I’m reading a book about New York in the late 1970s and it begins with a perennial observation that you can live many lifetimes in the city due to the unsentimental way it demolishes the past. I have a spooky feeling, peering over the shoulder of the writer, Paul Goldberger, forty-five years later. Most of the thrilling new items he describes – buses, which are all painted white, phone booths one cannot molest—are now in 2023 things in the past. Some of it reads like a prophecy: about Frank Lloyd Wright’s Mercedes Benz showroom at 430 Park Ave. Goldberger asks: “why Wright did this is a mystery… the idea of having sleek European cars appear to the purchaser to be gliding toward him off a curving ramp is an appealing one, but it doesn’t stand a chance of working in such a low cramped space.” And now that that show room is gone.

Working as an editor, especially within literary journals, can sometimes feel like a similar experience in hyperactive obsolescence. Not that writers’ manuscripts are gliding toward us in a low cramped space—but rather every week brings a new foreclosure. This month it’s The White Review and The Gettysburg Review. Next month it will be others. This is the way of literary magazine publishing. For every Virginia Quarterly Review or Paris Review, there are dozens if not hundreds of other small journals that open with fanfare, continue for a few issues and then close quietly in the night before the chill has gone off the wine for their launch parties. I’ve lived in New York City almost thirty years and my memory is cluttered with issue parties for little magazines like Open City or Astra, or Black Clock, beautiful journals which are no longer in circulation.

It can make you feel a bit gloomy, unless you accept that like New York City itself, literary magazines are by nature—most of them, not all—meant to be ephemeral. If they were part of a biosphere, little magazines wouldn’t be the tortoises swimming along well into their hundredth year, they would be the Great Danes of our planet—lovely, clumsy, a little slobbery and gone too soon. And of course, even though we know, otherwise, their days are numbered, we grow attached to them.

All of this is on my mind because Freeman’s, the literary annual I started in 2014, is also coming to a close this fall with its tenth issue, which is themed to conclusions. Yes, there was a time when I believed it would last for 70 years, and I fathomed going over proofs at age 114 with a looking glass and a pipe and stories of being at Ocean Vuong’s first public reading. I imagined having an office. I dreamed up the ways that it could become permanent. None of them were feasible. (Incidentally, these are reasonable things, by the way—and magazines which are striving toward semi-permanence, which employ people, like Gettysburg Review, absolutely deserve them, especially when people’s livelihood depend upon it)

That last parenthetical might sound like a bum-covering caveat, but these issues are important. I edited a literary magazine in the past, Granta, a magazine you might have thought had a license to burn money, since it was owned by one of the wealthiest women in Europe. It didn’t. And the unbuilding of the team I worked with was one of the most painful experiences of my professional life. What is one person’s choice is another person’s livelihood, and this is one of the challenges of working in a form that requires money, since virtually all literary magazines lose it, some of them quite a lot of it. Benefactors, institutional or individual, tend to have a different idea about money from the people who work for them.

John Freemand with with Garnette Cadogan at City Lights.

When I started Freeman’s one of the things I wanted to set in place was a support structure free of these hang-ups. It was a pipe dream, but I felt like it was possible in a world in which so many great things happen through mutual aid, not patronage. I wanted to pay writers first, everyone else who worked on it, and then see if it could make money. This meant, in essence, finding a book publisher who was willing to see if their existing system could take on some of the production tasks of the magazine: luckily, Morgan Entrekin at Grove, which has remained independent minded for almost eighty years, was willing to do this.

As a result, for the last ten years Freeman’s has benefited from some of the best young minds in publishing who were, essentially, moonlighting on their day jobs. Before his authors won Pulitzers (Viet Thanh Nguyen) and Booker Prizes (Douglas Stuart, Bernadine Evaristo), Peter Blackstock was its editorial assistant; followed by Alison Malecha and Dhyana Taylor and Emily Burns. For almost the whole run I had a managing editor, Julia Berner-Tobin, who made time out of her time to shepherd it along. If you’ve ever met a managing editor, the most minute-pinched people in all of publishing, you will appreciate what a lucky break I’d received. Freeman’s also had great copyeditors, production designers, and publicists. For a few year it’s had a home on this website thanks to Emily Firetog and Jonny Diamond, which brings it a distribution far greater than any post office can provide.

I knew this set-up had a time-limit. It was not, make money or else, it was rather: go for it, and let’s make sure not to overtax everyone involved. So I knew I’d have to treat every issue of Freeman’s like it might be the last. This was fine given my goals, which seem a little utopian when I set them down. I wanted to create a literary magazine that was a beautiful object, and whose pieces felt as warm and funny and sad, and intense as life itself. I wanted it to feel spoken to you. I wanted it to feel like the best dinner party you’ve ever been to, not because people are performing or dominating the table, but because one story built off another off another, and that in the exchange, something greater than the singular, came together, like a kind of music.

Storytelling and enchantment have come under criticism recently, perhaps because of the ways they are sold to us in a world in which our attention is a commodity. I never feel like this when I’m listening to a very good storyteller, or when a writer has plunged me into a world that they have created. It is astounding that the interior sonics of voice can change our minds. It can add new neural networks, alter blood-flow, it can literally change what we are made of, or what we care about.

Aminatta Forna and Binyawanga Wainana telling stories.

Little magazines have a history of utopian thinking and short life spans: I knew that if Freeman’s were to get beyond it’s third issue, it was going to need help. Freeman’s didn’t really have a promotional budget: so the only way to get it out there was to make it a place. Not just a paper bound book, or the corner of a website, nice as both are. I’ve always felt like events can do that, by creating a culture around a publication, and by occurring in spaces that already have acoustical mojo of their own: like independent bookstores. So for each issue Freeman’s had a series of events: more than 500 of them in all over the last decade, from Talking Leaves in Buffalo to City Lights in San Francisco, to Shakespeare & Co in Paris. I would say ninety percent of them at indy bookstores. There’s one this Friday at the Vancouver Writers Festival with Omar El Akkad and Tania James, this annual fall literary gathering has hosted no fewer than six launches.

This volume of events is glorious and wildly unsustainable, and yet I wouldn’t trade it for anything. To listen to and watch writers exchange ideas and think, even in the sometimes cynically tilted era of the book tour, the tidied model of the festival, is thrilling, especially when it’s people who aren’t often put together on stages. Literature is too easily slotted when we talk about it publicly. Sometimes it doesn’t have to involve physical travel either. I will never forget hearing Mieko Kawakami, Daniel Mendelsohn and Valzhyna Mort discuss the ways we talk about love in an event hosted online by the Vancouver Writers’ Festival.  Or to hear David Searcy talk about drag racing in Corsicana, Texas.

I love events because I went to many of them in my twenties and thirties. When I moved to New York City in the mid-1990s I didn’t know anybody, I was often lonely. A little bit less so in libraries and bookstores or sitting in an audience with the lights turned low. The first year I arrived I went to three or four a week. I can’t believe some of the people I got to see read and speak aloud: Toni Morrison, Saul Bellow, Nadine Gordimer, Adrienne Rich, David Foster Wallace, Gloria Naylor, Wanda Coleman. W.G. Sebald. Kay Ryan. Dagoberto Gilb. Svetlana Alexievich. The list is my library.

Of course, as Jane Jacobs has argued, urban planning and greed and accidents make a city; but it’s people, too, which means their stories. The space those tales open up. The New York City I moved to was made possible by the social space of defunct magazines. I lived in the village in areas kept sane and informed by Christopher Street, which ceased publication in 1995, but whose writers, those who had survived, remembered and paid testimony in ways that lasted. Andrew Holleran’s Ground Zero, his essays from Christopher Street about living and dying in New York during the days when there were successful treatments for HIV and AIDS, returned to relevance during the terrifying opening days of the COVID-19 pandemic.

As a model for a little magazine, it was hard to find a better one. A publication which made itself feel needed during a time when stories were important. (And if you want to revisit that time, check out co-editor Michael Dennehy’s book, On Christopher Street, published in March this year). So many crises—and explosions—have had their versions: journals, small newspapers, chapbooks. Fire!—the magazine which ran for just one issue during the Harlem Renaissance, fueled by the work of Gwendolyn Bennett and Wallace Thurman and Zora Neale Hurston’s. Robert Bly’s great window to the world, The Fifties, connected anti-war activists in America to those around the world, from Tomas Transtömer to himself.

One of the great powers of a little journal is that, even when it is geographically pinned to a place, it opens up an alternate imaginary community to the ones of a nation, or at least of the nation as it is defining itself currently. In her great book, Bad Mexicans, Kelly Lytle Hernandez describes the ever evolving role of Regeneración, the newspapers which began calling out of Porfirio Diaz in the build-up to the Mexican Revolution. Doing so landed its editors, Ricardo Flores Magón and his brothers, in jail, so in the early 1900s they crossed the border into the U.S. and continued publishing it from there, borrowing the presses of Spanish language publications across the borderlands, printing it there, and then smuggling it back into Mexico.

Aleksandar Hemon after a Freeman’s event in Sarajevo.

It’s an astonishing story, a harrowing one too, since the U.S. and Mexico collaborated to track down the Magonistas, the men and women who worked on these publications, and in so doing created many of the apparatuses of our current carceral and borderland states. Against histories like it, tales of little journals blinking out in the dark can sometimes seem like mandarin complaints in hard times. This both is and isn’t right—there ought to be room in publishing for all kinds of journals, from the silly and obscene, to the fabulist or realist, Apollonian or Dionysian. A healthy literary landscape includes all types: and this is why even though we accept their lives are brief, the ending of literary journals causes concern.

It would be a shame if, in the future, all we had were the well-funded magazines we all know. I have nothing against them, including this one—they are essential. Were it not for a set of Paris Review Book of Interviews, I’m not sure I would have become a journalist. Yet having edited a little journal myself, I can say that all of us at the bigger reviews depended on the work of littler magazines. Would Barry Lopez have gone on to publish Arctic Dreams if Skywriting hadn’t existed on the West Coast in the late 1970s? Probably, but they were there when he was writing his first book and few others were—and that first brush with oxygen of an audience is hard to measure.

A decade later, Corazon de Aztlan was covering life in East Los Angeles in a way few newspapers cared to, including the crisis in Chicano schooling. Out of this engagement a great many writers of that movement found faith. Now there’s still a bookstore in the San Fernando Valley, run by former East LA resident Luis Rodriguez and his wife Trina, a bookstore/cafe named after Rodriguez’s aunt. Now Tia Chucha Press are also publishing strong books, too, including the latest poems of Claudia Castro Luna. It’s impossible not to feel these tributaries are all connected. At one point, PEN had a syndicated fiction project—and thus the early stories of Lydia Davis ran in newspapers around America in the 1980s, if you can believe that.

Can we change some of these trends? Actually, yes, we can—not to the point journals or newspapers or the bookstores that sustain them will live forever, but they might survive another issue, another month. What if that PEN syndicated project were resurrected today? Would it give a lifeline to all the tiny alt weekly newspapers in America struggling to earn readers, if they had stories in them by Lydia Davis, or say Jon Fosse, who recently won the Nobel and excels at vignettes? What if more people who wrote short stories or poems subscribed to just one journal which published them? Denver Quarterly, Zyzzyva, The Caribbean Writer, by some accounts, there are nearly 1,000 of them. What if the hundreds of MFA programs around the country which earn money from the aspirations of writers subscribed to just a few more of the journals their students are submitting to. So many of them could afford it.

Valeria Luiselli reading at a Freeman’s pop up event in Portland, 2016.

If you’re reading this and care about literary journals, and don’t subscribe to one—and can afford it—please consider subscribing to one. What a novel thing it still is, I find, to receive in your mailbox something other than a bill. I recently began subscribing to my current favorite literary journal—in Icelandic. It’s called The Moon’s Poemletter and it’s a verse equivalent of One Story, which mails out one poem a month from Iceland. Every thirty days a poem chosen by the Icelandic poet Ragnor Helgi Ólaffson arrives in my mailbox in New York. It’s not printed on anything all that special, but the day it arrives time slows down a little bit. Click here to subscribe, or encourage Rangar to do one in English: it’s not much to ask for, but in a life where our minutes are finite, not to mention quite a few of our enterprises, it’s quite a lot to provide..

—John Freeman is the editor of Freeman’s, which completes its run this month with an issue on conclusions

__________________________________________

The final issue of Freeman’s, a collection of writings on conclusions, features work from Rebecca Makkai, Aleksandar Hemon, Rachel Khong, Louise Erdrich, and more, is available now.

This piece was written in 2014 and published in English in the 2016 issue of Freeman’s. Translated from the Arabic by Wiam el-Tamami.

To be clear, I don’t like mobile phones at all. But when my family and I arrived in Ramallah, a friend gave me one in case of emergencies. Even so, when it starts to ring, suddenly, at 8:29 on this morning in mid-July, I let it go until my partner picks it up. He goes quiet and holds the phone out to me, pressing it to my left ear. It’s a recorded message, delivered in a booming voice speaking in formal Arabic. I catch only a few words: “. . . You have been duly warned. The Israeli Defense Forces . . .” Then the message ends and the line goes dead. I freeze.

This is the kind of call made by the Israeli Army when it is about to bombard a residential building. The moment someone answers the call, they relinquish their right to accuse the army of war crimes, as they have been “duly warned.” The strike can take place within a half hour of the call.

Just yesterday I heard about a young man receiving a warning call like this, informing him that the building where he lived in the north of Gaza would be bombed. The young man was at work in the south at the time. He tried to call his family but could not reach them. He left work and rushed home, but found the building destroyed. Some of his family members were wounded; others had been killed.

I don’t know whether this incident really took place. One hears a lot of stories these days, some too awful to believe. But here it is, at 8:29 a.m., pouncing on me like my destiny.

I’m not sure who this phone belongs to exactly, or who the Israeli Army thinks it belongs to. I wonder if my friend might be part of some political group. I doubt it. I make a quick mental survey of the neighbors, trying to guess which of them might be “wanted.” The only people I’ve encountered since we arrived two weeks ago in Ramallah are annoying children aged four to eleven; two middle-aged women and an elderly one; and a man in his late fifties. None of this puts my fears to rest. Their profiles do not differ much from those of the victims of recent air strikes. And then I realize, with dread, that I’ve become a replica of an Israeli Army officer, pondering which of these Palestinians might represent a “security threat.”

My partner is still standing in front of me, and behind him our eight-year-old daughter has now appeared. Our son, three months old, is sleeping in the next room. My partner, who has limited Arabic, asks me what the call was about. I look at him, then at our curious daughter. I try to find something to say, but I am overcome by a feeling of helplessness.

I look at the number again. I could press a button and call the “Israeli Defence Forces” back. Or I could send a text message. I could at least voice my objection to this planned attack. But when I try to think of what I could say or write, I feel numb, knowing that the words that will pour out of me will be useless. This realization, that words cannot hold and that they are wholly feeble when I need them the most, is crushing. The Israeli Army can now call my mobile phone to inform me of its intention to bomb my house, but my tongue is struck dumb.

After telling our daughter to get ready I go to the room where our three-month-old is sleeping. We have less than a half hour to leave the house. I walk into the darkness of the room and stare at the wall. I begin to notice a strange, intensely black cube high up on the wall. I don’t understand what that cube is doing there. I am sure that the wall is white; it’s not possible that a part of it has suddenly turned black. I scan the room for other dark cubes that might have crept into it while I was outside. Finally my eyes fall on a dot of green light at the end of the computer adapter, in front of which a pile of books stands. The light emanating from that tiny dot has cast the shadow of the books on the opposite wall, creating that black cube.

That tiny green dot of light, as faint as it seems, barely visible, was able to throw me into another abyss of fear. Perhaps my terror following that phone call is also exaggerated. Before my daughter and I leave the house as we do every day—she to her summer camp, and I to the university to my students—I look at my partner and our three-month-old child. Will this be the last time I see them?

We go down the stairs, without meeting any of the neighbors or their children, so I stall in the hope of picking up some noises from behind their closed doors. I hesitate for a moment, wondering whether I should ring one of their doorbells to ask if they received a similar call. But I keep walking behind my daughter until we leave the building. Then I look at the fifth floor and at the sky, trying to detect any sound or movement of drones or fighter jets. So far, nothing. We continue down the road to catch a cab from the main street.

As we reach it, the morning bustle of the main street embraces me. I calm down slightly, thinking it might have been a mistaken call, or one intended as a general warning to everyone, and not specifically to me and my family. But once we get inside the cab, fear overtakes me again. I ask the driver to turn the radio on.

For the next half hour, there will only be news about bombings of buildings in Gaza, with none in Ramallah.

__________________________________________

The final issue of Freeman’s, a collection of writings on conclusions, features work from Rebecca Makkai, Aleksandar Hemon, Rachel Khong, Louise Erdrich, and more, is available now.

Since the early nineties and the war in Bosnia, my parents have lived in Canada, while I’ve lived in the United States. When I visit them with my family, we stay only for a few days. The night before our departure, my father might sit down on the sofa in the living room (a Western showing on TV), and say: “Conclusions!”

I know, of course, what that means: he wants to draw conclusions from our stay because he has a need to know what actually happened, what we have understood or achieved in our time together. Conclusions are closure to him, allowing him to process the imminent loss related to yet another parting from the people he loves.

At first, his demand for conclusions was annoying to me, as such parental quirks often are to intolerant children. But then, as per the usual process, it became an amusing story I would tell, which then naturally led to my doing the same thing, except ironically. It didn’t take long before I started feeling an unironic need to demand conclusions in similar situations and also to escape the compulsion to do so, lest I become like my father.

As all adult children know, there is no way to win that struggle— eventually we do things our parents did even if we swore never to do any of them. During the pandemic, I started producing music under the alter ego Cielo Hemon and released nine singles in 2021 and 2022, the last of which was entitled “Conclusions,” and it was not ironic.

The track concluded the first cycle of Cielo’s music, but it was also related to the reconfiguration of my (and, perhaps, our) relationship with time, wrought by the pandemic and the catastrophe of Trumpism. As every Bosnian knows, trauma splits time into the before and the after, whereby the before becomes inaccessible and available only as a reflective narrative, or even as blatant, delusional nostalgia (Make My Life Great Again!).

The need to draw conclusions is really a desire to convert what has just happened into memories as soon as possible—before the next, unquestionably oncoming trauma—and get as much from the experience as possible before moving deeper into the after, where things will not only feel less real but will also become a mark of loss. A demand for conclusions is an expression of a desperate hope to hoard love for the future, which will be marked by loss.

For the last couple of years I have increasingly felt that we are in the midst of a cataclysmic global rupture. Climate change and the related pandemic, the apocalyptic intensity of fascism, the pathetic weakness of Western democracies rooted in delusions of grandeur and the fact that they cannot, because they don’t want to, become systems of full inclusion so they’re reverting to the default: exclusion complete with misogyny and racism. I have an intense feeling that everything I love is ending: literature, writing, music, soccer, skiing, my body, Bosnia, you name it.

This is in fact the end of time, and you have to be a tech bro or a fascist, or both, to think that we are not at a precipice of cataclysmic loss. The question then becomes why write and publish, or do anything, since it won’t make a damn difference one way or another.

And the answer is love: for language, for imagination, for all those who precede us and all the less lucky ones who will come after us, for humanity. For conclusions still bespeak a faith in the future, even if a limited one. One day, we will unfold these conclusions as stories or music and we will know that we have lived and loved, and we might recall and experience again the joy of being together.

______________________________

From Freeman’s. The final issue of Freeman’s, a collection of writings on conclusions, features work from Rebecca Makkai, Aleksandar Hemon, Rachel Khong, Louise Erdrich, and more, is available now.

With the Winter Solstice behind us, each day will get longer, and with those minutes and eventually hors, as light falls later, there are—happily—more time to spend reading. Outside, inside, at cafes, in libraries. Sneakily at your desk. On train rides home or to visit friends and family. I talked to a number of contributors to Freeman’s about what 2023 books they were excited to read—or just finally have in their hands—and here are their responses, from a big biography to novels, a short story collection and a work of poetry.

–John Freeman, editor, Freeman’s

*

The Chinese Groove by Kathryn Ma

It’s been nine years since Kathryn Ma published her first novel, the marvelous The Year She Left Us, and I’ve been waiting ever since for her next.  At last, it’s almost here: The Chinese Groove will be published later this month, and I’ll be first in line to get my paws on a copy.”  –Jennifer Egan, Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Candy House

Winnie and Nelson: Portrait of a Marriage by Jonny Steinberg

The book I’m most looking forward to in 2023 is one I’ve already read. I was lucky enough to be sent an advance copy a few months ago of Jonny Steinberg’s Winnie and Nelson: Portrait of a Marriage, and was knocked sideways by it. This is a story I thought I knew, but Steinberg showed me that I don’t.

The Mandelas have achieved mythical status far beyond South Africa—but it’s a terrible burden to be a god. Many of us are familiar with the history; how many of us have a real sense of the human beings behind it? This remarkable book changes that. In heartbreaking detail, Jonny Steinberg adds up the catastrophic toll on these two lives and the lives of people around them. Yet he never takes his eye off the larger picture, and the damage done to the Mandelas comes to stand for the damage done to millions; their history is the history of modern South Africa. Even more impressively, he manages to illuminate two different political traditions through the personalities of Winnie and Nelson, and to give a fresh understanding of the crossroads at which my country now stands.

Gripping and profoundly moving, this is Jonny Steinberg’s finest book. I can’t wait to read it again.  –Damon Galgut, Booker Prize winning author of The Promise

Edo’s Souls by Stella Gaitano, translated by Sawad Hussain

I can’t wait for South Sudanese writer Stella Gaitano’s Edo’s Souls, translated by the wonderful Sawad Hussain. Hovering between folklore and historical fiction, Edo’s Souls grapples with love, motherhood, and relocation, all in the context of an unfolding civil war.  –Sara Elkamel is the author of the poetry chapbook Field of No Justice 

Witness by Jamel Brinkley

I’m excited for Jamel Brinkley’s second story collection Witness. His first collection A Lucky Man won my heart with its stunning prose and psychological nuance, its seamless movement across time and memory. According to the publisher’s page, the ten stories of Witness will focus on New York City and feature a range of characters “from children to grandmothers to ghosts.” A Brinkley ghost story? I’m in.  –Tania James, author of Loot, forthcoming from Knopf

The Applicant by Nazli Koca

The book I can’t wait for is Nazli Koca’s The Applicant, a fantastic debut novel coming from Grove in February: the story of a Turkish student in Berlin struggling to get by without a visa, forever caught between the demands of everyday survival and the fervent energy of youthful yearning and artistic dreaming.  –Manuel Muñoz, author of The Consequences: Stories

The Weeds by Katy Simpson Smith

I can’t wait for The Weeds by Katy Simpson Smith, a novel that repurposes the old-school botanical survey as a way of sorting through curiosity and desire in their rawest forms, set against the high-romantic backdrop of the Roman Colosseum in plant-strewn, crumbling ruin.  –Sam Bett is a fiction writer and Japanese translator. His translation of Akira Otani’s The Night of Baba Yaga is forthcoming from Soho Crime in Summer 2024.

__________________________________________

The preceding is from the Freeman’s channel at Literary Hub, which features excerpts from the print editions of Freeman’s, along with supplementary writing from contributors past, present and future.

“I was away from Korea for a long time,” he said.

We were having tea at a downtown café. I tried to recall the last time I’d seen him, but couldn’t. When I made some offhand comment about the tea timer on top of our table and how pretty it was, he reached for it at once and stuck it deep inside my purse. Shaped like an hourglass, the timer contained blue ink that flowed in reverse from bottom to top.

“This is stealing,” I whispered, glancing around the café.

“I’m good at it. On my travels in the past few years, I’ve stolen many things.”

He kept the things he’d taken in a glass cabinet in his living room. A silver fork from a Paris café, a teacup saucer from a London restaurant, a bamboo basket that had held orchids from a New Delhi bed-and-breakfast, and a pen belonging to a worker at a museum information desk in Berlin. There had also been an ashtray from an Osaka hotel (though he was caught red-handed and had no choice but to return it), as well as a cat from New York.

“Wait, you stole a cat?”

“Actually, that was the first thing I ever stole.”

*

He began to talk about the New York apartment he’d lived in after his divorce.

“It was a run-down building, but clean. Across the hall from me lived a man in his early sixties named Emerson. He lived alone. Well, not exactly alone. He lived with his cat Debbie. He was an old, overweight man living alone with his cat.”

Because of his weight, Emerson tottered comically when he walked. Surprisingly, he had an extremely soft voice. They talked in the hallway now and then, and each time he had to strain his ears in order to understand what Emerson was saying. Emerson had never been married. They even joked about their marital status, calling themselves “the divorcé and the bachelor.” Perhaps because of all the joking, they became quite comfortable with one another.

One weekend, Emerson invited him over to his place for a few beers. “And there she was—Debbie. She was all black, except for her white belly and paws. Until then, I hadn’t known he owned a cat. When we’d been smoking and chatting for a while, I noticed she was watching us from under the couch, with just her head poking out. I’d never seen a cat so close up before. I tried to pet her, but as soon as I raised my hand, she dashed under the couch. It was only then that I realized all the framed photos on the walls were of her. In other words, Debbie was Emerson’s only family.”

After that, he and Emerson got together every so often. They joked, drank, and smoked together, and Debbie would stare at them for a while and disappear under the couch. He found his life satisfactory in its own way. Objectively speaking, though, it would have been a stretch to call his life satisfying.

He had followed his American girlfriend to the States, despite not knowing a single soul in the country, but after being married for less than three years, she had left him. Then due to various overlapping circumstances, he was forced to quit his job.

“Because of her, I had my life stolen from me. Don’t you think?”

Still, he didn’t think his situation was all bad. Happiness and boredom, abundance and loneliness filled his life with order, as if these emotions had been woven together in a plaid pattern, and as a result, his life felt strangely balanced. To top everything off, he’d made a friend named Emerson. However, while he was intoxicated by this sense of equilibrium, his bank balance lost its equilibrium, which then unraveled the woven balance of his life.

“Luckily my old company called me. They said if I wanted to keep working for them, they could transfer me to their Philadelphia branch. I no longer had any reason to stay in New York, so I decided to leave. But first, I wanted to say goodbye to Emerson. The night before I left, we got sloshed at his place. I may have cried. He may have patted me on the back, who knows. Then I passed out on his couch.”

In the middle of the night, he felt a stare and snapped awake. Something in the dark was watching him. It was Debbie. She was sitting elegantly before him and Emerson, who had also fallen asleep on the couch. He got up, carefully moving Emerson’s arm that was splayed across his feet. The entire time, Debbie kept her eyes on him. When he stepped into the hallway and was about to close the front door, he realized Debbie was still watching. She walked slowly toward him. She then sat on her haunches and gazed up, stretching her front paws up toward him.

“It was as if she was saying, ‘I want to leave, I want to leave this place. Please take me with you.’ All of a sudden, it seemed wrong to leave her behind. I don’t know why I thought that.”

Debbie’s eyes glittered in the dark. He picked her up. He walked out of the building and left New York.

*

“That was a very bad thing you did,” I said.

“About two weeks later, I went back to New York with Debbie. I had to. Since I didn’t have the courage to explain my actions to Emerson, I planned to secretly drop her off at his apartment. But his place was completely empty. When I asked the property manager what had happened, he said that Emerson had committed suicide.”

“Suicide?”

“They found him a week after I’d left. He’d hanged himself.”

“Where’s Debbie now?”

“She’s home, back at my place. Why? Do you want to meet her?”

I hesitated for a moment. “No,” I said at last.

He nodded.

We talked about other things after that and had many good laughs. Yet, the whole time, I was thinking, Murderer! When a little more time passed, that thought faded from my mind, and instead I was picturing myself back in my own home, peering at the tea timer and the blue ink making its way to the top.

__________________________________

The preceding is from the Freeman’s channel at Literary Hub, which features excerpts from the print editions of Freeman’s, along with supplementary writing from contributors past, present and future.

The birds in a V-pattern
and the denuded tree with a dozen mighty branches
skeletal against the light blue sky
three varieties of purple in the distance
as the sun sets, and the birds exchange notes.
My dog Johnny falls asleep at my feet
on the terrace. I sip my drink and think:
just as having an even tiny portion of your portfolio
in bonds can help your long-term performance,
so even a few drops of dry vermouth
will improve your martini.

__________________________________

The preceding is from the Freeman’s channel at Literary Hub, which features excerpts from the print editions of Freeman’s, along with supplementary writing from contributors past, present and future. The latest issue of Freeman’s, a special edition gathered around the theme of change, featuring work by Joshua Bennett, Sandra Cisneros, Lauren Groff, Sayaka Murata and Ocean Vuong among others, is available now.

Previously I only used the word avalanche as a verb. It basically meant, “I am crying and I cannot stop.”

Still, owning a home in an avalanche zone, I have recently been compelled to try to make sense of my city’s urban avalanche advisories. They use the word avalanche in a way that means “a massive amount of snow, ice, and rocks falling down a mountainside.”

Please forgive my errors or oversimplification, but here’s my attempt at translating. It appears that it matters what kind of day a mountain is having. Depending on the weather, snow settles into different kinds of layers, and these layers stack up over time. What I understand to be our biggest current problem is what’s called a “deep persistent slab.”

A deep persistent slab is a big piece of snow with a very weak layer inside it. The weak layer is so deep you almost don’t know it’s there unless you’re looking for it. Another layer inside it might be a crust, which in a way amplifies the weak layer because you could poke the crust a long ways away and the poke would reverberate across the crust, and this is how one light touch could trigger an avalanche of giant proportions. No matter how soft or how strong the snow is, if you touch it when or where it is tender, it will drop to the depth and the width of its weakest part. And so an avalanche is not just snow, and it is not just the trigger, it is the result of holding too much when you were not properly grounded. On the same day, one year apart, I packed a bag. That’s a lie; one year ago my friend Melissa packed my bag, because I was avalanching on the living room floor. My sister had called. My father was fighting for his life in the ICU. At that time they said they didn’t think he would make it through the night, and I could not fly out until morning.

Sometimes you don’t get a warning.

I can’t separate the experience of saying goodbye to the home my dad built me from the experience of saying goodbye to my dad at this precise time last year. There are all kinds of natural disasters. They say our bodies remember grief anniversaries, which baffles me since my own grief is very bad at time management. Perhaps grief is just a weak layer and it doesn’t matter how deep it’s buried. A smell or a bird or the sunrise on a particular day can always touch it.

Grief, I mean the director of emergency management, knocked on my door Saturday morning to explain the danger of wishing for the best.

But it’s a blessing, isn’t it, to have a chance. To have a minute.

To take the irreplaceable with you.

If the avalanche were to hit our homes, they predicted it could be fourteen feet deep going fifty-seven mph across a quarter mile. I really can’t see how a human house could survive that, and yet I am familiar with praying against the odds. My father survived his first night, and on the second night, he briefly woke up. It was today, one year ago: my mother’s birthday. A miracle, they said, and the nurses had chills. It filled me with catastrophic hope.

When we dug our way out, we told my dad that we loved him, and that he didn’t have to worry about us. This was the third day. We said goodbye, because we were warned; and it’s better to say goodbye and walk away than to be destroyed inside it. That was 364 days ago. Some mornings I can walk on that layer and some mornings I’m still buried under the snow.

What type of weather do we want? my friends asked, and I don’t know enough avalanche science beyond “we want spring” to answer this. In grief counseling, no weather is bad; I think the goal is that you heal your deep persistent layers so no slab could kill you. The director of emergency management lowered the danger level from “extreme” to “high,” so I know that with the right conditions even an avalanche can change. The weak layer can strengthen, the facets can face the wind. The load can lighten and aspects can melt. It can be touched without breaking.

Often it just takes time.

__________________________________

The preceding is from the Freeman’s channel at Literary Hub, which features excerpts from the print editions of Freeman’s, along with supplementary writing from contributors past, present and future. The latest issue of Freeman’s, a special edition gathered around the theme of change, featuring work by Joshua Bennett, Sandra Cisneros, Lauren Groff, Sayaka Murata and Ocean Vuong among others, is available now.

Changed. Done

Changed. Did. Did been.

Do. The woo

     They

Do opon the shores,

The mercy that isn’t taken against

Thy cliff

       Be

How, the ways

In which, such privilege, and thusly

Y’all all

Changed

In respect,

Apparently, to gender

Entering me.

Days

Some start with little or

Less gender; other days overwhelm.

Why, yes, today

Is

Very gendered! The air

Bethicked right salt

Of it, and free

And

Everywhere

I look! Some days go

Restlessly, I remember,

And

I begin again the woes’

Whoing me up, a sun

Across a fog,

Desire,

Dolores and Truth,

The blue way

An ocean revises the shore,

Hinges,

Hinges that are the birds flying,

My very skin, black, growing

Softer

On

Each spill of a pill, breasts, lips,

The conjugation of

My waist, my

Hips,

And so daybreak

Breaks over me,

Apparent, a new woman,

Venus

Out of the grammared

Pearl and waves

To you, waves,

Waves—

It’s no longer then

You see me. No,

You sea me.

_______________________________________

The preceding is from the Freeman’s channel at Literary Hub, which features excerpts from the print editions of Freeman’s, along with supplementary writing from contributors past, present and future. The latest issue of Freeman’s, a special edition gathered around the theme of change, features work by Joshua Bennett, Sandra Cisneros, Lauren Groff, Sayaka Murata and Ocean Vuong among others, is available now.

Some nights, that deep cold lake brings my child self back to me again. This is often without my consent. I want no part of the person I was then, or to be back in the town of those years that made and held me. Cooperstown, where I was born, is a speck in-the-middle-of-nowhere New York, so small it is officially a hamlet, so pretty with its flower boxes and groomed hedges and American flags that it has been transformed into an object, its citizens offering the place up every summer for the pleasure of thousands of boys and men who come for baseball and nostalgia and a glimpse of their own child-ghosts. Can a town be objectified like a woman? If she is Cooperstown, she can.

In my dreams, the lake first sets me down at the Presbyterian church atop Pioneer Street, thin, tall, ancient, a building made of whittled bones, where I was long ago given the gift of awe but also of torment, the three-hour services with an indifferently talented choir and the crotch of my itchy woolen tights slowly sliding down my thighs. Through the rest of the week, I would bear the oppressive weight of a male god who was always furious at the tiny rebellions of my mind. I was defective because I feared far more than I loved. A mouse, this child me, blonde, pale, blinking, bewildered, scared. In the dreams, even as I repudiate her, this child self goes away from the church as fast as she can, flying down the hill toward Main Street. It is empty of cars and people, the single stoplight westward along the street shining against the wet asphalt, glazing the windows of the bakery in alternate red and gold and green, the cord of the great flagpole in the center of the street where I stand chiming in the small wind. From there, the street scoops downhill to Lakefront Park, where the statue of Natty Bumppo hunts with his dog, until at last it empties out into the dark glower of the lake.

It is this strange long lake, a block away, that peered from over the lawn into the windows of my childhood bedroom. Before I rose from bed every morning I would look out to gauge the lake’s mood that day, which could change with terrifying swiftness. There would be temper tantrums when the dust-devils grabbed loose snow up from the ice and spun it to frantic dancing; placid happy days of sunlight on the warm, navy blue August water; pen- sive sheets of fog lifting gently off its surface in an orange autumn dawn; thunderstorms descending from Cherry Valley nine miles north in luxurious woolen sheets of gray. We had a party every Fourth of July, where from our lawn we’d watch the fireworks double themselves on the water below, the hills grabbing the thunder of the explosions and tossing it back and forth between them until a new blast came and the old thunder was lost. The lake has always been pure intensity, beauty, terror to me.

And in my dreams the child me stands hapless at the flagpole, trying to resist its pull, but inevitably the lake draws my ghost down, toward this wild and uncontrollable and inescapable depth of feeling.

This is what I dislike, the way that as a child I felt absolutely everything, and it was all unbearable. I had a good childhood, I was fed and loved, but I was born unskinned, a girl bleeding out her hot red emotion everywhere. There were days I felt I would die of the sound of the crows eating the corn in my father’s garden or the taste of the honey I stole from the back of the pantry—sugar forbidden in my house, pleasure suspect—and spread surreptitiously on the hot biscuits I baked before swim practice. The membrane between my interior self and the world was easily rent. I could contain nothing within me. I am not quite sure how I survived. And everywhere I went in town, even in places where you couldn’t see the lake, you knew it was there, gleaming; it was my overlarge mirror, unskinned like me, shining the sky back to itself, too emotional, too much, too dangerous, you could drown in it.

A dreamer at last awakens into life. The lake’s nighttime draw fades until I wake in the mornings as an adult who has grown the calluses necessary to keep herself alive. Still, even as an adult, I am reluctant to come home. It has been almost a decade since I’ve been back to Cooperstown; my parents have moved away, there is no obvious reason to return. And so I have kept the place safe, stuck in aspic, somewhere deep inside. There is a beauty in this resistance, because the layers of time and space in me can be preserved unmixed. In this way, the bend where Lake Street descends to Council Rock exists as many things all at once: the spot where one Halloween in middle school, I lay down in the dark road to scare myself and was nearly run over by some quiet car, where I stepped on a flotsam board and drove a nail through my foot, where my first friend and I crouched, seven years old, scraping wet stones on stones to paint our faces and make ourselves warriors. To see the ways the town has changed, the trees loved decades ago dead and vanished, the buildings altered, the old friends startlingly old and stout and gray, looking like their parents as they bend their heads into the wind, crossing the street, no, no thank you, I cannot, it would be too much. The fragile defenses I have constructed against the overwhelm of the world would break. Anyone could see straight into my depths. And so I sacrifice, night after night, my child self to the lake, both self and lake through dream rendered subject, not object. Perhaps a ghost is a person and a place dreaming at the same time. I let my subconscious draw this trembling, world-sick child down to Lakefront Park, which in my sleep is simultaneously draped in night and too brightly daylit, the sun blazing the water hurts my eyes. In this place I once saw a flock of mallards peck a sickly drake to death, and my golden retriever would hie herself there to lap up the grease the motel’s restaurant set outside to cool, and my lovelorn best friend and I would eat whole pints of ice cream to find a foothold for self-hatred, and I once waded in after a frisbee and sank up to my hips in duck shit and had to be pulled out with a rope. All of it, all, remains as it has ever been, living, tender, wild.

__________________________________

2020 was a hard year for reading—it was a hard for so many things. Like wearing clothes some days. Or bathing. Or saying goodbye, or trying to mourn. It was a hard year for voting in public or for living with someone you love.

It was a hard year in which to believe in the possibilities of a fellow human.

And yet, as with so many of these essential tasks—well, perhaps not always bathing—we found ways to get it done. Even when powerful people tried to stop us, or the weight of what happened this year (and all that led up to it), piled on people.

What seemed like a year in which reading would stop turned into an explosion of reading. People turned to their shelves and cooked their way through cookbooks, read their way through novels bought years ago. Poetry readings ended up with crowds of hundreds because anyone could dial in. Book clubs for great classics kicked off and did brilliantly.

Normally when I write to Freeman’s contributors to ask what they read this year and loved—any book, not just new ones—I get a handful of responses. I need to chase. This year an avalanche of suggestions and enthusiasm was unleashed. Here’s the drift: there are great books out there, and they kept these writers sustained, engaged, sane, in pleasure—and less alone.

–John Freeman

*

2020 is the year when I discovered the joy of reading with other people. I had always been a solitary reader, but reading War and Peace, during the early months of the pandemic, with three thousand readers around the world for A Public Space’s Tolstoy Together was an extraordinarily sustaining experience. Since the spring, I’ve also been in a two-person book club with Edmund White, and we’ve been skyping every evening to talk about the day’s reading. One of the highlights was The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen. We marveled at her sentences, puzzled at words we didn’t know, and relished the stories, sometimes taking turns to read aloud to each other.

–Yiyun Li, author of Must I Go

Ever since I was a child, I’ve been searching for questions. Not the comfortable sort of questions that make me feel good, but the questions I find inconvenient, that are sometimes hurtful, that destroy the foundations of my inner structure and undermine the very depths of my world. I was drawn to The Schooldays of Jesus, by J.M. Coetzee as it felt full of these kinds of questions. Whenever I want to destroy the world in my head in order to discover an invisible truth, I am sure I will pick up this book again.

–Sayaka Murata (trans. Ginny Tapley Takemori), author of Earthlings

A couple months ago I read The Copenhagen Trilogy by Tove Ditlevsen, a Danish writer who has been dead almost 50 years, but her books are being given new life in English. The UK edition of this trilogy had been sitting on my shelf for almost a year, in three slim ice-cream-pink editions, “Childhood,” “Youth,” and the ominous, if precisely titled, “Dependency.” How could I have let these precious volumes just sit there, dormant?

One night I began to read them in order, one book per evening. They are each brief and riveting. Tove Ditlevsen has skills that come along a few times a century. She understands perfectly how to do the simplest thing that is also the most difficult thing: tell a story. She knows just how to configure the torment and life-force of a real-seeming person into a book. I don’t mean the author. I mean the character. Every childhood has a smell, she writes. Indeed. You know it when you’re a child, and also that only you can smell it. She goes to work in the second book, and instantly understands the nature of work, because she’s smart, this character, in an earthy and credible way: “I was someone whose physical strength they’d bought for a certain number of hours each day. They didn’t care about the rest of me.”  The rest of her wants to be a writer. Becomes one, but slowly. First, there are all the days spent toiling for money and the nights guzzling booze with people you don’t even like, so that you can try to find a lover. “You have to get through it,” she says of youth, “it has no other meaning.” Book three, “Dependency,” is brutal and quick. She’s a successful writer. Her life speeds up to a hurtling pace, only to stop on a dime, on a needle. Not as destiny, but something more like chance. She passes through the needle’s eye. Looks back, sees us, her reader, and communicates only that she can’t return to the world she’s left behind. She’s an addict.

–Rachel Kushner, author of the The Mayor of Leipzig and The Hard Crowd: Essays 2000-2020, forthcoming from Karma Books and Scribner in 2021

It’s seemed a year for notebooks, diaries, travelogues and catalogues of one kind or another—W.G. Sebald, Anne Carson, Annie Dillard, Franz Kafka, Derek Jarman, Beverley Farmer. Robin Wall Kimmerer’s wide-roving journeys via moss (Gathering Moss). Werner Herzog traveling on foot from Munich to Paris in a 1974 pilgrimage to reach his mentor Lotte Eisner; breaking into holiday cabins for shelter along the way, contemplating friendship with field mice, living mainly on tangerines and milk (Of Walking In Ice).

At one point—perhaps the darkest, during the shortest and most insular days of Melbourne’s stringent winter lockdown—I rediscovered a strange (fatalistic?) comfort in Henri Lefebvre’s The Missing Pieces (trans. David L. Sweet), an inventory of great works lost or destroyed or never completed: The journals of Annemarie Schwarzenbach, destroyed by her mother … The man Peter Handke … The sixteen drawings offered by Amadeo Modigliani to his lover Anna Akhmatova were “smoked” by the Red Guards, who used them as cigarette paper. The inscription on the flyleaf is from my former husband, years ago. It reads: To all the great things ahead. Finished and otherwise, all worthwhile. 

–Josephine Rowe, author of A Loving, Faithful Animal and Here Until August

When the pandemic started I could not read at all, it was like the imagination switch was off (and of course you need it on for reading and writing). So when I could start it was re-reads and poetry mostly. And I think my fave was The Beauty of The Husband by Anne Carson. I really can’t say much about it: it’s gorgeous and also it’s dedicated to Keats whom I’m obsessed with and it made me want to read and write again, which I didn’t really with any method but at least broke the spell of just being still.

–Mariana Enriquez, author of The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, translated by Megan McDowell (January 2021)

In a rich and varied diet of reading, this year, I seem to have wandered through several different categories of books. These have included appraisals of our current situation such as Bill McKibben’s deeply frightening Falter and Louise Aronson’s Elderhood, a description, from inside, of our country’s inadequate approach to elder health care. For personal memoir, there has been Lost Property, an outrageous yet captivating account by the well-read, whip-smart rich playboy turned publisher Ben Sonnenberg; and, starkly contrasting in tone and character, mystery writer Henning Mankell’s Quicksand, a sharply perceptive and moving meditation on life, death, his own fatal illness, our devastation of the planet. Doses of fiction, mostly from decades past, happily took me far away from the present catastrophes: James Agee’s wonderful A Death in the Family, for the second time; yet another from my row of Virago editions of Elizabeth Taylor’s always well written and engrossing novels, this one In a Summer Season; and, by Patrick Hamilton (author of Hangover Square), the poorly titled but very well done tale of a WWII boarding house, Slaves of Solitude. Finally, I have also been continuing through Lynne Tillman’s most recent, which, like much of her fiction, so deftly straddles the genres. Men and Apparitions tells a fully human story while miraculously feeding one’s mind with the complex narrator’s observations about childhood, family, photography and representation, self and self-understanding, culture, and the art and fallibility of seeing.

–Lydia Davis, author of Essays Two, forthcoming in November 2021 (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

When the pandemic hit, my body felt differently, some days more than others. My shoulders tense up, constant headaches, my left leg has knots up and down it, my gut has been acting up. For years, friends and therapists recommended The Body Keeps The Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. With a title like that, it felt too close to home and I wasn’t ready to face what I was afraid I’d find in the pages. These past months, the book has helped explain so much about the traumas that are stored in my body, from childhood, from crossing the border, from living undocumented in this country, all of them have bubbled up during this pandemic. Similarly, Roberto Lovato’s Unforgetting: A Memoir of Family, Migration, Gangs, and Revolution in the Americas, has helped explain the everlasting question: “why is my family in this country?” His account of his family’s migration is tied to the historical moments that mark every Salvadoran: the 1932 massacre, the civil war, and our current “gang problem.” These two books are helping me in my healing journey.

–Javier Zamora, author of Unaccompanied

A book I constantly reread is William Kentridge’s Six Drawing Lessons, his Charles Eliot Norton lectures published in 2014. In it he is trying every way he can to name the place where the fresh bubbles up, the new fights through, and show what a delicate repeated miracle that is. It is stumbley or however you’d spell that in just the right ways. And of course massively illustrated.

–Kay Ryan, author of Synthesizing Gravity: Selected Prose

I loved Aminatta Forna’s upcoming The Window Seat, a collection of essays of insatiable curiosity and enviable experience, endowed with a moral compass of great precision. They’re terribly entertaining to boot. This is the book of somebody who pays attention to the world and, like a great guide, makes us notice what we’d miss without her.

–Juan Gabriel Vasquez, author of The Shape of the Ruins, translated by Anne McLean

Well, the best book I read hasn’t been published in English yet, and that is Semezdin Mehmedinović’s My Heart (Catapult, March 2021), which I read in Bosnian (as Me’med, crvena bandana i pahuljica) and then in translation, and it is a marvel of thoughtfulness and love. Another Bosnian book I loved is Catch the Rabbit (Uhvati zeca), by Lana Bastašić, the winner of the 2020 European Union Prize for Literature. It’s coming out in English this summer. Lana Bastašić’s novel of two young women plunging into post-war Bosnia like two Alices into Wonderland is smart, energetic, passionate, announcing a major talent.

–Aleksandar Hemon, author of This Does Not Belong To You/My Parents: An Introduction

The most gripping book I read this year was Fate is the Hunter (1961), Ernest K. Gann’s classic (but still insufficiently appreciated) account of his life as a pilot in the early and dangerous days of civil aviation.  He shares with Len Deighton the ability to convey detailed technical information with no loss of narrative power.

–Geoff Dyer, author of Broadsword Calling Danny Boy: Watching Where Eagles Dare

Afterlives by Abdulrazak Gurnah saved me from a long reading slump. I have always been a fan of his work and this latest novel is a treat with its effortless storytelling, vivid East African setting and insight into German colonialism. Gurnah excels at depicting the lives of those made small by cruelty and injustice, those who look away rather than confront, the cowed and put-upon. This is why in his hands humiliated women, abused orphans and aspiring refugees are rendered so believable and within reach.  Seductive too is the beautiful, harsh world he depicts of bitter-sweet encounters and pockets of compassion, twists of fate and fluctuating fortunes. As I turned the pages, I forgot I was reading fiction, it felt so real.

–Leila Aboulela author of Bird Summons

But the mere thought of Mann’s 1,500-page tetralogy Joseph and His Brothers—a retelling of Genesis 27-50 (Jacob; Joseph’s youth; Joseph in Egypt; his reunion with his family), written between 1926 and 1943—had always intimidated me. (And, from what I can tell, many others, even Mann fanatics: although he considered “Joseph” his greatest work, it has failed to enter the literary current here the way the other big novels have.) How wrong I was. As with other great works of historical fiction (Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian comes to mind), this one uses a brilliantly vivid reimagining of a historical moment—Mann shrewdly places Joseph’s story during the reign of Akhnaton, the monotheist Pharaoh—as the armature for profound philosophical reflections: in this case, about the nature of religion and myth and the cyclical nature of human experience, both individual and collective. In John E. Woods’s lucid recent translation, this masterwork takes on a startling, gratifying freshness.

–Daniel Mendelsohn, author of Three Rings: A Tale of Exile Narrative and Fate

I read the prize-winning book, Everything Man: The Form and Function of Paul Robeson by Shana Redmond. It is both a meticulously researched exploration/celebration of Paul Roberson’s dynamic contribution to American music, art, sound, aesthetics; but equally important, the book braids this view with Robeson’s unique contribution to abolitionism, independence, and liberation worldwide.

–Robin Coste Lewis, author of Voyage of the Sable Venus: And Other Poems

I’d like to recommend Rachel Cohen’s Austen Years: A Memoir in Five Novels. Cohen, a beautiful writer, also has an extremely interesting mind: precise, patient, thoughtful, probing. For me, in this ghastly year, literature—not only this book but many others—has been my salvation. Cohen’s memoir, about the intense years of her children’s births and her father’s death, is also about reading Jane Austen, about the interweaving of Austen’s life with her own, about how the wisdom of those novels and their creator became inseparably a part of Cohen’s own transformative experiences. As Louise Glück writes, in “October,” “you are not alone, /  the poem said, / in the dark tunnel.” Words (thank goodness) to live by.

–Claire Messud, author of Kant’s Little Prussian Head and Other Reasons Why I Write: An Autobiography in Essays

Snake Poems: An Aztec Invocation (Reprint, Arizona University Press, 2019) by late, gay poet, Francisco X. Alarcón, presents a new idea in Latinx poetics—re-framing the metaphysics of the ancient Mexicas colonized by Spain in the early 1500s. Alarcón retrieves and repositions Spanish Priest Hernando Ruiz de Alarcón’s (Francisco saw this man as a fictive relative) ethnographic research into the spells, ritual songs, chants and stories of the Mexica. Here Alarcón creates a chorus and responds to and with the Mexica’s voices, heightened callings, transpositions of contemporary and hemispheric sources of knowledge.

–Juan Felipe Herrera, author of Everyday We Get More Illegal

Poetry, ideals, and creative work are not mere substitutes or metaphors for the substance of our lives. They can literally make it impossible to move, or just as easily make us take a breath. How do words engage like this with our existence? When we are steeped in sadness, with no relief in sight, how is it that words can engage with our memories and our love? In words that only Yiyun Li could have composed, Where Reasons End delves deep into the quiet reaches of these questions. An unforgettable novel.

–Mieko Kawakami (translated by Sam Bett), author of Breasts and Eggs: A Novel, translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd

Recalling its slow, restless intensity, I was rereading Forrest Gander’s Pulitzer Prize-winning poetry collection Be With recently for patterns of feeling that might help me cope with the tremendous loss of life due to Covid in the Black community in particular, a tragedy worsened by the history of racism in America.

–Gregory Pardlo, author of Air Traffic: A Memoir of Ambition and Manhood in America

I just loved Wilding, Isabella Tree’s account of her and her husband’s decision to return their farm to nature and which she uses as a lens to view the past and future of the environmental crisis, made all the more devastating for the utter absence of hyperbole, Tree’s measured tone and the courage of the couple’s convictions.

–Aminatta Forna, author of The Window Seat, forthcoming May 2021 (Grove)

This year, I found Jorge Luis Borges to be the ultimate escapism. Borges: Esplendor y derrota by María Esther Vázquez is a powerful, divinely written biographical work about him and his ideas, and strangely it’s only available in Spanish. Meanwhile Borges, penned by Borges’ best friend and collaborator Bioy Casares, is a massive brick of genius, where Borges voice lives again in all it’s wickedness and joy, unconstrained by Borges’ own prudence and obsession with form. Bioy Casares’s Borges has saved me many times this year, and it’s blissful to know that Valerie Miles is at work translating it and will be soon coming to American readers, to rock their world, too. Peeking into other writers’ lives became a pill-popper: I devoured Sontag: Her Life and Work by Benjamin Moser, and I’m currently fascinated with Inside Story by Martin Amis.

–Pola Oloixorac, author of Mona: A Novel, translated by Adam Morris, forthcoming March 2021 (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Geoffroy de Lagasnerie’s Judge and Punish: The Penal State on Trial (Stanford University Press) is an extremely powerful book on the way the penal system reproduces and amplify violence instead of undoing it, on how the juridical institutions are almost never a source of help for the victims but rather a place of victimization and of perpetuation of the most common social pulsions—racism, homophobia, classism. This book is really a classic for the new generation, and a radical manifesto to reshape our minds.

–Édouard Louis, author of Who Killed My Father, translated by Lorin Stein, and Dialogue sur l’art et la politique, with Ken Loach, forthcoming in March from Puf and in April from Seuil, Combats et métamorphoses d’une femme

I re-read Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North recently for a course I taught. Published in 1967 in Arabic, the novel has become a classic of postcolonial literature for a reason. It tells the story of Mustafa Sa’eed, a mysterious Sudanese man who is sent to England to study in the 1920s. In London, he commences a series of destructive relationships with English women—ostensibly in revenge for British colonialism of the Sudan. Told by a narrator who recounts Sa’eed’s story, the slim novel reads like a prose-poem of incredible power and beauty. Colonialism, gender violence, heap loads of Freud, and the Nile river all in one stunning package.

–Fatin Abbas, author of The Interventionists, forthcoming from W.W. Norton

There comes a point, maybe, at which you realize you’ve sung the praises of a book to so many people that it is becoming obscene—and yet, here I am, once again recommending Lost Children Archive, by Valeria Luiselli. A quick diary check has confirmed that I did indeed read it this year—the first week of January—and not in fact, as it now feels, a different life ago. However, its themes of loss and banishment —personal and state-sponsored—and the nuanced difference between alone together and together alone are more pertinent now than they were in that different lifetime a year ago when I first read the novel.

–Ross Raisin, author of A Natural and Read This If You Want to Be A Great Writer

The lost objects and extinct creatures catalogued in Judith Schalansky’s An Inventory of Losses will forever be remembered, now that their stories have been embalmed in her enviably well written prose. It is a book of our times and for our time; hopeful in its beautiful creation while admitting to the melancholy knowing that the beauty of art meets its match in material destruction. An Inventory of Losses is pure gold storytelling, excellently brought into English from German by Jackie Smith.

–Sjón, author of Red Milk: A Novel, translated by Victoria Cribb, forthcoming in 2021

Gunnhild Øyehaug is one of Norway’s finest writers and her latest collection of short stories shows her at her absolute best. Entitled Vonde blomar (meaning “Evil Flowers” and yes, there’s a link to Baudelaire here), clocking in at a mere 99 pages plus starting with this brilliant, no holds barred opening, “As I sat on the toilet menstruating, a pretty large piece of my brain fell into the bowl” (my translation here), what’s not to like? These stories are not only good, or brilliant, or expertly written, they also comment on each other; stories will object and protest furiously to other stories just told, narrators comments their own text, stops to digress or simply wonder and if it does sound confusing, it’s not. It’s so well done, playful and fun and experimental; it’s smart and a weekend in cloud cuckoo land, it’s punk and pure beauty and more than that, it is one of those, “damn, I wish I could write like that” and the feeling of relief that at least she’s able to. The book will be published in the US by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

–Johan Harstad, author of Ferskenen, forthcoming from Open Letters

Coincidentally, the two novels that most absorbed me in this distracting reading year were both written by Norwegians. Long Live the Post Horn by Vigdis Hjorth (published in English in 2020, translation by Charlotte Barslund) had me caring about a marketing campaign for the Norwegian Postal Workers’ Union—it’s funny, wry, insightful, and finally sincere. The Unseen by Roy Jacobsen (published in English in 2016, translation by Don Bartlett and Don Shaw) describes the life of a family living on a remote Norwegian island in the early 20th century, and is a masterpiece of accumulated effects. Both novels are testaments to the human connection to be found in ordinary daily rhythms—a moving reminder in this lonely year.

–Fiona McFarlane, author The High Places: Stories

Not actually out in the world until January 2021, but I read a proof of Daniel Loedel’s Hades, Argentina early in 2020 and remain its grip all these months later. It’s a novel about the impossibility of leaving certain places and people behind (because what you’re really trying and failing to leave behind is yourself). Loedel uses myth, history and imagination to produce a work of great complexity—although set in Argentina it speaks to so many nations’ brutal histories, some past, some still unfolding.

–Kamila Shamsie, author of Home Fire

Rye Curtis’s Kingdomtide is one of the best first novels I’ve ever read: gothic and crazy, tender, grotesque, comic, and deeply humane—a dizzying range of notes for a single book to strike, much less a debut. The novel is a riveting tale of wilderness survival powered by the irresistible voice of a woman in her eighties (deemed persuasive and compelling by my two beloved relatives who meet that description), an achievement all the more remarkable for a young male author. Rye Curtis is a wonder, and Kingdomtide deserves an enormous readership.

–Jennifer Egan, author of Manhattan Beach

The Cost of Living by Deborah Levy was a book I kept close at hand this year. It’s intelligent, funny, gorgeously written, and subtly offers lessons on how to live boldly as a woman and an artist. I also loved Brown Album: Essays on Exile and Identity by Porochista Khakpour. It’s a book that embraces complexity and bewilderment, that grapples more than it guides. It seems strange to characterize a book of essays as a page-turner, but that was my experience of reading Brown Album. I just had to know where her mind would go next.

–Tania James, author of The Tusk That Did the Damage

One of the best books I read this year was Sharks in the Time of Saviors by Kawai Strong Washburn. It came out in early March which makes it feel like it came out last year or a generation ago, but it’s really stayed with me even through all this change and interminable stagnancy. As good a debut as I have ever read.

–Tommy Orange, author of There, There

Julia Alvarez’s Afterlife is such a compact, resonant novel. It starts with the loneliness of beginning the rest of one’s life after the death of a partner and ends with the affirmation and necessity of our human connections.  Antonia, the retired literature professor at the center of this wonderful novel, finds that the privacy of her grief is no match for the ongoing and overwhelming need in the world. Soon, she’s dealing with a missing sister, while also contemplating just how much she can help in protecting a pregnant, undocumented young woman. Afterlife candidly confronts what it means when our individual sorrow might shield us from the ongoing troubles of the world, yet also reminds us of the solace in connecting and being with others. To Antonia’s surprise—and maybe ours as well—sometimes sifting through the old lessons of literature shows us that the urgent and poignant questions of living have been answered so many times by the wonder of the page itself.

–Manuel Muñoz, author of What You See in the Dark

The exasperation, warmth, honesty, and complete lack of distance in Karla Cornejo Villavicencio’s The Undocumented Americans made me feel like I was seeing someone take apart and rebuild the art of journalism. From the tough investigative interviews with undocumented Americans like the crews who helped clean up the World Trade Center site, to Villavicencio’s wild descriptions of the dreams that she has while reporting, this book was pure empathetic magic.

–HR Smith, writer and editor at Sierra Magazine

Serge Pey’s The Treasure of the Spanish Civil War (translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith): I read the opening six page story, “An Execution” and knew immediately I’d found a book I was hungry for. I read the second story, “The Washing and the Clothesline” and thought, this seven page story borders on a masterpiece, and knew then to slow down and savor what was still to come.

MAP: Collected and Last Poems by Wislawa Szymborska (Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh, translators.) This book, if read from start to finish, captures the drama and conveys the experience of a poet discovering an original voice and vision that will enable her work to rise to the level of genius.

–Stuart Dybek, author of Ecstatic Cahoots

Two books shook me this year in particular. It’s Me, Eddie, a fictional memoir (1979) by Eduard Limonov. Beyond the delusional, transgressive and sick story about the end of his marriage on the streets of an unrecognizable New York, Limonov talks about the despair and sadness that the most brutal capitalism engendered from the perspective of a very poor Russian immigrant, so unbearably narcissistic as funny and profane.

The other is The Notebook (1987) by the Hungarian Ágota Kristóf. With sharp phrases that seem to have been used for the first time, Kristóf—an immigrant in Switzerland—tells the story of Claus and Lucas, two merciless twins and their grandmother, known as The Witch. The twins, extremely clever and far from any moral consideration, fight to survive during the Second World War through small experiments or exercises, as they call them. They starve for days, stop talking for weeks, or whip each other until they bleed, among many other things. They are alone but they are together in an occupied land. An army of two.

In an increasingly politically correct world, where many writers are their own censorship machines fearful of what their potential fans, not readers, may think of them, these two works remind us that the truth of the books lives entirely in their pages, outside of them there are only speculations, vain complaints and self-complacency.

–Andrés Felipe Solano, author of Los días de la fiebre (Days of the fever)

This year the best was James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time. The prophetic cadence of the queer preacher kid. Hit a deep spot.

–Karen Tei Yamashita, author of Sense and Sensibility: Stories 

Reading The Palm-Wine Drinkard by Nigerian novelist, Amos Tutuola, it’s like I’m listening back to my grandmother telling a story. Not only is the fantasy dragging me to strange places with wonderful creatures, but also the way the story is told is so familiar as if the storyteller is right in front of us. The repetitions of the sentence may feel strange at first, but over time it becomes like a bewitching drum rhythm.”

–Eka Kurniawan, author of Kitchen Curse: Stories, translated by Annie Tucker and others.

Camille de Toledo’s Thésée, sa vie nouvelle (editions Verdier) is a very intimate autobiography that nevertheless also tells the story of Europe through four generations with poignant force.

–Marie Darrieussecq, author of Being Here Is Everything: The Life of Paula Modersohn-Becker, translated by Penny Hueston

The Family Clause by Jonas Hassan Khemiri—one of the wisest portraits of a family across generations that I’ve ever read—funny, poignant, and just an absolute pleasure to read, with a brilliant translation by Alice Menzies.

–Dinaw Mengestu, author of All Our Names

This year I finished reading Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, which has encouraged me to shift the focus of my writing, from describing the external world to examining my inner life. Proust was not simply chatting about his own life, but rather expressing the lives of all humanity through his own existence.

–A Yi, (translated by Jeremy Tiang), author of Two Lives: Tales of Life, Love and Crime from China, translated by Alex Woodend

Locked down, I read so many books this year, and loved quite a few, but here are my favorites, broken down by category. Favorite Novel: Blindness by José Saramago, recommended to me years ago, but it seemed too fantastical and dense: a pandemic where people suddenly go blind?! Come on. . . When the pandemic struck this year, I wanted books that could stand up to the strangeness and dark unreality of the times we found ourselves in. I could not put the novel down. Gripping, terrifying, a page turner but also deeply allegorical and morally transformative, Blindness earns its quiet and restless hope.

Favorite nonfiction book: Dictionary of the Undoing by John Freeman, again a book I needed to read NOW, and not just “because of” the pandemic. As we witnessed the heartbreaking divisiveness and violence of our country & world falling apart, this book gave me a vocabulary for reframing that world and moving forward. A lexicon for undoing broken structures of thinking and being that separate us, Dictionary provided new vocabularies of understanding, possibility, engagement. Each entry was like opening the small door of a word chosen for that letter of the alphabet and seeing new vistas, sweetness and light. As I told John in a fan letter, my go-to book for rekindling hope has always been Hope in the Dark by Rebecca Solnit. Dictionary of the Undoing is another companion text I’ll keep reading, rereading, recommending as we rebuild our Earth in the months, years to come. [Required reading by all public officials!]

Finally, favorite poetry book: (Oh man, hard to choose just one of Kate Daniels’s poetry books—I read through her whole opus this year.) If I have to pick just one of her collections, it’s A Walk In Victoria’s Secret—the poems have a narrative sweep, full-bodied, large-lined—reminiscent of Whitman. What I love about Kate Daniels’s poems is how they live inside the body, specifically a female body. The word made into unmistakable flesh. Moments, insights, phases, and stages I’ve never encountered in a poem and, in some instances, named for myself before. Her lyrical, oratorical, storytelling voice is like a current that carries me into and through feelings, moods, landscapes. Here is a poet, unafraid to see and say, proprieties be damned!

–Julia Alvarez, author of Afterlife and Already a Butterfly

One of the books I’ve had a great time reading during this pandemic year was Kurt Vonnegut’s Mother Night. Maybe because the novel’s narrator is telling us the story in solitary confinement in jail while waiting for his execution and, still, I find it a painful but heart-warmingly optimistic tale. It served, at least in my case, as a wonderful vaccine to self pity.

–Etgar Keret, author of Fly Already: Stories, translated by Sondra Silverston and others.

It was hot outside, but inside newly found quietude provided me room to explore what did and didn’t work for me as I tried to consider speculative futures beyond racial capitalism. Black Heretics, Black Prophets by Anthony Bogues, did work for me as it reminded me of an interior canon of thought beyond the flat, digitized iconography of this moment.

–Michael Salu is a writer, artist and creative director

As in all of her previous collections, Carolyn Forché’s long-awaited fifth book, In the Lateness of the World, takes Shakespeare’s question, “How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea, / Whose action is no stronger than a flower?” to its furthest ethical limit. The urgency she writes into is that beauty, broken, holds the possibility to not only renew or redeem our tragic world, but is necessary to make our world into a stronger whole. As such, Forché is our best proof, in this book, that poetry’s belatedness is action and poetry’s timelessness.

–Ishion Hutchinson, author of House of Lords and Commons  

Intricately structured, epic in its ambition and achievement, Phil Klay’s Missionaries takes on America’s evilly systemic war-mongering, imperialist, racist, violence, with the moral and spiritual force of Melville and Dostoevsky. Missionaries is, in the largest sense, a truly great book.

–Lawrence Joseph, author of A Certain Clarity: Selected Poems  

I’ve been reading slowly over the year Jean Genet’s last book, Prisoner of Love, or as the Arabic translation has it, Prisoner in Love. I tried to read the book more than twenty years ago when the translation by Kadhim Jihad first appeared, in 1997 with Dar Sharqiyyat. Trying to read it then immediately felt too alienating, as despair had its grip on our being with the political reality of Palestine, or in Palestine. This has only changed to the worst since, but now I got better at feeling despair without feeling defeated. Reading the book has contributed to that, as it embodies how literature can act as a manual for living against the bare life embodied in writing history. It is also a manual for how one can be next to one’s self, rather than be eternally captive by one’s self.

–Adania Shibli, author of Minor Detail, translated by Elisabeth Jaquette

Beneath its broad and terrifying investigation into corporate toxicity, Kerri Arsenault’s Mill Town undertakes to understand a deeper and more mysterious pathology—a sort of cultural Stockholm syndrome wherein a damaged population somehow learns to love its injury.

–David Searcy, author of The Tiny Bee That Hovers at the Center of the World, forthcoming in July 2021 (Random House)

I picked up the new translation of All My Cats, Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal’s 1986 memoir on a whim, thinking it would contain some delightful pensées on cats. What begins as a charming infatuation with a group of feral cats, descends into a squalid, brutal attempt to contain their numbers. The book evolves into a profound meditation on how we live with the enormous guilt, personal and inherited, that infects our daily lives and actions. Truly one of the most remarkable reading experiences I have ever had.

–Heather O’Neill, author of The Lonely Hearts Hotel

The most wildly entertaining and inventive novel I read this year was Enter the Aardvark, by Jessica Anthony. SAT question: Which of the following does not belong? A closeted contemporary Republican congressman, an eminent 19th-century British taxidermist, an African country of the sort that Donald Trump would classify as “shithole,” a stuffed aardvark with strangely human eyes. Okay, it was a trick question. They all belong. And so will you, reader.

–Richard Russo, author of Chances Are…

This fall, as megafires made the air unbreathable across the West, I found myself reading J.B. MacKinnon’s The Once and Future World, which transports the reader back to the planet before mankind reduced its abundance by 90 percent—to a Pennsylvania roamed by menacing black bulls, to a North Atlantic where ships were stalled mid-ocean by cod—to make a powerful case for “rewilding” the earth and ourselves.

–Amanda Rea’s work has appeared in Harper’s, Best American Mystery Stories and Freeman’s

Mitsuyo Kakuta is the kind of writer whose novels—about a woman who kidnaps the child of the man she’s having an affair with, or a bank teller who embezzles money to support her young lover, or an Edo-era prostitute who risks her life for the man she loves—no matter how far removed these are from the reality of our own lives, upon reading them we say, “These are our stories.” Her literary talents are laid bare before our very eyes. And so it is with Kakuta’s translation into modern Japanese of Murasaki Shikibu’s 11th-century classic, The Tale of Genji, that readers are saying, “This is our Genji.” Whether or not we were born in the Heian era or are familiar with court life of the period—or even if we are Japanese—it makes no difference. As long as you’ve got a human body and a human heart, you will definitely recognize the voices and sensations articulated in this version.

–Kanako Nishi (translated by Alison Markin Powell), author of Regarding Sam, Meeting Monkeys

Just when my brain felt the most mushy, re-reading How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu, molded it back into shape so I could use it again. I used it to let the father-son relationship in the book reverberate through me, and it left me with a bright aching closeness to my own father.

–Xuan Juliana Wang, author of Home Remedies: Stories

This year I had to resist the temptation to spend all my time re-reading Philip K Dick over and over again and especially Ubik in which reality disintegrates unless it is vigorously sprayed with existential antiseptic. I enjoyed (if that is the right word…) revisiting John Christopher’s The Death of Grass —an eerie post-apocalyptic novel about, well, the death of grass and the global turmoil that ensues. I greatly admired the coruscating brilliance of Anakana Schofield’s Bina and Lina Wolff’s Many People Die Like You as well as the dreamlike wilds of Gary Budden’s London Incognita and Agustín Fernández Mallo’s The Things We’ve Seen. It was also a delight to read Enrique Vila-Matas’s latest, Mac’s Problem, about a novelist who abandons fiction and decides that, henceforth, he will stick to the sage and sensible facts. But then the facts become non-factual, reality resembles fantasy and what is our plaintive novelist to do!? Back to Philip K Dick once again—”it’s is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.”

–Joanna Kavenna, author of Zed

I read Marcial Gala’s The Black Cathedral (translated by Anna Kushner) all the way back in January or February—or approximately a century ago in emotional time—and still Arturo Stuart’s quixotic quest to build a massive cathedral in the Cuban city of Cienfuegos is vivid in memory. The arrival of Arturo and his family gives way to acts of violence, gallows humor galore, ghosts, surreal twists of fate, and a cast of unforgettable—terrifying, tender, charismatic—characters. The Black Cathedral is one of the best, most distinctive and memorable, books I read all year.

–Laura van den Berg, author of I Hold a Wolf by the Ears: Stories

La linea del colore is Igiaba Scego’s latest book, and she does not disappoint. This historical novel moves between the life of an African American painter, Lafanu Brown in 19th-century Rome, and a Somali-Italian curator Leila, in contemporary Rome. This riveting novel is an unflinching, haunting gaze on colonialism and bigotry. It is also a moving affirmation of the strength of sisterhood, one that can traverse time and space.

–Maaza Mengiste, author of The Shadow King

Something about this long year of lockdowns has favored the nature of reading that is just right for re-visiting Proust’s À la recherche du temp perdu. Proust’s multi-volume meditation on unrequited love, fashion, death, society and art has been a godsend.

–Ben Okri, author of Prayer for the Living forthcoming February 2021 (Akashic Books)

Alison Lurie has recently joined the company of the great comic immortals. I was chortling over a smart reissue of Foreign Affairs (first read decades ago) when I heard the news. Wittily astute, astringently congenial, her bold and playful novels will endure.

–Helen Simpson, author of Cockfosters: Stories 

Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race, by Reni Eddo-Lodge, is a frank and incisive analysis of institutional racism, as told from the point of view of a young Black British woman. Compelling reading, it’s a call to action and reflection that may lead us into uncomfortable recognitions about ourselves.

–Xiaolu Guo, author of A Lover’s Discourse

One book that really floored me this year was Magnetized: Conversations with a Serial Killer by Carlos Busqued (translated by Samuel Rutter). This was an incredibly surprising, fascinating and dark but also deeply honest and human look into the world and mind of a man who has been in prison for over thirty years for a completely random murder spree he committed in Buenos Aires in 1982. With even less time to read than usual, and a shortened attention span, this year I also read a lot of 8th-century Chinese poetry—fitting given major themes of political turbulence, isolation and hermitude—in particular, Red Pine’s translations of Wei-ying Wu (In Such Hard Times) and Liu Tsung-yuan (Written in Exile).

–Chris Russell is a visual artist whose work has been published in The Believer, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Poetry Ireland Review.

Elena Skrjabina’s Siege and Survival paints a picture of civilian life during a conflict that has been studied over and over from a military perspective. The stark descriptions of hunger and the struggle to survive are so startling that they can read like surrealism while being firmly grounded in historical truth. Any city dweller can relate to Skrjabina’s portrait of Leningrad as a living thing, made up of buildings, boundaries and people.

–Patrick Hilsman is a New York-based journalist and analyst with experience covering the MENA region with a focus on the Syrian conflict, international weapons traffic, and refugee rights.

It’s a simple premise set within a tight frame—or is it? A mother goes out for the evening, leaving her young son at home, who in turn goes out for some fun of his own and then, once that’s done, to find her. But this is northern Norway in wintertime.  Something bright and hungry burns inside each character and is present on every page, along with the winter cold and its brutal indifference. A careless reader might refer to this novel as “quiet,” but Hanne Ørstavik’s Love is animated by a propulsive current of terror. It’s a book that finds a home beneath your skin. Meanwhile, This Does Not Belong To You, published in 2018 alongside Hemon’s more traditional memoir, My Parents, is an incandescent accumulation of vignettes and stories from his childhood in Bosnia. Memory is Hemon’s main subject here—its mutability, its strange curves, how mysterious it is that some experiences fade into oblivion while others become a part of us, like a limb. This book, at once lyric and lucid, feels determined to resurrect what’s been lost to displacement and the passage of time, while simultaneously fully aware of the impossibility of return. “A lifelong project, it’s been for me,” Hemon writes, “going home.”

–Lauren Markham, author of The Far Away Brothers: Two Young Immigrants and the Making of an American Life

Two supreme essay collections have been a mainstay this year. Of Color is by poet Jaswinder Bolina, who proves himself such an intelligent guide to questions of integration in a book that is both philosophical and full of feeling. I also loved Brian Dillon’s Suppose a Sentence, where lines from Donne, Didion, Ruskin and more are poured over: it’s a joyous collection and I kept marveling at the ease with which Dillon performs the difficult act of reading well.

–Sunjeev Sahota, author of China Room, forthcoming July 2021 (Viking)

This year has been jam packed with brilliant reads but a few have really stayed with me, one of them being Inferno: A Memoir of Motherhood and Madness by Catherine Cho. Entirely uncompromising and beautifully written, Inferno moves through time from the psychiatric hospital where Cho is admitted after developing postpartum psychosis to her childhood and early relationships. There is something really lingering and honest about the way Cho lets the reader in on an enormously hard period in her life and I have been recommending this book to everyone I know.

–Daisy Johnson, author of Everything Under and Sisters

Like a true Met fan most of the time I’m either losing or playing catchup, and this year I caught up with Babitz’ Slow Days, Fast Company and Darius James’ uproarious and unputdownable Negrophobia and—holy shit—read those. I finally got around to Steve Toltz’s super hilarious, madcap novel A Fraction of the Whole which both razzled and dazzled me, and another at-least-half-a-maniac Australian writer, too, Lexi Freiman’s Inappropriation. As for stuff published in the hellscape of 2020–man I feel terrible for anyone who had a book come out in this dickhead of a year—I loved Marie Helene Bertino’s Parakeet, Justin Taylor’s Riding With the Ghost (I’m a sucker for the Dad stuff), and I’m halfway through Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum’s collection Likes which is impressing the hell out of me with its meticulous sentences and generosity of spirit and intelligence which feels very foreign to me right now because my brain is mush and I really need to drink some water but, you know, Bynum rules!

–Matt Sumell, author of Making Nice

The book I kept reaching for earlier in the year was Bitter Grass, an early collection by Gëzim Hajdari, newly translated by Ian Seed for Shearsman Books. The book-length poem begins: “No one knows if I still hold out/ in this corner of the burnt earth”; as the news became increasingly terrifying, and we lurched into the unknown, I kept repeating those lines to myself. I’m still holding out, and I hope that you are too”

–Andrew McMillan, author of physical and playtime

Style by Dolores Dorantes (2016). Every element of this distinctive work—its form, length, and ordering—contributes to the collective project of an intensely political text, demanding a reckoning with structures of violence in Mexico, and everywhere, from inside the rebellious consciousness of the women whose bodies are on the line.

–Nimmi Gowrinathan, author of Radicalizing Her: Why Women Choose Violence, forthcoming April 2021 (Beacon Press)

I am reading Barbara Jane Reyes’s Letters to a Young Brown Girl, an epistolary sequence of poems pushing back at the forces that oppress and erase Filipino women, from internal colonialization to white privilege. The poems are not only instructions in self-care, they are abundant, musical and downright badass.

–DA Powell, author of Atlas T

Zadie Smith’s astute and eloquent essays are always essential reading—but after this year’s harrowing spring in New York City her newest collection Intimations, written in the early days of the pandemic, felt especially necessary. It’s a gift to be accompanied by her clarifying gaze and nimble mind, and to overhear her thinking on topics ranging from writing to lockdown to inequality in this exceptionally intimate and vulnerable book. All royalties have been donated to charity.

–Deborah Landau, author of Soft Targets

Letters from a Stoic, by Seneca. “You ask me to say what you should consider it particularly important to avoid. My answer is this: a mass crowd.” Words to read as a health warning and solace for lost rationality; a refute of popularism.

–Rawi Hage, author of Beirut Hellfire Society 

Yū Miri, Tokyo Ueno Station; cover design by Lauren Peters-Collaer (Riverhead, June)

It‘s hard for me to choose between Vesper Flights by Helen Macdonald and Tokyo Ueno Station by Yu Miri. In the former, Macdonald’s delicate and wise observations on humans, nature, humans within nature, freedom, and love spoke to me on a deeper level than many other books I’ve read this year. In the latter, Yu Miri weaves a quietly beautiful yet profoundly devastating tale that hasn’t left me since.

–An Yu, author of Braised Pork

I’ve actually read fewer books than usual this year, but came across several wonderful ones. The most impactful reading for me was maybe J.M. Coetzee’s The Death of Jesus, the final novel in his strange and powerful trilogy. It’s such a phenomenal achievement in fiction. It’s hard to grasp what the novels are exactly about, it feels like an allegory full of canonical and philosophical references where meaning hovers right before our eyes but remains out of reach. Nonetheless the narrative is consistently moving and profound, and incredibly self-sufficient. It creates its own rules and contains everything it needs. To me the journey of the boy David and those around him came across as a fable about our inspiring but ultimately doomed search for meaning. It states the importance of caring for each other, of committing to care, even when social struggle and the worst tendencies of the human spirit get in the way. And in the end literature itself proves to be the strongest tool for meaning and maybe transcendence. I’m eager to read the whole thing again. I’ve also enjoyed reading Franco Berardi’s essays and diaries published in Brazil by Ubu, full of inspired notes on the multiple crises of our times; Weather by Jenny Offill; Os supridores by José Falero and Marrom e Amarelo by Paulo Scott, both recently published in Brazil; and a lot of Tolstoy, always the purest reading pleasure.

–Daniel Galera, author of Twenty After Midnight, translated by Julia Sanches

Olga Tokarczuk, Bizarre Stories (translated beautifully into the Norwegian by Julia Wiedlocha), is one of the most breath-taking books I’ve read, so deeply original in its thinking and bizarre imagery, and yet so deeply embedded in modern society: a generous and powerful demonstration of what literature can actually be.

–Gunnhild Øyehaug, author of Knots and Wait, Blink, translated by Kari Dickson

No one was better company this year than Lucille Clifton, whose incandescent poems shone a path through the many dark days that enveloped us. I returned to How to Carry Water: Selected Poems of Lucille Clifton so often that a handful of her poems took up residence in my memory and kept coaxing my imagination to better places. These poems—capsule joys, wisdom nested in wit, with her capacious voice as attuned to the simple beauties as the everyday horrors—has a pull so strong that I was frequently tempted to stand on empty street corners and fill the spaces with Clifton’s resonant words.

–Garnette Cadogan is an essayist and a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia

I absolutely loved So I Looked Down to Camelot, a book of short and vertiginously strange poems by the late British poet Rosamund Stanhope. Originally published in 1962, Flood Editions reissued the book in January, when I first encountered and devoured it. The poem titles alone are worth the price of admission—“The Boy With the Next-Door Face;” “The Light Puts Out the Conifer”—and Stanhope’s penchant for off-kilter rhyme and surprising personification lend a timeless, fabular quality to lines like, “Warm granaries / Hoard their Julys / By that synthetic sun, the grate.” If that’s not endorsement enough, the book is also often uproariously funny. Read it whenever you need “the drink of a dream.”

–Maggie Millner is a poet whose work has appeared in Freeman’s, Poetry and The New Yorker

I was stirred by No Presents Please by Jayant Kaikini, a surreal collection of stories about various denizens of Mumbai, all of them outsiders in some way, and their off-kilter attempts to make their way in the unforgiving city. Tejaswini Niranjana’s translation from Kannada is sharp and bitingly funny.

–Jeremy Tiang, translator and author of State of Emergency

My favorite book this year was Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. I thought it was highly imaginative, entertaining, and I read it in one sitting. Stayed up until 5 am to finish it.

–Reyna Grande, author of A Dream Called Home

I’ve been so distractible this year that I was surprised and grateful to find myself immersed in Yiyun Li’s Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life, wanting it never to end. This 2017 collection of essays on the writing life is about love, time, mentorship, recovery, and solitude. (Read Li’s gorgeous stories before and after.) I also found my way to francine j. harris’s Here is the Sweet Hand: Poems, a 2020 collection I admire for its pulse, solace, and the way it maps—in new syntactical fittings and aerial linguistic maneuvers—a mind wrestling with eros, intimacy, distance, the boundaries of the self, and race. (It’s also funny, bitter, melancholy, and tender.)

–Catherine Barnett, Human Hours: Poems

I loved All Our Yesterdays by Natalia Ginzburg. It moves relentlessly through some of the darkest years in Italian history, yet remains leavened by the serene detachment of Ginzburg’s voice and the generosity of her vision. It’s utterly brilliant.

–Anthony Marra, author of The Tsar of Love and Techno

From his 2019 Page-Barbour Lectures at his alma mater, the University of Virginia, Daniel Mendelsohn has produced an exquisite and thrilling work of scholarly peregrination. As he discusses the technique of ring composition, Mendelsohn goes on to create a beguiling narrative that employs it, folding the works of W.G. Sebald, Erich Auerbach, Francois Fenelon, and Homer into his own experiences of trying to write. In this time of physical confinement and mental burden, Three Rings: A Tale of Exile, Narrative, and Fate springs a lock, allowing us to roam magisterially through centuries and geographies. It is an exalting read.

–Oscar Villalon, managing editor of Zyzzyva

I read Nina Renata Aaron’s beautifully written, sordid memoir about codependence, Good Morning Destroyer of Men’s Souls and couldn’t put it down. A welcome intervention against stories of addiction focusing on the addict, Aaron shows us the fallout of being in an addict’s thrall.

–Emily Raboteau, author of Searching for Zion: The Quest for Home in the African Diaspora

In late February 2020 I read White Noise, Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel about an “airborne toxic event,” one month before global recognition of our current airborne toxic event, and seven months before I published a book about airborne toxic events, all of which plonked an exclamation point on the bewildering joy I had experienced in reading DeLillo’s exuberant prose for the very first time. A maelstrom of human terror and hilarity, White Noise is a feisty, prophetic, tender satire and screed, glorious in its ramparts of high intensity and its guttered sadness, about unbridled consumerism, conspiracy theories, academic absurdities, and a subulate examination of slow but violent ecological collapse. “Every day on the news there’s another toxic spill. Cancerous solvents from storage tanks, arsenic from smokestacks, radioactive water from power plants. How serious can it be if it happens all the time?” a character wonders about the toxic cloud.

While many of us believe the flip of a calendar will somehow correct course and end the banal repetition of monstrous policy and behavior we’ve become accustomed to, DeLillo’s question still hovers on my lips as we fold into 2021: is it possible for our leaders to emerge from such white noise (largely of their own making) and arrest the environmental, cultural, and sociological cataclysms before us? Or have we reduced expectations of our own capacity so much that like DeLillo’s characters at the end of the book, stand mesmerized in front of a supermarket, caught between the past and the future, between the real and unreal?

–Kerri Arsenault, author of Mill Town

I’m almost done with Christie Tate’s Group, and I’m loving it! Sometimes you need a story that reminds you that you’re not alone and that things just might turn out okay, you know? Tate’s writing alternates from heartbreaking to hilarious and is full of such clarity and insight about what it means to truly be vulnerable with yourself and with others. Makes me want to hand this book to my 24-year-old self and say, here, read this. It’ll help.

–Nicole Im’s work has appeared in Freeman’s, Literary Hub, Hinterland Magazine and Pigeon Pages

I’m in awe of how language speaks against power, against loss in Michael Prior’s Burning Province, a collection about the internment of Japanese-Canadians at the outbreak of World War II. It’s a journey between houses with faces broken by eviction notices; a journey of tenderness, testimony, and fearlessness.

–Valzhyna Mort, author of Music for the Dead and Resurrected: Poems

The Cost of Living: A Working Autobiography by Deborah Levy has over 100 pages, but during the past year I spent most of my reading time revisiting these elegantly written memoirs. I haven’t finished reading it because I will still be coming back to certain passages in the future. The most important books are those we keep coming back to.

–Semezdin Mehmedinović, author of My Heart: A Novel, translated by Celia Hawkesworth, forthcoming in March 2021 (Catapult)

__________________________________________

The preceding is from the Freeman’s channel at Literary Hub, which features excerpts from the print editions of Freeman’s, along with supplementary writing from contributors past, present and future. The latest issue of Freeman’s, a special edition gathered around the theme of love, featuring work by Louise Erdrich, Haruki Murakami, Maaze Mengiste, Mieko Kawakami, Olga Tokarczuk and Semezdin Mehmedinovic, among others, is available now.