New yorker best books 2014
New York in books: readers' picks | Books | The Guardian
We asked some of our contributors for their favorite books they read this year. Most listed new books, but a few picked older favorites or ones that will come out in the new year. It felt like a fitting way to spy on historical events that are impossible to look at but that must, nevertheless, always be kept in sight. One difference is that, despite everything, Wharton somehow makes us root for, if not exactly like, the unsinkable, unthinkable Undine. I was thrilled by the way Knausgaard dared to explore the absolutely mundane, while also being unembarrassed about considering the utterly transcendent. In their very different ways, Cusk and Macdonald both admirably resist succumbing to the very British disease of self-deprecation, while also skirting any temptation to present an easily likeable literary persona. The two photo books that moved me most this year were both explorations of absence.
The 50 Year Argument--The New York Review of Books
The subject who is truly loyal to the Chief Magistrate will neither advise nor submit to arbitrary measures. Globe Books editors and reviewers name their favourite reads of the year, from fiction to poetry to kids' picks - and everything in between.
The Best Books of 2014
D o first-time writers have a sell-by date? You could be forgiven for thinking so. Making a debut is a huge achievement at any stage in life, and it would be churlish not to celebrate all of them, but something about the age limit makes me uneasy. Is writing a beauty contest? Is it a sports competition?
W e have just started a series about reading lists to prepare for — or accompany — visits to American cities. Her blog is a great place to start your reading — and here is what you had to add to it: your recommendations for fiction and non-fiction, in list form, and with added quotes. Is your favourite New York book not on the list? Add it in the comment thread below. The story circles around Hans van den Broek, a Dutchman who finds refuge in cricket as he starts to play for the Staten Island Cricket Club.
Actually, constructing a canon of any kind is a little weird at the moment, when so much of how we measure cultural value is in flux. Its supposed permanence became the subject of more recent battles, back in the 20th century, between those who defended it as the foundation of Western civilization and those who attacked it as exclusive or even racist. But what if you could start a canon from scratch? We thought it might be fun to speculate very prematurely on what a canon of the 21st century might look like right now. We asked each of them to name several books that belong among the most important works of fiction, memoir, poetry, and essays since and tallied the results. The purpose was not to build a fixed library but to take a blurry selfie of a cultural moment.
Impressively, it is also a vastly entertaining feat of storytelling. Wry and devastating in equal measure, the novel is a cracked mirror that throws light in every direction — on music and literature; science and philosophy; marriage and motherhood and infidelity; and especially love and the grueling rigors of domestic life. In , the anthropologist Margaret Mead took a field trip to the Sepik River in New Guinea with her second husband; they met and collaborated with the man who would become her third.
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For me, the great discovery of was the work of Elizabeth Harrower, an eighty-six-year-old Australian novelist who lives quietly in Sydney, and who has not published a novel since the nineteen-sixties. Around this sad, quarrelling couple move a group of friends and siblings, all of whom are struggling, in their various ways, to answer the question made proverbial by a much younger contemporary writer: How should a person be? What are the sources of happiness? Her characters usually female are frequently assailed by daunting forces—horrible men, all too often; but also self-doubt, faint-heartedness, conventionality, and the limitations of bourgeois Australian society during the fifties and sixties. Like Spark, Harrower is funny and elegant and devastating. How can you not like a novelist whose sentences are on the order of these?
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5 thoughts on “Favorite Books of | The New Yorker”
Rebecca Mead, Teju Cole, and other New Yorker contributors name their favorite books of the year.
Books from Elizabeth Harrower, Jenny Offill, Karl Ove Knausgaard, and others For me, the great discovery of was the work of Elizabeth.
With great sadness and much hard truth, Mengestu's novel looks at a relationship of shared dependencies between a Midwestern social worker.
The year's best books, selected by the editors of The New York Times Book Review.
By Dinaw Mengestu.