Books come to me seemingly at random, spontaneously, serendipitously—they find me and strike me down. Like divine intervention. Like falling in love.
I’ll mention just a few standouts from this year, in no particular order at all:
Just today, I finished reading Oliver Burkeman’s newest, Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts. This one was pressed into my hands by its brilliant editor Eric Chinski, Editorial Director at FSG, whom I am lucky to call my mentor and friend. I had to fight myself to read it only one chapter at a time, as Burkeman recommends, so that it takes exactly four weeks to think it through. For a recovering perfectionist like me, this book was utterly mind changing. Maybe my life will change, too!!? A girl can dream.
In the spring, I found Marguerite Duras’s The Ravishing of Lol Stein on the street, and it was a beguiling lesson in craft. How to render perspective. How to let go of lucidity; characters can move in darkness as well as the light. Too much clarity can be sterilizing. That’s a hard lesson for an editor to swallow sometimes.
Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte is the best work of contemporary literature I’ve read in years. It feels to me like true innovation, a quantum leap in the technology of American fiction, and especially Asian American fiction. It is disgusting and depraved and ruthlessly droll and somehow, still utterly vulnerable. Never have I seen a better cross-section of shame, its immutability, and its temporal dimensions: “Embarrassment is contained to incidents, gets funny and small over time; shame runs gangrene through the entire past, makes the future impossible.”
A few years ago, my friend gifted me Billy and Girl by Deborah Levy, one of her early novels published by Dalkey Archive. Finally got around to it this year. It’s uncanny to read a book made in one’s very own shape—this is a novel prototypical of my taste as an editor, somehow foundational to every book I’ve ever acquired and published. How peculiar and titillating, then, to have discovered it only just now. Billy and his sister Girl live alone together somewhere in England, having been abandoned by their parents. Girl copes by knocking on the doors of strangers and asking whatever woman who opens the door if she is their mother; meanwhile, Billy conducts research for his encyclopedic book on the subject of pain. The result is incorrigibly funny and exquisitely tender, rendered in frenetic, technicolor style and a surreal, inventive form. Sugar, spice, everything nice.
Terrace Story by Hilary Leichter is a book comprised entirely of perfect sentences. I read in one sitting, and I cried the whole time. I was going through a difficult, unusual break-up and thinking quite a lot about the pain of renegotiating boundaries, the mutable bounds of privacy, property, and solitude. And extinction. I was thinking a lot about that which cannot last. I was grieving.
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