{"id":132000,"date":"2018-12-21T12:57:57","date_gmt":"2018-12-21T17:57:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=132000"},"modified":"2018-12-29T18:01:13","modified_gmt":"2018-12-29T23:01:13","slug":"the-paris-review-staffs-favorite-books-of-2018","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/12\/21\/the-paris-review-staffs-favorite-books-of-2018\/","title":{"rendered":"The Paris Review<\/em> Staff\u2019s Favorite Books of 2018"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Lucia Berlin in Oakland, California, 1975. Photo: Jeff Berlin (\u00a9 2018 Literary Estate of Lucia Berlin LP).<\/p><\/div>\n

2018 has been a year of fragments, brief episodes, flashes. The seasons, at least here on the East Coast, fractured into kaleidoscopic hot and cold days, which alternated at random. The news was bad, then very bad, then bad, then worse. We were all watching, then no one was watching, then we lay under the covers, lit only by our screens.\u00a0Was there a summer? Yes, but that\u2019s its own novella, long ago. There was no single narrative.<\/p>\n

It seems no surprise, then, that many of the books I loved this year are short-story collections. Lydia Millet\u2019s Fight No More<\/em><\/a> fulfilled the voyeur in me, the one who stares into incandescent ground-floor windows of Brooklyn brownstones. In these linked stories, Nina, a realtor, drifts in and out of the lives and homes of strange, estranged Angelenos. She reveals a web of strangers and, in that isolation, shows our shared humanity. In the stories of\u00a0Some Trick<\/em><\/a>, Helen DeWitt\u00a0skewers the publishing world, the art world, mathematicians, and computer scientists with an outsider\u2019s cutting wit reminiscent of Paul Beatty and Nell Zink. Reading Lucia Berlin\u2019s Evening in Paradise<\/em><\/a> (and the accompanying volume of memoir and letters, Welcome Home<\/em><\/a>) is like sitting in the back seat of a car driven so fast over broken roads that your teeth rattle and the empty whiskey bottles clank together, while the driver sings the most heartbreakingly beautiful of songs (if that was a terrible metaphor, then please know I\u2019ve written about these books using fewer metaphors here<\/a>). Sabrina Orah Mark\u2019s Wild Milk<\/em><\/a> reinvents the fairy tale in a way I didn\u2019t know could still be done. Her craft feels generous, fluid, inventive: she bends myths and archetypes like balloon animals. And yet for all that sense of play, what she reveals is not lightness but wildness. There is something elemental in her stories, as complicated and tangled as the roots of any ancient tree.<\/p>\n

I read novels this year as well\u2014Sight<\/em><\/a>, by Jessie Greengrass, flew woefully under the radar, though it\u2019s one of the sharpest, smartest books on motherhood I\u2019ve read in a long time. Sayaka Murata\u2019s\u00a0Convenience Store Woman<\/em><\/a>\u00a0stuck with me far longer than I expected it to, especially for a book so intentionally flat and strange. The Transit of Venus<\/a>,<\/em> by Shirley Hazzard, was published in 1980, but anyone who knew me this year heard about it. It filled me with a sense of giddiness about the possibilities of literature that I haven\u2019t felt since I was twenty. I followed it up with Penelope Lively\u2019s Moon Tiger<\/em><\/a>, from 1988, which, though it didn\u2019t siderate me with the same outrageous coup de foudre (but what could?), made the perfect companion to Hazzard. Both books capture a sense of lucid, quiet feminine fury at the world\u2019s limited possibilities, of desire and intelligence bridled but by no means dulled. They felt, I must say, very appropriate to this year. \u2014Nadja Spiegelman\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis.<\/p><\/div>\n

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We all remember the famous first sentence of Joan Didion\u2019s \u201cThe White Album\u201d: \u201cWe tell ourselves stories in order to live.\u201d One person who I imagine really had that art down pat is Machado de Assis. Trying to learn, I was happy to find his collected stories<\/a>, translated this year by Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson in a deckle-edged, door-stopping delight of a book. Machado knows like no one else how to freeze the frame, how to shape a lump of clay into something that looks meaningful, sensible. He makes you feel that if you could adopt his wry glance, you, too, would understand what is going on around you.<\/p>\n

I always forget, though, how that famous quote has a shadow at the end of a long Didion paragraph: \u201cWe live entirely \u2026 by the \u2018ideas\u2019 with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.\u201d It became particularly clear this year that \u201cthe sermon in the suicide\u201d is just a matter of cropping, and so I was grateful to spend some time with Machado\u2019s century-later compatriot Clarice Lispector, whose complete stories<\/a>, translated by Katrina Dodson, came out in a paperback that was small enough to carry around with me but spent more months in my bag than length warranted; I could take only a little bit at a time. There are few trappings, few concessions here; there is little to hold on to, and each story feels like a breath of pure oxygen, which is to say a hazard. Lispector resists the shaping, the molding, Machado\u2019s arched eyebrow: she looks without blinking straight at the shifting phantasmagoria. It is hard to imagine a clearer eye\u2014but you have to know when to close your own.\u00a0\u2014Hasan Altaf<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Rachel Cusk. Photo: Siemon Scamell-Katz.<\/p><\/div>\n

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What better way to spend a terrible year than to read as much as possible? Rachel Cusk\u2019s Kudos<\/em><\/a>, the final volume in her trilogy of autofiction, and Kate Atkinson\u2019s Transcription<\/em><\/a> are two novels I reread immediately upon finishing them, determined on the one hand to figure out how they made such magic and, on the other, to live longer in those fictional worlds. Stephen Greenblatt\u2019s Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics<\/em><\/a> reminded me that the sordidness of our contemporary political moment\u2014recounted in Bob Woodward\u2019s Fear: Trump in the White House<\/em><\/a>, Michael Isikoff and David Corn\u2019s Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin\u2019s War on America and the Election of Donald Trump<\/em><\/a>, and Luke Harding\u2019s Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win<\/em><\/a>\u2014can inspire writers to take the measure of their time and turn it into enduring works of literature. Meantime, I traveled in my imagination with the Argentine writer Mar\u00eda Sonia Cristoff in her unclassifiable nonfiction book\u00a0False Calm: A Journey through the Ghost Towns of Patagonia<\/em><\/a>, translated by Katherine Silver, and discovered in Edward Carey\u2019s novel about Madame Tussaud, Little<\/em><\/a>, that superb storytelling can make all the difference.<\/p>\n

The poems in Tony Hoagland\u2019s Priest Turned Therapist Treats Fear of God<\/em><\/a> were a kind of balm when he passed away this fall, and William Trevor\u2019s Last Stories<\/em><\/a> was a voice calling from the grave, slyly instructing and delighting, in the same fashion as John Ashbery\u2019s They Knew What They Wanted: Poems and Collages<\/em><\/a>, a feast for the eye and ear that offers clues to how this late master remade the world. Clive James delivered another book-length poem from the abyss, The River in the Sky<\/em><\/a>,\u00a0defying death again while revealing himself to be one of the most vital poets writing in English. Lines from Henri Michaux\u2019s A Certain<\/em> Plume,<\/a>\u00a0published for the first time in English by NYRB this year, sum up my general state of mind: \u201cMisfortune was kicking itself,\u201d the Belgian writes. \u201cSuch is the situation at the present. Who\u2019s going to get the upper hand? There is a scintilla of hope. In the eddy appears the head.\u201d\u00a0\u2014Christopher Merrill<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Porochista Khakpour. Photo: Sylvie Rosokoff.<\/p><\/div>\n

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My favorite reads of A.D.<\/small> 2018 include three nonfiction titles: Kembrew McLeod\u2019s The\u00a0<\/em>Downtown Pop Underground<\/em><\/a>, an account of life south of Fourteenth Street that is as riveting as Herodotus\u2019s Histories<\/em> (and much better researched); Travis Jeppesen\u2019s See You Again in Pyongyang<\/em><\/a>, both a moving memoir of the first American to study at a university in North Korea and an eye-opening clarification of the U.S.\u2019s role in Korean history; and Porochista Khakpour\u2019s Sick<\/em><\/a>, which, unlike the two aforementioned titles, isn\u2019t about a world that feels intriguingly separate from my own, but one I am familiar with as a former \u201csick person.\u201d Sick<\/em>, a memoir on chronic Lyme disease, is one of the few recent books I\u2019ve put off finishing simply because I was enjoying it.<\/p>\n

Another highlight, Brad Phillips\u2019s Essays and Fictions<\/em><\/a> (which comes out next month), ingeniously erases the fact and fiction distinction with its title, leaving only psychological truths behind. The book is a masterpiece, the Last Exit to Brooklyn<\/em> of the creative nonfiction era. I read Dan Callahan\u2019s That Was Something<\/em><\/a> and Evan Fallenberg\u2019s The Parting Gift<\/em><\/a> each in one sitting, and though they couldn\u2019t be more different, both bring forth the best and worst aspects of desire\u2014and how it can either revive or derail your whole life. Wayne Koestenbaum\u2019s second \u201ctrance poetry\u201d book, Camp Marmalade<\/em><\/a>, delivers the playful philosophies of Gertrude Stein and Norman O. Brown packaged in the candy wrapper of darkly funny, dreamlike stanzas (a late-breaking favorite: \u201cI smile gratuitously at four men a day, or wait for accidental elbow touch\u201d).<\/p>\n

Finally, though they\u2019re not 2018 authors, my new literary obsessions of this and I think the next several years are Djuna Barnes and Dawn Powell, the latter of whom I would happily turn into if I could, if only so I could be the author of The Diaries of Dawn Powell<\/em><\/a> and The Wicked Pavilion<\/em><\/a>.\u00a0\u2014Ben Shields<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Rainald Goetz. Photo: Lesekreis [CC0], from Wikimedia Commons.<\/p><\/div>\n

2018 was the year I lost the plot. Or rather, it was the year I found myself drawn more often than not to novels that lacked a coherent storyline, though whether this was simply out of boredom or a logical reaction to the madness of the world around us, I don\u2019t know. Nevertheless, many of the books I liked best\u2014such as\u00a0Flights<\/em><\/a>, by Olga Tokarczuk (translated by Jennifer Croft), and Han Kang\u2019s The White Book<\/em><\/a> (translated by Deborah Smith)\u2014use fragmentation to their advantage, crafting meditations on travel and grief that are as beautiful as they are formally innovative.<\/p>\n

My favorite book that I read in 2018, though, is hands down Rainald Goetz\u2019s Insane<\/em><\/a>, translated by Adrian Nathan West. The novel, first published in 1983 in Germany, traces the eventual descent into madness of its protagonist\u2014a promising young psychiatrist named Raspe who has a taste for punk\u2014and questions the nature of sanity, West and East Germany\u2019s political structures, and the postwar German literary scene. It\u2019s a fervent, intense, teeth-chattering kind of novel: by the third and final act, Raspe\u2019s narration dissolves into a voice that sounds suspiciously like Goetz himself. The question of authorial intrusion and the presence of the writer\u2019s body seems to be something of a career-long theme for Goetz. Witness, for example, his infamous performance at the 1983 Ingeborg Bachmann Prize<\/a>, where halfway through he slices open his forehead with a razor blade, finishing the reading with blood dripping down his face. Gimmicky? Sure\u2014but when I watched this video on YouTube during the summer, halfway through finishing Insane<\/em>, I recoiled, then watched it four more times. How often does a reading make you physically jump?<\/p>\n

Other favorites: Rachel Cusk\u2019s Kudos<\/em><\/a>, which I swallowed whole while stranded in an airport in Iceland; Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore\u2019s Sketchtasy<\/em><\/a>, an evocative novel set in Boston\u2019s early-nineties queer scene; Taeko K\u014dno\u2019s disturbing short-story collection Toddler-Hunting and Other Stories<\/em><\/a>; Alexander Chee\u2019s beautiful essay collection,\u00a0How to Write an Autobiographical Novel<\/em><\/a>; and Simone de Beauvoir\u2019s America, Day by Day<\/em><\/a>, which was written in the late forties and yet captures an America eerily similar to our own.\u00a0\u2014Rhian Sasseen<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Richard Holloway. Photo courtesy of Canongate.<\/p><\/div>\n

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Richard Holloway, a former bishop of Edinburgh, has a seasoned, measured way of addressing difficult matters. Waiting for the Last Bus<\/em><\/a>, his reflections on mortality, quietened me as I read it. Understanding the reasoning behind the decisions of Holloway\u2019s life and career is hugely affecting\u2014this is particularly true of those passages that concern his internal conflicts with, and ultimate separation from, his church and faith. He is a vulnerable human and one of deep experience. I\u2019ve returned to this book more often than any other this year.\u00a0\u2014Robin Jones<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Sigrid Nunez. Photo: Marion Ettinger.<\/p><\/div>\n

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Solitary women populated my reading this year. The small UK press And Other Stories dedicated the past twelve months to publishing only women writers, and I began 2018 with the inaugural title in this quest, The Unmapped Country<\/em><\/a>, a compendium of unpublished short fiction and story fragments by the midcentury avant-garde writer Ann Quin. Her sharp, staccato sentences pulse with raw feeling on the page, with lust and anger. The reappearance last year of Anna Kavan\u2019s Ice<\/em><\/a> perhaps paved the way for Quin, who was in many ways a peer\u2014And Other Stories will reissue Quin\u2019s novel Berg<\/em><\/a> in 2019.<\/p>\n

Another reissue, this one from Wave Books, captivated me midyear: Danielle Dutton\u2019s Sprawl<\/em><\/a>, first published in 2010, is a stream-of-consciousness collage of domesticity and intimacy, the unwavering assertion of a suburban woman\u2019s individuality and selfhood that never loses its sense of humor. Dutton\u2019s almost entirely interior narrative is a contrast to the consciously exterior concerns of another favorite of mine,\u00a0Kudos<\/em><\/a>, the brilliant conclusion to\u00a0Rachel Cusk\u2019s Outline trilogy. My plan was to read all three books in succession, over a solitary weekend if possible, as a way of fully immersing myself in the totality of Cusk\u2019s signature narratorial erasure. My experiment was never realized, a failure I like to think Cusk\u2019s heroine, Faye, would sympathize with.<\/p>\n

Finally, in the fall I was given Sigrid Nunez\u2019s National Book Award\u2013winning\u00a0The Friend<\/em><\/a>. Immediately after I read it during\u00a0a day spent unable to think about anything else, I went out and bought three copies, all to give to three very different people in my life; the book reflects light when viewed from different angles. Of this list, Nunez\u2019s book comes the closest to traditional realism\u2014it has a plot easily summarized during cocktail-party small talk\u2014but the novel shakes itself free from formal conventions in a deftly subtle way. Nunez weaves quotes from books and people tightly into the psychologically and emotionally rich landscape of her narrator as she grieves the loss of a close friend and mentor, crafting a piece of literary criticism as much as a novelistic examination of memory and grief. You know what they say about misery\u2014whether I was simmering alongside the intensity of Quin, coasting passively through monologues with Cusk\u2019s Faye, or navigating sprawling suburban malaise, the lonely women of these novels kept me company during the loneliest moments of my year.\u00a0\u2014Lauren Kane<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Francisco Cant\u00fa. Photo: Keith Marroquin.<\/p><\/div>\n

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Despite sharing a border with Mexico, the California in which I live (in the rural north of the state) is geographically many worlds away from the harsh deserts of the border country to the south. Nonetheless, the current discussions of that border are unceasing and have served to underscore divisions less geographical in nature: of ethics, moralities, understandings of nationhood, citizenship, legality. Both Francisco Cant\u00fa\u2019s The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border<\/em><\/a> and Lauren Markham\u2019s The Far Away Brothers: Two Young Migrants and the Making of an American Life<\/em><\/a>\u00a0beautifully and personally address the myriad dramas the border country lays bare. Cant\u00fa, a former border patrol agent, speaks to the work of security and enforcement but also turns to the dehumanizing that same work promotes, where people become \u201cillegal\u201d by dint of their position to an arbitrary political line in the (literal) sand. An apt companion, Markham\u2019s book chronicles the story of twin El Salvadoran brothers who flee the threat of violence to seek asylum in California. Finally, in times when my heart is breaking, I often turn to poetry. This year, it\u2019s been Marcelo Hernandez Castillo\u2019s Cenzontle<\/em><\/a>, a book that centers itself in conversation with both the external border and the border of the self. The writing is powerfully personal, and so it is powerfully political, a rapture of honesty and terror and love.\u00a0\u2014Christian Kiefer<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Ling Ma. Photo: Liliane Calfee.<\/p><\/div>\n

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With scathing wit and savage imagination, Ling Ma\u2019s apocalyptic office novel\u00a0Severance<\/em><\/a>\u00a0invites readers to recognize both the humor and dangers of America\u2019s decadent consumerism. In her disconcertingly plausible world, Ma is able to atomize the absurdity of everyday life into something digestible, even downright funny. Her reason is simple: \u201cWhen you wake up in a fictional world, your only frame of reference is fiction.\u201d Perhaps Ma\u2019s companion in brutal honesty this year is none other than Tom McAllister, whose infinitely perceptive novel\u00a0How to Be Safe<\/em><\/a>\u00a0captures the cataclysmic aftermath of a small-town school shooting. Though it\u2019s been months since I devoured (and underlined and dog-eared) McAllister\u2019s book, what sticks with me most is a passage when readers are sunk into the consciousness of the shooter during his last meal: \u201cHe bites into the pizza again \u2026 he grinds it with his teeth and feels it sliding down his throat, it goes to the place in him that craves garbage and is insatiable in its pursuit of grease and sugar and fat.\u201d Like Ma, McAllister is gifted not only in evoking a visceral disgust at the glut and violence of humans but also in exposing the various ways people cope with tragedy when their illusion of security is shattered. Read both of these books at your own risk\u2014you won\u2019t regret it.\u00a0\u2014Madeline Day<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Alejandra Pizarnik.<\/p><\/div>\n

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\u201cThey tell me: choose silence or dream. But I agree with my wide-open eyes toward\u2014going toward, never to vacillate from\u2014this zone of voracious light that devours the eyes. You want to go, it\u2019s a must. Little phantom trip … We suffer and crawl, dance, we drag ourselves.\u201d So read a few lines from \u201cAnd What to Think of Silence,\u201d the poem that opens The Galloping Hour<\/em><\/a>, a slender yet nonetheless alluring compendium by the late Argentine poet Alejandra Pizarnik. (NB: Two<\/a> poems<\/a> from the book appeared in the Spring 2018 issue<\/a>.) Translated from the French by Patricio Ferrari<\/a> and Forrest Gander, the collection oscillates from prose poetry to verse to facsimiles of the poet\u2019s papers (with scribbles denoting her revisions), and it is the most coveted addition to my bookshelf this year.\u00a0Inside is a m\u00e9lange of delight and despair: a portrait of a soul in torment, eclipsed by sorrow and unease\u2014and yet her artistry endures. \u201cLanguage is my priestess,\u201d she writes. Throughout, in poems ranging from two lines to multiple paragraphs, she speaks of the black sack that will hold her head, of nights that subsume her and lilacs that have left her lost. Hers is an anguish that reverberates with the most palpable clarity and exquisite whimsy. Perhaps it\u2019s not the cheeriest read (Pizarnik took her own life in 1972), but The Galloping Hour<\/em> is\u00a0still one of the most stunning of 2018, conjuring tears, nightmares even, all while reveling in what plagues us all: love, lonesomeness, lust. \u2014Caitlin Youngquist<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Sally Rooney. Photo: \u00a9 Jonny L. Davies.<\/p><\/div>\n

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For decades, I\u2019ve been reading the backlist. While working at 192 Books<\/a>, Paula Cooper and Jack Macrae\u2019s perfect Chelsea bookshop, this was fine, even encouraged. And so I caught up on Middlemarch<\/em><\/a> and am still sounding Forster, James, M.\u2009F.\u2009K. Fisher, Duras, Joseph Roth, Dorothy Baker, and Dorothy West. Cherry-picking the best of the past three hundred years of fiction can make me skeptical of the new girls. My reading reflects this skepticism. But I enjoyed Alan Hollinghurst\u2019s sprawling The Sparsholt Affair<\/em><\/a>; Sally Rooney\u2019s fluent Normal People<\/em><\/a>, out now in the UK and in April in the U.S.; Jos\u00e9 Olivarez\u2019s\u00a0Citizen Illegal<\/em><\/a>, which seems to suture a hell of a lot of pain with a hell of a good collection of poetry; and\u00a0Royal Bodies<\/em><\/a>, an essay collection on royalty from the London Review of Books<\/em>,\u00a0whose title essay is a dissection as only Hilary Mantel can manage.<\/p>\n

But I wouldn\u2019t have made it through 2018 without D\u2019Angelo\u2019s\u00a0Voodoo<\/a><\/em>\u00a0(2000); Johann Sebastian\u00a0Bach\u2019s Cello Suites (ca. 1720) played without accompaniment by Yo-Yo Ma (1983); my period-tracker,\u00a0Clue<\/a> (2013);\u00a0and\u00a0Transit of Venus<\/a><\/em> (1980), by Shirley Hazzard, which is such a favorite in the office that it\u2019s lovingly abbreviated \u201cTOV\u201d in its increasingly frequent mentions. And if it had been written in 2018 rather than enjoying a replaced spotlight, If Beale Street Could Talk<\/em><\/a> would be the talk of the town. The blurbs of my colleagues would compete to laud different aspects, and the\u00a0New York Times Book Review<\/em> would forecast a forest of imitators\u2014if only. The book is astounding (as I\u2019ve written before<\/a>). This lucid, beautiful love story was published in 1974, but we are still standing in its light.\u00a0\u2014Julia Berick<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Deborah Eisenberg. \u00a9 John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Used with permission.<\/p><\/div>\n

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It\u2019s so hard making these lists. In the end, I guess you can just make a minilist of the things you remember, the things you keep going back to from a year\u2019s vast pile of reading, and for me, that would be two books of stories: one super contemporary, Deborah Eisenberg\u2019s Your Duck Is My Duck<\/em><\/a>, and one more grandly historical, The Collected Stories of Machado de Assis<\/em><\/a>, translated by Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson. I love the way Deborah Eisenberg stretches out the normal length of a short story so that it includes backtracks, long vistas, nostalgia, sudden futures, the absolute contemporary. Each story is a little exercise in giant composition. As for Machado de Assis, I\u2019d always adored his novels, especially his late ones, with their bored bourgeois characters and the savage honesty of their interiors\u2014and the savage playfulness with which Machado made each novel an open, exposed object, too. To discover the same astringency and wit in his stories\u2014and the tonal switchbacks and ironies preserved so brilliantly in translation\u2014was a cool discovery. So: short forms, I guess, have marked me most this year.<\/p>\n

Speaking of which, as well as stories, I\u2019ve been avidly rereading two new books of photography, both published by Mack: The Map and the Territory<\/em><\/a>, an overview of Luigi Ghirri\u2019s work, edited by James Lingwood; and Per Strada<\/em><\/a>, by Guido Guidi, a collection of photos from 1980 to 1994, all taken along the Via Emilia, connecting Milan to the Adriatic Sea. Everything in these two photographers is so deadpan, so precise, so intellectually agile.\u00a0\u2014Adam Thirlwell<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Nick Drnaso, self-portrait.<\/p><\/div>\n

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About halfway through Nick Drnaso\u2019s\u00a0Sabrina<\/em><\/a>, the best graphic novel I\u2019ve read since\u00a0Maus<\/em>, the main character opens his laptop and tumbles down an internet rabbit hole. Against his better judgment, Calvin googles the name of a man who\u2019s seized headlines for murdering a woman on camera and sending the tape to news outlets throughout the country. He learns about the killer\u2019s weight loss (\u201cpossibly up to forty pounds\u201d), his message boards of choice (men\u2019s rights and organic farming), the victim (twenty-seven-year-old Chicago native), and the bloodlust in the comments section (\u201cI NEED to see this\u201d). Unsettled, aimless, Calvin keeps clicking. He ends up on an article titled \u201cTeen surprises mom and toddler with good deed at mall.\u201d Alone in his dark bedroom, broken by this dissonance, he wails. Until I read Sabrina<\/em>,\u00a0I\u2019d never seen a book properly represent how the rapid ups and downs of the internet can break our brains\u2014the dangers of oscillating between schmaltzy clickbait and wide-eyed conspiracy, snuff films, and actual evil. It\u2019s far and away the best book I read that came out this year. Also notable are\u00a0Border Districts<\/em><\/a>, which introduced me to Gerald Murnane\u2019s careful, militantly observant prose, and Varlam Shalamov\u2019s\u00a0Kolyma Stories<\/em><\/a>, a brick of gray misery that, page after page, illuminates the depths of human cruelty.<\/p>\n

It would be a shame if I didn\u2019t mention the new friends I made along the way, though, even if they didn\u2019t produce new work in 2018.\u00a0Leonora Carrington\u2019s\u00a0The Complete Stories<\/em><\/a> is a near perfect book, two hundred or so pages of surreal stories and sketches that follow a logic all their own. If you could eat the food in a Renaissance painting, I imagine it would taste like this reads: sumptuous, sweet, and warm. Denis Johnson\u2019s collection The Largesse of the Sea Maiden<\/em><\/a>\u00a0<\/em>came out in January, but I just got around to\u00a0Jesus\u2019 Son<\/em><\/a>, which captures loneliness in a way that speaks directly to my depressed, Midwestern, night-wandering brain. No one has written better about the way people fade in and out of your life, how they glint in the light and die, years later, barely known to you.\u00a0I\u2019m glad I set aside my distrust of the novel and dived into Jesmyn Ward\u2019s Sing, Unburied, Sing<\/em><\/a>. Her writing keens like wind through stands of Mississippi trees. And I would be lost without Anne Carson, whose Sappho translations<\/a> sung me to sleep each night. Like 2018, the fragments of Sappho pass quickly, almost imperceptibly, but something else stirs in the white space. You feel the loss lurking behind each word. You\u00a0blink and miss it.\u00a0\u2014Brian Ransom<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Joshua Wheeler. Photo: Madi Rae Cronin.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

This was a strange year in reading for me. As you might imagine, I spent a lot of time getting up to speed on all things Paris Review<\/em>. I read every single interview with women writers in our Writers at Work series (resulting in this<\/a>) and most of those with international authors (stay tuned). I reread Sam Lipsyte<\/a>\u2019s earliest stories and previewed his forthcoming novel\u00a0Hark<\/em><\/a>, which is out next month, and then I filled some holes in my Pat Barker<\/a> reading. Between The Paris Review <\/em>and The Southern Review<\/em>, I read about fifteen hundred stories this year, only twenty or so of which have appeared or are forthcoming in those two publications. I know this is supposed to be about books, but please go read Lydia Peelle\u2019s \u201cNashville<\/a>\u201d in the summer issue of The Southern Review<\/em>, Rachel Khong\u2019s \u201cThe Freshening<\/a>\u201d in our Fall issue, and Kelli Jo Ford\u2019s \u201cHybrid Vigor<\/a>\u201d in the new Winter issue<\/a>\u2014those stories will blow your hair back, in the best way.<\/p>\n

But I did also manage to read some fantastic new books. I\u2019m not the first to tell you that Sigrid Nunez\u2019s The Friend<\/em><\/a> is tremendous. Nunez\u2019s touch is a light one: the narrator\u2019s commentary, her observations and asides, sometimes run only a few paragraphs before she shifts gears, but those conversations and scenes and literary contextualizations are masterfully braided into a narrative about grief, love, writing, and the impossibly generous affection of woman\u2019s best friend.\u00a0Acid West<\/em><\/a>, Joshua Wheeler\u2019s debut essay collection, is another favorite of 2018, and not because, full disclosure, Josh and I spent some time at what he describes in his acknowledgements as a \u201cdive where [he] wrote and moped but mostly reveled in sloppy fellowship\u201d\u2014though we did, and I remember it fondly. His writing is like McPhee on mushrooms, lyrical and funny and astute, often hitting all three in one of Josh\u2019s ideally rambling sentences. I\u2019ve read a lot of baseball literature, and \u201cThe Light of God,\u201d Josh\u2019s essay about minor-league baseball and drone warfare, has made my all-time best-of list.<\/p>\n

Other books I loved this year include Crystal Hana Kim\u2019s If You Leave Me<\/em><\/a>, Jamel Brinkley\u2019s A Lucky Man<\/em><\/a>, Kiese Laymon\u2019s Heavy<\/em><\/a>, and Rebecca Traister\u2019s Good and Mad.<\/em><\/a> And as soon as I turn in my novel revisions (like moving across the country and starting a new job wasn\u2019t enough to keep a gal busy), I\u2019m reading Asymmetry<\/em><\/a>, the new Lucia Berlin<\/a>,\u00a0There There<\/em><\/a>,<\/u> and another thousand stories, the best of which I look forward to sharing with you in 2019.\u00a0\u2014Emily Nemens<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What the staff of \u2018The Paris Review\u2019 loved this 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