For two years running, I've added my little spin on "Year End Best Of" lists. Rather than list my own favorite reads each year, I reached out to a bunch of authors - all of whom have appeared here on TNBBC in some way, shape, or form - asking them to share with us their favorite reads. I thought it would be really cool to throw it out there again and see what they've been reading and enjoying this year....
The response was amazing and I am really exited to share them with you today. And without further ado...
The TNBBC Author Series: Top Reads of 2013
Ryan W Bradley
Best Fiction:
Orphans by Ben Tanzer
A true surprise. Tanzer somehow manages to be very sci-fi and very Tanzer at the same time. The result is unlike anything you've ever read in the science fiction genre or among Tanzer's catalog.
Best Poetry:
Life Cycle by Dena Rash Guzman
Every poem in this book is worth re-reading again and again. You know a writer's special when you finish reading their work and your first thought is "I want more."
Best "How Had I Not Read This Yet":
Plainsong by Kent Haruf
This book is so in my wheelhouse, how did I ever miss it? An editor I'm working with on my Alaska-themed story collection recommended it to me and I was instantly in love with the writing.
Ryan W. Bradley is the author of four chapbooks, a story collection, a novel, and two poetry collections, as well as a collaborative poetry collection written with David Tomaloff. His novella, WINTERSWIM will be released in December 2014. He has a shiny new website: ryanwbradley.com
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Mark R Brand
1) George Saunders’ Tenth of December (2013)
If I had to pick a favorite, and I don’t like to, but if I had to, this would be it for me for the year. Not only does every story in this collection swing for the fences, but it had my favorite short story of the year (“The Semplica Girl Diaries”) in it, as well. I got to interview Saunders last winter, and he’s just as charming, witty, unpretentious, and brilliant as his fiction. If you only read one thing this year, read Tenth of December.
2) James M. Cain’s Mildred Pierce (1941)
Despite its dull premise, Cain (who also wrote Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice) managed here to write one of the most sharply mimetic female protagonists I’ve ever seen. Mildred, the down-to-earth and likable lead, is saddled with an exceptionally gifted daughter named Veda, with whom she has a turbulent relationship. Set in the tail end of the Great Depression, when economic hard times dragged into the better part of an entire decade (sound familiar?), I found this, and the novel’s eponymous main character, impossible not to like.
3) Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One (2011)
I was certain—absolutely certain—that this book was going to suck. After all: I AM a gamer dork from the late 1980’s, and I didn’t think any dopey parody of it was going to be able to tell me anything about those years and growing up at that time that I didn’t already know. I was so wonderfully, hilariously wrong. This book (and I read the audiobook version, narrated by Wil Wheaton of all people), had me laughing and smiling and giving myself unselfconscious air high-fives from almost page one. It also has a remarkably poignant dystopian message about net neutrality and the commodification of leisure. Highly, highly recommended for anyone who grew up in the 80’s. This book is like a little energon cube of fun.
Mark R. Brand is the author of the novels Red Ivy Afternoon (2006), Life After Sleep (2011), The Damnation of Memory (2011), and the collection Long Live Us. He is a two-time Independent Publisher Book Award winner and is the creator and host of the video podcast series Breakfast With the Author (available on iTunes). He teaches English at Wilbur Wright College, and is currently
completing his PhD at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
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Giano Cromley
Tomorrowland by Joseph Bates
Curbside Splendor Publishing
The stories in Tomorrowlandare surprising and inventive, shot through with humor and wit, but never at the expense of its characters. As the title would suggest, the stories frequently take place in the near or distant future, but the irony is that Tomorrowland is all about the past. In "Mirrorverse" a husband uses a Multiverse Spectrometer to relive his failed marriage. In the title story, a man surveys the soon-to-be-demolished remains of a futuristic theme park, only to be haunted by the mannequin family that resides there. And in "Boardwalk Elvis" an Elvis impersonator has the worst professional day of his career as he suffers for his art. The characters in Tomorrowland seem to be trapped in the past, wondering how the future they'd once imagined ended up looking like this.
The Fiery Alphabetby Diane Lefer
Loose Leaves Publishing
The Fiery Alphabettells the story of Daniela Messo, raised by her father to be a mathematical prodigy in eighteenth-century Rome. Repudiated by a fearful church hierarchy, Daniela eventually takes up with a mysterious mystic, Giuseppe Balsamo, and the pair barnstorm eastward across Europe, in search of a higher truth. Told in an epistolary fashion, I had no idea what to expect when I cracked this book and I found myself continually surprised and delighted by Daniela's adventures, right up to the last page.
Orphans by Ben Tanzer
Switchgrass Books
Author Ben Tanzer brings his unique voice to the science fiction genre and the results are great. Orphansfollows the story of young father Norrin Radd, as he tries to support his family in a future where jobs and money are nearly impossible to come by if you weren't born into the right family. The future in Orphans is dark, so don't be fooled when I tell you this novel is also really funny. Ultimately, though, we see the cost exacted when people are put in positions where they'll do whatever it takes to make a better life for their families.
Giano Cromley's first novel, The Last Good Halloween, was released this fall. His writing has appeared in The Threepenny Review, Literal Latte, and The Bygone Bureau, among others. He is a recipient of an Artists Fellowship from the Illinois Arts Council. He teaches English at Kennedy-King College and lives on Chicago's South Side with his wife and two dogs.
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Tod Davies
Since I'm elbow deep in the writing of Jam Today Too: The Revolution Will Not Be Catered, the second in the Jam Today cookbook/memoir series, needless to say, I spend my evenings noodling over other people's food writings. Which I love. And the three that I seemed to love the most this year are, unusually for me, two that came out in the last few months, and, not unusual for me, one classic that's hard to find unless you haunt thrift stores (I do).
First: A Bushel's Worth: An Ecobiography, by Kayann Short (Torrey House Press).
Man, I love those cookbook/farming memoirs. And Kayann, who is descended from farm families, writes lovingly and practically about her own life on a farm, hard at work and play with her partner John, just north of Boulder, Colorado. This book actually brought tears to my eyes with its descriptions of their travails and triumphs. And you need to read about the transport of an entire farm building from property being turned, inevitably, into tract housing...to Kayann's farm that is defending against its own disappearance into the same black hole. Funny, practical, and ultimately moving.
Second: A Commonplace Book of Pie, by Kate Lebo (Chin Music Press).
Utterly charming. A postmodern book about pie by a poet who makes a mean crust. The cheerfully mad descriptions and the excellent recipes/tips make this the world's great gift book. The illustrations are terrific too.
Third: The Cooking of Vienna's Empire: Foods of the World, by Joseph Wechsberg (Time-Life Books).
Back in the late 1960s, Time-Life published about a gazillion volumes of a series about foods of the world, and enlisted just about every great food writer of the period to help (M.F.K. Fisher! James Beard! Craig Claiborne!). But the best of the lot (and that's saying a bundle) is this one, by Joseph Wechsberg, who wrote the classic Blue Trout and Black Truffles. Absolutely amazing photography, evocative and classic, but that's just the icing on the cake of Wechsberg's precise and loving prose. I found this in a thrift store for 50 cents, which as you know, for a thrift store addict is ecstasy. What a find!
Tod Davies, editorial director of indie Exterminating Angel Press, is also the author of Snotty Saves the Day and Lily the Silent, both from The History of Arcadia series, and the cooking memoirs Jam Today: A Diary of Cooking With What You've Got and Jam Today Too: The Revolution Will Not Be Catered (June 2014). Unsurprisingly, her attitude toward publishing is the same as her attitude toward literature, cooking, and, come to think of it, life in general: it's all about working with the best of what you have to find new ways of looking and new ways of being. Find her and EAP at www.exterminatingangel.com.
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Heather Fowler
Satantangoby László Krasznahorkai
translated by George Szirtes
New Directions Press, 2012
This translation from Hungarian of Krasznahorkai’s work was recommended to me by a colleague as a peerless psychological novel. In many ways, it is exquisite, bringing to life a dark tale with apocalyptic intent via a long-form work that reads at once like a fable and a stylistically Eurocentric classic. It’s a gorgeous effort in understanding human motivations—one that explores human pride, eccentricities, and desire via a surreal filter. Transcendent. Another excellent New Directions release.
TheDoor by Margaret Atwood
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2007
After engaging with hundreds of pages of Atwood’s poetry this year, I ordered this, her most recent release, and was struck by the beauty of her concision, her ability to construct visual landscapes replete with their emotional savagery—year after year. While Atwood is most frequently discussed as a fiction writer, it is her poetry I love with a burning love, feeling her poetics influence all her genres—and this book shows a masterful use of white space and imagery. Any book that causes me to shed actual tears has a great chance at landing at my top of the year selections. This did. In addition, it includes a CD of the author reading the poems. This feels like a private, unexpected and intimate treasure.
At the Mouth of the River of Bees by Kij Johnson
Small Beer Press, 2012
As a short story fanatic, one who enjoys magical realism, literary traditional, feminist, and experimental work—this collection blew me away. Each piece is informed by its language, performs its own sacred act upon the reader. I reviewed this book in ABR regarding its use of eroticism, but this book does far more. Seldom do I read a collection with such an array of generative impulses and narrative styles—and the wildly creative originality of Johnson’s voice and style, as well as the beatifically executed text, made this a clear favorite in 2013.
Heather Fowler is the author of Suspended Heart, People with Holes, and This Time, While We’re Awake. Her new book Elegantly Naked in My Sexy Mental Illness, an illustrated collaborative collection with visual artist Pablo Vision releases from Queens Ferry Press in 2014. Please visit her website at www.heatherfowlerwrites.com
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Kim Henderson
The Oxford Book of Japanese Short Stories, ed. Theodore W. Goossen.
This semester, I chose stories from this collection to teach in my fiction workshop. My goal was to discover new work, rather than automatically selecting what I knew well. I sat down to see what the anthology had to offer, fighting my urge to start with the Murakami story I knew would be great. Hours later, I still had not emerged from the book. I blinked at the now dark room turned unfamiliar by the stories that had just jarred me out of any reading rut. I haven't had quite that experience since I read my first fiction anthology as an undergraduate.
Toddler-Hunting by Kono Taeko
There is such a range of stories in this book. It will leave you feeling a bit scarred, a bit sick, a bit mesmerized; "The Peony Garden" by Nagai Kafu feels like Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants" (but maybe better?), like a mountain of a story lies beneath what we are shown; many of the stories feel like novels in their breadth and scope. But I think what stunned me into getting lost in this book is that many of the endings are messy and unresolved, that these stories mimic life all too uncomfortably--there is no urge to tidy up here. This anthology showed me something new, or something I'd forgotten about.
Big World, Mary Miller.
I had read Mary Miller's chapbook of short-short stories, Paper and Tassels, in the Rose Metal Press anthology They Could No Longer Contain Themselves, but did not retain the author's name. Then at The Letters Festival in Atlanta this November, I heard her read from her upcoming novel about an evangelical family hoping to chase the apocalypse across the U.S. Afterward, I bought a copy of Big World.
You could get into a fight with your significant other, check into a cheap motel, and sit down with a fifth of whiskey, a pack of cigarettes, the movie Blue Valentine, and a copy of Big World, and have the best of bleak evenings, replete with relationships that have overstayed their welcome, beautiful yet self-destructive and indifferent girls and women, lots of bad decisions, and a general lack of satisfaction from characters who aren't willing or able to muster up whatever it takes to try to change. Miller knows exactly what to put on the page and what to leave off. What she chooses not to include keeps you thinking about these characters who are all too quick with a harsh, wry remark, who learned long ago to guard their deepest truths.
Nights I Dreamed of Hubert Humphrey, Daniel Mueller.
I may not have come across this book had my old professor (Daniel Mueller) not gotten in touch with me recently. I am so glad he did, and that I got a copy of his new book. This collection of stories is wonderfully daring, direct, brutal, and beautifully written. Mueller's sentences alone are admirable enough, but these characters and the unflinching honesty with which they are written take the collection to the next level. Also, the endings often push the stories into unexpected places--characters are turned inside out during the beginning and middle of the story, but at the end, a scalpel is taken to their hearts as Mueller reveals the complicated, unnamable intricacies that drive them. Some of these stories could easily find themselves in The Best American Short Stories anthology, and they deserve that wide a readership.
Kim Henderson is the author of The Kind of Girl, which won the Seventh Annual Rose Metal Press Short Short Chapbook Contest. Her stories have appeared in Tin House, H_NGM_N, Cutbank, River Styx, Chamber Four, The Southeast Review, New South, and elsewhere. She lives with her husband on a mountain in Southern California, where she chairs the Creative Writing program at Idyllwild Arts Academy.
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David David Katzman
The Man Without Qualities
The Man Without Qualities is a Modernist masterpiece. An expansive book of ideas yet an intimate view into Austrian society, circa 1913. The writing (in translation from German) is erudite and sophisticated. The view into the psychology of the numerous characters is rich and insightful. The overall critique of both Austrian and human civilization is profound and sharp.
The Last Novel
The Last Novel is a quick, easy, charming, sad, profound, surprising, humorous, angry, erudite, critical, clever, bitter, energetic, thought-provoking, challenging, heavy, light, experimental non-novel. An impossible to categorize work, The Last Novel is such a fast read that you've no excuse for not giving it a try.
Autonauts of the Cosmoroute
What a wonderful book. Part essay, part travelogue with a smattering of fiction, it's an indescribable blend of humor, sadness, quirk and love.
David David Katzman has published two novels, Death by Zamboni, an absurdist satire, and A Greater Monster, a multimedia psychedelic fairytale, which won a gold medal as “Outstanding Book of the Year” in the 2012 Independent Publisher Book Awards and was a Finalist in the Fantasy genre of the 2012 Indie Excellence Awards. In 2013, the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography published an illustrated collection of his letters entitled The Kickstarter Letters. He has performed as an actor and improviser throughout Chicago and has been interviewed by numerous bloggers.
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Kathe Koja
My three books this year are variations on a theme:
THE RECKONING, Charles Nicholl
CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE, A.L. Rowse
DOCTOR FAUSTUS, Christopher Marlowe
Research can be a lot of things: a compunctious duty, a heavy slog - or a dance. 2013 is my year of Dancing with Marlowe, most definitely a dance in the dark, as I collaborated with an actor (Steve Xander Carson) and a writer (Carter Scholz) on, first, an immersive performance of Marlowe's evil-haunted FAUSTUS, and (in progress) a fictional examination of Marlowe as poet and spy.
These tangoes were masterfully enabled by the steely work of Charles Nicholl, who investigates, then obliterates, the received wisdom on the death of Marlowe (stabbed in a sordid brawl in a crappy tavern? Not so much); and the panoramic, emotionally perspicacious A.L. Rowse's view of Marlowe in the context of his world and his work.
And the man himself, in glitter of his wit and the chill of his vision, threw open the doors to Hell itself, with doomed and clever John Faustus its victim and our guide. Never has poetry been so delicious, so ferocious, never has the darkness been so - well, say it - fun. Watch your step, let's go! https://vimeo.com/79721391
Kathe Koja's novels include THE MERCURY WALTZ (forthcoming January 2014), UNDER THE POPPY, THE CIPHER, SKIN, BUDDHA BOY, and HEADLONG. Her work has been optioned for film and adapted for performance. Her company Loudermilk Productions creates site-specific, immersive events. http://www.kathekoja.com/ (and FB and Twitter).
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Lavinia Ludlow
In fast-paced flash fiction, location often takes the backburner; however, when Burrow Press recently released 15 Views Volume II: Corridor, location took center stage. In 15 Views, thirty writers deconstruct the stereotypes associated with two of Florida’s most misrepresented cities, Orlando and Tampa, by presenting honest, intimate, and fleeting glimpses of the local human condition. These stories are not postcard snapshots of resort beachfronts or Epcot Center, but drama-laden accounts of shattered dreams, inescapable poverty, and atrocious violence. Full review here
Lavinia Ludlow is a musician and writer currently residing on the West Coast. Her debut novel alt.punk can be purchased through major online retailers as well as Casperian Books’ website. Recently, her sophomore novel Single Stroke Seven was signed to Casperian Books as well. Follow her reviews, news, and other tidbits over at: http://ludlowlavinia.wordpress.com/
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Courtney Elizabeth Mauk
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