When people find out that I am an editor and writer, they invariably ask me, “What are you reading now?” and I invariably seize up like a deer in headlights. I stare blankly back and make silent guppy movements with my mouth. This shouldn’t be a trick question for me. I should be able to come up with something since I read for a living. Tin House, the literary magazine I edit, receives 500 to 1,000 submissions every week. On top of that I just received a bulging box of books to read for the Young Lions Fiction Award, an award given to the best book of fiction by a writer thirty-five or under. Even at home there is no escape—UPS and FedX assault me daily, delivering piles of books for my wife, who writes the Hot Type column, for Vanity Fair. Water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink.
After they’ve talked me off the ledge, the well-meaning people change tacks: “Okay, it is that time of year and I need to get that special literate someone something special. What should I give them?” Oh, that’s a little easier. If that special someone is a writer, how about some cash? Or how about a subscription to a certain literary magazine staffed by starving writers? Okay, okay—first off, for anyone who even remotely considers themselves a writer, they should read William Gass’s amazing essay on the power and glory of the sentence in the latest edition of Bookforum, the always intriguing magazine of reviews and ideas. Maybe slip this inside of a more substantive gift, like an actual book. For those who believe (like me) that the short story form still holds surprising new possibilities, The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories is a stunning primer. The collection is compiled by Ben Marcus, who recently made literary waves in Harper's with his dismantling of Jonathan Franzen’s put down of “difficult” literature, while simultaneously making an argument for complexity in fiction. With stories by vanguard writers Mary Gaitskill, George Saunders, David Foster Wallace, along with some (pleasantly) surprising newer writers, this anthology offers a wide range of styles and forms, with only one unifying factor—strong writing. One of the writers in the collection, Aimee Bender, has a new collection of short stories, Willful Creatures, which dazzles with its mix of modern fable and wry humor. Willful Creatures is one of the few recent books that I am pressing on friends.
When people really pin me to the wall and ask me “Last book that changed your life? What can’t I live without?” I don’t hesitate in answering: Lydia Davis’s translation of Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way. It is simply the most stunning book I have read in many years. A desert-island book if ever there was one. I had tried to read Proust before, but got bogged down in the old, sludgy translations, Maybe I wasn’t ready yet, or maybe I lacked the intestinal fortitude to wade through Moncrieff’s sticky passages, but even fortified with madeleines and a press pot of coffee, I always felt as if I were trying to march through molasses. Davis, a MacArthur grant recipient and the recipient of a French Insigna of the Order of Arts and Letters for her numerous translations, also writes gemlike short, short stories (yes, she is included in the Anchor anthology). Davis sticks close to the original and let’s all of Proust’s humor and verbal playfulness come out, while at the same time preserving his profoundly beautiful (long) sentences and his devastating portraits of human frailty and hubris. The translation is part of an intriguing but inherently flawed British project which had seven prominent translators take on one volume each of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. While it is nice to have all seven volumes out at the same time, it is disconcerting to have seven different translating philosophies, something like having seven family members tell the seven chapters of the family history, with the first one overshadowing all that follow. Davis’s Swann's Way, however, read alone, is a deeply satisfying reading experience, suitable for any special literate someone—starving writer or just plain reader—on your list.