David Levithan is the author of The Lover’s Dictionary and of many acclaimed young-adult novels, including the New York Times bestselling Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist (with Rachel Cohn). He is also the editorial director at Scholastic and the founding editor of the PUSH imprint. The Lover’s Dictionary continues on Twitter @loversdiction. So many of my friends are finally reading Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games and then immediately asking me what to read next. To which I reply: Start with M. T. Anderson’s Feed, which is a different kind of dystopia but just as scary in its own way. I read it for the eighth or ninth time this year, and the future it portrays keeps getting closer and closer. Then there’s Maggie Stiefvater’s The Scorpio Races, which has such a singular, compelling vision that it’s hard to adequately describe. Just let yourself be taken away by it, as you’re taken away by The Hunger Games. (Full disclosure: I was an editor on both books.) Finally, be on the lookout next year for Jennifer Nielsen’s The False Prince, which I’ve already read twice now.
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Paul La Farge is the author of three novels: The Artist of the Missing (FSG, 1999), Haussmann, or the Distinction (FSG, 2001), and Luminous Airplanes (FSG, 2011); and a book of imaginary dreams, The Facts of Winter. His short stories have appeared in McSweeney’s, Harper’s Magazine, Fence, Conjunctions, and elsewhere. His nonfiction appears in The Believer, Bookforum, Playboy, and Cabinet. He lives in upstate New York. Summer camp is on my mind for some reason—maybe things have got so bad, finally, that I miss it—and so my list of favorite 2011 books takes the form of an end-of-camp awards ceremony. Please step up to the campfire when I call your name.
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David Bezmozgis was born in Riga, Latvia, in 1973. His first book, Natasha and Other Stories, won a regional Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and was a 2004 New York Times Notable Book. His second book, The Free World, was published by FSG in March 2011. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow and a Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library. In 2010, he was named one of The New Yorker’s “20 Under 40.” You can follow him on Twitter @dbezmozgis. I’ve written elsewhere about my admiration for Hervé Le Tellier’s Enough About Love and Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams. Both were among my favorite books of 2011. But I’d forgotten to mention two wonderful essay collections. One is by FSG’s own John Jeremiah Sullivan. I’ve been a fan of his since his Blood Horses came out in 2004. I remember getting an advance copy of it and reading it on a transatlantic flight from Rome to Los Angeles and not only admiring it tremendously but also being moved to tears by some of the writing. Since then, I’ve tried to keep up with some of Sullivan’s output in GQ and The Paris Review. It’s great to see so many of those pieces collected in Pulphead and to see the book get the attention it deserves. But there was another terrific essay collection in 2011 by another of my favorite American essayists, Arthur Krystal. The collection, Except When I Write, gathers many of the reviews and essays Krystal has published over the last several years, mostly from The New Yorker and Harper’s. These essays are different from Sullivan’s because Krystal’s are more strictly reviews of other books—though to say that doesn’t give the essays their due. Krystal manages to do what the best literary critics do, which is both to engage with the texts and to say something larger about the culture and, implicitly, about the critic. There are few people who do this with the intelligence, erudition, and wit of Krystal.
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Sean McDonald is the executive editor and director of paperback publishing at FSG. To be clear, I agree with everyone else: The three best books of 2011 are Frank Bill’s Crimes in Southern Indiana, John Jeremiah Sullivan’s Pulphead, and Héctor Tobar’s Barbarian Nurseries. But you want me to think beyond the walls of FSG. That makes my head hurt, but here goes. 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami I’m obsessed with Tokyo and a bit of a Murakami nut, so maybe I’m not to be trusted on this one. It’s a crazier book than most are letting on, but I like that about it. It may have its problems, but they mostly reflect falling short while taking impossible risks. Maybe because Murakami seems to keep having so much fun, the failings never (for me) got in the way of enjoying the reading and admiring the fireworks. Reamde by Neal Stephenson It’s a giant, pulpy techno-thriller, and as entertaining and implausible as that suggests. But it’s an extremely smart and insightful giant, pulpy techno-thriller in which the implausible characters doing implausible things feel whole and human, engaged with a world that’s undeniably ours, just presented in a way that reveals a series of new, exhilarating perspectives. The Information by James Gleick As if my fiction choices weren’t nerdy (and impossibly long) enough . . . This, for me, was probably the book of the year—erudite, urgent, definitive, beautiful.
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Caleb Scharf is the director of the Astrobiology Center at Columbia University, and his book, Gravity’s Engines, will be published in August 2012 under the Scientific American / Farrar, Straus and Giroux imprint. Scharf’s blog Life, Unbounded was named one of the “hottest...
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Jesse Coleman is an associate editor at FSG. For me, 2011 was the year of rereading, and my favorite reads of the year were books that I have read before: Mating by Norman Rush The Bathroom by Jean-Philippe Toussaint Erasure by Percival Everett The Laughing Policeman...
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Anthony Giardina is the author of four previous novels, most recently White Guys, and one collection of stories. His novel Norumbega Park will be published by FSG in January 2012. His short fiction and essays have appeared in Harper’s Magazine, Esquire, GQ,...
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Ellen Ullman is the author of a novel, The Bug, a New York Times Notable Book and runner-up for the PEN/Hemingway Award, and the cult classic memoir Close to the Machine, based on her years as a rare female computer programmer in the early...
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Christopher Tilghman is the author of two short-story collections, In a Father’s Place and The Way People Run, and two novels, Mason’s Retreat and Roads of the Heart. His next novel, The Right-Hand Shore, will be published by FSG in May 2012. Currently ...
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Ryan Chapman is the online marketing manager at FSG, and produces this very site. Pulphead by John Jeremiah Sullivan Hark! A Vagrant by Kate Beaton The Road to Somewhere by James Reeves The Chairs Are Where the People Go: How to Live, Work, and Play in the City...
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Andrés Neuman was born in 1977 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He has a degree in Spanish philology from the University of Granada. Neuman was selected as one of Granta’s Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists and was elected to the Bogotá-39 list. Traveler...
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Daniel Chamovitz is a biologist and the director of the Manna Center for Plant Biosciences at Tel Aviv University. You can find Chamovitz’s website here and follow him @DanielChamovitz. His book What a Plant Knows: A Field Guide to the...
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Jesse Bering is a scholar in residence at Wells College. He is a regular columnist at scientificamerican.com and a frequent contributor to Slate, and he has appeared on NPR, Playboy Radio, and more. He is the author of The Belief Instinct and Why...
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Héctor Tobar, now a weekly columnist for the Los Angeles Times, is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and a novelist. He is the author of Translation Nation, The Tattooed Soldier, and most recently, The Barbarian Nurseries. The son of Guatemalan immigrants, he is a...
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Mitzi Angel is the publisher of Faber and Faber. The House in Paris by Elizabeth Bowen The Stories of John Cheever by John Cheever Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner Patriotic Gore by Edmund Wilson All Authors' and Editors' Favorite Reads of 2011 The...
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Amy Waldman was co-chief of the South Asia bureau of The New York Times. Her fiction has appeared in The Atlantic and the Boston Review and is anthologized in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2010. She lives with her family in Brooklyn.
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Justin Taylor is the author of The Gospel of Anarchy and Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever. Check him out at http://www.justindtaylor.net These next books are mostly titles published this year, but also a few things that I finally got around to. The Bigger...
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Amelia Gray grew up in Tucson, Arizona. Her first collection of stories, AM/PM, was published in 2009. Her second collection, Museum of the Weird, was awarded the Ronald Sukenick/American Book Review Innovative Fiction Prize. She lives in Los Angeles. THREATS (FSG, March...
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Daniel Orozco’s stories have appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Mystery Stories, The Best American Essays, and the Pushcart Prize anthology, as well as in publications such as Harper’s Magazine, Zoetrope: All-Story, McSweeney’s, Ecotone, and StoryQuarterly. He was awarded...
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James Renner is the author of two books of nonfiction that detail his adventures in investigative journalism: Amy: My Search for Her Killer and The Serial Killer’s Apprentice. His novel The Man from Primrose Lane will be published by Sarah Crichton Books...