Heartwood favorites – 14 from ‘14

Published 9:13 am Wednesday, December 3, 2014

Below you’ll find the list of books published this year that I most enjoyed.

Heartwood readers know that my main reading interest is older international literary fiction, but I also read new releases, as well as some non-fiction and poetry. Additionally, the old and the new come together when foreign books that were published years ago finally get their first (or a new) English translation.

What I most admire about the books below is what makes them so difficult to write about – their dexterous and creative way with words; their narrative idiosyncrasies, interiority, and perspicacity; the frequent interweaving of other cultural material (especially literature and art); a sense of place uniquely realized and expressed. These books offer fascinating, richly satisfying pleasures to the reader, but consternation to the list-maker who wishes to convey the essence of these reading experiences.

So rather than write my own capsule summaries, I’m simply listing the titles. But you can read summaries or brief reviews in the library catalog by clicking on the titles. For most of the books I’ve also linked to longer reviews from a variety of sources, and for two of them I’ve linked to reviews I did manage to write earlier this year.

I liked most everything I read that was published this year – a rare and happy situation –but these were the cream of the crop. If you like good writing I think you’ll find something here to enjoy.

Fiction

Bridge

by Robert Thomas

BOA Editions 156 pgs.

read more: Bookslut, Kirkus, author website

Hotel Andromeda

by Gabriel Josipovici

Carcanet 139 pgs.

Heartwood review

Harlequin’s Millions (orig. pub. 1981)

by Bohumil Hrabal

trans. Stacey Knecht

Archipelago Books 312 pgs.

read more: Tweed’s, WaPo, Words without Borders

see also: Heartwood on Hrabal’s I Served the King of England

Pushkin Hills (orig. pub. 1983)

by Sergei Dovlatov

trans. Katherine Dovlatov

Counterpoint Press 161 pgs.

Heartwood review

The Professor and the Siren (orig. pub. 1986)

by Guiseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

trans. Stephen Twilley

New York Review Books 69 pgs.

read more: Complete Review, Paris Review

see also: Heartwood review of Tomasi di Lampedusa’s The Leopard

Conversations (orig. pub. 2007)

by César Aira

trans. Katherine Silver

New Directions 88 pgs.

read more: Three Percent, Entropy, Public Books

An Unnecessary Woman

by Rabih Alameddine

Grove Press 291 pgs.

read more: LA Times, Boston Globe, WaPo, SFGate

Unclassifiable Comic Book / Fiction / Non-Fiction Hybrid

Fantomas Versus the Multinational Vampires (orig. pub. 1975)

by Julio Cortázar

trans. David Kurnick

Semiotext(e) 87 pgs.

read more: Complete Review, MIT Press, Three Percent

see also: Heartwood review of Cortázar’s Hopscotch

Non-Fiction

A Place in the Country: On Gottfried Keller, Johann Peter Hebel, Robert Walser, and Others (orig. pub. 1998)

by W.G. Sebald

trans. Jo Catling

Random House 208 pgs.

read more: NY Times, The Spectator, LA Review of Books, Slate

Collection of Sand (orig. pub. 1984)

by Italo Calvino

trans. Martin McLaughlin

Mariner Books 209 pgs.

read more: The Guardian, The Independent, Bookanista

Sidewalks

by Valeria Luiselli

trans. Christina MacSweeney

Coffee House Press 110 pgs.

read more: Asymptote, LA Review of Books, Music &Literature