Paul La Farge is the author of two novels: The Artist of the Missing (FSG, 1999) and Haussmann, or the Distinction (FSG, 2001); 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. I first had the idea to make an immersive text back in the twentieth century. (I thought of it as a hypertext then, but we’ve since decided to call it an immersive text, to distinguish it from 1990s hypertext, about which see below.) I was working as a Web designer in San Francisco, which in those days was a job you could just kind of fall into. The skills you needed to make Web pages were arcane enough that most people didn’t want to learn them, but not so arcane that they were actually difficult, so I and some friends from Stanford (literature people: I’d just dropped out of their PhD program in Comp Lit) taught ourselves HTML and went into business. We rented an office in South Park, which was the epicenter of the tech industry in San Francisco. Everyone had a business plan. You couldn’t eat lunch in the park without overhearing someone’s scheme to monetize something by putting it on the Web. Once I went out to dinner with a friend, and the head of a software company offered us jobs, just because we were eating dinner in South Park and we looked kind of gangly. (Later the same guy ran off with his company’s money, so it’s just as well we turned him down.)

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.

[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: