Let me admit up front that I’ve included half a dozen books here that were read as part of my work with the Professional Creative Writing program at University College. But they all turned out to be worthwhile reading experiences. Even those I couldn’t quite connect with—Juan Gelman’s The Poems of Sidney West, Ben Lerner’s Angle of Yaw, and Adonis’s powerful Concerto al-Quds, which is also recondite and nakedly anguished by turns—continue to haunt me. This is usually an early indicator of re-readings in the offing.
All that said, it would be foolish not to recommend a few that simply bowled me over. Let me pick one from each genre.
Sherman Alexie’s You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me is harrowing and driven, always dancing along the nebulous boundary between revelation and self-advertisement. I don’t believe I’ve ever read a memoir that brought tears to my eyes so often or so often frustrated my desire for closure—a word I dislike because it’s really a desire to “get past this thing; but if you take anything from Alexie’s book, it’s that we never really get past the deep stuff: we just suffer each wave of it in different, less panicked ways.
Kapka Kassabova’s Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe is everything a great travel book should be: observant, granular but unafraid of larger patterns, given to reading deep histories in the present moment—and all with a personal stake in the experience. Don’t miss it!
The first full biography of the great Polish Nobel Prize winner, at least that I am aware of, is Andrzej Franaszek’s Miłosz: A Biography. Miłosz was a true poèt maudit, torn at the quick between spiritual ambition and the imperative of bearing witness to history. American poetry has no analog, I think, with the possible exceptions of Denise Levertov and Robert Bly—although our poets don’t suffer suppression, dispossession, and exile of the kind suffered by Miłosz’s generation of central European poets. Miłosz himself only became Miłosz by coming to America, where his books could be freely translated and published. This biography helps us imagine what such freedom means—and what it can cost.
My adventures in fiction were less successful for me than usual. I was pleasantly diverted by Percival Everett’s So Much Blue and alternately awestruck and bored by Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. Looking back, the most enjoyable and exciting book for me was The Collected Stories of Machado De Assis, beautifully translated by Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson. Joachim Maria Machado De Assis (1839-1908), the grandson of freed slaves, is today considered Brazil’s greatest writer. Based on these stories and on my almost total ignorance of Brazilian literature, I can only say that he is a great writer in English. It is breathtaking to watch him travel from a kind of Henry James—he is certainly as keen a social observer but has something James never had: a sense of humor)—to a proto-Kafka or proto-Borges. The next novel in my queue is Machado’s Epitaph of a Small Winner, and I can hardly wait.
Finally—poetry. Poetry! I recommend them all. But if anyone wonders where to start, I suggest these three: the Polish poet Ryszard Krynicki’s Magnetic Point: Selected Poems, 1968-2014; the Russian-American Eugene Ostashevsky’s hilarious and challenging The Pirate Who Does Not Know the Value of Pi; and the all-American Thomas R. Smith’s Windy Day at Kabekona: New & Selected Prose Poems. If you’re looking for an ample and joyfully varied anthology, check out Austerity Measures: The New Greek Poetry, edited and sometimes translated by Karen Van Dyck.
Here’s wishing you all a happy and productive new year!
César | Aira | The Little Buddhist Monk/The Proof | Trans. Nick Caistor | New Directions | 2017 | Fiction |
César | Aira | Dinner | Trans. Katherine Silver | New Directions | 2015 | Fiction |
César | Aira | Ema, the Captive | Trans. Chris Andrews | New Directions | 2016 | Fiction |
Sherman | Alexie | You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me | Little, Brown | 2017 | Memoir | |
Bob | Arnold | Heaven Lake | Longhouse | 2018 | Poetry | |
Carol | Bass, ed. | Ripple Effect: Water Stories | Maine Authors Publishing & Cooperative | 2018 | Poetry, Prose, Paintings, Photography | |
Robert | Bly | The Winged Energy of Delight: Selected Translations | HarperCollins Perennial | 2005 | Poetry | |
Daniel | Borzutzky | The Performance of Becoming Human | Brooklyn Arts Press | 2016 | Poetry | |
Robert | Cooperman | Saved by the Dead | Liquid Light Press | 2018 | Poetry | |
Machado | De Assis | The Collected Stories of Machado De Assis | Trans. Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson | Liveright | 2018 | Fiction |
Fyodor | Dostoevsky | The Idiot | Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky | Everyman’s Library | 2002 | Fiction |
Percival | Everett | So Much Blue | Graywolf Press | 2017 | Fiction | |
Andrzej | Franaszek | Miłosz: A Biography | Trans. Aleksandra and Michael Parker | The Belknap Press / Harvard University Press | 2017 | Biography |
Jean L. | French | Watershed | Folded Word | 2018 | Poetry | |
Juan | Gelman | The Poems of Sidney West | Trans. Katherine M. Hedeen & Víctor Rodríguez Nez | Salt Publishing | 2009 | Poetry |
David | Giannini | Traveling Cluster: Poems in Italy | New Feral Press | 2018 | Poetry | |
Peter | Handke | On a Dark Night I Left My Silent House | Trans. Krishna Winston | Farrar, Straus, and Giroux | 2000 | Fiction |
Meng | Hao-jan | The Mountain Poems of Meng Hao-jan | Trans. David Hinton | Archipelago Books | 2004 | Poetry |
Joseph | Heller | Closing Time | Simon and Schuster | 1994 | Fiction | |
Yuri | Herrera | Kingdom Cons | Trans. Lisa Dillman | And Other Stories | 2017 | Fiction |
Cathy Park | Hong | Engine Empire | W. W. Norton | 2012 | Poetry | |
Meirion | Jordan | Moonrise | Seren Books | 2008 | Poetry | |
JPJ | Last Aphorisms | JPJ | 2009 | Aphorisms | ||
Kapka | Kassabova | Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe | Graywolf Press | 2017 | Travel | |
Kapka | Kassabova | Someone Else’s Life | Bloodaxe Books | 2003 | Poetry | |
Edmund | Keeley | Nakedness Is My End: Poems from the Greek Anthology | Trans. Edmund Keeley | World Poetry Books | 2018 | Poetry |
Daniel | Klawitter | Quiet Insurrections | Kelsay Books | 2018 | Poetry | |
Ryszard | Krynicki | Magnetic Point: Selected Poems, 1968-2014 | Trans. Clare Cavanagh | New Directions | 2017 | Poetry |
Maria | Laina | Rose Fear | Trans. Sarah McCann | World Poetry Books | 2017 | Poetry |
Kyle | Laws | My Visions Are as Real as Your Movies, Joan of Arc Says to Rudoph Valentino | Dancing Girl Press & Studio | 2013 | Poetry | |
Kyle | Laws | George Sand’s Haiti | Poetry West | 2013 | Poetry | |
Chloé | Leisure | The End of the World Again | Finishing Line Press | 2015 | Poetry | |
Ben | Lerner | Angle of Yaw | Copper Canyon Press | 2006 | Poetry | |
John | Levy | On the Edge, Tilted | Otata’s Bookshelf | 2018 | Poetry | |
Luljeta | Lleshanaku | Negative Space | Trans. Ani Gjika | New Directions | 2018 | Poetry |
Dulce María | Loynaz | Absolute Solitude: Selected Poems | Trans. James O’Connor | Archipelago Books | 2016 | Poetry |
Samuel | Menashe | Samuel Menashe: New and Selected Poems | The Library of America | 2005 | Poetry | |
Jan C. | Minich | The Letters of Silver Dollar | City Art | 2002 | Poetry | |
Ange | Mlinko | Marvelous Things Overheard | Farrar, Straus, and Giroux | 2014 | Poetry | |
Sinéad | Morrissey | On Balance | Carcanet Press | 2017 | Poetry | |
Tam Lin | Neville | Journey Cake | BkMk Press | 1998 | Poetry | |
William | O’Daly | Yarrow and Smoke | Folded Word | 2018 | Poetry | |
Simon | Ortiz | Out There Somewhere | U of Arizona Press | 2002 | Poetry | |
Eugene | Ostashevsky | The Pirate Who Does Not Know the Value of Pi | NYRB | 2017 | Poetry | |
Elaine | Pagels | Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, & Politics in the Book of Revelation | Viking | 2012 | Nonfiction | |
Elise | Partridge | The If Borderlands: Collected Poems | NYRB | 2017 | Poetry | |
Veronica | Patterson | Sudden White Fan | Cherry Grove Collections | 2018 | Poetry | |
Emily | Pérez | Made and Unmade | Madhouse Press | 2018 | Poetry | |
Robert | Pinsky | At the Foundline Hospital | Farrar, Straus, and Giroux | 2016 | Poetry | |
Dennis | Potter | Blackeyes | Vintage | 1988 | Fiction | |
Salvatore | Quasimodo | Complete Poems of Salvatore Quasimodo | Trans. Jack Bevan | Carcanet Press | 2017 | Poetry |
Philip | Roth | Operation Shylock: A Confession | Simon and Schuster | 1993 | Fiction | |
Juan José | Saer | The One Before | Trans. Roanne L. Kantor | Open Letter | 2015 | Fiction |
Gary | Schroeder | After Rain | Folded Word | 2017 | Poetry | |
Nicole | Sealey | Ordinary Beast | Ecco | 2017 | Poetry | |
Tracy K. | Smith | Life on Mars | Graywolf Press | 2011 | Poetry | |
Thomas R. | Smith | Windy Day at Kabekona: New & Selected Prose Poems | White Pine Press | 2018 | Poetry | |
Susan Delaney | Spear | Beyond All Bearing | Resource Publications | 2017 | Poetry | |
A. E. | Stallings | Olives | TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern | 2012 | Poetry | |
A. E. | Stallings | Like | Farrar, Straus, and Giroux | 2018 | Poetry | |
Galen | Strawson | Things that Bother Me: Death, Freedom, the Self, Etc. | NYRB | 2018 | Essays | |
Nancy | Takacs | The Worrier | U of Massachusetts Press | 2017 | Poetry | |
Richard F. | Thomas | Why Bob Dylan Matters | Dey St. | 2017 | Nonfiction | |
Rosemerry Wahtola | Trommer | The Miracle Already Happening: Everyday Life with Rumi | Liquid Light Press | 2011 | Poetry | |
Karen | Van Dyck | Austerity Measures: The New Greek Poetry | Trans. Various | NYRB | 2016 | Poetry |
Karla | Van Vliet | Fragments: From the Lost Book of the Bird Spirit | Folded Word | 2018 | Poetry | |
Adam | Zagajewski | Without End: New and Selected Poems | Trans. Various | Farrar, Straus, and Giroux | 2002 | Poetry |
Adam | Zagajewski | Asymmetry | Trans. Clare Cavanagh | Farrar, Straus, and Giroux | 2018 | Poetry |
Adonis | Concerto al-Quds | Trans. Kaled Mattawa | Yale University Press | 2017 | Poetry | |
Euripides | Medea | Trans. Diane J. Raynor | Cambridge U Press | 2013 | Poetry |
Joe,
Thanks for reading Beyond All Bearing and including it on your list.
I am honored!
Susan Delaney Spear
I’m so impressed, as usual, with your international list … I’ll check out some of these, but I will never be as prolific a reader as you! Thanks, Joe! Happy New Year!
Joe, the number of books you read in a year always seems staggering to me, even allowing for books read to teach. I like your recommendation of Alexie’s memoir—will have to get that—and share your difficulty with Gelman. Happy 2019!
Joe, the number of books you read in a year always seems staggering to me, even allowing for books read to teach. I like your recommendation of Alexie’s memoir—will have to get that—and share your difficulty with Gelman. Happy 2019!
Happy new year, Joseph, and many thanks for sharing this rich and intriguing list.