Year-end best-of lists can make for predictable reading. Does anyone not know that Jonathan Franzen wrote the big novel of 2010? Instead, we've asked the authors of our favorites to tell us what they liked reading this year. Here's what they had to say. —Eds. TERRY CASTLE, The Professor (essays)
FICTION Lee Rourke's first novel, THE CANAL (Melville House, June), features an unnamed, bored first-person protagonist, but the book doesn't have the quirky and solipsistic observations that solitude spawns and that many debut novelists cram onto the page. For lack of anything better to do, the
My friend Matt paid me a visit to confide his anxieties about his impending marriage. “I wonder if I’m cut out for the whole thing, the enormity of it,” he said. “It’s not hesitation about the person, just a reckoning with the profundity of the challenge ahead, even in the best of
Jealousy may be the closest a sane person can get to the experience of psychosis. I'm referring to the kind of florid, full-blown jealousy that strikes poor, enraged Leontes in The Winter's Tale—a jealousy that leads to complete ruin. It is sometimes confused with envy, but the difference is
Desire is a question to which there is no answer, yet much of the time it's the only question that matters. "Love . . . makes one little room, an everywhere," wrote John Donne. Death, in its not-so-different way, does the same. The place of one's final heartbeat is immense, or so it seemed to me at
My friend Tom invited me to visit him in Tbilisi. He's a fearless, openhearted man, an international aid worker who had put in hard time in Rwanda and Sierra Leone. Now, he was the head of child protection for UNICEF in Georgia. "You can stay at my apartment, I've plenty of room. It'll more than
I've been thinking about constricted spaces lately, those crammed, no-exit corners that make us feel diminished in some way, wishing to expand, to break free. In New York, you fit yourself into these spaces daily. They have a way of dictating the very procedure of your mind: the segments, the modules,
