January 1, 2024

What my friends and I read in 2023

If you’re reading this entry as an email, it may be cut short. Read it in full here.

Movies—after Angelo—are my main squeeze. If you’re the same about [‘60s ad exec voice:] the movin’ pictures, I recommend Whatever Happened To Interracial Love? by the late great director Kathleen Collins. This unforgettably titled short story collection, written in the 1970s and published posthumously in 2016, made me see form anew. The novels of Barbara Browning, my favourite reads this year, did that too. In The Gift (Or, Techniques of the Body), the theorist Lauren Berlant e-mails the narrator: ‘I have also written that ethics to me feels like politics in denial, but that’s not always true, because sometimes no matter how politically saturated a relation is, it’s just about one person showing up for another’. This is to say that Browning made me think differently about ethics as well. Ditto for dance. (Still, Merce Cunningham once memorably compared writing about dance to trying to nail Jell-O to the wall.) I finally made good on my perennial reading resolution of ‘more poetry’, and enjoyed several debuts: Jake Byrne’s Celebrate Pride with Lockheed Martin, Momtaza Mehri’s Bad Diaspora Poems, Elizabeth Trew’s My Mother the Seal, and Maggie Millner’s Couplets. In the realm of non-fiction, the dazzling work of Byung-Chul Han, Gillian Rose, Nick Pinkerton, and Ellyn Gados guided me, respectively, through eros, illness, Tsai Ming-Liang films, and pig farms. And one Winter night alone in Kalk Bay, Yiyun Li’s Where Reasons End made me bawl for my mama. Onwards into 2024, in which I plan on more plays, more novels by men (I want to understand their alleged emotional interiority better), and much less Twitter.

—ZAO

I read widely this year, yielding to errant curiosities in service of my second novel, which is nearing a serviceable draft. I read to write, like all writers. Upon being commissioned by a magazine to write a survey of Don DeLillo’s career, I became a completionist. Reading every word a writer decides to publish forces intimacy. My piece became fiction. My invented name for his wife is Hazel Hewitt. She was, in reality, a banker named Barbara Bennett. I also read to blurb, as one does; this insidious practice left me disgusted, surprised, and, in some cases, rapt. I read too much criticism; Lorentzen, Emre, Robson, Ruby, Seghal, Wilson, Hoffman etc. continue to keep me moving. I have avoided, for some time, reading those long-dead writers and books resurrected by the au fait, preferring to fuck with the stacks on my own, but this year I was charmed into reading The Golden Notebook by a beautiful and relentlessly intelligent friend turned acquaintance, persuaded by her recollection of a passage (one that I would ultimately find pedestrian); it was something about how people are reconstituted by memory through gesture, flattening and expanding into a movement that they come to own (for the observer/you). It was something like this, I’m sure. The beautiful acquaintance said it better, and now I recall the tortured shape her fingers make when she’s disappointed in me. I returned to Salter a lot over the last few months because I indulged my obsessions a bit too much this year and couldn’t quite live while perceiving myself as living and steeped in the Manichean envy between the two personas, a phenomenon Salter diagnoses and resigns himself to in A Sport and a Pastime. I returned to Notes on Choreography, a book I included on a reading list last year because Merce and I are still getting to know each other. He dashed off idiocies like “There can be no clarity in poetry” (I’m fucking up the phrasing) that I’ve taken too much to heart, which will compel the inevitable concern of my publisher. I reread The House of Hunger because of an email exchange with Angelo. I realize the only things I have refused to read this year are my writing contracts. Let them kill me how they see fit.

—ZK

“You don't ever step into the same book twice after all.” So says Claire Louise-Bennett, the odd genius authoress of Checkout 19, a long ramble inside a smart and strange girl’s head with overtones of Anna Burns’ brilliant Booker-winning 2018 novel Milkman. Checkout 19 is my final read of 2023, a year that has reminded me of nothing so much as the possibly-over-recited-but-justifiably-so opening lines of T.S. Eliot’sWasteland:

April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

Winter kept us warm, covering

Earth in forgetful snow, feeding

A little life with dried tubers.

These past two years have marked a personal winter. I’ve retreated into an individual cavern of numbness while mourning my father’s death. Lately I’ve taken the first painful and tentative steps away from my cave of the dead. I’ve relished an earth-shattering portobello veggie burger drizzled with aioli and dashed onto brioche, swallowed down with a cold craft Trappist ale. I’ve cried—unwillingly, but copiously—at symphonies like Rachmaninoff’s No. 2 and indie movies that include The Farewell and The Holdovers. And I have read.

My top book of the year was Middlemarch, the sort of big tome you always aspire to but associate with tedium and thus never actually sit down with. Prompted by the exigencies of a syllabus, I got to it, reading about the provincial 1830’s world of Dorothea Brooke and Tertius Lydgate by headlight while snugly ensconced in a solo tent scarce fit for sitting up and pitched 16,000 feet above sea level in the high mountains of the Peruvian Andes, someone else’s donkeys inquisitively grazing just out front, their hot vital breath fogging up my shelter’s synthetic skin. There could be no better stage for the small dramas of Middlemarch to play out on.

I found myself both absorbed and astonished by the novel, which felt like an English response to Tolstoy’s godly omniscience: in it, George Eliot carefully captures the rhythms of life in a single English Midlands community, weaving a masterful web that depicts with authority every possible social permutation while also plunging deep and headlong into the fathomless interiors of dozens of characters. A hybrid of Henry James and Thomas Hardy, Eliot expertly zooms her focal lens out and in, capturing both the rigid, byzantine exterior of social decorum and the roiling souls of her people: their hopes, heartaches, and often-frustrated aspirations. Middlemarch is a novel full of life. That is fitting; I am, again, living.

—IN

In the last full year of my 20s, I felt particularly drawn to slim novels about listless people trying, in their own ways, to vanish into more meaningful lives. Or, maybe, these novels are just Timelessly Brilliant. Let’s go with the latter. I couldn’t stop talking about Solo Faces (James Salter), Cassandra at the Wedding (Dorothy Baker), and Lives of the Saints (Nancy Lemann). After years of putting it off, I finally read Less than Zero (Brett Easton Ellis), an occasionally brilliant (and undeniably influential) novel about how consuming evil content makes you evil. So much for Pure Aesthetics, I guess. I also read great books by writers I already loved and about whom I have nothing original to say: Breaking and Entering (Joy Williams) and Angels (Denis Johnson). The most inexplicable reference to Contemporary Culture came in No One Left to Come Looking for You (Sam Lipsyte) when Jeff Epstein, the New York financier, makes a cameo. My favorite fact gleaned from Non-Fiction: the British guy who first trademarked tennis briefly re-named the sport sphairistiké.

—JF

David Nutt is my neighbor in Ithaca, and I started off 2023 with his excellent (and very funny) collection of short stories, Summertime in the Emergency Room. David is a gifted prose stylist in the mold of Lutz, Beatty, or Lipsyte, and his stories are a pleasure to read for their sentences alone. We meet for beers occasionally, and I feel somewhat in awe that we’re pals. Another extremely funny book I read this year which I positively adored was Helen Dewitt’s Lightning Rods. I love how she takes this insane idea and runs it through so many permutations, page after page, until it’s grown into this bold, beautiful satire of corporate America. Reading it, I was like, is she going to manage to pull this off? And yup, she does. What else? I’m a big Bolaño fan, but for some strange reason I’d never read 2666, so that occupied my August. I once saw someone on Twitter refer to it as having the power to rewire the human brain, and while I think I emerged with my brain chemistry intact (I hope), I’d probably rank it among my all-time favorite novels. I also loved Kick the Latch by Kathryn Scanlan, an extraordinary act of literary ventriloquism, which I found very moving, plus I’m a sucker for a good racetrack story. I should probably seek professional help for my Virginia Woolf addiction: this year I read To the Lighthouse for maybe the ninth time. And finally, I closed out the year with Molloy by Samuel Beckett: his snaking, hypnotic prose cadences were a lovely way to welcome in the vagaries of December in Upstate New York.

—SM

Lorentzen was right. The Last Samurai (Helen DeWitt) is (and remains) the best book of this century. Never have I read a book so playful with Narrative that it liberates my conception of Thinking, as traditionally delivered in the novel.

—CN

My attention span this year has been shite, for reasons I won’t bore you with, and reading scattershot. However: the most significant: I was with my husband on a self-inflicted writing retreat in a room the size of a matchbox on Cape Cod and was in total crisis over the novel-in-progress. It was not what I wanted to be writing and I couldn’t see my way around it. On a walk around a dismal highway shopping park I made myself look directly at the problem and realized I had to re-read 2666 immediately. And forced my husband to drive me to Hyannis where there was a Barnes & Noble to acquire a new copy, since I wasn’t going to be able to wait until I got home. I read it inside of a few weeks and saw the way out. I also liked Breaking and Entering, by Joy Williams, and Under the Glacier, by Halldór Laxness. I had tried to read it years ago and got stuck, this time blazed through. It is extremely and unexpectedly (for me anyway) funny.

—EH

My memory is piss-poor, but here are a few things that stuck out to me this year. If you’re looking for an altogether rollicking good time through dream-like states of self-loathing, tightly wound prose, cars, leopards, and heroin addiction, look no further than Anna Kavan’s posthumous short story collection Julia and the Bazooka. Published in 1970 but collects pieces written a bit earlier (mid-century to the late ‘60s). Escapism for the author is escapism for the reader. If you or someone you know has a hard time existing in this completely demented lifescape, Kavan will feel like the dreamer bestie who just gets you and wants to go on an aimless drive, crank the heat, roll down the windows and chief butts while talking shit on all the type A’s. Sounding a bit twee, innit? Well, shockingly, her worlds reflect harshness, the way it should feel, an antidote to softcore acoustic, the Leather Nun to your John Cougar Mellencamp . . . well, not quite, but you get the picture. To be a woman in the ‘50s writing autofiction (sorry, had to) about addiction feels very ahead of its time. Really though, she is an excellent writer picking up where Kafka dropped the ball, leading you through strange timeless worlds where things are not as they seem, and I found myself absolutely loving where she led me. Needing more Kavan in my life, I next read her novel Ice (1967) which wasn’t exactly like trudging through six feet of snow, but it was a bleak landscape that took some time to get used to. Sheesh, even thinking about it now I’m immediately sucked into this dark, foreign reality which, like Julia, is placeless, timeless, and leaves me feeling like I’m revisiting a nightmare I had days ago that I just can’t shake. The grey stark terrain of New England this time of year is a perfect companion to this sort of stuff. Don't try and fight it, looking for pockets of sunshine where there are none. Decline the invitations to go out, stay stuck on the couch and just read Ice!

—CB

This year I vowed to read only the girls and the gays. I started on a high note with The Inheritors by Eve Fairbanks, which looks closely at the lives of three South Africans during and after apartheid. Fairbanks brings us from early democracy to the bewildered present. A poignant portrait of the aftermath of violence, and some of the best narrative nonfiction I have ever read. Three top novels were Second Place by Rachel Cusk, Wandering Souls by Cecile Pin and Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason. Each is equal parts painful and beautiful. But my favourite book of the year is one that still haunts me: Still Born by Guadalupe Nettel, a tale of motherhood. Annie Ernaux’s blurb is spot-on: ‘Guadalupe Nettel renders with great veracity life as it is encountered in the everyday, taking us to the heart of the only things that really matter: life, death and our relationships with others. All of these are contained in the experience of motherhood’. The same heart features in Soldier Sailor by Claire Kilroy, which I fear may yet break me. The gays delivered – as always – with writing tender and sharp. I devoured The Late Americans by Brandon Taylor and Michael Cunningham’s Day, and dipped into Cleanness by Garth Greenwell and Family Meal by Bryan Washington. Is Jonathan Escoffery gay? I’m not sure. In any case his hypermasculine debut If I Survive You is phenomenal. It has been a year with an embarrassing amount of riches and by the looks of it, 2024 is shaping up to be the same. In the new year, I look forward to new work from Coco Mellors (May), Rachel Cusk (June) and Eliza Clark (November).

—MA

I read three books in quick succession during a trans-Pacific flight and subsequent hours lounging on a couch in a dim AirBNB in Melbourne: Land of Milk and Honey by C Pam Zhang, Tastes Like War by Grace M. Cho, and Cold Enough for Snow by Jessica Au. Art imitates life and vice versa; maybe I'm a narcissistic reader or kismet drew me to these books, featuring fraught mother-daughter relationships, while I struggled with matricidal (and warmer) feelings towards my own Asian mother.

Zhang’s novel is sensual and Sapphic, but also lonely and brooding: it begins with a chef at the end of the world, cooking for a wealthy benefactor who’s set up shop on an Italian mountain. Her writing seesaws from indulgent passages describing plutocrats' feasts to the snappy rhythm of lines about labor in restaurant kitchens: “Each afternoon I thawed frozen fish at the restaurant that underwrote my refugee visa. My life was dredge, fry, plate. My life was wait, wait, wait.”

Cho is a sociologist, and I appreciated her academic lens in her memoir about growing up in painfully white (and racist) Chehalis, Washington with a white father and Korean mother who develops schizophrenia. Cho delves into how the South Korean state, and broader society, tacitly supported the provisioning of sex workers to American soldiers while stigmatizing and scorning these women (“Yankee whores”) and their offspring, who were shut out of citizenship and government services. The history is personal for Cho's mother. Like Zhang’s book, Cho’s is about food as well as affection and pain; the book's title comes from Cho’s love for cooking and baking.

Cold Enough for Snow is a sparse and elegant novel about a mother and daughter taking a trip to Tokyo. There’s something dreamlike about the prose. The narrator speaks in precise detail about exterior spaces, noting the shape of tiles underfoot on a rainy day, and still I felt I was watching their trip through a scrim. It’s emotionally minimalist and understated compared to Zhang and Cho’s books, so I didn’t relate to it at all (the protagonist and her mother are the type to try to take up less space, while my mother is a Character) but enjoyed lingering on the pages. They felt gently withholding, as some people are.

—A Svitak

This year I read The War for Gloria by Atticus Lish. It’s about a teenage boy named Cory whose mom, Gloria, is diagnosed with ALS. Cory’s dad Leonard, a security guard at MIT, is chronically in and out of his life. This is a caregiving novel at its core, about the complexity of that dynamic. Most of all I was impressed by the effortless-seeming style and metaphors. One of my favorite passages is when Lish describes Leonard’s influence on Gloria’s thinking. She reads a science book to impress him, which explains that all nature creates a fractal pattern. Of their unpredictable and somehow never-ending relationship, Gloria decides it would actually be fractal: “If you plotted his visits on a graph, the self-similar beauty would emerge.” Similarly, Gloria decides of herself: “All the essays she’d never written and never would . . . would bloom like clouds or be a starfish or a tree.” I like the sincere, moving simplicity of projecting natural explanations onto human shortcomings. The characters are doomed from the beginning, and Gloria knows it, but her thinking is continually creative and expansive like this in order to cope. She’s a very real and tragic character. I’ve been thinking about her a lot.

—AH

Much of my fiction considers what remains unsaid about what it’s like to be trans, especially how one might come to be trans. Desire, boredom, trauma—do these forces have roles in who transitions, and when, and why? Then, a year ago, I read about Caeneus in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a young woman raped by Neptune who, when offered a wish immediately after, asks Neptune to turn her into a man. “This injury evokes the great desire never to be able to suffer any such again,” says Caeneus, “Grant I might not be a woman: you will have given me everything.” I was thrilled to encounter this story about trauma meaningfully impacting gender formation. Struggling to think through my own transition years ago, questions about trauma’s role came to the fore; yet I could find almost no serious writing on the subject.

Therefore it feels appropriate to break the rules of Angelo’s original prompt in order to talk about the most transgressive book I read this year . . . because I haven’t, technically, finished reading it. My copy of Gender Without Identity arrived just before Christmas, and even though I am only halfway through, I already know this is my defining read of 2023. Avgi Saketopoulou and Ann Pellegrini are two practicing psychoanalysts and scholars who seek to reorient their field towards queer/trans flourishing.  “We are pushing back against the assumption that gender is immune to trauma, or that gender, in order to be healthy, is uncontaminated by early traumatic intrusions, by adult interventions, or by the emotional debris of intergenerational pressures,” they write in their first chapter. Not since Andrea Long Chu’s On Liking Women has trans theory felt this groundbreaking.

—MD

If pressed, I’d kill Sontag, fuck McCarthy, and marry Hardwick.

—SCC

Three new books stood out. Jack Houghteling’s novel Sunnyside proves to be unlike almost any other contemporary fiction; Houghteling is equipped with a stunning verbal toolbelt to tackle Americana’s be-all and end-all—American football. Other Minds by Bennett Sims: if I went to a dictionary and looked under the word “ouroboros” I would expect to see his name. And if I wanted to call him “Our Cortázar” I'm sure a cat would attack me. What an achievement this book is. If I Had Not Seen Their Sleeping Faces: Fragments on Death After Anna de Noailles by Christina Tudor-Sideri: A book of lyrical fragments on death, concluding in a de Noailles poem, the sum of all the first lines of the fragments. A forceful meditation on death that reminds us how “all that is is light.” Aside from that there was the finishing of Proust, the first half of Joseph McElroy’s incomparable Women & Men, and Rafael Chirbes’ stunning On the Edge.

—GG

Not my best year reading-wise. Many clunkers. But, for every bad book, I treated myself to something I knew that I would love. Some highlights from books that I loved (most rereads): Eat The Document by Dana Spiotta*, Tomb Sweeping* by Alexandra Chang, Florida by Christine Schutt, Out Of My Skin by John Haskell. There were also two books that, read for the first time, had a tremendous effect on me: 

1. Mary Robison’s Tell Me. A book of thirty Robison stories published by Counterpoint. It was the dialogue that got me. I had read some of her stories before—and I loved *Why Did I Ever—*but reading thirty together I was able to experience the power of her clipped back-and-forth. 

1. Paul Shrader’s Transcendental Style in Film. Shrader wrote this prior to any of his movies. My edition is published by University of California Press and focuses on the work of Ozu, Bresson, and Dreyer. I had not seen any movies by Ozu, Bresson, or Dreyer, so I watched some as I progressed in the book—I did something similar with Richard Brody’s fantastic biography of Godard, Everything Is Cinema—and I came away feeling lucky to be in the world making art.

—A Sammartino

Of the novels I read this year, ‘lineage’ emerged as a common theme. Elizabeth Strout’s Oh William! was a hit – a strange, funny novel about a failed marriage and a road-trip search for identity. I stumbled through unfinished book after unfinished book but it was at the end of the year that I found my groove – first with Jonathan Escoffery’s If I Survive You, which twists family, identity and a devastatingly wry sense of humour into eight interconnected stories that made me want to read more novels about Jamaica. The top spot, in a truly devastating twist of fate (those close to me know my reservations), goes to Damon Galgut’s The Promise. It tracks a well-worn path through the Mythologies of South Africa (crime, shame, land) but never in a way that feels clichéd. It’s an ingenious, urgent novel I could not put down. I was slightly better with plays – a trip through Ancient Greece with Oedipus and Medea, a brief, albeit disappointing foray through some Sam Shepard (I’m too dumb I think), the postmodern Boy Who Fell From the Roof by GENIUS Juliet Jenkins and of course Mama Nadia Davids, whose play What Remains blends choreography, chorus work and dialogue to speak the language of ghosts. But it was, inevitably, as always, a return to Athol Fugard and Tennessee Williams that got me off my phone. Fugard’s The Train Driver and Williams’s The Glass Menagerie are astoundingly lonely, isolated pieces of work, but at their core is an awe for humanity. What Williams in particular can do with stage direction alone is astounding! For 2024, I’m committing to 10 works of non-fiction (biographies of Stephen Sondheim and Gene Kelly and stuff about the Hayes Code is first on the list) and a return to what God intended, by which I mean novels about men – women have had a bit too much to say of late methinks!

—MH

This year, I read degenerates. A southern drunkard, a music guru, straight-faced business books, and Werner Herzog. Barry Hannah, who my mom tells me lectured at Bama with a six-pack and a loaded gun on the lectern, wrote like it. His Ray is stunted and disinhibited and a lot of fun. A good recommendation from my friend Angelo, who is something of a writer himself. Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act is great too, but I couldn’t tell you why. I’m now working my way through Werner Herzog’s memoir. I’m halfway and he still hasn’t broken character. Finally, if you want to know how to take over the world, I recommend reading business books. The 7 Powers by Hamilton Helmer is oddly profound. And last but not least, my Das Kapital of 2023: all-American salt-of-the-earth business folk hero Jack Stack’s Stake in the Outcome, on how workers can control the means of the production, is both an ironic and unironic classic.

—DWM

In 2023, I had textual ASMR midway through David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King. The fictional David Wallace is trapped in a hot car, late for a job appointment. Each second is excruciating ennui, including the one where he sees “an entire separate four-lane access road leading to something called Carousel Mall, which one shuddered even to think about.” Reading this, in the city where the real Carousel Mall once dominated, I smiled, stunned and buzzing; no way it could be the same one!

Through much digging, I learned that David Foster Wallace lived in Syracuse for a year, not long after the Carousel Mall was born out of a scrapyard surrounded by oil tanks. He lived in an unpleasant-looking apartment across from the food co-op, which my mom visited frequently with her two young children (not me, yet). Her children loved the carousel at the mall, dressed in costume, spinning for hours. She had to navigate often the special hell of the expansive, knotted surrounding-mall traffic patterns, so that she could sit and wait for the carousel’s spiraling to end. What a metaphor.

This peculiar, poignant detail in the book gave me a glimpse into the humanity of a mythologized writer and those closest to me. Mention of the Carousel Mall is like a little key that I wear on a necklace, and it opens up my heart. :’) I felt, in real-time, a book become personal to me. I saw my mom’s boredom in the demands of early motherhood, and I see each of our unique monotonous miseries. Fictional worlds are born of the real one that we all share. It is full of agonizing drudgery, but somehow reading about it in The Pale King turned it into glittering, imaginative insight.

—MR

I am a sucker for a book with an interesting form—a few favorite “structure-forward” reads this year were Raven Leilani’s Luster, Deb Olin Unferth’s Barn 8, and Fernanda Melchor’s (deeply disturbing—don’t say I didn’t warn you) Hurricane Season. But nothing wowed me more than There, There by Tommy Orange, which began with a short story about a Native man who agrees to help sneak a gun into a powwow. The following stories detail other characters—some first person, some third—as they navigate the rocky landscape of being Native in America. Partway through, I thought I understood the form of the book. But as I held it, and as the stories piled on top of each other, I experienced the incredible feeling of the book changing in my hands—from a short story collection to a novel, from a handful of voices to a single, unified shout.

—HG

My year of reading was marked by a resurgence of reading friends’ recommendations and reading and recommending as a form of love or something. Here is some of what I read. I read Mrs. Caliban by Rachel Ingalls and learned that the ordinary can be monstrous and that monsters can be ordinary and that our better angels are somewhere in between. I read The Dry Heart by Natalia Ginzburg and wondered if it was common for women to want to kill their husbands. I read Three by Ann Quinn and thought about the limits of Oulipo. I read Travesty by John Hawkes and threw it down. I read Erasure by Percival Everett and later thought about the irony of it becoming a movie. I read Siblings by Brigitte Reimann and thought about how I describe any media I consume that’s about two friends becoming enemies as “a fox and the hound situation.” I read Professing Criticism by John Guillory and wondered if the word crisis might reach a crisis point. I read everything that the Cleveland Review of Books published and enjoyed fiction and criticism and essays from The Drift, n+1, and The Point, amongst other outlets. I read Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro and thought damn, we don’t really realize the world-historical implications of our everyday actions. I read Arabesques by Anton Shammas and thought about the Angel of History flying backwards away from Israel-Palestine relations. I read All Souls by Javier Marias and learned about the tensions between secure certainty and world-expanding desire. I’m currently reading Middlemarch and learning to believe in God.

—BL

Most of my “content hours” these days consist of things that are not books. I know that’s what we all love to talk here—books—but I’m sure this rings true for a lot of people, too. Blog posts, movies, longform articles, TV shows, tweets, newsletters, podcasts, podcasts about the movies, podcasts about the TV shows, etc. That’s where my head was at for a lot of 2023. That being said, the best thing I read in 2023 was Coetzee's Disgrace. That shit banged so hard. They don’t make them like that anymore. It traffics in all the rich, knotty complexity that you hope a novel will, and then some—it seems like a field of landmines to talk about, but maybe that’s the whole point of the thing. I’m going to say The Fraud by Zadie Smith even though I haven’t read it yet—partly because I really do like Zadie Smith, and mostly because I fucking love the title. I wish I could’ve used that title. Everyone should be watching The Curse, the show of the year, even if just to watch Emma Stone run laps around everyone else. Positively Fifth Street by James McManus. My ass was reading non-fiction, and guess what . . . my ass loved this one. I think this is a great companion piece to that other Hall of Fame non-fiction narrative, Among the Thugs. Here, we have poker and true crime and fragile masculinity all bundled up into one addictive piece of travel writing. The prose and the pose are both quite capital-M Male, so take that how you will, but I crushed this. More non-fiction: Mark O’Connell's A Thread of Violence. Honest, thought-provoking, funny—all the adjectives that go on a book jacket, but I really mean it. A lot of time spent on the Golden State Warriors subreddit or MGoBlog, where the fellas had smart things to say about Moody’s net +/- numbers, whether we can package Wiggins and someone else for Lauri Markkanen, and if Harbaugh should sue the Michigan Supreme Court. Some of the most efficient, clarifying prose is being put together on sports blogs, and we’re all just letting it slide. Two short stories have really stuck with me. Mariah Kreutter in The Drift is an odd, perverse story that I can’t tell if I love or hate, but I keep thinking about it. And Tony Tulathimutte’s latest in The Paris Review is, to me, an instant classic. Here are some killer “Articles” and “Pieces of Criticism”: Terry Nguyen on Yellowface; Dylan Saba writing about the suppression of Palestinian voices; Samer Kalaf on Palestinian suffering; this piece about avocados and militias in Mexico; Paul Murray’s thing about the Metaverse; Zain Khalid’s Rushdie retrospective.

Other stuff, probably. I can’t remember. This is asking too much of me.

—NC

This year I read a lot of books about madness—about what kinds of things plunge you into madness, its normality and its exquisiteness. Portrayals of the destruction madness wreaks and stories about when it is enabling and necessary. These books captured the way I felt this year and of years sure to come. Three I particularly enjoyed: Jenny Erpenbeck’s Kairos, a bildungsroman and tortured romance set architecturally against the backdrop of the dissolution of East Germany; Andrew Lipstein’s The Vegan (not to be confused with Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, which itself is an excellent portrayal of the somatic effects of the forced muteness of a speaking body), in which madness surfaces as the only way in which to see the truth of the violence we inflict on animals; and Joshua Cohen’s The Netanyahus, which, brilliantly inventive with language, reminds us that there are better and worse kinds of ideas, better and worse kinds of madness, and if only we knew how to find the cure.

—RB

For those of us prone to self-defeating rumination, it can be hard to know what we really want. 2023 was the year of me finding out. It was also the year of me tearing through Hiroko Oyamada’s Weasels in the Attic (2022), in which a childless Japanese couple shares three meals with their reproductive peers, and Ian Reid’s I’m Thinking of Ending Things (2016), in which an unnamed girlfriend visits her boyfriend’s parents on a remote farm while contemplating the end of their relationship. Neither description does justice to these surreal and painfully solipsistic novels, which oscillate between the same haunting questions: to what extent are our desires and fantasies produced by social conditioning? How can we make ourselves legible to another person when we don’t understand ourselves? Where do we locate the quiet horrors of the mundane—and do we even want to know? These novels are short, but they linger. Whether your interests lie in masculinity, philosophies of mind, or weasels—whether you’re about to file for divorce or meet someone’s parents for the first time—Oyamada and Reid will take you on a journey. Besides, rumination is a lonely business. Thank you to everyone this year who wouldn’t let me do it alone.

—MVL

I rang in the new year with an extended rumination on suicide—Thomas Bernhard’s Correction. I was led out of that dark tunnel by Jesse Ball’s Notes On My Dunce Cap—on how to teach a workshop. In the spring, for the first time, I did just that. I taught some favorites by Sterling HolyWhiteMountain and Lydia Davis. In my last seminar with Dana Spiotta, I read novels that would illuminate the whole year: W. G. Sebald’s The Emigrants and Zadie Smith’s NW. Passed like contraband from a professor to a friend, and from that friend to me: Reader’s Block by David Markson, with the professor’s asterisks beside the depressing fragments. (Many asterisks.) I listened to Sally Rooney on the drives to Zahra. Beautiful World, Where Are You? is a great epistolary novel. Puzzled by the Rooney hate. Sometimes I think she’s what Tao Lin, in “The Levels of Greatness A Fiction Writer Can Achieve in America,” called a $9.98 Petco Gerbil. (Despite being foreign!) I was commissioned into the cult of Lorrie Moore—I like it here. Drifts by Kate Zambreno was the perfect soundtrack to an aimless convalescent summer. In the fall I began selling books and getting high on my own supply. The books I started and ditched form a graveyard on our shelves. For “research,” I passed evenings with Simone Weil, Hölderlin, and Wordsworth. I read Dambudzo Marechera’s infernal Black Sunlight in a library basement. His brilliant late lecture “The African Writer’s Experience of European Literature” helped me lose less sleep over the whiteness of my reading—not that I was losing much sleep over this to begin with (not that I was sleeping much, either). I happened to read Lydia Davis’s “Forms and Influences” series around the same time. Their combined enthusiasm for literature makes writerly despair impossible. Story highlights include “Anne Moore’s Life” by Roberto Bolaño, “Gazebo” by Raymond Carver, “Violations” by Catherine Lacey, “Unknown by Unknown” by Alexandra Chang, and Jackson Frons’s “Deleuze and Guattari,” the first story to make me think, for months on end, about a cup of tartar sauce. Now, ensconced in the Western Cape, I am reading The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born by Ayi Kwei Armah. Zahra’s copy from high school. In the margin, next to the description of a corrupt bus conductor, she has aptly noted: “a hole.”

—AHS

Contributors

Zahra Abba Omar, Maryam Adams, Raj Bhargava, Cameron Brown, S.C. Cornell, Nabeel Chollampat, Max Delsohn, Jackson Frons, Greg Gerke, Hadley Griggs, Emily Hall, Angelo Hernandez-Sias, Murray Hines, Aurora Huiza, Zain Khalid, Billy Lennon, Daniel Waid Marshall, Seph Murtagh, Isabella Nilsson, Courtney Noh, Martha Redmond, Alex Sammartino, Adora Svitak, Maia Vitarini Lwin