Support Coffee House Press!
It’s year-end donation time! As I’m sure you know, there are dozens of worthy publishing (or literary) enterprises out there deserving of your support. Over the next few days, I’ll try and highlight a few of them (including Open Letter), but wanted to start with Coffee House Press, since they have a really ...
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The Best Poetry Books from 2015 I Should Read [My Year in Lists]
Before getting into today’s list, I want to point out a new trend in the Great Listicle Explosion of Book List-Making of 2015™: the “overlooked list.” This has probably been going on for as long as people could count to ten (a prerequisite for list-making), but I had overlooked it (yes, groan) until I ...
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Three Funny Books [My Year in Lists]
Before getting into today’s lists, I want to draw your attention to Largehearted Boy’s List of ‘Best of 2015’ Book Lists.. This is just absurd—and it doesn’t even include all of these lists! Even if you eliminate all the entries on here that include Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant ...
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Not a Sophomore Slump if You Were Never Great [3 Books]
I’ve been waiting all week to write this post of three things that I’m loving, can’t wait to read, and hate. It’s rare that I know which books I want to include so far in advance, but immediately after posting last week’s edition, I knew exactly what I wanted to do. Since the lists I’ve ...
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This Place Holds No Fear
Heiner Resseck, the protagonist in Monika Held’s thought-provoking, first novel, This Place Holds No Fear, intentionally re-lives his past every hour of every day. His memories are his treasures, more dear than the present or future. What wonderful past eclipses holding your newborn for the first time or meeting the woman ...
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Four Books From Underrepresented Countries [My Year in Lists]
Yesterday I posted a bit of a screed against lists, followed immediately by a list of the six translations everyone’s talking about. My hope is to produce a bunch of lists featuring literature in translation from 2015, all organized by various rubrics that can allow you to find a handful of recommendations with a ...
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The Six Water-Cooler Fiction Translations of 2015 [My Year in Lists]
Following on my last post, here’s the first entry in my manic series of year-end lists. To kick this off, I thought I’d start with the list of the six books in translation that were the most talked about this year. I did some really heady numerical analysis to determine this—searching Facebook mentions, ...
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