2018 is in full swing now, but we're still excited that several books from NYRB made the "best-of" lists at the end of last year. Here's a handful of the selections:
In The New Statesman's "Best Books of the Year, 2017," Geoff Dyer writes, "My favourite discovery this year was the reissue of Eve Babitz's Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh and LA. First published in 1977, it’s a collection of linked, neurotically funny, autobiographical stories about the kind of stuff you would expect from southern California in the 1970s. The sensual pleasures of the prose are overseen by a blue-sky metaphysics....There’s no satire here – that would be too easy. It is more like a series of intoxicated love letters that have the potential to become an endlessly postponed suicide note."
In Bookforum's "Hit Parade: Writers Choose the Best Books of the Year," Sheila Heti writes, “One of my favorite books from 2017 is the reprint of Difficult Women, by David Plante. Though some reviewers found Plante’s book ‘morally indefensible,’ this objection sounds more like a veiled judgment of his subjects.... It’s funny, original, and risky, and it concludes with an index comparing the three subjects on such matters as abortion, alcohol, and animals; an amusingly absurd end.”
In NPR.com's "2017's Great Reads," Etelka Lehoczky writes, "Here's a terrific example of the current wave of great comics from Europe. Dominique Goblet's approach [in Pretending is Lying] is postmodern, with a scruffy, anything-goes mix of styles and moods, but it's marked everywhere by her forays into photography. She intersperses her tale – an autobiographical account of family, a lover, truth, lies and brutality – with images that look like photos."
And Chris Raschka's The Doorman's Repose made Publishers Weekly's "Best Middle Grade Books of the Year"—here's what they say: “Raschka brings readers to Manhattan's Upper East Side in this delightful novel told through linked stories, set in and around a fictional apartment building. With a quasi-sentient elevator and stories about mice families and city-mandated opera singers, it's an off-kilter vision of New York City that feels simultaneously true in its bones."
Here's to more good books in 2018!