This year, we’d like to specially feature our amazing friends at Brilliant Books, who style themselves “your local, long distance bookstore.” Though they feature a brick-and-mortar store in Traverse City, Michigan, Brilliant Books distinguish themselves as being one of the largest independent online book retailers in the country, and a crucial example of success in the fight to preserve independent bookstore culture. To show off their incredible selection and promote their mission, nearly all the titles in this year’s wrap-up link directly to the work available for purchase at Brilliant Books’ website, brilliant-books.net. For those books they don’t carry, we link directly to the publisher.
Sydney Ortiz, social media editor: My reading journey is always changing and I’ve read some incredible books this year. I mostly read fiction, but I try to mix in nonfiction and poetry is my true love. My favorite fiction books I read this year are The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen and My Monticello by Jocelyn Nicole Johnson. I learned so much from The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow. And the poetry collection The Sunflower Cast a Spell to Save Us From The Void by Jackie Wang spoke to me and shocked me in equal measures.
Jacqueline Schaalje, translation editor: I enjoyed reading all the books I reviewed this year, from The Owner of the Sea by Richard Price (read the review here), to Concerning My Daughter by Kim Hye-jin (read the review here). Some poetry books I admired, though not new from this year, were Lebanese-American poet Jess Rizkallah’s the magic my body becomes, which conjures up interesting landscapes of longing without all the cliché Middle-Eastern exoticisms, and collections by A.E. Stallings whose formal virtuosity blew me away. Sarah Hall’s beautifully upsetting stories and novels are about people shape-shifting or having to cope with sudden hostile environments. As I’m into archeology, I found Kara Cooney’s books about (female) power in ancient Egypt riveting. I also listened to Annie Ernaux’s The Years as an English audio book in my car, while slaloming bikes and scooters and shouting: “It wasn’t as bad as all that! Was it?!” Then, realizing things took place several decades before I was born. Lucas Kennard’s prose Notes on the Sonnets has a narrator at a party creating voltas for us and fresh looks at key Shakespeare concepts.
Kirk Sever, fiction editor: I read more than usual this year, mostly because I drank less, so I didn’t know what to do with myself at night. My readings seemed to settle into categories according to readability. My most relaxing reads were like watching popcorn television, such as the novels The Good German, A Game of Thrones, Leviathan Wakes, and Gone Girl. Good fun all around. Then there were the inscrutably awful, head-scratching, eye-clawing texts that I don’t recommend to anyone, like VALIS and Babel-17 – *insert barfing sound*. On the other hand, some of my most challenging reads provided rewarding moments of revelatory insight, though they also left me feeling a bit dumb, like Shadow of the Torturer and Blood Meridian. Read those, I dare you. But my favorite book of the year was Klara and the Sun. Just thinking about the characters in Ishiguro’s latest has my throat straining against tears. Books like that are why we read.
Lisa Ströhm Winberg, culture editor: The pandemic left us with various losses. A world that stopped spinning. Death. Never before had people come together to fight against such a strong, yet invisible, killer, only to find themselves more isolated than ever before. Now death has another face, a visible face. He’s a maniac who speaks Russian.
In the midst of all the heartache, worrying and anxiety it is easy to lose track of oneself. Our goals become secondary. Sometimes it might even feel selfish to dream. We update news sites frantically and are constantly reminded of the unpredictability of life. Do we even dare to dream?
Reading The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho helped me realize that just because the world is crumbling, it doesn’t mean your dreams should crumble with it. You have to keep fighting to fulfill your dreams. And listen to the omens, or you’ll end up like the crystal merchant on top of the hill. Whatever your calling is, it will keep calling, just like the prayer’s chant in Mecca.
The Alchemist is a beautifully written novel. In this philosophical tale we get to follow Santiago, an Andalusian shepherd, on his quest to find worldly treasure. The omens guide him to another land and take him across the desert to Egypt. While on his journey Santiago has several encounters with people who ultimately make him realize the importance of letting one’s heart lead the way. He is being taught the wisdom of how one should keep following one’s dreams, no matter the circumstances. Call it an omen, or the universe conspiring, but The Alchemist came to me when I needed it the most. It reminded me of the time I had a fire within, when I didn’t feel selfish for having dreams, the time before the permacrisis. The book became a wake-up call for me, and forced me to stop resting in a dreamless sleep.
Raki Kopernik, fiction editor: I love short stories and novellas. One of the best story collections I read this year was Lydia Conklin’s Rainbow Rainbow. The stories focus on queer, trans, and nonbinary characters navigating relationships and gender identity in the modern world. I had the pleasure of interviewing Lydia for MAYDAY. You can find the interview here.
I also read The Shame, by Makenna Goodman, a novella/short novel about a young woman struggling with her identity after moving to the country. The Shame was published by Milkweed Editions, a Twin Cities press. I’m partial to including small press and local (to me) books and writers in my reading lists.
Finally, I’m still working through Dream Pop Origami by Jackson Bliss, who I discovered through Unsolicited Press, another small press out of Portland, OR. Bliss is a mixed-race hapa writer and his book is a hybrid memoir of stories and list poems about his racial identity, as well as all the other complex and nuanced identities we weave around in life.
All worth the time and attention. Always recommend finding hidden gems in small press, queer, BIPOC and mixed-race writers. Intricate identities make for beautiful art.
Pepper Cunningham, translation editor: Standing on the precipice of great change in my own life, this year I’ve been drawn to work that grapples with better understanding my own experiences and all of the different and beautiful and terrifying ways you can fit into the world around you. I loved No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood and On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong. Some other big standouts: After devouring Carmen Maria Machado’s short stories, I finally picked up her memoir In The Dream House, some of the finest and most unique writing I’ve encountered. Not only were the parallels to my own experiences of abuse in queer relationships astonishing and heart wrenching, but the fantasy and horror narrative tropes made for a fascinating and genre-defying take on something I’ve struggled to put into words for years.
The poetry I loved the most was Chennai, India-based Tinashi Doshi’s A God At The Door, published by Copper Canyon Press. I read it while on a train in India and trying to get some context for where I was in the world. I was absolutely felled by her ability to embroider the sacred mundane into the cosmic expanse of the universe with sharp wit, feminist rage and a deep appreciation for nature. She tackles the big issues with precision and deftly interlaces delicate details that made me cry from the first poem onward. I’ll never stop talking about this collection.
Currently reading (and adoring): The Taiga Syndrome by Cristina Rivera Garza, translated by Suzanne Jill Levine and Aviva Kana.
Nathan Winer, assistant managing editor: The first of my favorite reads of the year has to allow for some slight cheating, because I began it in December of 2021, but I can’t not include Turgenev’s A Sportsman’s Notebook. These stories are more like character sketches, really, and as such the power of them comes entirely from Turgenev’s keen eye for finding the humanity in everyone. The other story collection that really shined this year was Morgan Talty’s debut, Night of the Living Rez, which deserves all the accolades it’s quickly earning.
Tie for favorite standalone novel is between Adam Levin’s latest, Mount Chicago, or David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, two stories which feel so drastically different, but both grabbed me immediately and would not let me go until I finished them. In a year in which I was doing a lot of concurrent reading, finding two separate novels that didn’t give me headspace for anything else was a treat. Also high on this list has to be Emily St. John Mandel’s Sea of Tranquility, but I’d be lying if I didn’t admit this was partially because I found a lot of echoes of my interview with her in certain sections of the book.
A few books I’m thankful to friends for: One of my closest pals lent me her copy of Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend over a calendar year ago, and I just got around to reading it this summer—a huge oversight on my part for not devouring it immediately. Also, early on in the magazine’s relaunch, fellow MAYDAY editor Cal Shook mentioned she had recently finished reading Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet, and because I’m a particular person I had to read them all along the right timeline; Autumn was last year, but throughout 2022 I read Winter, Spring, and Summer, and can’t recommend them all enough.
Lastly, on a night I needed something to genuinely make me feel, George Saunders’ slim little Fox 8 really did the trick.
Chase Erwin, managing editor: I’ve followed poet Karyna McGlynn’s career ever since someone correctly predicted I’d love I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill A Girl, so I looked very much forward to her latest. Yet, even with all the excitement, 50 Things Kate Bush Taught Me about the Multiverse exceeded my expectations. It went beyond her debut and her second release Hothouse by finally achieving the delicate synthesis between delightfully performative wit and nourishing, insightful wisdom for which, in my view, her poetry has always strived. You leave laughing, but also enlightened.
Long considered a hidden gem of particular brilliance among the many splendors of the NYRB Classics collection, John Williams’ campus novel Stoner glared at me from my bookshelf for most of the year. So when I picked it up, I did so with the feeling that it was long overdue. Nonetheless, I was not prepared. I found Williams’ novel, written with beautiful yet incisive prose, an absolutely and unbearably devastating read. I’ve read plenty of good books that gave me pause. Stoner left me paralyzed.
Finally, a book that came to me late in the year but captivated me instantly: S. Elizabeth’s The Art of the Occult: A Visual Sourcebook for the Modern Mystic. Elizabeth’s survey of the influence of occult ideas in Western art substitutes erudition with intimacy. Sometimes blithely, but always compellingly, she makes connections between periods, styles, schools and entire cultures, animated in her search by her broad knowledge of artistic practice and her passion for the esoteric. Up close, these connections vibrate with enthusiasm, but taken as a whole, the way the book is organized also offers a compelling and refreshing way of understanding how the various branches and practices of occult knowledge relate to each other through the lived experience of the practitioner.
