All things that were created during the year of the Dragon (2012) are magical amazing/still interesting to me. These four books, all from 2012, rocked seriously hard. CONSUME THEM ALL!!!!!
How perfect can you be Heidi Julavits? I mean, besides teaching at Columbia and marrying your super-smarty Ben Marcus and looking bomber in all author photos. You’ve got this cover??? This only proves your power as a super-genius that everyone wants to emanate/ball. This novel is also super hilarious and heartbreaking, about a psychics (living in a community not unlike a writers retreat) before they spiral into the totally wacky. Huge imagination. Voted best hair.
Jess Walter, I understand the desire to write something people will get behind, why after the merely moderate buzz over “the Financial Lives of Poets” you’re hitting us with the movie shit– Liz Taylor and Richard Burton shooting Cleopatra in Rome and the cute little starlet he’s knocked up hiding out in a picture perfect cinque terre town that is glazed in hot sun and long legs and swarthy Italian fisherpeople… I like this. I’m not going to write it, but I’ll see the movie. Voted most likely to succeed.
Are you into a terribly sad Jewish suburbs after all of your friends have gone to college and you left are alone to troll Whole Foods for MILFS and foie gras? What if you listen to your only friend, an elderly actor in a wheel-chair who may not just be “giving you” all of that free viagra and crystal meth? What if you sleep with the most depressed people on your block? Then imagine 30 different endings. Tadum! Adam Wilson wrote a filthy, funny novel a bit like Sam Lipsyte’s entire oeuvre, which I’m sure you’ll read in five seconds flat. Voted mostly likely to stay friends.
Junot Diaz is a puto who writes like he’s getting in serious shit from an ex-novia, like he’s got his balls in a vice, like he can’t always hide behind his school smarts, his MIT, his McArthur, his mega-huge Oscar Wao, his sucias, his huevones who cheat on their wives like everyone else, he can’t even hide behind his mother, or his hot neighbour, or the sweet old Dominicanas who are stuck cleaning the hospital sheets of New Jersey– This collection of stories is proof that Junot Diaz (or at least his writing) can still break a heart or two. Voted slut of the year, nerd of the year, culo of the year, genius.