On the occasion of the awarding of the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, Rail Books section co-editors Elizabeth Lothian and Joseph Salvatore interviewed 2023 recipient Tyriek White about his debut novel We Are a Haunting. In their conversation, White discusses troubling the boundaries between Western ideas of life and death, writing a story about growing up in a predominantly Black and brown, blue-collar neighborhood, and how Brooklyn to him represents an attitude, a demeanor, and a set of principles.

To mark the end of this annus horribilis, we are sharing a list of the best books we read and covered in the past 12 months. Piece by piece, the list reveals what—and how—we have endured.

Josip Novakovich quit studying medicine in Novi Sad to emigrate to the United States in 1976. Writing in English as a second language, he has published a dozen books and more than a hundred stories in various journals and in collections with Garywolf, Harper Collins, and lately, Dzanc Press which has just published his latest, Honey in the Carcase, including “A Taste of the Sea."

Paul Tremblay is an author who has ranged widely: hard-boiled crime fiction, mystery, fantasy, science fiction, horror, and suspense.

Selections from our Books Editor

Last winter, I asked writers Rick Moody and Porochista Khakpour—whose passionate and fiercely intelligent exchanges about literature, writing, and writers I’d been reading on social media—to bring their conversation to The Brooklyn Rail, partly to share their words with our readers and partly to celebrate the occasion of Rick Moody’s new novel Hotel of North America. I gave them no prompts other than to go as long as they’d like to explore their ideas as fully as they wanted to.

Recently Charles Bock was a guest writer in a fiction class that I teach at The New School in New York City, on the theory and craft of fiction. The whole class had read his new novel, Alice & Oliver, about a family’s brutal ordeal with cancer, before Bock’s visit.

The opening line of Nancy Davidoff Kelton’s new memoir, Finding Mr. Rightstein, is “My father in his coffin looked better than most of the men I dated.”

Recently the writer Matthew Vollmer began posting a series of beguiling, engaging, and suspiciously literary status updates on his Facebook page.

If you were to choose one novel that was fundamental to you as a writer, what would it be? This is the question Robert Lasner, editor at Ig Publishing, asked a handful of authors. The result is Bookmarked, his new series that features writers devoting an entire book to discussing their choices.

By the time I encountered Raymond Carver’s Where I’m Calling From: Selected Stories, in 1989, I’d already seen many of his stories in various magazines, books, anthologies—even on faded photocopies of copies of copies that my fiction teachers regularly taught from in class.

Red Ink is a new quarterly literary series centered around women writers, past and present. It’s inspired by this Virginia Woolf quote from Mrs Dalloway: “He thought her beautiful, believed her impeccably wise; dreamed of her, wrote poems to her, which, ignoring the subject, she corrected in red ink”

Scott Alexander Hess earned his MFA in creative writing from The New School, in New York City. He blogs for the Huffington Post, and his writing has appeared in Genre Magazine, The Fix, and elsewhere. Hess co-wrote Tom in America, an award-winning short film starring Sally Kirkland and Burt Young. The Butcher’s Sons is his third novel and was named a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2015. Originally from St. Louis, Missouri, Hess now lives in Manhattan. He spoke with The Brooklyn Rail’s Books editor Joseph Salvatore in Hell’s Kitchen, the setting for The Butcher’s Sons.

In his first novel, Part of the World (2007), Robert Lopez performed a kind of textual surgery, using language like a scalpel to cut new, trenchant incisions into narrative territory originally carved out by writers such as Alain Robbe-Grillet and Samuel Beckett.

In 1792, William Blake indicts the city of London by invoking the metaphor of its abominations running in blood down city walls.

Much has been written about Peter Markus’s limited vocabulary. Nearly every review of his previous three books offers a list of his words, often draped in quotation marks and given in no particular order: “moon,” “mud,” “river,” “rust,” “fish,” “star,” “brother.”

There’s chaos in Pisstown tonight.