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. What happens when the writer you admire most becomes your friend? In an essay he published in The New York Times in 1981, the writer Leonard Michaels cited the works of three writers who influenced him—Saul Bellow, Wallace Stevens, and Chekhov. He then wrote: “Finally, the writer who influences me more than any other: Isaac Babel. I never talk about his work.” Implicit was the idea that, if you were a writer, you were a fool or a heretic to say anything about your deepest and most fundamental influence.

[caption id="attachment_1497" align="aligncenter" width="522"] Jesse Bering's Bookshelf[/caption] With more and more books published every year, it's increasingly difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff. Does this increase the usefulness of all the annual "Best of" lists? Perhaps. It's irresistible when a critic distills a year of reading into a simple hierarchy, especially if her tastes match your own. It's just so efficient. I tend to eschew those books awarded the most (or loudest) hosannas in favor of the previously unknown novels that slipped past me at publication. (This year it's Ben Lerner's excellent Leaving the Atocha Station.) Sites like Salon, The Millions, and The Guardian go straight to the authors for their recommendations. I decided to do the same, canvassing our writers and editors. With a couple caveats: First, the editors couldn't choose their own titles; Second, one's choices didn't need to be published in 2011, just read in 2011. Old classics and novels from 2010 and 2009 are all welcome. Some submitted a straightforward list, while others penned brief summaries. (The Spanish-Argentinian novelist Andrés Neuman even separated his list by language.) I hope you'll find your next favorite book among them. Favorite Reads from 2011:

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.

Every month we'll roundup highlights from our Longreads page, where we'll be posting articles, interviews, and stories longer than 2,000 words. (Also keep an eye out for our Twitter posts marked with the #longreads tag.) From the past...

We are thrilled to feature New Yorker "20 Under 40" writer David Bezmozgis reading from his forthcoming novel The Free World (April, 2011). His previous book, Natasha, has become something of a favorite around the offices.