just an occasionally updated list that goes to 11
Sumita Chakraborty, ARROW: This is a poetry collection that’s entirely amazing for how much it does–it’s intellectual, human, thoughtful, sad, hurt, celebratory…so many great things. From “Essay on Joy”: “When as a child my father deemed my weight excessive, the measure of which shifted according to whim, he would take his underwear off of his body and place it on top of my head.”
Ota Pavel, HOW I CAME TO KNOW FISH: What a great collection recommended by a political science friend: quietly set against a backdrop of war, this is absolutely lovely and cheerful, stories told by a son about his Czech father who loves fishing and stubbornly keeps trying to defeat fish, eels, and the river from which they come.
Katie Ives, IMAGINARY PEAKS: I’m not quite finished with this…it’s a lovely book (by a grad school peer! go Katie!) about, literally, climbing mountain peaks–and entails so much more: the romance (and despair) of seeking out the unknown, the reassurance of nature’s sublimity, the impacts of colonialism/wanting to name/know everything. Impeccably researched, entirely inspiring.
Kevin Allardice, AS THE CEILING FLEW AWAY: Lucky to’ve read an early copy of this wonderfully bizarre book. Set on the island-nation Arolia (named due to a typo and, according to its citizens, the original inspiration for The Tempest), we follow our sad-sack hilarious narrator as he tries to place an immigrant couple and survive his own ruined marriage. Allusive-rich, a touch zany, entirely warm and funny.
Kiik Araki-Kawaguchi, THE BOOK OF MARGARET AND KANE
Carribean Fragoza, EAT THE MOUTH THAT FEEDS YOU
Liliana Colanzi, OUR DEAD WORLD: This is a small, intimate, and alarming collection of mostly magical realism stories from a very talented young Bolivian author who studied (studies?) at Cornell. The stories span the United States, Europe, and South America, and feature, variously, a young woman unsettled by a disembodied eye that follows her around, watching as she suffers the world’s abuses; a drug dealer’s girlfriend stuck in a hotel bar while a cannibal is on the loose; a photographer’s assistant suffering the awfulness of his boss and the strangeness of a gloriously in-fighting family…and more. Unsettling fiction at its best.
Lucy Corin, THE SWANK HOTEL: I meant to write about this earlier…this is a challenging book in its style and ambition–that’s meant both as praise and as wariness. Corin (one of my favoritefavoritefavorite living authors) takes an approach to the very writing of sentences and paragraphs that forces you to, in a way, re-learn how to read. Braided essays are sort of all the rage–this is an enormous novel written, at the sentence level, of so manymany braids. Overwhelming? Totally. Impressive? More so.
Moon Bo Young, PILLAR OF BOOKS: Hilarious, strange, an onrush of off-beat flash fictions (maybe some poems?) that look at the bothers and lovelies of existence with a very keen and disturbed viewpoint. From “Lips”: “I inspect the half pair of lips. I put them down. I can’t read the lips. We become lovers.” A little goes a long way here–the perfect kind of book to flip through/read sections at random to start your day, or to end your day, or to smuggle into meetings.
Gary Paulsen, HATCHET: Loved, loved, loved this book as a something-old adolescent, and was gifted it again recently (along with an actual hatchet that coincidentally matches the special anniversary book cover). While it’s not quite the work of art I remember it to be–rarely is anything; those are the things to treasure most–it’s an engaging read with, really, a message of (and directions for) perseverance and calm under duress.
Jenny Yang Cropp, STRING THEORY: Beautiful, sad poems about family, being Korean-American (in America, in Korea), about existing in other spaces, spaces which we enter through beautifully rendered quiet, evocative, poignant moments–as in “Monsoon Season”: “My last night, leaning over the sill // I lit matches and dropped them, / counting the seconds it took // for each flame to fizzle out, not one / strong enough to light a path to the ground.”