Fiction, poetry, and non-fiction books by MacDowell Fellows chosen by NYT editors for annual list.
At the end of each year The New York Times Book Review publishes its annual Holiday Books issue. In addition to picking the year’s best in cookbooks, travel books, and more, the editors include a list of the 100 Notable Books of 2013. Among the list of fiction, poetry and nonfiction selections, the editors named a baker’s dozen penned by MacDowell Colony Fellows.
Here is the list of the writers, their books, and brief descriptions.
Nonfiction
To the End of June: The Intimate Life of American Foster Care is the culmination of five years of study tracking dozens of children through the American foster care system by Cris Beam. The New York Times called it “a triumph of narrative reporting and storytelling, as well as a thorough and nuanced analysis of an American institution deeply in need of reform.”
Sheri Fink interviewed more than 500 people to write Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital that centers on the case of a doctor accused yet not indicted of euthanizing four patients in a New Orleans hospital during Hurricane Katrina. The book, a detailed study of what occurred during the disaster, was also picked by Times editors as one of the 10 best of the year.
Mary Ruefle gave a lecture to graduate students every six months, and Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures, is the record of those wise words. The poet takes on many subjects, surrounding poetry, moving from theory to the importance of every human being to civilization in this smart and sometimes funny collection.
Fiction and Poetry
The narrator in We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler grew up in the 1970s alongside a chimpanzee as part of a long-term experiment headed by her father, a psychology professor. His wrong-headed experiment results in deeply felt loss and a family that spirals into despair when the simian is removed from the home.
In Schroder, Amity Gaige’s third novel, a man who assumes a false identity to gain social status as a youth carries it through adulthood, a marriage, divorce, and then kidnaps his young daughter. He goes on the run with her, ultimately to be captured during a climactic chapter The New York Times says is the novel’s “best conceived.”
Elizabeth Graver writes about family, social class, money and prosperity against a setting of seaside summer homes in The End of the Point. In an interview on the Harper Collins website she says, “I wanted to portray a small place but go deep, to use a narrow lens to examine larger issues.”
Andrew Sean Greer has written The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells, a novel about a woman who suffers through the death of her twin brother and a break-up with her long-time lover. To alleviate her depression, Greta undergoes a “radical psychiatric treatment” with a side effect of transporting her into lives she might have lived.
David Leavitt writes about two barely married couples awaiting passage back to the U.S. from 1940 Lisbon in The Two Hotel Francforts. In the boredom of waiting for the ship to sail, and the energy derived from other people fearing the coming war, the two men have an affair.
Fiona Maazel wrote Woke Up Lonely about a man left by his wife and daughter. He builds an organization (or is it a cult?) based on the premise that a community of loners can help each other defeat their loneliness. The government assigns his estranged wife to spy on the group and the organization begins unraveling.
The Son, by Phillip Meyer, is a “masterly multigenerational saga” of a family from Texas centered on a codger of a patriarch who is unapologetically opportunistic and hands off his ranch, oil fields, power, and morals to his granddaughter.
Jamie Quatro, in I Want To Show You More, explores infidelity, faith, and family in a debut collection of short stories. The tales have been described as hypnotically intimate and urgent, unfolding lives stretched between spirituality and sexuality in the New American South.
Brenda Shaughnessy’s third collection, Our Andromeda, mythologizes the haunting, often dark complexities of motherhood and familial love. She imagines a parallel existence in the galaxy of Andromeda where, according to Publisher’s Weekly, the fierce and angry poems become transformative.
In The Interestings Meg Wolitzer explores the meaning of talent; the nature of envy; the roles of class, art, money, and power; and how all of it can shift and tilt precipitously over the course of a friendship and a life.
