n+1′s Keith Gessen has a piece upon HTML Giant about his top three books of the year. In it, he explains that when he was a New York Magazine book critic, and asked by them to write on the same topic he refused, calling it a “dishonest exercise.” So they had the mag’s TV critic, John Leonard, do it instead, and thus Gessen figured out how these things tend to work:
“…basically what he did was name his friends. Or maybe two friends plus a Nobel Prize winner. This was a very elegant solution to the problem of the best-books list — because unless you’re a full-time working fiction critic, and how many of those do we have in this country?, you really just don’t know. So why not just name your friends? It’s what everyone else does, and your friends probably wrote good books.”
So, for this year, his nepotistic picks are Sam Lipsyte’s The Ask, Elif Batuman’s The Possessed, and Perfect Rigor, by his sister Masha Gessen. (For the record, we’ve read The Ask, and it is fantastic.) He also names his favorite recent pieces of short fiction, which we’ve included after the jump.
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To say that Lydia Millet’s first book of short stories (after six novels) is merely a tome about human and animal relationships would be a blatant understatement — too Cesar’s Way. In Love in Infant Monkeys, the animal and human (er, superhuman, in the case of Madonna in the opening story, “Sexing the Pheasant”) hierarchy is leveled, with each influencing the other’s life, decisions, and emotions. You meet David Hasselhoff’s dog, the elephant that Thomas Edison electrocuted, and a ferocious Komodo dragon that an Indonesian billionaire bought for Sharon Stone.
After the jump, Millet discusses why she saw Noam Chomsky at the dump, which animal humans resemble the most, and what she’d like to do to a baby spider. Read More »
After purchasing a toy hot dog for 12 cents, Rob Walker and Joshua Glenn were able to sell it on eBay at a markup of (hmm, if we did this math correctly) 2,983%. Who might these wizards of finance be? Just a couple of writers with a taste for knickknacks and narrative. The two recently launched Significant Objects, a website that matches garage sale detritus with writers, who then create a story to go along with the object, a story that serves as the object’s description when it goes up on eBay. We particularly love how each object is photographed next to penny to illustrate its size — how quaint!
With writers like Ed Park, Lucinda Rosenfeld and Sarah Rainone slated to participate, the project’s been getting a ton of attention. We caught up with co-creator Rob Walker to find how the auctions are going so far, where he gets all those wacky objects and what’s next for Significant Objects. Read More »
Launched in early June, Electric Literature is a bi-monthly short story anthology already making ripples in the industry for its unique approach to publishing, both in production and compensation. The journal is available in numerous platforms; whether your cup of tea is the Kindle, an iPhone, Amazon, or a bricks-and-mortar independent bookstore, Electric Literature is cheap and accessible. Each issue contains five stories; for each contribution, the author is paid $1000. (Shocking, we know. How do they do that? Read on, friends…) Read More »
