Irish writer Kevin Barry, author of the novel City of Bohane, won a new honor recently when his latest book garnered Britain's Goldsmiths Prize. There is none better than this collection of pieces from the great Annie Dillard, an essayist of savvy, wit, and uncanny insight. I love books on the nuts and bolts and mechanics and tactics of writing. The Writing Life by Annie Dillard (Harper Perennial, $15). We'll be considering his influence for generations. Bolaño, who died a year before the book's 2004 publication, was a great, maverick, maniacal talent. Just when we thought the novel had no place left to go, here came this splintered masterpiece, a paranoid odyssey told in 900 writhing pages filled with a new, rich, glamorous prose. I read Dubliners dutifully in my early 20s and thought, 'Sure, fine, these are excellent stories, well-made, yadda yadda.' When I returned to them 15 years later, I began to sense the true depths within, depths I could only find after living more of my life.Ģ666by Roberto Bolaño (Picador, $22). It still sits close to my desk as a reminder and a goad.ĭublinersby James Joyce (Dover, $4). It had scope, fun, drama, and pitch-perfect dialogue, but above all it had sentences - sentences of special gleam and precision. In the '90s, this offered many young writers a view of what the novel could achieve. Underworldby Don DeLillo (Scribner, $20). That was when I read this collection, and I was awed by the dense emotional humidity of the world it depicted. I risk the wrath of O'Connorians everywhere when I suggest that there's a particular time in life when her short stories have the most charge or reverb, and it's in one's late teens or early 20s. Everything That Rises Must Converge by Flannery O'Connor (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $16).
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