One of the cool things about being an award losing midlist author is the opportunity one gets to be paid for doing things one would do for free...such as asking a bunch of your friends about their favorite books. The good people at E! kindly allowed me to entertain this very notion and today they posted the responses from over 30 authors who responded to my query in their Cool Stuff blog, where I regularly write about books and video games and Jessica Alba movies. Here's a snippet:
Mark Haskell Smith: My favorite novel this year is The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz, 'cause it rocks cover to cover. Most underappreciated, besides my own scandalously overlooked novels, would be Yes, Yes Cherries by Mary Otis.
Mark Haskell Smith is the author of several novels, including, most recently, Salty.
Janet Fitch: My favorite book this year is Dead Boys, a collection of rough-grained contemporary stories by Los Angeles author Richard Lange. This book uncaps some very keen insights about the lives of contemporary men, things that struck a pure chord of recognition when I saw them on the page. From Dead Boys I learned:
1. Men have secrets.
2. Men want things to have been decided. They want to “get it over with.”
3. Men want to feel real.
4. Men overlook love.
5. Men profoundly feel the tenuousness of family.
6. Men's loneliness is a bind—they feel the imperative for self-control and self-containment yet yearn for truth, communication and tenderness.
7. Men hope that everything will turn out all right. Stoicism and hope are the twin poles of their existence.
Janet Fitch is the author of the novels White Oleander and Paint It Black.
Victor Gischler: Cruel Poetry by Vicki Hendricks expresses humanity's potential for obsession and desperation, and sentence by sentence, Hendrick's prose leaps from the page and burns itself into your brain.
Victor Gischler's latest novel, Go-Go Girls of the Apocalypse, will be released in 2008.
Steve Almond: I'm gonna recommend The Expeditions by Karl Iagnemma. His new novel is a historical fiction set in Detroit and the Upper Peninsula after the Civil War. He's one of those writers who simply doesn't write any sentences that don't sing. It's an enthralling and deeply humbling book.
Steve Almond has authored books of fiction and nonfiction, including the essay collection (Not That You Asked).
As all of the people in this article are writers, their responses were long and interesting and digressive and funny and...ended up about 3000 words longer than the average E! reader's attention span. So, for those interested in the Director's Cut, after the jump I'll post all 5,000 words of book recommendations, which includes even more picks than those shown in the article...and all the requisite typos, too.
Susan Straight: I loved Andrew O'Hagan's Be Near Me, Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and Stewart O'Nan's Last Night at the Lobster.
Victor Gischler: In a genre sometimes overly entangled with series characters and forensics, and faced with the relentless prudery of a mass readership, it is perhaps no surprise that Vicki Hendricks has less than the audience she deserves. Cruel Poetry, more than any other novel in recent memory, expresses humanity's potential for obsession and desperation, and sentence by sentence, Hendrick's prose leaps from the page and burns itself into your brain. The right readers need to find this woman. She'd earned it.
Victor Gischler is the author of several novels. His latest, Go Go Girls of the Apocalypse will be released in 2008.
Gayle Brandeis: I read Grapes of Wrath for the first time this summer, and that moved me more than any book has in recent memory. There were some fabulous books published this year, though, many of which have the same compassion pulsing through them that Steinbeck wove so gorgeously into his work. My top choices for 2007 would have to be Still Water Saints by Alex Espinoza and The Camel Bookmobile by Masha Hamilton. I'll admit--both Alex and Masha are my friends, and I'm happy to give them a shout out here, but I would have adored these books even if I had never met the authors. Both novels are deeply human; both speak to the healing, and sometimes discombobulating, power of storytelling. Both broke my heart wide open.
Gayle Brandeis is the author of three books, including, most recently, Self Storage.
Andrea Seigel: My favorite book of 2007 was Meg Rosoff's Just In Case. I loved it. Adult readers probably ignored Case because it came out as a "young adult" novel, but it's about the impossibility of outrunning yourself, of escaping who you really are at the end of the day, and I don't think anyone ever outgrows that. I picked the book up after reading a review in People that warned parents that it might be too dark for its intended audience, but I'd recommend it to anyone who can handle reading at the paragraph level.
Andrea Seigel is the author of two novels, including To Feel Stuff.
Mark Haskell Smith: My favorite novel this year is The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz 'cos it rocks cover to cover. Most under appreciated, besides my own scandalously overlooked novels, would be Yes, Yes Cherries by Mary Otis.
Mark Haskell Smith is the author of several novels, including, most recently, Salty.
Scott Wolven: I think my vote for underappreciated book of 2007 would go to Stark by Edward Bunker (intro by James Ellroy). The book was released in the UK in June and is set for December release here in the US; We're not going to get any more books from Edward Bunker. He passed away in 2005 and this is supposedly his first book, which never made it to publication till now. The tremendous pairing of James Ellroy for the introduction with the terrific Bunker story…it's a handful of crime aces that you don't see dealt very often.
Scott Wolven is the author of the story collection Controlled Burn. His first novel, False Hope, will be released in 2008.
Alex Espinoza: Their Dogs Came With Them by Helena María Viramontes. Set in 1960s East Los Angeles
Alex Espinoza is the author of Still Water Saints.
T Cooper: Is it too nepotistic to suggest that my partner Felicia Luna Lemus' second
novel Like Son (Akashic Books) was one of the best books of 2007? I may be partial to tales about guys who just happened to have been born girls, but I can't help thinking that her book might've been one of the more overlooked titles of the year. The tale Lemus spins about Frank Cruz (born Francisca), deftly spans generations and genders, and even exhumes the life of the relatively unknown and under-appreciated icon of the 1920's Mexico City avant garde scene, Nahui Olin. (Felicia doesn't know I wrote this, so
hopefully I won't get smacked upside the head when this comes out.)
I'd also like to suggest a graphic novel called Revacuation by Brad Benischek, released by the new Press Street collective in New Orleans, which promotes art and literature in the community by facilitating relationships between regional artists, non-profits and small businesses. Benischek has collected pages from the scetchbook that he kept during the year that he and his family were evacuated fromNew Orleans after Katrina hit his city. The book's not perfect, but its imperfection and incisiveness conspire to forge
beauty out of the rubble of city--and the hypocrisy of the leaders he helplessly listened to during his exile.
T Cooper’s most recent novel Lipshitz 6 – Or Two Angry Blondes is out now in paperback.
T. Jefferson Parker: Several novels moved me greatly this year, but my two favorites were The Road by Cormac McCarthy, and The Blade Itself, a debut novel by Marcus Sakey. McCarthy’s book is a true original, unlike any novel I’ve read. Halfway through I couldn’t see a way for him to pull it off, but he does, beautifully. I have a son the age of the boy and The Road hit me square and hard. Sakey’s The Blade Itself is one of the best debut crime novels I’ve ever read. Terrific atmosphere and character and plotting. He’s a guy to watch.
T. Jefferson Parker is the author of numerous novels, including Silent Joe, California L.A.
HelenKay Dimon: Voices by Arnaldur Indridason. This is the third police procedural in a series of Reykjavik thrillers - not my term but the description is the reason I bought it. After all, Reykjavik thrillers are not my usual reads. In fact, I'm not sure I've ever read a Reykjavic thriller before this one, but I did go back and read the first two. In a sort of Ode to the Holidays, Voices revolves around the death of a hotel Santa Claus. Happy Holidays! This one was not as chilling as Indridason's Silence of the Grave where a child gnaws on a bone. Still, it's worth reading.
HelenKay Dimon is the author of a novel and a collection of novellas. Her latest novel -- Right Here, Right Now – will be released in 2008.
Steve Almond: I'm gonna recommend The Expeditions by Karl Iagnemma. A few years ago, Iagnemma published an incredible short story collection called On the Nature of Human Romantic Interaction. His new novel is an historical fiction set in Detroit and the Upper Peninsula after the Civil War. I read an advanced galley and couldn't put the thing down. He's one of those writers who simply doesn't write any sentences that don't sing. It's an enthralling, and deeply humbling, book.
Steve Almond is the author of several books of fiction and nonfiction, including, most recently the essay collection (Not That You Asked).
Tao Lin: Meyer by Stephen Dixon. I liked this book very much. I've read something like 13 books (he's published 27) by Stephen Dixon and liked them all, but I liked this the most so far I think. It's now a few days after I read it and I can still "feel" many parts of it and also the entire book, it's cumulative effect, in me. The book is about a man in his late 60's thinking about his past, thinking of things to write about, and mostly thinking about how to write again about meeting his current wife, or how to write again (the character has written many books and used real-life things in each of them as "starting points") about spending days with his 90-year-old mother. It focuses on mortality a lot, and made me very aware of how life will end for myself and everyone I know. The book was very moving to me.
Tao Lin is the author of several books of fiction and poetry, including the novel EEEEE EEE EEEE. His next book of poetry, Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy, will be released in 2008.
Laila Lalami: The novel I'd recommend is Sinan Antoon's I'jaam, which is a brilliant and innovative account of life under Saddam's rule
Laila Lalami is the author of the novel Hope & Other Dangerous Pursuits. Her next novel, The Outsider, will be released in 2009.
Aimee Bender: There were a lot of good ones this year but the one I'm savoring like chocolate at the moment is Maira Kalman's illustrated book, The Principles of Uncertainty, which has in it elegant drawings, amazing associative movement on the page, including surprising dots of Russian History.
Aimee Bender is the author of three books of fiction, including, most recently, the story collection Willful Creatures.
Antoine Wilson: I'd like to put in a word for Tito Perdue's latest, Fields of Asphodel, as well as for his first novel Lee, which was just reissued in paperback this year. Cranky, dark, and often hilarious, these books have had trouble, it seems, emerging beyond "cult" status. It might have something to do with their protagonist, Leland Pefley. He's a septuagenarian misanthrope disgusted with the decadence of modern times, a self-labeled "Dr." who claims to have read 12,000 volumes, an arsonist, and possibly, a murderer. Also, in the new book, he's dead. The language is singular, as is the vision. Highly recommended for the more-literary-than-thou reader on your holiday shopping list. Not recommended for those unable to read ironically.
Antoine Wilson is the author of The Interloper.
Samantha Dunn: I'm going to give a plug to two fine memoirs that might be overlooked among others with more flash and sizzle. In these there is no abuse, drug use, crazy parents or even a hot Italian lover, just beautiful sentences, deep emotions and intellectual stimulation: One is Dinah Lenney's Bigger Than Life: A Murder, A Memoir. This is not so much the story of how her father was murdered, but of how families come together, change, disintegrate, are resurrected. Lovely. The other is Practicing, by Glenn Kurtz, about his lifelong pursuit to perfect his playing of the classical guitar. It's a mediation on love and devotion in the face of failure. It's human, it's poetic, it's a quiet gem of a book.
Samantha Dunn is the author of three books, including, most recently, the memoir Faith in Carlos Gomez.
Janet Fitch: My favorite book this year was Dead Boys, a collection of rough-grained contemporary stories by Los Angeles
1. Men have secrets.
2. Men want things to have been decided. They want to “get it over with.”
3. Men want to feel real.
4. Men overlook love.
5. Men profoundly feel the tenuousness of family.
6. Men's loneliness is a bind--they feel the imperative for self-control and self-containment, yet yearn for truth, communication and tenderness.
7. Men hope that everything will turn out all right. Stoicism and hope are the twin poles of their existence.
Janet Fitch is the author of the novels White Oleander and, most recently, Paint It Black.
Sloane Crosley: I am in a two-person book club with my dentist. He read Pauline Chen's Final Exam and I read Jerome Groopman's How Doctor's Think on his recommendation. So there's a chance I went into this giving the book too much credit since it was recommended to me by a real live doctor. If he had chosen How Rodeo Clowns Think I may not have trusted his opinion so much. I also probably would have switched dentists. I found the book to be far more enlightening and enjoyable than I was prepared for it to be. I am actually a fiction reader at heart but how could I avoid getting hooked on a book that so precisely delves into all the thought processes you imagine your doctor going through? I think we get comfortable with the idea that there is an impenetrable wall between doctor and patient, but this book completely shattered that for me. And in a really productive way that I know will stay with me next time I walk into my dentist's office. Which will be in 6 months. It's the slowest book club in the universe.
Sloane Crosley’s debut collection of essays, I Was Told There’d Be Cake, will be released in 2008.
JD Rhoades: What The Dead Know by Laura Lippman. This book shows you just how good so-called "genre fiction" can be in the hands of a great writer. It's the story of two girls whose disappearance from a Baltimore shopping mall in 1975 haunted the city down through the years. Now, a hit and run driver claims to be one of the missing girls, grown up and with deep and harrowing secrets to be discovered. Lippman does everything right in this book: setting, character, plot and prose. Also: Finn by Jon Clinch: The story of Huck Finn's drunken abusive father, known as "Pap" in the book. There's a lot more to Pap than Twain ever showed, very little of it good. In fact, the guy's pretty much a monster, as shown in the book's harrowing opening. But Jon Clinch is such a courageous and skillful writer, he actually makes you feel something for the old bastard--maybe not sympathy, but at least some understanding.
JD Rhoades is the author of several novels, including Safe and Sound. His next novel, Breaking Cover, will be released in 2008.
Brad Listi: In My Skin by Kate Holden, a nervy and bracingly honest memoir from a middle class Australian girl who became a heroin addict and a prostitute in early adulthood. This is a clear-eyed testimony to the power of love and family, without even the slightest bit of schmaltz or preciousness. This book tore my face off.
Brad Listi is the author of Attention Deficit Disorder.
Barry Eisler: Cold Skin by Albert Sanchez Pinol. It's a short novel about a guy who's sent to man an Antarctic outpost sometime shortly after World War I. The guy he's taking over from seems deranged, and in short order our hero finds out the remote island is surrounded by savage yet strangely alluring humanoids who force him to fight for his life and question his deepest assumptions. Anyone who loves Lovecraft will love this book, too. The writing is stunningly original, the settings evocative... creepy, haunting, sexy, poignant, bizarre. I loved it.
Barry Eisler is the author of six novels, including, most recently, Requiem for an Assassin.
Roy Kesey: Lucy Corin's The Entire Predicament. These stories take about ten seconds each to get their hooks in you for life. Do those hooks hurt? Of course they do, in all the funnest ways.
Roy
Rob Roberge: TOTALLY loved Brian Frazer's Hyper-Chondriac: One Man's Quest to Hurry Up and Calm Down. It's beautifully written...really smart and at times incredibly funny and at times very touching (sometimes simultaneously). A heck of a book. I hope he does a novel next. Probably, along with Emily Rapp's Poster Child, my favorite non-fiction of the year. Have too many fiction favorites to single it down.
Rob Roberge is the author of three books of fiction, including the story collection Working Backwards from the Worst Moment of My Life, which will be released in 2008.
Clane Hayward: The book I couldn't put down in 2007 was Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. She makes economic theory dangerous, darkly thrilling, and sexy, in an end-of-the-world kind of way.
Clane Hayward is the author of the memoir The Hypocrisy of Disco.
Will Beall: Alan Moore established the graphic novel as a legitimate literary form with his 1986 book The Watchman. And the iconoclastic Moore
Will Beall, a Los Angeles
Tom Lutz: Here are the books that made me step up and take notice this year: of the lesser known, Ben Fountain's Brief Encounters with Che Guevara, an incredible mix of international realities and fantasies - Fountain imagines his characters into the funkier corners of the globe, playing golf with the generals of Myanmar, in a meeting with the head of the NYSE and a rebel drug lord in the jungles of Colombia. Another collection of stories I found compelling was Christina Henriquez's stories set in Panama, Come Together, Fall Apart. After his stunning debut collection of stories, Daniel Alarcon's novel Lost City Radio shows that he can do that incredibly well, too. Mischa Berlisnki's Fieldwork played some postmodern games but had an enormous amount of traditional novelistic wisdom and pleasure as well. The late Roberto Bolano's The Savage Detectives is a great romp through the art and poetry worlds of Mexico City circa 1970, and makes me look forward to the other translations of his work FSG is bringing out.
Tom Lutz is the author of several books of nonfiction, including, most recently, Doing Nothing: A History of Loafers, Loungers, Slackers, and Bums in America
Dave Housley: Ovenman" by Jeff Parker is a brilliant addition to the growing genre
of serious slacker literature. Parker's When Thinfinger is a direct descendant of Ignatius J. Reilly, Frank Portman's King Dork, Arthur
Nersesian's F*ckup, and Sam Lipsyte's Teabag. It's a joy to ride along on the back of his Haro with the kinky triangular frame or non-motorized longboard; as he careens from hardcore shows to the kitchen of Piecemeal Pizza (where he finally finds a form of, well, peace), through nights of not-quite-satisfying debauchery and into painful mornings and the inevitable discovery of the cryptic post-it notes written from his blackout drunk self to his hungover self. Ovenman is a great exercise in storytelling and voice, and it was the most entertaining (and underappreciated) book I read in 2007.
Dave Housley is the author of the story collection "Ryan Seacrest is
Famous" (www.ryanseacrestisfamous.com), and one of the editors of
Barrelhouse magazine.
Gary Amdahl: I spent most of 2006 reading all of a few writers, single works of whose had not just excited and pleased me, but triggered the addictive cycle--something that happens only every now and then. Patrick White, Jose Saramago, W.G. Sebald, and Javier Marias. When I finished the last Marias
A name had been hovering in the foreground of my litscape for a couple of years without my really taking proper notice: Roberto Bolano. Just a few years older than me, a Chilean who was imprisoned after the Pinochet coup, who escaped and lived in Spain
Even though Bolano's early death haunts and saddens every page I read, The Savage Detectives is easily my favorite book published in 2007. An excellent companion volume is Francisco Goldman's book of investigative reporting, The Art of Political Murder.
Gary Amdahl is the author of the story collection Visigoth. His next book, I Am Death: Two Novellas, will be released in 2008.
Julie Buxbaum: Then We Came to The End, by Joshua Ferris: A funny and sometimes poignant portrait of one of the few spheres of everyday life that has evaded much contemplation in the literary world: the modern day office. And though Ferris takes us to a place few of us like to go, he manages to make it recognizable and suprising and full of humanity. Better yet, the use of the first person plural--a brave choice--always feels natural, necessary, and unpretentious.
Julie Buxbaum’s debut novel, The Opposite of Love, will be released in 2008.
Peter Craig: First, in fiction, was Matt Ruff's Bad Monkeys. The book begins with Jane Charlotte, held in the psych ward of a Las Vegas Chernobyl South Korea Cyprus
Peter Craig is the author of several novels, including, most recently, Blood Father.
Larry Doyle: Abstinence Teacher, by Tom Perotta. Perotta's follow-up to Little Children is a funny, touching and remarkably even-handed take on the state of religion in America
Larry Doyle is the author of I Love You, Beth Cooper.
Stacey Richter: My favorite unappreciated book of 2007 is The Last Novel, by David Markson. Hopefully, people are starting to appreciate Markson, who has written a series of incredibly original and funny novels. Each is simply a series of carefully selected quotes and facts about art and artist, arranged in a fascinating, sad, and funny way. It's a little hard to describe because his work is not like anyone else's--reading The Last Novel is sort of like leafing through a pile of note cards compiled by a demented genius.
Stacey Richter is the author of two collections of short fiction, including, most recently, Twin Study.
Mark Sarvas: I was swept up into David Leavitt's The Indian Clerk within a few pages, and found my enjoyment never dimmed as I read this deeply intelligent novel which recounts the unlikely friendship between the British mathematician G.H. Hardy and the Indian prodigy of the title, Srinivasa Ramanujan. It's an epic and elegant work which spans continents and decades, and encompasses a World War. Leavitt's control of this dense, sprawling material is impressive – astonishing, at times – and yet despite its scope, he keeps us focused on his great themes of unknowability and identity. A remarkable novel.
Mark Sarvas’ debut novel, Harry, Revised, will be released in 2008.
Brett Battles: The book that's stuck with me the most this year is Linwood Barclay's No Time For Goodbye. The book just flat out rocks. I mean how's this for a set up? A teenage girl goes to bed after being caught by her dad after she snuck out for the night. When she wakes the next morning, her parents and her brother are all gone, and they don't come back. Flash forward twenty years to when she is now starting a family of her own, and suddenly the mystery of her past comes back full force threatening to once again take away those she loves. I read it as an advance copy last spring, and here it is nine months later and it's still sticking with me.
Brett Battles is the author of The Cleaner. His follow-up, The Deceived, will be released in 2008.
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Thanks for this list, many of these I've seen on other lists, but there were a couple of new ones. I'm always looking for great books from independents - to broaden my reading.
Posted by: flash | December 18, 2007 at 05:16 AM