A Year in Reading: Jess Row
Year in Reading
Jess Row December 19, 2007 | 10 books mentioned 2
Jess Row's first book, The Train to Lo Wu, a collection of short stories set in Hong Kong, was shortlisted for the PEN/Hemignway Award. In 2007 he was named a Best Young American Novelist by Granta. He is currently at work on a new collection of stories and a novel set in Laos during the Vietnam War.
I'd be lying if I didn't say that my favorite books read in 2007 were Little Dorrit and Daniel Deronda. But almost as much fun as the novels themselves were the copious endnotes (in the Penguin and Modern Library editions, respectively). I wonder: in a hundred years, will any novels from our era get the same treatment? And if so, what will the endnotes "say?"
Other favorites: David Means' The Secret Goldfish; Cees Nooteboom, Lost Paradise; Leonard Michaels, The Collected Stories; Nathan Englander, The Ministry of Special Cases; Nadine Gordimer, Beethoven was One-Sixteenth Black; Han Shaogong, A Dictionary of Maqiao. I was also introduced this year to the anthropologist and cultural theorist Michael Taussig, whose Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses was probably the book I carried around the longest (and still haven't finished).
More from A Year in Reading 2007
Jess Row is the author, The Train to Lo Wu, a collection of short stories set in Hong Kong that was shortlisted for the PEN/Hemignway Award. In 2007 he was named a Best Young American Novelist by Granta. He is currently at work on a new collection of stories and a novel set in Laos during the Vietnam War.
A Year in Reading: 2018
Editor December 3, 2018 | 10 books mentioned 3 min read
A Year in Reading: Nam Le
Nam Le December 1, 2008 | 10 books mentioned 2 min read
Nam Le's debut collection of short stories, The Boat, was awarded the Dylan Thomas Prize and the National Book Foundation's "5 Under 35" Award. It was also chosen as a New York Times Notable Book. Le is currently the fiction editor of the Harvard Review.It might seem unadventurous to nominate a book recently proclaimed by the New York Times as the best work of American fiction of the last 25 years, but in fact, when the list came out, some people may remember that an immediate, insidious backlash began against the winner, Toni Morrison's Beloved (accusing it, among other things, of being the obvious and politically correct choice), and I'll confess that I, too, found it all too easy to get swept along – especially given my one-eyed barracking for two of the runners-up, Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian and Don DeLillo's Underworld. Due to no fault of its own, the book – which I'd last read in high school – sank in my sheeplike (and sheepish) estimation. Then, this year, more than two years later, I finally returned to it. What I rediscovered stunned me: Beloved was a work of incomparable moral and aesthetic focus, in which structure, the actualised "intricate patterning" toward which Fitzgerald strove all his life, had elevated itself into ethical argument; in which memory-play, slippage and narrative deferral guided the reader – as all great books do – to a new mode of reading. It was a book planted deep in dirt and human muck, in a history where nothing – not feeling, nor language – remained uncompromised. And yet – and yet – it contained the sternness of heart and steadiness of will and stoutness of authority to claim this piece of history and completely possess it – to render it into testimony and prophecy both. Truly, I realised, Beloved was one of those rare works that remakes the whole enterprise; that marks, with one cruel stroke, beginning and epitome.More from A Year in Reading 2008
Nam Le | 10 books mentioned 2 min read
A Year in Reading: Karen Joy Fowler
Karen Joy Fowler December 2, 2014 | 10 books mentioned 2 2 min read
I suspect that few writers would survive the back-to-back reading of their works as well as Molly Gloss does. Her prose is meticulous, her characters distinct, her plotting unforced, her stories simultaneously iconic and completely natural in tone and incident.
Karen Joy Fowler | 10 books mentioned 2 2 min read
A Year In Reading: Hari Kunzru
Hari Kunzru December 7, 2012 | 10 books mentioned 1 2 min read
JohnFox says:
Jess Row is wonderful – wonderful author, and a great interviewee (I did one with him at BookFox, http://www.thejohnfox.com). Can't wait for the novel set in Laos, although last I talked to him he was working on another collection of short fiction dealing with religious fundamentalism (of which one was published in http://www.fivechapters.com) Maybe he's doing both?
Often, I change my mind by way of thinking, but I'm not a philosopher.
I don't know if God has ever changed my mind, so I'm not a man of faith.
Facts change constantly my mind, so I'm a schizophrenic of science.
I've written a novel too.
A Year in Reading: Zadie Smith
Zadie Smith December 10, 2012 | 10 books mentioned 2
I don't have anything intelligent to say about it. I just thought it was very beautiful.
Zadie Smith | 10 books mentioned 2
A Year in Reading: Michelle Richmond
Michelle Richmond December 15, 2005 | 10 books mentioned 2 min read
A Year in Reading: Jaquira Díaz
Jaquira Díaz December 11, 2015 | 10 books mentioned 1 4 min read
I finished it and then texted a bunch of friends to tell them about it and then immediately re-read it because DAMN it was just that good.
Jaquira Díaz | 10 books mentioned 1 4 min read
A Year in Reading: Ben Fountain
Ben Fountain December 3, 2012 | 10 books mentioned 3
Benjamin Benjamin is a wise-ass thirty-something who's lost his wife, house, livelihood, and solvency, all in the wake of an accident that claimed the lives of his two small children, an accident that occurred in the course of an otherwise normal day in his life as a stay-at-home dad. Out of options, he becomes certified as a caregiver, and takes a nine-bucks-an-hour job as helper for Trev, a 19-year-old in the advanced stages of muscular dystrophy. Are you laughing yet? You would be, if you were reading Jonathan Evison's excellent novel The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving instead of my thudding description of the premise. Evison is one of the sharpest writers around, and proves it in pretty much every line of this funny, brassy, unflinching tale of a broken boy and his equally broken caregiver. But broken, with these guys, does not mean finished; there's plenty of life in them yet, and when they set out on a weeklong road trip from Oregon to Salt Lake City, the story does what all good road-trip stories do, it busts wide into the free air of possibility. Nothing sentimental about this book, just good, honest, punch-to-gut emotion, with amazing adventures and revelations along the way. You'll get your heart broken several times over in this book, and yet, if you're like me, you'll end it with a full heart and a heavy sigh, and maybe a smile. How did he do that? Dunno, but I'm damn glad he did.
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Ben Fountain | 10 books mentioned 3