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Why Now?
But what if you could start a canon from scratch?
The purpose was not to build a fixed library but to take a blurry selfie of a cultural moment.
Any project like this is arbitrary, and ours is no exception.
But the time frame is not quite as random as it may seem.
They also reflected the fragmentation of culture brought about by social media.
Almost 40 books got more than one endorsement, and 13 had between three and seven apiece.
At least one distinctive new style has dominated over the past decade.
Call it autofiction if you like, but its really a collapsing of categories.
This new style encompasses Elena Ferrantes Neapolitan novels; Sheila Hetis self-questingHow Should a Person Be?
Its not really a genre at all.
Its a way of examining the self and letting the world in all at once.
Whether it changes the world is, as always with books, not really the point.
It helps us see more clearly.
Our dozen classics do represent some consensus; their genius seems settled-on.
They arent too surprising, because they are (arguably as always, but still) great.
Better not launch this canon into space just yet.
It is also, more precisely, a novel about universal human potential.
A boy undertakes rigorous training and goes in search of his father.
Is this boy, Ludo, a genius?
Sibylla, his mother, is of two minds about it.
Mill, who did Greek at age 3.
She knows hes a Boy Wonder and she encourages him in every way to follow his omnivorous instincts.
Otherwise wed be living in a world of Ludos.
DeWitts novel is infused with the belief thatanyhuman mind is capable of feats we tend to associate with genius.
But the novels characters, especially Sibylla, are aware that youthful talent can be thwarted at any turn.
Whatever the world had in store for Sibylla changed forever the night Ludo was conceived.
The 12 New Classics
Per our panel.
The ratio of taut plot to ghastly subject matter is disturbingly effective.
Most authors are lucky if they have one of those things going for them.
This novel is a rare symphony of both.
The title is a perfect joke, a mission statement of deranged grandiosity, straight-faced and self-aware.
Isnt this what every book, ever, wants (in its own way) to ask?
Ferrante fever struck readers all over the world, captivated by Lila and Elenas complicated relationship.
Her 21st-century classic is structurally just that kind of awoke re-shuffling.
The book is a world: teeming, immeasurable, unplumbable, materially solid but finally enigmatic.
The result is fiction like ice water, cold and clear, a mirror of our time.
Surely wed live happily ever after, observing the world with our cool eyes.
In short: No, she wouldnt.
AndThe Year of Magical Thinkingis actually not her personal anomaly.
Its the Didion thats been there all along funny, humane, trenchant transformed by tragedy and grief.
The 21st century is young, but this one will be on this list 50 years from now.
Theres something so reassuring about a bar that can never be surpassed.
What is the average persons role in history?
How can we live with our own fraudulence?
Why should we make art, and what kind of art can we make now?
To all these questionsAtocha Stationis an answer.
On top of that he gives the much bemoaned Brooklyn novel a good name.
Luc Sante
The High Canon
Books endorsed by two panelists.
Everett is always, in a sense, writing about race, and always not.
And then: Sorry if I get a little Homeric at times.
Thats genetic, too.
Eugenides packs so much richness into this Classical saga-cum-bildungsroman-cumpaean to the American Dream that Dickens would be proud.
The novel begins in a buzz of fear and the pitch increases steadily, unbearably.
But its really a marvel of racial politics and suspense.
And who doesnt love Nathan Zuckerman?
This is the story of two initiations.
This is McCarthy at his most restrained, and consequently most resonant.
The poems in Frederick Seidels 12th collection,Ooga Booga, dont kill but they come awfully close.
Some poets are easy to love; Seidel is so good you revere him despite yourself.
He also captures the absurd melancholy of modern existence in dark, crystalline stanzas.
At 82, hes the poet the 21st century deserves, too, and still desperately needs.
It could be written for an audience in ascendancy, told in vernacular but expertly formed and composed.
It could concern the intensely personal, but telescope out to the historic and the political.
No book this learned should be so wildly entertaining.
But this book kept me pinned to its pages until the end.
Unlike the more zeitgeistyUnderground Railroad, this is neither a lament about subjugation nor a tale of individual escape.
It neither denies the persistence of racism nor revels in the lingering wound.
In this book as in real life, anti-blackness is but a single facet of the black experience.
It is genuinely fresh.
Were playing byGone Girlrules now.
She unpacks layered cultural identities in the tradition of Dickens, Eliot, and Austen.
As it happens, the boyfriend has, stored on his phone, favorite lines from the book.
Here are some: Other people are always our parents.
I cannot bear to imagine unraveling my mother, her hair, her retribution.
Nowadays, no one leaves the house without some kind of script.
Id like to fuck some truth into Suicide Bitch, if I could get it up.
We hate white girls because we are white girls and thats what white girls do.
Was it the agony of his relationship with his alcoholic father?
Was it the tribulations of parenthood, so many hours at kiddie parties and not the writing desk?
In its pathetic way, its also the funniest.
LikeGreat Expectations,it concerns the sentimental education of an orphan as well as a mysterious benefactor.
of Speculationranks up there with BalzacsLost Illusions.
Its narrator is a pop in relatively new in literature a female writer who is also a mother.
Before having a baby, she had dreamed of being an art monster.
But this book is proof that great art does not require a spouse who licks your stamps.
Fiercely eccentric, refusing any easy resolutions,Citizens success represents a redefinition of the conventions of American literature.
As Clay puts it, the Escapist doesnt just fight crime, hefreesthe world of it.
And the ending: Oh!
My heart breaks again just thinking of it.
An ecstatic and furious book.
Damiens anguished, searching voice is the books oaken rudder, as she steers through currents of moral dilemma.
Is a lie a sin if it preserves her work?
Should she instigate against a false prophet, or dedicate herself to highlighting humans capacity for good?
Perhaps the last question is eternal, but Erdrich makes it feel freshly so.
John Freeman
Austerlitz, by W.G.
The sentences are long, the paragraphs cyclopean, the pacing leisurely, and yet its all hypnotically gripping.
Luc Sante
Fingersmith, by Sarah Waters(February 4, 2002)You know a twist is coming.
About ten million friends have hinted about the twist.
Oh man, that twist.
I myself threw the book to the ground, shouting, Holy shit!
The human story of a faltering marriage merges with the geopolitical in the form of a boiling civil conflict.
Rush is Joseph Conrads heir in the era of globalization.
Lipsytes Underground Man has a name and a nickname, both of which mark him as pathetic.
Lewis Teabag Miner is the embodiment of the loser under late capitalism.
Although a great writer of nonfiction, Wallaces idea of fiction was of another order of magnitude.
Can I buy you a drink?
ButHonored Guestis much more than its delightful surface.
Even incomplete, its a masterpiece of observation and character study, a standout of Holocaust literature.
Blond, white, underweight, and user-friendly, he was a plastic icon of inverted, Aryan masculinity.
As AIDS destroyed a population, as the internet quickened and anarchized our pornographies, the twink took off.
Dennis Cooper hit this crepuscular intersection of web and death with effortless genius.
Call it the twink cri de coeur all surface, and so, perversely impenetrable.
It is a dangerous fantasia, slipping so easily into the mouths and minds of homophobes.
But go ahead, let them taste it.
They want it as much as anyone.
Her books do not, however, bear much resemblance to the form as it is usually practiced.
They shimmer in the borderlands of myth, genre, and literature.
A convenience store caters to the mild-mannered zombies who emerge from a nearby gorge and clumsily attempt to shop.
A group of teenagers bond over an elusive TV series.
A suburban family becomes slowly and methodically alienated from every possession they own.
It was also an artistic breakthrough.
Antrims mother was an alcoholic.
The emotions in this book are raw, the writing exquisite, and the family pain shattering.
The story of 16-year-old Ree Dolly trying to save her Ozark family is at once intimate and mythic.
Woodrells language has a spiky beauty, he also uses localisms carefully.
His depictions of violence are first-rate, vivid, and essential to the story.
Hemons verbal effects accumulate into a haunting portrait of immigrant life.
Hemon is Nabokovs heir, in a more perilous time for American newcomers.
It derives its power from family pain and the radical nature of forgiveness.
Add to that her pitch-black humor she got the chuckles writing these gigantic stories.
Dagoberto Gilb
Scenes From a Provincial Life: Boyhood, Youth, and Summertime, by J.M.
Are these memoirs or novels?
(The last one kills off the author, among other departures from the facts.
The self-portrait that emerges from these (very funny) books is pitiless and unforgettable.
Its both comically droll and ardently, deeply noir.
Its title invites dual interpretations the feeling that something has ended, and making sense of an ending.
History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.
She protests sophistry and demonstrates the saneness of radical notions.
Its unforgettable which is the point.
Queasy, yes, but exhilarating too.
But Atwood herself never loses control.
The trilogy is the rare work of literature in which dread and joy exist in equal and extreme measure.
In this novel, we get a little of both.
Its that good, that important.
Sharma possesses a rare understanding of psychology and an unsentimental, bleakly comic sensibility.
I want to hang myself every day.)
Every detailhas been burnished and floats precipitously over depths of feeling, while the plot zooms ahead.
The point is not to wring meaning out of suffering Sharma never does but to bear witness to it.
And that may be the most radical thing about Lishs magnificent novel.
An exquisite examination of the psyche under duress.
Kate Tuttle
TheBroken Earthtrilogy, by N.K.
Beautifully written, with epic magical battles and earthquakes, these books are literally groundbreaking.
Greenwell is a poet, and his sinuous sentences seem to come from another time.
Since it cant be the past, it must be the future.
Its a tiny masterpiece, this book, and a gloriously weird read.
Why is being single the only thing people think of when they think of me?
Andrea asks her therapist, who instructs her to list the other things she is.
In my head I think: Im alone.
Im a former artist.
Im a shrieker in bed.
Im the captain of the sinking ship that is my flesh.
To my therapist I say, Im a brunette.
Stunningly self-assured, this is epic, intimate history rendered in understated words and images.
They are hipsters exiled to the heartland.
Lockwoods father is a clergyman and a conservative, but the resemblance to his bohemian poet daughter is unmistakable.
The family dog is named Whimsy.Priestdaddyis the funniest book yet written about millennialboomer culture clash.
Its brilliant stuff, and the woods surrounding the witchy herbalist character are both glittering and informed.
To read this is to feel Leni Zumas knows everything.
The beauty in Johnsons stories is the beauty of the broken wing.
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