Stand-Up Critics:

These influential and celebrated American critics from the National Book Critics Circle appear before every Festival event with the intention to enhance the Festival audience’s already extensive list of must-reads. These six tireless servants of literature rotate throughout the Festival week in order to develop a unique list of 30 meticulously tested titles. The Stand-up Critics present 1) a contemporary novel, 2) a translated book, 3) a classic, 4) a small/indie press title, and 5) a surprise!

Eric Banks is a Brooklyn-based writer and critic. He is the former editor of Bookforum, a senior editor of Artforum, and president of the National Book Critics Circle.

Jane Ciabattari is a PEN member and author of the short story collection Stealing the Fire. Her reviews and features have appeared in Bookforum, The Guardian online, The New York Times, NPR.org, The Daily Beast, Salon.com, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and Columbia Journalism Review, among others. She served as president of the National Book Critics Circle from 2008 to 2011, and is currently NBCC Vice President/Online.

Rigoberto González, author of eight books of poetry and prose, is the recipient of Guggenheim and NEA fellowships and has won the American Book Award and the Poetry Center Book Award. He is editor of Camino del Sol: Fifteen Years of Latina and Latino Writing, and is contributing editor for Poets and Writers magazine. He serves on the National Book Critics Circle board and is associate professor of English at Rutgers-Newark, The State University of New York.

Lev Grossman is the author of Warp, the international bestseller Codex, and the New York Times bestseller The Magicians, and its sequel, the forthcoming The Magician King. He is the book critic at Time magazine and a former National Book Critics Circle board member.

Laura Miller is a senior writer at Salon.com, which she co-founded in 1995. She is a frequent contributor to The New York Times Book Review, where she wrote the Last Word column for two years. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, and other publications. Miller is the author of The Magician’s Book: A Skeptic’s Adventures in Narnia, and the editor of The Salon.com Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Authors. She is a former National Book Critics Circle board member.

Roxana Robinson (PEN board member, critic and author) is the author of four novels: Summer Light, This Is My Daughter, Sweetwater, and Cost; three collections of short stories: A Glimpse of Scarlet, Asking for Love, and A Perfect Stranger, and the biography Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life. For more than twenty years, she has reviewed works of fiction, biography, and art history for The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Los Angeles Times, and the Boston Globe.

The Recommendations:

Eric Banks

Contemporary novel: C, by Tom McCarthy (Knopf). Smuggled within a Trojan Horse of a historical novel, McCarthy sets his Zelig-like protagonist on a collision course with the early twentieth century’s contours of literary modernism and technological revolution. The new wired world he discovers is one that seems both fascinatingly alien and uncomfortably familiar.

Translation: A Tomb for Boris Davidovich, by Danilo Kis (Dalkey Archive Press): Not a new translation, but a book that winds the experience of totalitarianism and tart prose about as tightly as the two can get, under a wickedly matte sheen of black humor. I can’t think of a better book to reopen on the twenty-fifth anniversary of PEN’s 1986 conference on “The Writer’s Imagination and the Imagination of the State.”

Classic: Kangaroo, by D.H. Lawrence (Penguin). It’s become fashionable to note how unfashionable Lawrence has become. This gangly novel-of-ideas, written during the author’s brief time in Australia, is a fierce picture of the author in (and as) exile, the memory of his own World War I traumas sharing the page with tantalizing threats of catastrophes to come.

Small/indie press: Seven Years, by Peter Stamm (Other Press). The most recent book from this remarkably cool Swiss stylist, Seven Years is an ice-cold study of the laws of attraction and the waywardness of desire. Yet the frigidity of Stamm’s look at an unlikely Munich love triangle is tempered by his ultimate care for his difficult-to-like characters.

Surprise! On Late Style, by Edward Said (Random House). Far from polished yet written with elegant flair, Said’s terse final book meditates on endings and impossible projects of culmination across a generous range of writers, musicians, filmmakers, and critics as cosmopolitan as its author—a reading made all the more poignant by its largely unfinished nature. In an era when too many are eager to see the humanities as an anachronism, On Late Style is a stylish retort.

Jane Ciabattari

Contemporary novel: A Mercy, by Toni Morrison (Knopf). This novel is set in 1690, 150 years before Morrison's celebrated novel Beloved. This is a little-known period of American history when indentured servants from Europe, African-born slaves, and native peoples, including the Lenape were the serving class to a small group of landed gentry along the Atlantic Coast. Despite a violent and heart-wrenching final scene, A Mercy creates an eerie aura of a more optimistic alternative future.

Translation: Without Blood, by Alessandro Baricco, translated by Ann Goldstein (Knopf). Set in an unnamed country at the tail end of a civil war, Without Blood addresses the questions behind the daily news: When is a war over? How can a soldier return to normal life? How many years, how many generations will it take to forgive

Classic: Housekeeping, by Marilynne Robinson (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). This astonishing first novel, set in the American West in the 1950s, describes a spectacular derailment on a bridge crossing a glacial lake, the train sliding into the water “like a weasel sliding off a rock, ” and a woman driving off a cliff to her death in the same lake. These losses flicker in the background of a haunting narrative filled with eccentric characters, with water, and with the dark pull of memory.

Small/indie press: How to Escape from a Leper’s Colony, by Tiphanie Yanique (Graywolf). This bold short story collection, set mostly in the Caribbean, keeps up an intriguing narrative pace. One story begins with the parable of a man who makes tiny decorative bridges. He is convinced by his family to build a real bridge “stretching from Guyana—the place in the world most south—to Miami, the place in the world most north.” On the day it opens, the bridge falls apart. There are many more surprises in store in this distinctive debut collection.

Surprise! Heart like Water: Surviving Katrina and Life in its Disaster Zone, by Joshua Clark (Free Press). This fierce and heartbroken memoir reads like a novel. The story begins in the French Quarter of New Orleans, where Clark and his girlfriend hunker down to weather Hurricane Katrina in August 2005, and evolves into a lyrical and damning witnessing of a city and a populace ravaged and abandoned.

Rigoberto González

Contemporary novel: Silver Sparrow, by Tayari Jones (Algonquin). A touching tale of half-sisters, daughters of a bigamist, whose lives cross paths repeatedly, one always in the shadow of the other.

Translation: The Black Minutes, by Martin Solares, translated by Aura Estrada and John Pluecker (Grove). A novel that defies categorization, weaving mystery, magic, and political corruption along the embattled Mexican border.

Classic: Uncle Silas, by Sheridan Le Fanu (Penguin Classics). A Gothic masterpiece by the Irish ghost story writer, which ushered in the “locked room mystery” subgenre.

Small/indiepress: Dhaka Dust, by Dilruba Ahme (Graywolf). A post-911 book of poems that explores how the South Asian community navigates America’s xenophobic anxieties.

Surprise! Forgotten Borough: Writers Come to Terms with Queens, edited by Nicole Steinberg (Excelsior Editions). An exceptional literary introduction to the most linguistically and ethnically diverse neighborhood in the nation.

Lev Grossman

Contemporary novel: The Financial Lives of the Poets, by Jess Walter (Harper). One of contemporary fiction's most criminally underrated writers, Walter is deceptively light on his feet, but when he lands his punches, they crush. This one's about a suburban journalist whose life falls apart during the recession. He tries dealing pot to fix things. Amazingly, that just makes them worse.

Translation: 2666, by Roberto Bolano, translated by Natasha Wimmer (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). This is the rare international sensation that is not overrated. A city-sized literary labyrinth encompassing a mysterious German novelist, a Mexican serial killer, love, hope, despair, and disappointment. It's like a Borges story that exploded. Maybe the one thing it doesn't contain is the number 2666.

Classic: Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh (Everyman’s Library). England's analog of The Great Gatsby, where instead of Daisy we have the charming, beautiful, alcoholic Sebastian, the doomed scion of a wealthy Catholic family, and instead of money we have God. For pure glitter and sadness, not to mention hilarious cruelty, nothing can touch it.

Small/indie press: Ventriloquism, by Catherynne Valente (PS Publishing). Don't pretend you've heard of her, because you haven't. But you will. Everybody who's serious about literary fantasy knows that Valente is the next big thing. These are her collected stories, which definitively prove that at 31 she can already do anything.

Surprise! The Great Outdoor Fight, by Chris Onstad (Dark Horse comics). Three days! Three acres! Three thousand men! Only one will win the Great Outdoor Fight! This is essentially a lavishly beautiful print-out of a series of comic strips originally published on the Web, and they are an example of why genius in any form is still genius.

Laura Miller

Contemporary novel: The Silent Land, by Graham Joyce (Doubleday). A couple on a skiing vacation survives an avalanche, only to find their hotel and its village strangely deserted. Rare is the novel that can combine the eerie metaphysics of a fable with a completely realistic and heartbreaking love story.

Translation: The Indian Bride, by Karin Fossum, translated by Charlotte Barslund (Houghton Mifflin). People will tell you this is a detective novel, and it is, but it's that rare crime fiction that makes the victim more important and, paradoxically, more alive than her killer.

Classic: Barchester Towers, by Anthony Trollope (Penguin Classics). In-fighting among provincial clergymen in nineteenth-century England. No premise could be duller. No novel could be more fun, which is probably why they never assign Trollope in college. But proceed with caution: His books are addictive.

Small/indie press: Love in Infant Monkeys, by Lydia Millet (Soft Skull Press). Short stories about famous people and the animals in their lives. By juxtaposing the vapid obsessions of our time with the eternal verities of creaturely existence, Millet finds profundity and humor where you least expect it.

Surprise! Little, Big, by John Crowley (Harper Perennial Classics). A man walks from the East Village to a very peculiar house in upstate New York to marry a woman named Alice. Renaissance memory arts, alchemy and Frederick Barbarossa come into it, too. This is the ultimate cult novel, and once read, never forgotten.

Roxana Robinson

Contemporary novel: A Visit from the Goon Squad, by Jennifer Egan (Knopf). This is one of the best contemporary novels I know. Its brilliant shimmering surface, its astonishing velocity, its imaginative construction are impressive, but what’s breathtaking is the confidence with which Egan moves through time, generations, and the music business. When we’re finished with this book, it feels as though we’ve read Proust, compressed.

Translation: Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert, translated by Lydia Davis (Viking) This is a great book, translated by a great writer: what more can we ask? Flaubert’s mesmerizing narrative, about the flawed, gorgeous Emma, continues to confound us. We fall under her spell from our first glimpse of her, shadows cast on her face by silk and rain. Throughout the book Flaubert wrestles with his own ambivalence about her, and who are we to disagree with his ambivalence?

Classic: Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volkonsky (Viking). It can’t get any better than this. This is one of the foundation stones of European literature, a solemn claim but true. The narrative is formed by two great arcs, that of Levin, slowly rising, and that of Anna, making her doomed descent. Tolstoy’s attentiveness to character and ideas, and his deep meditative love of his world, inform this novel, and sweep us into it. Once you’ve read Anna Karenina, it will never leave you.

Small/indie press: Widow, by Michelle Latiolais (Bellevue). This is an elegant book of stories, precise and glittering, like jewels. Latiolais writes exquisite, mandarin prose, in sentences you want to memorize. The stories are about excruciating loss, and other things as well—being alive, and having sex, and being betrayed, and having fun—and they will stay with you.

Surprise! Uncle Tom’s Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe (Barnes and Noble). This choice is made in recognition of the 150^th anniversary of the start of the Civil War, and of the author, who was my great-great-great aunt. Great Aunt Hattie was a woman of great moral courage, and though this book is not a work of great literature, it’s a work of great bravery, written at a time when these thoughts and ideas were considered unacceptable. I’m proud to be a writer from her family.