Stacey May Fowles wrote Fear of Fighting; likes Tamara Bach’s Girl From Mars
Lydia Millet (pictured at top)
wrote
How the Dead Dream;
likes Joy Williams’
The Changeling Lydia Millet’s How the Dead Dream is an unshakable and unnerving novel of property, greed and nature told through the eyes of a real-estate developer cut off from humanity, both emotionally and, by novel’s end, literally. Less expansive than her operatic Oh Pure and Radiant Heart, Millet’s latest book is a veritable Treasure of the Sierra Madre updated for the Zoloft set. For her own favourite of 2008, Millet tells me, “I’d have to pick the reissue of Joy Williams’ great novel The Changeling, which was out of print for 30 years before Fairy Tale Review Press brought it out again this year. Brilliant, strange, creepy and invigorating.”
Derek McCormack
wrote The Show That Smells;
likes Dodie Bellamy’s Barf Manifesto and
Kevin Killian’s Action Kylie
2008 finally saw the return of Derek McCormack — five years after The Haunted Hillbilly — with The Show That Smells, his art deco–dressed Hollywood fantasia of vampires and consumptive country singers. McCormack, true to his slowpoke reputation, was stuck on a tie for his top title of 2008. “I can’t decide between Barf Manifesto by Dodie Bellamy and Action Kylie by Kevin Killian,” he says. “The books are tied together in a bunch of beautiful ways. Besides being partners in life, Bellamy and Killian are both singular, original writers, breathtakingly bold and brilliant. These books are both tributes of a sort: Barf Manifesto is a celebration of “Everyday Barf,” an essay by Eileen Myles; Action Kylie is a series of poems inspired by Killian’s muse, Kylie Minogue.”
Stacey May Fowles
wrote Fear of Fighting;
likes Tamara Bach's Girl From Mars
Stacey May Fowles is Toronto’s most talented writer to come out of the last generation of zine and small press scribes. Her prose in novels like 2008’s Fear of Fighting has a complexity, as well as a sprightly edge, not dulled by the 24-grit touch of creative-writing workshops. Fowles’ first pick was, funnily enough, The Show that Smells, which she likened to “a really good date, the kind where the night flies by at full speed and you wake up the next morning confused and thinking, ‘what the hell happened, where are my pants and why do I feel so good?’” Pressed for a second title, Fowles admits, “I’ve been reading a lot of young-adult books this year because of my work with Shameless magazine. Groundwood recently put out a translation of Tamara Bach’s Girl From Mars that completely blew me away. It’s one of those rare books-for-girls that’s completely authentic to the teen experience, without being moralizing, patronizing or predictably vacuous. I think I’ve finally admitted to myself that, as I get older, I tend to revel in a genuine teen-girl romance narrative that much more, nostalgic for epic love letters, mixtapes and junior-high slow dances.”
Carl Wilson
wrote Let’s Talk About Love;
likes John Darnielle’s Master of Reality
Appropriately, then, this best of 2008 ends with a slow dance to “My Heart Will Go On.” Music critic Carl Wilson’s journey to the end of taste with Céline Dion in Let’s Talk About Love (his entry in the 33 1/3 series) wasn’t the conversion of St. Paul many were expecting. Thankfully, Wilson’s quest was more nuanced than that, primarily because, hard as he tries, he fails to connect with Dion. While there’s subtlety to be found in Dion’s French language recordings and while Wilson discovers common ground with interviewed fans, he ends up judging himself more for internalizing the conventions of discernment, which casually reproduce social striations. Call it learning to talk about Let’s Talk About Love rather than outright learning to love Let’s Talk About Love. His pick for book of the year is fellow 33 ? author (and main Mountain Goat) John Darnielle’s Master of Reality. Wilson describes it as better suited for budding children of the grave than for adult music nerds. “Disguised as a Black Sabbath album tribute,” he explains, “this little black book is actually the best young-adult novella I’ve read in years; it deserves a long cult life of being passed hand to hand, as a manual for how to hold on to your soul with willpower and heavy metal, even if you’re confined in a secure treatment facility."