Rather than write reviews of some of my favorite readings of the year, I have linked you to the reviews that whetted my interest. Added are some comments that occurred to me after reading them.
FICTION
Scrapper by Matt Bell
If the poet Philip Levine had written a novel it might have been something like this. Scrapper deserves a place alongside Joyce Carol Oates' Detroit novels although its style is very different.
Academy Street by Mary Costello
Costello placed two stories in the Irish Sunday Tribune in 1989. The long gap between then and the publication of her novel Academy Street shows what doesn't happen to good writers who are not well-connected.
Brief Loves that Live Forever by Andrei Makine
I can imagine a day when I wake up to hear that the Russian-born Andrei Makine has been awarded the Nobel Literature Prize. Makine, who was born in Siberia, sought asylum in France by camping in Pere Lachaise cemetery. When French publishers refused to believe that he wrote his elegant novels in French, he lied and said that they had been translated from Russian originals. Gustave Flaubert opined that inside every long book there are many bad pages, yet it is hard to believe that if you pruned the average blowzy contemporary American novel you could find anything equal to Makine's elegant concision.
Thirteen Ways Of Looking by Colum McCann
This Irishman's writing is quite well know but what stands out in this new novella and three stories is how ingeniously their author avoids the overworked Creative Writing commonplace of the moment of insight.
So You Don't Get Lost In The Neighborhood by Patrick Modiano
The Nobel Literature Prize winner in 2014, Modiano has been hidden in plain sight for a long time Modiano collaborated on the screenplay of Louis Malle's 1974 film Lacombe, Lucien
There Once Lived A Mother Who Loved Her Children Until They Moved Back In by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya
She writes post-modern parodies that also vibrate with the acute sensitivities of Anton Chekhov. She is one of best Russian writers alive and she makes the authorities nervous. As you can tell from the titles, there is a lot more at stake in Petrushevskaya's stories than the rubric "domestic" fiction allows for.
Mislaid by Nell Zink
To the New York Times reviewer (male) who dismissed Zink's mind-bending screwball comedy as "minor, " I say, well, Mister, that's what they said about Rubyfruit Jungle in 1973. And they keep saying it, no matter who often they are corrected. Psychologist David Halperin, writing under the imprimatur of Harvard University (How To Be Gay, 2012), dared to describe Rita Mae Brown's extremely funny and extremely serious coming of age novel as "hetero-normative." Only in academia can a person say that with a straight face.
NON-FICTION
Schubert's Winter Journey: Anatomy Of An Obsession by Ian Bostridge
Writing about music is a tricky undertaking, often leaving the reader to wonder why not just listen to the music. I can think of no praise higher than to say that Bostridge's book about Schubert belongs on the self next to Wendy Lesser's Music For Silenced Voices (2011), her book about the Shostakovich String Quartets. Both are so compelling that they make you want to listen to the musicv, even if you never have before.
Germany: Memories Of A Nation by Neil MacGregor
Women Artists: The Linda Nochlin Reader
Her vision and daring has awed and goaded me and so many others. Linda Nochlin: without whom, indeed.
Quixote: The Novel And The World by Ilan Stavans
What Is Landscape? by John R. Stilgoe
If you think geography is boring, you need to read John Stiloge's books, all of them, even the slightly loopy Old Fields: Photography, Glamor, and Fantasy Landscape (think: lightly clad pin-up girls). But seriously, Stilgoe follows in the footsteps of the late John Brinkerhoff Jackson and, if you don't know who he is, you need to read him too. After that, no landscape, whether viewed in person or on the wall of a museum, will ever look the same.
POETRY
Orphan by Jan Heller Levi
"I wanted to be with the boys so badly,/ watching the red fox stain cover Blue Hill./ But even then I knew I was the fox and I was the stain." - excerpted from "On Reading Robert Lowell's Skunk Hour in the 1970s." Poets routinely blurb each other's work as "brave." But I dissent; brave is what Levi does, taking on the worlds of pain that men inflict and then turn their eyes from.
This is a worthy successor to Levi's Once I Gazed At You In Wonder (1998).
I Must Be Living Twice by Eileen Myles
Like Jan Heller Levi, Myles has something to say about Robert Lowell ("On The Death Of Robert Lowell") and it's not hagiography.
War Of The Foxes by Richard Siken
“It should be enough. To make something / beautiful should be enough. It isn't.”
The Arrival by Daniel Simko
Simko (1958-2004) was born in Brataslava and left soon after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. He died in New York City where he worked at the New York Public Library.
ESSAYS ABOUT THE ARTS TODAY
What Is Art For?
Why Critics Have Failed Painting
Artistic Success In America Mean Wearing The Right Old School Tie
Image: Limbourg Freres - Les tres riches heures, c.1412-16, commissioned by Jean, Duc de Berry, Bibliotheque nationale de France, Paris.