This was the year of displaced persons.

The Invisible Bridge, by Julie Orringer. The untold story of Hungarian Jews forced to flee as Europe’s tragedy unfolds, renders the unthinkable poetic.

Brooklyn, by Colm Toibin. The story of Eilis who leaves her small village in Ireland in the 1950′s for Brooklyn, where she learns to live away from the only home she’s ever known.

Last Night at the Lobster, by Stewart O’Nan. Manny, the manager of a Red Lobster, wishes his last shift would never end because after tonight, the restaurant will close its doors forever and he will be demoted to a position at a nearby Olive Garden.

These stories, fueled by hope and despair, where no one leaves of their own accord, are filled with longing for the people and places left behind. With each one, I felt the way a child feels when suddenly separated from his parents on the street–that first struggle with being disconnected, a rippling anxiety, and the hopeful glimpse of a familiar skirt, that isn’t your mother’s after all.

Martha Southgate, author of The Taste of Salt

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan. Ambitious and genre-breaking in an unexpected and surprising way, this novel’s acclaim is well-deserved. Egan swings for the fences and hits them.

Open City by Teju Cole. Another surprising, ambitious winner, this time from a debut novelist. An elegiac tone poem to post-9/11 New York City narrated by a fascinating, complex protagonist.

Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self by Danielle Evans. Like Egan, Evans has received great acclaim for her work. And like Cole, it’s her debut–in this case, a collection of short stories. Like Egan’s the acclaim is deserved; like Cole’s,it’s a book you shouldn’t miss.

Hillary Jordan, author of When She Woke

A Hundred and One Nights by Benjamin Buccholz. This debut novel about Afghanistan is a spike in the heart. To quote my own blurb for it: “Fearless and seductive. . . . A powerful testimony to the insanity of war and the undeniable demands of love.”

State of Wonder by Ann Patchett. I’d follow Ann just about anywhere, including the muggy, buggy Amazon.

Ten Little Indians by Sherman Alexie. What a marvelous, joyful writer. “Do Not Go Gentle” has to be one of my favorite stories ever.

Lauren Grodstein, author of A Friend of the Family

The Family Fang by Kevin Wilson was inventive, sharp, alarming, surprising, and occasionally heartbreaking. It was everything I love in a novel, plus art, plus bad parents, plus bad children. Read it in a day.

One of my students turned me on to David Gordon’s The Serialist, which features porn, savage violence, and grown men dressing like their mothers. While these are not the sorts of things I usually go for in a novel, The Serialist was surprising in the best ways – hyper funny and fun to read.

Jesse Browner’s Everything Happens Today was also a true pleasure – the story of a too-smart, too-sensitive Greenwich Village teenager who grapples with life, death, sex, and regret all in the course of a memorable day in which he keeps forgetting to walk the dog.

Caroline Leavitt, author of Pictures of You

State of Wonder by Ann Patchett. The Amazon. A missing scientist. An  Anaconda about to swallow a boy. Patchett could write a grocery list and have me in a state of awe and this latest novel is absolutely enthralling.

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson. A thrillingly real look at a bonafide genius who could be as nasty and self-centered as he was brilliant about changing the world. Reading this, I had nightmares that Jobs was following me and yelling at me–but I’d read it again in a heartbeat.

Hemingway’s Boat by Paul Hendrickson. A sympathetic portrait of a complicated, complex, and sometimes brutal man, Hendrickson’s bio shows the full beating heart of Hemingway.

Julia Alvarez, author of In the Time of the Butterflies

Emily Alone by Stewart O’Nan, who became a new favorite. I went on to read several other novels by him including Wish You Were Here and Last Night at the Lobster.  A wonderfully detailed and absorbing portrayal of a old age and solitude.  It’s amazing how carefully and humbly and beautifully O’Nan casts his spell.

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Eagan. I know this novel garnered a lot of praise and earned many awards, which I’d add, are well deserved! I felt mesmerized by these interlocking narratives and Eagan’s ability to capture so many different sensibilities.  I also felt as an older novelist that I was getting a glimpse of the styles, wild inventions, about the concerns of a new “postmodern” generation of novelists.

Room by Emma Donoghue. Hands down, this was my favorite novel of the year, and up there with other “permanent” favorites.  A haunting  novel  from the language and perspective of a five-year old—the voice slowly and quietly invaded my thinking so that even after I put the novel down, I was thinking about the world and hearing language in the style of young Jack —the last time I remember this happening  in such an absorbing way was with A Hundred Years of Solitude by García Marquez.

Jon Michaud, author of When Tito Loved Clara

Nothing I read this year gave me more pleasure than Steven Millhauser’s short story, “Getting Closer,” published in The New Yorker in January. As for books, my favorites in 2011 were the widely praised debut novels by Chad Harbach—The Art of Fielding—and Karen Russell—Swamplandia!. This year was also the centenary of Mervyn Peake’s birth, which the Overlook Press marked by releasing a gorgeous, illustrated edition of Peake’s peerless fantasy epic, The Gormenghast Trilogy. That was the book I most enjoyed rereading.

Robert Goolrick, author of A Reliable Wife

Just My Type: A Book About Fonts by Simon Garfield — If the words Garamond, Baskerville or Helvetica give you a thrill, this book tells you everything you’ve ever wanted to know about how and why type faces are what they are and how they got that way. Fascinating and odd.

Lives Other Than My Own by Emmanuel Carrere — A memoir-as-novel that explores the effect on two lovers of the endless aftershocks of a tsunami in Sri Lanka. A wise, kind and infinitely sad work about the ripples and quakes of the human heart.

The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey — This book doesn’t come out until February, but when it does, you’ll find a brilliant first novel that continues to enchant long after the snow has melted. If Willa Cather and Gabriel Garcia Marques had written a book together, this would be it.

Jonathan Evison, author of West of Here

The Ringer, by Jenny Shank: Please don’t judge this book by the cover. I happen to know that the author cried for two days when she saw it. As good as Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding is (and I wrote a blurb for it which started with the word “spectacular”), The Ringer may be even better. Like Harbach’s Fielding, baseball serves only as a framing device for this promising debut about such durable American themes as race, class, and family. Make no mistake though, Shank knows baseball like the sister of the major league ballplayer she is.

Zazen, by Vanessa Veselka: At turns hilarious, unsettling, and improbably sweet, Veselka’s debut is, above all, a highly engaging, and totally unique experience, which will have you re-reading passages and dog-earing pages. But best of all, in the end, Zazen is that rare novel which dares to be hopeful in the face of despair, and succeeds. Veselka has a shit-ton of voice, and you know within the first paragraph that you’re in for a ride. She could write about dog turds and I’d happily read it.

Damascus, by Joshua Mohr: The third novel from San Fransisco’s Joshua Mohr is his best to date. Mohr is the bard of the underbelly, and the Mission District is his playground. Part Harry Crews, part Charles Bukowski, and part Franz Kafka, Mohr will make you squirm, laugh, recognize, and take pause. Behind his wayward and dissolute characters, burns the clear-eyed moral vision of a very unique artist.

Robert Morgan, author of Boone

On China by Henry Kissinger. This is an extraordinary survey of Chinese history and culture from the beginnings to the present day. Part memoir, part meditation, part analysis and prediction, Kissinger’s magnum opus gives us a detailed and authoritative narrative of how China and the United States and the West reached the present state of their complex relations.

The Penguin Book of English Verse by Paul Keegan. Just when you thought there were no surprises to be found in the canon of English poetry along comes this selection to reveal new examples from both the famous and obscure. Poems are showcased more than the poets. Both refreshing and comprehensive.

Wildflowers & Plant Communities of the Southern Appalachian Mountains & Piedmont by Timothy P. Spira. The photographs are stunning, the text vivid, learned, succinct and alive. Need I say more?

Richard Louv, author of The Nature Principle

Empire of the Summer Moon, by S.C. Gwynne. The truth about the West is always more amazing than the myth.

White Fang, by Jack London. Who tells a better nature story?

Jack Kennedy, Elusive Hero, by Chris Matthews.  JFK was….elusive, but Matthews reminds us why, in 1969, when Americans were polled on who should be added to Mount Rushmore, they picked the 35th president.

August gets a bad rap as the month of withering lawns, miserable heat, and end-of-summer ennui. An article published in Slate actually argued that it should be abolished from the year altogether. Before you start tearing pages out of your calendar, let me remind you that August marks the advent of Fair season, which means it’s the first of only a small handful of months when it’s socially acceptable to eat spaghetti and meatballs on a stick. August also happens to be the only month in the English language that is also an adjective, National Goat Cheese Month, and (most importantly) the month of my birthday. It’s also the kick-off of hurricane season, and here in Chapel Hill we’ve been getting some pretty woolly weather. First there was the earthquake that rumbled up the East Coast on the 23rd. Then we had some hefty winds from the outskirts of Hurricane Irene on Saturday. Fortunately, I was set for any emergency. I have a survival kit under my bed that includes five good books, emergency rations of cookie dough, and dental floss. My motto: always be prepared.

1. Survive the storms.  In case of a weather emergency, make sure your bookshelves are well-stocked. The New Yorker supplies a helpful list of five books to cozy up with during a hurricane.

2. Un-educate yourself.  I’ve always heard that you learn the most important lessons in life outside of school. I therefore feel completely justified in mail-ordering every single item on this list of the thirty least educational books ever published.

3. To arms, readers, to arms! According to this alarming article, 70% of adults in the United States haven’t been in a bookstore in the past five years. I find this hard to believe. If it’s true, then we the 30% a weighty task before us. Rather than despair, I suggest you all go to your favorite local bookstore and buy as many books as you can carry. The mother country thanks you. 

4. Reading makes you better. Better at what? At everything. I don’t understand this picture, but I like it.

5. My kind of tattoo. Earlier this month, I flirted with the idea of getting a tattoo. I was tempted to get a picture of Benjamin Franklin tattooed on my right thigh, but I decided that his face didn’t lend itself to tattooing and besides, I’m not really into pain. Instead, I tried to dye my hair red and ended up staining the bathtub permanently orange. If I’d realized that this was an option, you can bet your last tomato that I’d have it all over my back.

6. I wish I’d thought of this. Sometimes I get the urge to alphabetize my bookshelves. Other times I prefer a more thematic approach and organize them by subject matter or genre. Nina Katchadourian sorts them so that the titles on the spine make up hilarious, painfully apt mini-stories. It’s one of the greatest things I’ve ever seen.

7. More books as art. Slightly older, but utterly enchanting: take a gander at these high-quality images of medieval calligraphy.

8. Next time you’re in Paris, check into their swanky book-themed hotel. Each of the twenty-six rooms pays homage to a different writer.

9. If that’s a few hundred euros north of your budget, stop by the Paris’s legendary English bookstore, Shakespeare and Company. There’s a bed upstairs where all manner of famous writers (or, at the time, aspiring writers) have laid their head free of charge. I’m not sure what you have to do to convince the owners that you’re worthy of sleeping there. I’m guessing it involves Homeric recitation, on-the-spot Haiku composition, and cartwheels. One guidebook recommends bringing your own pair of sheets. Apparently they haven’t been changed since Hemingway slept there.

10. And finally, what you’ve all been waiting for. (Even if you didn’t know it.) Your favorite authors have now been reinvented as Lego characters. If they sold these in stores, I’d clear out the shelves. Also, when did Louisa May Alcott start looking so much like Princess Leia?

Okay, September. I have enough cookie dough in my fridge to last through a hurricane apocalypse. Do your worst.

Illustration credit: Lara Tomlin

Jon Michaud’s When Tito Loved Clara follows the story of Clara, a Dominican-American wife and mother, as she aspires to a middle-class suburban existence only to be drawn back to her community and culture by an old love. Jon articulates for a new generation what it means to come from two different worlds, and the price exacted when we turn away from our own past. His characters live on the boundaries of regret and aspiration, of yearning and discontent. In the words of the author Lauren Grodstein, Jon’s novel “is a joy, a treasure, and a triumph.” As Jon’s colleague at The New Yorker for the past seven years, I’ve had both the pleasure of working beside someone who has become a good friend and the rare privilege of observing the inception of this rich, multi-layered novel. Jon and I sat down recently to chat about his experiences as a début novelist and as The New Yorker’s head archivist.

Erin Overbey: Aside from the Mercedes and the G5, any plans to go a little crazy with your newfound success?

Jon Michaud: I’m having a yacht built. When it’s done, Charlie Sheen and I are going to sail around the world together.

Ah, Cheever might feel a bit left out. You’ve been the head librarian at The New Yorker for about seven years now, and before that you were a librarian at Time and at the EPA. Several of the main characters in your novel are also librarians. Can you talk about how being an archivist, particularly at a magazine like this one, has influenced your approach to writing fiction?

My professional life directly influenced the novel by providing two of the three main characters with their occupations—Clara and Thomas are both librarians. (Among the most crucial building blocks for a fictional character in my mind are name and occupation.) For Clara, librarianship—the graduate degree and the white-collar status that accompanies it—represents the final stage in her assimilation. And, as a number of reviewers have noted, the quiet order of the library is in stark contrast to the lives of her rambunctious, chaotic Dominican family.

While Clara works as a traditional reference librarian in a Newark law firm, Thomas is employed at the forefront of the digital revolution, working for a company that digitizes corporate and scholarly archives. For details about his job, I drew on the experience that you and I went through several years ago when The New Yorker digitized its archive, first for The Complete New Yorker book and DVD set and, later, for the digital archive on NewYorker.com. The watershed moment in library and information science we’re witnessing now seemed a worthy subject for a novel. There was a lot more of this material in the first draft of the book, but a fair amount of it got weeded out as the story developed and it became more Clara’s and Tito’s than Thomas’s.

One side note: the idea of going into someone’s house to catalog a private library was inspired by a friend who, for a time, had such a job. His stories about the voyeuristic nature of that job were irresistible to me and also informed the casual snooping that Tito enjoys in his job as a mover.

You mentioned the New Yorker digital scanning project….

Yes, that was a remarkable thing to be a part of, wasn’t it? More than a million index cards and four thousand issues of The New Yorker scanned and turned into a searchable database and archive.

Did you discover any “new” New Yorker writers during that project? I felt like I rediscovered the humorist Frank Sullivan, whose work is now out of print, I believe.

I discovered the work of John Collier, an English writer who published macabre and funny stories in the magazine in the nineteen-forties and fifties. And although it wasn’t a “discovery,” I must say that I also felt a renewed sense of awe at the scale and range of E. B. White’s contributions to the magazine over the decades, the sheer magnitude of which I hadn’t fully appreciated before the digital conversion.

You wrote much of this novel on the NJ Transit commuter train from Manhattan to Maplewood, NJ, where you and your family live. How did that work exactly?

I wrote the second half of the book and did almost all of my revisions on Midtown Direct trains between South Orange and Penn Station (and, in fact, I am writing this answer on one of those trains). Necessity being the mother of invention, I turned to my commute as a last refuge for writing after my wife and I had our second child in 2008 and the golden hour I’d had each night between ten and eleven at night evaporated. Working in two forty-minute bursts, one in the morning and one in the evening, is not the ideal way to write a novel, but it does have the advantage of keeping the book fresh in your head. I often found that a scene which had been giving me trouble in the morning was sorted out by my subconscious during the day so that I could finish writing it during the evening commute.

The novel raises a lot of intriguing questions about the immigrant experience, especially the costs of assimilation. You seem to have moved around quite a bit when you were growing up, living in such far flung places as Iran, India, Northern Ireland, and Paris. Do you feel that your background has given you more awareness of the particular problems many immigrants face?

I do think that my itinerant childhood and youth have contributed significantly to my fiction writing. My father was in the Foreign Service, so we were “visitors” rather than immigrants in all of those places, but the recurring sense of not being a native-born member of the culture in which we were living made a big impression on me and has certainly driven my interests in the immigrant experience.

Additionally, almost everyone who comes to New York with professional or artistic ambitions—as I did in the early nineties—goes through a process not unlike immigration. The city gives you the cold shoulder at first and you have to be tenacious and little bit wily to make your way here. The novel looks at both kinds of “immigrant” story and includes characters who prosper here and some who don’t.

Being a librarian is all about cataloguing and maintaining ties to the past and yet the immigrant’s journey toward assimilation often involves rejecting one’s past or culture. Can you expand a bit on how the past is seen in the novel as both something to embrace and, at times, reject?

A friend of mine who emigrated from Singapore to England many years ago said that the only part of his culture he retained was the food. At the same time, I know many people who have lived in the United States for decades without ever fully assimilating. They live in neighborhoods where their native language is spoken, read imported newspapers, watch satellite television, and frequent local stores that provide them with goods from their country of origin. It is partly a generational transition and partly an individual one and the book explores the full range of possibilities. For Clara, assimilating is the mission, though, at the end of the book, she realizes how bittersweet it can be. Then there is Clara’s father who has no interest in becoming American and who won’t even allow English-language television to be watched in his house. Tito, on the other hand, is trapped between the two words, unsure of where he belongs, but full of longing. Who’s to say which is the right way to go about it? For a writer, it’s interesting because it generates conflict and the conflicts result in stories.

Your wife, Zoraida, who is also a librarian, is Dominican-American, and an obvious inspiration for the character of Clara. In an interview with the novelist Caroline Leavitt last year, you said that you were interested in exploring “how Americans are assimilating to immigrant cultures.” What was it like coming from a middle-class suburban background and being thrown into this very vibrant Dominican family?

My wife was indeed the inspiration for Clara; likewise, Thomas began as an autobiographical character, but they only became interesting to me when they started separating themselves from their points of origin and developing their own characteristics. (I am a lousy memoirist and personal essayist: I need the liberty that fiction gives you to change the inconvenient facts of life.)

Moving to Inwood and living among the Dominicans and getting to know the neighborhood and meeting my wife’s family and listening to their stories over a period of months and years resulted in a kind of stretched-out “Eureka!” moment. I had the continuous sixth-sense feeling that all of this could somehow be combined into a work of fiction: in short, that I’d found the setting and the subjects I didn’t even know I’d been looking for. But, as with the characters of Thomas and Clara, it was necessary to take fictional liberties: I altered the geography of Inwood Hill Park. I synthesized characters. I took real events and monkeyed with them. I could never be a reporter and write a book like Adrian Nicole LeBlanc’s amazing “Random Family.”

I did feel that on a personal level I was facing a question that the U.S. has been debating on a national level for some time: is our country’s identity fluid and evolving, or is it constant and unchanging? My experience has been that the former is true.

All of the characters in your novel are so well defined, but the one I find myself most drawn to is Tito. Like many immigrants, he seems to be searching for some kind of foothold in the American Dream, and his love for Clara appears to both reflect and affirm this. How did you develop this character?

This novel grew out of an unpublished book of linked short stories called “Inwood.”  Tito came from an unfinished story that I’d hoped would be included in that collection. In the story, he was sitting in a car outside a woman’s house in New Jersey. I had no idea why he was there or who the woman was, but I had the sense that his life was about to change. Unable to decide exactly how his life was going to change, I set the story aside. A year or two later, when I was just beginning to work on the novel, I remembered him and realized that his quest, which begins outside that house in suburban New Jersey, would drive the book I was writing. He is a completely fictional character, with no model. And partly as a result of that, he’s also my favorite character in the book.

You’ve said that two of your favorite novelists are Junot Diaz and Edward P. Jones, both writers who explore the ramifications of what it means to be an outsider. Who are some of the other novelists who have inspired you and which books especially influenced you as you were writing this novel?

I first started writing When Tito Loved Clara in 2005, just after my wife and I had moved from Inwood to New Jersey and I had the sense that there was a sliver of the Garden State where I could set up shop—a little precinct bordered by Richard Ford’s Haddam, Philip Roth’s Newark, and Junot Diaz’s Parlin/Edison/New Brunswick. (I’d also now include the Bergen County of Lauren Grodstein’s A Friend of the Family.)

Once I started writing, I found great guidance and companionship in George Pelecanos’ Drama City, Zadie Smith’s On Beauty, Tom Perotta’s Little Children, and Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence. I think those influences are probably visible in the book, but I hope I have succeeded in combining them into my own fictional terrain.

Michele (far right) with Luis Alberto Urrea and Veronica Brooks-Sigler

.

What books recently rocked my world:

Other People We Married by my friend Emma Straub (forthcoming from FiveChapters Books in February 2011)

To The End of the Land by David Grossman

The Sojourn by Andrew Krivak (forthcoming from Bellevue Literary Press in May 2011)

Moby-Dick by Herman Melville

Skippy Dies by Paul Murray

.

Best damn event we’ve hosted:

There have been SO MANY that it’s hard to point out just one! On a personal note, the event I’m proudest of is the first time we hosted Pulitzer Prize-winning author Paul Harding. This was in early 2009, before most people knew who he was. I was so darn passionate about Tinkers that we ended up having a turnout of around 50 people at an event for a debut author. To me, this was proof of how critical indie bookstores can be. Booksellers introduce readers to good books.

.

Most entertaining authors we’ve hosted:

*  When we co-hosted Stephen King at The Music Hall for Writers on a New England Stage, he played air guitar on stage. AWESOME.

*  The award for funniest authors goes to Jess Walter and Sean Ferrell. They read together at our store recently, and they were HYSTERICAL!

*  We hosted Kate Christensen and Arthur Phillips at a local martini bar when they were on tour for Trouble and The Song Is You. Both authors had written about music in their books, and we had local musicians play music in between the author readings.

*  Chuck Palahniuk really knows how to work an audience. We had a jam-packed event with him at our local unitarian church, and he had customers blowing up inflatable Oscars. Also, we hosted Chuck in a CHURCH. Need I say more?

*  We recently hosted world famous wrestler Mick Foley at the library. He opened his talk by reading from Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, and pretending like he didn’t realize that it wasn’t his own book. He’s a funny guy.

.

Strangest question a customer has ever asked:

When I worked at a college bookstore, a girl once asked me for The Apples of Happiness. I stared at her for a few lonnnnng seconds before asking, “Do you mean The Grapes of Wrath?”

.

Why our store kicks ass:

There are only five of us on staff, including the owner/manager. All of us are dedicated bookworms. We live for reading and recommending books to customers. We’re small but potent. We host close to 200 author events a year. This year alone, we’ve hosted everyone from Jonathan Franzen to Bill Bryson to Margaret Atwood to Justin Cronin. In December, we’re hosting a sold-out book signing in our store with Stephen King!

.

What makes our neighborhood and customers awesome: Portsmouth, NH is a great location for an independent bookstore. There are so many readers in the area, and our well-read customers understand that it’s important to support your local brick and mortar stores. We’re lucky to have so many community partners and venues. The historical Music Hall right down the street is home to our biggest offsite series, called Writers on a New England Stage. New Hampshire Public Radio and Yankee magazine also are part of the Writers on a New England Stage series.

.

I promise you won’t find this at any other store:

We have a fake mouse hanging out in a hole at the front counter. It’s funny when people think it’s real!

.

Why I do what I do:

I’m a bookseller because every single day I wake up and say to myself: “I can’t believe I get paid to do what I love.” My job doesn’t feel like work. I know so many people who are stuck in 9-5 jobs that make them miserable. I left an ambitious career at the CBS Evening News with Katie Couric because I knew I was in the wrong job. I’ve never been the kind of person who could take a job just to pay the bills. A job to me = something that enriches your life, inspires you, and makes you want to be a better person. Working with books is something I was born to do.

.

If I weren’t selling books, I’d be:

Either working in publishing or working for The New Yorker (my other dream job!).

.

Books that changed my life:

The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa

Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Middlemarch by George Eliot

Tinkers by Paul Harding

Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell (I read this book when I was 10, and it was the first adult book I read)

Matilda by Roald Dahl

.

Top three authors, living or dead, I’d invite to my dinner party:

Fernando Pessoa

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

George Eliot

.

My last meal request:

Chicken tikka masala, coconut soup with pistachios, and garlic naan.

“After she discovered that her husband had been unfaithful, Maria Finn threw out his possessions, divorced him, and began considering the next phase of her life. The two had been planning a trip to South America—during their time in Argentina, they were going to take tango lessons—but now Finn, living in New York City, decided to learn tango on her own, fly to Buenos Aires solo, and, in the process, regain her strength.”

“Finn is hosting a heartbreak competition—through this Sunday, February 28th, readers can share, in two hundred words or fewer, the grand tragedy of their lives. The contest is judged by Margo Howard, Dean Olsher, and David Nadelberg; the winner will have his or her story arranged as a tango song by Marlan Barry.”