favorite books of 2013

[In no particular order]

Night Film
by Marisha Pessl

This big, inventive novel is about the dark secrets of a creepy film director, Stanislav Cordova, his mysterious daughter who has fallen to her death, and the investigative journalist who tries to figure out the whole story. But while it’s called a novel, Night Film wants to be a lot more than that. Marisha Pessl uses all kinds of made-up documents: newspaper clippings, photos, police reports, magazine articles supposedly taken from Time and Rolling Stone, and transcripts of chatter on a highly culty, closed online community called The Blackboard, to tell its thriller of a story.

Two or Three Years Later: Forty-nine Digressions
by Ror Wolf

Working in the traditions of Robert Walser, Robert Pinget, and Laurence Sterne, Ror Wolf creates strangely entertaining and condensed stories that call into question the very nature of what makes a story a story. Almost an anti-book, Two or Three Years Later: Forty-Nine Digressions takes as its basis the small, diurnal details of life, transforming these oft-overlooked ordinary experiences of nondescript people in small German villages into artistic meditations on ambiguity, repetition, and narrative.

Incredibly funny and playful, Two or Three Years Later is unlike anything you’ve ever read—from German or any other language. These stories of men observing other men, of men who may or may not have been wearing a hat on a particular Monday (or was it Tuesday?), are delightful word-puzzles that are both intriguing and enjoyable.

The Teleportation Accident
by Ned Beauman

When you haven’t had sex in a long time, it feels like the worst thing that could ever happen. If you’re living in Germany in the 1930s, it probably isn’t. But that’s no consolation to Egon Loeser, whose carnal misfortunes will push him from the experimental theaters of Berlin to the absinthe bars of Paris to the physics laboratories of Los Angeles, trying all the while to solve two mysteries: Was it really a deal with Satan that claimed the life of his hero, Renaissance set designer Adriano Lavicini, creator of the so-called Teleportation Device? And why is it that a handsome, clever, modest guy like him can’t—just once in a while—get himself laid? From Ned Beauman, the author of the acclaimed Boxer, Beetle, comes a historical novel that doesn’t know what year it is; a noir novel that turns all the lights on; a romance novel that arrives drunk to dinner; a science fiction novel that can’t remember what isotopemeans; a stunningly inventive, exceptionally funny, dangerously unsteady and (largely) coherent novel about sex, violence, space, time, and how the best way to deal with history is to ignore it.

BTW: A Novel
by Jarett Kobek

Bad relationships, interracial dating, cross-faith intermarriage, the endless pangs of monogamous love, reality television, Muslim fundamentalism, Crispin Hellion Glover, Internet pornography, Turkish secularism in the era of Erdoğan, the amorous habits of Thomas Jefferson, errant dogs, cheeseburger tattoos, alcoholics without recovery, 9/11 PTSD, female Victorian novelists, the people who go to California to die.

Jarett Kobek’s second novel, BTW, presents the tragicomedy of a young man in Los Angeles balancing a lunatic father, two catastrophic relationships, identity politics, and American pop culture at its most confused.

A Questionable Shape
by Bennett Sims

Mazoch discovers an unreturned movie sleeve, a smashed window, and a pool of blood in his father’s house; the man has gone missing. So he creates a list of his father’s haunts and asks Vermaelen to help track him down.

However, hurricane season looms over Baton Rouge, threatening to wipe out any undead not already contained, and eliminate all hope of ever finding Mazoch’s father.

Bennett Sims turns typical zombie fare on its head to deliver a wise and philosophical rumination on the nature of memory and loss.

The Juliette Society
by Sasha Grey

Film student Catherine has a secret: a long-held dream, the source of all her sexual imaginings. A dream full of desires of which she is ashamed and embarrassed. And these vivid dreams eventually find their way into her everyday life. One night, at a club, she meets at a man who leads her into a strange world. And soon she is drawn toward the Juliette Society, an exclusive secret society in which all the deepest, darkest fantasies are explored. But for those who join this world, there is no turning back.

The Story of My Accident Is Ours
by Rachel Levitsky

A product of over 15 years of writing, this multivalent new work both builds on and departs from Levitsky’s previous efforts, as she traverses a host of contemporary theoretical discourses and concerns: transgendered bodies, social movements, pharmaceutical management of the emotions, and countless others. “The movement revolves around an accident, the exact nature of which is not disclosed. Despite the abstractions inherent in these constraints, I want the document to be accessible, engaging, addictive, and uncomfortable to hold, as in the instance of a suitcase with something vibrating inside.” In this project, the formal poetics of expression confront fiction to create something utterly new.

Personae
by Sergio De La Pava

De La Pava’s (A Naked Singularity) shape-shifting latest is, in part, an upbeat existentialist comedy. We meet Detective Helen Tame (in a chapter titled Our Heroine and Her Work, no less) as she investigates a crime scene, before diving into the writings Tame discovers at the victim’s house. Notebook scribblings include pronouncements against filling with allusive arcana for dimwit professors. Next, a short story depicts a professor musing about loss and posterity as, during a swim, the tide carries him farther and farther from shore. Then, a play, making up almost half the book, presents personae with descriptions like A person, Another person, The first person plural; sometimes they alternate identities (Adam and Not-Adam are one and the same). The characters are trapped, à la No Exit, in an unidentifiable here, debating Sartrean questions about where, who, and why they are, misunderstanding and echoing one another at a hilarious, absurd pitch. But then the novel changes tone, which is appropriate considering it’s already run the gamut of perspectives, genres, and techniques. The conclusions for Helen and the victim, and especially the novella, which wraps up the book, are darker, and more touching. Game readers should have as much fun with this clever experiment as the author seems to have had inventing it, and be challenged by his more serious and troubling questions.

Tampa
by Alissa Nutting

In Alissa Nutting’s novel Tampa, Celeste Price, a smoldering 26-year-old middle-school teacher in Florida, unrepentantly recounts her elaborate and sociopathically determined seduction of a 14-year-old student.

Celeste has chosen and lured the charmingly modest Jack Patrick into her web. Jack is enthralled and in awe of his eighth-grade teacher, and, most importantly, willing to accept Celeste’s terms for a secret relationship—car rides after dark, rendezvous at Jack’s house while his single father works the late shift, and body-slamming erotic encounters in Celeste’s empty classroom. In slaking her sexual thirst, Celeste Price is remorseless and deviously free of hesitation, a monstress of pure motivation. She deceives everyone, is close to no one, and cares little for anything but her pleasure.

Tampa is a sexually explicit, virtuosically satirical, American Psycho–esque rendering of a monstrously misplaced but undeterrable desire. Laced with black humor and crackling sexualized prose, Alissa Nutting’s Tampa is a grand, seriocomic examination of the want behind student / teacher affairs and a scorching literary debut.

Mira Corpora
by Jeff Jackson

Mira Corpora is the debut novel from acclaimed playwright Jeff Jackson, an inspired, dreamlike adventure by a distinctive new talent.

Literary and inventive, but also fast-paced and gripping, Mira Corpora charts the journey of a young runaway. A coming-of-age story for people who hate coming-of-age stories, featuring a colony of outcast children, teenage oracles, amusement parks haunted by gibbons, mysterious cassette tapes, and a reclusive underground rockstar.

With astounding precision, Jackson weaves a moving tale of discovery and self-preservation across a startling, vibrant landscape.

Brief
by Alexandra Chasin

In a funny, angry, hyper-articulate monologue, an art vandal makes a passionate plea to a judge: you, the reader. The vandal has been charged with defacing a masterpiece of modern art, and asks you to consider the following argument: Maybe the way we turn out is less the fault of our parents and more the effect of larger cultural and historical influences — maybe history is the real culprit. Rich with references to the high art, mass culture, political ideologies, and military maneuvers of the post-war era, from the Cold War to the introduction of television, Brief chronicles the formation of an art vandal, until the story explodes in an enactment of temporary insanity.

Hawthorn & Child
by Keith Ridgway

A mind-blowing adventure into a literary fourth dimension: part noir, part London snapshot, all unsettlingly amazing.

Hawthorn and Child are mid-ranking detectives tasked with finding significance in the scattered facts. They appear and disappear in the fragments of this book along with a ghost car, a crime boss, a pick-pocket, a dead racing driver and a pack of wolves. The mysteries are everywhere, but the biggest of all is our mysterious compulsion to solve them.

We Need New Names
by NoViolet Bulawayo

Darling is only ten years old, and yet she must navigate a fragile and violent world. In Zimbabwe, Darling and her friends steal guavas, try to get the baby out of young Chipo’s belly, and grasp at memories of Before. Before their homes were destroyed by paramilitary policemen, before the school closed, before the fathers left for dangerous jobs abroad.

But Darling has a chance to escape: she has an aunt in America. She travels to this new land in search of America’s famous abundance only to find that her options as an immigrant are perilously few. NoViolet Bulawayo’s debut calls to mind the great storytellers of displacement and arrival who have come before her-from Junot Diaz to Zadie Smith to J.M. Coetzee - while she tells a vivid, raw story all her own.