Issunshi Hanasato, The Timeless Treasures of Literature (ca. 1844–1848), via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain,
One more year has passed: the humanoid robots are coming, my taxi has no driver (not even a metaphor), and ChatGPT tells me “there is hope even in the most hopeless times.” In our unreal reality, I’m inspired by a genre of compassionate absurdism: Roberto Bolaño, Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, Leonora Carrington, Toni Morrison, Thomas Pynchon. Another such writer is Enrique Vila-Matas, whose brilliant essay-fiction Insistence as a Fine Art (translated by Kit Schluter) came out this summer. Beginning in somewhat ekphrastic mode with Julio Romero de Torres’s painting La Buenaventura, Vila-Matas embarks on a playful defense of “insistence”: how authors echo themselves and others in their works; how these spiraling repetitions create an imaginary world more truthful than the adamantine pseudofacts of general reality. The publisher—Hanuman Editions—is also an expert practitioner of “insistence”: reimagining the legacy of Hanuman Books, a cult series of chapbooks produced between 1986 and 1993.
—Joanna Kavenna, author of “The Beautiful Salmon”
Joseph Andras’s writing favors the political: his novella Tomorrow They Won’t Dare to Murder Us, published in translation by Simon Leser in 2021, is narrated by a pied-noir during the Algerian Revolution, and in Faraway the Southern Sky, released in English this spring, the author traverses Paris to retrace the steps of Ho Chi Minh’s life there. Andras hunts down the houses where Ho Chi Minh allegedly resided and the offices where he worked, constructing a map of the relationship between France’s capital and Ho Chi Minh’s burgeoning radicalism. Descriptions of Paris’s underbelly intermingle with Andras’s account of a twenty-something-year-old who, dreaming of liberating his country, would one day dictate the assassination of his political enemies. The novel is a story of how ideologies transform but also, largely, of hope: “If the rebel intoxicates, the revolutionary impedes. … If the first is accountable only to himself, the other embraces humanity as a whole.”
—Zoe Davis, intern
Saskia Vogel’s translation of Linnea Axelsson’s Ædnan: A Novel in Verse does what you want a translation to do: take you inside a world and an experience that you couldn’t otherwise access, and make you ache for it. This epic follows three generations of Sami people in Norway as they try to preserve their way of life in the face of shifting borders and encroaching modernity. This spare and beautiful book will haunt you.
—Megan McDowell, translator of Samanta Schweblin’s “An Eye in the Throat”
Susie Boyt’s Loved and Missed is one of those books whose premise—the long-suffering narrator Ruth, in lieu of her absentee addict daughter Eleanor, raises Eleanor’s daughter—sounds so plainly tear-jerking that you go in with your guard all the way up and your heartstrings secured. But the book is written with such understatement and so little pity that it slips past all your tactical gear and shanks you in the lungs, spleen, and femoral arteries before double-tapping you, in the final chapter, with a POV shift that’s borderline unethical. Ruth is pissed off, elegiac, heroic, ironic, forbearing, and glum, but never saintly, and Boyt’s careful modulations of tone keep you off-balance: “I propped a tall red candle in an eggcup and lit the wick, sheltering it with the curve of my hand, the flame hot on my fingers until the fucking wind blew it out.” Your guard may go up again when you learn—to extend the parenting theme—that the author is Lucian Freud’s daughter and Sigmund’s great-granddaughter. Is it nepotistic? I think it’s nepotastic.
—Tony Tulathimutte, author of “Ahegao”
In Aesthetic Action, the philosopher Florian Klinger articulates a model of the aesthetic (which includes art) as a specific form of action performed in parallel by the “maker” and the “taker” (e.g., the artist and the viewer)—an action that produces a defined but irresolvable “aspectual irresolution” between conflicting ways of making sense of something. For example, Mazen Kerbaj’s “Starry Night,” recorded in Beirut during the 2006 Lebanon War, works the explosions of bombs into an improvisational jazz piece. As Klinger puts it, “we cannot let go of hearing the bombs as bombs, but neither can we refuse to hear what the improvisation makes of them.” His other examples include Franz Kafka’s short story “Wish to Become an Indian,” Marina Abramović’s The Artist Is Present, Tino Sehgal’s This Is Good, and Kara Walker’s A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby. By staging irresolutions between recognizable orienting logics, Klinger argues, aesthetic action renews access to something like aliveness, to the open-endedness of what it means to be human. Many of Klinger’s points are familiar, but the book achieves a certain clarity in its synthesis of various strands of thinking on aesthetics and sense-making, ranging from Kant and Hegel to Marx to Wittgenstein to contemporary action theory (that said: unless you’re a scholar in the field, skip chapters two and three). Klinger’s work provides a useful model for thinking about how art might meet, resist, and rework the existing logics of its world(s).
—Kai Ihns, advisory poetry editor
One of the books that has brought me the most pleasure, solace, and wisdom this year is Disability Intimacy, an anthology of essays on love, care, and desire edited by Alice Wong. Care in this anthology is defined broadly enough to encompass the intimacy of in-home personal assistants, how cerebral palsy can be an asset in kink, the weird eroticism of parenthood, and the joy of interspecies and pet love. This expansive definition allows each writer to bring their distinct perspective and nuance to the complexities of intimacy in a society that defines desirability narrowly.
—Morgan Thomas, author of “Everything I Haven’t Done”
I’m gonna give my favorite-novel-of-the-year award to Venita Blackburn’s Dead in Long Beach, California, about a woman who assumes her brother’s identity shortly after his death. It’s fun, beautiful, slim, weird. And it’s about grief. Blackburn’s approach to space-time in her short fiction is awesome; her novel has vivid characterizations—of both its people and setting (LA)—and a lot of wisdom.
—Elijah Bailey, author of “Social Promotion”
Yoko Tawada’s Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel, translated by Susan Bernofsky, set in post-lockdown Berlin, is an absurd, dark, dreamlike narrative that meditates on warfare, religion, memory, migration, and belonging through the strange consciousness of a literary researcher, Patrik. A Celan scholar who self-identifies as “the patient,” Patrik is a study in the precarious obsessions of academic life. Tawada’s novel moves through fragmented first- and third-person narratives, its feverish, furious narration bewitching in Bernofsky’s lucent translation.
—Sana R. Chaudhry, translator of Julien Columeau’s “Derrida in Lahore”
I picked up Edwin Frank’s Stranger than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel thinking I might read a few chapters. But this is literary criticism that is itself literary—alive and strange and hard to put down. Frank’s selection is eclectic—of the thirty-two novels he covers, some are expected (James Joyce’s Ulysses), some unexpected (H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau), some devastating (Hans Erich Nossack’s The End: Hamburg 1943), some comic (Colette’s Claudine at School). I’ll admit these aren’t all novels I want to read, though I did pick up Claudine at School, which was thoroughly enjoyable. Some are the extreme permutations of a form capable of such extraordinary metamorphosis. Stranger than Fiction gave me a fascinating glimpse of their souls.
—Marlene Morgan, author of “The Miracle”
My favorite fellow intern in fiction this year was the inimitable Catalina, who spends the first few pages of Karla Cornejo Villavicencio’s eponymous novel taking the L train to a summer gig at “America’s third-most-prestigious literary magazine.” Despite her hard-won access to Harvard and its associated network of elite institutions, a correspondingly starry future remains out of reach—undocumented and lacking a work permit, she can accumulate unpaid internships but not cash them in. The only capital the U.S. government allows Catalina is cultural, so she crafts the kind of besequined, Bukowski-reading persona seductive to old money white boys and alumni donors alike: manic pixie dream girl, Latina edition. Dreaming of being Woody Allen’s muse is a salve for her more impossible fantasies—she longs to be a “boy reporter on the eve of a revolution,” rather than a doomed civilian, a victim. But, like college-age protagonists everywhere, she remains trapped within the campus novel’s inexorable timeline. By the time she graduated, I already missed her.
—Emmet Fraizer, intern
Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria (reissued this year) was, for me, the most thrilling novel since The Savage Detectives. I wanted it to never end, and am now deep in her latest, Praiseworthy. The first two novels that have been translated (by Barbara J. Haveland) of Solvej Balle’s fugal septology, On the Calculation of Volume, suggest that it may, in fact, never end, as its narrative time is in a page-turning repeating loop.
In poetry, everything from the press World Poetry takes you far into the global imagination. A favorite among its recent titles is the wacky and inventive The Cheapest France in Town by the Korean poet Seo Jung Hak, in a snazzy translation by Megan Sungyoon. And Forrest Gander’s book-length Mojave Ghost is perhaps his best yet, occupying a place in his prolific work as “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower” does in the poetry of William Carlos Williams.
—Eliot Weinberger, author of “The Ceaseless Murmuring of Innumerable Bees”
Rio Shimamoto’s First Love, an overdue English-language debut by an important Japanese author translated by Louise Heal Kawai, is a portrait of patriarchy as a series of glassy, threatening surfaces. It turns a procedural setup—Yuki, a psychologist, investigates the case of a woman who stabbed her father to death, seemingly without motive—into a meticulous presentation of everyday life haunted by trauma. The killing at its center is the catalyst for the protagonist to confront not only the darkness in her own past but that which underpins a world saturated with masculine power. A classic slow burn, First Love brings the lives of both killer and psychologist into gradual, devastating focus. Kawai’s translation beautifully recreates Shimamoto’s tone—a smooth, unruffled narration that’s interrupted, every so often, by a casually devastating image or turn of phrase.
—Brian Bergstrom, translator of Fumio Yamamoto’s “Naked”
