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.

Chapter 38

Crunchy and Creamy made tea in the lodge, and all the People assembled to drink it.  How did we all know to go there?

I had a pulse in the back of my head, the soft dark spot where tendon meets bone, that roused me from where I lay with Laurel, like a pair of lizards waiting out the afternoon heat.  And I caught Laurel’s fingertips to bring her along, although, I let go her hand before we had gone far.  Not so much to hide that touch from D-, who knew all about it anyway, but.

The People moved toward the lodge from various directions, drawn perhaps by the funky aroma of the tea.  Or maybe it was the pull of D-‘s intention.  We could feel it, one could feel it, like a lodestone.  The smell was stronger the nearer you got.

With a certain solemnity, Crunchy and Creamy ladled from their caldron into Styrofoam cups.  The tea was black and tasted smoky, musty.  I must have been very distracted that day because it wasn’t till my vision started to go strange around the edges that I knew we’d just been drinking psilocybin, and the People were all going off on a higgledy-piggledy trip.

D- came downstairs then, wearing a blue flowered kimono so much too long for him that the hem trailed behind like a bridal gown’s train.  I thought he had lipstick and painted nails but that might have been just an effect of the drug.  He stitched himself through the People like a minnow through water.  Here a touch, there a kiss.  There a whisper.  We were thirty or forty strong that day.  Girls mostly, but a double handful of men.  But some of the men were just there for the party.

D-‘s voice began, rapt, sonorous.  The voice didn’t seem to come out of his throat.  It surrounded his whole body, like an aura.  That might have been an effect of the drug.

It’s all starting to come down, the voice said.

D- began undressing Stitch, loosening the white buttons on her pale blue work-shirt-same shirt as Creamy and Crunchy wore under their vests.  Stitch stood as passively as a child, except that in her smile I saw the points of her teeth.

Oh, yeah.  The voice.  We’ll break it down.

Like most of the women of the People (Laurel being a great blowsy exception to this rule), Stitch had a boyish build, next to nothing in hips and breasts-and yet her body was very well made.  A sigh went all around the lodge, when D- had laid it bare.

0

0

The drug made it a yawning hollow, echoing, deep.  Stitch tossed back her dirty hair, exposing her white throat.  Soundlessly she sank down to her knees before him.  But D- connected her to another and moved on.

The voice.  Me.

At the fringes of my vision there began to be little cobwebs of Op Art graphics.  Not possible for me to blink them away.  The drug, taking me into itself regardless of my will.  Without further prompting, others, everyone, began to disrobe.  I looked away from Laurel.  The other way from her.  A disposable person behind me assisted me with my clothes.  It had only taken him a second to shed the ridiculous striped djellaba he always wore.  So I must know him, though I didn’t know his name.  Was he one of the People or just …there.  For the ride.    With Jesus hair like all the rest, but melting brown eyes like a puppy.  A pulsing psychedelic cobweb crawled over the left side of his face.  I looked away.  D-‘s hands assisted our connection.

Me.  Me.

D- ‘s kimono had disappeared.  He was half erect in that cloud of goat hair but otherwise only a certain tightness in his voice betrayed any sort of erotic involvement.  He didn’t participate, directly.  He conducted.  Guiding, encouraging.  Inserting.  For the more difficult connections he had a prosaic little tube of KY jelly.

Memememememe

The mushrooms turned it into a sort of cricket sound as I sank deeper.  Bonelessly bending.  All the sounds warped.  D- bent people to his plan.  Like Gumbi.  What was the name of Gumbi’s horse?  The various noises of suction began to grow unbearably loud.  That familiar sensation: the invasion of arousal.  Willing or no.

Let go of me.  Let go of mememe

I agreed, I suppose.  Or there was no longer an I to agree.  Or suppose.  A butterfly shutter wheeled over my vision.  Darkness.  Darkness.  Light.  More darkness.  When it opened I saw or perceived that the People were linked into one great wriggling wreath around the central fireplace, which was cold and smelled of ancient ash.  When it closed I saw eyelid movies of Dayglo green and yellow fields, goats prancing, a woman turning into reeds.

My People.  Be One.  Be One.

A reduplicated compound.  A beast of many backs.  It hunched.  It moaned.

Let go of meme. Higgledy piggledy- let it all come down.  Be One.

I was then unpleasantly penetrated by the thought that although Laurel was several places away in this vast fucking daisy chain, I was still most tangibly connected to her, through the transitive power of fucking.  At the repulsion of this idea I groaned, which encouraged the beast, when I had no wish to encourage it.  I could find no voice to say to Laurel that I really didn’t care a damn for O-, that I had gone off with him only to hurt her.  There was only one voices in the bowels of the beast and the voice seemed only to speak to mememe though I knew it was meant for all the One People.

Hung up on each other.  Hung up on yourselves.  You can’t hear the god’s great voices.  You’re too busy-talking to  yourselves.

In the midst of it all there was mere discomfort.  Skin scraped across the splintery floor.

Can’t you hear the god’s great voices–

The truth came through D- .  Was not of him.  Perhaps D- didn’t himself understand it.  Except for the special times when he did.

I wanted to say I hear them I do! I hear gods’ voices.  The words they shape around me like a door. But I couldn’t, not only because some fleshy thing had stopped my throat.

I knew this bacchanalia was not what I had come for.  This was not the bacchanalia I had come for.  That was elsewhere.  My frenzy.  One’s frenzy.  I knew that it had happened before, if I and I only heard the true voices, and I knew it was going to happen again.

I bet it’s hard for some people not to be jealous of Madison Smartt Bell.  He published his first novel, The Washington Square Ensemble, in 1983 when he was only 25.  Since then he has published 20 more books and has been named a finalist for the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award for All Souls Rising. Additionally, in 2008, Madison was awarded the Strauss Living Writer Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.  Aside from all the awards, Madison has a black belt in Tae Kwon Do, he plays guitar, and he sings like a cross between John Lee Hooker and Johnny Cash.  And let us not forget that  Richard Avedon took a very cool photo of him once for The New Yorker!

Madison’s latest book, The Color of Night (Vintage Original), is a haunting, violent, terrifying story that will grip you from the first word to the last.  In the acknowledgments, he writes, “Surely it is the most vicious and appalling story ever to pass through my hand to the page, so inevitably some people will hate it.”  I loved this book and have a feeling all but the very prudish will feel the same.

Here are six questions for Madison Smartt Bell:

THE COLOR OF NIGHT is written from the point-of-view of a woman, Mae, teetering between middle and old age.  Was that a hard voice for you?  Or did you feel her inside you?

My first idea was for the narrator to be a sort of witchy old crone.  But then if I realized that if she had been in her teens in the late sixties she didn’t have to be as old as all that.  Fifty is the new thirty….you know.  She could still be active and attractive.  Although in another sense you might say that she is archetypally old.

Writing her voice was bewilderingly easy, though in earlier work I’d found it very hard to write from a woman’s point of view convincingly.  (Since finishing this book it has seemed easier; I hope that’s not a delusion).  It just fell out of me from somewhere onto the page.  The whole thing was written quickly, composed directly on the keyboard for the most part, and with very little revision either.  I felt like I was channeling the character, or possessed by her, which seemed to fit this particular story spookily well.

You describe the Manson Family without really mentioning the Mansons.  Can you tell me if the details in this story are accurate to the Manson Family or if they’re made up?

I would say it’s more like a group that makes the reader recall the Manson Family.  I’m writing about a Dionsysan cult that produces frenzies among its women, who in fact are maenads.  I happen to think that the Manson Family did fit that paradigm, but that’s just my theory, for whatever it’s worth.  For me the important thing for the book was to coax the elements of classical tragedy and the old mystery cults out of the situation.

These are fictional characters, especially Laurel and Mae.  I wouldn’t have had enough freedom with them otherwise.  The exact details of the Manson story are found in Vince Bugliosi’s Helter-Skelter-a very good book and a very scary one, even now.

This is one of the most violent books I’ve ever read.  I couldn’t finish In Cold Blood because it was too much for me.  But there’s something about the way you approach the violence via Mae, your narrator, that eased me through it.

You should try All Souls’ Rising sometime.  But seriously….  For me the creepiest thing about In Cold Blood is that at the time of the writing Capote understood that readers would already know the “what” of the story, since it had been all over the news, so in order to generate suspense he shifts attention and expectation to “how,” which becomes what the whole book has to reveal.  And he does it very subtly and skillfully.  The reader is lured along through the story by the most prurient interest imaginable in exactly how the hair got on the walls of the Clutter house, which the writer teasingly withholds to the end-and of course the reader knows these are real people …so, you know, it’s a snuff movie.  I still find this tactic to be fundamentally depraved.

So I hope that’s not what I did!  I think not.  The point in common is  that the reader can anticipate the outcome of the sixties plot thread in The Color of Night, but to me that meant I didn’t have to write those scenes explicitly.  I don’t think there are more than a thousand words directly depicting violence in the book, and even Mae’s eye is somewhat averted from the murders in the canyon, so there are only quick flashes of those.  Though I do think that maybe the less you see of it the more it bothers you; it casts a shadow over the whole narrative.  The real point of interest, for Mae and for me and the reader too I hope, is not hair on the walls but violent catharsis, in the Aristotelian sense.

I don’t want to give away too much, but I have to point out that although Mae commits some horrible, heinous crimes in this book, she is also a very sympathetic character.  It’s the same way I feel about Tony Soprano-he strangled his nephew to death (among other crimes), and yet when the FBI guys were running after him I was rooting for him to get away.  Did you deliberately seek the reader’s sympathies with Mae?  Or do you think that’s just how it sorts out when you give the complete, full character?

Yes, that aspect of things is rather strange; even I find it so.  I once said she had the beauty of a snake and my agent said it was like watching a cat kill mice; that is you don’t blame the cat for acting on its nature.  Mae expresses her essence, dreadful as it is, in a very pure way, and there’s something attractive about that.  Or at least compelling.

A conventional explanation of Mae would be that she is a victim/perpetrator in a cycle of abuse, and this option is available to the reader, but she doesn’t see herself that way, and I don’t either.   In fact her refusal to think of herself as a victim has its admirable side.  Tony Soprano’s sympathetic, I think, because he’s human and so many ways such a “regular guy.”  With Mae it’s the other way around I think.  Her project is to make herself immortal.  The more she can pull the reader into her vision of the way the world is, the more sympathetic she becomes.  Denis Johnson does something similar in The Stars at Noon, a book I much admire.

Making a real bid for the reader’s sympathy is not something Mae would do.  She’s a take it or leave it kind of person.  And in the writing I really did feel I was functioning as her secretary and not much more….

The terrorist attacks of 9/11 also appear in this book, but in a way that I’ve never seen before.  What made you decide to pull the events of 9/11 into an already tragic and violent story?

Well… for me the whole structure of the novel depends on the two horrifically violent episodes – 9/11 and the one in the sixties-and the space between them, which for Mae is empty space, the desert she inhabits for all those years, as if in a state of suspended animation.  9/11 brings her out of it.  For her (she’s not like the rest of us!) it’s invigorating.  In the end her attitude changes a bit, or is at risk of changing, as she becomes increasingly alarmed and even a bit threatened by her own human dimension.

I know that you wrote this book while you were writing one or two other books, running the Kratz Writing Center and teaching at Goucher College, and raising your daughter.  Can you please tell me how you manage to get so much done?  Do you ever watch TV? Do you ever lounge on the couch and read magazines? Have you ever wasted an afternoon playing Scrabble against a computer on your iPad? Please explain!

I don’t watch much TV, though as you see I do have an opinion of Tony Soparano; I tend to save magazines to read while operating exercise equipment; and I don’t play games on computers or have an iPad (though do think it’s a cool machine….).

I’m not a total workaholic either, lest I give the wrong impression.  I do martial arts, mostly tai chi now.  I spend quite a bit of time playing music.  I take naps and read for amusement.

But I think the real answer to your question is that I have always had a really good intuitive grasp of structure, which means that I can usually get a piece of writing, long or short, organized the way I want on first draft.  And I also can get a sufficiently polished surface quickly.  Together those two things save a lot of time.  I think I spend a lot less time on revision than most writers; it’s the one area where I’m a little lazy and don’t like to do it.

Okay, so you revise less than the rest of us.  Maybe that’s what it means to be a genius.  Lucky you!