With 2020 (finally!) coming to a close, we’re looking back at the year in publishing. In no particular order, these are the ten books SwR loved most.
Bring Me the Head of Quentin Tarantino by Julián Herbert
“[Julián Herbert] . . . has forged an enviable reputation as one of Mexico’s most talented and versatile writers. As a poet, novelist, short story writer, chronicler, literary critic (not to mention musician), Julián Herbert’s work defies definition and exhibits an extreme disregard for traditional genre boundaries.”
—Christina MacSweeney, English translator of Julián Herbert, Valeria Luiselli, Daniel Saldaña París, Elvira Navarro, among others
New Bad News by Ryan Ridge
“Everything awaits inside, kitchen sink leak synth included: the quickest wit in the West; tinsel town’s hissing mirages; dreams deeply American; cheap beer good and cold; downbursts of social commentary; scalpel-fine finessing of the human condition; wisdoms poached and wisdoms boiled and wisdoms deviled and wisdoms parboiled. Readers are encouraged to keep a cry-laugh hankie very, very handy.”
—Abraham Smith, author of Destruction of Man
The Clerk by Guillermo Saccomanno
“Guillermo Saccomanno is recognized as one of Argentina’s foremost living writers. Although often linked to neo-noir fiction, Saccomanno resists categorization . . . this is a relatively slim novel whose characters are as schematic as they are scheming: anonymous, pathetic creatures who could easily be spinning out their lives anywhere, at almost any intersection of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.”
—Andrea G. Labinger, winner of the PEN/Heim Translation Award for Saccomanno’s novel Cámara Gesell and a finalist for the 2020 Best Translated Book Award for his novel 77
Sleepovers by Ashleigh Bryant Phillips
“Let me tell you right now, Sleepovers is a marvel. Often violent, always surprising, it’s a book to explore, with each story yielding its own small wonders. It’s the kind of book you never want to stop reading.”
—Jimmy Cajoleas, author of four novels, including most recently Minor Prophets
The Last Taxi Driver by Lee Durkee
“The book is brilliant. Every word in the right place. It is perfect, and if I’m to be honest, I’m jealous.”
—Mary Miller, author of the two story collections Big World and Always Happy Hour and the novels The Last Days of California and Biloxi
Ornamental by Juan Cárdenas
“The book is compulsively readable, and that’s one reason why I was drawn to it as a translator. But it’s just as compelling for its language and style.”
—Lizzie Davis, English translator of Juan Cárdenas and Editor at Coffee House Press
City of Margins by William Boyle
“William Boyle’s wondrous new novel City of Margins is a tight knot of lives wound in ways both violent and romantic. Its worldview, as in much of Boyle’s work, is informed by the deafening din of modernity and the fated realities of Greek tragedy.”
—Elizabeth Nelson, music writer and frontwoman for the D.C.-based garage-punk band The Paranoid Style
Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor
“Hurricane Season is a novel, which means, first and foremost, it tenders a reading experience, and as reading experiences go, I find it hard to think of one in recent years that I have found as absorbing, as compelling, as thrilling. Hurricane Season rips along on a tide of real speech, real human instincts, real violence, real feeling . . . a page-turner in the best possible sense: authentic, compulsive, and vivid, from the very first page.”
—Sophie Hughes, English translator of Fernanda Melchor, Enrique Vila-Matas, Alia Trabucco Zerán, among others
The Ice Cream Man & Other Stories by Sam Pink
“The Ice Cream Man is a collection of stories that fully engages with the real world, the world of bent cigarettes and murder, of homelessness and day drinking, of rats in the alley and jobs you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy and evictions and sorrow. It’s a dark world, sure, but it also contains hope and healthy doses of laughter, friendship, and ice cream, and those things are enough to keep you coming back for more.”
—Gabino Iglesias, author of Zero Saints and Coyote Songs
The Dominant Animal by Kathryn Scanlan
“Kathryn Scanlan writes sentences so delicious that you want to roll them around your mouth like an expensive chocolate. Each of the pristine, compact stories in her debut collection, The Dominant Animal, links one ingenious grammatical construction to another in a chain of virtuosic prose.”
—Wilson McBee, SwR staff writer
