EDITOR’S NOTE:

Another year has come and gone, and it’s time once again to present The Nobbies, the official book awards of The Nervous Breakdown.

Below you’ll find this year’s winners, our picks for the best books of 2011.

Congrats to the victors, and their publishers.

And thanks, as always, for reading.

-BL

 

 

THE WINNER

 

Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day, Ben Loory (Penguin) Modern fables, as small and sparkly as pixie dust, that remain in the corners of your brain like creepy corner shadows.  The tales have this sort of secret ingredient in them that makes you feel incredibly wise when you read the book. And there’s always a mystery to discuss after you and a friend read the same story.  This is dark magical realism/surrealism at its finest, gently forcing us to suspend our digital beliefs in order to imagine octopi living in city apartments and lost children flying up and out of the cold water of deep slippery wells. Loory is a nerdy-cool and sophisticated avant-garde voice, an almost-ancient alien avatar calling into the darkness for more furry candy.

 

 

THE FINALISTS

 

	The Chronology of Water, Lidia Yuknavitch (Hawthorne Books) This book blows the doors off the traditional memoir.  Yuknavitch subverts the narrative form and invents a new language to tell her story.  Her writing is lyrical, raw, and dynamic.  Her story is haunting, touching, and heartbreaking. But it is the truth, and it is all here in an expansive, Technicolor dream.
	Stone Arabia, Dana Spiotta (Scribner) Spiotta’s satire is so smart, and her writing achingly beautiful. We love the risks she takes with structure, but her real triumph lies in her critique of the world we live in–full of blogs and 24-hours news, self-curation, and pain tourists.  Spiotta proves that fiction about our rock-and-roll hearts can be wise.

 

 

THE COMPLETE LIST                                

	The Angel in the Dream of Our Hangover, Mark Leidner (Sator Press) Some books are long, some books are short, some books are wound so tightly they explode.
	Blank , Davis Schneiderman (Jadid Ibis) Schneiderman captures the history of the novel in the spaces between words.  If you’ve ever seen/heard him read Blank live, he captures the history of the literary reading as well.
	The Book of Ice, Paul D. Miller (Mark Batty) Miller, aka DJ Spooky, surveys the way we might construct Antarctica as a mash-up of history, music, and conceptual art. Contained therein is an Occupy movement for the next century in a series of striking images: A Manifesto for the People’s Republic of Antarctica. You’ve never picked up a book quite like this.
	Blue Nights, Joan Didion (Knopf) Following her recent memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion returns with another, this time writing about her daughter, her experiences in motherhood, and the question of aging. Many questions are asked here, and many answers are presented, and Didion’s style is present as ever, meticulously worded sentences that pull you from your chair.
	The Color of Night, Madison Smartt Bell (Vintage) Bell finds the shortest distance between two points—in this case, Helter Skelter and 9/11—is a detour to the underworld of Greek myth. Dark, spare, and beautifully written, The Color of Night accomplishes one of the most difficult things a writer can attempt: it makes potentially repellent subject matter entertaining.
	Drinking Closer to Home, Jessica Anya Blau (Harper Perennial 2011) Blau’s semi-autobiographical follow-up to The Summer of Naked Swim Parties is funnier, more ambitious…and more heartbreaking.
	Enter Night: A Biography of Metallica, Mick Wall (St. Martin’s) In a year when the music biography emerged as the dominant genre of nonfiction, Mick Wall issued a thoroughly-engrossing, meticulously-researched account of the biggest rock and roll band in the world. Behind a mountain of research and interviews with an army of people intimately involved in the Metallica story, Wall issues a book with acres of new information, wryly rendered in his inimitably entertaining style.
	Everyone Loves You When You’re Dead, Neil Strauss (It Books) How Strauss can be so unlikeable and likeable at the same time is anyone’s guess, but nobody writes like this guy.  Whatever he does, whether The Game or The Dirt, it’s always existential in style and somehow hopeful by the end.
	Follow Me Down, Kio Stark (Red Lemonade) Kio Stark weaves a poetic tapestry of the streets of New York City. Sometimes you get a little dirty when you dig, and sometimes people need to disappear. Hypnotic and endearing.
	Galerie de Difformité, Gretchen E. Henderson (&NOW Books) This book is both funhouse and curiosity cabinet, art catalogue and choose-your-own-adventure. With the head of a novel and the body of a poem, this extraordinary work interrogates the nuanced concepts of ability/disability, voyeurism/exhibition, deformity/normality—all with a wry sense of self-representational humor.
	God Bless America, Steve Almond (Lookout) These thirteen stories are more like blessings, written by an author both enchanted and heartbroken by the earnest and irrational souls who populate his country.
	How the Mistakes Were Made, Tyler McMahon (St. Martin’s Griffin) If rock music conjures anything, it’s the desire for the besotted listener to become one with the music. Anything that expects to be remembered as rock lit needs to touch on this sentiment. How the Mistakes Were Made has this fever dream of rock and roll in spades.
	Leaving the Atocha Station, Ben Lerner (Coffee House Press) The best novel about a hash-smoking, tranquilizer-taking, womanizing Fulbright poet ever written. A slim but powerful and wickedly intelligent novel about the relationship between art and reality.
	My New American Life, Francine Prose (Harper) This chronicle of the assimilation of Lula, an immigrant from Albania and one of the more delightful inventions in recent memory, into George W. Bush’s America—or, more exactly, George W. Bush’s suburban New Jersey—is Prose’s best novel.  And that’s saying something.
	The Necessity of Certain Behaviors, Shannon Cain (University of Pittsburgh Press) The winner of the Drue Heinz Literary Prize for 2011, this collection of superb short stories speaks to us about love, need, and irreversible actions.
	Once Upon a River, Bonnie Jo Campbell (Norton) This coming of age novel, set in rural Michigan, is mythic and magical, yet all-too-real, setting a teenage girl against a world of natural predators.
	Other People We Married, Emma Straub (FiveChapters) A collection of stories by an emerging writer whose style is frank, expansive, and commanding. Quirky stories about everyday people. Originally published by FiveChapters, this will be re-released next year by Riverhead, who are also publishing her first novel, Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures. A force to be reckoned with.
	Repeat Until Rich, Josh Axelrad (Penguin) Every bit as fine as Bringing Down the House, Axelrad raises the ante with this dizzying account of addiction and algebraic beat-the-odds insanity.
	Resurrection of Cash, Graeme Thomson (Jawbone Press) Finally, someone gets the legend right.  As Cash’s legacy ages, the man in black needs contrast.  Thomson brings it here.
	Ten Thousand Saints, Eleanor Henderson (HarperCollins) An injection directly in the mainline of anyone who grew up on the East Coast in the eighties and had even a passing dalliance with punk rock, or, more accurately, the Hardcore scene.
	There Is No Year, Blake Butler (HarperCollins) If Blake Butler’s brain was a kind of cheese, it’d be Swiss, and the holes would be moaning human hair.
	Tongue Party, Sarah Rose Etter (Caketrain Press) A blurb on the back reads: “Sarah Rose Etter isn’t a writer; she’s a witch, and this is a house and storm of spells.” It’s the truth! Winner of the 2010 Caketrain Chapbook Competition, judged by Deb Olin Unferth.
	This Vacant Paradise, Victoria Patterson (Counterpoint) Against a backdrop of the O.J. Simpson trial, anti-Clinton conspiracy theories, and gorgeous beachfront property, the wonderfully-realized characters in Patterson’s debut novel struggle to reconcile their own individuality with the privileged circumstances of their blue-blooded births. Beautifully written and elegantly plotted, This Vacant Paradise is an engaging glimpse into a world few of us will never know, and proves Patterson is a master of the form.
	Various Men Who Knew Us as Girls, Cris Mazza (Emergency Press) Mazza’s latest is as gripping as her recent work, yet this book takes on a dark subject properly suited to antagonize any lingering visions of California as promised land. In Various Men, Mazza collates the sexual dynamics of suburbia with a border sex trade that stands just on its periphery.
	The Wake of Forgiveness, Bruce Marchart (HMH) A beautifully written and spare take on life in East Texas at the turn of the century. Not a cliché to be found in this fascinating book, which is full of treachery, violence, and unexamined manhood. It’s just the sort of thing everyone should read if only to remind us that less than a hundred years ago–about the lifetime of a grandfather–no one had it easy. They worked hard, suffered greatly, and endured more in one day than most contemporary Americans would be willing to in a lifetime.
	We the Animals, Justin Torres (Houghton Mifflin) This debut coming of age novel “goes down like strong liquor,” as Tayari Jones says in her blurb. One of the most intensely poetic, crystallized prose pieces we’ve read in a long time. And the subject matter is gritty and heartbreaking.
	You Deserve Nothing, Alexander Maksik (Europa Editions) A story of a teacher-student affair that feels vital and wholly original. Few contemporary writers treat their characters as Maksik treats his: as fully complex human beings, rather than literary artifices, who struggle and fail and keep struggling.
	You Killed Wesley Payne, Sean Beaudoin (Little, Brown) This book kills. The clever reworking of the noir format, the crisp plot, the rich and off-kilter world of Salt River High that Beaudoin has painstakingly created, the memorable characters, the cliques from hell, the dark and allusive humor bursting on every page—to label this “YA” is to limit its ambition.  Would that we had a guide like Beaudoin when we were in high school, to help navigate our nerd rowboat along the rocky and perilous shoreline of the Island of Cool.
	A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism, Peter Mountford (HMH) This expat novel set in Bolivia covers high finance, politics, and morality. It takes on the issues of our times better than any book we’ve read in years.
	Zazen, Vanessa Veselka (Red Lemonade) Zazen is a satire, a Leftist utopian fantasia, a Leftist dystopian fantasia, a piece of performance art in novel form, a prophesy, a valentine, a meditation. It’s also really funny (although Della, the empathic geologist narrator, is not in on any of the jokes, poor thing). Veselka notices things other people don’t, and she has a way of describing those things that is at once poetical, witty, and profound.

 

Also receiving votes, although ineligible because they were written by TNB editors and/or were published by our imprint, TNB Books, were: Fathermucker, by Greg Olear; My Dead Pets Are Interesting, by Lenore Zion; Thomas World, by Richard Cox; and West of Here, by Jonathan Evison.

NOTE: This excerpt from BLANK by Davis Schneiderman has been truncated from the original to better fit this space.

 

Chapter 1:
A Character

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

NOTE: This excerpt from BLANK by Davis Schneiderman has been truncated from the original to better fit this space.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

NOTE: This excerpt from BLANK by Davis Schneiderman has been truncated from the original to better fit this space.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

NOTE: This excerpt from BLANK by Davis Schneiderman has been truncated from the original to better fit this space.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

NOTE: This excerpt from BLANK by Davis Schneiderman has been truncated from the original to better fit this space.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

NOTE: This excerpt from BLANK by Davis Schneiderman has been truncated from the original to better fit this space.

 

Chapter 2:
Another Character

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

NOTE: This excerpt from BLANK by Davis Schneiderman has been truncated from the original to better fit this space.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

NOTE: This excerpt from BLANK by Davis Schneiderman has been truncated from the original to better fit this space.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

NOTE: This excerpt from BLANK by Davis Schneiderman has been truncated from the original to better fit this space.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

NOTE: This excerpt from BLANK by Davis Schneiderman has been truncated from the original to better fit this space.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

NOTE: This excerpt from BLANK by Davis Schneiderman has been truncated from the original to better fit this space.

 

Chapter 3:
They Meet

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

NOTE: This excerpt from BLANK by Davis Schneiderman has been truncated from the original to better fit this space.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

NOTE: This excerpt from BLANK by Davis Schneiderman has been truncated from the original to better fit this space.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

NOTE: This excerpt from BLANK by Davis Schneiderman has been truncated from the original to better fit this space.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

NOTE: This excerpt from BLANK by Davis Schneiderman has been truncated from the original to better fit this space.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

NOTE: This excerpt from BLANK by Davis Schneiderman has been truncated from the original to better fit this space.

 

Chapter 4:
An Obstacle

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

NOTE: This excerpt from BLANK by Davis Schneiderman has been truncated from the original to better fit this space.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

NOTE: This excerpt from BLANK by Davis Schneiderman has been truncated from the original to better fit this space.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

NOTE: This excerpt from BLANK by Davis Schneiderman has been truncated from the original to better fit this space.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

NOTE: This excerpt from BLANK by Davis Schneiderman has been truncated from the original to better fit this space.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

NOTE: This excerpt from BLANK by Davis Schneiderman has been truncated from the original to better fit this space.

 

Chapter 5:
They Fall in Love

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Seriously, a blank novel?  This has got to be a joke.

We do destroy 200 books in the trailer, many with a chainsaw.

Yet, it’s not a joke. But it’s a damn funny one.

BLANK is not completely blank, really. The text contains 20 provocative chapter titles, listed in the front matter and then scattered throughout the book as the introduction to each chapter. These titles take the form or word strings such as “A Character,” “Another Character,” “They Meet,” etc.

The artist Susan White produced a series of pyrographic illustrations. She burns paper, and in this case, fills the holes with various sky scenes. These pyrograph copies are arrayed throughout the text.

Additionally, BLANK will be released in multiple, “full spectrum” editions: e-book, commercial (the current edition), color, and fine-art. The latter will retail for $7500, come encased in smashable plaster, and contain a recycled bamboo flash drive with Bach remix tracks from Dj Spooky.

Half the proceeds from all editions go to the Spooky-related Tanna Center for the Arts, on the Pacific island of Vanuatu.

So BLANK is not blank?

Precisely. There is also the packaging, as well as those of the separate versions. For the commercial edition, the carefully constructed cover and back-cover information (the Andi Olsen author photo, my bio, etc.), all fill the text with content.

Rich cascading content.

To be embellished by the reader. The critic. The contrarian.

Ok. I get it. Sort of. The reader can “read” BLANK in the manner of pattern recognition. As a stand-in, a signifier of sorts, for other meanings.

I read BLANK recently at University of California, San Diego as part of the “New Writing Series” curated by Anna Joy Springer. As part of a larger performance, I read BLANK by performing a chapter title, paging through the empty text, and then performing the next. The 20 titles tell a story in a serial manner, and the audience reacts to that story—it’s a traditional narrative arc with a few twists.  There was real pathos present in the audience reactions.

At the February Association of Writing Programs Conference in D.C., I performed the text as part of an off-site Jaded Ibis reading…in full mime costume. I read excerpts from Glenn Beck’s novel The Overton Window, focusing on the silly descriptions of women.

The message: you can read that book, Glenn Beck’s…or read my blank book.  This reading was directly responsible for the cancellation of Glenn Beck’s Fox “news” program.

You see, TNB readers, conceptual art really can change the world.

Andy Devine (with help from Adam Robinson) interviewed you at HTMLGiant.com in the wake of Roxane Gay’s review of BLANK and Christopher Higgs’ contextualization of BLANK in a long-tradition of possibly similar works. You reworked the interview for Devine after an aborted first draft. Why not revisit some of the earlier responses now?

Devine: How did you decide between BLANK and, say, BLANKS for the title?

Would The Da Vinci Codes have been the same book? What about Chicken Soup for the Souls? The classics, the texts that stand the test of time, the books we return to again and again and again because they say something, and something very poignant, something heretofore unsaid, about the human condition…those can’t be changed. They are perfect, immutable, fixed like Platonic forms above the hoary ether, reminding us with their crushing perfectness, their Adonis DNA, of our own fallibility.

Let’s be accurate. BLANK would be a completely different book, even if it were largely blank, as per BLANK.

Devine: I was pleased to see that you don’t use any of the words that shouldn’t be used in fiction, as listed in Devine’s novel WORDS, but surprised to see that you didn’t use any of the words that should be used in fiction, as also noted in WORDS. I’m wondering…what you think of words.

I never think of words, at least not any more than I might think of a particularly charged but imaginary slice of consumer pornography: A picture of Paris Hilton spread-eagled against a piece of Ikea furniture. A picture of Perez Hilton hiding his head inside the bowels of a KFC basket. Picture this: Justin Beiber, his hair a mad swing of hormones, thrusting wildly against the wing of an A320 airbus.

In this way, thinking of words is like thinking of nothing.

So you are just copying Devine’s questions and repasting the answers that didn’t appear with his HTMLGiant interview? Isn’t this the same laziness that makes BLANK a completely inane and stupid piece of “art”?

BLANK takes as it starting point that there is no starting point. No endpoint either. As with the title of Paul Bowles’ biography, Without Stopping, this is literature that exceeds its frame and grows to encompass and then process it’s own discussions.

So, um, it’s laziness?

Far from it. You would curb your impertinence if you possessed even an inkling of the intense work—the labor—the sweat that goes into getting a book like this published.

First, you have to write a number of “real” books, in this case the experimental set of Abecedarium (with Carlos Hernandez, Chiasmus Press) and Multifesto: A Henri d’Mescan Reader (Spuyten Duyvil) and Drain (Northwestern). These are akin to Picasso’s Blue or Rose period, so other readers and writers can say things such as…at least Schneiderman really can write dense, postmodern prose that I can’t possibly bear to read, and that shows that his BLANK is really a choice, like Picasso’s cubism, rather than the recourse of the no-talent hack.

Then, you have pull this sort of stuff: cover the limited-edition of Multifesto with sandpaper so the text destroys what it rubs against; then you have to give readings where you thread a 100-foot rope into the audience and let them pull, en masse, in reaction to your work; then you have shoot a starter pistol borrowed from Cris Mazza at the head of a completely unaware James Tadd Adcox at a Chicago reading.

Twice.

Then, let’s see, you need to close the lights during another reading and ask the audience to close their eyes as you turn on an array of close strobe lights flickering in time to the alpha-wave pattern of the brain, in mimicry of Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs’s Dreammachine.

Thanks for these easy-to-follow steps. That’s it?

Hardly.

Along with these antics, you need to come up with the idea of BLANK at an earlier AWP with Lidia Yuknavitch, the publisher of Abecedarium and author of the new and fantastic Chronology of Water (Hawthorne Books). You have to try to convince her to publish the book on the Chiasmus label only to have Chiasmus politely decline, and then years later you have to talk to author and publishing visionary Debra Di Blasi who just happened to be getting good and fed-up with the state of contemporary publishing and who was ready to expand Jaded Ibis with a slate of fantastic authors including Janice Lee, Christopher Grimes, Lily Hoang, and David Hoenigman.

You should have published your earlier audiocollage record Memorials to Future Catastrophes (with Don Meyer), inspired by Dj Spooky, with Jaded Ibis and then realize in a series of stunning epiphanies that you and Debra are almost completely in sync on aesthetic issues.

BLANK, you are saying in an oblique manner, is about authorship?

When I was reading last fall at the University of Central Michigan, hosted by the talented Matt Roberson, I overheard a grad student complaining to his friends: “No one will publish my novel, but he can get someone to publish a friggin’ blank book…

Yawn. Bo-ring. Just give us the top reasons to read BLANK.

BLANK saves time. Many contemporary works, especially those that offer a commentary on contemporary literature, will take one or more weeks of your valuable time to read and digest.  BLANK raises its issues within seconds, so you may focus your time on your iPad apps.

BLANK is conceptual and accessible. BLANK is a conceptual work that allows you an entry point into a world beyond realist and experimental/innovative literature. This is conceptual work that responds to the at-times alienating character of contemporary art.

BLANK is a notebook for your ideas and a coloring book for your children. BLANK can be used as a journal, a scrapbook, and a collaborative text.

BLANK can be controversial. This is not a text that often produces the cool and apathetic responses that characterize so much of our reaction to the things we consume. You may be mad, you may be delighted. Either way, you’ll receive a strong feeling.

So BLANK is a gift?

Precisely.

Is there a sequel in the works?

Yes. Stay tuned. The next one will be sick. I promise you that.

1.Well, not really, but I have collected a quite large number of emails over the years as a function of my work as an editor, writer, and professor. On the rare occasion when I have a new book about to be released, I send out an email announcement.

2.I know, I know. How full of hubris! How can I get my big head through the motherboard?