The author's bookshelfThe literature world was weird this year. I almost don’t remember it. It was rapid, and overflowing with so many new presses and faces and legs that it was hard to know where to look and who or what didn’t suck. I started the year off vowing that I would not read anything by American authors for the entirety of 2013. I made it through like two months before caving, but a good long breath like that far from our lard shores was nonetheless refreshing, like a blanket over the face.Two of my best experiences were devouring all of the Kobo Abe and Thomas Bernhard novels that I hadn’t yet read, back to back, in short periods, which kind of cooked something about each of those minds into me that hadn’t been there before. I’m going to find a couple of bodies of work worth doing this with every year from now on.Some of my worst experiences this year—and every year—came from trying to read the books everyone is raving about at any given moment. I always feel like either I’m missing something or they’re missing something. The end of the year Best Of lists always seem to reinforce that theory, as I always wonder how so many people got so much out of a novel that to me read like a knockoff of the books that were on the same lists last year. But so it goes.In celebration of my annual distaste for adding onto the pile of what seemed biggest in the last twelve months, here’s the list of everything I read this year, regardless of when it was written or how good it was, with some particular standout highlights.***A Day in the Strait by Emmanuel HocquardThe Obscene Madame D by Hilda HilstA close friend of one of my favorites, Clarice Lispector, Hilst isn’t a far cry from the fragmentary, mutative mindset of that relation. This brief 57-page meta-monologue is stuffed to the gills with ideas of madness from a mind you actually want to see run rampant. It gushes in a somehow more intimate and raving Beckett-ian mode. I wish there were a shitload of little shattering novellas like this everywhere, available in gas stations, as a drug.The Ruined Map by Kobo AbeProstitution by Pierre GuyotatThe Use of Speech by Nathalie SarrauteThe Box Man by Kobo AbeReflections by Mark InsingelThe Moon’s Jaw by Rauan KlassnikTenth of December by George SaundersRed Doc > by Anne CarsonThree by Ann QuinThe Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey EugenidesCastle to Castle by Louis-Ferdinand CélineTaipei by Tao LinNo disappointment after the hype for this new novel from someone whom I’ve always looked to as an icon just ahead of the curve. Taipei takes everything Tao Lin was always astounding at—intricately bizarre observations of social contexts and the moment-to-moment shades of one’s emotions—to a newly effective depth. The book holds nothing back, fusing Wallace-sized sentence structures with Tao’s masterful minimalism, while somehow managing to infuse the mutative energy of the internet in what may end up being the most open look at the inner workings of a young person in whatever social era we’re currently trapped in.The Face of Another by Kobo AbeThe Map & The Territory by Michel HouellebecqNever having been a big Houellebecq enthusiast, I was pleasantly surprised by this one. The Map & The Territory seemed much more expansive than the French bitchboy’s usual sex-obsessed contraptions. Essentially cataloguing the life and career of a high-end photographer who builds a reputation out of a few rare conceptual projects, he soon ends up running into a character in the form of Houellebecq himself. A brutal incident and some strange complications end up turning the book into something mysterious and charged with an energy most hyper-realistic conceptual novels never manage.Kangaroo Notebook by Kobo AbeBurial by Claire DonatoHotel Crystal by Olivier RolinOn its face a catalog of meticulous architectural descriptions of different hotel rooms across the world, Rolin does something pretty sublime in building a suspenseful narrative, not to mention a great deal of oblique character development with the voice that emerges underneath. Basically a hyper-speed Robbe-Grillet-like concept pulled off with haunting flourish. I don’t think I’ll forget the way this book felt.A Naked Singularity by Sergio de la PavaThe Ark Sakura by Kobo AbeDark Matter by Aase BergBillie the Bull by xTxCrapalachia by Scott McClanahanWalking Across A Field We Are Focused On At The Time by Sara WintzTimes Squares Red Times Square Blue by Samuel DelanyExtinction by Thomas BernhardThe Last Scrapbook by Evan DaraSolip by Ken BaumannYoung Tambling by Kate GreenstreetCrush by Richard SikenConcrete by Thomas BernhardHybrids of Plants and of Ghosts by Jorie GrahamScience by Emily ToderThe Lime Works by Thomas BernhardUSO: I’ll Be Seeing You by Kim RosenfieldTroublers by Rob WalshWoodcutters by Thomas BernhardCan It! by Edmund BerriganGrace Period: Notebooks, 1998-2007 by Aaron KuninThrone of Blood by Cassandra TroyanThe First Four Books of Sampson Starkweather by Sampson StarkweatherTampa by Alissa NuttingHaute Surveillance by Johannes GöranssonMay We Shed These Human Bodies by Amber SparksThe Global Struggle for Dead Milk by Mark BaumerSomeone Who Did Something by Mark BaumerA Crack Up At The Race Riots by Harmony Korine (reread)I Live I See by Vsevolod NekrasovOne Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses by Lucy CorinJoie de Vivre by Lisa JarnotTina by Peter DavisThe Devotional Poems by Joe HallZazie in the Metro by Raymond QueneauSalamandrine: 8 Gothics by Joyelle McSweeneyA Questionable Shape by Bennett SimsRontel by Sam Pink7 American Deaths and Disasters by Kenneth GoldsmithBoycott by Vanessa PlaceThe Descent of Alette by Alice NotleyThe Skin Team by Jordaan MasonIn the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods by Matt Bell1986.6 by Matthew RobersonNight Moves by Stephanie BarberThe Flamethrowers by Rachel KushnerHe Died With His Eyes Open by Derek RaymondI Was Dora Suarez by Derek RaymondMurder by Danielle CollobertThe Fassbinder Diaries by James PateOn Ghosts by Elizabeth RobinsonMira Corpora by Jeff JacksonThe Suiciders by Travis JeppesenIf you want to talk about writing that can go almost anywhere at any time, from word to word, you should be talking about Jeppesen. On its face a novel about a bunch of punk squatters who fuck each other and eat drugs constantly, The Suiciders is really more a mechanism where every line is a weapon in and of itself. Paragraph by paragraph this book just deluges every sort of sense and sentiment in the most hyper-violent language this side of Guyotat or Sade. “TVLand is so much better than the WWW,” it goes. “I need world. I’m fried inside myself tonight. There are so many warblings out there to satiate the hunger that de-defines your spite version. I need a hammer. I will only go into the water if I am holding one.” Big balls, big syllables, big fuck.Pop Corpse by Lara GlenumIn the Moremarrow by Oliverio GirondoMouth of Hell by Maria NegroniThe Parapornographic Manifesto by Carl-Michel EdenborgThe Warmth of the Taxidermied Animal by Tytti HeikkinenDamnation by Janice LeeSexual Boat (Sex Boats) by James GendronAn Impenetrable Screen of Purest Sky by Dan Beachy-QuickMoods by Rachel B. GlaserFlee by Evan DaraAn Episode In The Life of a Landscape Painter by Cesar AiraOld Friends by Stephen DixonPhone Rings by Stephen Dixon100 Billion Days & 100 Billion Nights by Ryu MitsuseThe Strangers by Eugene LimGil the Nihilist by Sean KilpatrickSean Kilpatrick remains one of my favorite working writers, and this may be his most fucked yet. Set up as the shooting script for a sitcom revolving around three anarchic, misogynistic, desperately horny and beautiful pieces of shit, Gil the Nihilist lays it on thick from the first page and only gets more and more pigged out and black to the heart as it goes. Most any sentence Kilpatrick piles on is one you could get tattooed on your gums: “I bow to fast food. My smelted teensy ritual. It vacations in your catheter. The animal supplement smacks of copyright. Go on, shine what bucks you. No one takes their vitamins alone.”Tlooth by Harry MathewsEven Though I Don’t Miss You by Chelsea MartinHere Come the Warm Jets by Alli WarrenGeorge Anderson: Notes for a Love Song in Imperial Time by Peter DimockBerg by Ann QuinDeath Kit by Susan Sontag20 Lines a Day by Harry MathewsPersonae by Sergio de la PavaThe follow up to his totally fantastic novel A Naked Singularity (one of my favorites published last year), Personae takes on such a different shape it’s hard to believe it’s written by the same author. Where Singularity was gripping in voice and sheer ability to build pace and tension, Personae exhibits a whole other sheath of skills, one much more oblique and collage-like in its trajectory. And yet, de la Pava’s line-to-line brilliance and ambition are unmistakably his, and the manner in which he pilots this wide array of perspectives and tones opens over you in a wholly unexpected way, closer to Calvino now than Wallace. Personae cements de la Pava as one I will look forward to reading in years ahead.Cigarettes by Harry MathewsCreature by Amina CainCollected Alex by A.T. GrantFun Camp by Gabe DurhamOur Lady of the Flowers by Jean GenetMine by Peter SotosTelevision by Jean-Philippe ToussaintCollateral Light by Julia CohenYou and Me by Padgett PowellThe Desert Places by Amber Sparks and Robert KlossThe Compleat Purge by Trisha LowThe Magic Mountain by Thomas MannI decided to close out 2013 with one of the novels I’ve had on my Must Read Soon list for years and years now. I’m still reading it, but it’s becoming perhaps the brightest spot of the year. Ostensibly a 700-page chronicle of a man’s 20-year decline into a world of mental illness, spurred from simply going to temporarily visit a relative in an asylum and then just sticking around and taking part, the novel is sad in a calm, claustrophobic sense. Among long Moby Dick-like philosophical diatribes and strangely mesmeric scenes centered around food and music and desire, what really begins to eat at you is the sense of time as a destructor, and the mutability of a person surrounded and dying day by day. It’s rare a work can be so calm and enchanting about almost nothing for pages and pages while gradually accumulating a wide understanding of death.@blakebutler
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