I bookmark this page at The Guardian every year, and always find it a worthwhile guide to what is coming up, and when. And not just books, also the dates of literary events and anniversaries. The following is a list of some of the new works that interest me for one reason or another.
- A Swim in a Pond in the Rain by George Saunders (Bloomsbury)
- Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America by Eddie S Glaude Jr (Chatto & Windus).
- The Mysterious Correspondent by Marcel Proust, translated by Charlotte Mandell (Oneworld)
- Under a White Sky by Elizabeth Kolbert (Bodley Head)
- Everybody by Olivia Laing (Picador)
- Letters to Camondo by Edmund de Waal (Chatto & Windus)
- The Wife of Willesden by Zadie Smith (Hamish Hamilton)
- Home in the World by Amartya Sen (Allen Lane)
- The Magician by Colm Tóibín (Viking)
- Oh, William! by Elizabeth Strout (Viking)
- Greek Myths by Charlotte Higgins (Jonathan Cape)
- HG Wells by Claire Tomalin (Viking)
- Silent Catastrophes: Essays on Literature by WG Sebald (Hamish Hamilton)
There is no need to say that the Books section of The New York Times always has plenty to offer – by week, month and year, and just about everything else – but this international selection (mostly in translation) for the year to come is worth perusing. Here, for various reasons, and by those known and not, the following (just some amongst many) particularly interest me:
- An Apprenticeship, or The Book of Pleasures by Clarice Lispector, trans. from the Portuguese by Stefan Tobler (New Directions)
- Aristophanes: Four Plays trans. by Aaron Poochigian (Liveright)
- The Art of Losing by Alice Zeniter, trans. from the French by Frank Wynne (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
- Cleopatra by Alberto Angela, trans. from the French by Katherine Gregor (HarperVia)
- The Copenhagen Trilogy by Tov Ditlevsen, trans. from the Danish by Tiina Nunnally and Michael Favala Goldman
- First Person Singular by Haruki Murakami, trans. from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel (Knopf)
- The Impudent Ones by Marguerite Duras, trans. from the French by Kelsey L. Haskett (The New Press)
- In the Company of Men by Véronique Tadjo (Other Press)
- Painting Time by Maylis de Kerangal, trans. from the French by Jessica Moore (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
At year’s end, and in retrospect, I don’t ever seem to get as far as time and circumstance should allow for, but …!
Anyway, while in retrospect mode, here is The New York Times “10 Best of 2020”; of which, I have read only Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell and, still bringing to an end, Barack Obama’s presidential memoir. I appreciate being reminded of, on the fictional front, Homeland Elegies and The Vanishing Half, and non-fiction works pertaining to war, Shakespeare and schizophrenia that I had totally missed. (Though, Margaret MacMillan’s “War” may well be related to her 2018 Reith Lecture series.) One could, of course, go a step further (which I haven’t!) and be tormented further by their “100 Notable of 2020”.