Our editors share a few of the most memorable books of the year
Michelle Bailat-Jones, translations editor
Translated from Dutch by Michele Hutchison, Gerda Blees’ We Are Light (World Editions, 2023) is an innovative and riveting multi-vocal novel following three members of the Sound and Love Commune—who believe they can exist on light and love alone—after one of their members starves to death. The voices are, as expected, the different characters connected and related to the woman who has died, but there are also many inanimate (though very animate) voices—of a cello, a scent, a pair of socks. The novel is a creative and, at times, devastating portrait of loneliness as well as a reflection of contemporary society.
Much like her earlier Bellevue (2010), Ivana Dobrakovová’s Mothers and Truckers (Jantar, 2022), translated from Slovak by Julia and Peter Sherwood, is an intense reading experience. While Bellevue successfully took the novel form, with a pleasantly fractured style and dark humor, Mothers and Truckers is a slim volume of five stories, each turning around a different woman—Svetlana, Ivana, Olivia, Lara, and Veronika—with her own particular experience of despair. That sounds bleak, but the stories are not. They are everything that an interesting person is: self-aware, anguished, humored, careful, tender, curious, grim, hopeful, angry.
Two other books were high points of my 2023 reading. The first is The Wall by Marlen Haushofer, translated from German by Shaun Whiteside (New Directions, 2022). In this novel, a woman wakes one morning after spending the night at a friend’s cabin in the woods to discover there is an invisible wall between her and the rest of the world. Also, everyone else seems to be dead. Haushofer’s novel, which was originally published in 1963 and first translated into English in 1990, is a favorite of mine. When I saw that New Directions had republished it recently, with same translator and translation, I jumped to reread it as it is one of those books that feels relevant to any era. It did not disappoint on rereading, and its questions about human connection felt particularly keen after the recent pandemic.
The second high point was Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov, translated from Bulgarian by Angela Rodel (Norton, 2022). Truly clever, this excellent book about the pitfalls and thrills of memory and nostalgia (and so much more). It won the International Man Booker 2023; in-depth reviews abound. Nothing I could say in a few lines would do it justice. But it was one of the very best books of my year and my list would not be complete without it.
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Lacey Dunham, fiction editor
This year, my interests pulled me repeatedly towards novels where complex group dynamics take center stage. Nowhere are group relations more contrived, precarious, and consequential than in academic settings.
It’s 1897, and Irish Catholic Agnes is an outsider at college, both because of her ethnic and religious identities but also because of her demeanor and single-minded purpose. Agnes is an astute medical scholar with an eye on becoming a doctor. When her best friend, Bertha, mysteriously disappears, Agnes finds herself further estranged from her wealthy classmates and simultaneously under scrutiny from Bertha’s family, fiancé, and the private detective hired to locate her. Katharine Beutner’s Killingly (Soho Crime, 2023) is pulled from the actual disappearance of a Mount Holyoke student, but the novel is far from “ripped from the headlines” melodrama. Instead, it’s a compelling narrative about personal choices, family secrets, relationships between women, and the lengths we’ll go to for those closest to us.
While Killingly ends on an uplifting note of women supporting other women, Catherine Chidgey’s Pet (Europa Editions, 2023) is a psychological thriller with a manipulative woman at its heart. Set primarily in a 1984 New Zealand Catholic school, Justine’s mother has recently passed away from breast cancer. When her grieving father becomes emotionally distant, she finds comfort in her friend, Amy, whose parents are immigrants from Hong Kong, and in the attention of her classroom teacher, Mrs. Price, whom all the students adore. A thief soon begins to take students’ trinkets, and Mrs. Price is determined to root out the culprit, using her masterful skills of manipulation to turn the students on one another. The plot takes increasingly darker turns as the students’ devotion is twisted and exploited in this savvy novel that touches on themes of race, religion, and gender. Chidgey’s writing is sharp, and Pet is a compulsive page turner.
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Diane Josefowicz, books editor
When the narrator of At the Edge of the Woods by Kathryn Bromwich (Two Dollar Radio, 2023) abandons her ordinary life for a cabin in the Italian Alps, her presence touches off an ominous chain reaction in the neighboring village. But her solitary forest existence makes her strong and resourceful; she learns to glean sustenance from the surrounding hills while building what social bridges she can on occasional trips into town. This absorbing novel is an allegory of what it takes to change a life, to revise an unsatisfying status quo into an existence on fresh terms that are, if simpler, more one’s own. I read it in a single sitting, entranced as much by the premise as by Bromwich’s tautly lyrical style.
Longlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize, Selby Wynn Schwartz’s After Sappho (Galley Beggar, 2022; Liveright, 2023) is a fictional biography, told in scraps and glances, of queer writer and radical Lina Poletti (1885-1971), whose whirlwind existence included a passionate affair with the actress Eleanor Duse. This kaleidoscopic novel veers between the ecstatic and the hilarious, as when Duse accompanies Lina to the Florentine villa of the American socialite Mabel Dodge, who “kept dogs and disapproved of almost everything else” and “observed that Lina seemed to be wearing trousers and could not enter a room without imperiling dozens of porcelain pugs.” Lina struggles with her work; her characters won’t be corralled into the usual roles to be found in history and myth. “That was the beauty of Helen,” Lina reflects slyly. “While she was at sea, you could always hope that she was bound not for Troy but for Mytilene”— and in a phrase Schwartz raises the thrilling possibility of queering the Iliad. The view shifts again, and the novel’s clear-eyed chorus responds: “But it was difficult to write such things, we understood, because it was difficult to live them.”
Racing through genres from jokes to road trips to fairy tales, Alla Gorbunova’s It’s the End of the World, My Love, translated by Elina Alter (Deep Vellum, 2022) is a delirious post-Soviet coming-of-age romp with a singularly melancholy backbeat. Loosely anchored to the exploits of a teenager named Nastya, who is growing up fast in tough times, the novel has something for every taste in vicarious hard living—running away, brawling, sexual exploits, delinquencies of all kinds. But where the novel truly shines is in how it makes Nastya’s frantic storytelling the vehicle of her deliverance. As Nastya lives, loves, and suffers, she retains an awareness of herself apart from her losses. Within her is a powerful, Blakean child “whom everyone who comes to love wants to reach,” who lives not in reality but “in the very depths of childhood’s dream.”
Just about every story collected in Luke Dani Blue’s engaging Pretend It’s My Body (Feminist Press, 2022) punches above its weight. Characters appear fully in the round, inviting readers to imagine bodies and psyches at once vulnerable and powerful, knowing and blind. All are all stuck—between genders, lovers, jobs, changes of address, mind, heart, state. In “My Mother’s Bottomless Hole,” a queer English teacher struggling with inklings of transition returns to her mother’s house during the pandemic and finds that her mother has installed a black hole in the back yard. Unnerved, the daughter tries to get the hole uninstalled. No such luck—and she can’t uninstall her mother either. “When I die,” the mother tells her daughter, in a line that made me laugh until I wept, “I want you to throw me in the hole.”
The premise of Jen Craig’s smartly disquieting latest novel, Wall (Zerogram, 2023) is simple: The narrator’s last surviving parent has died, leaving behind a houseful of accumulated junk for her to sort, order, and dispose of. An artist, she intends to organize these items into an installation inspired by Chinese contemporary artist Song Dong’s Waste Not (2005), in which he arranged ten thousand of his dead mother’s belongings, including her house’s wooden frame, in an exhibit at the MoMa. Unfolding in massive paragraphs, Wall alternates between the narrator’s panicked efforts to organize her father’s things and her equally unhinged ruminations about them, flights she shares self-defeatingly with an elusive older man she desperately wants to please. Craig sends up the absurdities of the art world by juxtaposing them with the material conditions, equally absurd but more desperate, of a flawed person who is nonetheless an artist, earnestly caught up in the throes of her work.
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Steve Himmer, editor
Much of the reading I’ve done over the past several months, I realized when I sat down to write my part of this round up, has been for work. Some of it older novels for discussion with students, the rest of it students’ own writing which isn’t (yet!) available for me to recommend to our readers. But there were also some exciting, surprising recent books I’ve kept thinking about.
Sports and Social (Bluemoose Books, 2023) is Kevin Boniface’s first book of fiction, but I’m a longtime fan of his ongoing project recording incidents and observations along his daily route as a mail carrier. This collection of stories is like stopping at the doors and windows of the route a bit longer to see how those glimpsed moments are woven into whole lives, with the same humor, suspension of judgment, and — the quality I marvel at most — precision of detail.
Ashton Politanoff’s You’ll Like It Here (Dalkey Archive Press, 2022) pays a similar kind of attention but rather than private experience he reveals moments when individual lives slip into public view. Constructed as a series of historical news clippings — objects that would fit right into Boniface’s book — You’ll Like It Here presents the early days of Redondo Beach, California with all the idiosyncratic, absurd, tragic, and infuriating instances that make up any place. The ways in which Politanoff’s clippings are both specific to that time and place, and to those people, balance against the ways in which the coincidences and accidents that amount to the life and times of Redondo Beach could be anywhere and happen to anyone, a juxtaposition I enjoyed watching develop throughout the book.
The Bear Woman by Karolina Ramqvist, translated from Swedish by Saskia Vogel, also reveals overlooked lives in history but in this case by following the trail of Marguerite de la Rocque, a French noblewoman abandoned on a Canadian island in the sixteenth century. Her story is one of cruel misogyny and greed, told in tandem with the present day story of a Swedish writer not unlike Ramqvist herself as she discovers then uncovers Marguerite’s life. The Bear Woman asks what it means to tell stories, who gets to tell them, and what it is for, through a character whose work uncovering historical lives shapes her own modern life as well as the lives of others around her as she works. A section in which the narrator takes her teenage daughter on a research trip to France, layering the distant past, the more recent past of the narrator’s own younger years, and the present trip as a moment in her daughter’s life, has come back to me many times since I read it.
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