Best of 2023

 The third of my year-in-reading columns has gone up over at Dorian's blog: the best stuff I read in 2023.

First to Knock, Mr Crabby

I recently read and thoroughly enjoyed a book by a publisher new to me, First to Knock.The book was Jeremy Kitchen's Mr Crabby You Have Died, which was not quite like anything else I've read (always a plus).

Imagine falling into conversation in a bar with a stranger who starts telling you drink-fuelled anecdotes. Anecdotes about being an American soldier during Desert Storm, and being exposed to a blown Sarin gas store. Anecdotes about being a teacher while raddled with heroin. Anecdotes about a beloved but ill-fated hermit crab, weirdo Christian youth camps and incredibly ill-advised sex (not all of these anecdotes connect with each other, but some do, in surprising ways). Hilarious anecdotes and also truly disgusting ones.

Kitchen's book, with all the believable and alarming texture of lived experience, is that encounter in literary form. It's a bracing dose of particularly American ugliness, vividly captured. 

I also love the cover art (by Donald Bruno) and design (by Nick Ferreira). Ferreira has designed a number of excellent covers for First to Knock, as well as some of the album releases they also put out:

First to Knock also publish a free(!) irregular self-titled magazine, which even as a far-flung Australian I have been able to subscribe to, so I'll be interested to see an issue of that when it arrives. The covers so far (with Bruno providing the art to issue 1):

(Click all images for bigger versions)

Book Launch for Gibbons or One Bloody Thing After Another by James Morrison

Click through for full size.

Book Launch

The free online launch for my book is this weekend (21 or 22 October, depending where in the world you are): please feel free to come along!

GIBBONS

My book is out, published by the good folk at Orbis Tertius Press, should you wish to read it. You do wish to read it, right? It's the discontinuous narrative of an Australian family in short stories, including glass eyes, false mermaids, inadvertent death, nuclear weapons, and the accidental destruction of the Sydney Opera House.

You can buy it here for now. At some imminent-ish future date it should be available on Amazon, where it may be cheaper (but I'll get very little in the way of money), assuming you can square that with your conscience. That's up to you, I'm not your mother.

There's a zero-budget book trailer here:

100 Great Short Books

Because I will be doing a monthly thing next year with the mighty Brad Bigelow about novellas, here's the full list of 100 great short books I recommended on Twitter, in one place for ease of reference.

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1. THE DUEL: Joseph Conrad: genuinely funny novella about a Napoleonic officer being stalked over a period of years by a madman determined to fight a duel.

2. CONFESSIONS OF A LAPSED STANDARD-BEARER: Andreï Makine: maybe his most Chekhovian book, about Alyosha and Arkady, Young Pioneers in post-WW2 Leningrad; an oddly sweet book about terrible disillusionment

3. THE TWENTY DAYS OF TURIN: Giorgio De Maria: a political library of personal diaries inadvertently leads to a plague of mass psychosis and death; uneasy plague reading

4. THE GIRLS OF SLENDER MEANS: Muriel Spark: pretty much any book by Spark would fit this list, but this might be my favourite; the erotic/emotional hothouse of a girl's boarding house during the Blitz with an unexploded bomb on the premises

5. CASTLE RACKRENT: Maria Edgeworth: another black comedy with duelling in it, plus obsession, intra-marriage warfare, politics and endless bad behaviour; the first Irish Big House saga, and it's only 90 pages

6. I HAVE WAITED, AND YOU HAVE COME: Martine McDonagh: a woman's life in sodden, semi-ruined post-Climate-Change England is disrupted by a man who has fixated on her; subtle, vivid and beautifully written

7. THESE POSSIBLE LIVES: Fleur Jaeggy: Three short essays about the lives of three writers, making up an absolutely brilliant tiny book which loops through absurdities and weirdnesses, history and art. Fascinating and amazing.

8. JOAN SMOKES: Angela Meyer: a woman on the run from her past arrives in 1960s Las Vegas and reinvents herself in this noirish, fragmented novella

9. THE HOLE: José Revueltas: one of the most intense little books you'll ever read, positively humming with malignant energy; three Mexican prisoners scheme to bring drugs into their prison, and everything goes wrong

10. A JOURNEY AROUND MY ROOM: Xavier de Maistre; perfect isolation reading; XdM was put under house arrest after a duel (DUELS AGAIN!) in 1790, so he wrote a travel book for the room he was trapped in--like a proto-Proust doing stand-up

11. WHITE: Marie Darrieussecq: how about a tentative romance at a near-future Antarctic research base watched over by the ghosts of the many polar dead?

12. THEY SHOOT HORSES, DON'T THEY?: Horace McCoy: the best noir novella about death and non-stop dancing ever written

13. THE LIFE AND DEATH OF HARRIET FREAN: May Sinclair: near-perfect unhappy short novel of self-destruction via doing the expected thing. Sinclair's only novel, though she was also a dab hand at ghost stories.

14. THE CROQUET PLAYER: H G Wells: speaking of ghosts... if they're the product of violence, what about all the blood shed by Neanderthals and other pre-modern humans as they struggled to the top of the evolutionary ladder? Unusual and little-known Wells, but still very much it.

15. UPSTAGED: Jacques Jouet: a famous actor is captured, bound, gagged and stripped by his doppelgänger, who takes the stage in his place and begins to drag the world into chaos. Oulipian fun.

16. THE BEAUTIFUL SUMMER: Cesare Pavese: 1930s Italy, intense female friendship, first love affairs, discovering art and independence: get hooked on this, then move on to his 'Selected Works' from NYRB for four more brilliant novellas.

 

17. THE ALOE: Katherine Mansfield: a rare longer work by one of the greatest short story writers in lit history, an early but quite different take on what would become her 'Prelude': a captured moment of time in a NZ family's life circa 1900: magical, frankly

18. COMMONPLACE: Christina Rossetti: rare fiction from the great poet--three sisters tackle love, duty, marriage and independence in very different ways after the death of their parents. 

19. WERTHER NIELAND: Gerard Reve: (published with another novella as 'Childhood') -- enjoy the company of an 11yo mystic and probable psychopath as he forces his 'friends' to join him in a series of dangerous and esoteric clubs in occupied Amsterdam

20. MY MORTAL ENEMY: Willa Cather: as a child and then an adult, Nellie is obsessed with the life and loves of an older woman from her home town; she encounters and re-encounters her throughout her life

21. KILLING AUNTIE: Andrzej Bursa: you're young, you're bored, you murder your aunt, you dismember the body, you try to get rid of it, you meet a girl, you fall in love... we've all been there. Posthumously discovered blacker-than-black stuff from 1950s Poland.

22. TODDLER ON THE RUN: Shena Mackay: Morris, a grown man less than 4' tall, is on the run from the law and hiding out in a beach hut, besets by donkeys, beachside evangelists and British holidaymakers.

23. A DIFFERENT SEA; Claudio Magris: a young intellectual flees Austria-Hungary for the Patagonian pampas and reading Greek classics after his hero and mentor commits suicide; his search for an "authentic life" is completely fucked over by the inevitable unpleasantness of history

24. DOCTOR GLAS: Hjalmar Söderberg: brilliant, dark 1905 Swedish masterpiece about a depressive doctor in love with a woman whose monstrous clergyman husband insists on his "marital rights"; complications ensue, as they say

25. THE ENDLESS SUMMER: Madame Nielsen: modernist, beautifully done group portrait of a family and various hangers-on over the course of a rural Danish summer

26. BAD NATURE, OR WITH ELVIS IN MEXICO: Javier Marías: Elvis is in Acapulco to film a movie, and in the boozy chaos his interpreter gets stuck in a cantina full of violent and talkative criminals

27. REUBEN SACHS: Amy Levy: 1880s feminist Jewish novella of snobbishness, love and bad marriages, written in partial reaction to DANIEL DERONDA. 

28. THE YELLOW SOFA: José Maria de Eça de Queirós: short, intense black comedy of infidelity and outraged morals by 19th-Century Portuguese genius

29. THE ALIENIST: Machado de Assis: budding Brazilian psychiatrist and asylum-keeper discovers that the more he learns about his field, the more insane everyone around him becomes

30. PALE HORSE, PALE RIDER: Katherine Anne Porter: obvious choice--the great novella of the Spanish Flu outbreak, a modernist masterpiece told from the POV of a fevered woman lying in her sickbed, her childhood memories mingling with those of the war and the plague deaths

31. THE PENITENT: Isaac Bashevis Singer: deeply uncomfortable novella about a man desperate for salvation, retreating into Orthodox Judaism and dedicating his life to becoming a penitent

32. HUNGARY-HOLLYWOOD EXPRESS: Éric Plamondon: rambling post-modern fictionalised biography of Hungarian Olympian and Tarzan actor Johnny Weissmuller, leaping discursively around the erratic weirdness of the 20th Century

33. THE AFTERWORD: Mike Bryan: a novella in the form of an afterword to a non-existent American bestseller about faith and God in America

34. A DEAD ROSE: Aurora Cáceres: minor symbolist masterpiece from Peruvian Europhile, about an afflicted  Parisian woman who starts an affair with her gynaecologist

35. THE PALIMPSESTS: Aleksandra Lun: Demented remix of literary history, especially of writers who write in languages other than their own; hugely daft, lots of fun

36. THE HOUSE OF HUNGER: Dambudzo Marechera: vivid,  harrowing and linguistically acrobatic masterpiece of alienation about growing up in the slums of Harare; sadly Marechera was killed by alcoholism and AIDS by the age of 32

37. THE MEN'S CLUB: Leonard Michaels: hilarious and appalling, maybe the ultimate deconstruction of the delusions of the straight male, about a group of seven friends who decide, for reasons none of them are able to really articulate, to start a club for men

38. THE TOTH FAMILY: István Örkény: a Hungarian family is terrorised by a deranged army major on leave, forced to become a cardboard box assembling operation in their own home (comes with another fine novella, THE FLOWER SHOW)

39. A RIOT OF GOLDFISH: Kanako Okamoto: wonderful 1937 novella about an obsessive goldfish breeder in love from a little-translated Japanese poet and scholar of Buddhism (and mother of artist Tarō Okamoto)

40. SEVEN HANGED: Leonid Andreyev: appropriately grim novella of the last days of a group of Russian dissidents in Tsarist Russia; beautifully written, absolutely designed to sap your joie de vivre

41. THE LAST WOLF: László Krasznahorkai: funny, obsessive, one-sentence novella about a man hired by mistake to write about Europe's last wild wolf; also a perfect introduction to a sometimes forbidding writer

42. THE EQUESTRIENNE: Uršuľa Kovalyk: late-Communist Czech-set black comedy of adolescence, female friendship and trick horse-riding

43. MADAME DE: Louise de Vilmorin: the story of a pair of diamond earrings and the betrayals and deceit they cause as they pass from person to person; a perfect, appropriately jewel-like miniature

44. THE AWAKENING: Kate Chopin: probably ruined for many Americans by being forced on them in school, but this really is one of the most perfect short novels, about a woman undone by her quest for freedom and self-honesty

45. MARY: Vladimir Nabokov: his first novel, a short and intense story of White Russian exiles in Berlin, nostalgia, erotic and romantic obsession, and a cunning plan

46. TALKATIVE MAN: R K Narayan: a late, short novel in the Malgudi cycle, whose loquacious narrator tells the story of a mysterious man, allegedly part of some ill-defined UN project, who turns up at the railway station, takes over the waiting room, and refuses to leave

47. COUP DE GRÂCE: Marguerite Yourcenar: more White Russians, plus a German aristocrat, a collapsing Baltic siege and a love triangle--something for everyone!

48. ALL SAINTS' MOUNTAIN: Olga Tokarczuk: unsettling, excellent science-fiction novella by the Nobel laureate from last year who ISN'T a scumbag; free online (not in book form as yet): see it here.

49. THREE YEARS: Anton Chekhov: picking one Chekhov is like choosing your favourite diamond from a vast trove of perfect diamonds, but this is as good as anything else he wrote--a subtle and brilliant "novel of Moscow life"

50. A MONTH IN THE COUNTRY: J L Carr: the ultimate piece of evidence that shows you don't need more than 84 pages to write an absolutely perfect novel--if you haven't read this then no wonder your life is a pointless, empty void

51. AN OBSCURE MAN: Marguerite Yourcenar
Astonishingly convincing novella about a 17th-Century Dutchman, his travels, his loves and his failures. Found in this collection (also available as 'Two Stories and a Dream'), with its equally successful sequel novella, A LOVELY MORNING.

52. SICKLE: Ruth Lillegraven
Verse novel encapsulating the whole life of a Norwegian man in the 1800s, and the life of the woman who is unlucky enough to marry him. Big themes, done with a delicately light touch.

53. AN UNTOUCHED HOUSE: W F Hermans
It's the arse-end of WW2, you're an exhausted partisan fighting in the wreckage of Germany, and you find a beautiful, empty untouched house, an oasis of peace. What would you do to keep it for yourself?

54. BLIND HUBER: Nick Flynn
Blind beekeeper, beekeeper's assistant, the hives of bees: all have their own voices in this wonderful connected collection of poems

55. BRUGES-LA-MORTE: Georges Rodenbach
A creepy, decaying city hosts a creepy, decaying man in mourning as he sinks into sexual obsession and murderousness. What's not to like?

56. HIGHWAY WITH GREEN APPLES: Bae Suah
A novella about a near-affectless young artist adrift in Seoul, switching seamlessly through different times of her life. Perhaps more straightforward than Suah's longer works, but showing most of her preoccupations and strengths.

57. ADDRESS UNKNOWN: Kathrine Kressmann Taylor
A very effective and nastily stinging brief novella of betrayal and revenge, told entirely through letters. One of the books which warned of the dangers of the Nazis and was inevitably ignored by the people who should have listened.

58: THE MEMOIR OF AN ANTI-HERO: Kornel Filipowicz
Passivity, resistance and collaboration in WW2 Poland; what is your life worth?

59. THE STRANGE CASE OF EDWARD GOREY: Alexander Theroux
A perfect argument for why there should be more brief biographies of eccentric people by masterful novelists.

60. NESS: Robert Macfarlane & Stanley Donwood
Rich and strange and incantatory and ominous and Bomb-shadowed. A terrible Black Mass is brewing, and five THINGS are coming across the sea to stop it.

61. MRS CALIBAN: Rachel Ingalls
Just a perfect little novel about a neglected suburban housewife who falls in love with a swampy sea monster.

62. BOX HILL: Adam Mars-Jones
Incredibly uncomfortable, weirdly comic novella about love, sex, and being used and abused. Alarming and excellent.

63. PEREIRA DECLARES: Antonio Tabbucchi
(also published as PEREIRA MAINTAINS) Salazar's Portugal, a man trying to stand above the fray, a politicised encounter, a wonderful voice

64. THE BEAUTY OF THE HUSBAND: Anne Carson
Jealousy and sex and beauty and love filtered through the prism of Keats, in the form of a verse novella

65. RED SHIFT: Alan Garner
Dialogue-driven linked stories of people on the run in three widely separated timezones (Roman Britain, English Civil War, 1970s) near the hill/castle/town of Mow Cop; strange and mad and wonderful

66. PLEASE, SIR!: Frigyes Karinthy
Genuinely hilarious Hungarian satire on school life from the pupils' point of view. Impossible to find copies, but available online here.

67. THE UNION JACK: Imre Kertész
Another Hungarian, much less funny, but still wonderful: a man glimpses the Union Jack in the midst of the 1956 uprising, and it unleashes a contemplative mental spiral as the Soviet army prepares to invade.

68. AUGUST: Christa Wolf
An orphaned young boy in a TB sanatorium in the winter of 1946, written in a single day. An absolute gem, perfectly polished.

69. NOMADS: Dave Hutchinson
A group of people secretly living among us who are refugees from... something. A witty and clever example of why novellas are often the ideal length for science-fiction.

70. SEVERINA: Rodrigo Rey Rosa
A bored bookseller falls in love/lust/obsession with a sexy young book thief. AND WHY WOULDN'T YOU?

71. BULLFIGHT: Yasushi Inoue
American-occupied postwar Japan, and the editor of a relatively sophisticated Osaka newspaper gets mixed up in a scheme by a crime figure to organise a bullfight tournament.

72. FAUST: Ivan Turgenev
How things can go wrong when trying to seduce a married woman by reading her Goethe's 'Faust' when that's one of the things her husband JUST WON'T DO. Books will ruin your life.

73. THE RED SOFA: Michèle Lesbre
A woman on the way to Siberia, caught in a web of memories and emotions involving two old loves (one dead, one incommunicado), an old lady in her Parisian apartment, and the Russian landscape.

74. ON A RED STATION, DRIFTING: Aliette de Bodard
There aren't many extremely subtle novels of manners set on a space station in an alternative future where Vietname and China established Confucian galactic empires, and on this evidence that is a real shame.

75. THAT SMELL: Sonallah Ibrahim
Modernist, semi-existentialist goodness about a recently released political prisoner roaming Cairo, lost in the changing Egypt, and spying on his neighbours while under house arrest.

76. THE EMBALMER: Anne-Renée Caillé
Fragmented, oddly sweet story of someone interviewing her funeral worker father to capture all of his weird stories and strange workplace advice.

77. AMPHIBIAN: Christina Neuwirth
The old story: you come to work; management slowly floods the workplace to improve productivity (improve sales or drown)

78. GREAT GRANNY WEBSTER: Caroline Blackwood
An absolutely monstrous matriarch rules over her house and her family in this pitch-perfect black comedy of nastiness in an Anglo-Irish Big House.

79. WITTGENSTEIN'S NEPHEW: Thomas Bernhard
Strange and sometimes almost sweet fictionalised memoir of the time a young Bernhard shared a hospital with his friend Paul, a nephew of Wittgenstein; Bernhard for his endlessly knackered lungs, Paul for mental illness

80. MINE-HAHA: Frank Wedekind
Pleasingly mental tale of a deeply weird boarding school for girls that focuses entirely on bodily movement before releasing its charges entirely ill-equipped into the adult world

81. THE NIGHTMARE OF A VICTORIAN BESTSELLER: Brian Thompson
Funny, scathing brief biography of the first book of self-help pablum and its faintly ridiculous author

82. LOIS THE WITCH: Elizabeth Gaskell
Gaskell goes full-on Gothic in a bleak novella based on the Salem Witch Trials

83. THE TIDINGS OF THE TREES: Wolfgang Hilbig
The narrator surveys the ashy wasteland, haunted by the grisly "garbagemen", in this bleak novella of repressed history and the permanence of decay

84. HIS MOTHER'S HOUSE: Marta Morazzoni
A garden in Norway, the love and life's work of Haakon's mother. But now she has a young assistant, Felice, and Haakon is being pushed aside. The quietest power struggle in literature ensues.

85. ADVENTURES IN IMMEDIATE IRREALITY: Max Blecher
One of Blecher's several small masterpieces, a fictionalisation of his youth full of terrifying, visionary premonitions

86. THE LIFECYCLE OF SOFTWARE OBJECTS: Ted Chiang
Weirdly touching novella about consciousness, a sort of parenthood, AI and independence; available in the excellent EXHALATION collection.

87. CADAVER DOG: Luke Best
Grim as grim verse novel about a massive flood and its psychological toll on a woman who stays put in her mostly submerged house

88. RIPENING SEED: Colette
The ultimate young-love-going-sour-but-also-French novel, one of her many compact masterpieces, almost all of which are shamefully out of print in English because we are unworthy

89. NOSTALGIA HAS RUINED MY LIFE: Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle
Extremely funny, extremely uncomfortable fragmented diary-like tale of a year in a NZ woman's ill-considered life

90. THE FISH GIRL: Mirandi Riwoe
Riwoe fleshes out a minor Malay character from one of Somerset Maugham's 'Far Eastern Tales', giving her a richly textured history and tragic life story

91. THE SERVANT: Robin Maugham
See a man thoroughly manipulated, debased and destroyed! Lots of dark, seedy fun about power plays and switching roles.

92. LADY MACBETH OF MTSENSK: Nikolai Leskov
A servant embarks and what to him is just another affair with a married woman, not realising the emotional storm and violence he's about to unleash. The title will give you some hints.

93. THE BROTHER: Rein Raud
A stranger comes to town. All hell breaks loose.
(A deliberate attempt to do an Estonia "spaghetti Western", this succeeds in every way.)

94. TODAY: David Miller
Forster-channelling novella about the death of Joseph Conrad; beautifully observed only book by a writer who then sadly died himself.

95. JILLIAN: Halle Butler
Deeply grim and funny workplace comedy about a terrible employee in a terrible workplace and her obsession with/loathing of her even more terrible office-mate.

96. THE LEGEND OF THE HOLY DRINKER: Joseph Roth
Strange, wondrous story of transcendence about a man drinking himself to death, written by a genius in the process of drinking himself to death

97. EVERY EYE: Isobel English
A woman on a train unravels the mystery of her life; a compact masterpiece admired by Muriel Spark, who was no stranger to compact masterpieces

98. TRAVEL LIGHT: Naomi Mitchison
Weird, vivid fairy-story-ish fantasy of exiled children, talking shapeshifting animals and the language of dragons.

99. THALIAD: Marly Youmans
An origin story--a verse saga--of some future civilisation, drawn from the story of a group of children who (mostly) survive the fiery catastrophe that destroys ours.

100. THE DUEL: Giacomo Casanova
Ending this list with a second duel, this time in an autobiographical novella about two men (exiled Venetian, polish aristocrat) who end up in a battle of honour over a woman neither of them actually likes

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