Easily the worst year of my life. It was a time, for the most part, when reading at all felt very hard to me; not only due to what had been being done to our attentions, to our spirits, but to coming to grips with my greatest fear, the death of my mother, from out of nowhere after several years before now seeing her lose her mind to Alzheimer’s, and being cut out from the degradation of it through an unexpected reckoning with cancer. I don’t want to get into all of that stuff here, but suffice it to say that there was a point some time last year, when I was less consumed with death and more with the daily aspects of living, and helping the person who created me to keep living, that reading was the last thing on mind. I quickly began anticipating that my mind would never be the same, that I’d always be too tired at the end of the day to get anywhere with reading. I read less in 2018 than I have in my whole life, a trend that seemed destined to continue into the next.
Somehow, though, maybe even in the deepest recesses of my grief, I found the feeling again; or the feeling found me. Where for a while I’d begun to accept that I needed relief in the form of stupid television, or even sports, the engine in me that thrived and bred off of the experience of sentences, paragraphs, suddenly reappeared; I could suddenly hear myself thinking again, somehow, between the lines of others, and from there out, like a disease, though one that heals rather than undoes. Anyway, I don’t want to get hypershit about my feelings, but I am thankful to have found and worked to rekindle the process of reading in the midst of what felt like living hell. There’s still a long way to go, probably forever, but I am so thankful for those who continue to make work in the face of where we are, including many people who I am lucky to call friends; I can’t remember how or when it would have mattered any other way.
Nocilla Dream by Agustin Fernandez Mallo
This trilogy really set the tone-bar for the year of reading for me; totally new in its approach and how it allows possibility to manifest and remain volatile in expression, rather than instantly commodifying ideas into fiction or even overarching synthesis. Have been recommending this widely ever since, as it feels like the germ of a new approach to writing w/o the plague effect that Reality Hunger and its ilk always seemed to project, from my view. Would be on my list of works to be introduced in schools worldwide.
The Complete Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino (reread)
History of Violence by Edouard Louis
Milkman by Anna Burns
Wonderful and creepy in all sorts of ways; usually I don’t read stuff after it appears on an awards list, and yet the reaction this novel got after it won the Booker was hilarious to me: how the Times review described it as unnecessary and led nowhere. You’d think during a period of time where we’re all feeling hazed and fucked more than ever, people would be looking for work that resets the bar, that forces us to look at that which we do not wish to (in this case, the Troubles in Ireland, though its paranoid and discursive voice feels as trauma-bent in the now as any); instead we’ve seen the trend turn toward even more I-central manners of speaking, as if the whole world is just in duck and cover mode, talking to itself. Milkman reminds me a lot of the energy of Bob from Twin Peaks but presented here in a nearly classical mode that fears no means of description, no matter how unwieldy; thank fucking god.
Nocturne by Tara Booth
Yours by Sarah Ferrick
Vanishing Perspective by Alexis Beauclair
A Tunnel To Another Place by Apolo Cacho
The Brick House by Micheline Aharonian Marcom
Nip The Buds, Shoot the Kids by Kenzaburo Oe
Oe’s take on Lord of the Flies, in a way, which assumed a very simple mode of rhetoric, and yet one that made me wish I were able to write something so simple and so effective.
Nocilla Experience by Agustin Fernandez Mallo
Though the first part of the trilogy above ended up being my favorite, I really like how much Mallo shifted his approach in the other parts of the series. He seems committed to the thing, rather than to what the thing is meant to be, or how it should be applied.
Nocilla Lab by Agustin Fernandez Mallo
62: A Model Kit by Julio Cortazar
Mouthful of Birds by Samanta Schweblin
SS harnesses a volatility of image and affect that we rarely get to see anymore in major label fiction; at times her work reminds me of Cortazar, in how moments can be held down and examined up against the other moments that surround them, becoming elastic for a while, rather than simply attempting to convey their information or entertainment. It’s the sort of effect that feels disallowed from most American fiction lately, a trend that I will likely never figure out. I keep telling myself I’m getting old, that the forms of expression people seek no longer align with even what seemed possible ten years ago. It’s not hilarious. Anyway, thankful for the Schweblin injection.
Muck by Dror Burstein
Hated every second of this novel, honestly, despite the author’s obvious intellect, said obviousness causing, apparently, the need for him to prove it on each and every page of this book that in the end felt as if it had no heart. You can be as studied and allusional as you like and it still won’t make the pages come alive if all you’re doing is trying to direct the language through the sieve. Muck’s a good title for it.
Socialist Realism by Trisha Low
Trisha is such a pleasurable thinker. My blurb for SR: “In years like ours, what a relief it is to be allowed into the mind of Trisha Low. With infectious aplomb and zero pandering to the mind games of social grace, Socialist Realism weaves together intimate and moment-defining considerations of heritage, religion, masochism, sexuality, authenticity, utopia, transgressive art, and so much more, laying bare the myriad layers and projections of a persona surrounded by duress and still in search of something more. Equally candid and and courageous, this meditation from the dark side of the heart may have arrived in the nick of time.”
We Are Made Of Diamond Stuff by Isabel Waidner
Do You Hear Them? by Nathalie Sarraute
The True Deceiver by Tove Jansson
My Documents by Alejandro Zambra
Cyclonopedia: complicity with anonymous materials by Reza Negarestani
The Book of X by Sarah Rose Etter
So happy for Sarah, having read this novel in several different forms over the time she was working on it, and seen it come into such strong form. Here’s the blurb I wrote her: "Taut, macabre, with wounds electric, The Book of X will take your head off while staring dead-on into your eyes. Move over, Angela Carter, there's a new boss in the Meat quarry, and she is fearless, relentless, ready to feast."
King of Joy by Richard Chiem
Juliet the Maniac by Juliet Escoria
Trump Sky Alpha by Mark Doten
Blackly hilarious and effective rendition of esp. the earlier Trump years, when every day felt like being blitzed and held down, whereas now it’s beginning to feel like something much more inescapable than we ever even realized. MD’s Dennis Cooper influence demonstrates the viability of creating wormholes and plot falls that keep the sentence-level pyrotechnics flowing forward into something larger than the book itself, which seems more vital in the Reality Hunger sense than trying to stay pertinent; that is, there is an energy harnessed here that does not balk under the weight of its ideas; instead, it flows forward under the pressure, becoming preternatural.
Birthday by Cesar Aira
Doppelganger by Dasa Drndic
Drndic is probably my favorite discovery of the year; her fearlessness, coupled with an incredible sense of tone and the line as it relates to image, put her work up on the highest levels of what literature can do. I haven’t yet fully figured out how to talk about her work yet, as it contains so many different kinds of mode, but suffice it to say that she’s a fucking BALLER. Everyone should be reading her right now, especially:
E.E.G. by Dasa Drndic
A masterpiece; just blistering and revelatory in its handling of history and authority, how terror infiltrates and blends back in to daily life, how it continues to change us even in returning toward silence. A book I will never forget.
The Activist by Renee Gladman
Rag by Maryse Meijer
The Blood Barn by Carrie Lorig
Really love the effect of Lorig’s ability to delve into the unknown (and the all-too-well known) of one’s self, unpacking nervous energy into sheets of language that seem able to exist no other way. The kind of book that I love just staring at, turning the pages through, feeling its acidity getting on my clothes, my face, etc. A kind of monolith-like approach to exploring trauma in a way that refuses to commodify it, but to wield it, almost like a spellbook.
The Taiga Syndrome by Cristina Rivera Garza
Animalia by Jean-Baptiste Del Amo
A rare case where comparing the work to that of C. McCarthy actually holds water; such a brutal creation, finding ingenious new ways to describe the violence that is done against animals on a daily basis, by corporations sprung from seeds our relatives sewed before the advent of viral information. Sweltering sentences, desperate syntheses of the various machinations hidden in our lives, and an emotional curvature within that enabled greatly by the author’s ability to command language onto that which otherwise just remains blood, meat, wind. Fitzcarraldo Editions has just been killing it; so thankful for them as a press that can be counted on for greatness, title after title.
Apparitions of the Living by John Trefry
Reup that press praise for Trefry’s Inside the Castle, which feels like a dream press for me, exploring the margins of work that remains evasive of definition. Trefry’s own work is likewise fantastic, here carrying on the Robbe-Grillet tradition with a mind-slurring evocation of sexual paranoia and obsession, including passages so rich with style that it’s no wonder Trefry is an architect IRL; his paragraphs are buildings, his texts refreshingly, compulsively encrypted against narrative as potential space.
I <3 Oklahoma! by Roy Scranton
My blurb: “With whip-smart, multivalent prose akin to Barry Hannah spliced with William Burroughs, I <3 Oklahoma reads like a hypermodern Heart of Darkness, aimed straight into the malefic gnarl of Trump's MAGA. The result is an epochal, brainbending prism of a road novel, catalyzing any branded icon that might crop up into its wake—from Deleuze to Taylor Swift, Beuys to Bonnie and Clyde, ISIS to TMZ—into an immaculate reflection of a nation mesmerized by its own free fall through oblivion.”
Trieste by Dara Drndic
Another vital work from Drndic, probably second to EEG in personal ranks.
Northwood by Maryse Meijer
Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber
Actually still working on the second half of this, as the scope and bandwidth of its data is a lifetime achievement, and one that recalibrated the way I’ve thought about money and its interaction all my life.
A Sand Book by Ariana Reines
Ash Before Oak by Jeremy Cooper
Vivian by Christina Hesselholdt
The Country by Ken Baumann
Experimental Men by M Kitchell
The Laws of the Skies by Gregoire Courtois
Vineland by Thomas Pynchon (reread)
Might have replaced Gravity’s Rainbow as my favorite Pynchon, at least until I reread GR hopefully next year. Hilarious and well ahead of the curve that led to where we are . Will there ever be another figure like Pynchon in America? Seems impossible.
The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon (reread)
Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon (partial reread)
Malina by Ingeborg Bachmann
Another highlight of the year, though a heavy and complex one. One of the most emotionally charged pieces of writing I can remember in some way, in a a subterranean, nightmarish sort of way. The systems of language and affect Bachmann used to describe the female experience by citizens in Nazi Germany feels like a stranglehold of sorts, using such intricate means of POV and interaction between phases in the book that it feels like being smothered slowly and in due course. Effects of the prose unlike any other, really, and made of paragraphs that you could read over and again and still feel stung by. Need more of her work available in English translation ASAP.
The Milk Bowl of Feathers: Essential Surrealist Writing edited by Mary Ann Caws
People I’ve Met from The Internet by Stephen Van Dyck
Enjoyed the scope of this catalog of everyone the author had ever met online, going back to the earliest days of AOL chat rooms and the consolidation of the internet, but also felt disappointed that it never attempted to transcend the personal to larger means of thinking about its subject, or even a more robust texture resulting from the amassment of private data. Ideas are such strange things in this world now; reduced to headlines, never attempted to be nailed down, or given germ-body; just existing. Seems like that’s the more popular way to do it these days, so I won’t out myself as old as fuck, and even older at heart, it seems.
Feeld by Jos Charles
Moment of Freedom by Jens Bjorneboe
Sweatpants Paradise by Kyle Flak
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy (reread)
A top 10 all time novel for me still (or was that Suttree?), and no less incantatory an experience reading it for the fourth time.
Child of God by Cormac McCarthy (reread)
The Fallen by Carlos Manuel Alvarez
Hall of Waters by Berry Grass
Unamerica by Cody Goodfellow
The Divers’ Game by Jesse Ball
Vincent and Alice and Alice by Shane Jones
Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin
Prowler’s Universe by Larissa Szporluk
Trip Out & Fall Back by Joanne Kyger
Amygdalatropolis by B.R. Yeager
Probably my most infatuated-with book of the year by an American. If you could breed the DNA of a dream book for me, it would be something like this, though I could have read 600 pages of it; so vile and hyperdimensional and necessary in its rendition of the backblood of the internet, the phantom wreckage it is built upon, and what it does to people. Also just hilariously grotesque and full of danger-vibe. Do it.
As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals & Notebooks 1964-1980 by Susan Sontag
The End of the West by Michael Dickman
Barf.
Who Wrote the Bible? by Richard Friedman
Had always been interested in learning more about the origin of the bible and how it was formed and edited and by whom. This book felt like a mystery novel in that way, laying bare some of the most basic strands of the biggest true conspiracy of all time. Interested in reading more like this.
I Remain in Darkness by Annie Ernaux
The author’s unedited journal from the period of her mother’s descent into Alzheimer’s, and the personal aftermath of trying to cope through it. This book provided some extremely crucial insight to the experience of losing my own mother to the same disease, and some relief in attempting to manage to want to continue living after seeing what society and life does to our most beloved. I have a lot more to say about this, obviously, but well, later, maybe.
A Slow Boiling Beach by Rauan Klassnik
Houses of Ravicka by Renee Gladman
The Punishments of Hell by Robert Desnos
“Waiting for Godot”/”Endgame” by Samuel Beckett (reread)
Dolly City by Orly Castel-Bloom
Reminded me a lot of an old fav of mine, Nikanor Teratologen’s Assisted Living. Comically nasty and interpersonally degraded to the point that we’re able to look more directly at the darkness that surrounds us, for once, not pretending it is only something to offended by, or even improved by, but to be survived. Probably a great book about parenthood too haha but what do I know about that.
Medea by Catherine Theis
The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa
A fantastic concept for a book in the vein of Brave New World, but also so full of plot holes in a plot-driven novel that I found it irritating overall. Why do we have to bend these sorts of stories toward resolution and toward attempting to make a statement about something almost no statement will prove true through? I’ve never understood the impulse to try to calcify intentions to that degree, though again how else do you end up on a bookshelf at an airport? You can’t Instagram the void, but you can sure try.
The Faculty of Dreams by Sara Stridsberg
Johannes Goransson had been talking about this book in its Swedish form for years, so I was excited to get to experience it for myself. A fantastic and multivalent retelling of Valerie Solanas, that both attempts to depict her in the scenes of her own life, and to connect to the spiritual history of what she has come to represent. SS does a fantastic job of continuously altering and returning through the mechanisms of her approach to evoke a portrait of a being that goes far beyond its facts, and to in the process meld the impression of how a linear-esque novel can be assembled.
The Crying Book by Heather Christle
Notebook of a Return to the Native Land by Aime Cesaire
A hellscream, with such depth of spirit in the midst of atrocity that it feels like a revolution of spiritual intent; should be required reading.
The Hermit by Lucy Ives
What a refreshing, post Wittgenstein-like assemblage of fragments and ideas, about reading and writing, experience and meaning; feels like a tool chest of sorts, full of ideas that inspire the creation of ideas. Need to read more of her work now.
Armand V by Dag Solstad
A quite bizarre construction for a novel, told in footnotes that drop you in the wake of the aftermath of the parts of narrative that do not appear. I like the book best when it gave up circling the strands of its own narrative and burst out into speech bordering on the quasi-philosophical, much like the Ives book above; sometimes the work of following the fragments and their recursion into plot felt a bit too far of a reach, though also conceptually strong enough to want to continue being brought forward in it. Solstad seems like a writer’s writer, like Ives does, in that way where you are invited into the play of the work of creation, or at least into the illusion of doing so.
The Last Thing I’ll Ever Write by Adam Lauver
Garden, Ashes by Danilo Kis
The first section of this novel made me cry while reading it while very stoned, thinking about my mother, and how the conception of her in my own mind has changed, and continues changing, over time. The rest of the book blurred coming out of that, and I don’t want to remember it another way.
Screen Tests by Kate Zambreno
Nice to spend time in KZ’s brain, following her through her obsession and their indexing throughout life. This work felt honest and open to exposure in a way few books being written today do, in laying bare the thoughts behind her thoughts.
Old Food by Ed Atkins
The Beekeeper: Rescuing the Stolen Women of Iraq by Dunya Mikhail
Our Death by Sean Bonney
RIP
The Years by Annie Ernaux
Reminded me of Ourednik’s Europeana for how it condenses into massive paragraphs whole cycles of cultural history, coupled w/ Ernaux’s development as a person maturing alongside the larger mechanism of societal expansion and adaptation, how times are and how times change, shuffling back and forth throughout a meticulously deep archive of the experience of living. Moving, magnetic, and overflowing with the otherwise soon to be irretrievable data that fills up the backlog of one’s life.
Belladonna by Dasa Drndic
Avoka by Elle Nash
Walking by Thomas Bernhard
The Crisis of Infinite Worlds by Dana Ward
I Hotel by Karen Tei Yamashita