Salon Book Awards
Best fiction of 2006
This year, stories from five extraordinary writers about Africa, 9/11's aftermath and the Civil War captivated us the most.
Africa, race and 21st century global paranoia are the prevailing themes in our favorite books this year — less a reflection of the immediate moment than of the way ideas and events slowly make their way through the imaginations of talented writers and emerge, transfigured, long after the headlines have turned yellow. Literature, as Ezra Pound put it, is news that stays news. We expect that people will be reading these books for many, many years to come.
“What Is the What” by Dave Eggers
The unusual provenance of this novel — Eggers has written it in the first-person voice of a real man, Valentino Achak Deng, and all of the events in the story are true, although not all of them happened to Deng — is complicated. The result is sublime simplicity, the ego-less conveyance by Eggers of Deng’s plain-spoken, gentle, world-weary but never hopeless voice. One of the Lost Boys of Sudan, Deng saw his village destroyed by Arab militiamen as a little boy and fled alone into a chaotic landscape before joining a troupe of similarly dispossessed boys on an epic journey on foot to a refugee camp in Ethiopia. Hunger, thirst, lions, crocodiles and soldiers on both sides of Sudan’s civil war harried all of them and killed some. Deng finally made it to the promised land of America, but we know from the start that it proved to be no paradise. The novel’s framing device — Deng imagines telling his life story to thieves who beat and bind him while robbing his house and to the jaded officials who deal with the crime’s aftermath — is inspired; instead of making him pitiful, this silent appeal emphasizes Deng’s remarkable, ineradicable dignity.
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“Twilight of the Superheroes” by Deborah Eisenberg
Deborah Eisenberg’s short stories seem ready-made for this age of overcommitment. In just a few deceptively straightforward pages you get all the depth, breadth and nuance that other writers require whole novels to build. The stories in this newest collection are all tinged to one degree or another by 9/11, but the attacks don’t feature as significantly as the depredations of age, psychiatric fragility and that chronic weakness of Eisenberg characters, self-doubt. (Tellingly, the one story here that makes 9/11 its main focus — the title story, unfortunately — is the only disappointment.) What lifts Eisenberg’s work above the usual fiction in this mode is her uncanny ability, shared only with Alice Munro, to conjure an entire multifarious life in the span of a few incidents. This gives her stories an unusual suspense; you’re always waiting for the moment when the spell takes its effect and a human being materializes right before your very eyes.
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“A Disorder Peculiar to the Country” by Ken Kalfus
It makes perfect sense that the best novel about 9/11 — a collective memory by now encrusted in a layer of pieties — would be a biting satire. Kalfus chronicles the awful divorce of New Yorkers Joyce and Marshall; things have gotten so acrimonious that when each one suspects the other has died in the tragedy, they both secretly rejoice. Don’t mistake this for a book about how 9/11 affected our personal lives, though. Instead, it’s for every nice middle-class American who pleads astonishment at the malice and savagery of the attacks. Kalfus shows us that the far-off national conflicts we find so baffling and complicated actually work a lot like a really bad divorce — both are furious clashes between people who can’t get along but who also can’t escape each other. And let’s face it: Most of us know a lot more about divorce than we do about the Middle East. The novel’s story — rich with betrayals and outrageous antics and a couple of expertly drawn and miserable kids — never staggers under its thematic load. It remains always razor sharp, true to life, light on its feet and sneakily tragic.
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“Wizard of the Crow” by Ngugi Wa Thiong’o
Novels about African dictatorships are supposed to be dour and educational, the literary equivalent of Brussels sprouts — good for you if not especially tasty. The great Kenyan novelist Ngugi Wa Thiong’o capsizes that formula with “Wizard of the Crow,” an outrageously entertaining, madcap political farce set in the fictional nation of Aburiria, whose despot is known only as The Ruler and has been running things for as long as anyone can remember. When the book’s educated but destitute hero, fleeing a police constable, tries to throw the cop off his trail with a sign boasting of the awesome powers of the Wizard of the Crow, he inadvertently sets himself up as the sorcerer du jour. Soon, he’s mixed up in the affairs of scheming government ministers, fatuous businessmen, a ruthless political climber and an elusive band of rebels. The novel is full of disguises, mistaken identities, tall tales, slapstick, hairs-breadth escapes and double-crosses. Ngugi’s political satire is deep enough to apply to Midwestern regional marketing managers in addition to strutting West African tyrants — aren’t all tyrants the same, after all? — because its real subject is human folly in all its many, hilarious and heartbreaking forms.
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“Amalgamation Polka” by Stephen Wright
This is not your grandfather’s Civil War novel, but who would expect that from Stephen Wright, that rare combination of literary wild man and flawless prose stylist? A Candide-like figure named Liberty Fish — child of a renegade Southern belle and the Yankee abolitionist she eloped with — joins the Union army and wends his way back to his maternal grandfather’s plantation. Along the way, he meets all sorts of people — pirates, soldiers, preachers and con men — most of them driven half (or all the way) mad by their inability to make the American dream of freedom and the American reality of race add up to anything plausible. At the end of his journey he finds the heart of the nightmare in its ultimate, florid, night-blooming manifestation: his demented grandfather, Asa, trying to create — avant Norman Mailer — a white negro. This novel is a plummet down the black rabbit hole of American utopianism, with the brakes off and the seat belts removed, and it’s one hell of a ride.
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What was your favorite book of 2006? E-mail us a few sentences about it at bestbooks@salon.com before Thursday and we’ll publish your picks at the end of the week.
Laura Miller is a senior writer for Salon. She is the author of "The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia" and has a Web site, magiciansbook.com. More Laura Miller.
Hillary Frey is the Books editor at Salon. More Hillary Frey.
Best debuts of 2006
The creator of a wisecracking high-school sleuth and a moving graphic memoirist wowed us this year with outstanding first books.
The fixation on first books often seems misplaced. (And we’ve fudged the distinction a little ourselves, since our choice for best nonfiction debut has been writing a fiction comic strip for years.) Still, there’s nothing like spotting talent in its first white-hot bolt from the gate, which is definitely the case with our fiction selection. The best thing about both of these writers is that we expect them to be moving and delighting us for decades to come.
Fiction:
“Special Topics in Calamity Physics” by Marisha Pessl
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Laura Miller is a senior writer for Salon. She is the author of "The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia" and has a Web site, magiciansbook.com. More Laura Miller.
Hillary Frey is the Books editor at Salon. More Hillary Frey.
Our favorite books
From a gripping novel about terrorism to the memoir of a cross-country stripteaser, we pick the best -- that is, the most pleasurable -- reading experiences of 2001.
Like many other things, our reading life had a big hole in it in 2001. For about two months after Sept. 11, we read nothing but books about Afghanistan, terrorism and the Middle East (our two top recommendations: Ahmed Rashid’s still-relevant “Taliban” and Peter Bergen’s “Holy War, Inc.”). When we snapped out of it in mid-November, we had a lot of catching up to do, which is why this time around Salon’s annual book awards are coming out a bit late.
It was a great year for fiction, mostly because of a handful of deep, true, funny and otherwise wonderful books rather than an abundance of pretty darn good ones. Nonfiction, which usually sneaks up and steals our hearts away at the end of the year, offered fewer enthralling page-turners and more substantive fare. Since we’ve always made it a policy to offer you a 10-best list without spinach — noble endeavors are welcome but they must be slog-free — we wound up disqualifying many worthy, important and otherwise influential tomes if we felt they couldn’t beguile us through this year’s especially unsettled hours of air travel.
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Laura Miller is a senior writer for Salon. She is the author of "The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia" and has a Web site, magiciansbook.com. More Laura Miller.
Salon Book Awards
Ten books from 2000 we wished would never end.
This year marks the fifth anniversary of the Salon Book Awards, with a bit of continuity (Laura Miller has participated all five years) and a bit of fresh blood (this is Maria Russo’s first shot at it). On the following pages you’ll find lists of our favorite books of fiction and nonfiction published in 2000 — five of each.
Although almost everything else about Salon.com has changed (including that domain name) since we drew up our very first list in 1996, we’re still sticking by the mission we set for ourselves back then. The 10 books we present to you here aren’t necessarily the most critically acclaimed, or by the most widely revered authors, and you won’t find many bestsellers among them, either. But we loved them, we couldn’t put them down; we rifled through their pages like a thief through a jewel box, knowing that we’d found treasure.
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Laura Miller is a senior writer for Salon. She is the author of "The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia" and has a Web site, magiciansbook.com. More Laura Miller.
Maria Russo has been a writer and editor at The Los Angeles Times, The New York Observer and Salon, and is a regular contributor to the New York Times Book Review. More Maria Russo.
Salon Book Awards
Ten titles that kept us up all night in 1999
Fiction
“Cryptonomicon” by Neal Stephenson
“Motherless Brooklyn” by Jonathan Lethem
“Original Bliss” by A.L. Kennedy
“Plainsong” by Kent Haruf
“A Prayer for the Dying” by Stewart O’Nan
Laura Miller is a senior writer for Salon. She is the author of "The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia" and has a Web site, magiciansbook.com. More Laura Miller.
Craig Seligman is the author of "Sontag & Kael: Opposites Attract Me," and an editor at Absolute New York.
Original Bliss
Original Bliss
Somewhere within her ten thousand million cells of thinking, she remembered when loneliness had been only an easily remedied misunderstanding of nature, because there had always been Something Else there, just out of reach. He had, at times, been more or less revealed, but had been always, absolutely, perpetually there: God. Her God. Infinitely accessible and a comfort in her flesh, He’d been her best kind of love. He’d willingly been a companion, a parent, a friend and He’d given her something she discovered other people rarely had: an utterly confident soul. Because Mrs. Brindle had never known an unanswered prayer. For decades, she had knelt and closed her eyes and then felt her head turn in to lean against the hot Heart of it all. The Heart had given round her, given her everything, lifted her, rocked her, drawn off unease and left her beautiful. Mrs. Brindle had been beautiful with faultless regularity.
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You don’t have to follow every kink in the Byzantine plot of Stephenson’s tour de force novel (thank God) to enjoy it thoroughly. “Cryptonomicon” juxtaposes a handful of eccentric mathematical geniuses enlisted as cryptographers in World War II with a band of contemporary high-tech entrepreneurs trying to set up a “data haven” in a remote jungle island near the Philippines. And while the book’s primary concern (beyond the allure of secrecy) seems to be the elaborately artful rituals of deceit that both war and business necessitate, Stephenson’s novel is also both a the-way-we-live-now portrait of the new information economy and a ripping World War II adventure that includes a grueling trek through the jungle and a riveting expedition to salvage a sinking submarine. It’s a hell of a ride that throws in, among other delights, theories of cryptography, mathematical charts of the sexual appetite and various famous figures from the birth of computing for good measure.
It’s a mystery with a solution that won’t surprise anybody, but months after you’ve read it what you remember is not the outcome but the endearing central character, Lionel “Freakshow” Essrog, a would-be private eye with Tourette’s syndrome. Lionel’s feverish brain sends the standard obscenities spewing out of his helpless mouth, but what fascinates Lethem about Tourette’s is its obsessive-compulsive mauling and molding of language; he turns pathology into poetry and gives his jittery, galumphing narrator a poet’s sensitivity. The story of this lost soul and his hunt for the killer of the penny-ante thug who rescued him from a Brooklyn orphanage is too sad and strange to sit comfortably in the contours of a genre novel, but the originality of Lethem’s hero and the sputtering joy of his tic-pocked language take the book to a level that not many novels, genre or otherwise, can match.
An abused wife who’s lost her faith; a brilliant self-help guru addicted to violent porn: Although “Original Bliss” is, deep down, a conventional love story, you never get the feeling that you’ve been there before. In this funny, brutal and wonderfully touching book, Glaswegian novelist A.L. Kennedy doesn’t shy away from the big questions, but under her hard intelligence beats a heart of cotton candy. The book is a page-turner that teases you until the very end with the question: Can these two people, so wildly unlike and so clearly made for each other, escape their demons, spiritual and sexual, in each other’s damaged arms?
A schoolteacher’s wife leaves him, and their sons (9 and 10) have to learn how to get along with her gone. A pregnant teenager, thrown out of her house, takes refuge with two ornery old bachelor ranchers, whose initial distress gives way in time to helpless, comical love. If Kent Haruf’s profoundly simple and sentimental novel about a few decent people in an unremarkable High Plains town had hit a single false note, the whole delicate structure would have crumbled. But not the least of the book’s miracles is the matter-of-fact lightness with which it sustains its melancholy sweetness; the greatest may be the ease (or seeming ease) with which it reconciles the all but irreconcilable legacies of Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner.
Stewart O’Nan’s short novel takes place some years after the Civil War, in the bucolic town of Friendship, Wis., which with little warning finds itself quarantined during a catastrophic diphtheria epidemic and simultaneously threatened by an advancing fire. The narrator and Job-like hero — Friendship’s sheriff, preacher and undertaker all in one — has to make bitter choices, sealing off the town (and, thus, escape) as he watches his friends and loved ones die. And then he is left to learn that even the hardest choices can still be the wrong ones. The beauty and the horror are inextricably, almost obscenely joined; few novelists have gazed as unblinkingly on that union as O’Nan does in this great and shattering book.
A real nail-biter, Mark Bowden’s account of the 1993 raid on Mogadishu that resulted in the deaths of 18 American servicemen and more than 500 Somalis has been called one of the most accurate accounts of combat ever. With no experience in battle and little more with battle scenes, we can only testify that it’s a dazzlingly lucid, hair-raising depiction of total chaos. Bowden presents the conflict from dozens of points of view, including those of Somali civilians and of the United States’ elite Delta Force operators. If the ice-and-death adventure of Jon Krakauer’s
The second and final volume of Guralnick’s massive Elvis project doesn’t hunt for meanings and it doesn’t judge — or at least, it tries not to. The singer’s life from October 1958, when he arrived in Germany to complete his tour of duty with the army, to his ugly and undignified death in the summer of 1977 wasn’t all downhill, and his triumphs — notably his 1968 television special and his first Las Vegas performances the following year — take his biographer just as high as they took his audiences. But for most of this meticulous chronicle of second-rate movies, second-rate recordings and increasingly erratic (to put it euphemistically) concert performances, Guralnick can barely conceal his exasperation and his sadness. Yet he never loses sight of his subject’s talent and generosity, and he answers it with a talent and generosity of his own. Out of his narrowly focused month-by-month record of Elvis Presley’s fall arises a terrible and, in its way, magnificent fable of American excess, arrogance, weakness and waste.
Reporter Mark Fritz lays out his tales of refugees and refugee workers with a short-story master’s feel for character and plot. He has a real talent for affability: Almost without exception he likes the people whose stories he tells, and while their hardships obviously matter to him, what captures his imagination and his skill is their personalities. His portraits of the uprooted encompass natives of lands as diverse as Germany and Iraq and Togo and Bosnia, but no one he writes about seems foreign; he puts us in his subjects’ shoes by showing us how very much like us they are. (And he drives home the point that there is no longer anything anomalous about their experience, reporting that in the mid-1990s, roughly one out of every 100 people on the planet was forcibly uprooted from home.) He also has a gift for making tangled clashes (the Liberian civil war, for instance) easy to follow without talking down in the process. Although Fritz’s subject matter is cruel, his book is strangely delightful — on one level an outcry against acts of inhumanity, but on another a celebration of our common humanity.
Massive, research-packed biographies are often honored more for their comprehensiveness than for their readability; Thurman’s life of the sensual French writer is a glorious exception. Lushly textured and psychologically shrewd, it deftly digests the existing record and incorporates new material to provide an engrossing account of a fascinating and maddening woman. It helps that Colette’s life teemed with passion, scandal, intrigue (admittedly, some of it rather petty), perversity and celebrities, literary and otherwise. Thurman herself seems alternately dismayed, admiring and philosophical about her subject (“There was not an idea that could carry Colette away, or a sensation that couldn’t”), but her complex response only deepens this exemplary attempt to do justice to the mysteries of a woman’s life.
Belkin’s generous, intuitive story of the forced integration of Yonkers, N.Y., in the late 1980s and early ’90s is the kind of nonfiction book that writers attempting bold social novels (paging Tom Wolfe) might take as a challenge. It’s packed with compelling characters: the stern, idealistic judge who orders the city to build public housing in middle-class white neighborhoods (and nearly bankrupts the municipal government with fines when it defies him); the visionary but cold-blooded planner who believes that townhouses rather than high-rises will solve the chronic ills plaguing such developments; the little old lady in tennis shoes who starts out agitating against the housing and winds up advocating for its residents; the poor, struggling mothers for whom it is their last best hope; and the 29-year-old mayor who stands up to the local demagogues (their followers throw Pampers at him) and pays a terrible price.