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David Auerbach’s Books of the Year 2022: Literature

31 December 2022 / / 1 Comment

Scheduling constraints mean this year’s list is going to come out in stages, with the overall top at the end. It was a very busy year for me, focusing on my forthcoming book Meganets. Of the literature, Ottessa Moshfegh, Yiyun Li, and Alta Ifland all came in with very, very strong new novels, and Percival Everett and John Crowley were reliably excellent. Moshfegh’s is probably her best to date. I have not finished Goytisolo’s Antagony, but it’s too major not to list.

Lapvona: A Novel
Moshfegh, Ottessa (Author)
Penguin Press


Flint and Mirror: A Novel of History and Magic
Crowley, John (Author)
Tor Books


The Book of Goose: A Novel
Li, Yiyun (Author)
Farrar, Straus and Giroux


Speaking to No. 4
Ifland, Alta (Author)
New Europe Books


Dr. No: A Novel
Everett, Percival (Author)
Graywolf Press


A Very Old Man: Stories (New York Review Books Classics)
Svevo, Italo (Author), Randall, Frederika (Translator), Rich, Nathaniel (Introduction)
NYRB Classics


Peter the Great's African: Experiments in Prose (New York Review Books Classics)
Pushkin, Alexander (Author), Chandler, Robert (Editor), Chandler, Robert (Translator), Dralyuk, Boris (Translator), Chandler, Elizabeth (Translator)
NYRB Classics



After (NYRB Poets)
Narayanan, Vivek (Author)
NYRB Poets


The Best of Lucius Shepard (2)
Shepard, Lucius (Author), Sheehan, Bill (Editor)
Subterranean Pr


Antagony (Spanish Literature)
Goytisolo, Luis (Author), Riley, Brendan (Translator)
Dalkey Archive Press


Memories of Starobielsk: Essays Between Art and History (New York Review Books Classics)
Czapski, Jozef (Author), Valles, Alissa (Translator), Gross, Irena Grudzinska (Introduction)
NYRB Classics


Blind Owl
Hedayat, Sadeq (Author), Tabatabai, Sassan (Translator), Tabatabai, Sassan (Introduction)
Penguin Classics


Late Fragments: Flares, My Heart Laid Bare, Prose Poems, Belgium Disrobed (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)
Baudelaire, Charles (Author), Sieburth, Richard (Translator)
Yale University Press


Telluria (New York Review Books)
Sorokin, Vladimir (Author), Lawton, Max (Translator)
NYRB Classics


Their Four Hearts (Russian Literature)
Sorokin, Vladimir (Author), Klassen, Gregory (Illustrator), Lawton, Max (Translator)
Dalkey Archive Press


Spadework for a Palace (Storybook ND Series)
Krasznahorkai, László (Author), Batki, John (Translator)
New Directions


A Mountain to the North, a Lake to the South, Paths to the West, a River to the East
Krasznahorkai, László (Author), Mulzet, Ottilie (Translator)
New Directions


Homeward from Heaven (Russian Library)
Poplavsky, Boris (Author), Karetnyk, Bryan (Translator)
Columbia University Press


The Cambridge Centenary Ulysses: The 1922 Text with Essays and Notes
Joyce, James (Author), Flynn, Catherine (Author)
Cambridge University Press


The Poems (The Swiss List)
Walser, Robert (Author), Pantano, Daniele (Translator), Pantano, Daniele (Afterword)
Seagull Books

Alasdair Gray’s Lanark: The Four Frontispieces

4 February 2020 / / 0 Comments

I read Lanark as a very young adult and, like many others, was marked by its naked emotion, honesty, and despair. Gray’s death at the end of last year, after a long and successful career as an artist and writer, struck me hard. As a celebration of his life and work, I am posting an essay written for an anthology on Gray’s artwork which never materialized, on the sources of the frontispieces for Lanark’s four books and the uses to which Gray put them.

Revisiting Lanark at twice the age I was when I originally read it, I can step back from my heart and better see how intricately Alasdair Gray had crafted the inhuman machinery into which Duncan Thaw and Lanark fall. Coded with symbolic meaning, the four prints constitute Lanark’s most forceful allusions to modern history—and deliver Gray’s rejoinders to that history.

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David Auerbach’s Books of the Year 2018

21 December 2018 / / 2 Comments

To be a true reader or writer today is to exist primarily in a state of longing and loneliness (sehnsucht, in the German term), because the vast majority of one’s closest associates are dead. Over the course of the 20th century the world of letters separated rather violently from the world of consequence, and so loving writing as writing requires either myopic self-delusion or an absurd appreciation for the spiritual residue of artistic impact. I don’t have the former in me, so it is the latter that drives me.

A remarkable amount of excellent archival issues came out this year, particularly in fiction and literature. The two placed in the pole position are not necessarily more deserving than many others. Rather, I chose them because they seemed to be most resonant with this year, despite being written decades ago. Both are very unorthodox Cold War retrospectives, both vaguely “documentary”-like, and yet animated by almost opposite sensibilities.

Ironically, I found Anniversaries to be a gloomier tale than Kolyma Stories, in the same way that gray is a gloomier color than black, or Faith is more enervating than Closer. Likewise, Johnson’s self-appearance in Anniversaries is more despairing than Shalamov’s varied appearances in Kolyma, because there is a certain abdication of moral authority Johnson took on in writing Anniversaries that is either disingenuous or terrifying. I think it’s the latter.

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Bitwise

BITWISE Q&A with David Auerbach

28 August 2018 / / 0 Comments

I’m proud to announce that today, Pantheon Books is publishing BITWISE: A LIFE IN CODE. The New York Times Book Review kindly says, ““[Auerbach] writes well about databases and servers, but what’s really distinctive about this book is his ability to dissect Joyce and Wittgenstein as easily as C++ code.” I’m grateful that the book has been so well-received.

I did a Knopf Q&A around what inspired me to write it, as well as my thoughts on technology more generally.

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A Humument

David Auerbach’s Books of the Year 2017

22 December 2017 / / 3 Comments

While the world went mad this year, I retreated a bit and did more reading than I had in some time. I have seen the pendulum of public sentiment cycle from complacency to hysteria and back twice now, and I am more fatalistic than ever about such cycles having to take their course. (My description of Thomas Pynchon’s “decoherence events” applies just as well to the Trump presidency as it does to September 11, 2001.) Being part of the collective public discourse this year was unhealthier than in any time I have ever seen.

I believe all the titles below deserve attention. The top books have been chosen based on personal significance and relevance. Appiah’s As If is a plea for a cosmopolitan pluralism (of provisional viewpoints, not of truths) based on a reading of the great Hans Vaihinger. It is a theoretical work that has far more relevance to technology than it first appears, as I try to explain in my forthcoming Bitwise: A Life in Code. Földényi’s Melancholy is a Burton-inspired chronicle that bests a thousand other intellectual histories of its kind. It spoke to me of what it is to be the sort of person who feels the need and drive to read all these books in the first place, and of the intangible benefits I gain from them. And the purportedly final version of Tom Phillips’ A Humument is a thing of beauty, drastically different from its previous editions in many regards, and one of the deepest texts of our time, fifty years after its first publication.

The greatest novel I read this year was Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon, the right novel for the right moment, but not one published in 2017.

In an attempt to provide a bit more apparent order, I have created a few subcategories for nonfiction. These are quite approximate; some books could have easily gone under a different heading. They are there to break the lists down into more manageable chunks.

When it comes to books, my eyes are bigger than my…eyes. Books under “Of Interest” are there either because (1) they are too out of my areas of knowledge for me to feel comfortable recommending them, (2) I have sufficient reservations about their content but feel they are too significant to ignore, or (3) I just haven’t read enough of them. I would feel terrible not noting Slezkine’s The House of Government, but I did not have time to read most of its 1100 pages.

Be well, read much, take care.

BOOKS OF MY YEAR

As If: Idealization and Ideals

Price: $55.30

6 used & new available from $7.39

Melancholy (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

Price: $35.00

15 used & new available from $20.96


A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel

Price: $23.16

33 used & new available from $10.51

 

LITERATURE

Into the Cyclorama

Price: $14.95

9 used & new available from $8.25


Symphony for Human Transport

Price: $17.00

8 used & new available from $16.77


The Golden Cockerel & Other Writings

Price: $16.95

58 used & new available from $4.22


Homesick for Another World: Stories

Price: $37.97

15 used & new available from $10.04


The World Goes On

Price: $24.95

31 used & new available from $7.54


The Manhattan Project

Price: $28.99

13 used & new available from $25.20


So Much Blue: A Novel

Price: $15.99

63 used & new available from $4.00


Katalin Street (New York Review Books Classics)

Price: $11.24

59 used & new available from $1.49


Beasts Head for Home: A Novel (Weatherhead Books on Asia)

Price: $16.11

35 used & new available from $4.38


Blackass: A Novel

Price: $15.99

95 used & new available from $1.44


The Essential Fictions

Price: $21.95

21 used & new available from $12.50

Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr

Price: $28.99

42 used & new available from $3.75

Gap Gardening: Selected Poems

Price: $18.95

41 used & new available from $2.90


Judgment: A Novel (Northwestern World Classics)

Price: $18.95

22 used & new available from $2.78



Remains of Life: A Novel (Modern Chinese Literature from Taiwan)

Price: $29.00

26 used & new available from $4.91


I Was Trying to Describe What it Feels Like: New and Selected Stories

Price: $10.00

21 used & new available from $1.99

Nest in the Bones: Stories by Antonio Benedetto

Price: $18.00

50 used & new available from $4.47


Newcomers: Book One

Price: $18.00

41 used & new available from $4.20


Nine Continents: A Memoir In and Out of China

Price: $5.86

57 used & new available from $1.46


Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life

Price: $15.34

12 used & new available from $9.59


Sisters of the Cross (Russian Library)

Price: $14.64

46 used & new available from $9.27


Frontier

Price: $12.69

18 used & new available from $8.49


The Construction of the Tower of Babel

Price: $16.75

2 used & new available from


The War Nerd Iliad

Price: $22.95

55 used & new available from $13.20


Drilling through Hard Boards: 133 Political Stories (The German List)

Price: $25.11

13 used & new available from $16.57



Balcony in the Forest (New York Review Book)

Price: $16.95

32 used & new available from $6.38


Go, Went, Gone

Price: $12.80

129 used & new available from $1.36



The Collected Poems of Li He (Calligrams)

Price: $22.49

25 used & new available from $16.61


Chinese Poetic Writing (Calligrams)

Price: $19.95

27 used & new available from $13.96


The Complete Old English Poems (The Middle Ages Series)

Price: $65.00

25 used & new available from $26.65


The Book of Disquiet: The Complete Edition

Price: $22.49

53 used & new available from $13.00

 

HUMANITIES

Melancholic Habits: Burton's Anatomy & the Mind Sciences

Price: $52.46

14 used & new available from $52.46



Dystopia: A Natural History

Price: $83.20

3 used & new available from $83.20


The Rift in The Lute: Attuning Poetry and Philosophy

Price: $70.44

16 used & new available from $45.98


David Jones

Price: $17.91

13 used & new available from

The Messages We Send: Social Signals and Storytelling

Price: $32.58

19 used & new available from $26.12

The Mind of the Book: Pictorial Title-Pages

Price: $56.22

10 used & new available from $41.99


Changing the Subject: Philosophy from Socrates to Adorno

Price: $22.16

31 used & new available from $11.42



Res Publica and the Roman Republic: 'Without Body or Form'

Price: $115.00

13 used & new available from $80.00


The Epic Distilled: Studies in the Composition of the Aeneid

Price: $70.07

17 used & new available from $63.15

I, Me, Mine: Back to Kant, and Back Again

Price: $56.00

14 used & new available from $34.19


Art and Myth of the Ancient Maya

Price: $272.83

9 used & new available from

Wilfrid Sellars and the Foundations of Normativity

Price: $64.60

1 used & new available from $64.60

The Subject of Experience

Price: $19.24

1 used & new available from $19.24


The Emotions in Early Chinese Philosophy (Emotions of the Past)

Price: $88.90

22 used & new available from $79.01

Hercules Segers: Painter, Etcher, A Catalogue Raisonn

Price: $1,900.00

1 used & new available from

 

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

Price: $13.99

1 used & new available from $13.99



After Digital: Computation as Done by Brains and Machines

Price: $36.89

13 used & new available from $36.89


The Lazy Universe: An Introduction to the Principle of Least Action

Price: $41.43

20 used & new available from $34.92



 

THE SOCIAL SCIENCES

Prisoners of Reason: Game Theory and Neoliberal Political Economy

Price: $33.59

28 used & new available from $16.65



Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion

Price: $19.99

27 used & new available from $9.22



The Sum of Small Things: A Theory of the Aspirational Class

Price: $7.24

64 used & new available from $1.46


Marx's Inferno: The Political Theory of Capital

Price: $22.39

8 used & new available from $22.39


A Brief History of Economic Thought

Price: $85.70

14 used & new available from $30.98


Paths to Fulfillment: Women's Search for Meaning and Identity

Price: $31.95

23 used & new available from $8.64


The Timeliness of George Herbert Mead

Price: $66.50

1 used & new available from $66.50


The Enigma of Reason

Price: $46.91

15 used & new available from $20.00


Shame: A Brief History (History of Emotions)

Price: $24.95

22 used & new available from $13.85


The Truth about Language: What It Is and Where It Came From

Price: $30.00

25 used & new available from $5.00


 

HISTORY AND POLITICS


Cuz: The Life and Times of Michael A.

Price: $11.45

105 used & new available from $1.36


The Water Kingdom

Price: $15.23

15 used & new available from $5.72


False Dawn: Protest, Democracy, and Violence in the New Middle East

Price: $13.92

49 used & new available from $3.05



The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America

Price: $16.99

1 used & new available from $16.99


The Causes of War and the Spread of Peace: But Will War Rebound

Price: $25.00

24 used & new available from $5.00


A History of Judaism

Price: $60.00

2 used & new available from



One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps

Price: $5.19

77 used & new available from $3.99


The Habsburg Empire: A New History

Price: $14.04

1 used & new available from $14.04


What You Did Not Tell: A Russian Past and the Journey Home

Price: $11.17

67 used & new available from $2.75

The Transformation of American Liberalism

Price: $51.61

16 used & new available from $47.82


Politics in the Roman Republic (Key Themes in Ancient History)

Price: $62.00

17 used & new available from $62.00



Sold People: Traffickers and Family Life in North China

Price: $54.50

24 used & new available from $29.76



Lenin: The Man, the Dictator, and the Master of Terror

Price: $14.99

1 used & new available from $14.99


Classical Greek Oligarchy: A Political History

Price: $38.13

14 used & new available from $16.19


Russia in Revolution: An Empire in Crisis, 1890 to 1928

Price: $9.99

1 used & new available from $9.99


The Cold War: A World History

Price: $65.79

33 used & new available from $10.04

 

COMICS

Poppies of Iraq

Price: $18.41

71 used & new available from $1.46


Satania

Price: $26.75

19 used & new available from $12.49


It Don't Come Easy

Price: $17.81

33 used & new available from $11.65


The Green Hand and Other Stories

Price: $5.38

14 used & new available from


Voices in the Dark

Price: $21.95

55 used & new available from $2.25


My Favorite Thing Is Monsters

Price: $31.99

68 used & new available from $11.85

Pascin

Price: $24.95

16 used & new available from $13.72


Beanworld Volume 4: Hoka Hoka Burb'l Burb'l

Price: $16.99

28 used & new available from $9.79


The Interview

Price: $24.99

25 used & new available from $10.51


Yvain: The Knight of the Lion

Price: $7.69

63 used & new available from $1.46



Olympians: Artemis: Wild Goddess of the Hunt (Olympians, 9)

Price: $9.59

63 used & new available from $1.99


The Customer is Always Wrong

Price: $27.60

60 used & new available from $4.10


The Best We Could Do: An Illustrated Memoir

Price: $27.97

41 used & new available from $4.06

The Don Rosa Library Gift Box Set #4: Vols. 7 & 8

Price: $429.95

5 used & new available from

 

OF INTEREST





How the Mind Comes into Being

Price: $55.65

21 used & new available from $40.00




Herder's Hermeneutics: History, Poetry, Enlightenment

Price: $29.44

1 used & new available from $29.44





Capitalism without Capital: The Rise of the Intangible Economy

Price: $16.94

84 used & new available from $1.61


The Quantum Revolution in Philosophy

Price: $38.39

15 used & new available from $34.39


Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941

Price: $39.33

45 used & new available from $9.44


Pompey, Cato, and the Governance of the Roman Empire

Price: $88.63

14 used & new available from $84.63


The Allure of Battle: A History of How Wars Have Been Won and Lost

Price: $31.49

42 used & new available from $13.89





The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution

Price: $9.10

42 used & new available from $7.77




No Future: Punk, Politics and British Youth Culture, 1976–1984

Price: $68.35

24 used & new available from $32.60



The Sorcerer's Apprentice: An Anthology of Magical Tales

Price: $14.98

63 used & new available from $2.42

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