(I’m pretty anti-top 10 anything, and end-of-the-year stuff makes me nervous in weird ways, so I apologize for whatever hedging comes through in the following.)
My top discs of the year are, largely, what you’d expect from a nerdy white dude who wears glasses. That said, there were five tracks this year that seemed to over [...]
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The third Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize book is Terese Svoboda’s Black Glasses Like Clark Kent and, like Kate Braverman’s Frantic Transmissions to and from Los Angeles and Ander Monson’s Neck Deep, the book’s a formal phenomenon, structurally interesting and likely to get pegged, somewhat incorrectly, as “experimental.” What the book for sure is is: great and interesting and a good read [...]
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Each year I listen to stacks and stacks of albums, looking for the disc that resonates and moves me and becomes a staple in my audio rotation. And each year delivers a good number of good albums, records worthy of remembering and compiling into a year-end list, albums I then share with friends and set [...]
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Imagine this: you’re dating someone and the two of you are very in love (even though there’s been trouble recently, some friction), and one afternoon when you’re out for coffee, your beloved sees someone across the room, goes and says hello, and several hours later leaves with that person—not just leaves with the other person, [...]
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The dangerous part of writing about Stewart O’Nan’s phenomenal new Last Night at the Lobster is that there’s the temptation to say—truthfully, too—that this is the best novel (novella? It’s 146 pages: you decide) ever written about a restaurant. Far as I know, it’s the best treatment of a restaurant yet committed to page (and [...]
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