The author's bookshelf
The literature world was weird this year. I almost don’t remember it. It was rapid, and overflowing with so many new presses and faces and legs that it was hard to know where to look and who or what didn’t suck. I started the year off vowing that I would not read anything by American authors for the entirety of 2013. I made it through like two months before caving, but a good long breath like that far from our lard shores was nonetheless refreshing, like a blanket over the face.
Two of my best experiences were devouring all of the Kobo Abe and Thomas Bernhard novels that I hadn’t yet read, back to back, in short periods, which kind of cooked something about each of those minds into me that hadn’t been there before. I’m going to find a couple of bodies of work worth doing this with every year from now on.
Some of my worst experiences this year—and every year—came from trying to read the books everyone is raving about at any given moment. I always feel like either I’m missing something or they’re missing something. The end of the year Best Of lists always seem to reinforce that theory, as I always wonder how so many people got so much out of a novel that to me read like a knockoff of the books that were on the same lists last year. But so it goes.
In celebration of my annual distaste for adding onto the pile of what seemed biggest in the last twelve months, here’s the list of everything I read this year, regardless of when it was written or how good it was, with some particular standout highlights.
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A Day in the Strait by Emmanuel Hocquard
The Obscene Madame D by Hilda Hilst
A close friend of one of my favorites, Clarice Lispector, Hilst isn’t a far cry from the fragmentary, mutative mindset of that relation. This brief 57-page meta-monologue is stuffed to the gills with ideas of madness from a mind you actually want to see run rampant. It gushes in a somehow more intimate and raving Beckett-ian mode. I wish there were a shitload of little shattering novellas like this everywhere, available in gas stations, as a drug.
The Ruined Map by Kobo Abe
Prostitution by Pierre Guyotat
The Use of Speech by Nathalie Sarraute
The Box Man by Kobo Abe
Reflections by Mark Insingel
The Moon’s Jaw by Rauan Klassnik
Tenth of December by George Saunders
Red Doc > by Anne Carson
Three by Ann Quin
The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides
Castle to Castle by Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Taipei by Tao Lin
No disappointment after the hype for this new novel from someone whom I’ve always looked to as an icon just ahead of the curve. Taipei takes everything Tao Lin was always astounding at—intricately bizarre observations of social contexts and the moment-to-moment shades of one’s emotions—to a newly effective depth. The book holds nothing back, fusing Wallace-sized sentence structures with Tao’s masterful minimalism, while somehow managing to infuse the mutative energy of the internet in what may end up being the most open look at the inner workings of a young person in whatever social era we’re currently trapped in.
The Face of Another by Kobo Abe
The Map & The Territory by Michel Houellebecq
Never having been a big Houellebecq enthusiast, I was pleasantly surprised by this one. The Map & The Territory seemed much more expansive than the French bitchboy’s usual sex-obsessed contraptions. Essentially cataloguing the life and career of a high-end photographer who builds a reputation out of a few rare conceptual projects, he soon ends up running into a character in the form of Houellebecq himself. A brutal incident and some strange complications end up turning the book into something mysterious and charged with an energy most hyper-realistic conceptual novels never manage.
Kangaroo Notebook by Kobo Abe
Burial by Claire Donato
Hotel Crystal by Olivier Rolin
On its face a catalog of meticulous architectural descriptions of different hotel rooms across the world, Rolin does something pretty sublime in building a suspenseful narrative, not to mention a great deal of oblique character development with the voice that emerges underneath. Basically a hyper-speed Robbe-Grillet-like concept pulled off with haunting flourish. I don’t think I’ll forget the way this book felt.
A Naked Singularity by Sergio de la Pava
The Ark Sakura by Kobo Abe
Dark Matter by Aase Berg
Billie the Bull by xTx
Crapalachia by Scott McClanahan
Walking Across A Field We Are Focused On At The Time by Sara Wintz
Times Squares Red Times Square Blue by Samuel Delany
Extinction by Thomas Bernhard
The Last Scrapbook by Evan Dara
Solip by Ken Baumann
Young Tambling by Kate Greenstreet
Crush by Richard Siken
Concrete by Thomas Bernhard
Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts by Jorie Graham
Science by Emily Toder
The Lime Works by Thomas Bernhard
USO: I’ll Be Seeing You by Kim Rosenfield
Troublers by Rob Walsh
Woodcutters by Thomas Bernhard
Can It! by Edmund Berrigan
Grace Period: Notebooks, 1998-2007 by Aaron Kunin
Throne of Blood by Cassandra Troyan
The First Four Books of Sampson Starkweather by Sampson Starkweather
Tampa by Alissa Nutting
Haute Surveillance by Johannes Göransson
May We Shed These Human Bodies by Amber Sparks
The Global Struggle for Dead Milk by Mark Baumer
Someone Who Did Something by Mark Baumer
A Crack Up At The Race Riots by Harmony Korine (reread)
I Live I See by Vsevolod Nekrasov
One Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses by Lucy Corin
Joie de Vivre by Lisa Jarnot
Tina by Peter Davis
The Devotional Poems by Joe Hall
Zazie in the Metro by Raymond Queneau
Salamandrine: 8 Gothics by Joyelle McSweeney
A Questionable Shape by Bennett Sims
Rontel by Sam Pink
7 American Deaths and Disasters by Kenneth Goldsmith
Boycott by Vanessa Place
The Descent of Alette by Alice Notley
The Skin Team by Jordaan Mason
In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods by Matt Bell
1986.6 by Matthew Roberson
Night Moves by Stephanie Barber
The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner
He Died With His Eyes Open by Derek Raymond
I Was Dora Suarez by Derek Raymond
Murder by Danielle Collobert
The Fassbinder Diaries by James Pate
On Ghosts by Elizabeth Robinson
Mira Corpora by Jeff Jackson
The Suiciders by Travis Jeppesen
If you want to talk about writing that can go almost anywhere at any time, from word to word, you should be talking about Jeppesen. On its face a novel about a bunch of punk squatters who fuck each other and eat drugs constantly, The Suiciders is really more a mechanism where every line is a weapon in and of itself. Paragraph by paragraph this book just deluges every sort of sense and sentiment in the most hyper-violent language this side of Guyotat or Sade. “TVLand is so much better than the WWW,” it goes. “I need world. I’m fried inside myself tonight. There are so many warblings out there to satiate the hunger that de-defines your spite version. I need a hammer. I will only go into the water if I am holding one.” Big balls, big syllables, big fuck.
Pop Corpse by Lara Glenum
In the Moremarrow by Oliverio Girondo
Mouth of Hell by Maria Negroni
The Parapornographic Manifesto by Carl-Michel Edenborg
The Warmth of the Taxidermied Animal by Tytti Heikkinen
Damnation by Janice Lee
Sexual Boat (Sex Boats) by James Gendron
An Impenetrable Screen of Purest Sky by Dan Beachy-Quick
Moods by Rachel B. Glaser
Flee by Evan Dara
An Episode In The Life of a Landscape Painter by Cesar Aira
Old Friends by Stephen Dixon
Phone Rings by Stephen Dixon
100 Billion Days & 100 Billion Nights by Ryu Mitsuse
The Strangers by Eugene Lim
Gil the Nihilist by Sean Kilpatrick
Sean Kilpatrick remains one of my favorite working writers, and this may be his most fucked yet. Set up as the shooting script for a sitcom revolving around three anarchic, misogynistic, desperately horny and beautiful pieces of shit, Gil the Nihilist lays it on thick from the first page and only gets more and more pigged out and black to the heart as it goes. Most any sentence Kilpatrick piles on is one you could get tattooed on your gums: “I bow to fast food. My smelted teensy ritual. It vacations in your catheter. The animal supplement smacks of copyright. Go on, shine what bucks you. No one takes their vitamins alone.”
Tlooth by Harry Mathews
Even Though I Don’t Miss You by Chelsea Martin
Here Come the Warm Jets by Alli Warren
George Anderson: Notes for a Love Song in Imperial Time by Peter Dimock
Berg by Ann Quin
Death Kit by Susan Sontag
20 Lines a Day by Harry Mathews
Personae by Sergio de la Pava
The follow up to his totally fantastic novel A Naked Singularity (one of my favorites published last year), Personae takes on such a different shape it’s hard to believe it’s written by the same author. Where Singularity was gripping in voice and sheer ability to build pace and tension, Personae exhibits a whole other sheath of skills, one much more oblique and collage-like in its trajectory. And yet, de la Pava’s line-to-line brilliance and ambition are unmistakably his, and the manner in which he pilots this wide array of perspectives and tones opens over you in a wholly unexpected way, closer to Calvino now than Wallace. Personae cements de la Pava as one I will look forward to reading in years ahead.
Cigarettes by Harry Mathews
Creature by Amina Cain
Collected Alex by A.T. Grant
Fun Camp by Gabe Durham
Our Lady of the Flowers by Jean Genet
Mine by Peter Sotos
Television by Jean-Philippe Toussaint
Collateral Light by Julia Cohen
You and Me by Padgett Powell
The Desert Places by Amber Sparks and Robert Kloss
The Compleat Purge by Trisha Low
The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
I decided to close out 2013 with one of the novels I’ve had on my Must Read Soon list for years and years now. I’m still reading it, but it’s becoming perhaps the brightest spot of the year. Ostensibly a 700-page chronicle of a man’s 20-year decline into a world of mental illness, spurred from simply going to temporarily visit a relative in an asylum and then just sticking around and taking part, the novel is sad in a calm, claustrophobic sense. Among long Moby Dick-like philosophical diatribes and strangely mesmeric scenes centered around food and music and desire, what really begins to eat at you is the sense of time as a destructor, and the mutability of a person surrounded and dying day by day. It’s rare a work can be so calm and enchanting about almost nothing for pages and pages while gradually accumulating a wide understanding of death.