To kick off our new series, Dublin-based staff writer Mark O’Connell has penned an exploration of the Internet-era obsession with terrible art – bad YouTube pop songs, Tommy Wiseau’s The Room, and that endless stream of “Worst Things Ever” that invades your inboxes, newsfeeds, and Twitter streams. What, exactly, draws us to these futile attempts at making songs, movies, and art? What are the essential ingredients that render a ridiculous failure sublime? More importantly, what does our seemingly insatiable appetite say about our aesthetic impulses? In setting out to answer these questions, O’Connell uncovers the historical context for our affinity for terrible art, tracing it back to Shakespeare and discovering the early 20th-century novelist who was dinner-party fodder for C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. Read on for the first chapter of The Millions‘ first ebook original, Epic Fail: Bad Art, Viral Fame, and the History of the Worst Thing Ever. – C. Max Magee, editor, The Millions

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1. Behold the Monkey

In the Sanctuary of Mercy church in the town of Borja, in northern Spain, there used to be a fresco by the 19th-century painter Elías García Martínez. It was a fairly standard Ecce Homo scene, portraying the scourged Christ—the crown of thorns, the expression of serene forgiveness—in the moments before crucifixion. No one much cared about this fresco. It was the unremarkable work of a minor painter, of little or no interest to art historians, and the priests and parishioners of the Sanctuary of Mercy clearly didn’t hold it in especially high regard either. Until recently, Martínez’s fresco was in a state of severe decline, with most of the paint having rubbed off around the middle of Christ’s torso and some pretty serious chipping and flaking going on toward the right-hand side of His face. Because no one else had bothered to do anything about it, and because the church seemed uninterested in commissioning a professional restoration, an 81-year-old parishioner named Cecilia Giménez decided to take matters into her own hands. She had lived in Borja and worshiped at Sanctuary of Mercy all her life; even if the fresco was not a parish priority, she saw artistic and devotional value in it and was upset to see it fall into disrepair. She did her best with her limited talents, but the restoration attempt was not successful, and the fresco looked considerably worse by the time she was through. The attempt was so badly botched, in fact, that she wound up becoming internationally famous because of it. For a while there, Cecilia Giménez was probably the most talked-about artist in the world.

Chances are you’ve seen the result of her work, in which Martínez’s Christ is transfigured into what looks like a beady-eyed baboon wearing an ushanka. It very quickly became an iconic image; the Spanish took to calling it Ecce Mono (Behold the Monkey), while in the English-speaking world it became known simply as “the Jesus fresco.” For much of the late summer and early autumn of 2012, you couldn’t go online or open a newspaper without seeing it. People were obsessed not just with the aesthetic monstrosity of the restoration itself but with the idea of the devout and well-intentioned octogenarian who had created it. Twitter timelines filled with jokes about Giménez and links to articles about her, and tribute Tumblrs featured smudgily simian faces gimmicked onto the Mona Lisa, The Last Supper, Van Gogh’s self-portraits, Warhol’s Marilyn, Michelangelo’s David, Munch’s The Scream. The Financial Times, Der Spiegel, The New York Times, and Libération all covered the story of the restoration. The chief art critic for The New Statesman skittishly considered its supreme incompetence on Sky News. And here was the poor woman herself, grilled by television journalists, poignantly insisting that she had the full permission of the parish priest and that, anyway, she hadn’t finished the retouch yet; she had been called away mid-job to go on a trip with her son. (“When I got back, the whole village was there, and I couldn’t defend myself! I said, ‘Let me finish it,’ and they said not to touch it!”). More than 23,000 people signed an online petition to have the piece preserved in its current, profanely post-Giménez form. In a more or less textbook illustration of postmodern irony, the Church of the Face-palm Fresco became a site of tourist pilgrimage, a sacred location beyond the event horizon where ridicule becomes veneration. “The truth,” as one local small-business owner put it in a television-news interview, “is that we should be thanking her because of how much it has helped catering trade in the town. We were having economic problems, and now, thanks to this woman, we are recovering.”

Anyone who had read Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise would have found it difficult not to think of the famous scene in which Jack Gladney (professor of Hitler Studies) and his colleague Murray Siskind drive out into the New England countryside to visit a tourist attraction known as “the Most Photographed Barn in America.” They stand back from the crowd of tourists, observing them as they take photographs of a building that is noteworthy solely for the frequency with which people like themselves take photographs of it. In the epigrammatically deadpan idiom of DeLillo’s characters, Murray refers to the scene as “a religious experience in a way, like all tourism.” They are, as he puts it, “taking pictures of taking pictures.”

What was being enacted here, in the little town of Borja, was a kind of exponentially ironic pilgrimage. The object of fetishization was not so much the icon as the very act of fetishization itself—of participating in, and contributing to, the fame of the thing being venerated. More troubling, though, was the fact that this involuted self-regard was also characteristic of the precise way in which Cecilia Giménez herself had become famous. The consideration of her fame, in other words, was itself a major element of that fame. The woman herself became caught up in the seething vortex of our cultural self-fascination.

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The Face-palm Fresco Affair is a definitive example of our obsession with a particular kind of bad art. Its watchword is “Epic Fail”—the collective cry of elated online schadenfreude that greets each new disastrous attempt to create art or entertainment. The success, through captivating dreadfulness, of R. Kelly’s R&B opera buffa Trapped in the Closet. The brief but intense fame of the impressively atrocious American Idol contestant William Hung. The meme mother lode that was Insane Clown Posse’s attempt to illuminate the wonder of everyday “Miracles” (“Fuckin’ magnets: how do they work?”). The Irish mother-daughter-and-son country trio Crystal Swing, whose viral success with their transcendently lame and somehow insidiously creepy video for “He Drinks Tequila” saw them appear on The Ellen DeGeneres Show without any apparent awareness that they were an object of fun. Every day brings some new fantastic artistic outrage, some new Greatest Worst Thing Ever. There is now an entire echelon of viral celebrity populated by people—your Crystal Swings, your Giménezes—who have become known for their resounding failures.

I suspect that had the Spanish fresco simply been the anonymous work of an unknown guerrilla retoucher—if there wasn’t a body to be seen to undergo the indignity of the slapstick—the story would not have been nearly as compelling to nearly as many people. The personal element is crucial, and this is what accounts for the paradoxically humanistic and cruel constitution of the Epic Fail. It is predicated not just on the appreciation of the failed artwork but also on the aesthetic fetish for a particular misalignment of confidence and competence. We insist, in our judgments, on a sort of cultural habeas corpus. We don’t just want to look at the horribly disfigured Jesus fresco or listen to the horribly misfired effort at a pop song; we want to look at the person who thought they were talented enough to pull these things off in the first place. And I think part of our perverse attraction to these people and to the bad art they make is a particular sort of authenticity. Vigilant self-consciousness is both a primary component and a primary product of our online culture; an entire generation of Westerners (i.e., mine) has become preoccupied with the curation of permanent exhibitions of the self. We hate ourselves for the inauthenticity of these exhibitions, even if we wouldn’t have it any other way. And so the Epic Fail is, among other things, a paradoxical ritual whereby a pure strain of un-self-consciousness is globally venerated and ridiculed.

To watch an interview with Cecilia Giménez is to glimpse the strange and flamboyant cruelty of this phenomenon. The scale, the intensity, and the bewildering modernity of the attention that has been imposed upon her is something by which she is very clearly mortified—an essentially Catholic term, this. Soon after the restoration attempt went viral, she retreated behind closed doors and took to her bed, in the grip of a sustained anxiety attack. According to her family, they were having trouble getting her to eat anything. Perhaps, then, it’s worth thinking about what is truly emblematic of our contemporary culture here—and where the real Epic Fail actually is. Is it the smudged, monkey-faced Jesus and the exultantly amused response it provoked, or is it the debilitating case of viral celebrity now afflicting a frail old lady who just wanted to do some small good deed for her church?

Special thanks to our pals at Byliner who helped us turn our idea into an ebook.

Click here to buy the book from the ebookstore of your choice for $1.99.

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)

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Last week, a friend of mine told me he never understood why the government funded PBS in the first place. Sesame Street is marketable and could be bought out by Disney or Nickelodeon in a second. The same goes for all of PBS’s best shows. So why should taxpayers fund PBS?

“Believe” is the most overused buzzword of political rhetoric, so I will avoid it. But I really think PBS should be subsidized by the government. Here’s why.

PBS is a cheap way to educate. There’s way more of your tax dollar going to war machines than to this frivolous arts-n-farts station. Yes, it’s run by aesthetes and Ivy League intellectuals. But that should be a point of national pride. The History Channel now airs “Did Aliens Build the Pyramids.” The Learning Channel airs “Say Yes to the Dress.” If you let the market choose your programming, sooner or later, it will lead to Honey Boo Boo.

Henson Kept Big Bird Safe from For-Profits

It’s true that Sesame Street (produced by CTW, the Children’s Television Workshop) could get bought out by Disney – in an instant. In the 1980s, when Michael Eisner came to Disney and started its corporate expansion into resorts, hotels, cruise ships, Broadway shows, TV networks, stores, sports teams, etc., he also made a deal with Jim Henson to buy the Muppets.

But not the Sesame Street Muppets. Henson created Big Bird for CTW and owned the copyright. Henson refused to sell Eisner the Sesame Muppets, which included Big Bird, Oscar, Bert, Ernie, Grover, and Elmo. Half of all licensing money from these characters went to CTW, for Sesame’s autonomy and survival. Licensing these character was the financial lifeblood of Sesame Street at that point.

CTW’s Sesame Street started in 1969 as a grand experiment to see what would happen if you gave all children (inner city, rural kids, and suburban alike) entertaining pre-school lessons as a head start. When you consider the alternatives, this is an awfully cheap way to educate and unite kids all over the country.

Henson Was a For-Profit


Sesame Street was a great social experiment that came out of the liberal 60s. But in many ways, the show was a product of free market capitalism. Jim Henson, a successful businessman, donated his services to the show. He didn’t get a paycheck for it. For Henson, it was worth doing – for free. The show’s funding came from private philanthropy in the beginning, the Ford Foundation and the Carnegie Foundation. They put up the hundreds of thousands necessary to do research, hire education specialists, artists, and so on. CTW was not originally publicly funded. It did receive some public funds later, but then eventually became independent on the sale of toys (remember those $30 Tickle-Me Elmos?). So if private business is responsible for Sesame Street, why do we need to fund PBS?

The thing is, you need both sides – public and private – to make Sesame Street. The show was the brainchild of Rosemary Ganz Cooney, who was at the time an employee of New York’s channel 13, the nation’s first Public Broadcasting channel. Sesame Street was the kind of thing no other network would dream of – clearly – and no network would even air. It is sui generis, original, and produced by a company that doesn’t want to make a profit; it wants to keep achieving its mission of teaching lessons. It wants independence. No other station would offer CTW a home without strings attached. PBS’s lack of economic motives was imperative. PBS offers a home to strange shows that just want to do something positive.

That’s why Jim Henson didn’t let Michael Eisner buy Big Bird. Oh Eisner tried, and he made Jim Henson pretty “annoyed,” according to a 1990 Washington Post article, trying – in Cooney’s words. According to the book Street Gang, when Henson told him Sesame Street characters were not on the table, Eisner relented and invited Cooney and Henson for “a peace lunch.” Cooney said, “Michael was absolutely being just his most charming self… but then out of the blue, he said something that stopped Jim cold… he made some reference to the Sesame Street Muppets…Jim turned to Michael and said, ‘You did it again!’” This was a man who never seemed angry – getting angry.

And according to a 1991 Forbes article, when Disney’s lawyers finally realized they couldn’t get the Sesame Street Muppets, “Disney wanted to limit their use, presumably to enhance the value of the Muppets it was buying.” Disney wanted to see less Big Bird, in order to get more profits for Mickey. That’s the way the free market works, baby. It’s a zero-sum game, and the strong squash the weak. In a 1991 Newsweek article, a Henson source said Disney lawyer Jeffrey Katzenberg countered Henson’s plea for a “fair deal,” by saying, “Fair deal! Get out of the ‘60s, pal. You’re in Hollywood now.”

CTW could sell itself to Disney any day of the week if it wanted to. It pointedly does not want to. It wants to remain independent, to listen only to its creators’ consciences and its panel of educators and researchers. If Sesame Street were bought by Disney, it would be subject to Disney’s shareholders’ opinions. Shareholders of a global entertainment conglomerate like Disney probably care about a lot of nice things but none more than money.

For Innovation, We Need Both



The public television system is above all else an opportunity. You may not like most of the shows on PBS – Downton Abbey or Antiques Roadshow or Jim Lehrer or Barney – but the PBS infrastructure needs to stay available for innovation. For the next Sesame Street. For innovations that will bring us all together as a nation, make us better, stronger, and smarter. We need the potential for informative programming to come into poor neighborhoods. We need the potential for a new big idea that will, perhaps, make our teens decide to major in math and science and stimulate our economy. I don’t know what the next thing will be, but I know the networks won’t air it. They’ll air Millionaire Matchmaker and Real Housewives.



Sesame Street was an amazing moment in our national history, aspiring to unite all kids in a shared love of learning and a shared wonder at what America could do. It came about because of a unique partnership between the free market and a governmentally-funded station. We need both to give us another Sesame Street. If you shut down the public part of the equation, you’re dooming the next generation to a future without that opportunity.

Big Bird won’t get fired. CTW makes its own money. That’s not the issue. The issue is – in 1969, who else would have aired a crazy idea like Sesame Street if not PBS?

I devoured When it Happens to You in a day or two. It was an engaging and pleasing read, with lines like, “Greta had always been most beautiful to him when emerging from water. Swimming pools, oceans, bath tubs.” Ringwald treats her characters with compassion, and I enjoyed seeing how each story would connect to the next. Overall, though, I was underwhelmed, perhaps because the territory mined is so familiar: there’s an affair, there are blah sentences like, “The color had drained from her face.” There’s even a description of a woman who, after almost being run over, raises “a furious fist” at the driver, like some irate extra in an action flick’s chase sequence. I longed for a more daring and complicated book; Ringwald has one in her future, I know it, but this isn’t it.

Even so, as I said, I devoured the novel, and, in general, enjoyed it. Its predictable content and structure were comforting, like a catchy pop song or a romantic comedy. You know, as Adorno might say, its familiarity helped me ward off death. Or something.

In a recent profile of Justin Cronin in the New York Times Magazine, Colson Whitehead is quoted as saying he’d “rather shoot [him]self in the face” than have another discussion about literature genres. I don’t blame him. When people ask me what kind of fiction I write, I usually say, “It’s about people,” and leave it at that. But as I read Ringwald’s book, I found myself pondering literary fiction: as a genre, as a taxonomical category. When It Happens to You, you see, is a sterling example of literary fiction, if we were to consider literary fiction as a straightforward genre like romance or science fiction, with certain expected tropes and motifs.

What, you ask, are some attributes of this genre? Read on, my friend, read on.

1. The Long Title

When it Happens to You is not only a long title, it’s also in the second person, as are many titles in the literary fiction category. I think we should blame Dave Eggers for starting this trend with his novel You Shall Know Our Velocity. Or maybe Miranda July‘s story collection, No One Belongs Here More Than You, really got things going. I, too, am guilty of joining the bandwagon with my hard-to-say novella title, If You’re Not Yet Like Me. Uwem Akpan demanded us to Say You’re One Of Them, and Elliott Holt will comply with her forthcoming  You Are One Of Them.  Ramona Ausubel’s debut,  No One Is Here Except All of Us, switched things up with the first-person plural; perhaps she was inspired by fellow UC Irvine alumnus Joshua Ferris’s Then We Came to the End.

If Ringwald hadn’t chosen the long second-person title, she might have picked one with a full name, a la, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz, or Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain, or The Flight of Gemma Hardy by Margot Livesey, or Laura Lamont’s Life In Pictures by Emma Straub. Sheesh. I should call my next book And So Olivo D’Havellind and You Will Move Away From this Place I Call Home. It’s sure to win the Pulitzer.

2. Adultery

A decade later, Sean Carman’s “Lessons Learned from My Study of Literature” still makes me laugh. But the third lesson, “The thing about adultery is it’s the highest expression of pure human freedom,” has its inverse as well: that adultery in literary fiction (and in real life, too, I presume) also leads to stress, despair, and a complicated regret. Let’s just go ahead and credit Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina for making extra-marital affairs in fiction so popular. Anton Chekhov also gets points for his enormously influential story, “The Lady with The Lap Dog.” And all contemporary tales of domestic unrest must also pay dues to Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road, with its depiction of The Wheelers, an unhappy, unfaithful couple living in the suburbs. If you aren’t sure what kind of literary novel to write, I suggest starting with an English professor who has an affair with his (her?!) student while the wife (husband?! life partner?!) sculpts and flails at home. Abortion plot-line optional.

3. Scene, Exposition, Scene, Flashback, Scene, Cue Epiphany

The reader of literary genre fiction should feel the structure in her body, particularly with short stories. It’s a recognizable rhythm, it’s a shimmering in one’s veins as one moves from opening scene to well-placed background information to the next, more tense scene to that special, oh-so-revealing flashback about the time our protagonist ran over his rubber horse, or the time he knew he was in love with a real horse, or the time he — oh you see what I mean. In the genre of literary fiction, this structure must lead to a moment of revelation, suggested but never explained. The image of our protagonist in a Safeway parking lot, pushing his cart as if he were a cowboy riding a horse, the wind roughing up his hair, the distant neighs of horns in the far off distance. (Can you feel it? I can.) Let’s go ahead and give James Joyce his rightful due for such faintly falling, falling faintly moments of reverie and character change in literary fiction. (Damn that horse! Now I’m sobbing!)

4. A Dog barks, someone eats a watermelon, a car drives away.

In his terrific and funny Slate essay, Rosecrans Baldwin unveils how many authors write barking dogs into the backgrounds of their novels. Though he points out barking dogs in genre novels as well, I’d argue that you find them in literary fiction precisely because they show time passing. As Baldwin says, “Most authors…employ the trope as a narrative rest stop, an innocuous way to fill space and time.” In literary fiction, there is so little event, authors need that dang dog; without it, there’s only the mind, there’s only emotion, and the reader is floating in a vacuum. As James Wood has said of the aforementioned  “The Lady With the Lap Dog,” Chekhov needs Gurov to eat a watermelon for half an hour in front of his new mistress in order to show time passing. Otherwise, nada is happening! For good measure, I suggest adding to your scene a car driving away. Or even better, the distant rumble of a motorcycle. Ooh. Yes.

5. The plate drops!

Years ago, Maud Newton lodged the phrase “tea towel fiction” in my brain, and it’s stuck with me. Newton quotes a judge for the Orange Prize, Katharine Viner, who said of the many submissions she read:

They are books with 500 pages discussing a subtle but allegedly profound shift within a relationship. They are books where intricate descriptions of a man taking a glass out of the dishwasher, taking a tea-towel off a rail, opening out the tea-towel, then delicately drying the glass with the tea-towel, before pouring a drink into the glass, signify that he has just been through a divorce.

This is a “nothing happens” book, the former it girl of literary genre fiction. In my classes, I like to describe these stories as: “A man and a woman buy dishes at the store. When they get home, she goes to lie down, barely talking, something unsettling her. A dog barks in the distance. The man starts to put the plates away, and one breaks. The end.” What I love about this kind of narrative is that it’s often deliciously readable. How is that possible? Of course, this kind of narrative is a bit out of vogue — there’s a new it girl on the scene. It’s the same man and woman, but now time travel or zombies or tiny people who live in walnuts are involved. Raymond Carver is to blame for the popularity of the first kind of narrative, with his profound stories of small actions, uninterested as they are in directly exploring the inner lives of characters. That genius George Saunders is to blame for the latter: damn him and his faxing cave man!

I have certainly missed other tropes of this rich and admired genre. Feel free to add more in the comments — I need some tips for my next story. (I’m thinking of making it about a woman named Edan Lepucki. Woh…woh…mind melt!)

1.
The book review is dead. At the very least, it’s very obviously dying. Anyway, we can all agree that it should be killed off, because it’s gotten to be irrelevant. If not downright parasitic. (Though maybe it might be salvaged if the average review was a little meaner.)

I exaggerate only slightly here. This past August, a pair of meta-critical essays by Dwight Garner in The New York Times and Jacob Silverman in Slate sent everyone who fancied him- or herself a critic — whether institutionalized or not — into a collective fit. It was probably the biggest literary-cultural dustup since the Great MFA Debate of 2010-2011, when Elif Batuman’s London Review of Books article, “Get a Real Degree,” made everyone feel just a little bit bad about the existence of MFA programs.

I found it hard to get terribly worked up about literary criticism’s emotional register. For every Laura Miller or Lev Grossman who has foresworn negative reviews, I know that there will be just as many qualifiers for the Hatchet Job of the Year Award to fulfill the angry review quota. For every purchased five-star review, there will be that lady on Goodreads who says that the only good thing about the new Junot Diaz novel is that it taught her the Spanish word sucio.

But enough about the State of the Art! I enjoyed all of these essays, but the one thing that struck me was that they were all essentially negative, in the sense that they set out to describe how things were going wrong or why things ought not to be the way that they are. What they didn’t do a very good job of was describing what criticism or book reviewing is, or what it should be.

Okay, there were some nice, bold mission statements thrown in there. Here’s Dwight Garner: “What we need more of…are excellent and authoritative and punishing critics.” Agreed. Or Daniel Mendelsohn, in the New Yorker: “the critic is someone who, when his knowledge, operated on by his taste in the presence of some new example of the genre he’s interested in…hungers to make sense of that new thing, to analyze it, interpret it, make it mean something.” Sounds great. Or Richard Brody, again in the New Yorker: “Criticism is the turning of the secondary (the critic’s judgment) into the primary.” Sure, why not.

So I think we can all agree that A) the “book review” is a prestigious class of writing that people aspire to write, and B) there is a continuum of, shall we say, critical perceptiveness — what in the pre-everyone-gets-a-trophy age we might call “value” or “quality” — on which the multiple-thousand-word, tightly-argued essays of the New York/London/L.A. Review of Books reside at one end, and the rapid reactions of John Q. Tumblr reside at the other.

(By the way, I don’t want to suggest that there is something philosophically corrupt or intrinsically wrong about the latter, or that just because something is edited and not self-published, it is automatically better than a blog post. Advanced degrees, journalistic credentials, and/or getting published in hard copy is not a guarantee that a book review is any good. See, for example Janet Maslin’s misreading of This Bright River.)

But what should this excellence and interpretation and maybe a little bit of hard-headedness actually look like, in practice? Why has it been absent? And why does any discussion about literary criticism turn into a giant game of dodging the question, as if the concept of a book review were like the concept of pornography, in that you might not know how to define it, but you’d know it when you see it?

In the interest of getting everyone on the same page (book pun!), I thought it would be an interesting exercise to dissect a book review, to pick apart what makes it work or not work, what makes some book reviews great and others — most of them, really — bland and unhelpful and immediately forgettable. Because book reviewing is a genre with its own conventions, just as every murder mystery must start with a body, and every epic fantasy must feature elvish words with too many apostrophes. It’s worth figuring out what those conventions are.

2.
In the beginning, there is ego. As George Orwell put it in his essay “Writers and Leviathan”: “One’s real reaction to a book, when one has a reaction at all, is usually ‘I like this book’ or ‘I don’t like it,’ and what follows is a rationalization.”

The decision to like or not like a book is where every book review begins. This is what gives the genre its underlying suspense — will Michiko Kakutani like this book or won’t she? — but also its frustrating sense of chaos, because no matter how technically sound or philosophically sophisticated or beautiful a book might be, something minor or tangential can turn off a reviewer so much that he or she decides the book is not good.

A lot of book reviews never get past this first stage, and this is where the whole free-for-all of online reviewing can get frustrating. For instance, the Goodreads lady on Junot Diaz, or the people who unironically give one-star reviews to classic literature: all of these reviews consist entirely of the initial response and a subsequent explanation, and no self-reflection about whether there might be more to the book — and to the reviewer’s response — than that initial, emotional decision. If the nauseating chumminess of the publishing world is the Scylla of book criticism, than this kind of reviewerly narcissism is surely its Charybdis.

But hopefully, no matter how much reviewers are in love with themselves, they will at least step aside and say a few things about the book. In the case of fiction, its plot, its characters, some of the backstory, and the setting. In the case of nonfiction, the overall narrative or argument of the book, the author’s source material and expertise in the subject matter.

This is the next stage in the evolution of a book review, and it is plain nuts and bolts kind of stuff. But it’s so important to do readers this simple courtesy because, unlike an oil filter or a frying pan, the world of literature is so expansive and dependent on authorial decisions and whims that two books within a genre, or a sub-genre, or even a sub-sub-genre, may vary wildly in so many ways. Is the protagonist of this hard science-fiction story an astrobiologist on a generation ship or a detective on an asteroid base? And so on.

This is where things start to get complicated. The average paid reviewer gets one scant paragraph in Publisher’s Weekly, maybe four or six in your average major metropolitan daily, to appraise a book. And more often than not, they splurge on summary — often to the exclusion of everything else. So their concluding paragraphs tend to be a little overstuffed, as these recent examples show:

But finally, of course, this kind of rigidity exacts its own price, and Natalie can’t avoid paying. Each of the novel’s sections ends with a scene of violence, something Ms. Smith presents as inescapable in northwest London. Some characters die from it, others survive, but none are unscathed. What Ms. Smith offers in this absorbing novel is a study in the limits of freedom, the way family and class constrain the adult selves we make. In England, the margin for self-invention is notoriously smaller than it is in the U.S. — which is one reason why Ms. Smith, with NW, seems more than ever a great English novelist.

(Adam Kirsch, review of NW in The Wall Street Journal)

There are moments here and there in Telegraph Avenue where Mr. Chabon, himself sounds as if he’s trying very hard “to sound like he was from the ’hood,” but for the most part he does such a graceful job of ventriloquism with his characters that the reader forgets they are fictional creations. His people become so real to us, their problems so palpably netted in the author’s buoyant, expressionistic prose, that the novel gradually becomes a genuinely immersive experience — something increasingly rare in our ADD age.

(Michiko Kakutani, review of Telegraph Avenue in The New York Times)

The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving deals with sorrow and disability and all the things that can go wrong in life. But mostly Evison has given us a salty-sweet story about absorbing those hits and taking a risk to reach beyond them. What a great ride.

(Ellen Emry Heitzel, review of The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving in The Seattle Times)

In other words, you can see where these reviews are trying to do too much with too little space. Trying to sum up the quality of the prose with a few abstract descriptors. Making a final plea for the cultural relevance of the book. Ending on a gnomic, life-affirming mantra. And all this in fewer than 100 words.

The fact that these reviewers are reaching for something beyond what they have space to cover is, to me, a tacit admission that there is more to be done here; that saying “Here is the plot of the book, and here is a pile of adjectives to show how much I (dis)liked it” just barely scratches the surface of what book criticism can cover. But if you’ve already done all that and you still feel that readers ought to take away one more big idea — what do you do?

3.
Matt Taibbi hated The World is Flat and Hot, Flat, and Crowded. He hated their titles. He hated their premise. Hated their predictability, their utter lack of real insights, and most memorably of all, hated their language. In his reviews of Thomas Friedman’s two books, Taibbi tracked dozens of bizarre proclamations and just plain bad writing, from the first confusion between herd animals with hunting animals to his last, triumphant-until-you-think-about-it graph of freedom vs. oil prices, which used four data points selected basically at random to make a point about the march of democracy across the globe. (“What can’t you argue, if that’s how you’re going to make your point??” wrote Taibbi, two question marks included.)

This might make Taibbi sound like a prescriptivist grump, a Grammar Nazi who just happened to find the one guy who was famous enough and bad at writing enough to deserve this kind of thrashing. Except that the reviews do more than that. It turns out that Friedman’s “anti-ear” is actually the most obvious symptom of a larger case of intellectual and moral fraud. In Friedman’s world, the rules of basic logic and historical causation do not exist; he invents new realities out of a few cherry-picked events and the limited frame of reference of a privileged, jet-setting columnist based out of New York City.

On the one hand, this entire review stems from an act that we all can do: to try and gauge the quality of Friedman’s writing and thought. But Taibbi manages to do more than wag his finger at Friedman for writing poorly — he discovers something important and true that we didn’t know before, and more importantly, couldn’t know just by taking Friedman at his word. So Taibbi passes Daniel Mendelsohn’s “meaning” test, because we now know something new about Friedman’s book that we didn’t before. He certainly passes Dwight Garner’s bar for being both excellent and punishing. This is not simple aesthetic snobbery: it’s formal criticism that actually matters.

Then there is the big picture. It’s hard to get much bigger than James Wood’s famous 2000 proclamation: “A genre is hardening.” In it, he identifies the “perpetual-motion machine that appears to have been embarrassed into velocity” that characterized novelists like Don DeLillo, Salman Rushdie, and mainly, Zadie Smith, whose then-new book White Teeth Wood was reviewing. These practitioners of “hysterical realism,” Wood argued, were to the novel what the van Eyck brothers were to medieval painting — artists who thought that conceptual virtuosity and an inexhaustible supply of detail substituted for a plausible, profound exploration of the human experience.

Instead of treating the text as a mirror for the writer’s psyche, this kind of criticism assumes that the novel in question is a mirror of some kind of shared worldview, brought on not just by the writer’s personal choices (of character, setting, plot, and so on) but also by the context in which he or she is writing. In the case of the hysterical realists, they are all too in love with their grand, underlying, and basically untrue idea — everything and everyone is interconnected in ambition and subject to the same fate — that they have to make their characters essentially inhuman to make their plots work.

But not everyone has to be present at the birth of a genre to do this sort of criticism. Rosecrans Baldwin discovered a trope that’s almost as old as the modern novel — the “distant-dog impulse” — from Tolstoy to Picoult.

Evgeny Morozov tracked not only the intellectual vacuousness, but also the stylistic commonalities imposed by the new line of TED Books.

What’s going on here? Elif Batuman explains that all of these reviewers are looking for context in the morass of personal and artistic choices that go into every piece of writing:

Literature viewed in this way becomes a gigantic multifarious dream produced by a historical moment. The role of the critic is then less to exhaustively explain any single work than to identify, in a group of works, a reflection of some conditioned aspect of reality.

Maybe it doesn’t sound great when reduced to a mission statement like this — in fact, I think it sounds vaguely totalitarian, especially when you consider that this sort of criticism is called “Marxist criticism” in academic circles. But in practice, it definitely works.

4.
So. Reaction. Summary. Aesthetic and historical appraisal: these are the four classical elements of literary criticism. To that I might add that it helps to be negative — of the twelve reviews I quote here, eight are at least moderately negative, and about five are relentlessly so.

That people are even having this conversation about the supposed niceness of book reviews is great: it shows that book reviews are anything but irrelevant. And now that we’ve teased out the ground rules of what can and should go into a book review, it’s time to turn you loose. You now have the tools to cut through the morass of literary criticism and decide for yourself not only if a book review is worthwhile, but why. You can critique the critics. You can be a meta-Michiko. Use this knowledge wisely.

As for me, I eagerly await the next big, invented crisis to strike the world of literature. I hope it involves deckled edges.

Image via Wikimedia Commons

When I started writing seriously — by which I mean that I was serious in my intentions and commitment, which seem to me the main things a writer can control — I started by writing sentences. I spent a lot of time, sometimes a day, sometimes the better part of a week, on each one, moving its parts around, weighing the thing in my hand, struggling to achieve balance and shapeliness, waiting for all the pieces to click perfectly into place.

Paul Valéry once told André Breton that he couldn’t be a novelist because he refused to write, “The Marquise went out at five o’clock.” Fiction writing, Breton and Valéry agreed, relies too much on sentences written in this “purely informative style,” sentences of a “circumstantial, needlessly specific nature” — why five o’clock? why not five thirty? and why not a princess? In those early days of writing, I thought often of Valéry’s remark. I wanted to write fiction, but I didn’t want to write that kind of bluntly functional sentence. I wanted each sentence to be a thing unto itself, self-sufficient and entire. Needless to say, these sentences were all a long way from “The Marquise went out at five o’clock.”

Each sentence necessarily represented an end point, since it’s precisely the nature of self-sufficient things that they don’t have needs that must be met beyond their own borders. They don’t make demands that bring new things into existence. So I always felt, after finishing one, that I was starting from scratch. Naturally, I’d write another sentence, but it wouldn’t bear any relationship to the one I’d just completed. Again, necessarily so: self-sufficient things don’t have relationships.

This was in college, when I was taking writing workshops. What would happen is that I would go on in this way awhile, until I had perhaps a dozen such sentences. It would then occur to me that I had to turn them into a piece that I could submit to class, so I’d lay my sentences out and write a bunch more to connect them into something that could reasonably be called a story. These connective sentences were written much more quickly, with far less care.

If this doesn’t sound like a very good way to go about writing stories, it isn’t. And the stories I wrote in this way weren’t very good. This was as obvious to me as it was to anyone who was forced to read them. But things weren’t completely hopeless: my professors and classmates sometimes picked out isolated sentences that they believed contained enough life and interest to suggest some promise on my part. You may have already guessed that the sentences they picked were never — I’m not exaggerating: not once — those I’d labored over.

There was obviously a lesson to be had here, but I wasn’t sure what it was. For a while, I thought it had to do with spontaneity. The sentences I’d spent all my time on felt mannered, uptight. The sentences I’d written quickly had a breezy vitality. I tried to write entirely in this breezy way, but I couldn’t do it without already having those more carefully constructed sentences — the “real” sentences — to link up. And I couldn’t trick myself into writing my “real” sentences like throwaways, though I experimented with various approaches to get over this barrier. On the advice of one teacher, I tried “free” writing — first thought, best thought. On the advice of another, I attempted self-hypnosis. On my own initiative, I drank before sitting down to work. In all cases the results were a mess.

Eventually, I just went back to laboring. I decided I had to work harder, but that part of my work would be making the writing feel less worked over. I thought of it as the literary equivalent of stonewashing jeans or building with distressed wood — creating pleasing imperfections by first polishing and then artfully tarnishing. I built an entire novel this way. It took me a long time to do it, and the novel wasn’t any good.

This might have gone on much longer than it did except that, while working on that novel, I began writing nonfiction. Mostly I wrote book reviews, but also some essays and long-form journalism. After I’d finished the novel that wasn’t very good, I wrote a memoir. Among other things, this memoir was about the illness and death of a person I loved. When writing all this nonfiction, I labored over my sentences, but it was a different kind of labor. If you write about actual people and you are a halfway responsible human being, the mandate to account accurately for your subject is going to take precedence over everything else. So I spent a lot of time on my sentences, but I did so with a greater end in mind, which was making sure that those sentences captured the truth as I understood it. The results were better than anything I’d written before, and better than the fiction I was writing at the same time.

Once again there was a lesson to be had, and once again I didn’t know what it was. If the lesson was that I wrote better when I felt an obligation to the truth, I wasn’t sure how to apply it to my fiction writing, which was the writing that mattered most to me. More than one person suggested that the lesson was that I simply wasn’t a very good fiction writer, that I should be grateful that I could write nonfiction that people would pay to read, which put me ahead of most aspiring writers, and that I should stop driving myself crazy doing something for which I had no demonstrable talent. That wasn’t a lesson I was willing to accept. I was going to write fiction no matter what, so I might as well try to figure out how to do it properly. In fact, even knowing that the novel I’d spent six years on wasn’t any good, as I finished my memoir, I was mapping out a new novel in my head.

When you map a book out in your head, you don’t build it with sentences, since you can’t fit that many sentences in your head at once. You build it with images or scenes. Or you lay out the structure, or you outline the plot. I do some combination of all these things. In any case, the very day I sent my publisher the final changes to my memoir, I started writing what would become my first published novel. By then, the book already existed in some inchoate form in my head, and my job was to get it onto the page. There wasn’t the same kind of moral imperative that comes with nonfiction: I’d made everything up, so I didn’t owe it to anyone other than myself to render it truthfully, and I made changes to the initial conception whenever they seemed justified, many of them quite substantial. But I had finally learned the lesson, and it applied to my fiction as well as my nonfiction: Whenever my sentences had a function outside themselves — whether that function was connecting up other sentences, honoring the truth of a loved one’s life, or setting down an imagined world already existent in my head — they could in time be made to work. Whenever my sentences were built to be beautiful yet self-sufficient objects of attention, they collapsed.

It’s long been my experience that after I learn a valuable lesson through a lengthy and costly period of trial and error, I will quickly find that lesson stated in the most explicit terms in all sorts of places where I might easily have found it before. So I should not have been surprised, while I was working on the second novel, to come across the following passage in one of my favorite books:

These things I then knew not, and I loved these lower beauties, and I was sinking to the very depths, and to my friends I said, “Do we love any thing but the beautiful? What then is the beautiful? and what is beauty? What is it that attracts and wins us to the things we love? for unless there were in them a grace and beauty, they could by no means draw us unto them.” And I marked and perceived that in bodies themselves, there was a beauty, from their forming a sort of whole, and again, another from apt and mutual correspondence, as of a part of the body with its whole, or a shoe with a foot, and the like. And this consideration sprang up in my mind, out of my inmost heart, and I wrote “on the fair and fit,” I think, two or three books.

This comes from Augustine’s Confessions. It’s a minor passage — the actual volumes Augustine wrote “on the fair and fit” have been lost — but I couldn’t believe I’d taken so little notice of it in the half dozen previous times I’d read the book. Augustine is describing precisely the distinction I’d been failing to make all that time: there is a beauty to be found in a well-made whole, a body itself; then there is the beauty of a part in the whole, which is the beauty of a thing that elegantly serves its purpose. When it comes to writing stories or novels, sentences are parts, not wholes. They need to be both fair and fit. They can’t be treated as bodies themselves.

Finally, it’s not a limitation but a virtue of the novel that it demands its author to write, “The Marquise went out at five o’clock.” Within the context of the novel, such a sentence can even be beautiful, because it can be made necessary. This is the truth that another poet, W.H. Auden, gets at when he says that the novelist

Must struggle out of his boyish gift and learn
How to be plain and awkward, how to be
One after whom none think it worth to turn

Become the whole of boredom, subject to
Vulgar complaints like love, among the Just

Be just, among the Filthy filthy too,

Another bit of advice I’d read half a dozen times and didn’t understand until I’d learned it in my own way.

People can disagree, and have, over whether a novel or a story must itself have a “purpose” apart from being beautiful. But it seems to me inarguable that the parts of a novel or a story must have a purpose within the whole. These days, when I find that a sentence I’m writing isn’t working, I don’t think about what I want that sentence to look like or to be; I don’t pull it from the page to weigh it in my hand; I don’t worry over its internal balance. I simply ask myself, “What do I need this sentence to do?” I ask myself what role the sentence plays in its paragraph, what role the paragraph plays in its scene, the scene in its story. If I can’t answer these questions, even in some inarticulate and intuitive way, then I’ve got a problem, and that problem is bigger than this one sentence.

If this bit of hard-won knowledge sounds fairly obvious, I can only say in my defense that nothing about the academic creative writing complex as I experienced it encourages this attitude. The problem goes as deep as the very name of the discipline. I suspect that the perpetual debate about whether “creative writing” can be taught would cease if we just had a moratorium on that unfortunate moniker. No good teacher thinks that creativity can be taught; no good teacher doubts that writing — in the sense of a set of tools with which a writer can tackle literary problems — can be taught. Yet how often are beginning writing students who are not yet up to putting together an entire story placed in front of an object and asked to describe it in writing, in the way that students of painting and drawing are asked to render still lifes or the human form? Instead, they are simply told to write something that is in turn given to other students who are asked to judge it without any reference to what the piece of writing is supposed to be doing, what part it might play in a larger whole. The result, I suspect, is lots of students doing as I did, tirelessly perfecting sentences that serve no purpose, forever chasing the fair without ever considering the fit.

My own experience as a teacher has been that students are initially resistant to writing exercises, which they see as an infringement upon their self-expression. They are likely to be impatient if you suggest that these exercises will actually give them the tools necessary for self-expression, let alone that great writing might not even have that much to do with self-expression, in the end. But if you push them on it, if you set them to specific tasks, they will see improvement almost immediately and thus be encouraged to persist. I have had students admit to a great feeling of relief at being given an assignment at which they could succeed because even though they were certain that they wanted to write, they didn’t yet know what they wanted to write, and learning both the how and the what of writing at once is an overwhelming task.

There is another way that creative writing workshops at almost every level contradict the functional view I’m proposing. In most creative writing workshops, you will be encouraged to write short stories, even if your ambition is simply to write novels. (Once you’ve “graduated” from workshops, of course, you will be encouraged to write novels, even if your ambition is simply to write short stories, but this is another matter.) The idea is that stories are easier in some way, if not to write, then to discuss in class. But if it’s true that sentences and paragraphs need to be judged as parts of a whole, then it follows that the sentences and paragraphs of a short story — which is quite obviously a dramatically different form from the novel — need to be judged on different terms than the sentences and paragraphs of a novel. Treating short story writing as preparation for novel writing suggests that a good sentence is a good sentence, irrespective of its fitness to a particular task.

Here is what I’m not saying: I’m not saying that writing ought to be transparent, that language that draws attention to itself is an extravagance. I’m certainly not saying that a novelist must have a “purely informative style.” Nor am I saying that style should be of only secondary concern. In fact, I still more or less think that style is everything. But style, as Proust said, is just a way of looking at the world. It emerges from the effort to express something other than itself. You don’t develop a style by writing sentences that have no purpose other than to be stylish, sentences that seek to be self-contained works of art.

Admittedly, some truly great novelists, like Joyce and Flaubert and Nabokov, went a long way with the belief that every sentence should be a work of art. To this observation I have two responses. First, if you have the talent of Joyce or Flaubert or Nabokov, you should immediately cease listening to anything I have to say about writing. But second, if we’re being honest, even Joyce and Flaubert and Nabokov were in their ways harmed by this belief, achieved what they did more in spite of than because of it, and did their worst work when they were most committed to that aim.

Finally, the advice to make your sentences do something doesn’t rest on a particular attitude about the function of literature. It applies equally to traditionalists and experimentalists, to realists and to metafictionists. In a way, it doesn’t matter what you ask your sentences to do, as long as you ask them to do something. But my own experience has taught me that sentences have the best chance to fit their purpose elegantly when the work they’re being asked to do is fairly modest. One of the biggest surprises of my writing life so far has been the questions that occupy my thoughts when I’m writing. When reading great literature — the kind that made me want to write in the first place — I ask questions like “What is my attitude toward death?” or “How can meaning persist in the absence of God?” Because I want readers of my own work to be provoked into asking similar questions, I had long assumed that writing would involve my spending a lot of time on them. But when I write I am occupied by narrow questions specific to the work at hand, like “How do I get from this scene to that scene?” or “How do I make this character’s frustrations clear?”

If I’m lucky, my answers to these questions will implicitly suggest a relationship to all the persistent questions that I want my writing “really” to be about. I think this is what Annie Dillard means when she says that a writer must aim for the chopping block and not for the wood. But in the meantime, one advantage to the more modest questions is that they have answers. Those answers may not always be easy to find, but I long ago moved past the idea that the solution to my problems is to work less hard. At the very least, finding the perfect answer to a simple question seems feasible enough to get me started, to get me doing something.

“Sentences” by Christopher R. Beha will appear in The Writers Notebook II, which Tin House Books will publish in November.

Image Credit: Flickr/tjshirey

Imagine that one night you have a dream in which you are in an enormous bookstore lined with shelves upon shelves of books, each bound in the same plain white cover displaying only the author’s name, the title of the book, and a brief description of the book and its author. This is an anxiety dream, so it turns out that your livelihood depends on your ability to search this enormous bookstore and figure out which books are good and which aren’t. The thing is, in this bookstore, the vast majority of the books are bad - trite, derivative, poorly written, or simply the sort of book you would never read in a million years. You know there are some really good books in this store, maybe even one or two genuinely great ones, but from the outside they’re indistinguishable from the terrible ones.

How do you choose? Do you sit down at the first shelf and read each book all the way through? No way; you’d starve, if you didn’t kill yourself from boredom first. Do you glance at the descriptions of the book and author on the back cover, and then read a page or two of the ones that sound more interesting? That’s better, but we’re talking a huge room here – thousands and thousands of books – and what can you really tell from a couple of paragraphs, anyway?

So you begin to look for shortcuts. You decide to only consider the kinds of books you already know you like – mysteries, say, and literary novels with strong female protagonists. Still, there are a lot of mysteries and novels with strong female protagonists in this bookstore. So you look for other shortcuts. If you recognize the name of the author as someone who has already written something else good, you read that one. You might also look for other people in the bookstore so you could ask them what good books they had read lately and start looking for those. You might even take some of them out for lunch – it’s okay, you can expense it – to pick their brains.

For several hundred people, most of them living in New York City, this dream is their daily reality. They are called literary agents, and if you are a writer with one or more unpublished books on your hard drive you have probably received a terse note from several dozen of them telling you that your novel is “not a right fit” for their agency at this time. In that moment you tore open that thin self-addressed envelope or read the two-line return email, you probably hated them. Not just that one agent, but all literary agents, as a class. How could they not see the brilliance in your manuscript? How could they possibly guess at the quality of your manuscript based on a one-page letter and a synopsis? And what the hell does “not a right fit” mean, anyway? Is that even grammatical English?

This is a perfectly natural and human response. It hurts to be rejected, and it hurts even more when you walk into a real bookstore, one with chirpy sales clerks and splashy book covers, and see truly godawful books by authors represented by some of these very same agents. But as natural as that rage might be, as satisfying as it is to rant to your friends or online about the idiocy of the people in mainstream publishing, this anger is misplaced. There are good literary agents and bad ones – the gap between the two is huge – but literary agents are only middlemen navigating the rough seas between the swarms of unpublished writers and an ever-diminishing readership for literary fiction.

If your book isn’t selling, literary agents are not to blame. It may be that your book doesn’t really belong in mainstream commercial publishing, in which case you should consider self-publication or send your book to an indie publisher like Ig, Two Dollar Radio or Small Beer Press. Or it may be that your book would appeal to a mainstream publisher, but you haven’t done the groundwork you need to do to get out of the slush pile and onto a literary agent’s radar. Or perhaps your book just isn’t ready yet. Whatever the case, you would be wise to pay attention to what literary agents are trying to tell you, even if all they’re saying is “no”.

I should know because I recently finished a novel and have spent the last six months hearing polite, carefully hedged versions of “no.” This can be an enormously confusing, even maddening process. One agent will say she found my book too commercial, and then a few weeks later another will say she thought the plot “too quiet” and wished it had been more overtly commercial. Well, which is it? Commercial-minded pap, or wannabe Henry James?

One of the nice things about being a journalist is that when you want to know how something works, you can call up people who know and they will sit down and explain it for you. So earlier this year, on assignment from Poets & Writers magazine, I spent a day at the offices of Folio Literary Management in Midtown Manhattan to see for myself what literary agents do all day.

In the piece, which appears in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers, Folio co-founder Scott Hoffman explains that the agency receives roughly 100,000 unsolicited queries a year, or about 200 a week for each of the nine Folio agents who accept unsolicited queries. Hoffman has taken on four new writers in the last year, only one of whom came in through the slush pile, putting the odds of an author without connections getting Hoffman to take on his or her book at roughly 1 in 11,111. When I sat down with another agent, Michelle Brower, as she read her slush pile, I watched her power through 19 query letters in 14 minutes, rejecting 18 of them and putting one aside for more consideration.

Now, it may sound heartless to reject 18 query letters in 14 minutes, and every time Brower hit send on a rejection email, my heart sagged a little at the poor writer seeing yet another rejection from an agent, but you have to see it from the agent’s perspective. Literary agents work on commission – typically, an agent takes 15% of a client’s earnings – and every minute an agent spends working on a manuscript that doesn’t sell is a minute that agent is working for free.

This, I think, helps explain the anger and angst so many writers feel toward agents and other publishing professionals. Most writers when they show their work to someone – a professor, a friend, a spouse – they have a reasonable expectation of getting encouragement or at least some useful feedback. But an agent isn’t a friend. An agent isn’t a teacher, either. An agent’s job is to find an author whose novel is ready for publication, or so close to ready that it makes economic sense for the agent to put the time into helping make it ready, and connect that writer to a publisher. That’s it. The better agents attend writing conferences, visit MFA programs, and scour literary magazines for fresh talent, but all the rest of it, getting your work to a publishable level, building a track record that will be attractive to a publishing house, wangling connections that will get you out of the slush pile – that’s your job.

If you are sending out query letters blindly to dozens of literary agents, as I did when I finished my first book five years ago, you’re engaging in the same kind of magical thinking that makes people buy lottery tickets. You might get lucky, but the odds of that are, well, somewhere in the neighborhood of 1 in 11,111. If you want to improve your odds, you have to do serious research. You have to find agents who represent books similar to yours, and then craft your query letter to them to let them know why they should be taking you on. Many writers now have websites that name their agents, and most literary agencies have sites online that say what kinds of books they are looking for and which authors they represent. There are also databases, such as the one run by Poets & Writers, that list reputable agents and offer links to their websites.

But, really, that’s only a small part of what you need to do. Like most human enterprises, publishing is a relationship business. Literary agents – the good ones, anyway – are smart, quick readers, but these are books we’re talking about. It can take three or four days to read a book, and agents spend their working hours negotiating contracts and networking with other publishing people, leaving their reading to nights and weekends. They simply don’t have time to read all the books they’d like to read, even the ones from writers who sound like they might be talented. So, agents work with people they know, and friends of people they know.

If that sounds like I’m saying, “It’s all about who you know,” that’s because that is exactly what I’m saying. You can rail about how unfair that is, and how it makes publishing into an incestuous little club, and to a degree you would be right: a lot of very dumb books get published because somebody knew somebody. But that’s the way the machine is built, people. It may come a-tumbling down in the near future in the face of e-books and indie publishers, but for now, if you want to get published by a major publisher, you have two choices: you can keep banging your head against a wall and be angry, or you can figure out how to get yourself into the club.

To do that, you have to immerse yourself in the literary community. Five years ago, with my first book, I sent roughly 60 query letters to agents and editors at smaller publishing houses. I had an MFA, a few publications in small literary magazines, and not much else. My success rate – that is, the percentage who asked to see all or part of the manuscript – scraped along at about 10%. It was, let me tell you, dispiriting as hell. Then I went to a couple writing conferences, and my success rate began to climb. I met agents in person and told them about my book. I met other writers who referred me to their agents. By the end, my book was getting read by about half of the people I sent it to, a fair number of whom seriously considered taking it on.

That experience, painful as it was, taught me more about writing than I ever would have expected. Agents and editors began writing me real letters, not form rejections, but long, thoughtful responses telling me precisely where they had stopped reading with interest and why. Until then, I had always written for other writers – classmates, friends, the dead greats I imagined myself competing with – but that experience taught me to write for a reader, a smart, curious person who just wants to be told a good story.

By the time I finished my most recent novel, I had published a few more stories, plus I was now writing for Poets & Writers, as well as The Millions and other book reviews. More importantly, I had built up an inventory of agents interested in seeing my next book and writer friends who felt comfortable referring me to their agents. By my count, I’ve sent queries to 11 agents and editors, nine of whom asked to see the full manuscript. Their responses have varied from a few lines of boilerplate regret to two hours on the phone discussing my characters and story in brutally honest detail. Ultimately, of course, no is no, and I still don’t have an agent. But that’s my fault: I haven’t written a book an agent can sell yet.

At this point, I am seriously thinking about revising the book from beginning to end before I send it out again. If that sounds like a sad ending to this tale, then I haven’t made my point. I did the groundwork and got the attention of first-class literary agents who have helped launch bestselling authors and Pulitzer Prize winners. They took me seriously, and I learned two things from their responses: first, that the book I’ve written is definitely in the ballpark, and second, that it isn’t there yet. I can cry and tear my hair out, but this is the real world. If I want my book published, and I do, I have to make it better.

Mainstream publishing is a Rube Goldberg machine of perverse economic incentives, in which large numbers of mostly idiotic self-help guides, diet books, and airport thrillers subsidize an ever-shrinking number of mostly money-losing literary novels and books of poetry. But just because publishing operates on a crazy economic model doesn’t mean it doesn’t make sense. There is a market, however tiny, for good books, and there are a small number of smart, hard-working people who live for the thrill of finding a talented author. If you are one of those talented authors, then it is your job to stop whining and figure out how to make it easy for them to find you.

Image via CompletelyNovel.com/Flickr

Six months ago, I rounded up a list of my favorite literary Tumblr accounts. Half a year later, I’m pleased to see those blogs still going strong. I’m also pleased to see that a pile of the names on my Wish List came around to the land of likes and reblogs. In that regard, some shout outs are in order: Picador Book Room (and its “Sunday Sontags”) has become a favorite of The Millions’ social media team; The Strand made its way onto the blogging platform and we’re all better because of it; Poetry Magazine continues to draw from its enviable archives to bring some really exciting content to our Dashboard; and — whether it’s due to my friendly dig or their own volition — The Paris Review’s presence has been especially awesome of late. Indeed, the literary community on Tumblr is growing stronger by the day, and it has to be noted that a lot of that growth is due to Rachel Fershleiser’s evangelism and infectious enthusiasm. (An example of Rachel’s work was recapped recently by Millions staffer Lydia Kiesling as part of our own Emily M. Keeler’s Tumblr-centric #LitBeat column.)

Alas, six months in the real world is different from six months online, and Tumblr now has not only its own Storyboard curatorial system (run by the vaguely Soviet-sounding Department of Editorial), but it’s also grown by a few million blogs. The site boasts a growing number of blogs that have inked book deals. Rachel maintains a running tally of poets and writers who use the platform in exciting ways. This past week, Molly Templeton organized a blog, The How-To Issue, specifically aimed at countering the gender imbalance in the recent “How-To” installment of The New York Times Book Review. As a testament to the number of smart, engaged literary folks on the site, that blog has since received posts from a Salon writer, a former New Yorker staffer, and quite a few artists and freelancers.

So with all of that in mind, I’ve decided it’s time for another list — a better list, a bigger list. This list aims not only to cover blogs I missed last time, but also new blogs that have been born only recently. To that end, my rubric has been simple: 1) I’ve chosen blogs I not only believe to be the best and most compelling accounts out there, but also blogs that were overlooked on the last list — in some cases, readers helped me out in the last post’s comment thread. 2) I’ve done my best to ensure that these blogs are active members of the Tumblr community. 3) I’ve tried to make sure that the content on these blogs is “safe for work,” however I am but mortal, and perhaps some NSFW material will slip in between now and when you read this list. For that reason I can only caution you to use your judgment as you proceed.

For your convenience, I’ve organized the list in a similar manner as last time. “Single-Servings” are blogs organized around one or two particular, ultra-specific themes. The rest of the categories should be self-explanatory.

Please feel free to comment and shout out the ones I omitted or did not cover in Part One.

0. Shameless Self-Promotion

• The Millions: duh!

1. Single-Servings

• Book and Beer: The combination of everybody’s favorite duo will tease you from your office chair.
• Match Book: Or is it, instead, that books and bikinis are an even better pair?
• Movie Simpsons: An encyclopedic recap of every film reference in The Simpsons. Now open to submissions.
• Underground NYPL: Pairs well with CoverSpy. I’ve yet to find a match, however.
• The Unquotables: Brought to you by Dan Wilbur (Better Book Titles, which is going to be a book!) and Robert Dean. The premise is simple: Gandhi didn’t say that.
• Infinite Boston: A catalog of the locations mentioned in The Great Bandana’s Infinite Jest.
• Write Place Write Time: Remember our WriteSpace project? (Which we Storify’d?) This is ongoing.
• The Composites: Composite sketches of characters in famous literature. Creepy ones, at that.
• Poets Touching Trees: Happy Arbor Day, poets!
• You Chose Wrong: The tragic fates of mistaken “Choose Your Own Adventure” readers. It’s like reading The Gashlycrumb Tinies.
• Doodling on Famous Writers: Those warped lines beneath Proust’s eyes really suit him.
• Old Book Illustrations: A visual treat for nostalgic book nerds.
• Visual Poetry: Exactly what it says it is, yet also much more.
• PBS’ This Day in History: So much better to get this stuff on your Dashboard than in your inbox.
• Historical Nonfiction: This blog pairs well with the one above. Follow both and you’ll rival Howard Zinn in no time.
• Writers and Kitties: I have often wondered about that particular feline-author bond.
• Page Twenty Seven: The text from one reader’s collection of twenty seventh pages.
• Book Storey: Eye candy for lovers of book design.

2. Requisite “F*** Yeah!” Blogs

• Books!
• Book Arts!
• Manuscripts!

3. Foundations, Organizations and Writing Centers

• 826 Valencia: Dispatches and success stories from the California writing center focused on kids aged six to eighteen. It was co-founded by Dave Eggers.
• The National Book Foundation: They’ll announce finalists for their big awards in October, so you’ve got some time to get acquainted with the foundation.
• The Moth: Fabulous stuff from the story gurus. I’ll let Kevin Hartnett take it from here.
• The Poetry Society of America: Nice to see the nation’s oldest poetry non-profit embrace one of the newest mediums for storytelling.
• Harry Ransom Center: They have more than David Foster Wallace’s papers, you know.
• The Academy of American Poets: The organizers of National Poetry Month deliver some excellent Tumblr material, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t super relieved when they finally found Rob.
• PEN Live: A great example of a fresh, exciting way to use the blogging platform. PEN Live covers events put on by the PEN American Center.
• Poets & Writers: A great source of guidance for creative writers.
• Button Poetry: Performance poetry delivered straight to your Dashboard from the Twin Cities.
• VIDA Community: The creators of publishing’s annual gender-imbalance list curate a really interesting list of updates on women, culture, and writing.

4. Humorous

• Sh*t My Students Write: Proof positive that more MFA graduates should be teaching in secondary schools.
• The Monkeys You Ordered: These literal New Yorker cartoon captions are topped only by this one comment applicable to all of them.
• What Should We Call Poets: Based on the grandmother that started them all. This is the GIF blog poets deserve, but not the one they need right now.
• Title 2 Come: You can never follow too many GIF blogs. This one is for for writers of every stripe.
• News Cat GIFs: Same as above. Last but not least, this one is for journalists. (Who like cats.)
• Least Helpful: The worst of the worst reviews from the annals of the internet.
• Hey, Author: It’s like a Regina George’s Burn Book for the literati.
• Alt Lit Gossip (Can be NSFW): HTMLGiant is leaking.

5. Literary, Cultural and Art Magazines or Blogs

• Recommended Reading: Home of the marvelous ongoing fiction series run by Electric Literature.
• Words Without Borders: Spreading the gospel of international and translated literature one Tumblr post at a time.
• Tin House: You (should) know the magazine. Now you should know their blog.
• VQR: The brand new companion to the invaluable source for great long-form and narrative journalism.
• n+1: They recently decided to kill off their Personals blog, so perhaps this one will become more active.
• New York Review of Books: Need I introduce them? Also, not to be missed, check out the NYRB Classics blog, A Different Stripe.
• Granta: Follow these guys for updates on the magazine’s new releases and competitions.
• Guernica: Hey, you’re spilling your art into my politics!
• Full Stop: Who else would recommend Errol Flynn’s memoir, posit an alternate Olympics Opening Ceremony, and then review the work of Victor Serge?
• Vol. 1 Brooklyn: As their banner says, “If you’re smart, you’ll like us.”
• Rusty Toque: An online literary and arts journal backed by Ontario’s Western University.
• Book Riot: How can you help loving the kind of people who reblog photos of Faulkner’s oeuvre alongside galleries of literary tattoos?
• Berfrois: Some highbrow curiosities for that eager, eager brain of yours.
• Literalab: Dispatches from Central and Eastern Europe, which as anybody who knows me knows to be my favorite parts of Europe.
• Triple Canopy: The online magazine embraces yet another means of communicating.
• fwriction review: Finally an honest banner: “specializing in work that melts faces and rocks waffles.” (See also: fwriction)
• Little Brother: The latest project from our own Emily M. Keeler.
• Asymptote: Dedicated to works in translation and world literature.
• Glitterwolf Magazine: Devoted to highlighting UK writers and writers from LGBT communities.
• The Essayist: Aggregated long-form writing from all over the place.

6. Major, General and More Well-Known Magazines

• Smithsonian Magazine: “Retina” consists of the best visual content from Smithsonian Magazine.
• The American Scholar: Follow them. You’ll be more fun to talk to at cocktail parties.
• Boston Globe: News and photos, and we all know they’ve got plenty of both.
• Salon: Finally! We get to read Salon without actually having to go to Salon.com!
• The Morning News: Our friends who host the annual Tournament of Books have a Tumblr presence, too.
• Mother Jones: Politics and current events, ahoy!
• Tomorrow Mag: Ann Friedman & Co.’s new venture.
• Lively Morgue: Typically awesome photos from The New York Times archives.
• Bonus: This article covers the ways in which twelve news outlets are using Tumblr in innovative, fresh ways.

7. Publishers (Big Six) — Note: Many of these blogs are used by the imprint or publisher’s marketing team, but you’ll find that some of the most successful publisher Tumblrs are getting more focused and specific. This is an interesting development, and I encourage more of the same. Also: This list is only a small sampling of the publisher Tumblrs on the site — just naming all the ones from Penguin would amount to its own post!

• Random House Digital: Dispatches from the Random House digital team.
• Vintage Books Design: As they say, “vintage design from Vintage designers.”
• Harper Books: The publisher’s flagship imprint sets up shop on Tumblr.
• The Penguin Press: They publish Zadie Smith, in case you need validation of their taste.
• Simon Books: Straight from Rockefeller Center to your Dashboard!
• Pantheon: News and miscellany from Random House’s literary fiction and serious nonfiction imprint.
• Penguin English Library: Celebrating the Classic Penguins we all love so much. Plus, get a load of that animated masthead!
• Back Bay Books: Little, Brown’s paperback pals. Their list of authors is incredible.
• Mulholland Books: This group fully embraces Tumblr’s multimedia capabilities. A solid A+ in my book.
• Penguin Teen: Excellent content for younger readers.
• Free Press Books: Let’s just say these folks enjoyed the week Michael Phelps had at the Olympics.
• HMH Books: Be sure to check out their Translation and Poetry blogs, too.
• Riverhead: Of all the publisher Tumblrs, they boast the cutest mascot.
• Little, Brown: Their Daily First Line posts are tantalizing.

8. Publishers (University Presses)

• Duke: Hate the basketball team, love the press. (And their blog.)
• Chicago: Their posts are excellent. Continually substantial and interesting.
• McGill-Queens: Fun Fact: some folks up North would have it that Harvard is “America’s McGill.”
• Cambridge Exhibitions: Alerts and updates on the myriad academic conferences and events attended by the CUP staff.

9. Publishers (Indies and Little Ones)

• Chronicle: These folks have been known to turn Tumblr blogs into books, so of course they know their way around the platform.
• Grove Atlantic: I’m not a tough sell, but giving away books related to The Wire is my kryptonite.
• Open Road Media: Worth a follow for their YouTube discoveries alone.
• Two Dollar Radio: They published Grace Krilanovich‘s book (the one I recommended), so you know they’re good.
• Timaş Publishing Group: These Turkish publishers are so generous, they give away eBook credits on a bi-weekly basis.
• Quirk Books: These Philadelphia-based publishers sure find a lot of pretty bookshelves to reblog.
• The Feminist Press: The important indie operating out of NYC delivers some really interesting, innovative stuff in addition to the classics they “rescue.”
• The Lit Pub: Recommendations from The Lit Pub‘s staff.
• Muumuu House: No doubt this account is run by Tao Lin’s legion of interns.
• Overlook Press: Their About page even features a TL;DR version. They get Tumblr.
• Arte Público Press: Your dashboard destination for U.S. Hispanic literature.
• Coffee House Press Interns: Bonus “little” points because it’s run by their interns.
• Unmanned Press: They just joined Tumblr, but their “Sunday Rejections” posts seem promising.

10. Authors (Direct Involvement) — The Tumblr “Spotlight” list can be found here; it’s not comprehensive, but it lists accounts you’re sure to enjoy. I’ve listed one of each author’s books alongside their names. Additionally: YA Highway, an excellent resource for fans of Young Adult books, maintains a great directory of YA Authors.

• Emily St. John Mandel: Millions staffer whose most recent book is The Lola Quartet.
• Edan Lepucki: Millions staffer whose most recent book is If You’re Not Yet Like Me.
• Patrick Somerville: This Bright River.
• Neil Gaiman: American Gods.
• Roxane Gay: Ayiti.
• Sheila Heti: How Should a Person Be?
• Emma Straub: Other People We Married.
• Jami Attenberg: The Middlesteins. Bonus: check out her advice, too.
• Nathan Englander: What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank.
• Matthew Gallaway: The Metropolis Case.
• Miles Klee: Ivyland.
• John Green: Looking for Alaska.
• Alexander Chee: Edinburgh.
• Tayari Jones: Silver Sparrow.
• Rosencrans Baldwin: Paris, I Love You but You’re Bringing Me Down.
• Tao Lin: Richard Yates.
• Dan Chaon: Stay Awake.
• Christopher Dickey: Securing the City.

11. Authors (Indirect Involvement)

• Reading Ardor: Two readers go through Vladimir Nabokov’s Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle.
• Chuck Palahniuk: Don’t forward this blog to any Turkish publishing houses.
• John Banville Spectates Tennis: Serving up some observations on tennis. (I’ll excuse myself now.)
• Martin Amis Drinking: This should really just be a livestream video feed of Amis at all times.
• A. O. Scott Zingers: The film critic’s best one-liners.
• Fitzgerald Quotes: F. Scott’s got lines for days.
• Reading Markson Reading: Brainchild of Millions contributor, Tyler Malone.

12. Poets — As with the authors list, Tumblr’s poetry “Spotlight” can be found here.

• Leigh Stein: Dispatch From the Future.
• Michael Robbins: Alien vs. Predator.
• Paolo Javier: The Feeling Is Actual. Full disclosure: Paolo was one of my college professors.
• Zachary Schomburg: Fjords Vol. 1. He’s also one of the founders of Octopus Magazine.
• Saeed Jones: When the Only Light is Fire. This blog is really cool. It’s like the poet’s global travelogue.

13. Bookstores — I’ll list the location of each one.

• Unabridged: Chicago’s Lake View neighborhood.
• Community Bookstore: Park Slope, Brooklyn.
• McNally Kids: Manhattan.
• Skylight Books: Los Angeles.
• Open Books: Chicago.
• Emily Books: The Internet.
• Mercer Island Books: Seattle.
• Luminous Books: East London.
• Politics & Prose: Washington D.C.
• Micawber’s: St. Paul.
• City Lights: San Francisco.
• 57th Street Books: Chicago’s Hyde Park.
• The Little Book Room: Melbourne, Australia.
• Tattered Cover: Denver.
• Uncharted Books: Chicago.
• Green Apple Books: San Francisco.
• Taylor Books: Charleston, WV.

14. Libraries

• Darien Library: Excellent posts from one of the best libraries in the nation.
• Looks Like Library Science: “Challenging the librarian stereotype.”
• Live From the NYPL: Events and goings-on at the NYPL.
• Library Journal: The editors of LJ share what they’re reading.
• School Library Journal: Ditto for their scholastic counterparts.
• Espresso Brooklyn: The Brooklyn Public Library has an espresso on-demand book printing machine. How cool is it that it has its own blog, too?

15. BONUS SECTION DEVOTED TO @Horse_ebooks — Everybody’s favorite Dadaist Twitter handle has a devoted following on the blogging platform.

• Horse_ Fan Fiction: Look no further than your Twitter timeline for the best writing prompts on earth.
• Annotated Horse_: A valuable resource for the inevitable scholarly study of Horse_’s oeuvre.
• 33, Pyramid, and Dalton: Max Read’s impressive catalog of recurring Horse_ themes.

16. Wish List

• Oxford American: Maybe not the best time for the magazine at the moment, but my wish from last time still stands.
• Garden & Gun
• Oxford University Press
• More authors and poets!

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

What was Charles Dickens’s best novel? It depends whom you ask of course. G.K. Chesterton thought Bleak House represented the mature peak of Dickens’s skill as a novelist, although he went on to remark, “We can say more or less when a human being has come to his full mental growth, even if we go so far as to wish that he had never come to it.” This past February, on the occasion of Dickens’s 200th birthday, The Guardian put together this mesmerizing chart ranking 12 of Dickens’s 16 novels on a scale of most to least Dickensian. Bleak House came out first, Great Expectations was last, yet those two titles occupied the top two spots when Time issued its own Top-10 Dickens List for the Dickens bicentennial.

Searching for clarity, I decided to pose the question to a handful of leading Victorianists. In June, I sent out emails to select scholars asking them if they’d be interested in choosing a novel and making their case. I noted that of course there is no such thing as a singular best, and that really the exercise was meant to be fun. Just about everyone I reached out to was game. And, in recognition of how obsessive many Victorianists are about Dickens, one added that after debating his best novel, perhaps I’d be interested in curating a more esoteric discussion: Best Dickens character for a one night stand, or maybe which Dickens character you’d most like to have as your own child.

Saving those conversations for another day, here then are six impassioned, knowledgeable opinions on the topic of the best Dickens novel. I hope you’ll enjoy reading them, and that when you’re through, you’ll share your own views in the comments section.

1. Bleak House
Kelly Hager, Associate Professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies, Simmons College

“Not to put too fine a point upon it,” as meek Mr. Snagsby is wont to say, Dickens’s best novel is Bleak House. It might not be everyone’s favorite (that honor might go to Dickens’s own “favourite child,” David Copperfield, or to the newly-relevant tale of a Victorian Bernie Madoff, Little Dorrit, or to that classic of 10th grade English, Great Expectations), but Bleak House is absolutely his best: in terms of plot, characters, pacing, social relevance, readability, and its possibilities for adaptation, just to cite some of its virtues.

The BBC’s 2005 version brought to the fore the pathos of the heroine Esther Summerson’s plight and the hypocrisy of the world that produced that plight. Brought up by a guardian (actually her aunt) who led her sister to believe that her (illegitimate) baby was born dead, Esther does not learn who her mother is, or even that she is alive, until she has been so disfigured by smallpox that she no longer poses the danger of incriminating her (now married and ennobled) mother by their resemblance. The scene of their first (and only) meeting is heart-rending but not maudlin, revealing just how far Dickens has moved beyond the sentimental portrayal of Little Nell’s deathbed (in The Old Curiosity Shop) and his precious depiction of the orphaned Oliver Twist. The emotions the scene calls up are honest, earned, poignant.

Similarly, the anger John Jarndyce feels at the Chancery suit that occupies the novel is not the self-righteous ire of those who uncover the educational abuses of Dotheboys Hall (in Nicholas Nickleby) or rail against the inequities of the law of divorce (in Hard Times), but the heartfelt anguish of a man who has seen friends and relatives destroyed by the red tape and bureaucracy of the Court of Chancery (a court that relies not on common law statutes but solely on precedents and was abolished in 1875). Dickens mounts a comparable attack on the aptly named Circumlocution Office in Little Dorrit, where the important thing is to learn “how not to do it,” but there, the depiction is comic. He does the more difficult and subtle thing in Bleak House, relying not on humor but on sad case after sad case to reveal the evils of the system. He writes with empathy; he doesn’t poke easy fun. In Bleak House, written between two national epidemics of cholera, in 1849 and 1854, Dickens also draws attention to the need for sanitary reform (specifically for a regulated, clean supply of water for the public); Bleak House is, in fact, one of the earliest fictional engagements with the field of public health.

Engaged in social issues, moving, and full of characters we love (the unflappable army wife, Mrs. Bagnet; Jo, the crossing sweeper; Sir Leicester, Lady Dedlock’s loyal husband) and characters we love to hate (the selfish parents Mrs. Jellyby and Mr. Turveydrop; Vholes, the vampiric solicitor), Bleak House is Dickens at his very best.

2. Bleak House
Anna Henchman, Assistant Professor of English, Boston University

Bleak House begins in sooty obscurity: swirls of fog, snowflakes black with grime, indistinguishable masses. Movement is circular — “slipping and sliding,” — without progress. The laws of this world are quickly established: There is rigid separation between classes. Characters are moving parts in a system that consumes them. Separate realms coexist with little contact with one another.

But then the novel explodes when gauche Mr. Guppy presumes to call on the cold Lady Dedlock. She agrees to see him, and even more strangely, betrays in his presence a quivering vulnerability, a longing to know that echoes our own perplexity as readers of this novel. “What connexion can there be between the place in Lincolnshire, the house in town, the Mercury with the powder, and the whereabout of Jo the outlaw with the broom…?” After Mr. Guppy’s visit, a new sequence of events unfolds, and Lady Dedlock’s life rearranges itself before our eyes. Later, on the open grass, another extraordinary meeting brings us even more closely into her consciousness.

Like us, Mr. Guppy has been playing detective, putting together the pieces of the book, and at this point he’s doing it better than we are. Bleak House is a novel full of detectives with whom we sit in uneasy intimacy because their inquisitive state of mind mirrors our own.Their “calling is the acquisition of secrets.”

Two distinct narrators take us through this increasingly comprehensible world. The omniscient narrator can enter anywhere, taking us from foggy London to Lincolnshire. He floats through walls, moving from the airless chambers of one house in town to the greasy interior of another that stinks of burnt flesh. Esther, by contrast, is a timid outsider, for whom everything is new and strange. Some of the greatest effects of the novel occur when Esther takes us through spaces we’ve visited many times and thought we knew. Right after Esther talks with Lady Dedlock, for instance, she walks through the fragrant gardens of Chesney Wold. “Grostesque monsters bristle” as she thinks about the lives they lead inside, and for the first time we feel attached to the stately home.

The great pleasure of this novel is the pleasure of plot — of retroactively putting events into sequence. Like detectives, novelists construct patterns out of disparate fragments. This novel more than any other Dickens novel feels both ordered and dynamic. Characters who flash past us — a man from Shropshire, a crossing sweeper — resolve into detail, acquire names, and fill out in time and space. As the lines between networks of characters thicken, the world gets smaller, more recognizable, but also more dangerous for the ones we love most.

3. David Copperfield
Maia McAleavey, Assistant Professor of English, Boston College

“Of course I was in love with little Em’ly,” David Copperfield assures the reader of his childhood love. “I am sure I loved that baby quite as truly, quite as tenderly, with greater purity and more disinterestedness, than can enter into the best love of a later time of life.” Loving a person or a book (and “David Copperfield” conveniently appears to be both) may have nothing at all to do with bestness. The kind of judicious weighing that superlative requires lies quite apart from the easy way the reader falls in love with David Copperfield.

To my mind, David is far more loveable than Pip (Great Expectations’ fictional autobiographer), and better realized than Esther (Bleak House’s partial narrator). And it does help to have a first-person guide on Dickens’s exuberantly sprawling journeys. David, like Dickens, is a writer, and steers the reader through the novel as an unearthly blend of character, narrator, and author. This is not always a comforting effect. “Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show,” David announces in his unsettling opening sentence.

Here he is, at once a young man thoroughly soused after a night of boozing and a comically estranging narrative voice: “Owing to some confusion in the dark, the door was gone. I was feeling for it in the window-curtains…We went down-stairs, one behind another. Near the bottom, somebody fell, and rolled down. Somebody else said it was Copperfield. I was angry at that false report, until, finding myself on my back in the passage, I began to think there might be some foundation for it.”

Is the novel nostalgic, sexist, and long? Yes, yes, and yes. But in its pages, Dickens also frames each of these qualities as problems. He meditates on the production, reproduction, and preservation of memories; he surrounds his typically perfect female characters, the child-bride Dora and the Angel-in-the-House Agnes, with the indomitable matriarch Betsey Trotwood and the sexlessly maternal nurse Peggotty; and he lampoons the melodramatically longwinded Micawber while devising thousands of ways to keep the reader hooked. If you haven’t yet found your Dickensian first love, David’s your man.

4. David Copperfield
Leah Price, Professor of English, Harvard University

“Of all my books,” confessed Dickens in the preface, “I like this the best. It will be easily believed that I am a fond parent to every child of my fancy, and that no one can ever love that family as dearly as I love them. But, like many fond parents, I have in my heart of hearts a favourite child. And his name is DAVID COPPERFIELD.”

David Copperfield fits the bill for a “best of” contest because it’s all about who’s first, who’s favorite, who’s primary. It’s one of Dickens’s few novels to be narrated entirely in the first person; it’s the only one whose narrator’s initials reverse Charles Dickens’s, and whose plot resembles the story that Dickens told friends about his own family and his own career. (But Dickens takes the novelist’s privilege of improving on the facts, notably by killing off David’s father before the novel opens in order to prevent him from racking up as many debts as Dickens senior did over the course of his inconveniently long life.)

That means that it’s also one of the few Dickens novels dominated by one character’s story and one character’s voice (This stands in contrast to Bleak House, say, which shuttles back and forth between two alternating narrators, one first-person and past-tense, the other third-person and couched in the present). As a result David Copperfield is less structurally complex, but also more concentrated, with an intensity of focus that can sometimes feel claustrophobic or monomaniacal but never loses its grip on a reader’s brain and heart. Its single-mindedness makes it more readable than a novel like Pickwick Papers, where the title character is little more than a human clothesline on which a welter of equally vivid minor characters are hung. Yet at the same time, it’s a novel about how hard it is to be first: Can you come first in your mother’s heart after she marries a wicked stepfather? And can your own second wife come first for you after her predecessor dies?

On David’s birthday, he tells us, “I went into the bar of a public-house, and said to the landlord: ‘What is your best — your very best — ale a glass?’ ‘Twopence-halfpenny,’ says the landlord, ‘is the price of the Genuine Stunning ale.’”  David Copperfield is the genuine stunning: there’s nothing quite like it, in Dickens’s work or out.

5. Little Dorrit
Deb Gettelman, Assistant Professor of English, College of the Holy Cross

There’s a different best Dickens novel for every purpose. Even though Dickens’s peculiar characters with their tic phrases sometimes appear interchangeable, his novels as a whole are surprisingly different from each other in their focus of interest, narrative structure, and in some cases, length. The best Dickens novel to read? Bleak House. To teach? Oliver Twist. To boast that I’ve read? Martin Chuzzlewit (really, I have). To understand Dickens’s consciousness as a writer? Little Dorrit.

I’d like to think a writer’s best novel is the one that, if it had never been written, would cause the greatest difference in how much we think we understand about that writer’s overall work. It might be predictable, but for me the later, darker, reflective books often suit this purpose best: Persuasion, Villette, The Wings of the Dove. For Dickens’s readers it is Little Dorrit, his deeply personal novel of middle age that reveals the author’s consciousness as an artist at its most mature, reflective, and darkest stage

Little Dorrit is Dickens’s moodiest novel, and comparatively little happens in it. There are the usual plot complications — and what Dickens called the novel’s “various threads” often seem to hang together by a thread — but at its heart is the stasis of a debtor’s prison, where Amy, or Little Dorrit, has grown up tending to her self-deluding father. The novel’s many psychologically imprisoned characters mostly sit around brooding about their thwarted lives, especially the hero, Arthur Clennam, who is older and more anguished than Dickens’s other heroes and heroines. Elements familiar from Dickens’s other novels — satiric portrayals of bureaucrats and aristocrats, the self-sacrificing young woman, even a murderous Frenchman — seem more sinister in this novel because they are the cause of so much melancholy.

At one point Dickens summarizes Clennam’s thoughts in a way that seems emblematic of the novel: “Little Dorrit, Little Dorrit. Again, for hours. Always Little Dorrit!” As Lionel Trilling observed, Little Dorrit is the most interiorized of Dickens’s novels. Shortly after writing it Dickens made a spectacle of breaking up his family, and characters in the novel torture, contort, misrepresent, and stifle one another’s feelings in spectacularly awful ways. In a game of word association, ‘Dickens’ would readily call to mind words like ‘comedy,’ ‘caricature,’ and ‘satire.’ ‘Little Dorrit’ would yield ‘interiority,’ ‘psychological depth,’ ‘angst,’ and all the inventive strategies Dickens uses to achieve these qualities. It enables us to see the fullest possible psychological and artistic spectrum of his work.

6. Our Mutual Friend
Daniel Pollack-Pelzner, Assistant Professor of English, Linfield College

Our Mutual Friend was my Dickens gateway drug. The opening sequence plays like a Scorsese tracking shot on steroids. A body fished out of the Thames becomes gossip at a nouveau riche banquet, from which two lawyers slip out to a dockside police station, where they meet a mysterious man who runs off to take lodgings with a clerk, whose daughter becomes the ward of a dustman, who hires a peg-legged balladeer to read him The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. And I haven’t even mentioned the taxidermist.

It’s the Facebook fantasy: everyone is connected — though in the darkly satiric world of late Dickens, this is less an accomplishment than an indictment. The surprise comes from how much fun it is to navigate his corrupt social network. Conventional wisdom asks you to choose Dickens savory or sweet: the ineluctable fog of Bleak House or the bibulous conviviality of The Pickwick Papers. Our Mutual Friend, his last completed novel, gives you both an intricate web of plots and a cast of delightfully scurrilous plotters.

Its particular tickle comes from the recognition that everyone’s an impostor, and a gleeful one at that. People who dismiss Dickensian eccentrics as fanciful caricatures miss how much the fancies are the characters’ own insistent projections. As the narrator says of the self-important balladeer: “His gravity was unusual, portentous, and immeasurable, not because he admitted any doubt of himself, but because he perceived it necessary to forestall any doubt of himself in others.” The self we perform is the self we become.

And everyone’s performing in Our Mutual Friend. A lawyer pretends to be a lime merchant for an undercover job in pub, and after the sleuthing concludes, he’s so enamored of the role that he offers the potboy a job in his fictional “lime-kiln.” When the orphan Sloppy reads the newspaper, “he do the police in different voices” — a line that T.S. Eliot pinched as his working title for the The Waste Land.

This literary legacy, along with the novel’s sustained imagery, have led some critics to call it proto-modernist. Dickens shows us as well that the insights we call post-modern (personality as performance, fiction as artifice) have Victorian roots. The creators of The Wire declared their debt to the 19th-century master of serial narration, and it’s no surprise that a season finale of Lost revolved around a copy of Our Mutual Friend. This is the book you want on a desert island.

Image Credit: Wikipedia

The list that follows isn’t exhaustive – no book preview could be – but, at 8,700 words strong and encompassing 76 titles, this is the only second-half 2012 book preview you will ever need. Enjoy.

July:

Broken Harbor by Tana French: In French’s fourth Dublin Murder Squad mystery, Mick “Scorcher” Kennedy — the big jerk detective from Faithful Place — is assigned to a triple homicide in a half-built housing development in a north suburb of Dublin where (inevitably) he spent his summers as a child. As he waits for the fourth victim — who is alive but in a coma — to wake up, he deals with his rookie cop of a partner, a neighborhood of tight-lipped witnesses, and his younger sister’s fraught reaction to the case. French is known for creating detectives that are as complex as the mysteries they solve, and then showing the one case that could tear them apart. This is Kennedy’s case. (Janet)

Dare Me by Megan Abbott: Set in the fiercely competitive world of high school cheer-leading, Megan Abbot’s new novel Dare Me is already being hailed as “a mesmerizing piece of prose” by The Independent and “truly menacing” by The Wall Street Journal. Taking her cue from the power politics of Shakespearean drama and the adrenal intensity of teenaged life, Abbott’s latest thriller should make for entirely captivating—dare I say, criminally compelling—reading. After last year’s The End of Everything, it seems like this book marks Abbot as a very strong contender in the role of head honcho of Suburban Noir.  (Emily K.)

A Million Heavens by John Brandon: Brandon’s first two novels — Arkansas and Citrus County — both focused on criminals, but with his third he turns his attention to a comatose piano prodigy. Lying in a hospital bed in New Mexico, he is visited by his gruff father while a band of strangers assemble outside, vigilants for whom he is an inspiration, an obsession, or merely something to do. They in turn are watched over by a roaming wolf and a song-writing angel (who can’t quite get to Heaven). In Brandon’s darkly hopeful and deadpan voice, this collection of the downtrodden become a community. (Janet)

Office Girl by Joe Meno: Joe Meno set out to write about falling in love — void of angst, political uncertainty, tragedy, or the march of history. The result is Office Girl, a book (with illustrations and photographs) about Odile and Jack. Odile is an art school dropout, Jack is lazy 25-year-old who loves his tape recorder. They decide to start an art movement to counterpoint the banality of modern culture, and perhaps to make the fleeting feeling of being in your 20s and capable of anything last a little bit longer. (Janet)

Sorry Please Thank You by Charles Yu: Yu, the author of the short story collection Third Class Superhero and the novel How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, provides more meta-science-fiction fun with this new collection.  Sorry Please Thank You includes such stand-outs as “Standard Loneliness Package,” about a firm where employees earn money for suffering other people’s pain, and “Inventory,” about a hypothetical version of Charles Yu. Yu’s work has been compared to that of Kurt Vonnegut, George Saunders and Gary Shteyngart. (Edan)

Our Kind of People by Uzodinma Iweala: In 2007, Uzodinma Iweala made Granta’s list of the 20 Best Young American Novelists for his debut novel, Beasts of No Nation. Deserved praise indeed, but doubly so considering Iweala’s not a full-time writer; instead, like Chris Adrian today and Anton Chekhov long ago, Iweala is also a practicing physician. In Our Kind of People, Iweala draws from his medical experience to craft a nonfiction on-the-ground account of the HIV/AIDS crisis in Nigeria. A well-known critic of what fellow Nigerian-American writer Teju Cole calls “The White Savior Industrial Complex,” Iweala focuses his book on the stories of the ill and the healthy alike to relay the honest, personal narratives—not the sensationalist headlines—of the people dealing with this unprecedented epidemic. (Nick)

You & Me by Padgett Powell: Padgett Powell’s eighth work of fiction is a novel called You & Me that consists of a conversation between two middle-aged men sitting on a porch chewing on such gamey topics as love and sex, how to live and die well, and the merits of Miles Davis, Cadillacs and assorted Hollywood starlets. Since his 1984 debut, Edisto, Powell has won comparisons to Faulkner and Twain for his ability to bottle the molasses-and-battery-acid speech of his native South. One early reader has described You & Me as “a Southern send-up of Waiting for Godot.” Which is high praise indeed for Samuel Beckett. (Bill)

The Investigation by Philippe Claudel: French author Phillipe Claudel and translator John Cullen, the team that won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the Translation Award for their work on 2010′s Brodek, return with The Investigation. This, Claudel’s sixth novel, set in the not-so-distant future, follows the Inspector, a balding everyman, in his search to uncover the cause of a string of suicides in the Enterprise. Before the Inspector can enter, he is dragged through a beurocratic hell of places and characters bearing names capitalized for genericism: the Psychologist, the Guard. Equal parts Kafka and Huxley, Claudel paints a nightmarish vision of a technocratic, dystopic future. (Matt)

August:

Lionel Asbo: The State of England by Martin Amis: The late Christopher Hitchens would have been pleased to know that his partners in literary bromance Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie, and Ian McEwan all have major work coming out this fall. First up to bat is Amis, whose last novel, The Pregnant Widow, signaled something of a return to form. The eponym of his new one, Lionel Asbo, is a classic Amis creation – an id-addled criminal who takes his last name from a British court document called an Anti-Social Behavior Order. In a Dickensian twist of fate, the novel shackles Asbo together with a more sensitive nephew, Desmond. The subtitle is “The State of England.” What more do you need to know? Oh, yes: the jacket design is one of the best of the fall. (Garth)

Winter Journal by Paul Auster: The title of novelist Paul Auster’s second work of memoir refers to the author’s sense that, at age 64, he has entered the winter of his life.  This is Auster’s second memoir (his first, The Invention of Solitude was published 30 years ago) and Publisher’s Weekly, in a starred review, describes it as a “quietly moving meditation on death and life.”  The PW review goes on to say, “From the vantage point of the winter preceding his 64th birthday, Auster lets his body and its sensations guide his memories. There is no set chronology; time and place bleed from one year to another, between childhood and adulthood.” (Kevin)

The Devil in Silver by Victor LaValle: In a mental institution in Queens, a motley crew of four inmates, led by a mostly sane, rabble-rousing “big man” named Pepper, sets out to kill the devil-monster that all four of them swear is stalking the halls.  Other characters include “Dorry, an octogenarian schizophrenic who’s been on the ward for decades and knows all its secrets; Coffee, an African immigrant with severe OCD, who tries desperately to send alarms to the outside world; and Loochie, a bipolar teenage girl who acts as the group’s enforcer.”  In this fourth book, LaValle – who, among other honors like the Guggenheim and the Whiting, was given the key to Southeast Queens – is sure to break our hearts, make us laugh, and freak us out, as he has with his previous two novels and story collection. (Sonya)

Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation by Rachel Cusk: Aftermath has been positioned as kind of sequel to A Life’s Work, Cusk’s controversial memoir about motherhood, which she published over ten years ago.  Her new book examines the breakdown of her marriage:  “My husband believed that I had treated him monstrously,” she writes.  The Telegraph admires the book very much, saying, “If her probing is sometimes clinical, it is also full of beauty – the beauty of language struggling to reveal an experience which is complex and scored with doubts and pain.”  The Guardian says:  “It’s not a congenial place, this Cuskland, with its low mephitic cloud of complex melancholia…What detains us is her cool, clinical examination of the remains, the truths that are returned when she scrapes at the marrow of experience.” (Edan)

The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving by Jonathan Evison: Evison follows up his bestselling West of Here with a tale of an unusual roadtrip. There is nothing that you cannot lose, and Benjamin has lost most of it: his wife, his family, his home, and his livelihood. Short on options, he enrolls in a night class called The Fundamentals of Caregiving and finds himself responsible for nineteen-year-old Trev, an angry and stubborn boy in the advanced stages of Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy. A friendship develops, and they set out together across the American west to visit Trev’s ailing father. (Emily M.)

September:

The Casual Vacancy by J.K. Rowling: Oh me! Oh my! J.K. Rowling has a new book out—a novel for adults. Publisher Little, Brown describes the book as “blackly comic” and offers this glimpse of the plot: “When Barry Fairweather dies unexpectedly in his early forties, the little town of Pagford is left in shock. Pagford is, seemingly, an English idyll, with a cobbled market square and an ancient abbey, but what lies behind the pretty facade is a town at war. Rich at war with poor, teenagers at war with their parents…Pagford is not what it first seems. And the empty seat left by Barry on the parish council soon becomes the catalyst for the biggest war the town has yet seen. Who will triumph in an election fraught with passion, duplicity and unexpected revelations?” (Kevin)

NW by Zadie Smith: Smith’s first novel since On Beauty (2005), NW follows a group of people from Caldwell–a fictional council estate in northwest London whose buildings are named for English philosophers–and documents the lives they build in adulthood.  Smith (who since 2005 has become a mother, NYU professor, and Harper’s columnist) has variously called this a novel of class and a “very, very small book” (highly unlikely).  Smith’s own deep roots to London, and this particular corner of London, were most recently aired in her stirring defense of London’s local libraries for the New York Review of Books blog. (Lydia)

Telegraph Avenue by Michael Chabon: Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Chabon turns his verbal dexterity to the left coast with this novel set in 2004 in the Flatlands neighborhood of Oakland, California. The tale centers on two families, one white, one black, whose fathers jointly own a small used-record shop threatened by a new music megastore on Telegraph Avenue. Called “High Fidelity for smart people” in one early review, the book features pop culture riffs on Kung Fu, ’70s Blaxploitation films, vinyl LPs, jazz and soul music, and a certain newly elected senator from Illinois headed for higher office. See our excerpt. (Michael)

This Is How You Lose Her by Junot Díaz: Díaz, who made readers wait eleven years between his first book of stories, Drown, and his Pulitzer-winning novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, now returns after only five years with a new book of stories, many of which first appeared in the New Yorker. According to his publisher, the stories “capture the heat of new passion, the recklessness with which we betray what we most treasure, and the torture we go through – ‘the begging, the crawling over glass, the crying’ – to try to mend what we’ve broken beyond repair.” Word is Díaz is also working on a new novel, titled Monstro. If he keeps to his usual pace, we only have six more years to wait. (Michael)

The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver: Silver, author of the political prognostication blog FiveThirtyEight.com (which now makes its home on the New York Times site), knows more than most on prediction. Before turning his attention to politics and pretty much acing the 2008 election, he developed the groundbreaking PECOTA system for forecasting baseball talent while at Baseball Prospectus. With his first non-baseball book, Silver broadens his scope to look at the science and art of predictions, visiting “the most successful forecasters in a range of areas, from hurricanes to baseball, from the poker table to the stock market, from Capitol Hill to the NBA.” (Patrick)

Nice Weather by Frederick Seidel: Frederick Seidel, age 76, belongs to the last generation of poets who could assume that people cared what they had to say. Late in life, he’s turned that into a self-fulfilling prophecy. His singular voice – urbane, seductive, nostalgic, lucid, lusty, rich, visionary, and ruthless – has as much to tell us about the way we live now as the best novels. For those of us who couldn’t afford his Collected Poems in hardcover, Nice Weather offers a more manageable selection of new work. (Garth)

Every Love Story is a Ghost Story: The Life of David Foster Wallace by D.T. Max: Six months after David Foster Wallace’s suicide, The New Yorker published a novella-length piece by journalist D.T. Max on Wallace’s last difficult years and his encompassing effort to surpass Infinite Jest.  That article started the drumbeat for two books: The first, The Pale King, was released last April; the second, Max’s biography of Wallace, debuts this August.  The biography was written with the cooperation of Wallace’s family and promises to be the first definitive treatment of the author’s life. (Kevin)

San Miguel by T.C. Boyle: Boyle follows his 2011 novel, When the Killing’s Done, with a second novel set on the Channel Islands off the California coast, focusing this time on the most remote of the eight islands, San Miguel. In an interview last year with Untitled Books, Boyle, known for his fondness for narrative bells and whistles, called his new book “a straightforward, non-ironic, historical tale of two families who lived in different periods alone on this particular island, the farthest one out, the most wind-blown, the most difficult.” (Michael)

Joseph Anton by Salman Rushdie: The iconic figure Salman Rushdie cuts owes more to early triumphs, bravery in the face of death threats, celebrity antics, and sheer chutzpah than to recent brilliance. Since about The Moor’s Last Sigh, his work has been hit or miss – almost always within the same book. In this doorstopper-sized memoir, however, Rushdie turns his eye on the fatwa itself, and on his own years in hiding. The title comes from the code name he chose for himself: Joseph (after Conrad), Anton (after Chekhov). Neither of those writers were known to substitute substance for flash, and if their spirits preside over the book, it’s may well mark a turning point in Rushdie’s career. (Garth)

Reinventing Bach by Paul Elie: Paul Elie knows how to pick ‘em: his first book The Life You Save May Be Your Own, winner of the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction, and a NBCC nominee, delved into the intertwined lives of four famous Catholics – Flannery O’Connor, Dorothy Day, Walker Percy, and Thomas Merton.  His second book is a study of Bach; specifically,  “the ways that numerous musicians have rendered Bach’s music through the years through various technologies.”  From PW’s starred review:  “Reading Elie’s stately and gorgeous prose is much like losing oneself in Glenn Gould’s Goldberg Variations, for his study convincingly demonstrates that the music of Bach is the most persuasive rendering of transcendence there is.” (Sonya)

May We Be Forgiven by A.M. Homes: Jason Rice of the book blog Three Guys, One Book calls May We Be Forgiven Homes’s “triumph, her masterpiece, and crowning moment.”  Dennis Haritou, of the same blog, says it’s “about 480 pages of suburban insanity.”  There’s a Nixon scholar, there’s an F-ed up family, there’s an act of terrible violence, there’s that dark, vicious suburbia that Homes depicts so well. (Edan)

Canvas by Benjamin Stein: Benjamin Stein’s novel, translated from the German by WNYC fixture Brian Zumhagen, involves a mysterious suitcase, a missing psychoanalyst, and a Holocaust memoir that might be a fake. Equally compelling is the structure, which recalls Mark Z. Danielewski’s Only Revolutions. It consists of two different versions of the story, told by two competing narrators. Each starts from one end of the book, and they meet in the middle. To switch from one to the other, the reader flips the book over and upside down. (Garth)

Scientists: A Family Romance by Marco Roth: “The contemporary memoir is a bastard genre, neither truth nor art,” claims n+1 editor, literary critic, and reluctant memoirist, Marco Roth, whose first book–a memoir–debuts from FSG this fall. In spite of the short shrift he gives the genre, Roth’s material doesn’t stray terribly far from his usual terrain as a literary and cultural critic. In Scientists: A Family Romance he meditates on loss, of the Jewish intellectual tradition he was raised within and of his father, who died of AIDS in the early ‘90s, and he speaks of coming to the world through books. Despite his protestations, Roth might just make an art of the form. (Anne)

Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures by Emma Straub: Bookcourt Bookseller and Rookie contributor Emma Straub debuts this fall with her decades-spanning novel about a young woman from Wisconsin who becomes a movie star.  Barnes and Noble has selected the book for their Discover Great New Writers program, and Jennifer Egan says, “At once iconic and specific, Emma Straub’s beautifully observed first novel explores the fraught trajectory of what has become a staple of the American dream:  the hunger for stardom and fame.” Now you can pre-order a signed and personalized copy from WORD Bookstore. (Edan)

The Forgetting Tree by Tatjana Soli: Tatjana Soli broke out with The Lotus Eaters, her sad and emotionally resonant debut novel from 2010. Now in The Forgetting Tree, Soli traces many of the same themes such as love, loss, and darkness to conjure the story of Claire Nagy, a young woman who marries into a notable California ranching family. Quickly, Nagy settles into her new life on the farm, peacefully adapting to its particular charms, but it’s not long before fate intervenes, followed closely by tragedy. Riven, Claire finds herself disconnected from her family, her husband, and the life she’s come to know, and when she’s finally at her most vulnerable, tragedy strikes again. Soli demonstrated her gift for emotional storytelling in her debut, so when critics describe this effort as “haunting” and “triumphant,” you should pay attention. (Nick)

My Heart Is an Idiot by Davy Rothbart: FOUND Magazine began in 2001 after Davy Rothbart found a note to some dude named Mario on his car windshield. “I fucking hate you,” it began, and Rothbart was hooked. Each year since, Rothbart (a contributor to This American Life) has released a new magazine of “found” items that captures the raw, honest emotion of everyday life, and he’s traveled far and wide in order to promote it. Such rapid obsession is also emblematic of Rothbart’s sudden infatuations with women, and the “terminally romantic” Rothbart has pursued with gusto his share of (often uninterested) flames—so many, in fact, that in 2011, a documentary was made about his journeys. Now, in his collection of essays, Rothbart describes his feelings in a comic, honest, and altogether relatable way. (Nick)

Between Heaven and Here by Susan Straight: In the final novel of her Rio Seco trilogy, Straight explores the aftermath of the murder of Glorette Picard, found dead in the alley behind a taqueria.  Ms. Straight is beloved for her soulful, lyrical, unflinching and compassionate evocation of place: namely, the Inland Empire (and its fictional town of Rio Seco), and this book, which Publisher’s Weekly billed as a “novel-in-stories,” should be no exception.  For a literary amuse-bouche, read Straight’s moving piece in the Los Angeles Times about giving away her books. (Edan)

October:

The Twelve by Justin Cronin: 2010′s The Passage told of a North America 100 years after it had been destroyed by deadly “virals” (the virus in question being one that makes you a vampire), and the colonists who had managed to survive. The Twelve, the second installment of the planned trilogy, picks up the characters of The Passage where we left them, goes back in time to the virus’s outbreak, and introduces other pockets of survivors around the continent. As it turns out, scrappy survivalism isn’t the only way to go about a post-apocalyptic life, and attacks by the virals aren’t the only threat to the colonists’ life. (Janet)

Building Stories by Chris Ware: Big-time American comics and cartoon artist Chris Ware (RAW contributor, anthologizer, anthologizee, creator of the Acme Novelty Library series which produced Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth), is collecting the entirety of his Building Stories strip in a volume for publication by Pantheon.  The strip first appeared as a monthly feature in Nest Magazine, and wound up as a weekly strip in The New York Times Magazine from 2005-2006. (Lydia)

Back to Blood by Tom Wolfe: Wolfe does Miami in his new book Back to Blood–not the “wet” kind, according to Wolfe, but like the (questionable) term “bloodlines.” The ones in question are those of the immigrant population of Miami, which Wolfe told those assembled at a Little, Brown party “is the only city…in the whole world where people from another country, speaking another language and from another culture have taken over a vast city at the ballot box in one generation.”  Wolfe can be seen cruising the city in the trailer to Blood Lines, a documentary about Wolfe’s research stint in Miami set to release concurrently with the book.  (Lydia)

In Sunlight and In Shadow by Mark Helprin: Mark Helprin’s 1991 novel A Soldier of the Great War may be the most swashbuckling tale ever inspired by the First World War.  For his sixth novel, In Sunlight and In Shadow, Helprin shifts to the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, when paratrooper Harry Copeland returns to New York and falls in love with a ravishing young actress, singer and heiress named Catherine Thomas Hale.  Skipping from Sicily to Maine to the Sacramento Valley to London during the blitz, this is, first and last, a love story drawn in broad strokes against the dawn of our age. (Bill)

Elsewhere: A Memoir by Richard Russo: Richard Russo won the Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for his novel Empire Falls, which was suffused with the claustrophobia and sweet sorrows of life in a small, fading New England mill town.  For his first work of non-fiction, Russo takes us back to his boyhood in Gloversville, the small, fading New York mill town where he grew up in the 1950s.  (For another take on this once-thriving glove-manufacturing hamlet, see Philip Roth’s novel American Pastoral.)  As economic decline and illness shadow Russo’s childhood, his mother, an affectionate echo of Grace Roby from Empire Falls, urges her son to train his gaze beyond Gloversville’s confining horizon.  (Bill)

The Fifty Year Sword by Mark Z. Danielewski: House of Leaves author Mark Z. Danielewski returns with another bout of suspenseful storytelling coupled with innovative formatting, with the wide release of his novella The Fifty Year Sword. He’s also a master of limited editions, as volumes from the novella’s initial print run sold for up to $1,000 apiece. The Fifty Year Sword is an homage to oral storytelling and ghost stories. Five narrators retell the story of a man telling five orphans the tale of an invisible sword whose wounds appear suddenly in the victim’s fiftieth year. Danielewski has held readings of the novella on Halloween for the past two years in L.A. This new edition will be available in October, making for perfect Halloween reading that won’t break the bank. (Anne)

Heroines by Kate Zambreno: Intensity and intelligence forge the baseline current that runs through and characterizes most of Kate Zambreno’s written work. Zambreno, who was just named one of Jezebel’s 25 “game-changing women,” has already published two novels, Green Girl, which as Jezebel says, “has been almost universally praised in thinky literary circles,” and O Fallen Angel, a book that Bookslut’s Jessa Crispin says should have been nominated for the Guardian First Book Award. Zambreno’s third book, Heroines, is a critical memoir, borne from her blog Frances Farmer Is My Sister, that takes on myths of modernist writers and their silenced wives, mistresses, and muses. (Anne)

Ancient Light by John Banville: Like most of his novels, John Banville’s latest book forms part of a larger subgroup of works within his oeuvre. Although it can be read as a standalone narrative, it belongs to a trilogy that includes 2000’s Eclipse and 2002’s Shroud. It revisits Eclipse’s narrator, the aging actor Alexander Cleave, as he recalls an affair he had at age fifteen with the mother of his best friend – a plot/narrative combo that might be described as The Reverse Lolita. It’s a much lighter affair than its dark and sometimes inscrutable predecessors. Banville’s trademark self-reflexivity, though, is at its most elaborately involuted here. A subplot involves Cleave’s playing the starring role in a film essentially modeled on the story of Shroud, the screenwriter of which is “a somewhat shifty and self-effacing fellow” referred to as JB.  (Mark)

The Silent House by Orhan Pamuk: Orhan Pamuk’s second novel The Silent House, published in Turkey in 1983, is finally slated to appear in English.  The novel describes a week in the lives of three siblings who visit their grandmother in the fictional village-turned-spa town of Cennethisar on the outskirts of Istanbul.  It is told from the perspective of five separate characters–the grandmother, her manservant, and the three children–and details their various family intrigues and the turbulent Turkish sociopolitical climate in the months leading up to the 1980 coup. Upon its publication in Turkey, this sophomore effort won the prestigious Madaralı Award, whose previous recipients included literary lights like Yaşar Kemal and Adalet Ağaoğlu. (Lydia)

The Middlesteins by Jami Attenberg: Jami Attenberg’s fourth novel concerns Edie and Richard Middlestein, who have charted a steady course through suburban married life for three decades. But Edie has become enormous. She is obsessed with food—eating it, dreaming of it—and if she doesn’t change, she won’t live for much longer. Attenberg explores the nuances of marriage, the strength and the limits of family bonds, and our culture’s dangerous, fascinating obsession with food. (Emily M.)

The Round House by Louise Erdrich: Continuing on with the trilogy she began with A Plague of Doves, which Michiko Kakutani called  “supple and assured” in the New York Times back in 2008, Louise Erdrich’s The Round House promises to be among the highlights of the fall literary season. The book follows a young man coming of age in trying times on an Ojibwe reservation in North Dakota. Judging from the beauty of Erdrich’s previous novels—Tracks is one of my personal all time favorites—you can expect The Round House to deliver a heart-breaking story through brutally gorgeous prose. (Emily K.)

Have You Seen Marie? by Sandra Cisneros: The author of The House on Mango Street and Caramelo returns with a “an illustrated fable for grown-ups,” a story about a grieving middle-aged woman’s search for a friend’s cat, lost following the death of her mother.  The book is illustrated in color by the San Francisco artist Ester Hernández, and depicts the two protagonists’ journey through the San Antonio streets, looking for the wayward Marie. (Lydia)

There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra by Chinua Achebe: The focus of Chinua Achebe’s long-awaited memoir is the Nigerian Civil War of 1967-1970, when the Biafran people of Nigeria attempted to form their own state in the southeast of the country.  Achebe, who was an established novelist when the war began (Things Fall Apart was published in 1958 and swiftly became the major “African novel” known to American students), was an itinerant representative of the Biafran people during the war years.  He spent the subsequent decades in the United States, and this is his first published comment on the horrors he witnessed during this painful interlude in Nigerian history. (Lydia)

Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan Three years after its inception as on Sloan’s website, Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore has blossomed into a full-length novel. First time novelist and media-guru Robin Sloan tells of Clay Jannon, a web-designer recently out of work, who finds a new job working at a mysterious bookstore. Soon, Clay discovers that behind the unassuming titles on the shelves lie a cult and a code and a bizarre cast of characters. With his wildly imagined libraries and playful take on the future of books, Sloan brings to mind an online Borges. (Matt)

We Are What We Pretend to Be and Letters by Kurt Vonnegut: In the league table of posthumous productivity, Kurt Vonnegut ranks somewhere between Biggie and Bolaño; for a dead guy, he’s no slouch. Since he passed away in 2007, we’ve had three collections of unpublished fiction, and we’re about to get a fourth. We Are What We Pretend to Be is a volume that yokes together two texts unpublished in his lifetime: Basic Training (already available as an ebook), an early satirical novella which is thought to date from the 1940s, and If God Were Alive Today, which he never managed to finish before his death. Probably more significant for serious Vonnegut readers will be the publication, three weeks later, of his letters. The 464 page collection, edited by his friend Dan Wakefield, spans sixty years and contains mostly unpublished correspondence. (Mark)

Astray by Emma Donoghue: Donoghue has the unenviable task of following a literary mega-hit, her acclaimed bestseller Room. Perhaps the confinement of Room led Donoghue to dream of traveling, as Astray is a story collection “which brings together fourteen fact-based fictions about travels to, within and from North America, from the 1630s to the 1960s.” The collection includes several stories already available or soon to appear, including “The Widow’s Cruse,” which will appear in One Story in August. (Patrick)

Object Lessons: The Paris Review Presents the Art of the Short Story: Who needs an MFA when there’s The Paris Review? The magazine’s author interviews have long been the go-to toolkit for aspiring writers looking for nuts and bolts (as well as juicy tidbits). And their latest anthology has a didactic intent that promises to pleasure while it imparts. Object Lessons features favorite stories from the Review selected by some of the best fiction writers scrawling today, and pairs the stories with “lessons” on what makes a short story great. With writers like Lydia Davis, Lorrie Moore, and Amy Hempel at the helm, and selections from the likes of Jane Bowles, Leonard Michaels, and Jorge Louis Borges, this is a surely a winning match for The Paris Review school of writing. (Anne)

It’s Fine by Me by Per Petterson: It’s Fine by Me is actually an older novel, first published in Norway in 1992. It tells the story of Audun, a teenage boy who has recently moved to Oslo from the country. Out in the UK since December, the reviews have been strong. Writing in The Guardian, Tim Parks calls it an “edgy bildungsroman,” while Martin Chilton of The Telegraph says it’s “a gripping and subtle coming-of-age story, ripe with melancholy.” (Patrick)

The Fun Stuff: And Other Essays by James Wood: New Yorker literary critic James Wood’s last book, 2008’s How Fiction Works, was a short and, in many ways, very simple exposition and defence of the realist tradition in fiction. It was nonetheless hugely divisive, and set off any number of debates about his perceived conservatism and antagonism toward the literary avant garde. Wood is now unquestionably one of the most influential voices in contemporary literary criticism, and those debates will likely be sparked off again with the publication of this new collection. The Fun Stuff contains essays on Tolstoy, Lermontov, Edmund Wilson, Cormac McCarthy, Lydia Davis, Aleksander Hemon and Michel Houellebecq. The title piece is a 2010 New Yorker essay on The Who’s Keith Moon, and on Wood’s own love for pounding the skins. While we’re on the topic, might I suggest this quietly amazing video as the basis for a book trailer? (You’re welcome, FSG marketing department.) (Mark)

The Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira by Cesar Aira: Cesar Aira has published so many short novels in his native Argentina that people seem to have lost count (50? 70?), and, slowly but surely, New Directions is bringing them into English. His brilliant and peculiar method – a simple version of which is that he never returns to a previous day’s writing – has, perforce, produced some oddities (see, e.g., The Seamstress and The Wind) as well as some classics (see, e.g., Ghosts, Varamo). But as one can devour an Aira novel in an afternoon, one walks away from even the misses weirdly invigorated, as from an unforgettably incoherent dream. Time will tell which category The Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira falls into, but, if you’re an Aira fan, does it matter? Getting there is most of the fun. (Garth)

The Heart Broke In by James Meek: Meek, journalist and author (of, among other things, the beautifully-written People’s Act of Love) has written a family novel that his agent called a “21st-century Anna Karenina.”  The novel tells the story of siblings whose father is assassinated by Northern Irish guerrillas–one turns to rock ‘n’ roll and reality television, the other sets herself to finding a cure for malaria.  The novel is said to ask its readers “what conscience means” in our current day and age. (Lydia)

November:

Dear Life: Stories by Alice Munro: A collection of new short stories from a master of the form. Munro’s thirteenth short story collection is set in the countryside and towns around Lake Huron, and examines, with her signature clarity and simplicity, the strangeness and danger and beauty of ordinary life. (Emily M.)

Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan: Ian McEwan’s last outing, Solar, failed to find an American audience to match that of his Very Serious books of the early Aughts, perhaps because McEwan, while often funny, witty, clever, and ironic, isn’t naturally a comedian. His newest, Sweet Tooth, looks to split the difference with its campus setting and cloak-and-dagger set-up: in 1972, a lissome Cambridge student (and MI5 recruit) falls in love with the target of an intelligence operation – a young fiction writer. Shades of LeCarre, shades of Atonement. (Garth)

Both Flesh and Not by David Foster Wallace: As far as internet book hype goes, it doesn’t get much easier than this: David Foster Wallace + 15 essays never published in book form = Yahtzee! Novices and devotees alike should appreciate this collection, which will house what many consider to be Wallace’s masterpiece, the eponymous “Federer: Both Flesh and Not,” a piece on the tennis player so earth-shatteringly good that its reverberations are still being felt in the sportswriting world—to say nothing, at that, of the Times’ copy desk (Ctrl + F in that article for Josh Dean’s write-up). In addition, readers will get The Great Bandana’s analysis of Terminator 2, a look at how television had begun to influence a younger generation of writers, and twelve more. As I said, Yahtzee! (Nick)

Woes of the True Policeman by Roberto Bolaño: Roberto Bolaño continues to lay claim to the title of World’s Most Prolific Dead Author.  The latest addition to his posthumous avalanche is Woes of the True Policeman, a novel Bolaño worked on for some 30 years prior to his death in 2003 at age 50.  Like 2666, his grueling exploration of the disappearance of hundreds of women in Mexico’s Chihuahua state, the new novel is set in a northern Mexico border town called Santa Teresa that is also haunted by the unsolved killings of women.  Both novels give credence to Bolaño’s claim that he wished he’d been a homicide detective rather than a writer.  This is believed to be his last unpublished novel. (Bill)

Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm: A New English Version by Philip Pullman: It’s been two hundred years since the publication of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s collection of Children’s and Household Tales, and what better way to celebrate than with the author of His Dark Materials’ 400-page tribute? For two years, Pullman has worked on retelling fifty of his favorite tales in a manner “clear as water,” and as a means of refreshing his own creative cache. “Rather as a pianist relishes playing Bach’s preludes and fugues,” Pullman told The Guardian last March, the Grimm’s project has acted “as a sort of palate-cleansing discipline.” Readers will find many of the classics in the new volume, but also such unfamiliar ones as the extremely creepy “Hans-my-Hedgehog” and “The Girl Without Hands,” as well as Pullman’s personal favorite, “The Juniper Tree.”  (Nick)

Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver: Flight Behavior details an awakening for its 29 year old protagonist: After marrying at 17, raising three children, and abandoning her more worldly ambitions, Dellarobia Turnbow suddenly takes leave of her failing farm in her small town to start a self-destructive affair with a young man. From the publisher’s copy, it seems like things don’t turn out the way she imagines they might, and given Kingsolver’s deftness in the nearly surreal mode, plus her arborist’s eye for compellingly strange horticultural minutiae, I think that it’s fair to anticipate a surprise or two for the reader as well. (Emily K.)

The Testament of Mary by Colm Tóibín: Tóibín, whose career has been characterised by a long-standing preoccupation with relationships between mothers and sons – see, for example, the stories of Mothers and Sons and the recent non-fiction collection New Ways to Kill Your Mother – seems like he has been building up to this topic for a while now. The Testament of Mary tackles the mother of all mother-son stories. In this short novel, Mary deals with her grief in the aftermath of the execution of her son, Jesus Christ of Nazareth. Living in exile in the wake of his death, she attempts to piece together the events that led to his betrayal and crucifixion. Mel Gibson, we can assume, will not be attached to any potential film adaptation. (Mark)

Prosperous Friends by Christine Schutt: “I can be very bold and brave and nasty on the page,” Christine Schutt says of her writing, which has been praised by Gary Lutz and Gordon Lish alike. Schutt’s prose is nothing if not taut, and, as she suggests, her writing pushes boundaries in spite of her subject’s seemingly everyday terrain. Her previous novel, All Souls, depicts a class of high school seniors at an elite private school, where the central character has a rare form of cancer. Her latest, Prosperous Friends, takes on ideas of art and love, by following two artistic couples, one who revels in their love and the other who suffers because of it. (Anne)

Magnificence by Lydia Millet: Brainy, funny, artful, and ambitious, Lydia Millet is one of America’s most underrated novelists. That’s despite being a Pulitzer Prize finalist. A few years ago, after reading from her novel How the Dead Dream, she told me that William Gaddis’ JR had been an inspiration for its protagonist, T. Her last outing, Ghost Lights, opened with T. MIA in Central America, and sent IRS functionary Hal in after him. The new one, which completes the trilogy, finds Hal’s widow Susan wrestling with her grief in a California mansion. What better way to follow up this summer’s #OccupyGaddis read-along than by tackling all three? (Garth)

These Things Happen by Richard Kramer: Kramer has had a successful career as a television writer, with credits including thirtysomethings and My So-Called Life. These Things Happen is his debut novel, a masterfully executed domestic drama set in an elite upper-class liberal milieu. Wesley is in the tenth grade. His mother is an editor married to a doctor; his father is a gay activist whose long-term partner is a restaurateur. A shocking act of violence forces all of them to consider who they are, what they stand for, and their relationships to one another. (Emily M.)

December:

Me and the Devil by Nick Tosches: Any writer who has the nerve to refer to Jesus Christ as “the kike in diapers” gets points for audacity.  Over his long and multi-faceted career, Nick Tosches has been unapologetically audacious and scabrous, sour and sage, foul and funny – virtues now in sadly short supply.  So it’s fitting that his new novel features an aging New York writer named Nick who discovers that drinking human blood has remarkable restorative powers – and even darker consequences.  One early reader called Me and the Devil “as raw and blazing an account of a descent into hell and return that you will ever read.”  It’s scary too, according to its author.  As Tosches told an interviewer, “This is the only one I’ve written that’s scared even me.” (Bill)

Raised From the Ground by Jose Saramago: Originally published in 1980, Saramago’s third novel — in which, according to the Paris Review, he “at last established his voice as a novelist” — will be translated into English for the first time (a posthumous Christmas morning for Saramago fans!).  Written in the wake of Portugal’s Carnation Revolution, Raised From the Ground follows three generations of agricultural laborers from the Alentejo region and won the City of Lisbon Prize.  Incidentally: Saramago published his first novel at the age of 24, and then did not publish another novel for 30 years; he was 59 when Balthasar and Blimunda launched him onto the international stage.  Look out for him in our Post-40 Bloomers series! (Sonya)

January 2013:

Tenth of December: Stories by George Saunders: In an interview with the New Yorker’s Book Bench about the title story of his fourth collection, Saunders said that what he’s trying to do in fiction these days is to “create a representation of consciousness that’s durable and truthful, i.e., that accounts, somewhat, for all the strange, tiny, hard-to-articulate, instantaneous, unwilled things that actually go on in our minds in the course of a given day, or even a given moment.”  Two other New Yorker-published stories – “Victory Lap” and “Home” – will also appear in the new collection, and Saunders fans can expect, as always, stories that are “vividly and lovingly infused with Saunders’s signature blend of exuberant prose, deep humanity, and stylistic innovation.” (Sonya)

His Wife Leaves Him by Stephen Dixon: This is the first novel in five years from the prolific Stephen Dixon, an American treasure of the small presses whose had two of his books, Frog and Interstate, nominated for the National Book Award. His Wife Leaves Him is, according to the author himself, about a lot of things: “love, guilt, sickness, death, remorse, loss, family, matrimony, sex, children, parenting, aging, mistakes, incidents, minutiae, birth, music, writing, jobs, affairs, memory, remembering, reminiscences, forgetting, repression, dreams, reverie, nightmares.” The novel is narrated by a man mourning the death of his wife, and was excerpted in the The Three Quarter Review earlier this year. (Emily K.)

February 2013:

See Now Then by Jamaica Kincaid: For the first time in over a decade, Jamaica Kincaid, author of stunners like Annie John, has a new novel on the horizon.  This time her subjects are the Sweets–parents and two children–a family in turmoil who inhabit the Shirley Jackson house in Vermont.  Several excerpts of See Now Then appeared in the premier issues of Little Star Journal last year. (Lydia)

Vampires in the Lemon Grove by Karen Russell: Karen Russell’s fiction animates unlikely worlds–of Floridian alligator wrestlers, of sleep-away camp for disordered dreamers, of a home for girls who were raised by werewolves. Her novel, Swamplandia!, made many a year-end list as a best book of the year (including our own), and was one of three shortlisted for the Pulitzer prize, alongside books by literary heavyweights Denis Johnson and David Foster Wallace. If her new collection, Vampires in the Lemon Grove, is anything like her previous, then prepare a good dose of heartbreak laced with humor and a bevy of fantastical subjects whose tribulations, fascinations, and adventures resonate as both unusual and authentic. (Anne)

A Thousand Pardons by Jonathan Dee: Author of The Privileges, a pitch-perfect portrait of life among the hedge fund set in the Naughty Aughties, Dee returns with another tale of family strife in the upper reaches of New York society. When her husband loses his job as a partner at a white-shoe law firm, Helen Armstead lands a job at a PR firm, where she discovers she has an almost magical, and certainly 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)

Give Me Everything You Have: Notes on a Crisis by James Lasdun: Renowned English poet, author, and academic James Lasdun’s memoir promises to be, like the rest of his writing, a lucid and affecting affair. As both a Guggenheim Fellow and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Lasdun is no stranger to praise and acclaim, so in lieu of providing more here, consider the following an amuse-bouche: his 2009 Paris Review story, “The Hollow;” the opening credits to Besieged, a film written by and based on Lasdun’s novel of the same name; and “It Isn’t Me,” one of Lasdun’s poems. (Nick)

How Literature Saved My Life by David Shields: Titles of David Shields books read like the song titles of a highschool emo band; Take his New York Times bestseller: The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead, or 2010’s Reality Hunger: A Manifesto. Luckily, the books themselves are provocative, and his latest is no exception in name-scheme or quality. Employing the technique he pioneered in Reality Hunger—equal parts manic personal-essay and literary mash-up—Shields tackles the question, “What is literature’s power?” He finds literature aspires and fails to assuage loneliness, but through admitting defeat, literature’s true value shines. “Literature doesn’t lie about [failing]—which is what makes it essential.” (Matt)

March 2013:

The Book of My Lives by Aleksander Hemon: The brilliant Aleksandar Hemon has evidently completed his fifth book and first collection of non-fiction pieces (the translation rights have been sold, the manuscript alleged to exist). The title, The Book of My Lives, alludes to, and will presumably include, his 2000 New Yorker essay of the same name–a short, powerful description of his mentoring literature professor turned war criminal Nikola Koljevic. This will be Hemon’s first book since the familial tragedy documented in his heartrending 2011 essay “The Aquarium,” also for The New Yorker. (Lydia)

The Fun Parts by Sam Lipsyte: Lipsyte follows his brilliant and hilarious novel The Ask with his first collection of stories since his debut, Venus Drive. There isn’t much information available yet about this title, other than that it contains a story about “a grizzled and possibly deranged male birth doula” and another that offers “a tawdry glimpse of the Northern New Jersey high school shot-putting circuit, circa 1986.” It will presumably feature several stories that have appeared in the last few years in The New Yorker, including (hopefully) his marvelous “The Dungeon Master.” (Patrick)

Middle C by William H. Gass: William H. Gass is a giant of American letters, with nine essay collections, five novellas, and one of the all-time great books of short stories to his name. Yet he’s published only two novels in forty-five years, largely because the second, The Tunnel, took a quarter century to write. The gestation period for Middle C isn’t that long – not quite – but one can be glad that Gass, 87, will finally be publishing it in 2013. It concerns a music professor of European provenance in exile in the Midwest with his daughter, and presumably
contains a great deal of Gass’ beautifully figurative and alliterative prose. (Garth)

Unknown:

Subtle Bodies by Norman Rush: Rush’s third novel is a companion piece of sorts to Mating and Mortals, both of them (in my judgment) contemporary masterpieces. Where they tackled courtship and marriage, respectively, Subtle Bodies focuses on agape love, a.k.a. friendship. Michiko Kakutani is bound to kvetch about how the geographic setting – the Catskills – offers none of the shimmering magisterial blah blah of Rush’s Botswana (you can take that to the bank, friends), but the temporal one – the run-up to the Iraq War – offers an ample field of play for the author’s bristling political intelligence. (Garth)

The Dying Grass by William T. Vollmann: Speaking of long in the making…how about Vollmann’s Seven Dreams series? These books tell of the seven different encounters between Native Americans and European settlers, and collectively, they will make a fictional edifice to rival Vollmann’s 3,000-page essay on violence, Rising Up and Rising Down. The first volume, The Ice-Shirt, appeared in 1990; then came volumes II (Fathers and Crows) and VI (The Rifles). The most recent addition, volume III (Argall), came out a decade ago. Now Viking is bringing out volume V, The Dying Grass, concerning the fate of the Nez Perce tribe of Plains Indians in the 19th Century. The manner here is said to be closer to the (relatively)
pared-down The Royal Family than to the baroque Argall, but, Vollmann being Vollmann, there’s bound to be some clunkiness and repetition amid the passages of visual intricacy and visionary intensity. Still, would Vollmann-ites want it any other way? Come on, Bill! Only two
more to go! (A volume of “ghost stories” called Last Stories is also slated for publication.) (Garth)

Necessary Errors by Caleb Crain: Caleb Crain is a journalist, critic, and academic…and also, with Steamboats Are Ruining Everything, one of the bloggers who has most fully realized what the form can do. Or maybe the word is feuilletoniste. His first book, American Sympathy, seems to have been an influence on Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding. Now a novel, Necessary Errors, is being published by Penguin Press. All we know for now is that, like The Art of Fielding, it concerns “youth.” But Crain can really write, so it’s one to look out for. (Garth)

Your Name Here by Helen DeWitt: This series has for some time been keeping track of DeWitt’s star-crossed and exuberantly unorthodox follow-up to The Last Samurai. For a while, you could buy it from DeWitt’s website as a .pdf; now, the independent Noemi Press has the print rights. When last we checked, the publication date had been changed from “forthcoming” to “Summer 2012″ to “forthcoming 2012.” It’s hard to say if the book’s release is getting closer or farther away. (Garth)