(My) Imprints of the Year

At the close of this year, I'd like to sidestep the naming of favorite books to honor two imprints instead—imprints whose books most advance my faith in publishing and occupy much of my shelf space. The first, of course, is Graywolf Press, which publishes my dear friend Alyson Hagy (Ghosts of Wyoming), introduced me to my now-friend Jessica Francis Kane (The Report), publishes the brilliant Per Petterson (I Curse the River of Time), puts out books that consistently surprise me (take Vanishing Point, that fascinating riff on memoir by Ander Monson), and celebrates some of the best poets of our day (Jane Kenyon, Linda Gregg, Carl Phillips, Thomas Sayers Ellis). Look for The Last Brother, a Nathacha Appanah novel being released from Graywolf in February.  I started the book this morning.  It is going to be an everlasting favorite.

The second honorable, wonderful, heart dance of an imprint is Black Cat, of Grove Atlantic, which publishes some of the most beautiful original trade paperback novels and nonfiction I've ever seen.  I first started connecting the imprint itself to actual book titles when I read Chloe Aridjis's Book of Clouds, an utterly sensational and surreal portrait of Berlin.  More fabulous Black Cat titles came my way (an angel sent them), and I was hooked.  This year The Disappeared by Kim Echlin engulfed me.  I laughed hard at Steve Hely's How I Became a Famous Novelist, and for Christmas I am buying myself Vida, the  Patricia Engle story collection that was named one of the 100 Notable Books of the Year by the Times. 

The end of real literature is not near.  It lives among gray wolves and black cats.

Read more...

The Disappeared by Kim Echlin: Thoughts

No, there wasn't time to read, but there's no not reading Kim Echlin's The Disappeared. There's no easy way to summarize this gorgeous, disturbing book, either—taut as it is, urgent, spanning decades, rubbed into with the raw horror of the Cambodian genocide yet at the same time suffused with the unbrittle beauty of a country doused in the sudden gold of late afternoon and the "uncurtaining" of a full moon on the face of a canal.

Yes, of course—this book is about love. Impossible love. About a young woman—just sixteen—who meets a young man, a refugee of the Khmer Rouge regime, in a bar in Montreal. When Serey leaves Montreal for home, Anne Greves cannot follow. When she can, years later, she does. In that crippled, mottled, brilliant-hued country, there is only them, but that's not true (it never is). There are the wells of secrets, there are the mass graves of tens of thousands, there is the desperation of the survivors pitted against the atrocities of the dead.

Who can be saved from any of that?

Who can forget it, who won't be shaped by it, who will not live an entire life aching?

I was laughing the way I used to before my laughter hid things, before I lost love. There are lines like this. But I was no longer wedded to life. Neither was I yet married to death. I was memory and hope calculated to their smallest ratio.

Often, you read a book and you say to yourself: Ah, how well-constructed. How smart. How pretty or savvy the sentences. How clever.

There are other books, though, and they are much rarer, when you think: This writer had no choice but to make this book, and in making it, she lived it, and in living it, she left her very soul on the page. And you want to reach out to the writer, offer up your own sad bones of shelter.

Read more...

The Books I Bought This Week

I have a funny habit of buying books when I know—it's an unbeatable, unbearable fact—that there will be no time to read them. They sit on the chair that sits opposite my desk, their lovely perfect spines toward me. They tease, they seduce until I finally give in—slip one into my bag and take it with me, everywhere.

I steal into a page or two while waiting in the Whole Foods line. I read while warming up for Zumba. I hover over pages while on hold on conference calls. I say to my husband, "Go ahead. No, seriously. You watch that show on the air battles of World War II; I'm just going to go upstairs."

It feels so good it almost feels wrong.

Here are the books that came into my home this week, in the order in which I believe I will read them. (I've already started The Disappeared, and so far it's the dream I thought it would be after reading the review in last week's Times):

The Disappeared (Kim Echlin)
The Girl with Glass Feet (Ali Shaw)
How I Became a Famous Novelist (Steve Hely)
A Jury of her Peers (Elaine Showalter)
Unfinished Desires (Gail Godwin)

Read more...