Alternately bizarre, poignant, and unsettlingly funny, William Walsh’s Ampersand, Mass.—the titular town situated somewhere between Winesburg, Ohio and Yoknapatawpha County—brings Donald Barthelme’s darkly comedic compressions to mind. These fragmentary, non sequitur-filled stories, peopled by ne’er-do-wells, nincompoops, and priapic not-quite-post-adolescents, circumvent expectations, the seemingly desultory images and events actually carefully sutured together to evoke the sadness, anomie, rebellion, boredom, apathy, and, yes, even heart and kindness that you might find within a small-town in these altered and dissociated states of America. Marked by concision and precision, a commanding use of narrative ellipsis, and humor and utter strangeness, these stories, moving between strange and funny and sad, sometimes in the same story, sometimes in the same paragraph, might just cut you up, in both senses of the phrase.

What you will find in Edward Mullany’s I Falter at the Gallows: inventorying as a means of criticizing silly consumerisms; arguments for and against narrative poetry; stuff about dogs; an overripe banana speaking; a tennis ball awaking; a laughing television saying “the devil /  is real”; stuff about beards and bearded men; puzzling dialogues with C. S. Lewis, Søren Kierkegaard, Sinéad and Flannery O’Connor, Rick Moody, Leo Tolstoy, and the biblical Daniel; elegies for suicides; poems to members of married couples and other solitaries. Evoking great meditative poets, like Kat Bryan and Jack Gilbert, but also the complex simplicities of Bashō, Shiki, and Issa, I Falter at the Gallows is a text where a contemplative brevity betrays a mournful complexity, crystallized by an ambiguous, but no less evocative, Christology. Like Stephen Dedalus’s conception of the artist in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Mullany “remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible,” while paring existences through each refined line. There is so much sadness and violence in these poems, and some hope, albeit a hope measured in coffee spoons.

Joseph Riippi’s The Orange Suitcase is a case study of a man trying to make sense out of what doesn’t make any sense, all the while registering his ideas and sensations in series of wistful, conversational fragments, featuring a flesh-covered three-inch nail, a wine-drenched copy of Salinger’s Nine Stories, and other necessary objects. Opening this suitcase, you’ll find evocative, splintered somethings about some things and other things, and about someone’s others, significant and otherwise. Favorite line: “It didn’t take long before we realized we brought out the worst in each other.”

Matt Bell’s How They Were Found uses the phantasmatic, the metaphorizing of the mundane, the intractability of history, personal and otherwise, to probe the concerns of a seemingly post-everything age, where everything happens in the interstices, of time, of space. A number of writers come to mind when I read these stories. There’s Jesse Ball’s sense of the uncanny and unexplained mystery; there’s Brian Evenson’s scorched earth, post-apocalyptic mania; there’s late Cormac McCarthy’s slash-and-burn sentences; and Eugene Marten’s brusque musculatures; there’s Robert Coover and Angela Carter’s evocative re- and deconstructions of fairy tales. My favorite stories turned out to be stories I’d read before in other venues or publications: “The Cartographer’s Girl,” “Her Ennead,” “Dredge,” and “The Collectors.” Creepy murder mystery, fairy tale deconstruction, historical fiction reconstruction, post-apocalyptic paranoia, interstitial fabulations, cinematic structurings, indexing of a tragedy: they’re all in here. Seven sections of Matt Bell’s “The Collectors” are devoted to inventorying the stockpiles of Herman and Langley Collyer, the infamous eccentric hermit packrats. Bell uses the list as a device for cataloguing fear, despair, detachment, pride, loneliness, and as a kind of anthropological study. He writes: “I came in through the inventory of your home, through the listing of objects written down as if they meant something, as if they were clues to who you were.” We find one character here taking “inventory in his mind, counting piles of newspapers, broken furnishings, books molded to floorboards.” This is only a glimpse of the wild piles of stuff that these deeply disturbed brothers accumulated over the course of their lifetimes. Talk about baggage! Bell has created an indelible work that might just get you to throw some stuff away. “What I learned is that even a book can be a door if you hold it right,” says one of Bell’s narrators, and if you hold How They Were Found right, you will have a door, a door of immaculate perception, a door into elsewhere and whatever is next door to it. It’s a fine debut collection demonstrating the author’s versatility, especially with regard to form and content, realized by a measured, strapping prose style.

Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: Ampersand Mass., Big Other, Edward Mullany, How They Were Found, I Falter at the Gallows, John Madera, Joseph Riippi, Matt Bell, The Orange Suitcase, William Walsh ]]> http://bigother.com/2012/05/04/new-books-roundup-1/feed/ 7 John Madera http://www.keyholepress.com/images/front-page/ampersand2.png http://vouchedbooks.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/mullany-front.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1294767909l/10120786.jpg http://www.mdbell.com/storage/HTWF%20Cover%20for%20Web%202-16.jpg?__SQUARESPACE_CACHEVERSION=1266943929478 http://bigother.com/2012/04/21/a-sentence-from-imre-kerteszs-kaddish-for-an-unborn-child/ http://bigother.com/2012/04/21/a-sentence-from-imre-kerteszs-kaddish-for-an-unborn-child/#comments Sat, 21 Apr 2012 20:41:46 +0000 John Madera http://bigother.com/?p=27759 ]]> “In short, I suddenly caught myself writing because I had to write, even though I did not know why I had to, the fact is I noticed that I was working incessantly, one might say with an insane diligence, always working, driven not solely by the need to make ends meet, because even if I did not work I would still exist, and if I were existing then I don’t know what that would drive me to do, and it is better that I don’t know, even if my bones, my guts, have an inkling, to be sure, for the reason why I work incessantly is that while I man working I am, and if I did not work, who knows if I would be, therefore I have to take it seriously, because the most deadly serious associations subsist between my continued subsistence and my work, that much is blatantly obvious and not in the least normal, even if there happen to be others, even a fair number of them, who likewise write because they have to write, but in my case there was no getting away from the fact that I had to, I don’t know why, but it seems this was the only solution open to me, even if it solves nothing, on the other hand at least it does not leave me in a position of—how shall I put it?—unsolvedness that would compel me to regard it as unsolved even in its unsolvedness and consequently torment me not only by virtue of unsolvedness but also by the shortcoming of this unsolvedness and dissatisfaction over that.”

The names Borges and Calvino are used on countless dustjackets, covers, press releases, and reviews, often to, at best, misleading effect, and at worst outright deception. Because of this, I was annoyed to discover Rebecca Makkai’s blurb on the back of Understories, Tim Horvath’s forthcoming debut collection of short fictions, where she references those selfsame names. (Yes, I’m one of those readers who do judge books, at least initially, by their covers.) After reading the first few fictions in Understories, though, I realized that referencing those two fabricators of fabulist fictions was not only thoroughly appropriate but only hinted at the book’s profound conversation with these two writers and their own heavily-mediated-while-still-gracefully-executed texts. You might say that Borges and Calvino are Horvath’s interlocutors, the three of them engaging in conversation (an important word and concept in Understories), across time and space, that is, the historical continuum, a place which is mainly textual, that is, occurring between language that happened before with language that is happening and with language that might happen later, that conversation extending backward from the texts of Borges and Calvino, two writers who engaged with their predecessors and contemporaries as well, writers who realized what T. S. Eliot in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” asserted was the prerogative of artists (I’m going to insert words as a corrective to Eliot’s highly gendered language):

No poet, no artist of any art, has his [or her] complete meaning alone. His [or her] significance, his [or her] appreciation is the appreciation of his [or her] relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him [or her] alone; you must set him [or her], for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of æsthetic, not merely historical, criticism. The necessity that he [or she] shall conform, that he [or she] shall cohere, is not one-sided; what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new. Whoever has approved this idea of order, of the form of European, of English literature, will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past. And the poet who is aware of this will be aware of great difficulties and responsibilities.

Horvath’s Understories accomplishes the difficult task of introducing a series of novelties that in their way alter the texts that preceded them. It accomplishes this by juxtaposing what might be called an engagement with a peculiarly self-aware mimesis at a postmodern remove against the construction of what might be called “Immanent Cities,” and by “immanent,” I’m thinking of Deleuze’s definition of that space not only occurring within, but also upon or of that space, that is, the effect and affect of these fictions do not occur simply within itself but within a larger system of fictions, folding in and out and from that very same system, operating consistently upon it, with it, and through it, dynamically and kinetically mapping its topography as it extends the limits of that system. This juxtaposition brings me to another aspect of this multifaceted book. In Borges’s “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” a magnificently cerebral fiction, the narrator describes Tlön, a strange place with strange beliefs and customs, where even their books are “different.” The narrator goes on to say that in Tlön

Works of fiction contain a single plot, with all its imaginable permutations. Those of a philosophical nature invariably include both the thesis and the antithesis, the rigorous pro and con of a doctrine. A book which does not contain its counterbook is considered incomplete.

Tim Horvath has taken that last sentence as a dictum for his collection, for Understories is a book that contains at least one counterbook. But first I should describe the book itself. And I think I’ll do that after first describing how I first came to discover Tim’s writing. I used to run an online review journal called the Chapbook Review, and in the summer of 2009 I was lucky to have found “Circulation” in a pile of chapbooks. In “Circulation,” Horvath imagines a librarian who imagines that books “choose their recipients as much as they are chosen,” that can, like wild animals, “camouflage themselves such that at times they blend in with their surroundings as readily as a tree frog, hugging the walls of the shelves around them, appearing less palatable than the plump bestseller they lean against.” A season after reading this poignant portrait of a librarian and his uncertain love for his father, I discovered Horvath’s “The Discipline of Shadows” in Conjunctions 53; it’s an incredibly imaginative story that largely takes place in a school’s department of “Umbrology,” that is, a place where shadows are given all the intellectual rigor of any academic discipline (Thomas Browne, who, according to W. G. Sebald in The Rings of Saturn, “saw our world as no more than a shadow image of another world far beyond,” would certainly have been welcome at this university, where he could have lectured on King Solomon’s de Umbris Idæarum: a “treatise on the shadow cast by our thoughts.”). In the spring of 2010, I asked Horvath to contribute to my “Sentence About a Sentence I Love” series, to which he contributed a sentence about a sentence from Norman Rush’s Mating. I’m not sure where and when we finally met, but once we did, we were able to share our mutual love for writers like Alexander Theroux, Don DeLillo, David Foster Wallace, and many more. I also invited him to join the “Othership,” that is, Big Other, an online arts forum I edit. I’ve been lucky to have shared journal space with him in two consecutive issues of Conjunctions, my favorite literary journal. There I found “The City in the Light of Moths” and “Altered Native,” two thoroughly imaginative stories that I’m happy to say now also appear in Understories. I’m also honored to say that “The Lobby,” the story opening the collection, was one of several stories I solicited from Tim for jmww, where I used to be a senior editor.

Those stories are family to many of Understories’s other stories in what I’m thinking of the book’s book, not to be confused with the book’s counterbook, which I’ll get to later. Those fictions foreground conversation, conversations occurring primarily in that quagmire we call “human relationships,” but also conversations with other texts and writers; like “The Understory,” which imagines a botanist named Schöner, reminiscing about conversations he’d had with famed philosopher Martin Heidegger, but which also engages with Shakespeare and Hölderlin, and namechecks Goethe, Trakl, Schlegel, and Heine, among others; like “Planetarium,” which artfully navigates a story-length lie and a rivalry, imagined and otherwise; like “The Gendarmes,” which re-envisions America’s so-called national pastime; like “Runaroundandscreamalot,” a story as much about parenting and post-breakup-dating as it is a portrait of an inventor as a young man; like “The Conversations,” which besides literally foregrounding conversation, also, like other stories in Understories (I’m thinking of The Atlas in “Circulation”), imagines another book, namely, The Encyclopedia of Substantive Phenomenology.

But I haven’t come to the book’s counterbook. Here is where the connection to Borges and Calvino becomes clear. Within the interstices of this book’s juggling of mimesis with metaphysics is a collection of case studies of urban planning, which, like Calvino’s Invisible Cities, imagines a number of impossible cities, cities that can only exist in the mind, the imagination, or even better, on the page. While Calvino’s stories are very much aligned with a classic kind of folk storytelling, a kind of storytelling going at least as far back as Scheherazade, Horvath’s is a post-Benjaminian storyteller, one who recognizes that the “epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out,” which is

a concomitant symptom of the secular productive forces of history, a concomitant that has quite gradually removed narrative from the realm of living speech and at the same time is making it possible to see a new beauty in what is vanishing.

Yes, the eight stories in Understories’s counterbook make it possible to see “a new beauty in what is vanishing.” And what enables that beauty is exemplified in the book’s command of language. Horvath is unafraid to make up new words. Here’s just a sample of the book’s coinages:

übermule, ultradubious, nonspewer, cineburbs, cinaddiction, nonhappening, sadlovely, horrormongers, anticinemite, nocturnocidal, roomsuit, mintgasm, wildcrafted, intratime, outgabbing, blahnguage.

As any great book, Understories confronts the making of fiction itself, intermittently directly confronting the mechanics of fabrication. There’s the moment, for instance, in “A Box of One’s Own,” a story I think of as a kind of parable of narratogological logics, the title itself a play on a book by Virginia Woolf, where a box, after being told a variation of the worn-out dictum to show and not tell, says:

“Narrative structure would dictate a gradual withering away of my defenses and a climactic divulgence of the contents of my secret interiority. But I know all about narrative structure. So don’t even try it, buddy.”

Understories is a major accomplishment by a major writer and friend, full of writing as deeply aware of its antecedents as it is aware of the possibilities within, of, and about narrative. So it is with great pleasure that I ask you to join me in welcoming Tim Horvath to our Demitasse.

Come Monday, March 12, 2012 John will be reading with four other writers at the Franklin Park Reading Series in NYC. More details below:

FRANKLIN PARK READING SERIES 3/12: AUSLANDER/WILSON/BRODER/WOODS/TOWNSEND

Hope you can join us on March 12, 2102 when we celebrate three great years of prose and poetry in Crown Heights — NYC’s hottest literary community! The event features comic novelists SHALOM AUSLANDER, described in the NY Times as “an absurdist with a deep sense of gravitas” and ADAM WILSON, whose debut novel FLATSCREEN was praised by Time Out NY as “depressingly hilarious and undeniably real.” At this multigenre event, poet MELISSA BRODER (Meat Heart) will share her incendiary work, and acclaimed graphic novelist JOHN DERMOT WOODS (The Complete Collection of People, Places and Things) will screen his illustrated stories and comics. We’ll also be showcasing up-and-coming Crown Heights author BEN TOWNSEND (Stonecutter Journal).

Featuring:

SHALOM AUSLANDER (Hope: A Tragedy)
ADAM WILSON (Flatscreen)
MELISSA BRODER (Meat Heart)
JOHN DERMOT WOODS (The Complete Collection of People, Places & Things)
BEN TOWNSEND (Stonecutter Journal)

SHALOM AUSLANDER was raised in Monsey, New York. He is the author of the novel Hope: A Tragedy, as well as the short story collection Beware of God and the internationally bestselling memoir Foreskin’s Lament, which was named a New York Times Notable Book and a Best Book of the Year by the San Francisco Chronicle and Slate. Nominated for the Koret Jewish Book Award for writers under thirty-five, he has published articles in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, GQ, and Tablet and has had stories aired on NPR’s This American Life. He lives in upstate New York.

ADAM WILSON is the author of the novel Flatscreen. His fiction has appeared in many publications, including The Paris Review,Washington Square Review, New York Tyrant, Cousin Corinne’s Reminder, The Coffin Factory, and elimae, as well as the anthology Promised Lands: New Jewish American Fiction on Longing and Belonging. A founding editor of the The Faster Times and former culture critic for Blackbook, he is currently a regular contributor to Bookforum and The Paris Review Daily. His essays, journalism and criticism have appeared in The New York Times, The New York Observer, The Forward, The Rumpus, and the anthologies Dirty Words: A Literary Encyclopedia of Sex and A Friday Night Lights Companion: Love, Loss, and Football in Dillon, Texas. He holds an MFA from Columbia University, where he received a fellowship, and teaches creative writing at NYU and the Sackett Street Writer’s Workshop. He lives in Brooklyn with his cat.

MELISSA BRODER is the author of two poetry collections, Meat Heart and When You Say One Thing But Mean Your Mother. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in Guernica, Redivider, Court Green, The Missouri Review online, Barrelhouse, The Awl, Drunken Boat, and other places. She edits La Petite Zine and curates the Polestar Poetry Series at Cakeshop in New York. By day, she is a publicity manager at Penguin.

JOHN DERMOT WOODS draws comics and writes stories in Brooklyn, New York. He is the author of The Complete Collection of People, Places & Things. The image-text novel he wrote with J.A. Tyler, No One Told Me I Was Going to Disappear, has recently been published by Jaded Ibis Press. A collection of his comics will be released by Publishing Genius Press later this spring, and a collection of his illustrated stories, The Baltimore Atrocities, is forthcoming. His work has appeared in numerous journals, including The Fairytale Review, The Collagist, Hobart, Caketrain, Opium, The Salt Hill Review, The Indiana Review, and 3rd Bed. A professor of English at Nassau Community College, he is also the editor of the arts quarterly Action, Yes and co-curator of the Soda Series readings in Brooklyn.

BEN TOWNSEND grew up in a brown house on a small hill overlooking a very large cornfield. He has since lived in a few different places and still owes library fines in Ann Arbor, MI, Lexington, VA, and New York City, where he currently resides. He holds a Comparative Literature degree from the University of Michigan, and has published fiction in Stonecutter Journal. He now calls Crown Heights, Brooklyn home.

Check out lists from Nick Antosca, j/j hastain, Lincoln Michel, and William Walsh. Here are parts one, two, and three.

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Nick Antosca

Here are some things I admired in 2011:

Sleeping Beauty: Australian novelist Julia Leigh’s directorial debut, starring Emily Browning as a college student who gets paid to take a sleeping pill and let men take liberties with her unconscious body, is as beautiful and discomfiting a film as I’ve ever seen.  My favorite film of the year.  Mesmerizing, haunting, perfect.

Margin Call: I used to work at a financial firm.  In recruiting, not one of the get-rich jobs, but I was there in the fall of 2008, when everything came crashing down (my firm’s assets declined by $20 billion).  JC Chandor’s first film feels authentic.  It is a more gripping thriller than anything where badges get flashed and bodies get buried (although, actually, one body does get buried in Margin Call), and it is also a controlled character drama of the highest order, on par with Glengarry Glen Ross or Quiz Show.

You Deserve Nothing by Alexander Maksik: Now-controversial because it’s allegedly based on truth (the author apparently really did, as one of the three narrators does, have an affair with, and impregnate, one of his 17 year old students), Alexander Maksik’s first novel is an unexpectedly profound, deeply engrossing, and beautifully written novel about ethics, literature, courage, and sex.  The prose recalls James Salter and nuance of character recalls Francine Prose.  Buy it, read it.

Last of the Live Nude Girls by Sheila McClear: A memoir of the author’s time spent working in peep shows in Times Square.  One thing it is not is titillating.  It’s funny, sad, blunt, and familiar.  If you lived in New York during the latter half of the last decade, you will probably find yourself nodding in recognition as you read this book.  McClear is a terrific writer.

Nick Antosca is the author of two novels: Fires (2006, Impetus Press) and Midnight Picnic (2009, Word Riot Press).  His novella The Obese comes out in 2012 from Lazy Fascist. His blog is HERE.

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j/j hastain

Some Stimulations From 2011

Some books, music, movies and meta-rants about how they pricked:

Books:

The ferality of Jenny Boully’s latest book not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them–symbolic engagement and torque of some of my own childhood mythos.

Melissa Buzzeo’s books Face, What Began Us- questions about lacunae, form, crux and climax. Re what the shapes of page by feeling and as aesthetic are and can mean. Re the performativity of thirds or nexts. What are the ethics of getting to a there from a here? Proceeding from a here by hearing?

Some books re their violences (JA Tyler (A Shiny Unused Heart), Selah Saterstrom (Meat and Spirit Plan), some fellow dusiers’ (I loved Jared Hayes’ DUSIE http://www.dusie.org/jhayes.html).

Simone Weil-for content, emotio-spiritual kinship and philosophy more than praxis.

Elizabeth Robinson’s books generally-re the integration of the quotidian into the rhythmically moving (and always surpassing of borders) alchemical.

Bhanu Kapil’s Schizophrene-Bhanu’s usual and brilliant aphotic, poetic, edge.  Embodied haunts.

Akilah Oliver’s A Toast in the House of Friends-for heartbreak of content of book and timing of book.

Brenda Iijima ‘s Glossematics, Thus -“the myriad global, political, biological, and economic resonances of any local event” (Jamie Townsend).

Tc Tolbert’s territories of folding-the slow approach to the deep and beveling body. To space and text as honor.

Trace Peterson’s Since I Moved In- content that disquiets and destabilizes. For mirror.

Music

Duke Ellington’s Sacred Songs

“Jeongseon Arirang” sung by Kim Young-im (from film: Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter and Spring)-OMG–your body your bridge!

Sarah Brightman/Andrea Bocelli Time to Say Goodbye-so much like fucking a content-oriented matrix.

Films

Lars von Trier’s Melancholia-for those of us who know the feeling of our appendages having become roots to ulteriors. How can we stay? What happens to our surroundings and social/kinship contexts if we stay? Is staying core? Also considers agencies re leaving?

Stephen Elliot’s The Adventures of Priscilla Queen of the Desert and John Cameron Mitchell’s Hedwig and the Angry Itch- both of these are always for descants of the kinships. For feeling the ephemeral lineages.

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Lincoln Michel

Looking back on my 2011 art and entertainment consumption, the first thing I notice is that I read very few books published this year and watched virtually no new movies at all. I didn’t listen to all that many 2011 albums either. I am embracing my change into a crotchety old man. All new music is bleepy bloop Star Trek disco nonsense, all new films are watered-down remakes ruining my childhood, all new books are… well I still like a lot of new books, but I had a harder time keeping up with them this year. I started a lot of great books that I haven’t finished yet. So, that said:

Best 2011 novel: TBA (I’ll have to get back to you on this one.)

Best new-to-me novel: tie between Hunger by Knut Hamsun and Jakob Von Gunten by Robert Walser

Best 2011 story collection: The Angel Esmeralda by Don DeLillo

Best new-to-me story collection: Taking Care by Joy Williams

Best 2011 comic: Wilson by Daniel Clowes

Best new-to-me comic: Weathercraft by Jim Woodring

Best 2011 TV: Breaking Bad season 4

Best new-to-me TV: early 1930s Betty Boop cartoons.

Best 2011 movie: TBA

Best new-to-me movie: Rumble Fish

Best 2011 hip-hop album: The Book of David by DJ Quik

Best new-to-me hip-hop: Diplo Presents Free Gucci mixtape

Best 2011 rock/pop/indie/whatever: NewVillager by NewVillager

Best new-to-me rock/pop/indie/whatever: tie The Sensual World by Kate Bush and Love vs Money by The-Dream

Lincoln Michel is around. You can find him online at lincolnmichel.com.

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William Walsh

Bee-Loud Glade  by Steve Himmer
A high-concept novel about a modern-day decorative hermit. It is also a novel about this American age of diminished expectations. Should become a major motion picture within the next three years starring Jonah Hill.

Fog Gorgeous Stag by Sean Lovelace
Filing this one under nonfiction. I know that everything in this book happened. It’s like a few dozen episodes of a reality show. Lovelace reduces all human thought and action into a plate of nachos, and says, Enjoy.

Townie by Andre Dubus III
The best parts of this memoir are the scenes with Dubus’s dad, the great short story writer Andre Dubus. And there’s a wonderful passage of Andre III and his father visiting with Thomas Williams, one of my old writing teachers at UNH. Overall, the central, repetitive action of Dubus as a street-fighting man would have read better as a novel. Like a lot of contemporary memoirs, Townie would have benefitted greatly from fictional compression.

Beauport by Kate Colby
What a concise poet. Every image, every idea is delivered perfectly.

Cut Through the Bone by Ethel Rohan
Acute stories, unsentimental but emotional writing.

The Weather Stations by Ryan Call
These stories do for the weather what Pontius Pilate did for the stations of the cross.

House of Holes by Nicholson Baker
It’s even pervier than The Fermata. The writing is just so good, and it seems effortless. Baker has simplified his sentences significantly over the years.

The Curfew by Jesse Ball
I haven’t read this yet, but I hope to by the end of 2011. If it is only half as good as Samedi the Deafness and The Way Through Doors then it will be brilliant.

You Can Make Him Like You by Ben Tanzer
This novel reads like a sitcom. It’s a litcom about you an your friends. A fun, quick read.

Stories V! by Scott McClanahan
Authentic.

Four for a Quarter by Michael Martone
Probably Martone’s fourth best book, behind, in order, Michael Martone, Seeing Eye, and Unconventions (his craft book).

William Walsh is the author of Ampersand, Mass., just out from Keyhole Press. His other books include Pathologies, Questionstruck, and Without Wax. His stories and derived texts have appeared in journals such as Annalemma, Quick Fiction, New York Tyrant, Caketrain, Juked, Lit, Quarterly West, and elsewhere.

Euphorbia Rhizophora: A Harvested Ginger Rhizome

I love reading lists, especially lists from smart people who are paying attention and have insightful things to say. Hence, these lists from Ravi Mangla, Lance Olsen, Dawn Raffel, Joseph Riippi, and Penina Roth. With all these choices of amazing things to check out and revisit, 2012 is looking very promising already. Check out our first and second installments of Best of 2011, HERE and HERE.

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Ravi Mangla

I’m woefully behind on my reading, to the point where the books on my nightstand threaten to smother me in my sleep. Any “best of” list I came up with would undoubtedly be riddled with glaring omissions, so instead I’ve decided to cite just a small handful of favorites (in literature, film, television, and music) from the past year:

Divorcer, by Gary Lutz:

At this point Lutz could write an unauthorized sequel to Twilight: Breaking Dawn and I would still read it at least fifteen times.

Weather Stations, by Ryan Call:

It’s a hugely ambitious, richly textured, and wildly imaginative debut collection. I enjoyed every page of it.

The Tree of Life:

Sometimes it feels like the film scene is overrun with slice-of-life fare. I admire that Malick, like Kubrick and Tarkovsky before him, isn’t afraid to wrestle with larger metaphysical themes.

Beginners:

There’s a lot to love about this film. It’s warm and whimsical and deeply sincere. I can’t wait to see what Mike Mills does next.

Louie, Season 2:

Louis C.K. might be the closest thing television has to an auteur. He’s reinventing the sitcom form and it’s a joy to behold.

Strange Mercy, by St. Vincent:

It’s hard to believe that someone with such a dreamlike voice and delicate appearance can do such disgusting things with a guitar. I don’t expect the album to leave my listening rotation for a while.

Ravi Mangla‘s collection of microfictions, Visiting Writers, was recently released as an ebook by Uncanny Valley Press.

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Lance Olsen

I met for the first time this year both Theresa Hak Jyung Cha’s Dictee (1982), an extraordinary multi-voiced undoing of the usually underwhelming memoir form, and William Gass’s Cartesian Sonata and Other Novellas (1998), his lush sentences always, always a joy to swim through, phrase to phase.

Most of my year, though, due to my teaching responsibilities, has been informed by rereadings, one of the great joys in the world and a chance to meet earlier versions of yourself triangulated through texts that are no longer quite themselves.

Among my delights are, in no particular order:

Crying of Lot 49.  Thomas Pynchon.  I revisited this one for the first time in, oh, fifteen years or so, and was struck again and again by what a perfect, goofy-as-hell, Rube-Goldbergian-structured, existentially/epistemologically menacing novella it is, why it remains one of my special favorites.  Too, Oedipa Maas’s quest into the nature of the Tristero, an underground postal network committed to circulating small narratives from the dispossessed that stand in opposition to the dominant one(s), feels in many ways like it was written last Tuesday.

Nox. Anne Carson.  An elegy for her older brother, whom she didn’t know well and who died unexpectedly while on the run from the law in Europe, Nox arrives in a box that simulates both a thick book and a textual version of the brother’s coffin. Open it, and inside you discover, not a codex, but an accordioned series of “pages” that unfolds into an arrangement suggesting an ancient scroll (Carson is professor of classics at the University of Michigan) made up of shards of her brother’s letters, old photographs, tickets, Carson’s observations, Catullus’s poem 101 (the one addressed to the Roman poet’s own dead brother, which in many ways doubles Carson’s situation), and extensive dictionary entries on all the words that comprise that poem. The aggregate produces a collage about the impossibilities of aggregates, of understanding fully, of fully translating word to word, word from deed, of capturing the absences that inhabit language.  Although Carson is usually thought of as a poet, Nox is really novel as assemblage art.

Jealousy.  Robbe-Grillet.  A kind of innovative detective novel where the real gumshoe is the reader, Jealousy is a beautiful obsessed thing told from the point of view (although the first-person pronoun never appears) of an unhinged husband shot through with potential for violence. Scenes are repeated almost verbatim a number of times with only slight alterations from earlier iterations, with the intent of casting the truth-value of the whole “plot” (and with it our culture’s communal sense of “reality”) into question. The more one pays attention to Robbe-Grillet’s text, the more the definition of what constitutes “new and interesting information” alters, even as “progress” comes to signify, not the traditional forward plot thrust, but the reader’s experience of making a sort of meta-sense out of the uncertain structures before him or her.

Dawn Raffel

Best literary Facebookers
Shya Scanlon—he makes you think
Roddy Doyle—he makes you laugh, and then he makes you think about why you laughed
Meg Pokrass—best kick in the pants, and that is meant as a compliment

Best memoir
Say Her Name, Francisco Goldman—genre-bending, mind-bending, heartbreaking

Best writers I hadn’t read before this year (in alphabetical order), quite possibly because I was under a rock
Lucas Church, Leopoldine Core, Scott Garson, Roxane Gay, Richard Peabody, Anna Joy Springer

Best book I screwed up and missed when it was published but finally read this year
Where the Money Went by Kevin CantyBest book I still haven’t read and probably won’t read next year either
Moby Dick

Best bust
Ben Franklin (with his pal, Philip Roth) at the Center for Fiction (see attached photo)

Dawn Raffel’s memoir, The Secret Life of Objects, will be published by Jaded Ibis in June. http://www.dawnraffel.co

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Joseph Riippi

Best of what I read, saw, or heard in 2011

Novel with the most heart: Michael Kimball’s Us.

Novel I most wish I had written: Roy Kesey’s Pacazo.

Poetry book: Edward Mullany’s If I Falter At The Gallows

Short book (as in novella): Tie between Jean-Phillippe Toussaint’s The Truth About Marie and Denis Johnson’s Train Dream

Short book I hadn’t read yet but am glad now to have finally done so: Ben Marcus’s Notable American Women

Memoir: Deb Olin Unferth’s Revolution

Otherwise non-fiction: Sebastian Junger’s War

Reading I’m saddest I missed due to a fever in excess of 103 degrees: Joan Didion at Paula Cooper Gallery

Reading I’m saddest I missed due to working late: Paul Auster and Don Delillo for Granta

Best play I read multiple times: Thom Pain (based on nothing) by Will Eno

Best play I saw: Hand to God by Robert Askins

Book for which I had a great deal of expectation and by which I was NOT let down: Michael Ondaatje’s The Cat’s Table

Television for which I had a great deal of expectation and by which I WAS let down: Mad Men Season 4

Literary reading: Tie between Scott McClanahan at the 510 Series in Baltimore (May) and Scott McClanahan at the Franklin Park Series in New York (November)

Film for which I had very little expectation and was happily delighted: Margin Call written/directed by J.C. Chandor

Concert: Tie between The Weakerthans’ performance of Reconstruction Site at the Bowery Ballroom, NYC and Ryan Adams at Carnegie Hall and Bill Callahan at Bowery Ballroom

New band featuring members of Sleater-Kinney: Wild Flag

New band NOT featuring members of Sleater-Kinney: Wild Flag

New writing music: Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ score for Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

Reigning best holiday movie of all time: National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation

Book I’m most looking forward to reading in 2012: Jonah Lehrer’s Imagine: How Creativity Works

Reading series (if seating were weighted heavily): Soda Series by John Dermot Woods and Greg Gerke

Reading series (if seating were not weighted at all): Franklin Park Series by Penina Roth

Joseph Riippi wrote Research: a novel for performance, which is currently in development for full production in Los Angeles and New York in 2012-13. His books include A Cloth House, The Orange Suitcase, and Do Something! Do Something! Do Something!………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

Penina Roth

Lots of great things happened in 2011 for Gary Amdahl, Donald Breckenridge, Tobias Carroll, Aaron Gilbreath, Johannes Göransson, Dylan Hicks, Christopher Higgs, Tim Horvath, Jamie Iredell, and David Peak.

Find Part One, here.

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Gary Amdahl

It’s been a miserable year…fallen out of touch with nearly everybody and everything. But some good beat its way relentlessly towards me:

The Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists, founded and directed by John Eliot Gardiner (Sir John if anybody’s checking… “Oh good Sir John, thou art mincing me to death!” “Mistress Quickly, I shall tickle thee! and pretend to chase thee round this stage, this globe, this so on and so forth.”) produced the final volumes of the “Bach Cantata Pilgrimage” that they undertook in 2000…nearly all of the 200 cantatas, more or less on the dates appropriate to the Lutheran Calendar, in Bach-related and architecturally interesting venues. I am a convert to the cantatas, and agree with Good Sir John (and Albert Schweitzer and a few others) that they are the heart and soul of Bach’s music. A lot of them incorporate Lutheran hymns that I grew up hearing and loathing, but which I–no surprise–now find unbearably moving. I associate them not with church attendance but things like a claymation TV series called “Davey and Goliath,” boy-and-his-dog stories sponsored by the Lutheran Church of America that I watched “religiously.” In other words…my childhood, the second of which I am afraid I am moving into.

Jordi Savall, founder and director of Hesperion XXI (ancient music and odd instruments), La Capella Reial de Catalunya, and Le Concert des Nations (slightly less ancient music) produced a book-and-CD of Haydn’s “Seven Last Words of Christ” (always look on the bright side of life–sorry, that’s eight) that included commentary by José Saramago. I think it was the last thing he wrote. “Cain,” “The Elephant’s Journey,” and “Small Memories” were also published.  Maybe not his greatest books, but good notes to go out on….

Gary Amdahl is the author of Visigoth and I Am Death, and is currently working on A Devil’s Dictionary for the 21st Century, channeling Ambrose “Bitter” Bierce, for Kelly’s Cove Press in San Francisco.

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Donald Breckenridge

Tobias Carroll

So: here are five live musical moments that impressed me most in 2011.

Tobias Carroll lives and writes in Brooklyn, New York; links to his writing can be found at www.thescowl.org/fiction, and he regularly contributes to www.vol1brooklyn.com.

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Aaron Gilbreath

Best to me isn’t one thing but always a tie for first place. (But not like in those politically correct, misguided elementary school softball games where both teams win and everyone gets robbed and feels flat like in Huxley’s Brave New World.) Best to me is a pile, a mess of bests, because I love too much stuff to be able to choose. Add to this the fact that volume means some current favorites arrived on a delay, bubbling up through the 2011 after years of circulation. That makes this less a “Best of 2011” list and more a “Best of the Last Few Months of My Life” list. February, 2011 feels so long ago it might as well have been 2006, and some of this stuff came out in 2006.

I. Music:

People without large iPods mystify me. Really, you can fit all the music you like on that tiny stick of gum? I try not to judge, but I do wonder how they get by. I like everything from Hard Bop jazz to electric juke joint Blues to surf instrumentals, but I especially love stuff that cooks my brain like a microwave with no door on it: feral, chugging, sloppy, sleazy, fuzzy, loud guitar-driven rock and roll. I don’t know what that this says about my heart’s wiring or mental metabolism, but I do know we’re living in a golden age for that kind of music. Some current jams:

1) Night Beat’s self-titled album is a powerhouse: dark, raw, spacy, and stony, with lots of bottom-end set beneath lots of fuzz and high pitch guitar squealing, like an apocalypse of lightning bolts and mudflows. I haven’t smoked weed in over a decade, but listening to this, I don’t need to. The songs “Ain’t Dumbo” and “Hallucinojenny” will blow up your brain. The record’s currently sold out http://troubleinmindrecs.com/bands/nightbeats.html but you can get the tunes at iTunes, and this song runs on rocket fuel: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3cGNuA17i4I&feature=share This one, too:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_gKi8J-3Cw&feature=related

Their split 10” with UFO Club is pretty good, too: http://thedecibeltolls.com/the-ufo-clubnight-beats-split-10/

2) Thee Oh Sees need no introduction. Their new LP, Carrion Crawler/The Dream, is all killer, no filler. They’re insane live, and this album captures that energy pretty well: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBLQ7TSrHpU&feature=relmfu

3) Mikal Cronin’s debut solo album

Over the last year, Cronin has emerged from being just another California kid in a surfy band to being one who writes some of the catchiest, most melodic songs coming of the San Francisco fuzz-pop underground. Cronin plays bass and sings in the band Moonhearts. He and guitar shredder Ty Segall released their scorching Reverse Shark Attack LP in 2009, and Cronin often plays bass with Ty’s band on tour. He also spells his first name in that really unusual way to get women’s attention and slay your suggestive heart. Just kidding. (It is pronounced “Michael,” though.) Most important is his musical sensibility. Sure, songs on this ten-song solo debut and the last Moonhearts record conjure a slew of familiar influences – Brian Wilson, Del Shannon, The Beatles, T. Rex, Neil Young – but Cronin’s particular amalgam is potent.

As some wise guy in the bible said, “There is no new thing under the sun,” but sun is the key word here, rather than the reference to recycling. Listening to tunes like “Get Along” and “Is It Alright,” you feel like you’re bathed in sunlight. Not blinded, but subdued, euphoric. There’s a comforting wash of blissful vibes in Cronin’s best slow songs. Soft guitar strum, overlaid by a reverb-soaked electric and lots of layered, high-end harmonies that will have you humming even before you know the words. Cronin is a curator of the woo-woo harmony. Not new age woo-woo like crystals on your forehead in Sedona, Arizona, but Beach Boys/60s pop woo, that intoxicating sing-a-long sound. Even though Cronin draws much of the album’s emotion from melancholy and confusion, this is feel good music, for sure, sounds of the eternal summer. But Cronin’s no one-trick pony.

Judging from the two extreme poles that define this album and Moonhearts’ range, Cronin seems a man perpetually in love and frustrated at the same time. His songs go from full-force rock and roll fuzz (“Green and Blue,” “I Hate Myself,” and “Obliteration”) to love-struck, euphoric cloud-splitters (“Get Along,” “Apathy,” and “Shine”), making him as much Black Flag as Pet Sounds. Fans of his band Moonhearts will recognize the Cronin signature all over this album. Added bonus: a flute solo courtesy of Thee Oh Sees’ John Dwyer, and most of the drums played by Ty Segall.

Did that go on too long? I recycled it from a magazine pitch that no one wanted, magazines who are missing the boat. You can get the album here: http://troubleinmindrecs.com/catalog.html

4) Pow Wows from Toronto came out of nowhere and landed red hot with their debut album Nightmare Soda. Their song “Four” is a fun one; too bad there’s no YouTube link to share.

5) I like when musicians can make melancholy feel good, like The Goodnight Loving does with this song, “Into a Grape”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNV12HDtWD8

6) “Scales,” by Poor Sons – this song is melting my brainstem right now. (Free download here: http://poorsons.bandcamp.com/)

7) This song still holds its heat for me, too: “Dry Basement” by Apache Dropout

8) Though so does Sonny Rollins’s “Strode Rode,” and it’s fifty-five years old. Jazz players like Rollins, Coltrane, and Art Blakey were punk before there was a word for it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7G4DciALDs

II. Books I Read:

Most of the stuff I read during 2011 came out in or before 2010. Every year produces more brilliance than even the hungriest readers can handle. It’s all you can do to keep up, but you never crawl out from under the pile. And who’d want to? We’re blessed with an overabundance of options, though despite the biblical-sounding verb, the gods have nothing to do it. These are golden times for music and the literary arts. Talent abounds.

I write and read fiction, but mostly, I write nonfiction, with a deep love of essays. So I’ll stick to the genre I know best and leave most of the fiction coverage to the talented fiction writers here, like J. A. Taylor, Amber Sparks, Gabriel Blackwell, Paula Bomer, and Tim Horvath.

1) The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, by Elif Batuman

If you want brilliance and humor, lit-talk, first-person narrative and perceptive analysis, then Batuman is your author. This book is a singular blend of elements, and her mind is proof that human evolution is happening as we speak. The Batuman Brain and its correlative, The Batuman Effect, as they will one day be known in critical and scientific studies, are things of power, awe, and beauty, and I have a feeling I’m going to be reading everything she writes for the rest of my life, though not in a creepy stalker kind of way. She’s the real deal. Her website: http://www.elifbatuman.com/

2) American Nerd: The Story of My People, by Benjamin Nugent

If you’re reading Big Other, chances are these are your people, too. Be proud.

3) Work and Other Sins: Life in New York City and Thereabouts, by Charlie LeDuff

I bought this collection of reportage in November, 2006 at The Strand in New York City and have been slowly reading through it ever since. I’m still only three quarters of the way through its 357 pages. It’s not that I’m slow – although I often am – it’s just not the kind of book you burn through. Or maybe it is and I’m just not that kind of reader. The book’s been my nice bottle of Scotch that you take sips from here and there, savoring the quiet moments you spend with it and the knowledge that there’s always more there on the shelf waiting for you.

A Pulitzer Prize winner and former New York Times correspondent, this year LeDuff received a much-deserved multipronged buzz platform: his essay “Who Killed Aiyana Stanley-Jones?” was reprinted in both Best American Essays 2011 and Best American Nonrequired Reading 2011. Who does that? A badass nerd, that’s who.

4) The 2009 Believer collection, Read Hard, contains essays I’ve already read in the magazine, but I love having them all in one bound volume. Also, like Jereme Dean, I like things that roll hard.

5) Pulphead: Essays, by John Jeremiah Sullivan

By now you’ve likely stumbled onto a review or some glowing hunk of praise heaped on this book, at least I hope you have. It really is that good. Instead of redescribing how much it rules, I’ll direct you to my review of the book here in the Portland Mercury and try to convince you that I, too, rule, because I’m needy like that: http://www.portlandmercury.com/portland/whats-in-an-essay/Content?oid=5094400

Also, I’d suggest you check out James Wood’s review of it in The New Yorker, but that would only make my review look weak by comparison. Wood does get it, though. He’s a skilled essayist himself, and a badass. He and I played drums in a band once, very briefly, at the Bennington MFA program. Seriously, he really is super cool. Trust me when I say, I’ve seen it with my own eyes. For further proof, check out his piece “The Fun Stuff” in the November 29, 2010 issue of The New Yorker about his other life as a drummer: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/11/29/101129fa_fact_wood

6) One Nation Under a Groove: Motown & American Culture, by Gerald Early

I recently rewatched Ken Burns’s Jazz documentary while researching an essay I was writing, and some of the best analysis came from essayist and thinker Gerald Early. I’ve read many of his pieces here and there, but somehow this particular book had eluded me. Even though the title sounds like the title of a collection of elevator music, this slim book of 135 pages is packed with more grit and brains that countless books three times its size. That’s because it’s Early’s. Calling him a national treasure makes him sound like some intellectual artifact or cement obelisk. He’s a teacher and family man, fully engaged in the culture of now, but the level of his Motown analysis, his broad scope of vision and ability to see what it all means while articulating its tangled complexity, show that, as a thinker, he really is one of our country’s cultural and intellectual assets. Asset – that word’s better. I should’ve used it instead of “treasure” from the get-go.

7) Best American Travel Writing 2009 and 2010 – playing catch up, and well worth the extra effort.

8) A Week at the Airport, by Alain de Botton

In a tie with Approximation and Weak Convergence Methods for Random Processes with Applications to Stochastic Systems Theory (Signal Processing, Optimization, and Control) for most boring sounding book on earth, Botton’s is, in fact, one of the more novel and interesting ones I’ve seen in ages. 111 pages of brilliant text and gorgeous color images, it’s a glowing example of the power of looking deeply at what on the surface seems too ordinary to be interesting. Flying is still annoying, though.

9) Facing Unpleasant Facts: Narrative Essays, by George Orwell

“Shooting an Elephant,” “Such, Such Were the Joys,” all Orwell’s best essays are here. Just knowing they’re on the shelf next to my writing desk makes me feel more sophisticated, even if I do spend most days at my desk dressed like a homeless person.

10) Coltrane: The Story of a Sound, by New York Times jazz critic Ben Ratliff

Ratliff does Coltrane proud by focusing on the saxophonist’s artistic development and spiritual and intellectual evolution, rather than rehashing his biography.

11) Oracle Bones: A Journey Through Time in China, by Peter Hessler

An enlightening book on a country that every American should be paying attention to. Journalist Peter Hessler is one of the best writers covering China, penning probing, digestible first-person narratives that bring the people and complexities of their enormous, diverse country to life. Hessler won a MacArthur Foundation grant this year. Having read this book and various essays of his, I can see why. Then again, I think Dex Romweber of Flat Duo Jets is pretty ingenious and wish he could get one of those $500,000 MacArthur Foundation checks. Last time I saw Dex play a show, his tour van had just been broken into.

III. Book I’m Excited About:

1) I’m excited about this change in format for the Best Music Writing anthology. They’re going indie, and their new publisher is expanding its purview to music. Pre-ordering the 2012 edition helps the publisher cover production costs: http://funboring.com/bestmusicwriting/

2) Excited about the next novel on my to-read list: John Haskell’s LA satire, Out of My Skin

3) I’m finally going to read Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, only partially to prove that the 1952, Signet mass market edition with the cool cover isn’t just a furniture book designed to impress visitors, although it is partly that.

4) Why Orwell Matters, by Christopher Hitchens

I know why Orwell matters to me, but I like Hitchens’s big mouth and big brain, so I’m curious what he has to say on the subject, and curious to learn what else I’m missing about Orwell.

5) Travels in Siberia, by Ian Frazier

This book is as big as Siberia. It’s going to take a while. I’m thirty-six. I hope I have enough time.

6) I’m always rereading Joseph Mitchell, but I recently found an old, 1962 mass market of James Thurber’s The Years with Ross, about The New Yorker’s brilliant and volatile founder. Judging from the size of my to-read pile, and the Mitchell pieces I’m revisiting, I probably won’t get to it this year. I’ll definitely be sniffing it a lot, though. It has that musty, sweet, almost cake-like old book smell. I suspect there’ll be an app for that in 2012.

IV. Movies: I also just watched the documentary Page One: Inside The New York Times. It’s relevant to all writers and booksellers, even those who never want to write or sell a word of journalism, because at its core it’s about content and platforms, and the way we choose to read what we read, and the struggle to monetize web content, which affects everyone who values the written word and loves having a local bookstore to go shop and sit around in.

Aaron Gilbreath has written essays for Tin House, The Paris Review, Gettysburg Review, The Smart Set, Popmatters, Gastronomica and The Normal School.  You can find an excerpt from his Link Wray-themed novel, “Run Chicken Run,” at storySouth.

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Gary Amdahl

It’s been a miserable year…fallen out of touch with nearly everybody and everything.  But some good beat its way relentlessly towards me:

The Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists, founded and directed by John Eliot Gardiner (Sir John if anybody’s checking…  “Oh good Sir John, thou art mincing me to death!”  “Mistress Quickly, I shall tickle thee! and pretend to chase thee round this stage, this globe, this so on and so forth.”) produced the final volumes of the “Bach Cantata Pilgrimage” that they undertook in 2000…nearly all of the 200 cantatas, more or less on the dates appropriate to the Lutheran Calendar, in Bach-related and architecturally interesting venues.  I am a convert to the cantatas, and agree with Good Sir John (and Albert Schweitzer and a few others) that they are the heart and soul of Bach’s music.  A lot of them incorporate Lutheran hymns that I grew up hearing and loathing, but which I–no surprise–now find unbearably moving.  I associate them not with church attendance but things like a claymation TV series called “Davey and Goliath,” boy-and-his-dog stories sponsored by the Lutheran Church of America that I watched “religiously.”  In other words…my childhood, the second of which I am afraid I am moving into.

Jordi Savall, founder and director of Hesperion XXI (ancient music and odd instruments), La Capella Reial de Catalunya, and Le Concert des Nations (slightly less ancient music) produced a book-and-CD of Haydn’s “Seven Last Words of Christ” (always look on the bright side of life–sorry, that’s eight) that included commentary by Jose Saramago.  I think it was the last thing he wrote.  “Cain,” “The Elephant’s Journey,” and “Small Memories” were also published.  Maybe not his greatest books, but good notes to go out on….

P.S.  And oh yeah:  Dalkey Archive brought out a translation of a great novel published fifteen years ago in Portugal, The Splendor of Portugal, by António Lobo Antunes, and City Lights published the long-awaited Paper Conspiracies, by Susan Daitch.

Gary Amdahl is the author of Visigoth and I Am Death, and is currently working on A Devil’s Dictionary for the 21st Century, channeling Ambrose “Bitter” Bierce, for Kelly’s Cove Press in San Francisco.

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Johannes Göransson

Dylan Hicks

I don’t keep a record of my reading, partly because such a register would either unduly privilege the book (as a form, that is) or be pointlessly thorough. My register from 2011 might, for instance, make note of Geoff Dyer’s Otherwise Known as the Human Condition, which I read it its entirety on assignment, and Jonathan Lethem’s The Ecstasy of Influence, which I poked around in for fun, but be silent about the sort of things that make up those collections: not only long-form criticism and essays, but also book reviews, magazine journalism, website riffs, and other material that, if written by less prominent figures, would be recycled only in the sense involving bins and alleys. All that between-the-cracks stuff—the book review I read to avoid writing my own book review, the poetry books and lit journals I browse with no cover-to-cover intentions, the Harper’s story I skim while waiting for a prescription to be filled—is an important part of my reading life, but to document it would start to resemble the map of the Empire whose size is that of the Empire, or the to-do list that makes room for seven minor tasks dispatched in the hour leading up to the creation of the to-do list.

So I’ve already forgotten much of what I read this past year, but I did at least scan our bookshelves, and—restricting the discussion to books published in 2011—figure that I read, or read a good share of, twenty to twenty-five of the year’s books, a bit over half of those for review (these, I promise, I finished). Here are five, arranged alphabetically by author, that I especially enjoyed:

Don DeLillo, The Angel Esmeralda. Master hypnotist and surveillant collects tales of dread and transcendence. Good with orange juice.

Paul La Farge, Luminous Airplanes. A newfangled historical novel whose disparate elements get filtered through one modest, engaging voice and harmonize in a hymn to failure.

Evan Lavender-Smith, Avatar. A study of extreme isolation in which nonthoughts of the void share outer space with floating hair and sneaker daydreams.

Ben Lerner, Leaving the Atocha Station. A skeptical Künstlerroman for the charlatan in all of us. The present charlatan is now happily working backwards through Lerner’s poetry.

Dana Spiotta, Stone Arabia. A book about delusions, some of them quite honorable, by a novelist who’s as sharp on rock music and sociopolitical history as she is on romance and family and, especially, the spaces where such things overlap.

I nearly put Humiliation, Wayne Koestenbaum’s nervy book-length essay, in my little top five, but didn’t know what to let go, on top of which it seems appropriate that Humiliation should in some small way be shunned. I also enjoyed books by fellow or onetime Twin Citians Jim Moore, John Jodzio, and Will Hermes, and was a sometimes complaining fan of novels by David Foster Wallace, Alan Hollinghurst, Mat Johnson, Jesse Ball, and others. I hope to spend some of January catching up on ’11 books by Teju Cole, Maggie Nelson, and Gary Lutz.

Making a list of 2011 music is even more problematic. There’ve been a few years in which, largely for professional reasons, I’ve managed to listen with various degrees of concentration to hundreds of albums and singles, and come up with long lists of endorsements. This year, though, my Top Ten list would be rather too close to a ranked list of all the new albums I happened to hear. Even more distressingly, it would be long on folks I’ve been following for decades, and would reflect that I entirely lost track of jazz this year and heard only a few things in hip hop and country. I have a hunch that my sixth favorite 2011 album is in fact my twenty-eighth favorite album 2011 album; I just have to find those twenty-two albums in between. In other words: I’m kind of old. But determined, next year, to be a younger kind of old.

Anyway, I got a lot of listening pleasure out of tUnE-yArDs’ Whokill, Paul Simon’s So Beautiful or So What, Raphael Saadiq’s Stone Rollin’, Bill Callahan’s Apocalypse, TV on the Radio’s Nine Types of Light, and Nico Muhly’s Seeing Is Believing, and was somewhat less taken, but still enthusiastic, about albums by Mates of State, Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks, Tom Waits, and Drive-By Truckers. A very provisional Top Ten. Among the radio hits I now mostly hear when my son gets to choose the station, my faves were Britney Spears’s “Till the World Ends,” Beyoncé’s “Countdown,” Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way,” and Flo Rida’s “Good Feeling,” an intoxicating dance single that makes brilliant use of the a cappella intro to Etta James’s “Something’s Got a Hold on Me.” “Oooh, sometimes, I get a good feeling,” she sings, and then, like magic, I get that feeling too.

Dylan Hicks’s first novel, Boarded Windows, comes out in May of 2012 on Coffee House Press, along with a companion album, Dylan Hicks Sings Bolling Greene.

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Christopher Higgs

My 2011 was bookended by Blake Butler: at the beginning with his novel There Is No Year and at the end with his memoir Nothing, both published by Harper Perennial. Between those two boundless slices of cake, I delighted most in devouring these ten books:

The Angel in the Dream of Our Hangover: Aphorisms, by Mark Leidner (Sator Press)

The Necropastoral, by Joyelle McSweeney (Spork)

The Marbled Swarm, by Dennis Cooper (Harper Perennial)

Schizophrene, by Bhanu Kapil (Nightboat)

I Am a Very Productive Entrepreneur, by Mathias Svalina (MLP)

Green Girl, by Kate Zambreno (Emergency Press)

The Iguana Complex, by Darby Larson (Nephew)

Simple Machines, by Michael Bible (Awesome Machine Press)

Arcane Carnal Knowledge, by Feng Sun Chen (Pangur Ban Party)

Entrance to a colonial pageant in which we all begin to intricate, by Johannes Göransson (Tarpaulin Sky)

Christopher Higgs self-identifies as an author, educator, assembler, curator, theorist, husband, and doctoral candidate.

David Peak

Please let me know what you think and any other ideas you may have. You can reach me at johnmadera at gmail dot com.

Thanks,

John

A few days ago, I reached out to writers and other artists across the country to provide me with a list of some of their favorite books, music, films, events, moments, or whatever from 2011, which needn’t necessarily have happened or been made in 2011. So I’m happy to publish this first installment, featuring lists from Gabriel Blackwell, Samuel R. Delany, Giancarlo DiTrapano, Andrew Ervin, Eugene Lim, Brad Listi, Kyle Minor, J. A. Tyler, and Curtis White.

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Gabriel Blackwell

On Thursday, I came home with fifty rather beautiful student chapbooks. In an effort to post grades early and get on with this novel I haven’t had the focus to write during the semester, I have been reading ~300 pages of student work a day since (at that rate, I ought to be done by the end of the week, but we’ll see how long I can keep it up). Naturally or not, this process has put me in mind of reading jags, those brief and not-so-brief fashions I’ve put on and discarded this year.

And so, the five “best” reading jags of 2011, in chronological order:

1. Stanley Elkin: Which actually began in the waning days of 2010, when I started The Magic Kingdom (I finished it on the plane back to Portland, firmly in 2011), but which for some reason I did not follow up on in the new year until several months later, with Criers & Kibitzers, Kibitzers & Criers and Boswell. I was greedy for more, but also a little afraid that my enthusiasm for Elkinizing was beginning to show just a bit too much. Is there anything worse than a parody of a parody? After this Mardi Gras of prose, a self-imposed Lent — I’ve only just begun George Mills, but, confidentially: I don’t think it will last through Christmas. Perhaps I am inaugurating a new New Year’s ritual — I suspect The Dick Gibson Show and The Franchiser  are wrapped and under the tree, and if I’m right, The Franchiserwill be next up.

5. Alexander Theroux: Years ago, Josh Billings recommended I read Theroux. He recommended that I read Three Wogs, but, again, I am stubborn, and so I said, “Yeah, yeah, I’ll read it,” but didn’t (which reminds me that I really should read Andrei Bitov, after all, and everything else Josh has recommended). I found a very cheap copy of The Primary Colors and kept it on my shelf for a couple of years. Then, while making my way through Handke, I had to move my books from one bookcase to another, and I rediscovered it. If Absence hadn’t been enough to stifle the Handke run on its own, the great love I developed for Primary Colors would have provided the necessary impulse. I immediately bought and read The Secondary Colors, which I think was even better. I pined for the next volume (the fabled Black, which has apparently been finished for some time, as has its sequel, White– viz. this 2008 Bookslut interview). Deprived, I wasn’t sure where to turn next. I did eventually pick up Three Wogs (honestly, mostly for its appendix, Theroux Metaphrastes, entirely worth the price of admission) but I think I prefer Theroux’s essays (or else the other reading I have been doing this year has made me prefer them); not that I was disappointed in Three Wogs, but that I want to read Black  and White so much, nothing else will do. (600 pages! Each! About black and white! From A. Theroux! Agents, publishers, for the love of literature, I beseech you, bring them out.)

Gabriel Blackwell is the author of Critique of Pure Reason,  (Noemi Press, 2012) and Neverland (Uncanny Valley Press, 2011).

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Samuel R. Delany

I thoroughly enjoyed the film Hugo a few weeks ago. As well, the reading list for my graduate seminar “The Structure of Complex Novels” proved to be wonderfully salutary and satisfying to both me and my class. This term we read three major novels, interspersed with three relatively short books that threw an interesting light on our primary texts. Our first was Balzac’s Lost Illusions, but before we took on that, we read Roland Barthes’ S/Z (his study of Balzac’s novella “Sarazine”) to give us a preliminary taste of Balzac at his most characteristic as well as a few notions of how fiction might be analyzed in some way other than as  a set of character studies. Then we plunged into his great tapestry of the hypocrisies of life in Paris  and the province of Angouleme at the turn of the 18th Century. Next, in preparation for reading Flaubert’s novel of the revolution of 1848, Sentimental Education, we read Marx’s The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte–his eye-witness account of Louis Phillipe’s  coup d’etat of December 1851, just after the revolution in France, and how the one grew out of the  other. Then we plunged into Flaubert’s rich picture of the failure of the young men of his generation to make anything of the opportunities that the revolution itself had afforded them. Finally, we read Virginia Woolf’s The Partigers, the novel-essay she wrote in preparation for The Years; then we read The Years itself, one of her richest novels (and certainly her most ambitious), which dramatizes changes in sensibility between 1880 and 1937, over three generations of an upper middle-class Victorian/Edwardian family. Well over half the class was really knocked out by the Woolf, especially in the light of what had preceded it. For each, we discussed the narrator’s strategies for depicting social changes (in Woolf, the heroine’s first glimpse of an airplane, of her first hot shower, of another woman’s putting on lipstick for the first time, a bombing in the midst of dinner during the Great War. . .), landscape, and character.

I hope that gives you a taste of what I’ve been doing–and what I’ve been enjoying about it.

I’m still waiting for my own novel, Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders, to materialize into an actual object. . . any week, now; any week . . .

Samuel R. Delany  is the critically-acclaimed author of over forty books, which includes novels, literary criticism, and memoirs.

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Giancarlo DiTrapano

Best Album: The Year of Hibernation by Youth Lagoon (Fat Possum)

Best New (to me) Artists: Riff Raff and Dent May

Best Party: Vice with Rick Ross and DFA 1979

Best Movie: Mumblecore (MDMA Films)

Best Book released in 2011: Divorcer, by Gary Lutz

Best book I read in 2011: Dog Soldiers, by Robert Stone

Best Internet Writing: ‘Andrew’: A Dialogue of Texts in the Year of Drugs and Kindness

Best Breakout Writer: Michael Bible

Best New Thing in General: Spotify

Giancarlo DiTrapano edits New York Tyrant and Tyrant Books.

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Andrew Ervin

There’s something melancholy about looking back at a year’s worth of reading. I didn’t read enough books this year. I never read enough books. American letters lost a tremendous voice this year, and I lost a friend, when Jeanne M. Leiby of The Southern Review was killed in a car accident on the Atchafalaya Basin. I haven’t completely come to grips with the fact that I won’t see her again, but I’m hopeful that some of the stories she was working on will make it into print one day.

The idea of ordering a list and crowning a champion—Best Book of 2011!—is a bit distasteful to me, but I’d love to mention a few things that challenged and affected my thinking over the past twelve months. Peter Nádas’s epic Parallel Stories got lost amid the Murakamimania, and it’s in many ways an even more remarkable accomplishment. And for all the fetishization of big, doorstop books, I read very little about The Iovis Trilogy by Anne Waldman, which was this nation’s publishing event of the year. I also adored We Others by Steven Millhauser and David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King. The Chronology of Water by Lidia Yuknavich is one of those books that should be handed out at the DMV; my immediate surroundings would be livelier and more thoughtful if more people read it.

Jennifer Tamayo’s radical, debut poetry collection/scrap book/memoir [Red Missed Aches] opened up the possibilities of how meaning can occur on the page. (My interview with her will be on Hobart’s website next month.) I was delighted by the tremendous response to Tayari Jones’s Silver Sparrow—it’s not often that a book that’s so smart also gets the critical and popular attention it deserves. And I personally can’t put much faith in any year-end list that doesn’t include Kate Christensen’s The Astral. It’s a quirky and delightful novel that feels more real than real life. Whatever that is. It’s one I wholeheartedly recommend. Also, the afterimage of Denis Johnson’s novella Train Dreams is still seared into my retinas.

I also read some great short stories by my Temple University undergrads, several of who are currently applying to MFA programs. Stow the names Harmon, Thomas, Bates, and Rastetter in the back of your mind. Two readings I attended have inspired me a great deal: I got to hear the legendary Joseph McElroy read a short story from his collection Night Soul (and had him sign my first edition of Women and Men, albeit with my name misspelled) and more recently heard Brian Evenson read the title story of his forthcoming collection Windeye, which is on my immediate to-read list along with a novel called Blueprints of the Afterlife by Ryan Boudinot.

David Asma’s study On Monsters gave me a lot to think about for the novel I’m working on, as did John McFee’s classic The Pine Barrens, which I’ve just read for the first time. And my intellectual life, such as it is, has benefited enormously from incessant listening to P.J. Harvey’s Let England Shake and—shameless plug—my partner Elivi Varga’s Silver Tunes: Music for Flute and Organ (Sterling Records), which she recorded in Sweden over the summer and is available in Europe; it’ll be stateside early next year. I’m closing out 2011 by filling one of the most egregious and embarrassing holes in my reading life: I’ve only now started reading Virginia Woolf for the first time. What a joy.

As soon as I submit this text to Big Other I’ll think of a dozen more things I should have included. I’m so looking forward to the books that 2012 will bring.

Andrew Ervin is the author of Extraordinary Renditions.

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Eugene Lim