00a0The Point\u00a0<\/em>write, \u201c[lies] in helping to close the\u00a0gap between the emotional crosscurrents that swell beneath the surface of our\u00a0political life.\u201d Perhaps, then, the imperative of political writing in 2017 is less to \u201cexpose \u2026 \u2018lies,\u2019 \u2018crimes\u2019 or \u2018iniquities\u2019 \u201d than it is to puncture \u201cthe increasingly prevalent illusion that it is possible to wall ourselves off\u00a0from the America that disappoints, frightens or disgusts us.\u201d \u2014Sylvie McNamara<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Garth Greenwell\u2019s \u2018What Belongs to You\u2019, Kima Jones\u2019s \u201cHomegoing AD,\u201d Mark Leyner\u2019s \u2018Gone with the Mind\u2019, Hariton Pushwagner\u2019s \u2018Soft City,\u2019 and more.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[26379],"tags":[26407,26410,22986,25174,26416,25175,5004,26413,19774,26418,712,16289,24876,21598,25041,1516,24183,26417,24185,26409,25173,3533,10544,1712,26419,26412,3136,26411,26420,20435,25042,1994,24184,4856,24875,26415,26408,836,26414,21221],"class_list":["post-106099","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-best-of-2016","tag-a-legacy","tag-against-everything","tag-alejandra-pizarnik","tag-back","tag-carpet-sweeper-tales","tag-caught","tag-clarice-lispector","tag-complete-stories","tag-eve-babitz","tag-extracting-the-stone-of-madness","tag-frederick-seidel","tag-garth-greenwell","tag-ge-fei","tag-gone-with-the-mind","tag-hariton-pushwagner","tag-henry-green","tag-jessmyn-ward","tag-julie-doucet","tag-kima-jones","tag-love-in-a-cold-climate","tag-loving","tag-mark-grief","tag-mark-leyner","tag-maureen-mclane","tag-mr-splitfoot","tag-mz-n-the-serial","tag-new-york-review-classics","tag-nous","tag-on-political-fiction","tag-slow-days-fast-company","tag-soft-city","tag-sybille-bedford","tag-the-fire-this-time","tag-the-hare-with-amber-eyes","tag-the-invisibility-cloak","tag-the-last-wolf","tag-the-radetsky-march","tag-tristan-garcia","tag-what-belongs-to-you","tag-widening-income-inequality"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nStaff 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