http://www.themillions.com Wed, 17 Mar 2010 02:09:18 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Of Lists, Generally Most Emailed Articles. Most Beautiful People. 100 Best Singles. 50 Greatest Novelists Between the Ages of 31 and 33. Verily, as William H. Gass observes in his wonderful essay collection Tests of Time - which made the New York Times Notable Books List even as it missed Bestsellers ... http://www.themillions.com/2009/10/dissecting-the-list-an-excursus.html Below is a list of all of the titles nominated by our "Best Fiction of the Millennium (So Far)" panel that did not appear on our Top 20 or Honorable Mention lists. Absurdistan, by Gary Shteyngart American Purgatorio, by John Haskell Among the Missing, by Dan Chaon Atomic Aztex, by Sesshu Foster Await Your Reply, ... http://www.themillions.com/2009/10/best-fiction-of-the-millennium-so-far-the-longlist.html I. In the aftermath of the Best Fiction of the Millennium series – given that none of my own favorite five made the list, either the “professional” list or the readers list – I am thinking about awards, recognition, popularity; and how reading (and critiquing) fiction is, on the one hand, ... http://www.themillions.com/2009/09/top-20-alternative-manjushree-thapa%e2%80%99s-the-tutor-of-history.html As we had hoped, our "Best of the Millennium (So Far)" poll stoked a fair amount of conversation around the web last week. List-making, as we've argued in the past, is an imperfect enterprise, and reactions ranged from "Great picks" to "Why didn't you mention x?" One of the difficulties of reaching consensus ... http://www.themillions.com/2009/09/best-fiction-of-the-millennium-so-far-honorable-mention.html One thing I know after working on The Millions for all these years is that the site has some incredibly knowledgeable and avid readers, the sort of book people I loved working with back in my bookstore days and who are the lifeblood of literary culture. And so, even ... http://www.themillions.com/2009/09/best-of-the-millennium-pros-versus-readers.html Growing up in Scotland, I knew several farmers who pronounced with Delphic confidence on the weather. On a clear December day they would forecast a blizzard; in the middle of rain they would claim a drought was coming. In the spring and summer of 2001, people who ... http://www.themillions.com/2009/09/1-the-corrections-by-jonathan-franzen.html The Known World, Edward P. Jones' gorgeously written novel, turns the world of race relations as we know it upside down. The lines that divide the races in his antebellum are not so much blurred as crooked, doglegged, and doubling back on each other. And race is only ... http://www.themillions.com/2009/09/2-the-known-world-by-edward-p-jones.html I read Cloud Atlas with two contradictory impulses: first to let loose a yodel, dance a fandango, wrestle an alligator, seize strangers by the hair and hold them firmly until they, too, read this shockingly beautiful Matryoshka doll of a book; second, to pout alone in the darkness under my ... http://www.themillions.com/2009/09/3-cloud-atlas-by-david-mitchell.html I read Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 on the beach last winter, and when I think about it now, there are still children running around at the edges of the book, burying each other in the sand. It seems only fair that memory should encroach on Bolaño’s magnum opus, the novel which ... http://www.themillions.com/2009/09/4-2666-by-roberto-bolao.html I concluded my voyage through Liberal Arts in May 2000—a typical fairly useless poised-to-succeed-and-doomed-to-fail twentysomething of a hazy new millennium, and a less typical city-sluck Irangelite-turned-Brooklynite with no concept of the country I’d lived in for nearly two decades—when George Saunders’ second collection came out. I was of course was ... http://www.themillions.com/2009/09/5-pastoralia-by-george-saunders.html