25 Sentences About 10 Books

Hi. This week I want to share ten favorite novels I read this year. Most are newish, but not all. As we enter 2019 I'd say choose two: the one that interests you the most, and the one that interests you the least. —Lonny Pugh

An American Marriage by Tayari Jones
A man wrongly incarcerated, a new wife left behind, an old friend that reenters her life—nobody does anything wrong, but everything falls apart anyway. 
 

Asymmetry by Lisa Halliday
Almost half my life ago but not quite, in a college writing workshop, a fellow student submitted a short story called “Symmetry,” which involved an origami bird tossed into a trashcan. I don’t know what happened to the author, but her lucid storytelling showed me how much I had to learn about being a real writer. Lisa Halliday's novel reminded me of that. (Previously featured here.)

Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin
As of last week, I was burdened with the shame of living as a gay man who had not read Giovanni's Room. On Tuesday it was under the tree, and after two Thursday planes back to Los Angeles I began my new life as a man preparing to reread Giovanni's Room. 
 

History of Violence by Édouard Louis
It’s a dark, cold Christmas Eve in Paris, and the author of this nonfiction novel has just met his rapist in the street. The book is a corner of leaning mirrors, refracting and reflecting the long night and its aftermath. (Previously featured here.)
 

Home After Dark by David Small
Coming of age means making mistakes. Some you remember forever. (Previously featured here.)
 

The Idiot by Elif Batuman
First, listen to Elif Batuman's interview on the Longform podcast. Then read her New Yorker story on Japanese people who rent fake family members. Now you’ll have her wry, astute voice in your head as you read her story of a young brilliant woman bumbling through Harvard in the '90s. 
 

MacArthur Park by Andrew Durbin
It’s about weather and escalation, starting with a lonely man riding out Hurricane Sandy in his boss’s Manhattan apartment. It’s also about cruising and longing and a certain kind of extinct Brooklyn nightclub I didn't get to experience but I’m nostalgic for it anyway. 
 

Outline by Rachel Cusk
One swampy Brooklyn night this summer, I was pinned behind a table in Greenlight Bookstore, where rattling air conditioners could not summon the strength the wall-to-wall crowd required. We were there to see Rachel Cusk, and surprised to find there were so many like us. I couldn’t see her, or hear her, or move. Someone passed out. I ran home to my sublet in a furious rainstorm and began to read. There she was. Kudos, the finale of Cusk’s trilogy, was published this year, but you have to start with Outline.
 

Severance by Ling Ma
Unless you found some other recent novel that’s a zombie-apocalypse zinger, a satire of capitalist complacency, and a moving story of immigrant parents working hard for their Chinese-American daughter, you’ll need to read this one. (Previously featured here.)
 

There There by Tommy Orange
A modern epic about urban Native Americans hurtling toward their fates at an Oakland Coliseum powwow. Keywords: Gertrude Stein, Radiohead, and 3D-printed guns. (Previously featured here.)

Asymmetry

A young editorial assistant, Alice, sits in a famous novelist’s apartment. He can’t drink because of all his medications, but he offers white wine and a cookie. She’s grateful, but the pairing is gross. The writer finds her some bourbon. It burns. That’s better.

In Lisa Halliday’s debut novel, Asymmetry, yes, the protagonist’s much-older love interest bears a close resemblance to Philip Roth, whom the author dated when she was in her twenties and he was very much not in his twenties.

What matters more is that, during their days of ice cream and baseball and news of the Iraq invasion, Alice figures out she wants to be a writer, too—even as she worries he has already said what could be said. Then she realizes she cannot be a writer, cannot become who she is, while also living in the hunched shadow of his failing body. 

And just before we’re halfway through the book: record scratch. 

Now we listen as Amar, an Iraqi-American, gets pulled aside by security at Heathrow Airport. It’s 2008, and he’s just trying to get to Kurdistan to visit his brother. The logistics of the trip are complicated by America’s invasion of Iraq. Security has many questions, but few answers.

The stories of Alice and Amar harmonize so eloquently it’s like music. Then part three comes along: It’s about music, and about the book you’re holding. PLEASE READ

Asymmetry by Lisa Halliday, from Simon & Schuster

Frankenstein in Baghdad

A man finds something unspeakable, cloaks it a rag, brings it home.

He’s in Baghdad, after America has invaded. Bombs syncopate the city. Body parts are everywhere, unidentified, unburied.

If the man can stitch the parts into a body, he thinks, maybe the body will get a proper burial.

Then the body disappears. 

In Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad, newly translated into English, a monster rises to roam a ravaged city.

We follow a man into a bomb, we follow his soul as it is blasted away, and we watch the soul seep into the monster. “It didn’t have a soul, while he was a soul without a body.” This is how the monster rises. 

First it kills the killers, a lumbering quilt of vengeance. But its body starts loosening, which requires replacement parts. PLEASE READ

Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi, translated by Jonathan Wright, from Penguin

The Museum of Modern Love

Marina Abramović sits in one of two chairs inside the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. The first of more than 1,000 people sits across from her. Abromović raises her head, meets the gaze.


Some visitors stay for a few minutes of transformative eye contact. Some stay much longer. Some weep.


The artist never speaks, never stands, at 63, all day, every day. She offers only her gaze.


And over the course of almost three months, 850,000 people will gather around the edges of the room, watching, unable to fathom the prospect of facing the artist’s gaze, yet unable to be anywhere else. This kind of connection, this kind of eye contact, is not generally found in New York City.


A composer has lost his wife. A tourist has lost her husband. They return day after day, watching, in awe. They whisper to each other from the periphery. They go to her hotel bar. 


And then a ghost swoops in to tell us: No. This is not a love story.


In Heather Rose’s new novel, The Museum of Modern Love, we walk with the (fictional) characters consumed by Abramović’s (real) 2010 exhibit, The Artist Is Present. PLEASE READ


The Museum of Modern Love by Heather Rose, from Algonquin

Home After Dark

A lanky white boy stands alone in front of a Christmas tree. The precarious globe dangling at eye level distorts his reflection no matter which way he turns. It’s never quite his face he sees, never quite him.

In the kitchen, his parents are drunk. “That night, when the screaming and shouting began, it was like hearing my parents’ real voices for the first time,” he says. Soon his mom’s gone, forever, with Action Jackson.

In David Small’s aching graphic novel Home After Dark, ’50s adolescence is not easy. Never is.

Young Russell is dragged to California by his father, a Korean war vet. Housing plans evaporate. Russell’s father evaporates. Animals go missing, then turn up dead. His kind, strange friend Warren wants the two of them to take off their clothes and hug. His two other friends sense something’s up with Warren. 

Russell makes mistakes. Terrible, quotidian mistakes. You see his eyes in the moments that will haunt him. PLEASE READ

Home After Dark by David Small, from Liveright

Heads of the Colored People

A black man with a bleached-blond bob and blue eyes walks on a sidewalk. And before we get any further, the narrator tallies and deconstructs the many assumptions you might already have—about the man's appearance, his relationship to race, even his sexuality—and how little room they’ve left for him to walk down the street. 

This is the first story in Nafissa Thompson-Spires’s debut short-fiction collection, Heads of the Colored People.

The man—Riley, straight, wearing colored contacts, heading to a cosplay convention—doesn’t make it inside. He and a man pushing pamphlets misunderstand each other, and their confrontation draws the police, and the police pull their guns, and video of the shooting hits the internet.

This isn’t the end of the story, just another edge for it leap over, down into the writer’s heart: “How to end such a story, especially one that is this angry, like a big black fist? The voice is off-putting. All the important action happens offscreen; we don’t even see the shooting or the actual bodies or the video. Like that one guy in fiction workshop said, meta is so eighties.” PLEASE READ

Heads of the Colored People by Nafissa Thompson-Spires, from Atria

Disoriental

A young girl, about six, sits in the bathroom, watching her dad shave. She is fascinated by the brush, the sharp blade. She knows she is different from other girls, without understanding why, and she assumes she will grow up to be a man. It’s just a matter of time.

In Négar Djavadi’s new novel, Disoriental, the young girl has grown up into Kimiâ, a woman waiting for hours, alone, inside a fertility clinic. Her thoughts curlicue back through time, out of sequence. As we wait beside her, she talks to us directly. She tells us her story, which is the story of her family, which is the story of Iran—which her family fled for Paris when she was 10.

She tells us about her parents, who became revolutionaries. She tells us about Uncle Number Two (she has six), who harbors a secret much like her own. She tells us about the bomb. She tells us about escape, about exile, and how it feels the first time she hears her sister say the word “lesbian.” PLEASE READ

Disoriental by Négar Djavadi, from Europa Editions

Friday Black

Inside Prominent Mall, retail employees gird for battle. Over by the fleeces, one employee stands ready for the carnage, armed with an eight-foot pole. He’s the store’s top seller.

The gate rises. The mob enters.

In “Friday Black,” the title story in Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s new short story collection, the busiest shopping day of the year will have a body count. Happens every year. (This week, Esquire published the story online here.)

In the first story, “The Finkelstein 5,” a young man constantly adjusts his internal blackness dial as he confirms, then loses, a job interview, while America reckons with the trial of a white man who killed five black children with a chainsaw. Self-defense, the white man says, and he’s acquitted.

And in “Zimmer Land,” a black man works as an actor in a theme park where a paunchy white man confronts him on a fake residential street, asks him what he thinks he’s doing in this neighborhood, and pulls out a gun. Afterward the actor cleans off the fake blood and gets ready for the next customer. PLEASE READ

Friday Black by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, from Mariner

You Think It, I'll Say It

“There’s no way Donald Trump will be the Republican nominee for president,” a professor tells her driver in Kansas City. After he drops her at her hotel, she can’t find her license. 
 

Thus begins “Gender Studies,” the first story inside Curtis Sittenfeld’s You Think It, I’ll Say It—her first collection of short fiction. 
 

In the final story, a man reunites with a woman for dinner. The election has happened, and the man has only belatedly realized (or admitted) that he benefited from sexist administrators overseeing a student-government election at the boarding school they both attended. She had a crush on him back then, but now she’s—what is she? She is ordering another martini, and they have some things to discuss. PLEASE READ

You Think It, I’ll Say It by Curtis Sittenfeld, from Random House

History of Violence

A young man returns home from the laundromat and remakes his bed, then douses the clean sheets with air freshener, deodorant, aftershave, and cologne. He scrubs his floors, the slats of his blinds, the knobs of the doors. He wipes the bathroom mirror, in which his rapist admired his own reflection. 

Édouard Louis’s History of Violence is based on what happened the night—Christmas Eve, 2012—the author met a man in the street, and let the man inside his Paris apartment.

Édouard sits behind a door, quiet, unheard. He listens as his sister relays to her husband what happened. He silently corrects the record when he disagrees with her retelling. 

His friends convince him to report the assault, then he tries to retract the charges. He bristles at the racist language the police use when discussing his attacker. And he believes prison doesn’t stanch violence—it breeds more. PLEASE READ

History of Violence by Édouard Louis, from Farrar, Straus and Giroux

There There

A young Oakland boy dons a feather headdress and dances in front of his grandmother’s mirror. He doesn’t know anything about his heritage, doesn’t know his parents. His grandmother takes care of him and his brothers, and she’s “openly against any of them doing anything Indian.” He doesn’t know how this moment should make him feel. 

He’s one of many Native American characters in Tommy Orange’s debut novel, There There.

Gertrude Stein once said about Oakland, “There is no there there.” Early on, one character notes the context behind the famous line—Stein returned to Oakland to find it unrecognizable, her childhood home gone.

Another character listens to “There There,” by Radiohead. (“Just because you feel it / Doesn’t mean it’s there.”)

And the title also calls to mind the cursory, timeworn consolation: “There, there.” Those who say it admit no blame, and those who hear it are not consoled.

A big powwow is coming to the Oakland Coliseum, where many characters will converge. One prepares by dancing in a headdress. One young man prepares to meet his father for the first time. Others are 3D-printing plastic guns that will go undetected by security. PLEASE READ

There There by Tommy Orange, from Knopf

Severance

A mother pulls out the good plates from the cherry sideboard, sets the table, licks the empty plates with her fevered family, puts the plates away. Then she pulls them out again.

In Ling Ma’s novel, Severance, Shen Fever turns nearly everyone into zombies reenacting the daily rituals of their former lives.

This apocalyptic fever has spared Candace Chen, but survival for her means reenacting the daily rituals of her former job—outsourcing Bible print jobs to China—even as the printings grind to a halt, the office empties, and New York City's infrastructure crumbles around her.

She joins a caravan of fellow survivors heading west, and she is reminded of the westward journey her immigrant parents made when she was a child, of the gallon of milk they buy in an unimaginably vast grocery store.

Shen Fever isn’t humanity's chance for a fresh start, just a reboot for capitalist lust. Candace’s group scavenges Walmarts and the homes of the fevered, seeking not just survival tools but throw pillows, tablecloths, soap dishes. Her new leader: a diabolical IT guy named Bob. He tells them they'll go to Chicago. Well, he clarifies, just outside Chicago. "I am not living in the suburbs," one says. PLEASE READ

Severance by Ling Ma, from Farrar, Straus and Giroux