David Auerbach's Books of the Year 2019

My top pick is not surprising. Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming, László Krasznahorkai’s self-declared completion to his life’s work, is a monumental portrait of catastrophe, and though published in Hungarian in 2016, it feels absolutely of the moment, a depiction of a scattering world in which everything is devalued and no one has the resources to make sense of things. I wrote about it at great length for Music & Literature, and while I avoid the present trend of deeming any and every work of writing to be essential and crucial, I do think that Krasznahorkai’s quartet of novels will endure.

Otherwise, it seemed a bit of a lean year for books compared to the riches of 2018, and some of the best books below, like the two Laura Ridings from Ugly Duckling Presse, actually date from 2018. It’s wonderful to see another book from the always-brilliant Barbara Maria Stafford, and some very strong archival work in philosophy and classics appeared. (Sara Humphreys’s book on Athenian kinship is magisterial.) Melanie Mitchell’s book on artificial intelligence is perhaps the best survey of the state of the field I have read and is strongly recommended to all.

Many powerful forces encourage us to devalue knowledge, and to devalue even the very pursuit of knowledge. In an age of fear and encroaching chaos, this pressure grows stronger. It is my article of faith that whatever meaning can be gleaned from life nonetheless resides in expanding our epistemological horizons as far as they can go, and confronting the new frontiers even if we tremble in so doing. It is the only antidote to the myopia of lived experience.

Book of the Year

Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming
Krasznahorkai, László; Mulzet, Ottilie (Translator)
(New Directions)

Literature

Unions: Two Stories
Musil, Robert; Grill, Genese (Translator); Grill, Genese (Introduction)
(Contra Mundum Press)

And Go Like This: Stories
Crowley, John
(Small Beer Press)

Malina
Bachmann, Ingeborg; Boehm, Philip (Translator); Kushner, Rachel (Introduction)
(New Directions)

The Prosecutor
Bastos, Augusto Roa; Weldt-Basson, Helene Carol (Translator)
(Fairleigh Dickinson University Press)

Convalescent Conversations (Lost Literature)
Riding, Laura; Fragopoulos, George (Editor)
(Ugly Duckling Presse)

Weeds
Xun, Lu; Turner, Matt (Narrator)
(Seaweed Salad Editions)

Experts Are Puzzled
Riding, Laura; Fragopoulos, George (Editor)
(Ugly Duckling Presse)

Dictator
Terry, Philip
(Carcanet Press Ltd.)

Love in the New Millennium (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)
Can Xue; Wasmoen, Annelise Finegan (Translator); Myles, Eileen (Foreword)
(Yale University Press)

Bad Words: Selected Short Prose (The German List)
Aichinger, Ilse; Wolf, Uljana (Translator); Hawkey, Christian (Translator)
(Seagull Books)

The Penguin Book of Oulipo: Queneau, Perec, Calvino and the Adventure of Form

(Penguin Classics)

All That Is Evident Is Suspect: Readings from the Oulipo: 1963 - 2018
Monk, Ian (Translator); Levin Becker, Daniel (Translator); Duchamp, Marcel (Contributor); Perec, Georges (Contributor)
(McSweeney's Publishing)

Necropolis (Russian Library)
Khodasevich, Vladislav; Vitali, Sarah (Translator); Bethea, David M. (Introduction)
(Columbia University Press)

The Best of R. A. Lafferty
Lafferty, R. A.
(ORION PUBLISHING GROUP)

R. A. Lafferty: Three Great Novels: Space Chantey, Fourth Mansions, Past Master

(Gollancz)

The Revenger's Tragedy (Arden Early Modern Drama)
Minton, Gretchen E. (Editor); McMullan, Gordon (Series Editor); Jowett, John (Series Editor); Gossett, Suzanne (Series Editor)
(The Arden Shakespeare)

The White Devil (Arden Early Modern Drama)
Webster, John; Robinson, Benedict S. (Editor); McMullan, Gordon (Series Editor); Jowett, John (Series Editor); Gossett, Suzanne (Series Editor)
(The Arden Shakespeare)

Where Reasons End: A Novel
Li, Yiyun
(Random House)

Japanese Ghost Stories
Hearn, Lafcadio; Murray, Paul (Editor); Murray, Paul (Introduction)
(Penguin Classics)

The Labyrinth of Tender Force: 166 Love Stories (The German List)
Kluge, Alexander; Hoban, Wieland (Translator)
(Seagull Books)

World-Changing Rage: News of the Antipodeans (The German List)
Baselitz, Georg; Kluge, Alexander; Derbyshire, Katy (Translator)
(Seagull Books)

Rock, Paper, Scissors: And Other Stories (New York Review Books Classics)
Osipov, Maxim; Dralyuk, Boris (Editor); Fleming, Alex (Translator); Jackson, Anne Marie (Translator); Alexievich, Svetlana (Preface)
(NYRB Classics)

The Magic: (October 1961-October 1967) Ten Tales by Roger Zelazny
Zelazny, Roger; Delany, Samuel R (Editor); Schweitzer, Darrell (Introduction)
(Positronic Publishing)

West-Eastern Divan: Complete, annotated new translation, including Goethe's "Notes and Essays" & the unpublished poems
von Goethe, Johann Wolfgang; Ormsby, Eric (Translator)
(Gingko Library)

Abel and Cain (New York Review Books Classics)
von Rezzori, Gregor; Dollenmayer, David (Translator); Neugroschel, Joachim (Translator); Yarbrough, Marshall (Translator); Cohen, Joshua (Introduction)
(NYRB Classics)

Dante's Divine Comedy: Part One: Hell. Decorated and Englished in Prosaic Verse by Alasdair Gray
Gray, Alasdair
(Canongate Books)

PURGATORY: Dante's Divine Trilogy Part Two. Decorated and Englished in Prosaic Verse by Alasdair Gray
Alighieri, Dante; Gray, Alisdair (Translator)
(Canongate Books)

Krishna's Lineage: The Harivamsha of Vyasa's Mahabharata
Brodbeck, Simon (Translator)
(Oxford University Press)

The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison
Ellison, Ralph; Callahan, John F. (Editor); Conner, Marc C. (Editor)
(Random House)

Humanities

Ribbon of Darkness: Inferencing from the Shadowy Arts and Sciences
Stafford, Barbara Maria
(University of Chicago Press)

Catastrophizing: Materialism and the Making of Disaster
Passannante, Gerard
(University of Chicago Press)

A History of Ambiguity
Ossa-Richardson, Anthony
(Princeton University Press)

Andalus and Sefarad: On Philosophy and Its History in Islamic Spain (Jews, Christians, and Muslims from the Ancient to the Modern World)
Stroumsa, Sarah
(Princeton University Press)

Composition and Cognition: Reflections on Contemporary Music and the Musical Mind
Lerdahl, Fred
(University of California Press)

Difference and Orientation: An Alexander Kluge Reader (signale|TRANSFER: German Thought in Translation)
Kluge, Alexander; Langston, Richard (Editor)
(Cornell University Press)

Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs
Townsend, Camilla
(Oxford University Press)

Cassius Dio (Ancients in Action)
Madsen, Jesper Majbom
(Bloomsbury Academic)

Music of a Thousand Years: A New History of Persian Musical Traditions
Lucas, Ann E.
(University of California Press)

The Oulipo and Modern Thought
Duncan, Dennis
(OUP Oxford)

Sophocles: A Study of His Theater in Its Political and Social Context
Jouanna, Jacques; Rendall, Steven (Translator)
(Princeton University Press)

A History of Art History
Wood, Christopher
(Princeton University Press)

I, the Poet: First-Person Form in Horace, Catullus, and Propertius
McCarthy, Kathleen
(Cornell University Press)

Inside Arabic Music: Arabic Maqam Performance and Theory in the 20th Century
Farraj, Johnny; Shumays, Sami Abu
(Oxford University Press)

Magic in Ancient Greece and Rome
Watson, Lindsay C.
(Bloomsbury Academic)

Reading Backwards
John Crowley
(Subterranean)

A Śabda Reader: Language in Classical Indian Thought (Historical Sourcebooks in Classical Indian Thought)
Bronkhorst, Johannes (Editor)
(Columbia University Press)

The Essence of Tsongkhapa's Teachings: The Dalai Lama on the Three Principal Aspects of the Path
Dalai Lama, His Holiness the; Russell, Jeremy (Editor); Lhakdor, Venerable (Translator)
(Wisdom Publications)

Nietzsche's Free Spirit Works: A Dialectical Reading
Meyer, Matthew
(Cambridge University Press)

Archilochus: The Poems: Introduction, Text, Translation, and Commentary
Swift, Laura
(Oxford University Press)

Rudolf Carnap: Early Writings: The Collected Works of Rudolf Carnap, Volume 1
Carus, A.W. (Editor); Friedman, Michael (Editor); Kienzler, Wolfgang (Editor); Richardson, Alan (Editor); Schlotter, Sven (Editor)
(Oxford University Press)

Frame by Frame: A Materialist Aesthetics of Animated Cartoons
Frank, Hannah; Morgan, Daniel (Editor); Gunning, Tom (Foreword)
(University of California Press)

Chaucer: A European Life
Turner, Marion
(Princeton University Press)

How to Be a Pyrrhonist: The Practice and Significance of Pyrrhonian Skepticism
Bett, Richard
(Cambridge University Press)

Imitating Authors: Plato to Futurity
Burrow, Colin
(Oxford University Press)

The Cypria (Hellenic Studies Series)
Davies, Malcolm
(Center for Hellenic Studies)

Networking the Bloc: Experimental Art in Eastern Europe 1965–1981 (The MIT Press)
Kemp-Welch, Klara
(The MIT Press)

How to Read a Japanese Poem
Carter, Steven D.
(Columbia University Press)

Knowing Our Limits
Ballantyne, Nathan
(Oxford University Press)

Brahms's Elegies: The Poetics of Loss in Nineteenth-Century German Culture (Music in Context)
Grimes, Nicole
(Cambridge University Press)

Romanticism and the Re-Invention of Modern Religion: The Reconciliation of German Idealism and Platonic Realism
Hampton, Alexander J. B.
(Cambridge University Press)

Kinship in Ancient Athens: Two-Volume Set: An Anthropological Analysis
Humphreys, S. C.
(Oxford University Press)

Wittgenstein on Logic as the Method of Philosophy: Re-examining the Roots and Development of Analytic Philosophy
Kuusela, Oskari
(Oxford University Press)

Philosophy, Rhetoric, and Thomas Hobbes
Raylor, Timothy
(OUP Oxford)

The Autobiography of Solomon Maimon: The Complete Translation
Maimon, Solomon; Melamed, Yitzhak Y. (Editor); Socher, Abraham (Editor); Reitter, Paul (Translator); Freudenthal, Gideon (Afterword)
(Princeton University Press)