Village Voice Best of 2007

After Ed Park left the Village Voice I inwardly swore to myself that I would never read it again. (No reason to rehash it now, but there were a lot of controversial and somewhat embarrassing things that happened to the Voice at that time.)

Although I’ve stuck to my beliefs in terms of avoiding the New York Press for firing John Strausbaugh on Christmas Eve . . . I have to admit that the VV‘s Best of 2007 list is actually really intriguing . . . (Sorry Ed!)

Similar to the one from The Guardian—and unlike the anonymous Top 100 list of the New York Times—this is a list of 20 books recommended by 20 different Voice writers.

And on the whole, it’s pretty impressive. There as some “to be expected” titles, like Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, and Miranda July’s No One Belongs Here More Than You, but also included are Eliot Weinberger’s An Elemental Thing and Lydia Davis’s Varieties of Disturbance.

The big winner is NYRB though, with All About H. HAtterr by G. V. Desani, Ice by Vladimir Sorokin, and Novels in Three Lines by Felix Feneon all making the list.