{"id":119687,"date":"2017-12-22T13:00:45","date_gmt":"2017-12-22T18:00:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=119687"},"modified":"2017-12-23T21:59:10","modified_gmt":"2017-12-24T02:59:10","slug":"paris-review-staffs-favorite-books-2017","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/12\/22\/paris-review-staffs-favorite-books-2017\/","title":{"rendered":"The Paris Review<\/em> Staff\u2019s Favorite Books of 2017"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Danez Smith.<\/p><\/div>\n

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\u2019s After Kathy Acker<\/i><\/a>\u00a0and Sam Stephenson\u2019s Gene Smith\u2019s Sink<\/a>\u00a0<\/i>(which, full disclosure, I worked on as posts for the\u00a0Daily<\/em>). 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\u2019s life, it is impossible to know that person\u00a0fully; and the story of our lives is never really ours alone\u2014the telling comes, in large part, through the words, observations, and experiences of those with whom we\u2019ve shared time. Which brings me to Barbara Browning\u2019s\u00a0The Gift<\/i><\/a>, 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\u2014friends, family, acquaintances, and strangers. Browning\u2019s prose is open and unpretentious; I read her book\u00a0deliberately, soaking up the fullness of each sentence. Last, a book that knocked me over: Danez Smith\u2019s\u00a0Don\u2019t Call Us Dead<\/i><\/a>, 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\u2019t), creates an especial urgency, heightens the rhythm and emotion: \u201cwe say\u00a0wats gud<\/i>\u00a0meaning\u00a0i could love you until my jaw\u00a0<\/i>\/\u00a0is but memory<\/i>, we say\u00a0yo<\/i>\u00a0meaning\u00a0let my body\u00a0<\/i>\/\/\u00a0be a falcon\u2019s talon & your body be the soft innards of goats\u00a0<\/i>\/ but we mostly say nothing, just sip \/\/ some good brown trying to get drunk \/ with permission.\u201d Another kind of recommendation: I\u2019ve dog-eared nearly every page. \u2014Nicole Rudick<\/strong><\/p>\n

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\u2014and then to step back, assess the amassed galaxies of information, and zero in on which exact book best suits a particular customer. It\u2019s a wonderful way to stay in the know, but it\u2019s exhausting. I\u2019ve been happy to spend most of 2017 letting the new books stream past me like schools of fish. It means I\u2019ve been able to go back and nudge stones I haven\u2019t touched yet: the mind-warping nightmares of Kenzaburo Oe<\/a>; the haunting agony of Han Kang<\/a>; Joy Williams<\/a>\u2019s dead-eyed, disquieting brushes with the beyond; and the peppy charm of Haruki Murakami<\/a>\u00a0(whose running memoir, to my doctor\u2019s dismay, did not turn me into a pro athlete or even a casual jogger, but I\u2019m getting there). And after all this buildup, I\u2019m still going to tell you that the best thing I read this year is Lincoln in the Bardo<\/i><\/a>, the hottest, tenderest ghost chorus I\u2019ve 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\u2019s latest; I don\u2019t have much to add. I\u2019ll just say that prior to reading Lincoln in the Bardo<\/i>, I had left the contemporary novel for dead, and Saunders\u2014with his characteristic heart and funny bone\u2014showed me just how deeply wrong I was. Looking back at a strange, terrible year, that discovery is enough for me. \u2014Brian Ransom<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Still from Lady Bird<\/em>.<\/p><\/div>\n

Confession: there is an Ian Parker profile of\u00a0Greta\u00a0Gerwig and Noah Baumbach I read when I\u2019m down; it\u2019s called \u201cHappiness<\/a>.\u201d There\u2019s the line\u2014\u201cIn the time that it took Gerwig to drink two beers, Baumbach weighed the case for ordering a glass of wine.\u201d I\u2019m a Noah who wishes she was a\u00a0Greta, and never more so\u00a0than when I saw\u00a0Gerwig\u2019s triumphant Lady Bird<\/em>. (Don\u2019t get me wrong, I love Baumbach\u2019s movies, too, but I want to quaff the beer of life, while I more often deliberate.) Both Gerwig and Baumbach make films and a life together, but Lady Bird<\/em><\/a> is Gerwig\u2019s solo debut. It would be hard to overstate the pleasure of watching it.<\/em> The young female protagonist is given the license to be egotistical, ambitious, absolutist, sentimental, and impulsive. It is so clear a portrait of adolescence as I knew it (and wished I\u2019d known it) that it would take a second viewing to report on other aspects of film as work of art. As I rose from my seat at Manhattan\u2019s Angelika Cinema, I could hear, as well as feel, the young women around me saying, My sister has to see this. \u2014Julia Berick<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

From the cover of\u00a0Conversations with<\/em> Friends<\/em>.<\/p><\/div>\n

This year, I found myself swept away by Sally Rooney\u2019s Conversations with Friends<\/em><\/a>.\u00a0The jealousy-inducing story behind the book\u00a0(Rooney wrote\u00a0the first draft in three months, at the the age of twenty-six) is difficult to reconcile\u00a0with the tight grace of this novel, though all of the volatility and speed is there.\u00a0Rooney so expertly captures what it\u2019s like to be young today: the conversations that flow seamlessly from email to text message to unspoken glance, the\u00a0sexual and creative confidence, the\u00a0admiration for older men who write\u00a0emails written in all lowercase. Her first-person narrator, the twenty-one-year-old Frances, is a constant, careful observer, and yet Rooney leaves room for the reader to see all the things Frances herself does not. Frances\u2019s deceptively deadpan tone\u00a0encases moments of revelation;\u00a0among\u00a0the many sentences I underlined: \u201cShe made us all laugh a lot, but in the same way you might make someone eat something when they don\u2019t fully want it.\u201d I also loved Carmen Maria Machado\u2019s Her Body and Other Parties<\/a>.\u00a0<\/em>Machado plays with the oldest archetypes of myth and genre in ways\u00a0that feel wholly new. And, when composing this list, I was delighted to remember that Emil Ferris\u2019s graphic novel,\u00a0My Favorite Thing Is Monsters<\/a>,\u00a0<\/em>was also published in 2017, albeit at the very beginning, which now feels very long ago. It\u2019s a stylistic wonder, dark\u00a0and beautiful and form-bending, and a profound exploration of monstrousness, both female and otherwise. \u2014Nadja Spiegelman<\/strong><\/p>\n

No writer disorients reality quite like Renee Gladman. Or maybe that\u2019s not the right way to put it. Her expert handling of language is not so much a disorientation as a reorientation. The fact that I can\u2019t quite pin it down speaks to Gladman\u2019s particular mastery. Her\u00a0Prose Architectures<\/i><\/a>\u00a0is a captivating (and beautiful) book of ink line drawings in which words inhabit extended physical manifestations that hum energetically on the page. For Gladman, language does not just construct our reality, it exists alongside it in space and time. Language as a form of architecture is also a preoccupation in Gladman\u2019s Houses of Ravicka<\/i><\/a>, the\u00a0fourth of her Ravickian novels. These novels are set in a fictional city, Ravicka, and Houses<\/i> follows the city\u2019s comptroller as she obsessively seeks a house that\u00a0has been lost. What I love about Gladman\u2019s world is that it\u2019s not quite dystopian, not quite science fiction, and not entirely removed from our reality\u2013but it\u2019s not entirely a part of it either. In Ravicka,\u00a0names of streets are impossible for the reader to pronounce (Czorcic, Flvoder, Monstastrajen, Vibja), as we don\u2019t really know the rules of language in this fictional city. Gladman also peppers her prose with invented words such as feleedpur<\/em>\u00a0and tij<\/em>. Since we\u00a0can\u2019t pronounce them, we\u2019re\u00a0left with only\u00a0the visual comprehension of letters on the page\u00a0and are\u00a0confronted with the questions: How can something exist if you cannot speak it into existence? Are these literal prose architectures enough to build a world? Gladman\u2019s artful consideration of linguistic limitation is quietly smart, thrillingly unique, and, perhaps most impressively, translates into an thoroughly absorbing narrative. \u2014Lauren Kane<\/strong><\/p>\n

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

It has been\u00a0more than a year since I last read a novel quite as winning, and so warmly poignant, as Andrew Sean Greer\u2019s fifth,\u00a0Less<\/a>. <\/i>Endearing, hapless Arthur Less is a writer of tepid reputation\u2014a\u00a0 \u201cmidlist homosexual\u201d\u2014on the brink of his fiftieth birthday, and, as such, \u201cthe first homosexual ever to grow old.\u201d Rather than suffer through an ex\u2019s wedding, Less strings together a series of literary engagements\u2014also midlist\u2014in seven countries and embarks on a prolonged junket around the world. But half a century is not so easily outrun: his journey, like his memory, is littered with stray\u00a0assignations and lost connections,\u00a0all of which threaten to tow him back into the past. \u201cWhat was it like to live with genius?\u201d someone asks Less at a symposium, in Mexico, about another, more famous ex\u2019s work. \u201cWhat is it like to go on knowing you are not a genius, knowing you are a mediocrity?\u201d Less\u00a0waves off the question, but, like the rest of his life, it insists on coming back, unbidden: \u201cThe work, the habit, the words, will fix you,\u201d he tells himself on a flight. \u201cNothing else can be depended on, and Less has known genius, what genius can do. But what if you are not a genius? What will the work do then?\u201d There are flashes here of To the Lighthouse<\/i>\u2019s <\/i>Mr. Ramsay, and\u2014not surprisingly\u2014The Hours<\/i>\u2019 <\/i>Clarissa Vaughan: much like those characters, Arthur Less cannot stop\u00a0mourning the loss of his former and forgone\u00a0selves.<\/p>\n

The risk of misfire in such a story\u00a0would seem formidable: if aging is a\u00a0singular tragedy, it is also a\u00a0general affliction; all of us will at some point\u00a0have\u00a0youths misspent, or not misspent but, in any case, gone.\u00a0Yet in Less\u00a0<\/i>an\u00a0awareness of pain\u2019s banality leads not to mawkishness\u2014the\u00a0predictable destination\u2014but to a kind of wry world-weariness. The author\u2014the real\u00a0as well as the\u00a0fictional\u2014becomes free to explore the soberest of topics. Chief among them is\u00a0how suddenly a life\u2019s center of gravity can\u00a0appear to shift, as it always does, away from the future and\u00a0toward the past, so that one day the mind wakes and finds itself stuck\u2014if not tragically, then at the least\u00a0inescapably\u2014in memory\u2019s orbit. \u2014Spencer Bokat-Lindell<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

From the cover of House Full of Females<\/em>.<\/p><\/div>\n

I like my reading to be as ironic as possible, that\u2019s why Robert Coover\u2019s Huck Out West<\/a> <\/i>was my favorite novel this year. Coover\u2019s sequel to Twain\u2019s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn<\/i>\u00a0takes Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn to the edge of \u201csivilization,\u201d through the Civl War up to the centennial year of 1876. Huck Out West <\/i>is hilarious and pointed in the way only Coover can be. If you\u2019re left wanting to stay in that era, then Laurel Thatcher Ulrich\u2019s A House Full of Females: Plural Marriage and Women\u2019s Rights in Early Mormonism, 1835\u20131870<\/a><\/i>\u00a0is an impressive history. I\u2019ve long appreciated Ulrich\u2019s view of history as a chorus of singular stories. A House Full of Females <\/i>isn\u2019t your typical history pulled from headlines, memoirs of \u201cimportant white men,\u201d or official records;\u00a0it\u2019s a history gleaned from individual journals, personal stories, and heirlooms, putting us as close to the real story as possible. \u2014Jeffrey Gleaves<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Camille Bordas.<\/p><\/div>\n

This year was filled with great new books, I\u2019m sure\u2014admittedly, I didn\u2019t read most of them. Much of my year was spent with the Russians; I lived for months in Anna Karenina<\/i>, Doctor Zhivago<\/i>, Crime and Punishment<\/i>, <\/i>and The Brothers Karamazov<\/i>. A few new books that I read and loved, however, were Camille Bordas\u2019s How to Behave in a Crowd<\/i><\/a>, Hernan Diaz\u2019s In the Distance<\/i><\/a>, and Ben Loory\u2019s\u00a0Tales of Falling and Flying<\/i><\/a>. How to Behave in a Crowd, <\/i>Bordas\u2019s first novel, enticed me with its eleven-year-old narrator, puzzled by the world he encounters, all the while facilitating the healing his family so badly needs. Another first\u00a0novel, In the Distance <\/i>did something new, subverting the Western genre and, in so doing, raising important questions about cultural attitudes made evident by assumptions we make about art, particularly toward guns and immigrants. It\u2019s also just a great story. Tales of Falling and Flying<\/i> was the most fun I had reading a book in 2017. Loory\u2019s playfulness with language is infecting; he writes like a boy playing with a\u00a0new puppy. In his hands, language is a conduit of life and liveliness, an insight into what our imaginations could do if we let them. Finally, my favorite piece of writing from this year was an excerpt from George Saunders\u2019s introduction to The Grace Paley Reader<\/i>, published in The New Yorker<\/em><\/a>. As he praises the writing of Paley, Saunders shows what makes him so beloved: the deep feeling with which he writes, the intent to get to the heart of the matter. In a year from which many of us stumble with dogged weariness, bits like the following are rejuvenating, giving me a new hunger for the year to come: \u201cAll of Paley\u2019s work is marked by heart, precision, and concern for others, and surges with real, messy life, and the way life, lived, actually makes us feel: outgunned, befriended, short on time, long on regret, so happy we can\u2019t stand it, so in love we become fools.\u201d \u2014Joel Pinckney<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u2019s After Kathy Acker\u00a0and Sam Stephenson\u2019s Gene Smith\u2019s Sink\u00a0(which, full disclosure, I worked on as posts for the\u00a0Daily). Kraus and Stephenson have written unconventional lives, approaching their subjects askance and with […]<\/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":[32152],"tags":[28261,32319,32304,32317,32310,4639,32306,30494,30085,30078,8960,32312,7106,32303,13480,32307,8692,32313,7998,970,3461,2980,22740,2081,30079,30404,32316,32321,26568,32309,32322,7285,19406,32308,32320,32318,27364,32314,2308,32315,8695,26569,32311,1551,32305,32323,7818,31307,40,8754,29444],"class_list":["post-119687","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-best-of-2017","tag-a-house-full-of-females","tag-adventures-of-huckleberry-finn","tag-after-kathy-acker","tag-andrew-sean-greer","tag-angelika-cinema","tag-anna-karenina","tag-barbara-browning","tag-ben-loory","tag-camille-bordas","tag-carmen-maria-machado","tag-chris-kraus","tag-conversations-with-friends","tag-crime-and-punishment","tag-danez-smith","tag-doctor-zhivago","tag-dont-call-us-dead","tag-dorothy","tag-emil-ferris","tag-gene-smith","tag-george-saunders","tag-grace-paley","tag-greta-gerwig","tag-han-kang","tag-haruki-murakami","tag-her-body-and-other-parties","tag-hernan-diaz","tag-houses-of-ravicka","tag-how-to-behave-in-a-crowd","tag-huck-out-west","tag-ian-parker","tag-in-the-distance","tag-joy-williams","tag-kenzaburo-oe","tag-ladybird","tag-lauren-thatcher-ulrich","tag-less","tag-lincoln-in-the-bardo","tag-my-favorite-thing-is-monsters","tag-noah-baumbach","tag-prose-architectures","tag-renee-gladman","tag-robert-coover","tag-sally-rooney","tag-sam-stephenson","tag-sink","tag-tales-of-falling-and-flying","tag-the-brothers-karamazov","tag-the-gift","tag-the-new-yorker","tag-tom-sawyer","tag-wave-books"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Paris Review Staff's Favorite Books of 2017<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"What the staff of The Paris Review loved this year.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/12\/22\/paris-review-staffs-favorite-books-2017\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Paris Review Staff\u2019s Favorite Books of 2017 by The Paris Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"December 22, 2017 \u2013 It turns out that the books that top my reading list this year are, in one way or another, about intimacy. 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