Festival Days

by Jo Ann Beard

Jo Ann Beard doesn't write—or at least publish—a lot, but, boy, when she does... She's in her mid-sixties, and this is just her third book; her first, The Boys of My Youth, made her a bit of a cult hero in the rather uncultish world of essay writing. I am a card-carrying member of that cult (it was a Phinney by Post selection a few years ago), so when I say that her new book, Festival Days, is as good as that one, please understand that makes it the best new book I've read this year. Why are these essays (and two pieces she calls "stories") so heart-flutteringly good? There is her tender, clear-eyed intimacy with mortality (most of the stories concern the dying and the dead); there is the equally tender, lively presence of animals (dogs, mostly) through nearly every story. But most of all it is the structure of these stories, subtly ricocheting and reverberating between mourning and laughter, between memory and the moment, that gives them the fullness that only the most observed and felt life ever achieves.

The Devil That Danced on the Water

by Aminatta Forna

One of our favorite novels to recommend in recent years has been Happiness, Forna's story of two people meeting in London: Jean, an American woman in her 40s, and Attila, a wonderfully appealing Ghanaian man in his 60s. After reading this memoir, I couldn't help imagining that Attila is an idealized portrait of the man Forna's father might have lived to become. The Devil That Danced on the Water recounts Forna's earliest years, as she is shuttled between Sierra Leone and Scotland, the homelands of her father and mother, while her idealistic physician father rises in the government of his newly independent nation and is then destroyed as it falls into dictatorship. It's a tender, fascinating, and brilliantly observed story that seamlessly weaves together her child's perspective with the often terrible knowledge of later experience.

Crossroads

by Jonathan Franzen

Of all the things a novelist can do, Jonathan Franzen is among the best at one of the most important: creating full, human characters who make terrible decisions, again and again. In Crossroads, those characters are the Hildebrandts, a family of six in suburban Chicago in December 1971, each of them vivid and flawed, thwarted by their own essence but capable, possibly, of change. A suburban Christian youth group (which gives the novel its name) may not sound like a promising subject for a 592-page novel, but in Franzen's hands it's rich and fertile ground, not just for satire but for a fully populated world of actions and consequences that left me looking forward to the rest of the trilogy that Franzen has said will follow.

Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks, 1941-1995

by Patricia Highsmith

Zorrie

by Laird Hunt

Zorrie is a short novel about a full life. Not full in the usual way we think of for a character in fiction: travel, romances, adventure, public achievements. Zorrie Underwood's life, covering most of the 20th century, was so tied to the soil of her patch of rural Indiana that a few months spent working in Illinois as a young woman remained an exotic memory for years after. Mostly she worked, hard, and loved, patiently, with her curiosity and appreciation of the world around her burbling along at a low simmer. This little gem will remind readers of Marilynne Robinson and Kent Haruf and (for me especially) of Brad Watson's lovely Miss Jane, as it reminds us of the passions that can grow, and be sustained for decades, in a quiet mind and a laboring body.

Distant Fathers

by Marina Jarre, translated by Ann Goldstein

Jarre was always an outsider: raised speaking German in Latvia, where her Jewish father was killed by the Nazis in 1941, she learned Italian after she moved to her mother's country but spoke French at home within their minority religious community of Waldensians. And from this memoir, which came out in Italian in 1987 but was just translated into English this year, you feel as though she even felt an outsider to herself and her own history, which she holds and examines at arm's-length distance in a brilliant style that might remind you of Phinney favorite Annie Ernaux. She doesn't trust her own memories, but she knows they are all she has. She turns them over in her mind, and from sentence to sentence you have no idea where she will turn next, and you feel that she doesn’t either. It's quite thrilling.

Palmares

by Gayl Jones

Jones's first novel in two decades reads like a story that has been marinating at least that long. Set in late-17th-century Brazil, with a historical community of escaped slaves as its title and central idea, Palmares is the story of Almeyda, a Black slave girl who takes her freedom, but it has none of the linear structure we might associate with such a story. In keeping with the complex and fluid racial conditions of colonial Brazil, Almeyda's path is meandering and deeply episodic, as faces come in and out of her life and return, as she waits passively and often silently and then, when possible, takes action. Jones doesn't hold the hand of her reader, but she offers the greater gift of immersing you in a time and place utterly unlike ours, but full of its echoes. It's a one-of-a-kind visionary journey.

The War for Gloria

by Atticus Lish

There are few writers whose every book I know I'll read, but, two books in, Atticus Lish is one of them. His debut novel, Preparations for the Next Life, grabs your lapels with its story of two people at the desperate edge of American life, and his second holds on just as hard. His short sentences come at you with a declarative velocity, and his characters push themselves with a similar urgency, even when they are stuck, churning and feeling like they are getting nowhere, like Corey Goltz, the teenage son of a single, ailing mom on the outskirts of Boston, trying to find a father figure and a foothold in a cruel world. If this book had a smell, it would be a gym mat after a long day of mixed martial arts training sessions. Luckily, it doesn't, but you may find yourself needing a shower, or a long, brooding walk, after it's done. —Tom

The Names: A Memoir

by N. Scott Momaday

A review quoted on the back of The Names calls it "a Native American version of Roots," an obvious comparison at the time (both books came out in 1976, and Roots was an immediate blockbuster) for an American story of non-white ancestry, but that's about where the similarities end. There is ancestry in The Names, but, unlike Roots, it is equally the story of an individual consciousness, of a writer coming to understand the world. The story has a forward movement to it, from his forebears to his own coming of age, but it is hardly linear, as Momaday circles back through memory, his own and his ancestors', to construct his own imagination. His "I" is often a "we," but it is no less concrete for that, full of a wonder that's grounded in the details of personality and place and that makes his well-observed existence seem like a miracle.

The Killing Hills

by Chris Offutt

It's rare that I read everything a writer publishes—I tend to sample more widely—but I come back to Offutt every time, because I know I'm in good hands and because I'm compelled to let everyone else know what a thoroughly enjoyable and modestly masterful writer he is. The Killing Hills is advertised as his "first crime novel," but it's of a piece with his previous book, the wonderful Country Dark: a young man comes home from war to Kentucky and puts his skills, and his country know-how, to use in righting wrongs. In this book, it's as if Offutt has written a Lee Child novel, with an almost superhumanly savvy, two-fisted hero, but grounded it in the local details and drama of the Appalachian hollers he knows so well. It's a brisk, refreshing drink, straight from a mountain spring.

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life

by George Saunders

George Saunders is one of the best short-story writers around—he blew out the doors of the genre back in the '90s and has not rested since—and if you've seen him speak or read his interviews you'll know that he's also one of the wisest givers of advice on the craft and creative process of fiction writing, so it's no surprise that this book is a treat. Based on a class he taught at Syracuse for two decades, it includes seven stories by 19th-century Russian masters (including three by Chekhov, among them the exquisite "Gooseberries," the source of his title), each followed by Saunders's modest, funny, and thoroughly insightful analysis of both the technical and—dare I say it—moral details that make them tick. It's obviously a book for writers, including some exercises at the back that I, who hate writing exercises, might actually try, but it's equally a book for readers, especially those for whom stepping back and examining how art is made just adds to the wonder of its creation.

LaserWriter II

by Tamara Shopsin

As much as I liked The War for Gloria (see above), when I finished it I needed an antidote, and this sweet little book was the perfect prescription. When I say that it's a novel about an Apple repair shop in Manhattan in the 1990s, I mean that is exactly what it is about. No love story, no grand metaphors or broad social commentary. But like Arbitrary Stupid Goal, Shopsin's wonderful memoir about her family's Greenwich Village diner, it's a funny, heartening portrait of a small business that, while it lasts, operates as a refuge both for honest, creative work and for a city's misfits. It may make you pine for the lost art of printer repair.