Tuesday, December 09, 2003
AUTHOR FAVORITES
PW Daily took this from the Westchester Journal-News, so I don't feel so bad republishing it here. My favorite is Kevin Brockmeier talking about Dennis Vannatta's "Lives of the Artists":
from PW DAILY:
Literary Lagniappes: Authors' Favorite Titles of 2003
David Daley, books editor of the Westchester Journal-News, surveyed a
group of authors to find out their favorite books this year. PW Daily
will run a selection of the responses throughout the coming weeks:
Beth Ann Bauman, author of Beautiful Girls (MacAdam/Cage):
This year I had the pleasure of reading Lara Vapnyar's There Are Jews
in My House. These short stories are graceful and deeply moving
portraits of Russian life told with wisdom and sly humor. Also great
is The Average Human by Ellen Toby Potter. Ambitious, mysterious,
funny, and wonderfully creepy, the debut novel tells an intricate
story of a clan of outcasts and the neighboring locals of a small
town. A perverse delight! Both these books take you into worlds that
are fully realized and absolutely alive.
Charles Baxter, author of Saul and Patsy (Pantheon):
My favorite book this year was Michael Byers' Long for this World, a
beautifully lyric and comic novel about science, aging, youth and the
possible horror of living forever.
Tom Bissell, author of Chasing the Sea: Lost Among the Ghosts of
Empire in Central Asia (Pantheon):
Brian Hall's I Should Be Extremely Happy in Your Company was the best
book I read last year. In fact, it's one of the best novels I've read
ever. Normally I'm no fan of historical fiction, and I'm not really
that interested in Lewis and Clark, so maybe it's weird that a
historical novel about Lewis and Clark gripped me so relentlessly, but
it did. It's that good. It's also strange and fascinating and may even
make you cry.
Kevin Brockmeier, author of The Truth About Celia (Pantheon):
Of the 10 books that have made it onto my favorite books case this
year, four of them were 2003 or late-2002 releases: Italo Calvino's
Hermit in Paris (a collection of Calvino's autobiographical writings,
the most noteworthy being "American Diary 1959-1960," which is a long
travelogue with such subheadings as "The Most Beautiful Image of New
York By Night," "The Most Important Young Writers in America" and "A
Beatnik Party"); Victor LaValle's comic, invigorating, sort of
sideways-poignant novel The Ecstatic (perhaps the best first-person
account of schizophrenia I've ever read); Jonathan Lethem's The
Fortress of Solitude (which is every bit as good as the other people
who are bound to mention it in this section say it is); and Dennis
Vannatta's beautiful and formally innovative story collection Lives of
the Artists (each section of which organizes itself around a different
well-known painting, my favorite of them, about a man who imagines
himself inside Seurat's "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande
Jatte," ending, "Place your wife here, your daughter and son here and
here, all those you've loved there, there, over there. Now place
yourself among them wherever you wish. But choose carefully, for soon
it will all be beyond revision, and whatever is beyond revision is
forever").
Michael Byers, author of Long for This World (Houghton Mifflin):
Currently I am in love with The Furies by Fernanda Eberstadt. Recently
favorites have included Louis Begley's Shipwreck, B.H. Fairchild's
Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest, and Paul Krugman's
The Great Unraveling.
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from PW DAILY:
Literary Lagniappes: Authors' Favorite Titles of 2003
David Daley, books editor of the Westchester Journal-News, surveyed a
group of authors to find out their favorite books this year. PW Daily
will run a selection of the responses throughout the coming weeks:
Beth Ann Bauman, author of Beautiful Girls (MacAdam/Cage):
This year I had the pleasure of reading Lara Vapnyar's There Are Jews
in My House. These short stories are graceful and deeply moving
portraits of Russian life told with wisdom and sly humor. Also great
is The Average Human by Ellen Toby Potter. Ambitious, mysterious,
funny, and wonderfully creepy, the debut novel tells an intricate
story of a clan of outcasts and the neighboring locals of a small
town. A perverse delight! Both these books take you into worlds that
are fully realized and absolutely alive.
Charles Baxter, author of Saul and Patsy (Pantheon):
My favorite book this year was Michael Byers' Long for this World, a
beautifully lyric and comic novel about science, aging, youth and the
possible horror of living forever.
Tom Bissell, author of Chasing the Sea: Lost Among the Ghosts of
Empire in Central Asia (Pantheon):
Brian Hall's I Should Be Extremely Happy in Your Company was the best
book I read last year. In fact, it's one of the best novels I've read
ever. Normally I'm no fan of historical fiction, and I'm not really
that interested in Lewis and Clark, so maybe it's weird that a
historical novel about Lewis and Clark gripped me so relentlessly, but
it did. It's that good. It's also strange and fascinating and may even
make you cry.
Kevin Brockmeier, author of The Truth About Celia (Pantheon):
Of the 10 books that have made it onto my favorite books case this
year, four of them were 2003 or late-2002 releases: Italo Calvino's
Hermit in Paris (a collection of Calvino's autobiographical writings,
the most noteworthy being "American Diary 1959-1960," which is a long
travelogue with such subheadings as "The Most Beautiful Image of New
York By Night," "The Most Important Young Writers in America" and "A
Beatnik Party"); Victor LaValle's comic, invigorating, sort of
sideways-poignant novel The Ecstatic (perhaps the best first-person
account of schizophrenia I've ever read); Jonathan Lethem's The
Fortress of Solitude (which is every bit as good as the other people
who are bound to mention it in this section say it is); and Dennis
Vannatta's beautiful and formally innovative story collection Lives of
the Artists (each section of which organizes itself around a different
well-known painting, my favorite of them, about a man who imagines
himself inside Seurat's "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande
Jatte," ending, "Place your wife here, your daughter and son here and
here, all those you've loved there, there, over there. Now place
yourself among them wherever you wish. But choose carefully, for soon
it will all be beyond revision, and whatever is beyond revision is
forever").
Michael Byers, author of Long for This World (Houghton Mifflin):
Currently I am in love with The Furies by Fernanda Eberstadt. Recently
favorites have included Louis Begley's Shipwreck, B.H. Fairchild's
Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest, and Paul Krugman's
The Great Unraveling.
