this year, i took a hint from the nobel committee and collected svetlana alexievich’s oral histories of life in the soviet union. “voices from chernobyl” and “boys in zinc” were unlike anything I had read before, and they affected me in ways I find hard to describe. Alexievich’s interviews broadened my sense of what is possible to endure; they also made me feel the extreme narrowness of my own experiences and perceptions. They convinced me that I know nothing about people, that there are areas of emotion and thought as far from my mind as the moon from the earth. A mother from near Chernobyl, whose daughter was born with birth defects, asks, “Why will what happens to butterflies never happen to her?” a man who has returned to live in the irradiated zone, to wander, alone, in a religious trance, as a kind of holy fool, explains his decision by saying: “man’s life is like grass: it blooms, dries up, and then goes into the fire.”
I also found myself mesmerized by Leena Krohn, a Finnish writer whose collected stories and novels, translated into English by many different translators, have just been published as a single volume, “Leena Krohn: Collected Fiction”. generally speaking, krohn is a speculative writer; one of the novels in the collection, for example, consists of thirty letters written from a city of insects. (“it is summer and one can look at the flowers face to face”). Krohn writes like a fantastic Lydia Davis, in short chapters the size of prose poems. her characters often have a film noir toughness; one of her, explaining her approach to philosophy, says that when she asks an existential question, “life answers. it’s usually a long, full answer.”
You are reading: Page turning books 2015
Looking back, I realize that my favorite books this year were the ones that took me away from the ordinary social world and into very different spaces. I don’t know why that was the dominant theme, but I know these books took me further.
—joshua rothman
I recently started reading “just mercy: a story of justice and redemption” by bryan stevenson, which was published last year, but in many ways, 2015 was the right time to pick it up again. . our criminal justice system received more attention this year than it has in a long time. The number of videos of police violence that bounced around the internet skyrocketed, and we learned countless names of people who had lost their lives after encounters with law enforcement: Freddie Grey, Sandra Bland, Laquan McDonald. but video footage only tells a small part of the story of how damaged our criminal justice system is; Stevenson’s first-person account of his years representing poor people on death row in Alabama and elsewhere offers a fuller picture. I remember reading his book late at night, obsessing, as Stevenson recounted what it was like to talk to a client after failing to stop his execution, knowing the man would soon be executed. At times, I felt as if I was reading a book from another era, or at least wishing that the injustices described by Stevenson were a thing of the past. But Stevenson comes from his stories, and his ideas, over the many years he spent representing the poorest and most defenseless, and it is this first-hand knowledge that makes his book so powerful and so necessary. .
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—jennifer gonnerman
Two collections of stories washed the floor with me this year. David Gates’s “A Hand Outstretched to Guide Me” is brutal, brutally intelligent, and filled with a reckless and difficult love for its characters. these are gripping, sophisticated, and gasping stories from the author of “jernigan,” one of the angriest and saddest novels in existence. Joy Williams’ “The Visiting Priveleance” is harsh and grim and somehow still bitingly funny, a kind of long-running nihilistic comedy routine. except you should sit down and probably keep self-harm implements out of reach.
Further down the category of why bother, especially since we’re all going to die soon is “the sixth extinction,” from New York writer Elizabeth Kolbert, which reveals that the fate of civilization is a fine dust band. Kolbert leads an amazing investigation to argue that the end is not near, it is now.
In the category of novels unlike anything I’ve ever read before, satirical, moving and strange, there were three books that ambushed me and gave me faith. “The First Bad Man,” by Miranda July Rachel B. glaser “paulina & fran”, and paul beatty “the sale”.
“The Bed Moved,” a debut collection of rebecca schiff stories, won’t be available until April, but I’d like to see the faces of the people who read it as they switch between amazement, admiration and shock. this writer is very good.
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finally, rumor has it that george saunders is working on a novel. if only the n.s.a. he had his priorities straight and could filter some pages. she would give up some personal liberties to take a look early.
—ben marcus
“The Prize: Who’s in Charge of America’s Schools?” by Dale Russakoff (part of which was published in this magazine) is infuriating, harrowing, and motivating. Russakoff, a veteran Washington Post reporter, recounts the ambitious and ill-conceived effort to reinvent public education in the city of Newark, sparked by a $100 million donation from celebrated power player Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook. In the custody of two others, Cory Booker, then the charismatic mayor of the city, and Chris Christie, the governor of New Jersey. Before the Zuckerberg-funded intervention, Newark schools were a picture of dysfunction and despair: more than half of the city’s children did not meet expected standards, some failing drastically. The hope, the prize, was that by applying the kind of ingenuity and resources readily available in the world of technology to Newark’s dilapidated and dilapidated educational institutions, a radical transformation could be wrought in the lives of the most vulnerable. of the city: their children. It’s no spoiler to reveal that arrogance, cowardice, and the same old politics prevail: at the end of the book, with Zuckerberg’s money spent, the city’s schools continue to fail their children. Newark was to serve as a model for educational reform; instead, it stands as a signal example of the misapplication of the reform. Russakoff’s book is, however, a model of his own way: reports of him are full, clear, and always compassionate. the heroes of his book are not political crusaders or confident philanthropists, but the teachers who dedicate themselves so thoroughly to their young students, and those children and parents who fight so bravely to seize what should be their right, not a prize they winning against the odds: an education.
the satirical novel “submission” by michel houellebecq arrived with amazing punctuality; its publication in france in january coincided with the charlie hebdo massacre, while its publication in america occurred less than a month before the paris attacks in november. Houellebecq imagines an Islamic France of the near future: the rationalist, secularist nation conquered not by radicals and their terrorist agents, but by moderate Muslims. Houellebecq’s insight is to suggest how surprisingly agreeable the new religious dictates turn out to be for many of Parisian intellectuals: there are comfortable salaries subsidized by the Gulf states and multiple willing young wives for professors. the book is dark and funny, touching and vile; it should be read not for the shine it gives headlines, but for the light it sheds on the culture that gave rise to them.
—rebecca mead
for me, the best book of 2015 was kent russell’s collection of essays “I’m sorry to think I’ve raised a shy son,” an amalgamation of reported pieces and interstitial vignettes that form a skewer , impressive and wildly intelligent evocation of contemporary masculinity. Russell, not yet thirty, writes about hockey enforcers, a childhood friend serving in Afghanistan, Juggalos, a man living alone on a desert island, Amish baseball players, and most of all, his father. an irascible wit that serves as both source and foil. If the essay is an interrogation by design, an argument from some eternally confusing puzzle, Russell suggests that the solutions lie not so much within as beyond; the questions he asks others help him unravel his own. In my favorite piece, “Mitradates of Fond du Lac,” he introduces Tim Friede, an autoimmunizer who injects himself with snake venom in a desperate or perhaps heroic attempt to get stronger. Russell’s account of the experience is electric. he describes the body of a venomous cobra, lunging hungrily at friede’s hand, like “a string dragging a harpoon.” he describes a black mamba bite: “she bit him twice, actually, in quick succession, fangs through the skin making the same little noises like forked vents at TV dinners.” What is truly remarkable about Russell’s pieces is the way he historicizes his subjects and their desires; he seems to instinctively understand that if we need something now, we probably have needed it before. this is how the human continuum works: whenever we are, we have been. look there for answers. look here for the answers.
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