{"id":119581,"date":"2017-12-20T11:00:40","date_gmt":"2017-12-20T16:00:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=119581"},"modified":"2017-12-21T10:59:17","modified_gmt":"2017-12-21T15:59:17","slug":"contributors-favorite-books-2017","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/12\/20\/contributors-favorite-books-2017\/","title":{"rendered":"Our Contributors\u2019 Favorite Books of 2017"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Fleur Jaeggy<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

This past July, I read\u00a0Fleur<\/span>\u00a0Jaeggy<\/span>\u2019s most recent collection, I Am the Brother of XX<\/em><\/a> (New Directions, 2017) with a mix of envy and admiration. While it may not qualify as holiday reading, this slim volume combines all of my favorite fictional things: a touch of cruelty, the comitragedy of the absurd, and a reverence for the domestic. I am a firm believer in the idea that in everyday household objects we find the magic, menace, and violence of our world distilled, a notion\u00a0Jaeggy<\/span>\u00a0extrapolates to great and unsettling effect. In these strange, dark tales, photographs and paintings frequently come alive. Tea cups and spoons converse with spinsters. A lonely diner finds companionship in the fish she is about to eat (\u201cHe is already\u00a0a friend\u201d), while nihilistic children harbor sartorial obsessions with a \u201ccertain blue coat\u201d or \u201ceggplant-colored penny loafers.\u201d\u00a0As with all of\u00a0Jaeggy<\/span>‘s work, I Am the Brother of XX<\/em> is menacing, moving, and disturbingly\u00a0comic\u2014austere, but without ever losing its sense of play. I recently shared my favorite story in the collection, \u201cAgnes<\/a>,\u201d with a poet friend of mine. Her response sums up my feeling exactly: \u201cIt\u2019s perfect. I wish I\u2019d written it myself.\u201d \u2014J. Jezewska Stevens\u00a0<\/strong>(\u201cThe Party<\/a>\u201d)<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>My revelation of the year was the writing of Joan Silber. When I was asked a few months ago to review Improvement<\/i><\/a>, her new novel, I had never heard of her. But I was immediately captivated by her fictional method, a cross between the novel and linked stories, in which a minor character in one chapter will become a major figure in another. This connect-the-dots narrative structure makes possible wide leaps over time and space, while still offering that sense of connection and emotional depth that makes the best fiction so satisfying.\u00a0In the space of a few weeks, I tore through five of Silber\u2019s eight books. I especially admired Fools<\/i><\/a> (2013), which starts with a group of anarchists in 1920s New York and spirals out from there, and The Size of the World<\/i><\/a> (2008), a meditation on the themes of immigration and expatriation. But my favorite was Ideas of Heaven<\/i><\/a>, which was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2004. The characters range from an aging dancer to an Italian Renaissance poet, an American missionary in China, a French goat farmer. All are driven by love or longing, the desire to submit themselves to a person, a discipline, a god. Silber finds the commonality beneath these different kinds of yearning, paradoxically locating in the wish to lose ourselves the essence of what makes us most human. I know this is a book I\u2019ll return to again and again. \u2014Ruth Franklin\u00a0<\/strong>(Stacy Schiff, The Art of Biography No. 6<\/a>)<\/p>\n

<\/a>

Lucia Berlin<\/p><\/div>\n

Rereading an author whose work once blew you away is always a risk. What if the work doesn\u2019t hold up? When this happens\u2014and to me it seems to be happening more and more with age\u2014the effect can be quite disheartening. But rereading Lucia Berlin\u2019s stories in A Manual for Cleaning Women<\/i><\/a>, a selection edited by her friend Stephen Emerson and published in 2015, has been a thoroughly pleasurable and inspiring experience. Berlin, who died in 2004, was a fine prose stylist and a master of the short-story form. She wrote mostly about women, many of them down and out, many in bad, even catastrophic, relationships, many of them victims, as was Berlin herself, of child abuse and of severe alcoholism. But though her stories were taken mainly from her own hard life, they are notable for an absence of resentment and self-pity. Instead, these pages are suffused with compassion, empathy, and a sense of wonder at ordinary human experience. I am reminded of the distinction once made by John Cheever, writing about John O\u2019Hara, \u201cbetween a fascinated horror of life and a vision of life.\u201d As clear-eyed as any writer about human nature and the suffering that makes up so great a part of life, Berlin also saw beauty, tenderness, and comedy everywhere she looked. Now I don\u2019t think there will ever come a time when her unique, meticulously nuanced stories, which reveal not only large literary gifts but also a truly good heart, will fail to reward rereading. \u2014Sigrid Nunez <\/strong>(\u201cThe Blind<\/a>\u201d)<\/p>\n

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

 <\/p>\n

This year, I read two unusually excellent new poetry books from Greece, in unusually excellent translation. Both were published by World Poetry Books. They were:\u00a0Homerica<\/em><\/a> by\u00a0Phoebe\u00a0Giannisi,\u00a0translated bv Brian Sneeden, and\u00a0Rose Fear<\/a><\/em> by Maria Laina,\u00a0translated by Sarah McCann. \u2014 Anne Carson\u00a0<\/strong>(\u201cEddy<\/a>\u201d)<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Susan Howe. Photo: courtesy of Ruth Medjber<\/p><\/div>\n

Here are my favorite books of theory I read this year, in no particular order: In Nature as Event: The Lure of the Possible<\/a>,\u00a0<\/em>Didier Debaise\u00a0revises the modern conception of nature by rereading Alfred North Whitehead. He says, \u201cBeing and manner are intermingled \u2026 \u201d Object as mannerism. Debaise doesn\u2019t throw his lot in with object-oriented-ontology, but there is some overlap. In\u00a0Reality Is Not What it Seems<\/a>,\u00a0<\/em>Carlo Rovelli, one of the pioneers of quantum gravity theory\u00a0argues that space is an emergent property arising from relations between \u201cneighboring objects.\u201d In\u00a0The Fire and the Tale<\/a>,\u00a0<\/em>Giorgio Agamben\u00a0explores the internal resistance that he says characterizes art works. He has a lot to say about poetry.<\/p>\n

And, again in no particular order, my favorite books of poetry: In The End of Something<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>by Kate Greenstreet, every line\/sentence is both complete and incomplete. I have never read anything quite like it. It\u2019s a good example of the kind of resistance Agamben was talking about.\u00a0Debths <\/em><\/a>by Susan Howe\u00a0feels like a culmination of Howe\u2019s long project. She\u00a0makes us experience loss through,\u00a0paradoxically, examining what people have attempted to preserve. In\u00a0Explosion Rocks Springfield<\/a>,<\/em>\u00a0Rodrigo Toscano\u00a0rings the changing language of a news article about an accidental explosion in a strip club. The book asks hard questions and also explores the creative potential in destruction. This year, I also reread\u00a0The Unfollowing<\/em><\/a> by Lyn Hejinian. It\u2019s a series of fourteen\u00a0line elegies, a formal exploration of lives broken off. It is somehow both riotously alive and melancholy. \u2014Rae Armantrout\u00a0<\/strong>(Five Poems<\/a><\/em>)<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Jesmyn Ward \u00a9 Beowulf Sheehan<\/p><\/div>\n

Here are three books that affected me this year, all by women, and all about loss, community, and the damaged, damaging natural world. I went back and read the earlier work of Jesmyn Ward (who just published\u00a0Sing, Unburied, Sing<\/i><\/a>), and was devastated by Salvage the Bones<\/a>\u2014<\/i>a novel that interweaves Euripides with Faulkner, and shows how Hurricane Katrina was only one of a sequence of disasters to hit impoverished families across the South. I finally read The Sixth Extinction<\/i><\/a> by Elizabeth Kolbert, and I feel changed by a new awareness of how exactly we are messing up the planet. I reread Mary Shelley\u2019s Frankenstein<\/i><\/a>, and it\u2019s even better than I remembered: a terrifying, heartbreaking rewrite of Paradise Lost<\/i><\/a> that meditates on the pain of social exclusion, and the costs of shutting out the monsters we have made, whoever they may be. \u2014Emily Wilson\u00a0<\/strong>(\u201cFrom the \u2018Odyssey,\u2019 Book I<\/a>\u201d)<\/p>\n

<\/a>

Mary Gaitskill<\/p><\/div>\n

What a terrible year it\u2019s been! And my\u00a0reading has been hugely affected by what\u2019s swirling around the country, the world. It\u2019s not so much affected what<\/em> I\u2019m reading\u2014I\u2019m reading mostly fiction, apparently\u2014but how<\/em> I read what it\u2019s front of me. Last spring, when everyone was marching all day every day I was scheduled to interview Mary Gaitskill on stage, whose work I knew in that casual but very adoring way\u2014I\u2019d read Veronica<\/em><\/a> and several of her stories, as well as her essay \u201cLost Cat<\/a>.\u201d But I found myself delving deeper into her stories, and marveling at everything I found in Because They Wanted To<\/em><\/a>, Don\u2019t Cry<\/em><\/a>, and Bad Behavior<\/em><\/a>. I was struck by how she might drop a little bomb on the reader, just some dangerous sentence in the middle of a paragraph, and then the story would carry on as if nothing had happened. In the summer, I found myself reading more and more short stories, revisiting Sam Lipsyte\u2019s \u201cThe Climber Room<\/a>,\u201d which is howlingly, and painfully funny, and worth a reread, and everything in Z. Z. Packer\u2019s Drinking Coffee Elsewhere<\/em><\/a>, but so much more. This whole year I was supposed to be writing a novel, but I kept getting distracted by writing these long short stories, including the one that appeared in the Winter issue of The Paris Review<\/em><\/a>. There\u2019s something about the enormity of a book, and of the news in 2017, that\u00a0made me only want to focus on the smaller frame and seek order there, where it seemed somewhat manageable. Maybe I wasn\u2019t alone? This was the year, after all, when a short story ended up trending on Twitter. I\u2019m sure you know I\u2019m talking about the fabulous and painfully apt story \u201cCat Person<\/a>,\u201d by Kristen Roupenian, which went viral earlier this month. So it was, for me, a year of reading fiction, mostly, always shorter, and more troubling, always arresting and alive. \u2014Peter Mountford<\/strong> (\u201cPay Attention<\/a>\u201d)<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Olivia Clare<\/p><\/div>\n

Anthony Marra\u2019s The Tsar of Love and Techno<\/a>.<\/em>\u00a0My husband never stopped talking about how great it was, and since I had agreed to begin with, I also reread it. It\u2019s astonishing. I\u2019m a big fan of Damon Galgut, and The Impostor<\/em><\/a> scared and overwhelmed me. Also, Willy Vlautin\u2019s Northline<\/em><\/a>, partly a (posthumous) pas de deux with Raymond Carver. Short-story collections: Disasters in the First World<\/em>,<\/a> by Olivia Clare; Twenty Grand: And Other Tales of Love and Money<\/em><\/a>, by Rebecca Curtis; and I loved the Library of America\u2019s\u00a0John O\u2019Hara: Stories<\/em><\/a>, with an excellent introduction by Chip McGrath. \u2014Ann Beattie <\/strong>(\u201cRuckersville<\/a>\u201d)<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Rachel Cusk<\/p><\/div>\n

Rachel Cusk\u2019s Transit<\/em><\/a> was one of my favorite reads this year. Hyperintelligent and deeply strange, Transit<\/em> is the second of a trilogy (Outline<\/em><\/a> being the first) that obscures the narrator in a cloak of dialog and second-hand stories. We discussed Transit<\/em> on my podcast, Fan\u2019s Notes<\/a><\/em>, in a stretch that also included Knausgaard\u2019s My Struggle<\/em><\/a>\u00a0and Ben Lerner\u2019s Leaving the Atocha Station<\/em><\/a>\u2014a triptych of modern first-person storytelling that eschew novelistic conventions like plot and stakes and conflict. In a larger sense, immersing myself in these books was the highlight of my reading year; as a writer, they challenged my thinking about what a successful novel requires, both in its constituent elements and on the part of the reader. \u2014Adam O\u2019Fallon Price <\/strong>(\u201cA Natural Man<\/a>\u201d)<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

From the\u00a0original cover of The House in Paris<\/em>.<\/p><\/div>\n

Last week, I discovered Elizabeth Bowen, and\u00a0The House in Paris<\/a><\/em>\u00a0(1936) has, at the last minute, topped my reading of 2017. The drama of this slim novel occurs within the confines of some familiar structures\u2014oppressions of marriage, questions of honor\u2014with matters of life, death, and love whispered about in drawing rooms and back gardens. Among all this \u201ctraditional\u201d narrative furniture, Bowen\u2019s wild sentences strike vibrant, violent chords. \u201cBetween the tamarisks passing the rainy window and this lamp-invaded darkness, nothing remained \u2026 The weight of being herself fell on her like a clock striking.\u201d \u2014Isabella\u00a0Hammad\u00a0<\/b>(\u201cMr. Can\u2019aan<\/a>\u201d)<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>1. Inferno<\/em><\/a>, Eileen Myles
\n2. Black Wings Has My Angel<\/em><\/a>, Elliott Chaze
\n3. Total Chaos<\/a>,<\/em> Iggy Pop
\n4. Jubilee City<\/a>,<\/em> Joe Andoe
\n5. Prussian Blue<\/em><\/a>, Philip Kerr
\n6. Old Filth<\/em><\/a>, Jane Gardam
\n7. My Face for the World to See<\/em><\/a>,<\/em> Alfred Hayes
\n8. Juliet, Naked<\/em><\/a>, Nick Hornby
\n9. The Man with the Golden Typewriter<\/em><\/a>, letters of Ian Fleming
\n10. Reunion<\/em><\/a>, Fred Uhlman
\n\u2014Duncan Hannah\u00a0<\/strong>\u00a0(\u201cDiaries, 1970\u201373<\/a>\u201d)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  This past July, I read\u00a0Fleur\u00a0Jaeggy\u2019s most recent collection, I Am the Brother of XX (New Directions, 2017) with a mix of envy and admiration. While it may not qualify as holiday reading, this slim volume combines all of my favorite fictional things: a touch of cruelty, the comitragedy of the absurd, and a reverence 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