As a book reviewer, I get sent a lot of books. I read as many of them as I can. Here I present what to me are four great books I read this year that didn’t get nearly the attention they deserved. I present them in the form of a list, with very brief descriptions.
1) Gyorgy Dragoman, The White King. Beautiful modernist prose by Hungary’s most promising young novelist about life before the Iron Curtain fell. A must-read.
2) Bryan Mealer, All Things Must Fight to Live. Currently the definitive account of war-torn Congo in the past decade by an intrepid, insightful reporter [and, in the interest of full disclosure, a former colleague of mine at Esquire Magazine]. You probably read some of these stories when they appeared in Harper’s.
3) Salvatore Scibona, The End. Possibly the only novel I’ve ever read that legitimately deserves to be called Bellovian. And that’s no small claim. (Also further proof– after Per Petterson and Benjamin Percy and Ander Monson– that Graywolf puts out some of the best, and best looking, literature today.)
One more after the jump!
4) Monica Ferrell, The Answer Is Always Yes. One of our most promising young poets writes a long, involved, sometimes post-modern novel about the high life in NYC in the late ’90’s.
