Phil Dyess-Nugent
By Blood, Ellen UllmanUllman made a splash in 1997 with her first book, Close To The Machine: Technophilia And Its Discontents,
a memoir of her time as a computer programmer in the pre-Internet
years, when that was an exotic profession. Her second novel—the first
was 2003’s The Bug—is set in the mid-’70s, and part of its
strange power comes from the way it taps into our awareness of how,
since then, technology has changed to make the simplest form of
pre-Google snooping seem mysterious and epic. The narrator is a
professor who, hiding out in an office after the collapse of his career,
takes to listening in on the psychiatric patient next door as she talks
about her decision to find her birth mother, a quest the professor
takes up himself. The trail leads back to the orphaned Jewish survivors
of World War II, a time as distant, yet as recent, to the narrator as
Ullman’s San Francisco, with its news bulletins about Patty Hearst and
the Zodiac killer, are to contemporary readers. Ullman’s attachment to
the past is a theme running through all her work, and she gets readers
to share it. She’s vividly aware of the changes that can make the
distant past seem like life on another planet, but on another level, as
Faulkner said, the past is never dead; it isn’t even past.
Runner-up: Swimming Studies, Leanne ShaptonShapton is a terrific illustrator and graphic designer, which more people now know thanks to her surprising, brilliant memoir about her swimming career in the late ’80s and early ’90s, which took her to the Canadian Olympic trials. Shapton beautifully describes the experience of swimming, as well as the mixture of excitement, frustration, and self-consciousness that comes from doing anything competitive in the public eye, and her impressionistic descriptions of sights and sensations remembered have the same compact lyricism as her drawings. Her racing days past her, she writes that when she swims for recreation now, “I step into the water as though absent-mindedly touching a scar. My recreational laps are phantoms of my competitive races.”
Zack Handlen
The Wind Through The Keyhole, Stephen KingStephen
King’s Dark Tower series lost its way somewhere around the middle. The
story of Roland of Gilead’s journey to save the universe, and the
companions he met along the way, had all manner of ups and downs, but by
the end, King’s exhaustion was palpable; the final volume, The Dark Tower, is
epic yet abrupt, full of the power of conclusion, but marred by the
impossibility of satisfying several decades’ worth of ambition. The Wind Through The Keyhole, a short, relatively self-contained novel set just before The Wolves Of The Calla, is
simpler and far more satisfying, both by comparison and in its own
right. As Roland and his companions settle in during a supernaturally
destructive storm, Roland tells the story of his first mission, which in
turn becomes a story a much younger Roland told a boy to comfort him
during another great storm. The tale-within-a-tale-within-a-tale
structure is a bit lopsided, and the book takes some time to get warmed
up, but once it does, it’s a richly rewarding fable about love, loss,
and family. Stripping Roland’s world down to its fairy-tale roots
reconnects the series to its iconic power, and even with the
nesting-doll narrative, the story’s directness makes it all the more
affecting.
Runner-up: Back Story, David MitchellAt 38, comic actor and panel-show enthusiast David Mitchell (who is not the novelist David Mitchell) is probably too young to write a memoir. But what Back Story lacks in dramatic incident, it makes up in the author’s wit and candidness. Mitchell chronicles his life from early childhood, to his time at Cambridge, to meeting his heterosexual life mate Robert Webb, and dealing with their (eventual) success. It’s a long monologue, self-effacing, at times hilariously over-thought, yet still disarmingly heartfelt. For fans of Mitchell & Webb, Peep Show, or excellent writing, it’s a delight.
Jason Heller
Lost Everything, Brian Francis SlatteryBrian Francis Slattery’s previous two novels, Spaceman Blues and Liberation, dealt with various levels of collapse or apocalypse in deft yet dizzying ways. But in Lost Everything,
he lets his Armageddon simmer. In the unmarked grave of America
sometime in the future, civilization limps along at a vaguely
19th-century level of scavenged technology and moral retrograde. But Lost Everything
isn’t about the world at large. Although glimpses of America as we know
it—echoes of blues, a sinister trip up the Susquehanna, and
weed-swallowed Three Mile Island—skim across the surface of the
narrative, it’s centered on a man named Sunny Jim, his traveling
companion Reverend Bauxite, and Jim’s journey in search of his young
son. Along the way, they fight for survival against an ocean-sized storm
that sweeps the continent, and a ravaged land. And where Slattery’s
prior books swim in textured prose, he reins in his language in Lost Everything,
meting out skeletal sentences with a ghostly, gracious tenderness.
While many post-collapse novels of recent years, good or otherwise, have
tried to serve as cautionary tales, Slattery embeds his clear views on
issues like climate change and ecology in a stirring allegory that’s as
lyrical and elemental as a folk song. Rarely is a tableau so desolate
suffused with this much teeming, magical humanity.
Runner-up: Marvel Comics: The Untold Story, Sean HoweMany people have told the history of Marvel Comics, many times. But the company’s decade-long rise into a movie powerhouse and pop-cultural dominator cried for an updated, exhaustive revisiting of the company’s epic ups and downs. Sean Howe provides that, and then some, with Marvel Comics: The Untold Story. Tracing the publisher’s underdog triumph throughout the ’60s—a heroic origin tale to rival those of Marvel’s breakout characters, like Spider-Man and The Avengers—as well as its decay and regeneration from the ’70s until now, the book combines immaculate reporting with lush yet penetrating comics criticism. But it’s the central struggle at Marvel’s core that makes The Untold Story sing. The fight for creators’ rights is played out in the earth-shaking conflict between legends and former collaborators Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, a struggle that’s piercingly poignant and culturally important.
Rowan Kaiser
We Are Anonymous, Parmy Olson
The story of how the Anonymous collective of Internet activists exploded into public consciousness would be compelling enough on its own. In We Are Anonymous, journalist Parmy Olson tells that story, primarily through the people who founded the Anonymous splinter group LulzSec. But what makes We Are Anonymous so powerful is the universality of its story. It's about creating organization where none existed, about hierarchical organizations being unable to respond to chaotic groups, about chaotic groups being unable to avoid turning hierarchical, and about how rapid success cannot be maintained. Even beyond that, Olson succeeds with We Are Anonymous as a character study. The people comprising LulzSec—particularly their creative spokesperson “Topiary” and “Kayla,” a talented hacker playing at being a giggly teenaged girl—make sure the book stays compelling as a story beyond its analysis of power structures. It's also well-organized: Olson's decision to bounce around in chronology makes a potentially overcomplicated story easy to grasp. It's a superb demonstration of current-event writing.
The Age Of Miracles, Karen Thompson WalkerThe Age Of Miracles is a feel-bad novel in exactly the right way. As its main character, Julia, tries to navigate her early teen years, the world stops spinning, making days longer and longer. Animals and plants die off, society divides in response to the slow apocalypse, people become sick, and the sun itself becomes dangerous. For adolescents growing up, any setback can be the end of the world, but through Julia's eyes, the actual end of the world is enough. Her growth is charming, even as its background is horrifying. The Age Of Miracles gains extra power as an extended climate-change metaphor, but it's hauntingly elegiac on its own.
Kevin McFarland
This Is How You Lose Her, Junot DíazIt’s
clear now that Junot Díaz will never shake the voice of Yunior de Las
Casas, the ever-present, semi-autobiographical narrator of Díaz’s
previous books, and once again in his second story collection, This Is How You Lose Her.
Yunior is as integral to Díaz as Antoine Doinel to François Truffaut.
The fiction community debates the classification of short-story
collections versus a “novel in stories,” but Díaz’s work transcends
those distinctions: He’s used the same protagonist or narrator in every
single published story, an interconnected fictional patchwork that dates
back almost two decades. This Is How You Lose Her is the story
of how Yunior de Las Casas grows up by lying, cheating, grieving, and
writing—and the metafictional question of whether Díaz or Yunior
authored a story only makes the dense canon more intriguing.
Runner-up: When Captain Flint Was Still A Good Man, Nick DybekThough the title of Nick Dybek’s debut novel references Treasure Island, it follows a different tradition, that of isolated, small-town, blue-collar working communities. Like Herman Melville with his industrial seafaring tales and John Steinbeck with the coastal-town portraits Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday, Dybek creates a bleak, bleary setting in a secluded Washington community dependent on the survival of commercial fishing, and a young protagonist hardened by that crucible environment. Its hypnosis isn’t slow or trancelike; it’s unrelenting and punishing, methodically parsing out the secret necessary evils of trying to keep a sinking ship afloat.
Tasha Robinson
By Blood, Ellen UllmanUllman made a splash in 1997 with her first book, Close To The Machine: Technophilia And Its Discontents,
a memoir of her time as a computer programmer in the pre-Internet
years, when that was an exotic profession. Her second novel—the first
was 2003’s The Bug—is set in the mid-’70s, and part of its
strange power comes from the way it taps into our awareness of how,
since then, technology has changed to make the simplest form of
pre-Google snooping seem mysterious and epic. The narrator is a
professor who, hiding out in an office after the collapse of his career,
takes to listening in on the psychiatric patient next door as she talks
about her decision to find her birth mother, a quest the professor
takes up himself. The trail leads back to the orphaned Jewish survivors
of World War II, a time as distant, yet as recent, to the narrator as
Ullman’s San Francisco, with its news bulletins about Patty Hearst and
the Zodiac killer, are to contemporary readers. Ullman’s attachment to
the past is a theme running through all her work, and she gets readers
to share it. She’s vividly aware of the changes that can make the
distant past seem like life on another planet, but on another level, as
Faulkner said, the past is never dead; it isn’t even past.Runner-up: Swimming Studies, Leanne ShaptonShapton is a terrific illustrator and graphic designer, which more people now know thanks to her surprising, brilliant memoir about her swimming career in the late ’80s and early ’90s, which took her to the Canadian Olympic trials. Shapton beautifully describes the experience of swimming, as well as the mixture of excitement, frustration, and self-consciousness that comes from doing anything competitive in the public eye, and her impressionistic descriptions of sights and sensations remembered have the same compact lyricism as her drawings. Her racing days past her, she writes that when she swims for recreation now, “I step into the water as though absent-mindedly touching a scar. My recreational laps are phantoms of my competitive races.”
Zack Handlen
The Wind Through The Keyhole, Stephen KingStephen
King’s Dark Tower series lost its way somewhere around the middle. The
story of Roland of Gilead’s journey to save the universe, and the
companions he met along the way, had all manner of ups and downs, but by
the end, King’s exhaustion was palpable; the final volume, The Dark Tower, is
epic yet abrupt, full of the power of conclusion, but marred by the
impossibility of satisfying several decades’ worth of ambition. The Wind Through The Keyhole, a short, relatively self-contained novel set just before The Wolves Of The Calla, is
simpler and far more satisfying, both by comparison and in its own
right. As Roland and his companions settle in during a supernaturally
destructive storm, Roland tells the story of his first mission, which in
turn becomes a story a much younger Roland told a boy to comfort him
during another great storm. The tale-within-a-tale-within-a-tale
structure is a bit lopsided, and the book takes some time to get warmed
up, but once it does, it’s a richly rewarding fable about love, loss,
and family. Stripping Roland’s world down to its fairy-tale roots
reconnects the series to its iconic power, and even with the
nesting-doll narrative, the story’s directness makes it all the more
affecting.Runner-up: Back Story, David MitchellAt 38, comic actor and panel-show enthusiast David Mitchell (who is not the novelist David Mitchell) is probably too young to write a memoir. But what Back Story lacks in dramatic incident, it makes up in the author’s wit and candidness. Mitchell chronicles his life from early childhood, to his time at Cambridge, to meeting his heterosexual life mate Robert Webb, and dealing with their (eventual) success. It’s a long monologue, self-effacing, at times hilariously over-thought, yet still disarmingly heartfelt. For fans of Mitchell & Webb, Peep Show, or excellent writing, it’s a delight.
Jason Heller
Lost Everything, Brian Francis SlatteryBrian Francis Slattery’s previous two novels, Spaceman Blues and Liberation, dealt with various levels of collapse or apocalypse in deft yet dizzying ways. But in Lost Everything,
he lets his Armageddon simmer. In the unmarked grave of America
sometime in the future, civilization limps along at a vaguely
19th-century level of scavenged technology and moral retrograde. But Lost Everything
isn’t about the world at large. Although glimpses of America as we know
it—echoes of blues, a sinister trip up the Susquehanna, and
weed-swallowed Three Mile Island—skim across the surface of the
narrative, it’s centered on a man named Sunny Jim, his traveling
companion Reverend Bauxite, and Jim’s journey in search of his young
son. Along the way, they fight for survival against an ocean-sized storm
that sweeps the continent, and a ravaged land. And where Slattery’s
prior books swim in textured prose, he reins in his language in Lost Everything,
meting out skeletal sentences with a ghostly, gracious tenderness.
While many post-collapse novels of recent years, good or otherwise, have
tried to serve as cautionary tales, Slattery embeds his clear views on
issues like climate change and ecology in a stirring allegory that’s as
lyrical and elemental as a folk song. Rarely is a tableau so desolate
suffused with this much teeming, magical humanity.Runner-up: Marvel Comics: The Untold Story, Sean HoweMany people have told the history of Marvel Comics, many times. But the company’s decade-long rise into a movie powerhouse and pop-cultural dominator cried for an updated, exhaustive revisiting of the company’s epic ups and downs. Sean Howe provides that, and then some, with Marvel Comics: The Untold Story. Tracing the publisher’s underdog triumph throughout the ’60s—a heroic origin tale to rival those of Marvel’s breakout characters, like Spider-Man and The Avengers—as well as its decay and regeneration from the ’70s until now, the book combines immaculate reporting with lush yet penetrating comics criticism. But it’s the central struggle at Marvel’s core that makes The Untold Story sing. The fight for creators’ rights is played out in the earth-shaking conflict between legends and former collaborators Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, a struggle that’s piercingly poignant and culturally important.
Rowan Kaiser
We Are Anonymous, Parmy Olson
The story of how the Anonymous collective of Internet activists exploded into public consciousness would be compelling enough on its own. In We Are Anonymous, journalist Parmy Olson tells that story, primarily through the people who founded the Anonymous splinter group LulzSec. But what makes We Are Anonymous so powerful is the universality of its story. It's about creating organization where none existed, about hierarchical organizations being unable to respond to chaotic groups, about chaotic groups being unable to avoid turning hierarchical, and about how rapid success cannot be maintained. Even beyond that, Olson succeeds with We Are Anonymous as a character study. The people comprising LulzSec—particularly their creative spokesperson “Topiary” and “Kayla,” a talented hacker playing at being a giggly teenaged girl—make sure the book stays compelling as a story beyond its analysis of power structures. It's also well-organized: Olson's decision to bounce around in chronology makes a potentially overcomplicated story easy to grasp. It's a superb demonstration of current-event writing.
The Age Of Miracles, Karen Thompson WalkerThe Age Of Miracles is a feel-bad novel in exactly the right way. As its main character, Julia, tries to navigate her early teen years, the world stops spinning, making days longer and longer. Animals and plants die off, society divides in response to the slow apocalypse, people become sick, and the sun itself becomes dangerous. For adolescents growing up, any setback can be the end of the world, but through Julia's eyes, the actual end of the world is enough. Her growth is charming, even as its background is horrifying. The Age Of Miracles gains extra power as an extended climate-change metaphor, but it's hauntingly elegiac on its own.
Kevin McFarland
This Is How You Lose Her, Junot DíazIt’s
clear now that Junot Díaz will never shake the voice of Yunior de Las
Casas, the ever-present, semi-autobiographical narrator of Díaz’s
previous books, and once again in his second story collection, This Is How You Lose Her.
Yunior is as integral to Díaz as Antoine Doinel to François Truffaut.
The fiction community debates the classification of short-story
collections versus a “novel in stories,” but Díaz’s work transcends
those distinctions: He’s used the same protagonist or narrator in every
single published story, an interconnected fictional patchwork that dates
back almost two decades. This Is How You Lose Her is the story
of how Yunior de Las Casas grows up by lying, cheating, grieving, and
writing—and the metafictional question of whether Díaz or Yunior
authored a story only makes the dense canon more intriguing.Runner-up: When Captain Flint Was Still A Good Man, Nick DybekThough the title of Nick Dybek’s debut novel references Treasure Island, it follows a different tradition, that of isolated, small-town, blue-collar working communities. Like Herman Melville with his industrial seafaring tales and John Steinbeck with the coastal-town portraits Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday, Dybek creates a bleak, bleary setting in a secluded Washington community dependent on the survival of commercial fishing, and a young protagonist hardened by that crucible environment. Its hypnosis isn’t slow or trancelike; it’s unrelenting and punishing, methodically parsing out the secret necessary evils of trying to keep a sinking ship afloat.
Tasha Robinson
