More and more memoirs seem to come out every year — a product, perhaps, in our unslakable interest in the human condition — but as far as we’re concerned, 2011 was a particularly great one. We had actually wonderful celebrity memoirs, unusual and experimental prose, and particular standouts in the traditional memoir fields of family history and tragedy. Click through to read about our favorite memoirs of the year, and since we can’t possibly have read all the great ones out there, be sure to chime in with your own picks in the comments. One note: the last entry on the list — a really fantastic book — may be slightly NSFW. Proceed with caution.
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Penina Roth is the director of the Franklin Park Reading Series, which debuted in 2009 and has been garnering praise from writers and fans alike because of her ability to bring together two things we love: readings and beer. We were able to get her to curate a list of her favorite 2011 books so far, and there’s something for everyone on this list, from devastatingly sad novels to stories about alligator wrestlers in the Florida swamplands. She writes, “At the Franklin Park Reading Series, our watchwords are ‘provocative, humorous and poignant.’ It’s a tricky balance, but the ten authors on this idiosyncratic list – from indie superstars like Blake Butler and Emma Straub to New Yorker “20 Under 40″ designee Karen Russell and internationally heralded first-time novelist Teju Cole – have mastered this feat.” So read on, dear readers, and let us know what your favorite books have been so far this year in the comments section below.
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Now that it’s the end of the year, there are a million suggested reading lists out there — including a few from us. So with such an overwhelming array of choices, how’s an aspiring literary hipster to know which books are most important in terms of general knowing-it-all-ness? Like last year, we decided to go straight to the source, and to that end, we’ve collected a few of our favorite and most knowledgeable lit-hipsters’ own hit lists for your cred-building convenience. Click through and enjoy!
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There are a million suggested reading lists out there, especially now that it’s the end of the year/decade/life as we know it. So how’s an aspiring literary hipster to know which books are most important in terms of street cred and general knowing-it-all-ness? We decided to go straight to the source, and to that end, we’ve collected a few of our favorite and most knowledgeable lit-hipsters’ own hit lists for your cred-building convenience.
Most of the books and stories suggested here are completely awesome, and we’re pretty confident that these people know what they’re talking about (most of them create some not-too-shabby literature themselves), so we suggest that the anti-hipsters among you might do well to read on too. After all, we mean hipster in the good way (this time).
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Reading Blake Butler‘s “novel in stories” Scorch Atlas
will disorient you. Its imagery is vivid, fleeting, and sometimes grotesque, and the relationships within it — whether familial dynamics or laws of physics — exist to be defied. And yet there’s an exhilaration to it — through the length of the slim volume, its cover designed to resemble an artifact from some unspeakable disaster, Butler balances these scenes from upturned life with prose that glides and disorients. Read More »
The Fiction Fix is your weekly dose of short story. If that’s not your drug of choice, too bad: consider it medicine. Every week, we’ll scour the literary magazines you don’t have time to read, online and in print, and let you know where to find one story worth reading.
When HarperPerennial’s Fifty-Two Stories blog updated this week, and the title and first line or so appeared in our RSS feed, we were pretty certain we had a strong Fiction Fix candidate on our hands. We were pleasantly surprised to click through and discover that the author is Blake Butler, who we’ve previously encountered online as one of the brains behind HTML Giant, “the internet literature magazine blog of the future.”
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