{"id":93042,"date":"2015-12-18T18:06:50","date_gmt":"2015-12-18T23:06:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=93042"},"modified":"2015-12-18T18:20:50","modified_gmt":"2015-12-18T23:20:50","slug":"staff-picks-favorites-from-2015","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/12\/18\/staff-picks-favorites-from-2015\/","title":{"rendered":"Staff Picks: Favorites from 2015"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

From the cover of Resentment<\/i><\/p><\/div>\n

I\u2019m mistrustful of year-end lists, especially best-ofs. I didn\u2019t get to all the books I wanted to read (or write about) this year, though a number of the ones I liked have appeared in this column over the past twelve months. For my last selection here in 2015, I\u2019ve chosen a book that\u2019s old (originally published in 1997) and new (reissued this year) and that I\u2019ve only just finished: Gary Indiana\u2019s\u00a0Resentment<\/a>.\u00a0<\/em>I read the novel with great pleasure and with a kind of deep attention that I can\u2019t summon for all books, though I might want to. In that respect, it has come as a year-end gift, despite the fact that it trolls America\u2019s darker instincts. The novel circles around a murder trial in Los Angeles that is based on that of the Menendez brothers\u2019\u00a0parricide in 1994 and follows the peregrinations of Seth, a reporter who is both attending the trial and writing a celebrity puff piece. The swirl of Seth\u2019s various encounters, the details of the trial, and the seediness of wealth congeal into an ugly mass that so aptly captures the tabloid heart of America. Perhaps because this time of year is acutely, sordidly commercial, I found the novel\u2019s every line to be viscerally true. \u2014Nicole Rudick<\/strong><\/p>\n

One book stuck with me all year\u2014Mark Greif\u2019s atmospheric history The Age of the Crisis of Man:\u00a0Thought and Fiction in America 1933\u201373<\/a><\/em>. Alternate subtitles might include \u201cBooks Your Parents Studied in College, and Why Nobody Studies Them Now,\u201d \u201cThe Origins of the Culture Wars,\u201d or \u201cAre You Serious: The Rise and Fall of the Great American Novel.\u201d None of these screams best seller, but if you grew up equally confused by Jean-Paul Sartre and Henderson the Rain King, this may be the book for you. \u2014Lorin Stein\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Parts of Alexandra Kleeman\u2019s You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine<\/a><\/em> keep coming back to me at odd moments: when I see a particularly over-stimulating advertisement, when my stomach burbles in a certain way, when evangelical types start to raise their voices on the subway. Of the novels I read this year, You Too <\/em>is the one I\u2019ve had the most trouble shaking. By creeping several degrees to the left of realism, it captures the bewildering experience of inhabiting your own body, navigating the blur of generic office buildings and cookie-cutter homes and big-box stores that accounts for so much of the nation. To live, love, eat, and shop in contemporary America\u2014what a frightening thing. And who, after weeks of holiday gluttony and hangovers, wouldn\u2019t return with deep empathy to a passage like this? \u201cI felt a smothered hunger beating out from the unseen places inside my body. I felt corseted in skin. I wanted to turn myself violently inside out. I wanted to throw myself into the outside and begin tearing off chunks of it for food.\u201d \u2014Dan Piepenbring<\/strong><\/p>\n

Some of the most indelible lines of poetry I\u2019ve come upon this year are from\u00a0Donald Hall<\/a>\u2019s new collection,\u00a0Selected Poems<\/em><\/a>. The book is a compendium of Hall\u2019s finest work, self-chosen, stretching the breadth of his life, and it\u2019s a pleasure to read\u2014I\u2019ve folded more corners in this book than in any other I\u2019ve finished recently. Its pleasure is tethered to Hall\u2019s rather morose, methodic verse, which sinks my heart with every reading. He writes about the birth of a son (\u201cMy son, my executioner \u2026 \u201d), a lover\u2019s betrayal\u00a0 (\u201c \u2018I wanted to sleep neither \/ with her nor without her \u2026 \u2019 \u201d), the deaths of fathers and of wives. And then there are other poems, on noses and urinals and naps and peonies, that deliver the same somber thoughtfulness. At eighty-seven, Hall has given up on poetry;\u00a0he can\u2019t write it<\/a>, he says. So I\u2019m grateful for this sort of final bow. By the book\u2019s end, the reader says farewell to Jane, Hall\u2019s late wife whom he wrote often about, to youth, to the poet himself. From \u201cAffirmation\u201d: \u201cLet us stifle under mud at the pond\u2019s edge \/ and affirm that it is fitting \/ and delicious to lose everything.\u201d \u00a0\u2014Caitlin Youngquist<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Donald Hall.<\/p><\/div>\n

Since reading Stephen Clingman\u2019s memoir Birthmark<\/a><\/em> in the first quarter of 2015, its powerful afterimages have delighted, haunted, and challenged me on an almost daily basis. At the age of two, Clingman had a birthmark removed from the lid of his right eye. After the surgery it returned, partially impairing his vision: \u201cthe flap was half there, half not, a strange kind of layering, grafting, chimera. So I had to confront the world like that after all, except not exactly as I had before, unadulterated. What had been my eye was now also a wound.\u201d Clingman writes a thoughtful and affective memoir; it tracks many personal, intimate, uncomfortable, and nourishing memories under the sign of the wounded eye\u2014a lens of pained vision. The jumps across time, place, and modes of address capture a kind of mnemonic chaos. You can picture him hastily grasping at memories and putting them to paper before they flitter away. Nevertheless, each sentence is assiduously crafted and self-contained. Each signals a care at odds with the welter of form and memory. If the end of year is a time for self-reckoning, this book will set those circuits of reflexivity in motion. \u2014Joshua Maserow<\/strong><\/p>\n

On the cash registers of a certain kind of New York City bar, you can find a sticker with phrase I MISS OLD NEW YORK<\/small> printed in Goudy Old-Style font. Every time I see it, I\u2019m reminded of Joseph Mitchell. The anthology Up in the Old Hotel<\/a><\/em>, which includes stories published in The New Yorker <\/em>from 1938 up to his last in 1964, serves as a great introduction, and it was a favorite of mine this year. Mitchell captured the lives of the kinds of New Yorkers who exist today only as myths: gypsies, fishmongers, oystermen, shad fishermen, a sidewalk preacher, the country\u2019s most famous bearded lady, a fast-talking bum bankrolled by Tammany Hall big-shots. These various characters frequently lament the demoralization of society brought about by Wall Street, the death of skilled trades like fishing, and the alienation caused by technology\u2014several rail against the automobile in particular. Their complaints are especially poignant in the New York City of the present, where there are similar threats to a dying way of life, represented by empty pied-\u00e0-terres packed in polished glass towers. Denizens like old Joe Gould, arguably Mitchell\u2019s most well-known subject, would be vilified in today\u2019s New York, where nonconformity is respected only so far as it conforms to the ideals of a privileged creative class. Up in the Old Hotel<\/em> is a requiem for the perpetual death of the \u201creal New York.\u201d \u2014Andrew Jimenez<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Tove Jansson.<\/p><\/div>\n

I’ve mentioned it before, but I think it bears repeating: Tove Jansson\u2019s Fair Play<\/a><\/em>\u2014rereleased by NYRB Classics\u2014is great. The series of autobiographical vignettes about two artists living on a remote Finnish island is a deft, unsentimental portrait of a long-term relationship between two creative people. Often peculiar, often touching, it\u2019s quintessential Jansson (fans of her Moomin series will recognize the voice) but as fresh and viral as anything I read in 2015.\u00a0\u2014Sadie Stein<\/strong><\/p>\n

On the off chance you missed its featuring in this year\u2019s\u00a0Paris Review<\/em>\u00a0book club<\/a>\u2014and to add another voice to its twenty-four-year history of universally glowing reviews\u2014Norman Rush\u2019s\u00a0Mating\u00a0<\/em>tops my list as the best writing I encountered in 2015. In Rush\u2019s own words, it\u2019s a novel \u201cprimarily about courtship and mating: a romance set in a utopian development.\u201d But, of course, it\u2019s so much more than that\u2014and its manifold explorations play out through the mind of one of literature\u2019s headiest and most incisively captivating narrators. For a particularly satisfying holiday-season reading schedule, pair\u00a0Mating<\/em>\u00a0with Rush\u2019s (and his wife Elsa\u2019s) 2010\u00a0Art of Fiction<\/a>\u00a0interview\u2014and, if you’re a quick reader, add\u00a0Whites<\/em>\u00a0or\u00a0Subtle Bodies<\/em>\u00a0to the mix. \u2014Stephen Andrew Hiltner<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m mistrustful of year-end lists, especially best-ofs. I didn\u2019t get to all the books I wanted to read (or write about) this year, though a number of the ones I liked have appeared in this column over the past twelve months. For my last selection here in 2015, I\u2019ve chosen a book that\u2019s old (originally […]<\/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":[438],"tags":[1513,20652,7434,20651,17542,8397,15968,813,9619,883,20650,11329],"class_list":["post-93042","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-this-weeks-reading","tag-alexandra-kleeman","tag-best-of-2015","tag-donald-hall","tag-favorites","tag-gary-indiana","tag-joseph-mitchell","tag-mark-greif","tag-norman-rush","tag-recommended-reading","tag-staff-picks","tag-stephen-clingman","tag-tove-jansson"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nStaff Picks: Our Favorites from 2015<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"What the staff of The Paris Review liked best 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\/2015\/12\/18\/staff-picks-favorites-from-2015\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Staff Picks: Favorites from 2015 by The Paris Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"December 18, 2015 \u2013 I\u2019m mistrustful of year-end lists, especially best-ofs. 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