The Paris Review Staff’s Favorite Books of 2019
Lydia Davis. Photo: © Theo Cote.
Was it worth plowing through this year, after all? The jury has a few more days on that, but a compelling argument came in last month, when Lydia Davis’s Essays One hit the shelves. Even just as a physical object, it is delightful: a small, pleasantly chubby book, the jacket a grassy and somehow optimistic green, the design unadorned, as though there is nothing more you need to know than title and author. (It makes a nice companion to her collected stories—similar in size and shape, green against orange.) The delights continue inside. Davis is speaking of reading Lucia Berlin when she writes, “This is the way we like to be when we’re reading—using our brains, feeling our hearts beat,” but the phrase applies well to this book: it’s an experience in an active, alive sort of reading, sensitive and attuned. Sitting with the book felt as though someone had come in to gently adjust my antennae, helping clarify signals in what had seemed just noise. And in any case, this book is part promise: that One in the title, those notes in the preface—there is more to come. —Hasan Altaf
T Fleischmann. Photo: May Allen.
At the risk of sounding hyperbolic, 2019 felt like the year when civilization teetered definitively toward collapse. Notre Dame burned down, authoritarian governments shut off the internet, a child sailed across the ocean to tell us we were destroying the planet—all of which, of course, is not to mention our own president or what’s happening in England. This past January feels impossibly long ago—how innocent we were then, when we still thought we might find resolution in the Mueller Report or the Game of Thrones finale—and yet Sarah Moss’s Ghost Wall still feels as vivid to me as the cold day on which I read it. It’s a book about willfully severing our ties from civilization, and the dormant brutality that lies under the surface in us all. Adolescent Silvie’s obsessive, controlling father forces their family onto an anthropological mission where they, along with a class of college students, live in the woods of England as primitively as early man, foraging for food and bathing in streams. As the past rises up around them and a terrifying masculine violence is unleashed, Silvie sneaks off for snacks at the gas station. I have rarely felt so gripped by a narrator’s voice. From within the sways of puberty, Sylvie possesses the cynicism and clarity only the newfound loss of one’s own innocence can bring. It’s a deceptively slim book for how full a soul it contains.
Another book I carried with me this year was T Fleischmann’s . As explicitly sexy as it is intelligent, it’s a genuinely radical text that transcends genre: part essay, part poem, part art criticism, part history, part intimate letter to a friend. It feels written not for the world as it is but for the world as it should be. The book is unapologetically addressed to a queer audience, set in a milieu where anticapitalism is the baseline and no one’s gender is normative, and where none of these things need to be explained. It’s an ode to human, which makes murdering one’s husband sound perfectly logical, and Rebecca Godfrey’s impressive feat of reporting , which examines the deadly brutality of teenage girls. Perhaps I was seeking anger this year, or the feeling of transcendence that can be found when things break irreparably open.
