Continuing with our series of “Best of 2014″ lists curated by the entire Entropy community, we present some favorite selections as nominated by the diverse staff and team at Entropy.
This list brings together some of our favorite books of fiction released in 2014.
In no particular order:
1. Nochita by Dia Felix (City Lights)
“In Nochita, Dia Felix builds an extraordinarily rich and inventive language to carry the kaleidoscopic point of view of her young protagonist. What a pleasure to open a book and find such exuberant and committed artistry. A stunning debut.” — Janet Fitch
2. Does Not Love by James Tadd Adcox (Curbside Splendor)
“In James Tadd Adcox’s first novel Does Not Love, marital love disintegrates for complex time-tested reasons, but this reeling couple is packaged in a gritty contemporary milieu with pharmaceutical human guinea pigs run amok underground, and an FBI agent both creating and participating in S&M sex tapes with a librarian staggering in grief over her numerous miscarriages. A swirl of cultural satire and palpable pathos. —Cris Mazza
3. The Wallcreeper by Nell Zink (Dorothy, a Publishing Project)
“Nell Zink is a writer of extraordinary talent and range. Her work insistently raises the possibility that the world is larger and stranger than the world you think you know. You might not want to believe this, but her sentences and stories are so strong and convincing that you’ll have no choice.” —Jonathan Franzen
4. 10:04 by Ben Lerner (Faber & Faber)
“Mr. Lerner is among the most interesting young American novelists at present . . . In 10:04. he’s written a striking and important novel of New York City, partly because he’s so cognizant of both past and present. He’s a walker in the city in conscious league with Walt Whitman . . . We come to relish seeing the world through this man’s eyes.” —Dwight Garner
5. My Very End of the Universe by Chris Bower, Margaret Patton Chapman, Tiff Holland, Meg Pokrass, and Aaron Teel (Rose Metal Press)
“The five novellas-in-flash in My Very End of the Universe are excellent type specimens of the genre, and the accompanying craft essays help give this chimeric form a theory and a practice. Writers interested in story structure owe it to themselves to add this book to their office bookshelves, but it’s adventurous readers who will surely benefit the most, finding themselves thrilled by the surprising tales within.” —Matt Bell
6. Crystal Eaters by Shane Jones (Two Dollar Radio)
“Jones demonstrates a tightrope-like eye for finagling between Pynchon-esque quasi-science-fictional feels and the books’ physics, allowing almost anything to happen at any time, wrapped in a Wallace-like grip of childlike awe. The result is a novel that, paragraph to paragraph, is alive with imagination. Crystal Eaters is the rarest of kinds of objects, one that replenishes its readers’ crystal counts by simply being read.” —Vice
7. Faces in the Crowd by Valeria Luiselli (Coffee House)
“Luiselli’s haunting debut novel, about a young mother living in Mexico City who writes a novel looking back on her time spent working as a translator of obscure works at a small independent press in Harlem, erodes the concrete borders of everyday life with a beautiful, melancholy contemplation of disappearance. . . . Luiselli plays with the idea of time and identity with grace and intuition.” —Publishers Weekly
8. Baptism of Fire by Andzrej Sapkowski (Orbit)
“The character interplay is complex, unsentimental and anchored in brutal shared history. All bodes well for twisty plotting to come.”—SFX
9. The Ants by Sawako Nakayasu (Les Figues Press)
“We have plenty to learn from the numerous ants. Sawako Nakayasu—writer, antologist, Baudelaire’s sister—turns daily life inside out and upside down then puts it into perfect little boxes. Here we follow the lines of black legged, syntactical units—the words—as they cross and they tickle the heart of the matter with us.” —John Granger
10. Preparation for the Next Life by Atticus Lish (Tyrant Books)
“Atticus Lish’s Preparation for the Next Life, published this month, is the first novel I’ve read in ages that takes New York as seriously — with as much fortified realism — as Dubliners takes Dublin” —Flavorwire
11. Inside Madeline by Paula Bomer (Soho Press)
“With surgical insight, Inside Madeline delves into the most complex female territory imaginable and dissects until every honest bone is revealed. Bomer’s prose doesn’t flinch, doesn’t filter—the bravery of these stories left me breathless.” — Alissa Nutting
12. Works by Edouard Levé (Dalkey Archive)
“Levé isn’t calling for the creation of a new kind of art. Rather, encoded in this catalog of works and meta works is a call to revisit what it is we value in art. Is it to work in opposition to what we cherish? To double back on that which we find extraordinary? To call the extraordinariness of the thing in question into question? “Works” is a book charged with wit and wonder, seeded with the prospect of future masterpieces. It’s a pity that no more of them will sprout from Levé.”–Jim Ruland
13. I’ll Be Right There by Kyung-Sook Shin (Other Press)
“The shimmering, lucid tones and silver melancholy of I’ll Be Right There give readers a South Korea peopled with citizens fighting for honor and intellectual freedom, and longing for love and solace. Kyung-Sook Shin’s characters have unforgettable voices—it’s no wonder she has so many fans.” —Susan Straight
14. The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing by Nicholas Rombes (Two Dollar Radio)
“There are a lot of writers who explore the cinematic, but, frankly, most of them haven’t got a clue about what that means. Rombes, who has written eloquently about film for years, here debuts a novel about the intersection of writing and film, among other things. In a year of uncontrolled genre-jumping, Rombes’ novel stands out for its awareness of the intersection of artistic forms.” —Flavorwire
15. Department of Speculation by Jenny Offill (Knopf)
“Slender, quietly smashing . . . The story shifts and skitters, spare but intricate as filigree, short bursts of observation and memory—comic, startling, searing—floating in white space . . . Offill has tapped a vein directly into the experience of this marriage, this little family, this subsuming of self, and we mainline it right along with her . . . A book so radiant, so sparkling with sunlight and sorrow, that it almost makes a person gasp. —Boston Globe
16. City of Stairs by Robert Jackson Bennett (Broadway Books)
“Suddenly, the pages are whipping by, 50 at a clip as mysteries are uncovered, miracles happen and assassins begin scaling the walls. … Bennett is plainly a writer in love with the world he has built — and with good cause. It’s a great world, original and unique, with a scent and a texture, a sense of deep, bloody history, and a naturally-blended magic living in the stones.” —NPR.org
17. Dear Committee Members by Julie Schumacher (Doubleday)
“A hilarious academic novel that’ll send you laughing (albeit ruefully) back into the trenches of the classroom… [A] mordant minor masterpiece… Like the best works of farce, academic or otherwise, Dear Committee Members deftly mixes comedy with social criticism and righteous outrage. By the end, you may well find yourself laughing so hard it hurts. —Maureen Corrigan, NPR
18. The Spectral Link by Thomas Ligotti (Subterranean)
“The dark poet of ‘redemptive demoralization’ (or depression) returns with two surreal novelettes collected in an elegant, slender volume. Ligotti (The Conspiracy Against the Human Race) continues exploring his fascination with the primal question of meaning for those in dispute with ‘reality itself, or what passes for reality.’… Ligotti publishes slowly, but like a philosophical oyster irritated by the grit of existence, he produces miniature pearls.” — Publisher’s Weekly
19. Ready to Burst by Frankétienne, Translated by Kaiama L. Glover (Archipelago)
“His work can speak to the most intellectual person in the society as well as the most humble. It’s a very generous kind of genius he has, one I can’t imagine Haitian literature ever existing without.” — Edwidge Danticat
20. Running Through Beijing by Xu Zechen, trans. Eric Abrahamsen (Two Lines Press)
“Running through Beijing is clean and fast, deeply felt and very smart: a profoundly engaging story about a certain kind of honor, and a certain kind of thief, and a life that feels hidden in plain sight.” — Roy Kesey
21. Nevers by Megan Martin (Caketrain)
“Megan Martin’s muscular, gleaming prose contends with how we as humans cope with the itchy banality of reality. Stuffed with imaginary men, future bathtub deaths, sick black jellies, meteor lettuce, and vaginas full of Jesus light, Nevers emerges from the tension between what is real, what is perceived, what is felt and what is completely imagined. What makes Martin such an amazing writer is that it’s hard to discern the differences—and it doesn’t even matter.” —Melissa Broder
22. Echopraxia by Peter Watts (Tor Books)
“If you read one SF novel this year, read this one.” —Richard Morgan.
23. Beside Myself by Ashley Farmer (Tiny Hardcore)
A girl drinks river water that gives her good advice but a bad reputation. A young woman’s job at a make-up counter ends in disaster. Car accidents and cornfields cause siblings to disappear while, up above, airplane banners advertise hair care products. Welcome to Beside Myself, Ashley Farmer’s debut collection of short stories. These brief, lucid dreams illuminate the moment the familiar becomes strange and that split second before everything changes forever.
24. Forest of Fortune by Jim Ruland (Tyrus Books)
“Powered by adept characterization, darkly lyrical prose, and an unexpected but oh-so-perfect ending, this is the literary equivalent of a slot machine jackpot.” —Publishers Weekly
25. Ugly Girls by Lindsay Hunter (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
“Lindsay Hunter is a dazzling talent, and with Ugly Girls she has written what will surely go down as a new American classic. Every character is complex, every scene is dense as a bullet, and every sentence pulses with electricity. Magnificent.”—Christina Henriquez
26. A Sentimental Novel by Alain Robbe-Grillet (Dalkey Archive)
What constitutes pornography is very much in the eye of the beholder, but there is little doubt that this is an openly and joyfully pornographic book, in that it turns into an unbound celebration of deviancy at its most explicit and imaginative. —The Guardian
27. With My Dog Eyes by Hilda Hilst, Translated by Adam Morris (Melville House)
“Hilst’s writing is characterized by an exuberant, masterful impropriety and winding sentences that put it, by her own lights, squarely in the tradition of literature that includes Joyce and Beckett.” —Boston Globe
28. Nicola, Milan by Lodovico Pignatti Morano (Semiotexte)
“In the chosen land—a Milan full of bored rich people too dumb to know themselves—a man longs to know Nicola, a cruel and ineffable hustler. What’s it like to really ‘go home’ with Nicola? I could not turn away from the answer—trashy and female, dangerously hot. Nicola, Milan reads like a part of the secret literature that it wishes to penetrate.” —Tamara Faith Berger
29. How to be Both by Ali Smith (Hamish Hamilton Ltd)
“This adventurous, entertaining writer offers two distinctive takes on youth, art and death—and even two different editions of the book . . . Both are remarkable depictions of the treasures of memory and the rich perceptions and creativity of youth, of how we see what’s around us and within us. Comical, insightful and clever, Smith builds a thoughtful fun house with her many dualities and then risks being obvious in her structural mischief, but it adds perhaps the perfect frame to this marvelous diptych.” —Kirkus Reviews
30. Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer (and the entire Southern Reach Trilogy)
“There is a comfort in familiarity, a foundation from which to definitively identify and label. But Jeff VanderMeer is not interested in putting his readers at ease. With Annihilation–the first volume of The Southern Reach Trilogy–he carefully creates a yearning for answers, then boldly denies them, reminding us that being too eager to know too much can be dangerous. The story follows an expedition of four women who are known only by their professions: the Psychologist, the Surveyor, the Anthropologist, and the Biologist–nameless pawns tasked with exploring, discovering, and (hopefully) delivering data about a portentous coastal territory called Area X. We are a bit like fifth members of that team (perhaps “the Reader”), learning at the same pace, guided by the observations of our narrator, the Biologist. Still the context remains blurry as VanderMeer twists each discovery into a deeper mystery. Through potent description and unrelenting tension, he achieves a level of emotional manipulation that should appeal to anyone who embraced the paranormal phenomena and maddening uncertainties of Lost.” –Robin A. Rothman
