Sometimes it felt like there was little time for the books I loved this year, because of the twitter feed I hated so much. but some of the reading I did (in real books, on real paper, what a relief) took me away from the terrible questions the news was posing, questions like “is this what American fascism looks like?” or “wait, what happened to my e.u. citizenship?”, or just “are you kidding me?”
Instead, these books brought me face to face with more elemental concerns: birth and bereavement. In her deceptively thin third novel, “Eleven Hours,” Pamela Erens introduces a woman who has just been admitted to a hospital maternity ward and, in the hours between her arrival and that of his girl, tells her story. the flashback narrative (who is this woman and why is she there, alone?) is interwoven with a propulsive, often harrowing account of the physical demands of the job in all their compelling and unimaginable inevitability. for those of us who have been there, erens deftly evokes that wild, suprapolitical condition. and she reminds all readers, whether or not they have experienced labor, of the dangerous transgression at the edge of life that all childbirth entails.
my friend katherine barrett swett is one of the most widely read people i know; Her students at Brearley School, where she teaches English, are the fortunate beneficiaries of her thoughtful, analytical, and sensitive affinity for literature. this year saw the publication of swett’s own book of poems, “twenty-one“. It is a collection born of tragic circumstance: the poems, most of them just three lines long, were written after the death of Swett’s daughter, at the age of twenty-one, and together they trace the terrible cycle of the first year past. in those sequels. they are understated, resonant, sometimes inspired by or alluding to the writers and literary works that have sustained swett: robert frost, sappho, “king lear”. they are breaking: small containers filled with limitless pain. i have a poem, “sulky”, handwritten in its entirety on a post-it on my desk: “i hope some god can forgive all / parents we’ll never forgive ourselves / every meanness in a short life . ” reminds me on behalf of whom I am most desperate for the turn the world has taken, and for whom that despair must, however, dissipate daily.
You are reading: New yorker best books 2016
—rebecca mead
It’s not surprising, in hindsight, that in a year of stagnant ideologies, I was drawn to friendship novels. mauro javier cardenas debut, “the revolutionaries try again”, tells the story of three ecuadorian friends—one living in exile in san francisco, the other two still in guayaquil—who come together in a quixotic attempt to take over the presidency of the country. “everyone thinks they’re the chosen ones”, one character reminds another, and cardenas’s gift is to show, through long and brilliant phrases, the charm of inaction and delinquency. The book was published by the clever little coffee house publisher and deserves a much wider audience: it’s funny and honest and full of hilarious modernist tricks.
another debut, tony tulathimutte’s private citizens, takes a different group of friends, the so-called millennials in the middle of san francisco, and turns them into a souffle of disappointments and depressions. His characters are plugged-in, party-going, drug-addicted, webcam-absorbing Stanford graduates who are frequently sharp-witted and self-aware in the course of their self-destruction. as in the case of “revolutionaries”, the brilliance of “private citizens” lies in their phrases, but where cardenas’ phrases wave those of tulathimutte are wise and precise, as if someone had given david foster a verbal haircut wallace.
both books work with a high degree of intelligence, as do the other two books I particularly admired this year: adam ehrlich sachs’s debut collection, “inherited disorders,” a brutal, comic and exhaustive approach to father-son relationships, and vivek shanbhag’s “ghachar ghochar”, a novel translated from Kannada and set in bangalore, featuring an extremely passive protagonist who allows his bourgeois family to become almost criminal in his greed. and clanness. Which is, perhaps, a sadly appropriate note to end a memory from 2016.
—karan mahajan
In 2016, as America was imploding, I read three excellent books on romantic love: one magnificently earth-shattering, one delightfully dazzling, and one a bit of both. “ willful disregard ”, by lena andersson, which was a bestseller in its author’s home country of sweden, describes a writer’s newfound friendship and her eventual fixation with an artist older and more successful male. Hugo and Ester have an intense intellectual connection, which makes her feel like she has a crush on him and makes him feel, well, like they have an intense intellectual connection (although he is willing to dabble in sex with her). Like Rachel Cusk’s “Sketch,” “Intentional Contempt” is searing in its intelligence and honesty; makes you vacillate between hatred and compassion for basically all humans.
On the other side of the romantic spectrum, “eleanor & park”, by rainbow rowell, follows two high school misfits in omaha, nebraska, in 1986, when they meet on the school bus, repel each other and ultimately fall madly in love. Rowell’s humor, tenderness, and sense of detail are extraordinary. And its pacing is perfect, which is a clinical way of saying it intensifies Eleanor and Park’s ever-increasing attraction with such wonderful control that when they do things like make eye contact or brush their fingers it’s thrilling. Rowell also describes the poverty in which Eleanor’s family lives with skill and subtlety.
loved “eleanor & park” so much so that I then moved on to “landline,” also by rowell, about a burnt-out successful TV writer named georgie, whose marriage to a stay-at-home dad is falling apart. while georgie is, for work reasons, separated from her husband and children during christmas, she finds a rotary telephone in her mother’s house that allows her to call her husband in the year 1998, that is, before he was her husband. Rowell pulls off this impossible premise with great charm, and his portrayals of the couple’s sweet courtship and subsequent compromised marriage are equally unsentimental and knowing.
—curtis sittenfeld
Although my preference is clear on this one, since I wrote the introduction, the long-awaited English release, of the verse, of “we want everything“** by nanni balestrini was, for me , the highlights of 2016, as a reader. the figure of the worker, the absurdity of work, the violence of the rebellion: we would do well to study how it was that Balestrini made politics and fiction and art, all in one place. it is one of the most convincing pieces of literature of the entire second half of the 20th century. Plus, it’s incredibly fun.
but possibly nothing, for me, beat an incredible nonfiction novel written by new york state inspector general catherine leahy scott, along with a team of twenty-nine investigators. The book is titled “Investigation of the June 5, 2015 Escape of Inmates David Sweat and Richard Matt from the Clinton Correctional Facility” and, at one hundred and fifty-four pages, it is an impressive and absorbing book. , funny, tragic, incredible but true account of the life of Americans in America.
—rachel kushner
in july, after the coup in turkey, during the growing trump campaign, i read “a strangeness in my mind” by orhan pamuk. Despite being a six hundred and twenty-four page novel about a man selling boza, a low-alcoholic fermented wheat drink of waning popularity in the Balkans and the Middle East, this novel is of great relevance to anyone who wants to understand the sociopolitical panorama of turkey or the sociopolitical panoramas in general. pamuk conducted six years of field research, speaking with street vendors, electricity bill collectors, and the builders and residents of istanbul’s many slums, a population that has generally voted for recep tayyip erdoğan, the increasingly authoritarian populist who He has been the head of state. since 2003, and then weaved the information he collected into the individual experience of this traveling salesman, a dreamy fellow who suffers from a condition he calls “a weirdness in his head.” the book encouraged me about the possibilities of the novel, the way it can do a kind of work that social analysis and even history, with its limited access to private life and unspoken desires, cannot: namely, to track the relationship between large-scale historical change and the thoughts and feelings that fill a given person’s head at a given time. I found it just as mind-boggling as “War and Peace”, and more comforting. It gave me a window into a part of the human experience and a part of the geography of Istanbul that I thought I didn’t and couldn’t understand.
For readers with a particular interest in Turkish politics, or a more general curiosity about polarized democratic societies with authoritarian patriarchal rulers, I also recommend “turkey: madness and melancholy“, a non-fiction exciting work by ece temelkuran, one of the many turkish journalists who have lost their jobs for criticizing the current government. now that i think about how movingly temelkuran writes about the plight of women in turkey today, it occurs to me that pamuk’s “strangeness” is also very strong on this topic. I’m thinking of one character in particular, a nightclub singer, who comments: “I could write a book about all the men I’ve ever met, and then I’d also end up on trial for insulting Turkey”. insulting the Turkish nation, formerly insulting turkishness, is an offense punishable under article 301 of the Turkish penal code, which was used to bring charges against Pamuk himself, in 2005.
—elif batuman
See Also: The Best Books on Immunology – Five Books Expert Recommendations
This year, I reread “all quiet on the western front” by erich maria remarque. The book had a huge impact on me when I first read it thirty years ago during my mandatory service in the Israeli army, and it has remained just as poignant and relevant on my second reading.
It’s been more than a hundred years since the first world war began, and even though our world has advanced in many ways, too many things still don’t make sense as they did a century ago. I read somewhere that “all quiet on the western front” is donald trump’s favorite book. if it’s true, I urge you to read it again too.
—etgar keret
this summer when i picked up robert j. Gordon’s “The Rise and Fall of American Growth,” a 784-page history of living standards in the United States, I didn’t expect to be moved. Gordon’s book covers the years between 1870 and 1970, which he calls the “special century,” a time during which our collective way of life was transformed by unprecedented inventions such as indoor plumbing, electricity, telephones, antibiotics and cars. some of those transformations are obvious. “Although not a single home was connected to electricity in 1880, nearly 100 percent of the US. uu. urban homes were wired in 1940,” writes gordon. but others are more subtle or, at any rate, more invisible to us now that they are complete. The book is packed with statistics on how, to pick just one example, light bulbs have gotten dramatically brighter and longer lasting in ways that sidestep the consumer price index. we can easily imagine a dark city of the eighteenth century, and we know what our houses are like now. Gordon gives us the dark homes of the past that get brighter, decade by decade.
Over the course of Gordon’s book, a vivid picture emerges of everyday life as lived by our parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents. it documents what we would now experience as deprivation: until relatively recently, offices and workplaces were cold in winter (imagine a truck cab or warehouse floor before cheap heating); the food was drab and unhealthy (many Americans ate mostly salt pork and corn, or “hogs ‘n’ hominy”); and life was dull (in 1870, “major league sports were yet to come”). it also presents delightful examples of ingenuity and self-sufficiency. he did not know that, on a nineteenth-century farm, one could see horses “walking on treadmills that ran machines for baling hay and threshing wheat.” I was fascinated to learn that while canned food was invented in the early 19th century (America’s first canned food magnate, Gail Borden, started her business in response to the donner party disaster in 1846), it didn’t take off until well into the mid-20th century, in part because of “housewife pride in ‘putting out’ her own food and admiring the row upon row of jars with their colorful contents”. One of Gordon’s themes is the gradual way new inventions make their effects felt. it may take a generation or two for an important technology like canning to spread through society, just as, today, we await the actual arrival of driverless cars, sunroofs, and virtual reality.
In a way, “the rise and fall of American growth” is about how easy we forget how good we have it. it’s also about gdp’s openness. as a measurement tool (it fails to capture “the liberation of women, who previously had to perform the Monday ritual curse of doing laundry by scrubbing on a washboard”) and the grandiose and perhaps unsustainable narrative of material progress that It’s become central to the American dream.” Gordon thinks it’s unlikely we’ll ever experience such dramatic transformations again; the iPhone, while great, isn’t nearly as important as the toilet. (Other economists are more optimistic about the future.) Now that the “special century” is over, he argues, we need to rethink our relationship to progress. what lingers in my mind, along with these ideas, is a new and more important sense of the past, and of what they ate, touched, heard , the people who lived in it saw and did. reading “the rise and fall of american growth”, i thought a lot about my grandparents. gordon’s book has made their lives more real to me.
—joshua rothman
one of my favorite literary experiences this year was rereading “madame bovary,”** **in the lydia davis translation. every word vivid and precise, leading to the inevitable tragedy. As I read, I wrote a list of all the phrases in the book that involve color: a green square on the table; a small piece of white paper; her yellow gloves. they spread out like many small manets.
—maira kalman
Perhaps the only good thing to come out of 2016 was Olympic champion Simone Biles, whose smiles, on her way to gymnastics gold, were as wide as her backflips were high. the same cannot be said for nadia comaneci, the protagonist of one of my favorite novels of the year, “the little communist who never smiled”, by the french writer lola lafon, translated by nick caistor. Lafon’s Book, a metafictional biography that follows Comaneci’s life from her relentless training by Bela Karoli to becoming the first gymnast to earn a perfect 10, at the ripe old age of fourteen, to her defection to the United States days before the ceasescu regime collapsed, is a brilliant blend of reality, invention, and creative historiography. lafon was raised by french parents in ceausescu’s romania; her observations on the hypocrisies of both capitalism and communism when it comes to sports and women’s lives are sharp and relentless. this is a fiercely feminist novel. it’s also compulsively readable, with descriptions of feats of physical daring to stop your heart.
a very different kind of daring is the theme of “how to survive a plague”, david france’s fascinating account of the effort of citizens and scientists alike to combat AIDS in its devastating early years. France moved to New York fresh out of college in 1981 and focuses on the city, where almost half of the gay population was infected with H.I.V. before the virus was discovered. Laced with poignant personal memories, her story is formidable in scope and deeply human. it’s also a study in the power of protest and civil disobedience, destined to be useful in days to come.
With a nod to the times book review custom of asking writers to recommend a book to the president, I’d like to suggest that the president-elect pick up a copy of “evicted” for sociologist matthew desmond, which the magazine excerpted this spring. Writing about Milwaukee, Desmond shows how homelessness is not simply the result of poverty; It is at the root of poverty. it is also at the root of disenfranchisement. A new state law in Wisconsin requires voters to show an approved photo ID. cards, which cannot be obtained by citizens, such as Desmond’s minions, who are forced to move too often to maintain a fixed address. the vulnerable deserve your government’s protection. They, too, deserve dignity, which Desmond’s forceful prose bestows upon them in abundance.
Finally, for some much-needed comic relief: Inspired by a peek at Jane Austen’s letters in Morgan’s library this spring, I binge on Austen, reading “mansfield park >”. and “persuasion” for the first time, and “pride and prejudice” for the third time. I intended to scorn “eligible,” curtis sittenfeld’s tale of “pride and prejudice,” set in cincinnati. instead, I gobbled it up happily. Bingley is the star of a “bachelor” type reality show; Mr. darcey is a neurosurgeon; Liz Bennett is, well, a magazine writer. (Jane teaches yoga, of course). It should be a universally recognized truth that all travel is a spirited pleasure.
—alexandra schwartz
“the grackles are donald trumps”. earlier this year, i drove to the woods of albany to spend forty-eight terribly weird hours with the author of this terribly weird line: seventy-one-year-old bernadette mayer, who is one of the great experimental poets and downtown figures . of his generation. The only woman included in the original anthology of the New York School Poets, Mayer has written twenty-eight books encompassing an epic poem written in a day, a lengthy dialogue with a house, and a series of lyrics composed over a half-year. . sleep. her latest collection, “works and days,” which came out this June, is among her best, combining daily struggles (menstruation, money) with natural obsessions (blue herons, mushrooms) and big unanswered questions. response. (Is motherhood virtuous? Where is the patriarchy?). all of this is backed up by a heavy dose of irony:
mayer writes the kind of nonsense that makes sense, and sense that it is nonsense: I can’t think of a better centering device in these backwards times.
—daniel wenger
See Also: AudioBook Rentals: Guide to Rent Audio Books Online [2022] – AudioforBooks.com
This year, I have sought and found solace in language, both in poetry and prose. “the black maria” by aracelis girmay has left me with images that are still deeply embedded. Brenda Shaughnessy’s “so much synth” is a brilliant feminist excavation of adolescence. “notes on the assemblage” by juan felipe herrera has been a ladder of hope, while monica youn’s “blackacre” is masterful in its unraveling of the mystery of being and Body. “the regional office is under attack!, by manuel gonzales, a novel that makes jumping on the shark seem like a domesticated literary device, created for a much-needed good time filled with female superheroes and scenes from struggle. Hannah Pittard’s “Hear Me” is a quiet and revealing novel that exposes the inner workings of a marriage over the course of a harrowing road trip. in the realm of nonfiction, kristin dombek’s “the selfishness of others” is a riveting book-length essay that delves into the concept of narcissism in a way that might make you give up the internet forever. Finally, after returning from Chile, I read and fell in love with “multiple choice” by Alejandro Zambra, who is as ingenious with language as with form; is it a true triumph of genre-bending lyrical fiction, or is it poetry?
—ada lemon
“of being dispersed” by simone white, published by futurepoem, is a recent book of poetry for which I am especially grateful. (He brought me back to his excellent earlier book, “house envy of all the world”, which I think is out of print and someone should republish). and within this book of poems there is a piece of prose entitled “lotion”. which is one of my favorite recent essays.
I also recommend “them and we will get in trouble for this” by anna moschovakis,** **published by coffee house. Like White, Moschovakis uses formal innovation as a way to imagine new modes of interconnection.
Right now, I’m reading Dorothy Wang’s Thinking Your Presence, a powerful challenge to conventional ways of thinking (or not thinking) about race and poetry.
I was recently introduced to the work of jamaican novelist erna brodber, and am reading her short but profound novels. “myal” is probably my favorite so far.
Finally, I have spent a lot of time in the last few months on “history and obstinacy”, by the philosopher and filmmaker alexander kluge with the sociologist oskar negt. Zone Books published an English translation in 2014, and the introduction, by Devin Fore, is one of the great things written about Kluge’s work. kluge, by the way, recently wrote a short story about donald trump. It’s called “drunk elephant charisma.”
—ben lerner
When I love a book, I can’t help but think of it as delicious, not brilliant, vivid, or insightful, but something sumptuous that induces hunger. this year, i devoured, in one continuous night of reading, “the unseen world” by liz moore, a novel about artificial intelligence and family secrets. Moore brings computing to life through the eyes of a girl who begins to see that her scientist father is not who she appears to be. but I read the book so much for its portrayal of early a.i. research, which moore captures in all its idealism and raw emotion: his desire to make human beings less lonely by creating machine companions is an impulse not unlike those that drive people to have children or to write a book.
Some books don’t lend themselves to a feast: they’re too rare, too precious. i read rivka galchen’s “small jobs”, an essay in aphorisms that explores the twin phenomena of motherhood and childhood, and “the ants”, a collection of obsessed poetry with sawako nakayasu’s insects, regretting having only one opportunity to read each page for the first time. in these cases, I recommend greedy self-control and letting each bite dissolve completely on the tongue.
—alexandra kleeman
something that 2016 has been good for, at least, is poetry. “night sky with exit wounds” by ocean vuong, “eventually one dreams of the real” by marianne boruch, and “last sext” by melissa broder are but some of the beautiful and dynamic arrivals of the year. one collection that had a particularly strong effect on me was solmaz sharif’s debut, “watching,” an indefatigable meditation on the language of war. Sharif, whose family immigrated to the United States from Iran and lived under surveillance, relies on the Defense Department’s Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms to make a powerful case against the United States. intervention in the middle east. it is a book about violence, but it is also immensely loving. you can read the poem that gives title to the volume here.
—elisabeth denison
My Catholic taste for poetry allowed for all sorts of wonder this year. the paisley rekdal collection “imaginary containers” made me wonder. read “a peacock in the cage,” for example, and see how he builds a poem around the single notion of confinement, so that you’re levitating with it, and all the better. elizabeth powell’s “reckless daughter of willy loman” is a daring hybrid collection that deftly fuses linear verse, snappy prose, and powerful monologues. By posing a single question, what if Loman had an illegitimate daughter?, it upends our serious understanding of Arthur Miller’s classic “Death of a Salesman” and the easy dramas that plague families.
Collected volumes of poems often read like treatises. such is the case of rita dove’s “complete poems: 1974-2004”, whose central claim, presented in elegant and vividly human language, is the gravity of our stories and the restorative power of language and culture. david rivard’s “standoff”**, which I returned to over the course of a week, while riding the subway or waiting for my son’s basketball practice to finish, assailed me with the vivacity and cunning of him. humor. Drawing on the panoply of artists, philosophers, writers, and musicians of the last century, from Wittgenstein to Dylan and Coltrane, Campbell McGrath’s “XX: Poems for the Twentieth Century” seems to launch its own defense of the humanities and their presence in our lives. and the poems in vievee francis’s haunting collection “forest primeval**” are understated yet revealing, indecisive yet decisive, anguished yet serene. a poet of superb courage.
finally, in an election year marred by silly anti-immigration speeches and scaremongering, the celebrated volumes of young poets solmaz sharif (“look”), safiya sinclair (“ >cannibal”), and ocean vuong (“night sky with exit wounds”), all born on other shores, served as my personal antidote. individualizing their lives in a lyrically fierce language, each in their own way sings, criticizes and dances the electric body. such a verse honors what is great within us, our plurality, which is our poetry.
—major jackson
See Also: The 7 Best Books To Improve Influencing Skills – Roffey Park Institute