This imaginative drive to bring farcical inevitability under control is both disciplined and, as G.K. Chesterston points out, romantic. In his defense of the “lighter and wilder forms of art,” Chesterton whimsically describes the “nameless anarchism” behind our desire for farce:

To the quietest human being, seated in the quietest house, there will sometimes come a sudden and unmeaning hunger for the possibilities or impossibilities of things; he will abruptly wonder whether the teapot may not suddenly begin to pour out honey or sea-water, the clock to point to all hours of the day at once, the candle to burn green or crimson, the door to open upon a lake or a potato-field instead of a London street.

The descent into farce is thus an ascent into a higher imaginative realm, the yearning for a chaos more magical than the one that governs our lives.

Several recent farcical works have crafted this chaotic order to predictably entertaining effect. If you missed any of these the first time around, fear not. It is a minor readerly tragedy easily remedied.

1. Michael Frayn, Skios

In Skios, Michael Frayn, the author of the beloved theatrical farce Noises Off, set out to capture the same bustling comic energy in a novel. The plot involves Oliver Fox, a charming roué who on a whim decides to impersonate the keynote speaker of a European cultural conference taking place on a sun-baked Greek island. Fox is welcomed by the lovely Nikki Hook, who shepherds the impostor through the weekend’s events even as some part of her knows the dashing figure is too good — and good-looking — to be true. By a causal chain of events too complicated to recount here, Dr. Norman Wilfred, the real keynote speaker, adopts Oliver Fox’s identity only to be hounded by the latter’s scorned lovers and the scorching Greek sun.

In the novel’s first chapter, there is a description of the arriving plane carrying Oliver and Norman that aptly describes the farcical condition: “Too late now to alter what that was going to be. It was coming towards them all at 500 mph.” This inevitable force finds a particularly suitable target in the perfectly ordered and manicured grounds of the foundation’s retreat:

Everything was so at ease with itself, so delicately balanced, like the works of a good watch, or nature itself…It was a complete world, a miniature model of the European civilization that it existed to promote…

The very clockwork precision that makes this miniature world so balanced also makes it particularly primed for comic disruption. In one scene, Fox can’t remember the name of his cabin, all of which are named after Greeks. After shuttling among Xenocles, Theodectes, Menander, and Demosthenes, he convinces himself that Damocles is the right name. Oliver is wrong about the name but right in sense that Damocles is an apt figure for the farcical impostor who is always one false move, or unlucky circumstance, away from disastrous revelation. The least slip-up and the strings controlling the puppet show are severed, which is precisely what makes farce so exhilarating:“[Oliver] felt intensely alive, like a mayfly with only one day to enjoy it all.”

2. Penelope Lively, How It All Began

Penelope Lively’s How It All Began, which itself begins with an epigraph on chaos theory, is also structured around a merciless and uncontrollable causal chain of events. While Lively’s novel is best described as a comedy of manners, it originates by drawing on the accidents and “swerves” of farcical theater. The plot involves how the mugging of an elderly woman systemically “derail[s]” the lives of seven people. As the consequences of the mugging ripple outward, a series of personal, professional, and familial humiliations are “capriciously triggered” and meticulously chronicled by Lively.

How It All Began’s one true farcical character is a retired history professor, Henry, who is so quintessentially donnish that “you couldn’t invent him.” Some of the novel’s funniest scenes involve his doomed effort to host a TV program on Hogarth’s London for the BBC, whose executive is alternately fascinated and repulsed by the parodic don’s “awful appeal.” And yet his farcical status makes him an oddly moving figure of pathos as he muffs his lines and is mocked by youths hanging out on street corners. Among the seven people whose lives are disrupted by the mugging, one feels the most for Henry, whose harmless pedantry is exposed to the public’s — and the reader’s — enjoyment.

3. Dave Barry, Insane City

If you like your farce manic, pure, and pathos-free, then Dave Barry’s Insane City is perfect. The novel is set during the wedding weekend of a mismatched pair — the moneyed bride is a high-powered lawyer while the groom is a marketer who tweets about feminine hygiene products. The plot involves a lost wedding ring, Haitian refugees, and a stoned billionaire’s inventive, extravagant method of procuring late-night take-out. A sample sentence captures the spirit of the novel: “Any man fleeing from the police with three women, two children, and an orangutan is a friend of mine.” And that’s not even mentioning the flamingo suit and pirate ship.

4. Lucy Ellmann, Mimi

In the same manic vein is Lucy Ellman’s Mimi, a novel that stays true to farce’s etymologic roots — from farcire, to stuff — by packing in a romantic comedy, family tragedy, lists, music scores, a manifesto, and even a deli menu. The plot involves a neurotic Manhattan plastic surgeon who takes up with an free-spirited public speaking guru, Mimi, who in turn inspires him to start a feminist revolution. Ellmann’s is a frenetic, energetic style that attempts to will comedy into existence through sheer determination by deploying an army of exclamation marks, legions of italics, swarms of puns. Farcical in style if not in content, the novel feels somehow off, like a sentence with a dangling modifier. Unlike the concentrated zaniness of Barry’s south Florida or the delicate balance of Frayn’s circumscribed Skios, Mimi’s sprawl disperses Ellmann’s anarchic energy until it is too diffuse to provide a charge.

5. Helen DeWitt, Lightning Rods

There is not a trace of Ellmann’s exuberance to be found in Helen DeWitt’s Lightning Rods, a daring attempt to translate the bedroom farce into the boardroom. Her novel follows an entrepreneur who translates his particular sexual fantasy into a farfetched solution to combat sexual harassment in the workplace. For a fee, he supplies a company’s top earning workers with a perk that must break every OSHA regulation: anonymous sexual encounters with female employees specifically hired for the task. We learn all about the initial resistance to the idea, the hiring and implementation process and the ingenious contraption devised to back the undercover “lightning rods” into the bathroom’s handicap stall. With such a setup, the opportunity for farce abounds, but DeWitt seems more interested in pursuing her outrageous conceit with an equally outrageous affectlessness. The prose, by design, is as passionate as the sex, which is to say not very. Logic rather than Eros reigns. The real triumph is not in the satire of alpha-male behavior and female exploitation but in the novel-length commitment to so flat and eerie a comic vision.

6. Nathan Englander, “Camp Sundown”

Farces originated as brief comic interludes stuffed between longer, more serious fare. It is therefore fitting to conclude with two short stories, one from Nathan Englander’s collection, What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, and the other from Sam Lipsyte’s more recent The Fun Parts.

Englander’s “Camp Sundown” establishes a perfect farcical scenario — a geriatric camp in the Berkshires that “revives certain adolescent elements of human nature.” But the septuagenarians’ hijinks take a darker turn when several campers become convinced that there is a Nazi war criminal in their midst and resolve to bring him to justice. As the beleaguered camp director, Josh, puts it: “An old Nazi hiding in the Berkshires under the guise of a blue-toed low-sodium bridge-playing Jew. It is madness. It is too much to take.” Within the space of two-dozen pages, Englander pivots from the initial comic setup — and its pitch-perfect Jewish humor — to an unsettling and lyrical exploration of guilt, responsibility, and memory. The story ends gorgeously as the focus shifts from the old kvetches to the even older inhabitants of Camp Sundown, creatures who are immune from all human history and farce: “They watch those turtles on their slow march and behold those ancient creatures, shell-backed and the color of time, as they lower themselves, turtle upon turtle, disappearing into the stillness of the lake.”

7. Sam Lipsyte, “The Republic of Empathy”

Sam Lipsyte’s “The Republic of Empathy” is a kaleidoscopic story narrated by different voices, including that of a drone. The first narrator, William, witnesses a shocking accident on a Manhattan rooftop. Two janitors are rehearsing a fight scene for their action movie when one falls to his death. The scene rattles William but teaches him a valuable lesson we too often forget: “It just reminds you of the fragility of everything…Especially the fragility of brawling on the roof of a very tall building.” Later, William falls victim to an equally senseless act of violence, inexplicably targeted by a roving Reaper 5, or as the central command puts it, “a truly mouthwatering piece of drone ass.” If there is a moral in this slippery tale, it is that the dearth of empathy leads to terrifying farce; to viewing people as nameless, impersonal falling objects; to an absurd state of affairs in which a “slightly chubby man in his pajamas standing on his lawn in the middle of the night” is a valid target for a hyper-sexualized drone with a “death-bringing ass and titties” and a “sweet armored bod.”

The Millions has been on Tumblr for over a year now, and in that time we’ve discovered hundreds of fellow literary blogs on the platform. A year ago, I rounded up a list of my favorite Tumblr neighbors, and due to that list’s great response, I rounded up an additional batch six months ago. My goals both times were simple: to get more eyeballs on these great pages, and also to alert Tumblr agnostics of the vibrant literary community blossoming on the site. Hopefully I achieved both.

Today I’ve compiled the third installment in this series, and also the final piece to run on our main site. I do this not because I’ve run out of worthy selections. On the contrary, I believe Tumblr has matured into its own self-sustaining ecosystem of art and literature, and so I want these master lists to be natives within that ecosystem, too. This way the posts will be much more shareable on the site, and the blogs we list will be more immediately accessible to Tumblr users. As such, this third installment in our Great Taxonomy of Literary Tumblrs project will also serve as an introduction to a new, ongoing feature on The Millions’s own Tumblr blog: Tumblr Index. Going forward, the series will occasionally highlight a smaller and more detailed list of 4-5 blogs worth following. We’ll be able to keep readers clued into new developments on Tumblr as they happen, and we’ll be able to better explain what it is about each blog that we really enjoy. To follow the series, either follow our Tumblr or simply track the #TumblrIndex tag in the months to come. We hope to see you there!

One additional note: this list features much more art and photography than either of its predecessors. I felt readers might appreciate a visual break between book marginalia and curiosities.

0.0 Shameless Self-Promotion

• The Millions: duh!

0.1 General Best Practice

• Tumblr’s Official Book News Blog: This is the platform’s official dashboard for alerting users of new book deals, meet-ups, and general happenings in the online literary community.

1. Single-Servings

• NY Times Haiku: Haven’t you ever / wanted to read news stories / just like poetry?
• Chickens in Literature: As inspired as SpaghetMurakami, however drawing from a much wider and more diverse body of work.
• Printed Internet: What is the Internet if not the world’s best magazine?
• Book Stalker: One clandestine bookavore scours New York City readings and reports on how they went.
• Nabokolia: The creators of Reading Ardor bring together all things Nabokov into one tidy place.
• Daily Cheever: Not really “Daily,” but certainly “Cheever.”
• African Book Covers: A round up of some covers you might find in bookshops around Africa.
• The Diaries of Alejandra Pizarnik: The influential Argentine poet’s diary entries – spanning 1954 – 1971.
• Too Much Horror Fiction: A book art blog dedicated to spooky covers.
• New York Review of Bots: In the future, the Internet will be like Skynet: artificial, intelligent, and robotic.
• British Crime Writers Glaring: How many cases constitutes an epidemic?
• Sad YouTube: There’s some seriously melancholy poetry being written in YouTube’s comment sections.
• Put a Poe On It: And quoth the raven / everywhere.
• Simultaneous Reads: Be honest. You have like six tabs open right now.
• Pages and Polish: Now you can match your nails to your book to your bikini.
• Poets Without Clothes: [NSFW] “Naked, you are simple as one of your hands, / Smooth, earthy, small, transparent, round” – Pablo Neruda
• Who Pays Writers?: A useful resource for aspiring writers. Context is everything.
• My Daguerreotype Librarian: Think of this as an ongoing effort to locate the world’s first “sexy librarian.”
• Share Your Shelf: You can learn a lot about someone by looking at their bookshelves.
• Typographie: There’s more to typography than Helvetica.

2. Publishers

• Oxford University Press: We asked them to set up a blog last time, and boy did they deliver.
• Melville House: Serving up outstanding novellas and sarcasm since 2001.
• NYRB Lit: Bringing contemporary fiction of high literary caliber to eReaders around the world.
• Wave Books: Seattle’s indie poetry publishers.
• Workman: These New York-based publishers focus mostly on nonfiction, but their Algonquin imprint is also worth checking out.
• Black Balloon: Be sure to check out their ongoing Horatio Nelson Fiction Prize.

3. Libraries — Note: Tumblr is rife with libraries. They’re everywhere. I’ve included just two examples of individual branches below, but if you’re interested in more, I recommend these two guides: Archivists and Tumblarians.

• The ALA: The official Tumblr of the American Library Association’s Washington Office.
• Chicago Public Library: Located in Chicago, Illinois.
• Canterbury: Located in Caterbury, Connecticut.

4. Literary, Cultural, and Art Magazines or Blogs

• Kenyon Review: They’re not listed first because we share a color scheme, we promise.
• The Rumpus: Not only is their output excellent, but check out that Tumblog name! Wordplay, ahoy!
• Ploughshares: There’s a reason they lead all journals in Best American Short Stories selections.
• [PANK]: A consistently outstanding journal deserving way more attention than it gets.
• The Electric Typewriter: Rounding up great essays and articles from some of the world’s best.
• The New Republic: The revamped mainstay goes digital. (P.S. Guys, bring back your Daily Reader!)
• Heavy Feather Review: Vouched Books defined HFR’s style as “Bold and Big and Varied.”
• SunDog Lit: Drawing together voices from all over the country, this magazine is one to watch closely.
• TriQuarterly: Northwestern University’s journal of writing, art, and “cultural inquiry.”
• Helicon: Northwestern University’s undergraduates can throw down, too.
• Tongue: This literary journal celebrates “an expansive, poetic dialogue among communities of thought.”
• Bushwick Review: “It is not only a literary and art magazine, it is also a growing community of creative people.”
• Superstition Review: Arizona State’s online literary magazine.
• Columbia Journal: Columbia University’s MFA students highlight worthy writing and art.
• Stillpoint: Brought to you by undergraduates at the University of Georgia.
• Memory House: This University of Chicago journal highlights first person narratives.

5. Comics

• The Bristol Board: Comics art spanning many generations; there’s something here for everybody.
• Crimes Against Hugh’s Manatees: Daily comics delivered to your Dashboard, one silly post at time.
• Badly Drawn Human: A Venn Diagram overlap between song lyrics and drawings.

6. Art

• Black Contemporary Art: “A safe place for art about and by artists of the diaspora.”
• Walrus Magazine: Check out art from the magazine about Canada and “its place in the world.”
• Cave to Canvas: Art spanning the ages between Stone and Modern.
• Sketch the Book: Endearing reproductions of books and their designs.
• Scientific Illustration: All of the best visuals from science textbooks of all kinds.
• Geometry Daily: There’s something so comforting about mathematical precision.

7. Film

• Movie Bar Code: Apparently The Lorax is an extremely colorful movie.
• Criterion Collection: Come for the news about which movies are streaming for free, stay for the artful stills.

8. Photography

• NYC Past: Admire the city that no longer exists while you wait on a stuffy, overcrowded subway platform for a train that isn’t coming.
• Collective History: This blog looks at the world as it used to be, and in the process teaches us about things that feel new. (Pig Cafeteria is a personal favorite.)
• Explodingtorium: Archival material from San Francisco’s Museum of Human Perception.
• National Geographic (Found): Inspiring images from the world-renowned magazine’s archives.

9. LOL

• Neruda Cats: I can haz your Chilean poetry?
• Ke$hek: “Don’t stop / Make it pop. / DJ blow my speakers up. / In its very invisibility, ideology is here, more than ever.”
• Slush Pile Hell: Do not judge cranky literary agents until you’ve walked a mile through their inbox.
• When In Academia: GIF blogs, ahoy!
• PhD Stress: A secondary source in case the first one (above) wasn’t sufficient.
• Life In Publishing: …And also a GIF blog for those of us who chose publishing instead of postgrad.
• Best of NaNoWriMo: I see we’re taking some liberties with the word “best.”
• Thanks, Textbooks: “Really? But I like your brother, not you.”
• Jacket Party: The art of turning book covers into embarrassing messes.
• Citation Needed: Wikipedia has gotten better over the years, but some of these sentences… yeesh.
• Lousy Book Covers: In this case, it’s OK to judge a book by its cover.

10. Poetry

• Poetry Society of America: The nation’s oldest poetry non-profit shares tidbits of literary curiosities.
• Google Poetics: “Should I yes or no / should I leave you / should I go yes or no.”
• Free Crap On the Side of the Road: In our last installment, one reader alerted me to his ongoing poetry project: haikus about detritus on the side of the road. It’s incredible.

11. Bookstores (And their locations)

• McNally Robinson: Grant Park & Saskatoon, Canada
• Book Cellar: Chicago
• Wellesley Books: Wellesley (near Boston)
• Brookline Booksmith: Brookline (near Boston)
• The Astoria Bookshop: Queens
• Bureau of General Services: Queer Division: Manhattan
• One More Page: Arlington, VA
• Politics & Prose: Washington, D.C.
• PowerHouse Arena: Brooklyn
• WORD Dogs: Cutesville, a lesser-known neighborhood in Brooklyn
• Greenlight: Brooklyn

12. Honorable Mention

• OSU English: Ohio State’s English department seems pretty hip – must be why everybody in Columbus seems to be reading.
• Found Freebird: A collection of objects found inside of used books. As Adam Sternbergh noted, this really should be a Tumblr.

[Ed Note: Don't miss Part One and Part Two!]

Either sickening or illuminating, Koch’s book is an international success. With Koch climbing the U.S. bestseller lists, it’s time to take a closer look at some newly translated Dutch fiction.

The Dinner by Herman Koch, translated by Sam Garrett

Praised in the Netherlands, the U.K., and now the U.S., The Dinner is Herman Koch’s breakthrough novel. In the Netherlands, Koch is still first and foremost known as one of the makers of the satirical television series Jiskefet; only in recent years has he gained popularity as a novelist.

The Dinner is loosely based on the story of the murder of a homeless woman in Barcelona in 2005, set on fire by three “respectable” young men, children of The Dinner’s main characters, who are prominent politicians. Over the titular dinner, they must discuss the crime their sons committed. It has been recorded by a security camera and aired on national television in order to find the perpetrators, and so far their parents are the only ones who have recognized them. How loyal, the book asks, should parents be towards their children?

The Dinner isn’t a thriller in the usual sense of the word, because it’s not a real whodunit, but one could definitely call it a psychological thriller. Koch has a great talent for creating and maintaining tension in a storyline.

Tirza by Arnon Grunberg, translated by Sam Garrett

Tirza is a story about the obsessive love of a father for his daughter and is one of the most renowned novels by Amsterdam-born, New York City resident Arnon Grunberg, who debuted as a novelist in 1994 and has since created a vast oeuvre of fiction, literary journalism, essays, and stage plays.

Tirza revolves around Jörgen Hofmeester, for whom things aren’t going very well: he lost his job as an editor and all his savings after investing in a hedge fund. His wife left him, but suddenly returns after three years, shortly before their daughter Tirza is about to move out after graduating from high school.

Tirza is the apple of Hofmeester’s eye, and he can’t let her go. When Tirza introduces her boyfriend Choukri to him, Choukri’s strong resemblance to 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta occurs to Hofmeester, who starts to regard him as his “personal terrorist.” Later on, Tirza announces that she and Choukri want to travel to Africa. The three of them spend a weekend together at a farmhouse in the Dutch countryside before Hofmeester drops them off at the Frankfurt airport. The story reaches its apotheosis when Hofmeester, after not having heard from Tirza for a few weeks, travels to Namibia to look for her.

Ten White Geese by Gerbrand Bakker, translated by David Colmer

Just before he turned 44, Gerbrand Bakker surprised the world with his literary debut The Twin, which was published in 2006. The novel was highly praised, both in the Netherlands and abroad – it won him the Impac Dublin Literary Award among other prizes.

Ten White Geese, Bakker’s third novel, is mainly set in the Welsh countryside, during the months of November and December, where a woman from Amsterdam has left a painful situation to start all over again. As things develop in Wales — of the ten white geese to which the title refers, only four remain after two months — her husband, back home in Amsterdam, contacts the police and tries to find answers. On the day before Christmas, he and a policeman get on a ferry to the other side of the Channel, and the two story lines come together.

Ten White Geese has also been praised by both Dutch and international literary critics, especially for Bakker’s economical style and his descriptions of nature. There’s a lot that Bakker deliberately leaves unclear so that the reader can interpret the story on his own. In other words: in Bakker’s novels, nothing much happens, and that’s what makes them so powerful.

Little Caesar by Tommy Wieringa, translated by Sam Garrett

Tommy Wieringa wrote Little Caesar after gaining fame with his breakthrough novel Joe Speedboat. Both novels read like a fictional life story. Little Caesar chronicles the story of Ludwig Unger, son of a destructive artist and a porn star (Wieringa based this character on Jeff Koons’s and Ilona Staller’s son).

Little Caesar received mixed reviews after Joe Speedboat was unanimously hailed by the literary critics. Perhaps it was the constant comparison to its predecessor that made the critics doubt Little Caesar’s quality: while Joe Speedboat was mostly set in a rural Dutch village, Little Caesar has a great deal of symbolism and a story in which the protagonist travels all around the world. However, Wieringa still shows his quality as a literary craftsman, with a wonderful sense of style and tone, as we follow Ludwig – mostly in flashbacks after he returns to the British coastal town where he grew up – trying to cope with his difficult relationship with his mother and his quest to find his father in the Southern American jungle.

“You would know more than we do.”

“He speaks up in class?  That’s good because he doesn’t talk much at home.”

“I ask him if he has work for class but he always just says ‘no.’”

It makes me think that this is why The Catcher in the Rye is a classic. People are just so thrilled to hear a teenage boy’s thoughts.

Then maybe they’re sorry they asked.

There’s no getting around it: 15-year-old boys talk to their friends more than they talk to their parents. They probably talk to their dogs more than they talk to their parents. In class, they can’t stop talking for five minutes to work independently on a writing project, but when they get home, apparently, they’re mute.

When they’re talking in class, it isn’t about their thoughts and feelings. But my informal qualitative research suggests that young men today are growing up with the same basic longings and tribulations that Holden did. How do I know? How do I have any idea what these walking enigmas feel inside? By what they read, of course. Teenage boys might be closed books, but the ones that they open are those in which the author manages to capture the honest-to-god truth about coming age. Here are three books the teenage boys in my class have been reading:

The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky: I’m so excited that this novel has been made in to a movie; originally published in 1999, Perks might not be enjoying the readership it is today without the film publicity and modern cover art. The book merits its evolution from cult classic to mainstream movie fame — in turns heartbreaking and hilarious, Stephen Chbosky’s novel gets the coming-of-age motif just right. His character Charlie is the wallflower that the title references, and Charlie’s journey, told through letters to an anonymous recipient, is ultimately one of moving out onto that dance floor and of refusing to play bystander to his own life.

A freshman in high school, Charlie navigates friendship, bullying, crushes, sex, drugs, and loss. He is an earnest, shy kid who struggles against depression and seclusion, hanging on to moments of joy and human connection. The novel is just angsty enough to feel honest, without being cringeworthy, and the voice is real and raw. I haven’t met a student yet who didn’t relate to Charlie’s story.

Ball Don’t Lie by Matt de la Pena: One of my favorites this year, Ball Don’t Lie tells the story of Travis Reichard, or as his mom used to call him: Sticky Boy. Matt de la Pena’s character portrayal is incredibly rich — not only when it comes to Sticky, with his compulsive tics and subconscious motivations, but with the entire cast: Sticky’s addict mom, his girlfriend, Anh-thu, and all the boys who go head-to-head on the basketball court and the streets.

We first meet Sticky on the gym floor of Lincoln Rec: “the best place in L.A. to ball.” De la Pena’s description of the game and the boys who play it is so vivid you can hear the squeak of sneakers on the court and the thud of the ball on the bent and battered rim. Initially, all but the outcome of each play is a mystery, and it takes a while to get to know Sticky, a foster kid whose only dream is to play in the NBA. Sticky is slow to show himself, as his past has left him broken, and the uncertainty of his future leaves him guarded. But, chapter-by-chapter, piece-by-piece, greater depths are revealed, and the book opens up to an emotional and riveting account of an urban basketball community, and a boy looking for a home.

Will Grayson, Will Grayson by John Green and David Levithan: Yet another delight from John Green, and this time with the added bonus of Levithan, Will Grayson, Will Grayson tells the story of two Will Graysons: a pair of teenage boys who meet serendipitously, at a time when a small miracle of coincidence is just what each one needs.

The two male protagonists, one gay, one straight, navigate platonic and romantic relationships with varying degrees of success and failure, with all the modern day complications of texting and online messaging. The story builds to an epic climax, complete with a high school musical and passionate declarations of love. The writing is funny, the characters relatable, the circumstances engaging, the themes meaningful and poignant. I haven’t seen my copy of the novel since September: as soon as one student signs it in, another signs it out.

Most literary novelists feel relatively confident they can sell copies of their newly published book to their parents, probably to their siblings, maybe (if they haven’t sparred too often over loud music or lawnmowers or leaf blowers) to their neighbors. Their local bookstore, if they still have one, is likely to agree to carry the book too and may even put a copy in the shop window or on a central table.

With a review or two in a local paper, these same writers may also experience the disconcerting ecstasy of seeing their book in the palms of a stranger sitting across from them on a bus or subway. With a few reviews in a national publication or by powerful bloggers and Twitter pundits, he or she may receive SMS’d pics from friends who have seen it in bookstores in other U.S. towns and cities.

But how about beyond the fruited plain? Whose work gets read outside of America?

In 2008, Horace Engdahl, then permanent secretary of the Nobel Prize selection committee, infamously called American authors “too insular,” and “too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture.” The last American to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature was Toni Morrison in 1993; American writers, Engdahl said, “don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature.” The implication was no one cares about contemporary American fiction but Americans.

During the ten years I lived in France, I witnessed firsthand the regional limitations of American literary fiction. But not all American novels go unnoticed. On any bestseller list in France, you’ll find The Help and Fifty Shades of Grey and the latest book by Dan Brown. You’ll also find American literary fiction. You just won’t find all or necessarily the same books as on similar lists in America. [Editor's note: As the commenters have pointed out Fifty Shades author E.L. James is indeed British and not American. To clarify, her books, like The Help and those by Dan Brown have perched atop American bestseller lists.]

Distribution decisions play an obvious role: if a reader in Lyon can’t get a book, the reader in Lyon won’t be reading it. I was ready to kiss the ground the day my publisher decided to create a paperback international edition for my debut novel, An Unexpected Guest, in addition to the hardback U.S. edition. I’ve subsequently seen An Unexpected Guest on bookstore shelves not only in France, but also in England, Switzerland, and Finland. I receive messages through my website from readers as distant as India and Malaysia. Foreign rights sales also award far-flung readers (and in my case have given me a couple of new first names: “Anna” on the Russian edition; “En” in Serbia).

Set post-9/11 amongst expatriates in Paris, An Unexpected Guest seems a likely candidate for finding a global audience. But every country has its own literary predilections. With a relative absence of cronyism, the playing field is leveled; a new balance of criteria goes into building an audience. It seems to me that French readers frequently go for novels that manage to be both intensely American and yet possess one of the characteristics often attributed to works in their own contemporary oeuvre: dark, searching, philosophical, autobiographical, self-reflective, and/or poetic (without being overwritten). The last French novel I read, Le canapé rouge by Michèle Lesbre, clocked in at 138 pages, and French readers are not dismissive of short American novels either: Julie Otsuka’s 144-page-long Buddha in the Attic won this past year’s prestigious Prix Femina Étranger. But they are not averse to length either (see, for example, Joyce Carol Oates below). They also like authors who like France and have an understanding of French culture. They enjoy being taken to places – U.S. college campuses, inner Brooklyn, suburbia – they might normally never visit.

But just as there are many sorts of French authors, each American author admired in France brings an own set of attractions. Following are eight examples.

The New Yorker
During the ten years I lived in France, I could have easily believed Paul Auster was America’s preeminent living author. French prizes that Auster has won include the Prix France Culture de Littérature Etrangère, the Prix Medicis étranger, and Grand Vermeil de la Ville de Paris. In a 2010 interview, Auster, who lived in Paris from 1971-74, explained his cult-like status in France, thus: “In France, they feel I am on their side. It helps that I speak French. I am not the American enemy.” But can that account for the ardent following, which extends across the Continent, for his very New York-centric fiction? On his official Facebook page, a multi-lingual collage of comments, a Slovakian woman has this to say: “I generally don’t like American writers, but this one is really special, readable yet in-depth and philosophical.”

The Expat
Douglas Kennedy’s renown overseas was chronicled in a 2007 TIME article entitled “The Most Famous American Writer You’ve Never Heard Of.” It’s hard to pigeonhole Kennedy’s ten thought-provoking-yet-page-turner novels, but their immense popularity in France — indeed, in all of Europe — is borne out by the droves of adoring fans who line up for his signature and a second’s worth of his Irish-American charm. (I’m not making that up. I’ve seen them.) A Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, Kennedy keeps a home in Paris and speaks fluent French, but he was born and raised in New York City. His first three novels were published in the US, but when the last didn’t meet outsized expectations, U.S. publishers scattered. Alas for them – his fourth novel, The Pursuit of Happiness, sold more than 350,000 copies in the UK and more than 500,000 copies in France in translation alone.

The Soul Mate
Written more than a decade ago and more than 750 pages long, Blonde continues to fly off the shelf in French bookstores. The Falls won the 2005 Prix Femina for Foreign Literature. French director Laurence Cantet just brought out a film adaptation of Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang. I asked Joyce Carol Oates about her avid French following. “For me,” she says, “the very sound of French spoken is musical, beautiful, subtly cadenced.” Her involvement with French language began in high school; as an adult she has taught and published French literature. “This is my background for writing, and my relationship with the French reading public may be related to it.” She also praises her translators. But the French devour Oates’s dazzling, precise prose equally in English; at France’s largest English-language bookstore, WH Smith/Paris, along the Rue de Rivoli, Oates is one of the nine American authors of literary novels most in demand with customers. Perhaps her novels take French readers into an America that simultaneously surprises and confirms their expectations?

The Autobiographer
Philip Roth first won acclaim in France with Goodbye, Columbus in 1960; his fame was cemented with Portnoy’s Complaint in 1969. He’s since won the Prix de Meilleur livre étranger for American Pastoral and the Prix Médicis étranger for The Human Stain. The French often speak of a quasi-autobiographical quality in his works, citing it as a passageway to truths about certain periods of time and segments of society in America. It was during an interview about his most recent and apparently last novel, Nemesis, with the French publication, InRocks, that Roth chose to announce his intention to retire from writing fiction. The news spread like wildfire throughout France before it could even be picked up by a U.S. news agency.

The Poet
Go to “books” on the French Amazon site, type in “Laura,” and the first prompt to come up will be “Laura Kasischke.” Kasischke’s most recent novel, The Raising, became a bestseller in France within a matter of days; it was shortlisted for the 2011 Prix Femina Étranger, and nominated for the JDD France Inter Prix and Telerama-France Culture. Be Mine and In a Perfect World have sold prodigiously. In the U.S., Kasischke, who teaches at U. Michigan, has probably won more acclaim for her poetry. She graciously points to “having a fantastic editor and press… [and] fantastic translators” when I ask her about the recognition for her novels in France. But Kasischke was the other female author on the list of nine top-selling American authors given to me by WH Smith/Paris — like Oates, she is being read both in translation and in English. “She is the painter of the American Midwest, an America where behind the walls of nice manners live individuals overwhelmed with sadness and boredom,” influential French journalist Francois Busnel stated on French television last year.

The Cowboy
Whether set on the border areas of the U.S. and Mexico, in the South, or in post-apocalyptic landscape, Cormac McCarthy’s novels wax dark and darkly reflective. Oliver Cohen, Cormac McCarthy’s French editor, has explained their popularity in France thus: “McCarthy reveals a collective anguish, to which he figured out how to give a shape.” French novelist Emilie de Turckheim offered me for further insight: “[McCarthy] manages…. to use, with virtuosic erudition, all the lexical richness of his language… at same time as abusing and decomposing English syntax to create a language brutal, impressionistic, extraordinarily poetic, capable of mimicking the immense violence of everyday life.” The French routinely compare him to Faulkner, a deceased American author they venerate. The French translation of No Country for Old Men sold about 100,000 copies. La Route, aka The Road, has to date sold over 600,000, with no sign of abating.

The Philosopher-Poets
According to Sylvia Whitman, proprietor of the English-language bookstore near Notre Dame Cathedral, Shakespeare & Company, Russell Banks and Jim Harrison are among the five contemporary American authors most frequently requested by their French patrons. (The other three are Auster, Kennedy, and David Foster Wallace.) Banks and Harrison use literary realism to take their readers into richly tinted but not always rosy pockets of modern America. Harrison, whose numerous fiction works include Legends of the Fall and just-released The River Swimmer, lives in Montana; in France, he’s been described as “the bard of America’s wide-open spaces… of the eternal conflict between nature and society.” Like McCarthy, Harrison is considered a literary descendant of Faulkner. Russell Banks, whose many novels include The Sweet Hereafter and most recently The Lost Memory of Skin, lives in upstate New York; InRocks has called him “the best portraitist of marginal society in America.” In 2011, he was awarded him the rank of Officier des Arts et Lettres by the French Minister of Culture. Russell and Harrison both also write poetry — a sort of win-win, all things considered.

Ultimately, finding readership in France or elsewhere is like any love affair: alchemy, composed of varied, delicate elements. “Reading, an open door to the enchanted world,” wrote French Nobel laureate Francois Mauriac.

Image via christine zenino/Flickr

The list that follows isn’t exhaustive – no book preview could be – but, at 7,900 words strong and encompassing 79 titles, this is the only 2013 book preview you will ever need.

January or Already Out:

Tenth of December by George Saunders: Tenth of December is George Saunders at his hilarious, heartbreaking best, excavating modern American life in a way that only he can. In “Home,” a soldier returns from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to a deteriorating family situation. In “Victory Lap,” a botched abduction is told from three very different perspectives. Tenth of December has already prompted an all-out rave profile from the New York Times. And for those George Saunders super fans out there, yes, there is a story set at a theme park. (Patrick)

Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief by Lawrence Wright: While Wright was working on his 25,000-word take-down of the Church of Scientology for The New Yorker (where he is a staff writer), a spokesman for the organization showed up with four lawyers and 47 binders of documentation. “I suppose the idea was to drown me in information,” Wright recently told the Times, “but it was like trying to pour water on a fish.” The investigation has blossomed into a full-length book that’s shaping up to be as controversial as anything that crosses Scientology’s path: Wright has been receiving numerous legal missives from the church itself and the celebrities he scrutinizes, and his British publisher has just backed out—though they claim they haven’t been directly threatened by anyone. (Elizabeth)

Umbrella by Will Self: Shortly before Umbrella came out in the UK last September, Will Self published an essay in The Guardian about how he’d gone modernist. “As I’ve grown older, and realised that there aren’t that many books left for me to write, so I’ve become determined that they should be the fictive equivalent of ripping the damn corset off altogether and chucking it on the fire.” Umbrella is the result of Self’s surge in ambition, and it won him some of the best reviews of his career, as well as his first Booker shortlisting. He lost out to Hilary Mantel in the end, but he won the moral victory in the group photo round by doing this. (Mark)

Revenge by Yoko Ogawa: English-reading fans of the prolific and much-lauded Yoko Ogawa rejoice at the advent of Revenge, a set of eleven stories translated from Japanese by Stephen Snyder.  The stories, like Ogawa’s other novels (among them The Diving Pool, The Housekeeper and the Professor, and Hotel Iris) are purportedly elegant and creepy. (Lydia)

Ways of Going Home by Alejandro Zambra: Drop the phrase “Chilean novelist” and literary minds automatically flock to Bolaño. However, Alejandro Zambra is another name those words should soon conjure if they don’t already. Zambra was named one of Granta’s Best Young Spanish Language Novelists in 2010, and his soon-to-be-released third novel, Ways of Going Home, just won a PEN translation award. The novel has dual narratives: a child’s perspective in Pinochet’s Chile and an author’s meditation on the struggle of writing. In Zambra’s own words (from our 2011 interview): “It’s a book about memory, about parents, about Chile.  It’s about the 80s, about the years when we children were secondary characters in the literature of our parents.  It’s about the dictatorship, as well, I guess.  And about literature, intimacy, the construction of intimacy.” (Anne)

Scenes from Early Life by Philip Hensher: In his eighth novel, Scenes from Early Life, Philip Hensher “shows for the first time what [he] has largely concealed in the past: his heart,” writes Amanda Craig in The Independent.  Written in the form of a memoir, narrated in the voice of Hensher’s real-life husband Zaved Mahmood, the novel invites comparison with Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.  Described as a hybrid of fiction, history, and biography—and as both “clever” and “loving”—the inventive project here is distinctly intriguing. (Sonya)

Exodus by Lars Iyer: Exodus, which follows Spurious and Dogma, is the eminently satisfying and unexpectedly moving final installment in a truly original trilogy about two wandering British intellectuals—Lars and W., not to be confused with Lars Iyer and his real friend W., whom he’s been quoting for years on his blog—and their endless search for meaning in a random universe, for true originality of thought, for a leader, for better gin. (Emily M.)

February:

Vampires in the Lemon Grove by Karen Russell: Russell’s short stories are marked by superb follow-through: many succeed due to her iron-clad commitment to often fantastical conceits, like the title story of her first collection, St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, which draws a powerful metaphor for adolescent girlhood in an actual orphanage for girls raised by wolves. Last year saw her debut novel, Swamplandia!, nominated for the Pulitzer prize; this year, her second short story collection—and another batch of fantastical conceits—finally arrives. Just imagine the characters in this title story, trying to quell their bloodlust, sinking their fangs into lemons under the Italian sun. (Elizabeth)

My Brother’s Book by Maurice Sendak: When Maurice Sendak died last May he left one, final, unpublished book behind.  It is, according to a starred review in Publisher’s Weekly, a beautiful, intensely serious elegy for Sendak’s beloved older brother Jack, who died in 1995.  The story, illustrated in watercolors, has Guy (a stand-in for Sendak), journeying down the gullet of a massive polar bear named Death- “Diving through time so vast—sweeping past paradise”- into an underworld where he and Jack have one last reunion. “To read this intensely private work,” writes Publisher’s Weekly, “is to look over the artist’s shoulder as he crafts his own afterworld, a place where he lies in silent embrace with those he loves forever.” (Kevin)

Benediction by Kent Haruf: Kent Haruf’s previous novels, which include Plainsong and Eventide, have all taken place in the fictional Colorado town of Holt, which is based on the real life city of Yuma.  His newest work is no exception.  It is a network of family dramas in a small town, most of which revolve around loss or impending loss, strained relationships, and efforts to grapple, together, with the pain the characters face in their own lives and feel in the lives of those around them. (Kevin)

See Now Then by Jamaica Kincaid: For See Now Then, her first novel in a decade, Jamaica Kincaid settles into a small town in Vermont, where she dissects the past, present and future of the crumbling marriage of Mrs. Sweet, mother of two children named Heracles and Persephone, a woman whose composer husband leaves her for a younger musician.  Kincaid is known as a writer who can see clean through the surface of things – and people – and this novel assures us that “Mrs. Sweet could see Mrs. Sweet very well.” (Bill)

The Bridge Over the Neroch: And Other Works by Leonid Tsypkin: Like Chekhov, Tsypkin was a doctor by trade. In fact, that was all most people knew him as during his lifetime. At the time of Tsypkin’s death, his novel Summer in Baden-Baden, one of the most beautiful to come out of the Soviet Era, remained unpublished, trapped in a drawer in Moscow. Now New Directions brings us the “remaining writings”: a novella and several short stories. (Garth)

How Literature Saved My Life by David Shields: Like his 2008 book The Thing About Life is that One Day You’ll Be Dead, which was nearly as much a biology text book as it was a memoir, How Literature Saved My Life obstinately evades genre definitions. It takes the form of numerous short essays and fragments of oblique meditation on life and literature; and, as you’d expect from the author of Reality Hunger, it’s heavily textured with quotation. Topics include Shields’s identification with such diverse fellows as Ben Lerner (his “aesthetic spawn”) and George W. Bush, the fundamental meaninglessness of life, and the continued decline of realist narrative fiction. (Mark)

The City of Devi by Manil Suri: Manil Suri is perhaps best known for his first novel The Death of Vishnu, which was long-listed for the Booker and shortlisted for the 2002 PEN/Faulkner Award.  The City of Devi, his third novel, takes place in a Mumbai emptied out under threat of nuclear attack.  Sarita, a 33-year-old statistician, stays in the city to find her beloved husband, who has mysteriously vanished.  She ends up teaming up with a gay Muslim man named Jaz, and together they travel across this dangerous and absurd and magical landscape.  According to Keran Desai, this is Suri’s “bravest and most passionate book,” which combines “the thrill of Bollywood with the pull of a thriller.” (Edan)

Breakfast at Tiffany’s & Other Voices, Other Rooms: Two Novels by Truman Capote: Holly Golightly is turning 55, and to mark her entry into late middle age, the Modern Library is reissuing Capote’s dazzling 1958 novella that made her and Tiffany’s Fifth Avenue showroom into American icons. The short novel is paired with Capote’s (also brief) debut novel Other Voices, Other Rooms, a strange and haunting semi-fictional evocation of Capote’s hauntingly strange Southern childhood. Modern Library will also reissue Capote’s Complete Stories in March. (Michael)

Nothing Gold Can Stay by Ron Rash: Ron Rash has earned a spot as one of the top fiction writers describing life in Appalachia with his previous books, The Cove, Serena, and One Foot in Eden.  His newest collection of short stories tells of two drug-addicted friends stealing their former boss’s war trophies, of a prisoner on a chain-gang trying to convince a farmer’s young wife to help him escape, and of an eerie diving expedition to retrieve the body of a girl who drowned beneath a waterfall. (Kevin)

The Love Song of Jonny Valentine by Teddy Wayne: If you have ever wondered what, if anything, is going on inside the head of one of those kiddie pop stars who seem animatronically designed to make the tween girls swoon, then Jonny Valentine may be for you. Winner of a Whiting Writers’ Award for his first novel Kapitoil, Wayne has built a reputation for offbeat wit in his humor columns for Vanity Fair and McSweeney’s, as well as “Shouts & Murmurs” pieces in The New Yorker. Here, he channels the voice of a lonely eleven-year-old pop megastar in a rollicking satire of America’s obsession with fame and pop culture. (Michael)

Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked by James Lasdun: English poet, novelist and short story writer James Lasdun’s new book is a short memoir about a long and harrowing experience at the hands of a former student who set out to destroy him and through online accusations of sexual harassment and theft. J.M. Coetzee has called it “a reminder, as if any were needed, of how easily, since the arrival of the Internet, our peace can be troubled and our good name besmirched.” (Mark)

Fight Song by Joshua Mohr: Joshua Mohr’s previous novels—Some Things That Meant The World To Me, Termite Parade, and Damascus—formed a loose trilogy, each book standing alone but all three concerned with a mildly overlapping cast of drifting and marginal characters in San Francisco. In Fight Song, Mohr is on to new territory, “way out in a puzzling universe known as the suburbs,” where a middle-aged man embarks on a quest to find happiness, to reconnect with his distant and distracted family, and to reverse a long slide into purposelessness. (Emily M.)

March:

Middle C by William H. Gass: Not many writers are still at the height of their powers at age 88. Hell, not many writers are still writing at 88. (We’re looking at you, Philip Roth.) But William H. Gass has always been an outlier, pursuing his own vision on his own timetable. His last novel (and magnum opus) The Tunnel took thirty years to write. Middle C, comparatively svelte at 400-odd pages, took a mere fifteen, and may be his most accessible fiction since 1968′s In The Heart of the Heart of the Country. It’s a character piece, concerning one Joseph Skizzen, a serial (and hapless) C.V. embellisher and connoisseur of more serious forms of infamy. The plot, such as it is, follows him from war-torn Europe, where he loses his father, to a career as a music professor in the Midwest. Not much happens – does it ever, in Gass? – but, sentence by sentence, you won’t read a more beautifully composed or stimulating novel this year. Or possibly any other. (Garth)

The Burgess Boys by Elizabeth Strout: Maine native Elizabeth Strout won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2009 for Olive Kitteridge, her novel in the form of linked stories.  Strout’s fourth novel, The Burgess Boys, is the story of the brothers Jim and Bob Burgess, who are haunted by the freak accident that killed their father when they were children in Maine.  They have since fled to Brooklyn, but they’re summoned home by their sister Susan, who needs their help dealing with her troubled teenage son.  Once they’re back home, long-buried tensions resurface that will change the Burgess boys forever. (Bill)

The Fun Parts by Sam Lipsyte: Sam Lipsyte returns to short stories with his new book The Fun Parts. The collection contains some fiction previously published in The Paris Review, Playboy, and The New Yorker, including his excellent “The Climber Room,” which ends with a bizarre twist. Several of the stories, including “The Dungeon Master” and “Snacks,” explore the world from the perspectives of misfit teens. As with all of Lipstye’s stories, expect his absurdist humor and a just a touch of perversion. Get excited. (Patrick)

Red Doc> by Anne Carson: It’s been more than a decade since Carson, a poet and classicist, published The Autobiography of Red, a dazzling and powerful poetic novel that reinvents the myth of Herakles and Greyon: hero and monster reworked into a story of violently deep unrequited love. Red Doc> promises to be a sequel of sorts, with “a very different style,” “changed names,” and the spare preview is incredibly intriguing: “To live past the end of your myth is a perilous thing.”  (Elizabeth)

A Thousand Pardons by Jonathan Dee: Author of The Privileges, arguably the best novel about haute New York in the boom years of the past decade, Dee returns with another tale of family life in the upper reaches of New York society, this time post-recession. When her husband loses his job as a partner at a white-shoe law firm, Helen Armstead finds a job at a PR firm, where she discovers she has an almost magical, and definitely lucrative, gift: she can convince powerful men to admit their mistakes. But this is a novel, so her professional success does not necessarily translate into success in her personal life. (Michael)

Speedboat by Renata Adler: This novel, first published in 1976, brings to mind the old saw about the Velvet Underground. Not everybody read it, but everybody who did went on to write a novel of his or her own. Adler is primarily known for her acerbic New Yorker fact pieces, but, like her omnicompetent contemporary Joan Didion, she is also a terrific fiction writer. This fragmented look at the life of an Adler-like journalist may be her Play It As It Lays. Writers still urgently press out-of-print copies on each other in big-city bars near last call. Now it’s getting the NYRB Classics treatment. (Garth)

Mary Coin by Marisa Silver: Following the success of her novel The God of War, The New Yorker favorite Marisa Silver returns with Mary Coin, a novel inspired by Dorothea Lange’s iconic “Migrant Mother” photo. The book follows three characters: Mary, the mother in the photograph; Vera Dare, the photographer; and Walker Dodge, a contemporary-era professor of cultural history. Ben Fountain says it’s “quite simply one of the best books I’ve read in years,” and Meghan O’Rourke calls it “an extraordinarily wise and compassionate novel.” (Edan)

How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia by Mohsin Hamid: Hamid’s previous novels were The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Moth Smoke. His third borrows the structure of self-help books (chapter titles include “Avoid Idealists”, “Don’t Fall in Love”, and “Work For Yourself”) to follow a nameless man’s ascent from a childhood of rural poverty to success as a corporate tycoon in a metropolis in “rising Asia.” (Emily M.)

The Tragedy of Mr. Morn Vladimir Nabokov: I furrowed my brow when I saw Nabokov’s name on the preview list, imagining a horde of publishers rooting through his undies for hitherto undiscovered index cards.  But this is a very old play, in the scheme of Nabokov’s life–written in 1923, published in Russian in 2008, published in English this spring.  The play is about royalty, revolutionaries, allegories; “On the page,” writes Lesley Chamberlain for the TLS, ” the entire text creeps metonymically sideways. Its author weaves language into a tissue of reality hinting at some veiled, mysteriously interconnected, static truth beyond.”  I’m not sure what that means, but I think I like it. (Lydia)

The Book of My Lives by Aleksandar Hemon: Sarajevo-born, Chicago-based author Aleksandar Hemon—winner of the MacArthur “genius grant” and editor of Dalkey Archive’s stellar Best European Fiction series—abandons fiction for essay and memoir in his fifth book, The Book of My Lives. The title alludes to and, as far as we can tell, calls upon Hemon’s New Yorker essay “The Book of My Life,” about his former literature professor turned war criminal, Nikola Koljevic. Just as Hemon’s novel Lazarus Project straddled the fiction/nonfiction divide, The Book of My Lives isn’t strictly memoir, pushing boundaries of genre now from the nonfiction side. (Anne)

The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards by Kristopher Jansma: Kristopher Jansma, academic and Electric Literature blogger, drawer of daring and controversial parallels on the digital pages of our own august publication (Is The Killing like or not like Kafka?), publishes his debut novel on the first day of spring.  The novel features young writers, young love, artistic competition, girls, jaunts.  I predict that at least one blurber will reference This Side of Paradise. (Lydia)

A Map of Tulsa by Benjamin Lytal: In the 2003, “a young Oklahoman who work[ed] in New York” stole the eleventh issue of McSweeney’s from the likes of Joyce Carol Oates and T.C. Boyle with a story – well, scenario, really – called “Weena.” Maybe I only loved it so much because I, too, was from outlands like those it so lovingly described. Still, I’ve been keeping an eye out for that young Oklahoman, Benjamin Lytal, ever since. I assume that A Map of Tulsa, too, is about coming of age in Tulsa, a city that looks from the window of a passing car at night “like a mournful spaceship.” (Garth)

In Partial Disgrace by Charles Newman: Newman, the editor who put TriQuarterly on the map in the 1960s, was once spoken of in the same breath with the great dark humorists of postwar American writing. Even before his death, in 2006, his novels were falling out of print and his reputation fading. If there is any justice in the republic of letters (which is a big if), the belated publication of his incomplete masterwork, a sprawling trilogy set in a fictional Mitteleuropean nation to rival Musil’s Kakania, should put him permanently back on the map. (Garth)

The Childhood of Jesus by J.M. Coetzee: J.M. Coetzee, Nobel laureate and two-time Booker Prize winner, continues to explore the plight of the outsider in his new allegorical novel, The Childhood of Jesus.  It’s the story of an unnamed man and boy who cross an ocean to a strange land where, bereft of memories, they are assigned the names Simon and David before they set out to find the boy’s mother.  They succeed, apparently, only to run afoul of the authorities, which forces them to flee by car through the mountains.  One early reader has called the novel “profound and continually surprising.” (Bill)

April:

Life After Life by Kate Atkinson: The beloved author of Case Histories, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, and Started Early, Took My Dog (among others) is out with the stor(ies) of Ursula Todd. In 1910, Todd is born during a snowstorm in England, but from then on there are parallel stories — one in which she dies at first breath, and one in which she lives through the tumultuous 20th century.  As the lives of Ursula Todd continue to multiply, Atkinson asks what, then, is the best way to live, if one has multiple chances? (Janet)

All That Is by James Salter: Upon return from service as a naval officer in Okinawa, Philip Bowman becomes a book editor during the “golden age” of publishing.  The publisher’s blurb promises “Salter’s signature economy of prose” and a story about the “dazzling, sometimes devastating labyrinth of love and ambition.” In our interview with Salter in September, he told us it was “an intimate story about a life in New York publishing,” some 10 years in the making.  From John Irving: “A beautiful novel, with sufficient love, heartbreak, vengeance, identity confusion, longing, and euphoria of language to have satisfied Shakespeare.” Tim O’Brien: “Salter’s vivid, lucid prose does exquisite justice to his subject—the relentless struggle to make good on our own humanity.” April will not come soon enough. (Sonya)

The Woman Upstairs by Claire Messud: The Emperor’s Children, Messud’s bestselling novel from 2006, did as much as anyone has to bridge the gap between the social novel and the novel of consciousness her husband, James Wood, has championed in his criticism. Now, Messud returns with the story of a Boston-area woman who becomes entangled with a Lebanese-Italian family that moves in nearby. Expect, among other things, insanely fine writing. (Garth)

The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer: In a review of her most recent book, 2011’s The Uncoupling, the San Francisco Chronicle declared that, “At this point in her career, Meg Wolitzer deserves to be a household name.” Wolitzer’s tenth novel begins at a summer camp for the arts in 1974, and follows a group of friends into the adulthood. They’re all talented, but talent isn’t enough, and as they grow up, their paths split: some are forced to exchange their childhood dreams for more conventional lives, while others find great success—and, as one might imagine, tensions arise from these differences. (Elizabeth)

The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner: Rachel Kushner’s first novel, Telex from Cuba, was lauded for its evocative descriptions and its power of suspense. Kushner will surely call on both talents for The Flamethrowers, as her heroine first becomes immersed in a late ‘70s New York downtown scene peopled by artists and squatters, and then follows a motorcycle baron to Italy during the height of the Autonomist movement. Images are central to Kushner’s creative process: a ducati, a woman in war paint, and a F.T. Marinetti lookalike riding atop a cycle with a bullet-shaped sidecar were talismans (among others) for writing this book. (Anne)

Harvard Square by André Aciman: In 1970s Cambridge, Massachusetts, a young Harvard graduate student from Egypt wants to be the consummate American, fully assimilated and ensconced in the ivory tower as a literature professor. Then he meets Kalaj — an Arab cab driver who denigrates American mass culture and captivates the student with his seedy, adventurous life. Harvard Square tells the story of this young student’s dilemma, caught between the lofty world of Harvard academia and the magnetic company of his new friend. (Janet)

Woke Up Lonely by Fiona Maazel: Woke Up Lonely is Fiona Maazel’s first novel since being named a “5 Under 35″ choice by the National Book Foundation. The book focuses on Thurlow Dan, the founder of the Helix, a cult that promises to cure loneliness. Ironically, Thurlow himself is profoundly lonely and longing for his ex-wife, Esme. The book has been compared to the work of Sam Lipsyte and Karen Russell, and if there’s one phrase that continually appears in early reviews and press materials, it is “action packed.” (Patrick)

The Dark Road by Ma Jian: Ma Jian, whose books and person are both banned from China, published his third novel The Dark Road in June (Yunchen Publishing House, Taipei); the English translation will be released by Penguin.  The story: a couple determined to give birth to a second child in order to carry on the family line flee their village and the family planning crackdown. At Sampsonia Way, Tienchi Martin-Liao described it as “an absurd story” that uses “magical realism to describe the perverse reality in China.” The publisher describes it as “a haunting and indelible portrait of the tragedies befalling women and families at the hands of China’s one-child policy and of the human spirit’s capacity to endure even the most brutal cruelty.” Martin-Liao tells us that the book’s title, Yin Zhi Dao, also means vagina, or place of life and origin. (Sonya)

The Pink Hotel by Anna Stothard: Stothard’s second novel (after Isabel and Rocco) follows an unnamed 17-year-old narrator as she flies from London to L.A. for the funeral of Lily, a mother she never knew, the proprietess of The Pink Hotel. While the hotel’s residents throw a rave in Lily’s honor, her daughter steals a suitcase of Lily’s photos, letters, and clothes. These mementos set her on a journey around L.A., returning letters to their writers and photos to their subjects and uncovering the secrets of her mother’s life. Longlisted for the 2012 Orange Prize, The Pink Hotel has been optioned for production by True Blood’s Stephen Moyer and Anna Paquin. (Janet)

Our Man in Iraq by Robert Perišic: Perišic is one of the leading new writers to have emerged from Croatia after the fall of the Iron Curtain. In this, his first novel to appear stateside, he offers the funny and absurd tale of two cousins from Zagreb who get caught up in the American Invasion of Iraq, circa 2003. Perišic speaks English, and assisted with the translation, so his voice should come through intact, and a blurb from Jonathan Franzen never hurts. (Garth)

May:

And the Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini: Few details have been released so far about the third novel from international publishing juggernaut Hosseini (The Kite Runner, A Thousand Splendid Suns).  In a statement posted to Penguin’s website, Hosseini explains,  “My new novel is a multi-generational family story as well, this time revolving around brothers and sisters, and the ways in which they love, wound, betray, honor, and sacrifice for each other.” (Kevin)

My Struggle: Book Two: A Man in Love by Karl Ove Knausgaard: The first part of Knausgaard’s six-part behemoth was the single most stirring novel I read in 2012. Or is the word memoir? Anyway, this year sees the publication of Part Two, which apparently shifts the emphasis from Knausgaard’s childhood and the death of his father to his romantic foibles as an adult. But form trumps content in this book, and I’d read 400 pages of Knausgaard dilating on trips to the dentist. There’s still time to run out and catch up on Part One before May rolls around. I can’t imagine many readers who finish it won’t want to keep going. (Garth)

You Are One of Them by Elliott Holt: You Are One of Them is Pushcart Prize-winner Elliott Holt’s debut novel. You might be forgiven for thinking she’d already published a few books, as Holt has been a fixture of the literary Twittersphere for years. Holt’s debut is a literary suspense novel spanning years, as a young woman, raised in politically charged Washington D.C. of the 1980s, goes to Moscow to investigate the decades-old death of her childhood friend. (Patrick)

The Fall of Arthur by J.R.R. Tolkien: In a letter to his American publisher two decades after abandoning The Fall of Arthur, Tolkien expressed regret that he’d left the epic poem unfinished (some suggest it was cast aside as he focused on writing The Hobbit, published in 1937). Nearly eighty years later, the work has been edited and annotated by his son, Christopher, who has written three companion essays that explore the text and his father’s use of Arthurian legend in Middle Earth. Tolkien fans will be grateful for the uncharted territory but unused to the book’s bulk, or lack thereof: in the American edition, poem, notes, and essays clock in just shy of 200 pages long. (Elizabeth)

Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: The author of the critically acclaimed novels Half of a Yellow Sun and Purple Hibiscus, both set in Adichie’s home country of Nigeria, now turns her keen eye to the trials of cultural assimilation for Africans in America and England. In the novel, a young Nigerian couple leave their homeland – she to America for an education, he to a far more unsettled, undocumented life in England. In their separate ways, each confront issues of race and identity they would never have faced in Nigeria, where they eventually reunite. (Michael)

Red Moon by Benjamin Percy: Percy, whose previous books include the novel The Wilding and the story collection Refresh, Refresh, imagines a world wherein werewolves have always lived among us, uneasily tolerated, a hidden but largely controlled menace, required by law to take a transformation-inhibiting drug. He describes his new novel as “a narrative made of equal parts supernatural thriller, love story and political allegory.” (Emily M.)

A Guide to Being Born by Ramona Ausubel: A short story collection that includes the author’s New Yorker debut, “Atria”. If that piece is any indication, the book is more than a bit fabulist – the plot involves a girl who finds herself pregnant and worries she’ll give birth to an animal. The specter of parenthood, as the title suggests, appears in numerous guises, as does the reinvention that marked the protagonists of her novel (the genesis of which she wrote about in our own pages). (Thom)

The Hanging Garden by Patrick White: The last work of Nobel Laureate Patrick White gives his homeland an Elysian feel. At the beginning, we meet two orphans, Eirene Sklavos and Gilbert Horsfall, whose parents both died in separate conflicts early on in the second World War. They escape to a house in suburban Sydney and bond in a lush little garden. As with most things published posthumously, the story is a little bit scattershot, but early reviews out of Oz (and our own take) say the book is worthy of its author. (Thom)

Love Is Power, or Something Like That by A. Igoni Barrett: Barrett’s middle name, Igonibo, means stranger, though he’s no stranger to all things literary: he chronicled his childhood bookishness in our pages last year, and his father is Jamaican-born poet Lindsay Barrett who settled in Nigeria, where the younger Barrett was born and still lives. The streets of Lagos provide the backdrop for his second story collection, Love Is Power, or Something Like That. His first was called From the Cave of Rotten Teeth, and rotting teeth seems to be something of a recurring motif. It’s picked up at least tangentially in this book with “My Smelling Mouth Problem,” a story where the protagonist’s halitosis causes disturbances on a city bus ride. (Anne)

The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America by George Packer: George Packer reveals the state of affairs in America in his ominously-titled new book, a history told in biographical inspections of its various residents (read about one, a lobbyist, in a truly riveting excerpt in The New Yorker).  The bad news, probably, is that American is fucked.  The good news, I learned from an interview in The Gunn Oracle, the paper of record at Packer’s high school, is that Packer didn’t become a proper journalist until age 40, which is sort of heartening, and may officially qualify him for Bloom status.  (More bad news: no posted vacancies at The Gunn Oracle.) (Lydia)

Pacific by Tom Drury: Drury’s fans will be ecstatic to learn that his new novel focuses once again on the inhabitants of Grouse County, Iowa, where two of his four previous books, The End of Vandalism and Hunts in Dreams, also take place. In this new novel, Tiny Darling’s son Micah travels to L.A. to reunite with his mother who abandoned him years before, while back in the Midwest, a mysterious woman unsettles everyone she meets.  The novel tells two parallel tales, plumbing both the comic and tragic of life.  Yiyun Li says that Drury is a “rare master of the art of seeing.” This novel is sure to prove that—yet again. (Edan)

Forty-One False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers by Janet Malcolm: The title of this collection comes from a 1994 New Yorker profile of the artist David Salle, in which Malcolm tried in 41 different ways, without success, to penetrate the carefully constructed shell of an artist who had made a bundle during the go-go 1980s but was terrified that he was already forgotten by the art world, a has-been.  Malcolm trains her laser eye on a variety of other subjects, including Edward Weston‘s nudes, the German photographer Thomas Struth, Edith Wharton, the Gossip Girl novels, and the false starts on her own autobiography. (Bill)

June:

Transatlantic by Colum McCann: Known for deftly lacing his fiction with historical events – such as the high-wire walk between the twin towers that opened his National Book Award-winning novel, Let the Great World Spin – McCann threads together three very different journeys to Ireland in his new novel, Transatlantic.  The first was Frederick Douglass’s trip to denounce slavery in 1845, just as the potato famine was beginning; the second was the first transatlantic flight, in 1919, by Jack Alcock and Arthur Brown; and the third was former U.S. Sen. George Mitchell’s repeated crossings to broker the 1998 Good Friday Agreement.  In an interview, McCann said it’s the aftermath of such large historic events that interests him as a novelist: “What happens in the quiet moments?  What happens when the plane has landed?” (Bill)

The Hare by César Aira: A recent bit of contrarianism in The New Republic blamed the exhaustive posthumous marketing of Roberto Bolaño for crowding other Latin American writers out of the U.S. marketplace. If anything, it seems to me, it’s the opposite: the success of The Savage Detectives helped publishers realize there was a market for Daniel Sada, Horacio Castellanos Moya, and the fascinating Argentinian César Aira. The past few years have seen seven of Aira’s many novels translated into English. Some of them, like Ghosts, are transcendently good, but none has been a breakout hit. Maybe the reissue of The Hare, which appeared in the U.K. in 1998, will be it. At the very least, it’s the longest Aira to appear in English: a picaresque about a naturalist’s voyage into the Argentinean pampas. (Garth)

Taipei by Tao Lin: Indie darling Tao Lin officially enters the world of big six publishing with his eighth published work, Taipei, an autobiographical novel beginning in 2009 and concerning a few years in the life of a 25-year-old protagonist moving from Taiwan to New York City and Las Vegas. In an Observer interview from 2011, Lin said that the book “contains a marriage, somewhat extreme recreational drug usage, parents, [and] a book tour” – all of which should be familiar subjects to people who’ve followed Lin’s exploits on Twitter, Tumblr and his blog over the past few years. (And especially if you’ve been one of his “interns.”) (Nick)

In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods by Matt Bell: Matt Bell’s novel is an exploration of parenthood and marriage, and it carries the premise and the force of myth: a woman who can sing objects into being and a man who longs for fatherhood get married and leave their hectic lives for a quiet homestead by the side of a remote lake. But as pregnancy after pregnancy fails, the wife’s powers take a darker turn—she sings the stars from the sky—and their grief transforms not only their marriage but the world around them. (Emily M.)

His Wife Leaves Him by Stephen Dixon: Stephen Dixon, a writer known for rendering unbearable experiences, has built his 15th novel around a premise that is almost unbearably simple: A man named Martin is thinking about the loss of his wife, Gwen.  Dixon’s long and fruitful career includes more than 500 shorts stories, three O. Henry Prizes, two Pushcart Prizes and a pair of nominations for the National Book Award.  His Wife Leaves Him, according to its author, “is about a bunch of nouns: love, guilt, sickness, death, remorse, loss, family, matrimony, sex, children, parenting, aging, mistakes, incidents, minutiae, birth, music, jobs, affairs, memory, remembering, reminiscence, forgetting, repression, dreams, reverie, nightmares, meeting, dating, conceiving, imagining, delaying, loving.” (Bill)

Seiobo There Below by László Krasznahorkai: The novels of the great Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai have recently begun to break through with American audiences. Thus far, however, we’ve only glimpsed one half of his oeuvre: the one that deals (darkly, complexly) with postwar Europe. Krasznahorkai has also long taken an interest in East Asia, where he’s spent time in residence. Seiobo There Below, one of several novels drawing on this experience, shows a Japanese goddess visiting disparate places and times, in search of beauty. (Garth)

Carnival by Rawi Hage: True to its title, Carnival – which takes place in a city loosely based on the author’s hometown of Montreal – takes the reader on a tour of a place well-populated with odd and eccentric characters. The protagonist, Fly, is a cab driver with a penchant for binge reading. We learn that he chose his name to draw a contrast with a group called the Spiders. The Spiders are a loose collection of predatory cab drivers, who choose to wait for their customers rather than to hunt them on the streets. Fly himself, too, is no slouch when it comes to weirdness – he says that his mother gave birth to him in front of an audience of seals. (Thom)

Cannonball by Joseph McElroy: Of the American experimental novelists of the 1960s and 1970s, Joseph McElroy may be the most idiosyncratic. He specializes in what you might call information architecture, overloading his narratives with nonfictional data while strategically withholding the kinds of exposition that are conventional in fiction. The results speak for themselves: moments of startling resonance, power, mystery…and topicality. His work has previously tackled the Pinochet regime, artificial intelligence, and, in his terrific recent story collection, Night Soul, terrorism. Now he turns his attention to the Iraq War. (Garth)

On the Floor by Aifric Campbell: Banker-turned-novelist Aifric Campbell takes on the testosterone of the eighties. At Morgan Stanley, she saw firsthand the excesses of the era, which drove young female analysts to develop “contempt” for other women. As a product of that environment, her main character, Geri, feels like a “skirt among men.” She lacquers her ambitions with conspicuously feminine gestures and modes of dress. In an interview with the Guardian, Campbell pointed out that she used to race greyhounds, which gave her a “certain logic” that helped her in banking and writing. (Thom)

July:

Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish by David Rakoff: Rakoff passed away last summer at the age of 47, shortly after completing this slender novel “written entirely in verse.” His previous books have been largely satirical, so this final work is a departure: stretching across the country and the twentieth century, the novel’s stories are linked by “acts of generosity or cruelty.” Ira Glass, who brought Rakoff to the airwaves for more than a decade, has described the book as “very funny and very sad, which is my favorite combination” (a fair descriptor of much of Rakoff’s radio work, like this heartbreaking performance from the live episode of “This American Life” staged just a few months before his death.) (Elizabeth)

Five Star Billionaire by Tash Aw: In his third novel, Aw writes about Malaysian immigrants to contemporary Shanghai, featuring an ensemble cast who hail from diverse backgrounds; their stories are interwoven, and counterpointed with the lives they left behind.  Aw, who was a practicing lawyer while writing his first novel, The Harmony Silk Factory, won accolades for his debut: longlisted for Man Booker Prize, International Impac Dublin Award and the Guardian First Book Prize; winner of the Whitbread First Novel Award as well as the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Novel (Asia Pacific region).  (Sonya)

August:

Night Film by Marisha Pessl: This much-anticipated, oft-delayed follow-up to Pessl’s bestselling Special Topics in Calamity Physics originally set to come out in 2010 is now scheduled – no, this time they really mean it – in the fall. The novel is a “psychological literary thriller” about a young New Yorker who sets out to investigate the apparent suicide of Ashley Cordova, daughter of a reclusive European movie director. (Michael)

The Infatuations by Javier Marías: Javier Marías’s new book, translated by Marguerite Jull Costa, is his 14th novel to be published in English. It was awarded Spain’s National Novel Prize last October, but Marías turned it down out of an aversion to receiving public money. It’s the story of a woman’s obsession with an apparently happy couple who inexplicably disappear. It’s his first novel to be narrated from a woman’s perspective, so it will be interesting to see how Marias manages to accommodate his penchant for detailed descriptions of ladies crossing and uncrossing their legs. (Mark)

Clare of the Sea-Light by Edwidge Danticat: My time at the University of Miami overlapped with Danticat’s, though unfortunately I never took her creative writing course. I did, however, see her speak at an event for the English department during my junior year. She was astounding. There are prose stylists in this world and then there are storytellers, and rare are people like Danticat who are both. She read from her memoir Brother, I’m Dying, which features one of the most devastating and personal depictions of our wretched immigration system ever written. Haiti has always been an remarkable place – a nation built with equal measures of hope, passion, charm, malfeasance and tragedy. In this forthcoming story collection, Clare of the Sea-Light – which draws its title from a piece she originally published in Haiti Noir – we can expect the prodigiously talented author to render each aspect of the place beautifully. (Nick)

Necessary Errors by Caleb Crain: Caleb Crain’s debut novel, which concerns the topic of “youth,” borrows its title from W. H. Auden’s 1929 poem “[It was Easter as I walked in the public gardens]” and takes place in the Czech Republic during the last decade of the 20th century. Look for Crain, a journalist, critic and banished member of the NYPL’s Central Library Plan advisory committee, to use research and insight from his previous book – a provocative look at male friendship, personal lives, and literary creation – in order to give Jacob Putnam and the rest of the characters in Necessary Errors a great deal of interwoven influences, covert desires and realistic interaction. (Nick)

September:

Enon by Paul Harding: In 2009, the tiny Bellevue Literary Press published Harding’s debut novel, Tinkers, which went on to win the Pulitzer Prize. Tinkers tells the story of George Washington Crosby, an old man reliving the memories of his life as he dies surround by family. Enon, named for the Massachusetts town where Crosby died, is about his grandson, Charlie Crosby, and Charlie’s daughter Kate. (Janet)

October:

The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert: Elizabeth Gilbert’s mega-bestselling Eat Pray Love put her on Time Magazine’s list of most influential people in the world, and then Julia Roberts played her in the movie adaptation. What many fans of that memoir don’t know is that Gilbert started her career as a fiction writer, penning a short story collection, Pilgrims, and the novel, Stern Men, which was a New York Times Notable Book in 2000.  Now, 13 years later, she returns to the form with the publication of “a big, sprawling, epic historical novel that takes place from 1760 to 1880, following the fortunes of a family called the Whittakers, who make their name in the early botanical exploration/proto-pharmaceutical business trade.” That description is from Gilbert herself, taken from this candid, illuminating and entertaining interview with Rachel Khong for The Rumpus. (Edan)

Dissident Gardens by Jonathan Lethem: Sunnyside Queens has long held a contrarian perspective. In the 1920s, as urban development projects washed over the outer boroughs, the folks in Sunnyside did all they could to keep the place from turning into a cookie-cutter suburb. Driveways were banned and garages were disallowed. Instead of lawns, the neighborhood’s designers recommended long courtyards that spanned the entire length of blocks – these were meant to encourage mingling and space sharing. It’s no doubt this spirit of dissent, skepticism and opinionated egalitarianism that’s drawn Jonathan Lethem to the neighborhood as the centerpiece for his new novel, a “family epic,” which focuses on three generations of American leftists growing up in the outer borough. (Nick)

Unknown:

Bleeding Edge by Thomas Pynchon: Washington Post critic Ron Charles broke the news recently that Thomas Pynchon will have a new book out from Penguin this fall called Bleeding Edge. (Though Penguin says the book has not yet been scheduled). Charles said the news of the new book was confirmed by two Penguin employees and that “everything is tentative” at this time. More as we know it, folks. (Max)

Subtle Bodies by Norman Rush: There’s still not much to report on Rush’s latest, a novel of love and friendship set in upstate New York on the eve of the Iraq War. In October, though Granta Books in the U.K. announced an autumn 2013 publication date, so here’s hoping… (Garth)

The Dying Grass by William T. Vollmann: The fifth of Vollmann’s Seven Dreams books to appear, The Dying Grass will most likely not see print until summer of 2015, according to his editor. First up is Last Stories, a collection of ghost stories slated to hit bookstores next year. Assuming there still are bookstores next year. (Garth)

Your Name Here by Helen DeWitt: Your Name Here seems to be stuck in a holding pattern at Noemi Press, befitting, one supposes, its tortured publication history. In a recent Believer interview, DeWitt suggested that the version that appears in print, if it appears in print, may not be the same as the .pdf she was selling on her website a few years back. Chunks may have been spun off into other works of fiction. Whatever the damn thing ends up looking like, we eagerly await it. (Garth)

Escape from the Children’s Hospital by Jonathan Safran Foer: Foer returns to childhood, to trauma, and to interwoven voices and storylines. The childhood here is Foer’s own, though, so this may mark a kind of departure. We’ll have to wait and see, as no publication date has been set. (Garth)

More from The Millions:

The good stuff: The Millions’ Notable articles

The motherlode: The Millions’ Books and Reviews

Like what you see? Learn about 5 insanely easy ways to Support The Millions, and follow The Millions on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr.

1. Our pair of Most Anticipated posts were popular among readers looking for something new to read. Our 2013 book preview is coming soon.

2. The Arcades Project: Martin Amis’ Guide to Classic Video Games: Mark O’Connell unearthed an obscure video gaming guide by Martin Amis, which proved to be a monumental exercise in cognitive dissonance. “Narrow that phalanx!”

3. Dashboard? More Like Bookshelf: Your Guide to Literary Tumblrs: The Millions debuted on Tumblr in late 2011 and Nick Moran helped us get acquainted with our new neighborhood by exploring the rich array of literary Tumblrs. He followed up with even more literary, Tumblr-y goodness a few months later.

4. Tolstoy or Dostoevsky? 8 Experts on Who’s Greater: Kevin Hartnett orchestrated a throwdown, asking eight scholars and avid lay readers to present their cases for Tolstoy or Dostoevsky as the king of Russian literature.

5. Our star-studded Year in Reading, with 74 participants naming 261 books, was a big hit across the internet.

6. The Marquise Went out at Five O’clock: On Making Sentences Do Something: In a sublime craft essay, novelist Christopher Beha explored why some sentences work and some don’t. “I simply ask myself, ‘What do I need this sentence to do?’”

7. Judging Books by Their Covers: U.S. Vs. U.K.: This unscientific look at book covers had readers taking sides in a trans-Atlantic design debate.

8. This Chart Is a Lonely Hunter: The Narrative Eros of the Infographic: Novelist Reif Larsen delivered a richly illustrated tour of the infographic, plumbing our fascination with information, beautifully presented.

9. It’s All in Your Head: The Problems With Jonah Lehrer’s Imagine: A couple of months before Jonah Lehrer landed in the center of a firestorm of controversy over plagiarism and fabrication, science writers Tim Requarth and Meehan Crist pointed out the problems with the science behind Lehrer’s bestseller. Lehrer himself showed up to defend his work in the comments, but the piece would become one of the first data points in the emerging story of Lehrer’s downfall.

10. “A Right Fit”: Navigating the World of Literary Agents: Michael Bourne wanted to know how exactly one lands a literary agent. To those who send out query letters blindly, he wrote, “You might get lucky, but the odds of that are, well, somewhere in the neighborhood of 1 in 11,111.”

11. I Greet You in the Middle of a Great Career: A Brief History of Blurbs: Blurbs are a filthy business, everyone seems to agree, and yet every book comes plastered with them. Alan Levinovitz’s hilarious history of the blurb also introduces us to “blaps” and “blovers.”

12. Big Bird is History: Why We Fund PBS: Shortly after Mitt Romney told the world he wants to fire Big Bird, Elizabeth Stevens explained why the free market alone can never be trusted to produce quality educational programming.

13. Crime Pays: Jo Nesbø Talks about Killing Harry Hole and the Best Job in the World: The Scandinavian crime novel remains a favorite genre, and Robert Birnbaum delivered an illuminating interview with one of its foremost practitioners.

14. Dickens’s Best Novel? Six Experts Share Their Opinions: Kevin Hartnett again polled the experts, this time to discover the best on offer from the prolific 19th century master.

15. Literary Fiction is a Genre: A List: Edan Lepucki’s got news for you: literary fiction is a genre with its own conventions, just like romance and thrillers. Her argument is both clever and convincing.

16. The High Line: New York’s Monument to Gentrification: Michael Bourne provoked controversy with his essay, part love letter, part critique, of New York’s High Line, “the distressed skinny jeans of public parks, the gourmet taco truck of urban tourist attractions.”

17. Are eReaders Really Green?: Ebooks are here to stay, and some suggest that the move to digital will save a lot of trees and carbon-spewing transport, but Nick Moran ran the numbers to find that going digital doesn’t necessarily mean going green.

18. Ban This Book: An Uncensored Look At The Lorax And Other Dangerous Books: Alan Levinovitz used Banned Book Week as a launch pad for revealing the closet censor that lies within all of us.

19. Is This Book Bad, or Is It Just Me? The Anatomy of Book Reviews: We always seem to be in a crisis of book reviewing, but Darryl Campbell wanted to mark out some territory for what the book review should be, not just what it is. Along the way he breaks down the form to its essentials.

20. The Game’s Afoot: The Case of the Mystery Genre’s Terrible Secret: Daniel Friendman lampoons the many tired tropes of the mystery novel. Get ready to have an entire genre irrevocably spoiled.

There are also a number of older pieces that Millions readers return to again and again. This list of top “evergreens” comprises pieces that went up before 2012 but continued to interest readers over the last year.

1. The Best of the Millennium (So Far): Our late-2009 series invited a distinguished panel of writers and thinkers to nominate the best books of the decade. The ensuing list stoked controversy and interest that has lingered. The write-ups of the “winner” and runners-up have also remained popular. We also invited our readers to compile a “best of the decade” list. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the readers’ list seemed to receive a warmer reception.

2. A Year in Reading 2011: 2011’s series stayed popular in 2012.

3. Introducing Difficult Books, A Descriptive List: Our currently dormant, but still fascinating series on the most challenging (yet rewarding) books ever published.

4. Hard to Pronounce Literary Names Redux: the Definitive Edition: Six years on, our “definitive” literary pronunciation guide is still a favorite The Millions. There must be a lot of people name-dropping Goethe out there. The initial, aborted attempt remains popular as well.

5. Confessions of a Book Pirate: Our interview with someone actually “pirating” ebooks put a face on a nebulous trend and generated huge interest among readers, the publishing industry, and the media.

6. Reasons Not to Self-Publish in 2011-2012: A List: Self-publishing has been one of big industry trends of the last few years, but Edan Lepucki gave us eight reasons why she won’t be self-publishing… at least not any time soon.

7. The Best Sports Journalism Ever (According to Bill Simmons): Sports fans love this collection of links to some of the best sports writing of all time.

8. 12 Holiday Gifts That Writers Will Actually Use: Hannah Gerson’s list of gifts for writers includes only one book and exactly zero blank journals.

9. On Our Shelves: 45 Favorite Short Story Collections: A terrific list that will keep the short story fan busy for quite a long time.

10. The Stockholm Syndrome Theory of Long Novels: Mark O’Connell articulated how big books can entrap us and hold us hostage. “It’s reading that has at least as much to do with our own sense of achievement in having read the thing as it does with a sense of the author’s achievement in having written it.”

Where did all these readers come from? Google (and Facebook and Twitter and Tumblr and Reddit) sent quite a few of course, but many Millions readers came from other sites too. These were the top 10 sites to send us traffic in 2012:

1. Arts & Letters Daily
2. Andrew Sullivan and the rest of The Daily Beast
3. The New Yorker
4. The Browser
5. The Rumpus
6. Publishers Weekly
7. MetaFilter
8. Slate
9. Kottke.org
10. The Morning News

Once again, it’s time to buy a gift for the writer in your life, that fickle person who probably already has more classic novels and Moleskine notebooks than he knows what to do with. Last year’s guide was inspired by my own collection of blank notebooks and high-quality pens, beautiful gifts that I had never found occasion to use. This year’s list is inspired by my e-reader, which I received last year as a Christmas present. It took me most of the year to incorporate it into my reading routine, but now, as more of my reading happens electronically, I’m feeling nostalgic for all things bookish and old-fashioned. Judging by the market for vintage typewriters, I know I’m not the only one feeling this way. So, here it is, a list for the sentimental writer, with a couple of book recommendations thrown in for good measure.

1.  A Bookshelf Portrait

If every bookshelf is a portrait of its owner, then why not commission an actual portrait of a bookshelf? That’s what Your Ideal Bookshelf allows booklovers to do, offering hand-painted portraits of “the books that changed your life, that defined who you are, that you read again and again.” If that seems like too much pressure, you can purchase prints of other people’s ideal bookshelves, as well as drawings of ideal bookshelves organized by genre, subject, and author. Harry Potter fanatics can find portraits of the entire series, while home cooks can choose from several different shelves of culinary classics. The creators of Your Ideal Bookshelf have also produced a book, My Ideal Bookshelf, which showcases the favorite bookshelves of a variety of writers and artists, including Patti Smith, Junot Diaz, Miranda July, and Judd Apatow.

2.  Bookends

Bookends are underrated. Not only do they keep books from falling off the shelf, they allow you to make a bookshelf anywhere — on a desk, in a windowsill, or atop a bedside table. Even ugly bookends end up being used, so go ahead and spring for ones in the shape of golden pigs or green poodles.

3.  Typewriter-inspired clothing

The prints in fashion designer Mary Katranzou’s fall 2012 collection were partially inspired by old school office equipment, and included a cape printed with the circular numbers of a rotary phone dial, skirts printed with classic yellow #2 pencils, and most striking of all, a dress whose bodice was dominated by a red Olivetti typewriter. The runway items are hard to come by (not to mention, several thousand dollars), but you can purchase a Katranzou rotary-phone dial tee shirt here, with the proceeds going to charity.

4.  An Elaborately Beautiful Book

The recent publication of Chris Ware’s graphic novel, Building Stories, got me thinking about the many beautifully designed books that have been released in the past few years. To name a few: Anne Carson’s poem Nox; Lauren Redniss’s biography of Marie and Pierre Curie, Radioactive: A Tale of Love and Fallout; and Vladimir Nabokov’s unfinished novel-in-index-cards, The Original of Laura. In addition to being wonderful literary works, they are also beautiful objects, the kind of book that simply cannot exist in electronic form, and which readers will keep for a lifetime.

5.  A subscription to Journal of the Month

Literary journals! There are so many of them, and so many of them are good, and almost all of them would like you to read a copy before you submit your stories to them. Journal of the Month helps writers sample a wide variety of journals by sending subscribers a different journal each month. Each month’s selection is a surprise, and you can buy subscriptions of 3, 6, or 12 months. You can also choose to receive magazines on a quarterly basis.

6.  Draw It With Your Eyes Closed

This unusual, practical, gossipy, eclectic, and highly entertaining anthology is a collection of assignments for fine arts students. But it’s unexpectedly useful for writers, too — or, at least, it was useful to me, helping me to think about the writing process in new ways. I bought if for my brother-in-law, who teaches drawing, but found myself unable to put it down after reading a couple of entries. With contributions from art teachers, art students, artists, and art professionals, some within the academic community and some without, Draw It With Your Eyes Closed delves into the creative process of artists by focusing on their art school training. If there’s an equivalent to this book from the world of creative writing MFAs, I’d love to read it, but I doubt it’d be as raucous or mischievous.

7.  The Dictionary of American Regional English

When I was growing up, my parents had a slang dictionary, which I dorkily consulted in order to learn the meanings of certain colorful insults. But I quickly found the dictionary to be more interesting when I browsed beyond the curse words. The Dictionary of American Regional English is kind of like the slang dictionary except that it is six volumes, and its contents are fifty years in the making. Based on hundreds of years of historical documents, as well as interviews taken from across the country, it is a comprehensive record of American dialect. The final volume was completed earlier this year, an event that one of its founding researchers did not live to see. Long a resource for editors and lawyers, it’s the kind of book that any word nerd could appreciate.

8.  A Quill Pen

With the current enthusiasm for typewriters going strong, can quill pens be far behind? There are hundreds on Etsy, from turkey feather models to Hunger Games-inspired arrow-feather quills.

9.  A Fireplace

According to poet Adam Kirsch, “Every writer needs a fireplace”:

On publication day, an author should burn a copy of his book, to acknowledge that what he accomplished is negligible compared to what he imagined and intended. Only this kind of burnt offering might be acceptable to the Muse he has let down.

The ultimate in old-school technology, a fireplace (or perhaps, a fire table?) allows writers to dispose of unsatisfying drafts in a truly dramatic fashion. Sometimes the trashcan icon at the bottom of your computer screen just doesn’t feel definitive enough.

10.  A Place to Write

Virgina Woolf said it best when she wrote that a woman “must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” Poet Brenda Shaughnessy put a somewhat finer point on it in Poets & Writers, when she speculated that the happiness of her marriage to fellow poet Craig Morgan Teicher depended on a shared rented writing studio:

This might be the true secret of the sane poet-couple: Rent writing space. Make it as private as possible. This single thing has completely changed our lives.

As I write this, I have been displaced from my own writing desk for almost a month, courtesy of Hurricane Sandy, and without that space it has been very hard to sit down and get to work. Laptops and abundant wi-fi access have turned us all into nomads, but there’s something to be said for returning to the same place every day. How do you give someone a place to write? It could mean finding someone a cubicle in your office, renting a studio, lending a summer cottage or winter cabin, helping someone to finance a residency, or simply rearranging a shared space to make room for a bookshelf, a comfy chair, or a desk.

• Arcadia by Lauren Groff (a Staff Pick, Paradise Regained: An Interview with Lauren Groff)
• At Last by Edward St Aubyn (Most Anticipated, Illicit Pleasures: On Edward St Aubyn’s At Last)
• Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain (Everything is Political: An Interview with Ben Fountain, National Book Award Finalist)
• Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel (Booker Prize Winner)
• Building Stories by Chris Ware (Infographics of Despair: Chris Ware’s Building Stories)
• By Blood by Ellen Ullman (Who We Are Now: On Ellen Ullman’s By Blood)
• Canada by Richard Ford (Across the Border: Richard Ford’s Canada)
• City of Bohane by Kevin Barry (The Mad Music of Kevin Barry’s City of Bohane)
• Fobbit by David Abrams (Post-40 Bloomer: David Abrams Taking As Long As It Takes)
• The Forgetting Tree by Tatjana Soli (Going Back to the Page: An Interview with Tatjana Soli, A Millions contributor)
• Gods Without Men by Hari Kunzru (Plot, Rhyme, and Conspiracy: Hari Kunzru Colludes with His Readers, Fractured World: Hari Kunzru’s Gods Without Men)
• HHhH by Laurent Binet (Exclusive: The Missing Pages of Laurent Binet’s HHhH)
• A Hologram for the King by Dave Eggers (National Book Award Finalist)
• Home by Toni Morrison (Where the Heart Is: Toni Morrison’s Home)
• Hope: A Tragedy by Shalom Auslander (So, Nu?: Shalom Auslander’s Hope: A Tragedy)
• How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti (How Should a Writer Be? An Interview with Sheila Heti)
• NW by Zadie Smith (Lamenting the Modern: On Zadie Smith’s NW, Exclusive: The First Lines of Zadie Smith’s NW)
• The Round House by Louise Erdrich (National Book Award Winner)
• Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward (National Book Award Winner)
• Shout Her Lovely Name by Natalie Serber (Mothers and Daughters: On Natalie Serber’s Shout Her Lovely Name)
• Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan (The Lies We Tell: Ian McEwan’s Sweet Tooth)
• Swimming Home by Deborah Levy (Booker Shortlisted)
• Telegraph Avenue by Michael Chabon (Golden Oldie: Michael Chabon’s Telegraph Avenue, Exclusive: The First Lines of Michael Chabon’s Telegraph Avenue)
• This Is How You Lose Her by Junot Díaz (The ‘You’ In Yunior: Junot Díaz’s This Is How You Lose Her, A Brief Wondrous Interview with Junot Díaz)
• Watergate by Thomas Mallon (I Am Not A Character: On Thomas Mallon’s Watergate)
• What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank by Nathan Englander (Speaking of Anne Frank…)
• The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers (National Book Award Finalist)

Typing THE END on your first novel is nearly as epic as saying I DO. Similar to an exchange of vows, after the champagne has been chugged and the celebratory cheers have faded, you wake up to a reality loaded with questions. Most notably: Where do I go from here? This isn’t a paper Jenga on my desk. How do I get my book published? These were my questions, at least. My published author friends answered: find a literary agent.

This is no reinvented love story. Many of you are at this juncture now, so we can be honest with one another. When you have your first manuscript in your arms and are querying agents, you aren’t particularly picky. The focus is on the end result — getting the book to a publisher. So you rush the agent “dating” process. I was guilty of that. I viewed finding an agent as yet another hurdle on my way to the printing press.

I welcomed every agent suitor. Sure, I scanned credentials, but querying from El Paso, Texas, everyone in New York City looked flashy and impressive. Every agent had a Bestseller in his or her clientele list. All sounded enthusiastic in email and on the phone. Frankly, I didn’t want to sit around pondering if I emotionally clicked with my agent or not, so long as they took my novel to Publisher’s Row. I was holding my first “book baby” and eager to get it to the next developmental stage.

“Why not fly to New York to meet the prospective proxies?” one of my friends asked. I laughed. Like, spittle-flying laughter. I had mortgage payments, utility bills, student loans. I barely had two quarters left at the end of the month to buy gum from a candy machine. Fly to New York to meet these people? Only on Santa’s sleigh.

So I did the best I could from afar. I gratefully signed with an agency, and we sold my first and second novels, The Time It Snowed In Puerto Rico and The Baker’s Daughter, to Random House/Crown in a two-book deal. But within twelve months, the blush of first love rubbed off the bloom, and I discovered that my first agent was not my match. In fact, we were remarkably unmatched. I now empathize for the swept-off-their-feet celebrity nuptials that end in tears and divorce.

Your agent relationship is akin to a marriage. Emotions, finances, and trust are all tangled up and can be easily wounded if you aren’t careful. Similarly, that agent can be one of your most loyal and cherished people on earth. Your literary spouse of sorts. I spent nearly two years silently observing and developing friendships with a select handful of admired agencies until I was ready to “date” seriously again.

This month, I celebrate my one-year anniversary with my new agent and it still feels as if we’re in our honeymoon phase. I recently saw her at one of my book events. To use a canned metaphor: we went together like peanut butter and jelly. She’s editorially brilliant and has the business prowess of a tiger, yes. But more importantly, she gets me and my writing. She believes in my work even when I doubt myself and encourages me to set my sights past the moon to the brightest star. She pushes me, using compassion and insight to buoy me forward, never backwards. She’s someone my husband loves. Someone I will introduce to my children when I have them. Someone I can’t imagine not having in my career or my life.

This is what a good author-agent relationship should be like. Still, I am but one author with a subjective experience to share. So I polled fellow author friends on what makes a good literary agent, in their experience. I ended up with the three essential C’s.

1. The Click.
Definition: that intangible zing through your core alerting you this is no ordinary meeting; the kinetic energy between two people; the magnetic draw that makes you want to not just go into business with this person but invite them into your life.

Testimonials:

Beth Hoffman (author of Saving CeeCee Honeycutt):

There was an immediate “click” between us. We chattered and laughed as if we’d known each other for years. She has integrity and exudes confidence and professionalism…I trust her completely.

Matthew Dicks, author of Memoirs of An Imaginary Friend:

My agent falls only below my wife in terms of important women in my life (when my mother-in-law is in the room, I assign her the #2 spot, but it’s a lie). She is one of my most honest critics and also my biggest fan… In short, my agent is my friend above all else.

Megan Mayhew Bergman, author of Birds of a Lesser Paradise: Stories:

I live in rural VT and [my agent] is my lifeline. I love her energy and her smarts. I trust her deeply…

Sarah Pekkanen, author of These Girls:

Like dating, authors need to find someone who feels like the right fit before taking the plunge into a committed relationship. I definitely found that in my agent. Before we even met, she cracked some very funny jokes—a sense of humor is high on my list of desirable qualities…

Lydia Netzer, author of Shine, Shine, Shine:

Having an agent that will be honest with you is wonderful. Having an agent you can be honest with is even better.

2. Chutzpah.
Definition: the quality of being gutsy, both personally and professionally; someone who will go to the mat with you every time, as a partner, a cheerleader, a Mr. Miyagi to your Karate Kid. (I’m showing my age here.)

Testimonials:

Christina Haag, author of Come To The Edge:

Guidance, honesty, expertise, and chutzpah… She brings an excellent mix of instinct and business smarts to the table; she’s able to nurture a project, as well as fight for it.

Jenna Blum, author of The Stormchasers:

1. Unforced, enthusiastic love for the writer’s work. 2. Consistent and fast responsiveness. 3. Belief in the writer’s career, not just one project. I’ve been with my agent almost a decade and she is my right arm. I can’t imagine being without her. And she’s got the fiercest French accent ever.

M.J. Rose, author of The Book of Lost Fragrances:

While loving your agent is also great – this is 100% a business deal and your agent does work for you – you hired him or her – so it’s a partnership and important to have an agent who respects that and whom you feel comfortable in that role with.

Sarah Pinneo, author of Julia’s Child:

Not merely a lover of books, but a true business woman. She represents dozens of authors, yet still encourages me to copy her on every communication with my publisher, and she’s always on top of the flow… She knows how to talk to authors at those vulnerable moments when their insecurities are sticking out like porcupine quills.

Laura Harrington, author of Alice Bliss:

Key to a great relationship: Respect, honesty, loyalty… I want someone romantic enough to be in this crazy book world and hard-nosed enough to help me survive it.

3.  Character.
Definition: moral and ethical quality. (That came straight from Webster’s Dictionary. No expounding necessary.)

Testimonials:

Marie Myung-Ok Lee, author of Somebody’s Daughter:

A need for mutual respect and ETHICS as well as a sharp literary sense helped me to the right person.

Kristina McMorris, author of Bridge of Scarlet Leaves:

An agent who: expresses passion for the author’s voice versus a single book, which sets the stage for a long-term relationship; treats the client like a partner, welcoming ideas and input in all areas; reads a client’s manuscript within days or weeks; communicates clearly and promptly, and above all, is a genuinely good person.

Marilyn Brant, author of A Summer in Europe:

Find someone you can trust professionally, communicate with effectively, and feel confident loves and respects your writing style. You want an agent who knows how to steer you well in both strengthening your manuscripts without changing your voice and in matching each of your novels with an editor who will also appreciate it and champion it within the publishing house.

There you have it. Like matrimony, your literary representation must be your better half in the publishing community. Never settle for mediocre. Take a cue from the love gurus and matchmakers: look in the mirror and tell yourself, “I’m worthy of a respectful relationship. I’m worthy of my one, true agent and nothing less.”

Image: Shelley Panzarella/Flickr