1. The Complete Works of Isaac Babel, edited by Nathalie Babel. Translated by Peter Constantine (W.W. Norton & Company). Babel, a Jew from the Soviet Black Sea port of Odessa, rode with the Cossacks into Poland in 1920 as a war correspondent and committed revolutionary. He wrote as a Jew and a revolutionary riding with Jew killers. And all his contradictions propel his prose — and the reader — forward. It’s a mixture of — to borrow a Babel phrase — "horror and rapture," told in a style that blends the verbal compression of lyric poetry with the visual expansiveness of a movie camera. This new translation, edited by Babel’s daughter, includes all the stories, as well as diaries, movie scripts, and other writings.
2. The Biographer’s Tale, by A.S. Byatt (Alfred A. Knopf). Readers of Byatt (Possession: A Romance, Babel Tower, Angels and Insects) will find some familiar things — literary ventriloquism, scholars in turmoil, lapidary descriptions of both the organic and the inanimate world; but they’ll also be surprised by the novel’s experimental heart. The biographer is one Phineas G. Nanson, and his adventures — begun as a search for specificity, for things — lead him to the black whole of his own singularity, and the satisfaction of a small wisdom gained.
3. The Corrections, by Jonathan Franzen (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). In the surround of hype and Oprah controversy, the quality of Franzen’s National Book Award winner remains undiminished: a big novel about domestic life and relationships (it is, after all, a story about a family coming home for Christmas) that nonetheless captures all the moods and currents of modern American life in vivid character portrayals.
4. Of Cats and Men, by Nina de Gramont (Dial Press). Intimacy (along with the communication that makes it possible) and cats are the threads tying together this wonderful, gentle debut collection of 10 stories by Cape Cod–based author de Gramont. The protagonists in these deft portraits tend to begin by feeling a little closer to the smaller, fur-covered creatures than to the human ones, and sometimes they end that way as well. The skirmishes in the intervening battles of the sexes rarely escalate into all-out war, but de Gramont’s grasp of the smaller conflicts — a lover’s misread cues, the confused promptings of the protagonists’ own hearts — lead to equally hard-won insight.
5. Yonder Stands Your Orphan, by Barry Hannah (Atlantic Monthly Press). We’re so used to identifying Hannah as a "Southern novelist" that we tend to lose track of how thoroughly this American original transcends category. This baroque orgy of fornication, degradation, and salvation both confirms and overturns every Southern stereotype out there. But it’s also misleading to emphasize the bizarre in Hannah’s fiction at the expense of the beauty and the absolute control of his prose.
6. Half a Life, by V.S. Naipaul (Alfred A. Knopf). This short novel compresses all the themes of the 2001 Nobel laureate’s 45-year-career into a swift flowing narrative that’s equal parts comic and brutal. Willie Chandran is a poor Brahmin who goes to London on a scholarship, writes a novel, then takes off with a female admirer to a Portuguese African colony (probably Mozambique), where he spends the next 18 years. Whether he’s depicting the manners of post-WW2 Notting Hill bohemians or African colonial-estate owners on the cusp of revolution, Naipaul’s eye and ear remain true, distilling political and social realities into individual existential dramas of freedom and identity.
7. The Dying Animal, by Philip Roth (Houghton Mifflin). This relatively terse (156 pages) yet typically loquacious novel comes as a coda to Philip Roth’s renaissance decade. David Kepesh, who was first seen as the title character in the Kafka-esque The Breast (1972) and again in The Professor of Desire (1977), is here still that familiar, annoying Roth type, the randy poon hound. As the 70-year-old protagonist faces mortality — not merely his own, but that of his latest young inamorata — Roth challenges us with a portrait of desire as an idiot that doesn’t care about lasting allegiances or social niceties.
?. What’s Come Over You?, by Marian Thurm (Delphinium). Before the onset of chick lit, there was Marian Thurm, the author of six books, including The Clairvoyant and Henry in Love. The 13 stories here are all explorations of the worst-case scenario in matters of the heart — deception, divorce, death. Thurm exposes the romantic busts of baby boomers and beyond with elegance, intuitive ease, and interspersed moments of brutal reality and humor. Hip and urban, she nonetheless covers the everyday rather than the fast lane. This is what chick lit could look like when it grows up.
9. The Dying Ground, by Nichelle D. Tramble (Villard/Strivers Row). This debut is subtitled "A Hip-Hop Noir Novel," and the "noir" part makes immediate sense — Tramble’s 23-year-old Berkeley undergrad protagonist is a black detective by circumstance. The hip-hop is more difficult to pin down: rather than the narrative cross-fades, sampled voices, and collage effects of more obvious efforts (like Ricardo Cortez Cruz’s 1992 Straight Outta Compton), Tramble writes with careful, studied pacing and follows a traditional narrative arc. But in her depiction of Oakland Street life, she approaches hip-hop as a social movement lived out through popular culture.
10. The Collected Stories of Richard Yates (Henry Holt). Yates, who died in 1992, continues to go in and out of print, but perhaps the publication of his collected stories will secure his posthumous legacy. Despite the grim trajectory of most of these tales, their craftsmanship is undeniable (at his best, Yates never wastes a word or gesture), and so is their readability. Sometimes his stories seem like perfectly constructed machines intended to strip their characters of every last illusion. But his compassion for his people is pervasive. Perhaps the stories will also lead readers to superb novels like Revolutionary Road and The Easter Parade.
