Mary-Louise Parker is a Tony, Emmy, and Golden Globe award-winning actress.

Fiction

Andy Vernon-Jones / Henry Holt

Though summing up Helen Phillips’s debut novel, The Beautiful Bureaucrat, is an elusive task, reading it is an addictive, uncanny experience. Here is Phillips’s own stab at describing her short book: “a ‘poetic thriller’ about a woman who gets a data entry job in a big, windowless building and then her husband begins to disappear.” Josephine Newbury and Joseph Jones have landed in a nameless city that must be Brooklyn, but this isn’t cutting-edge fiction about cubicle life. Think Kafka instead. Tracing the couple’s paths to work and back (or not) to their serial sublets, Phillips pursues timeless themes. Her prose is exact, at once ominous and droll, and her pacing is perfect. As she probes the mysteries of marriage and mortality, choice and chance, freedom and fate, her pages command close focus—and fly by very fast. —A.H.

Greywolf Press / Ecco

Helen Phillips: For me, 2015 was the Year of Falling Even More Deeply in Love with Graywolf Press. Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts was probably the most transformative read of the year, boldly drawing on different realms of scholarship and art and experience in the struggle to answer intensely personal questions. And I can attest that Sarah Manguso’s Ongoingness—an exploration of the tension between the present moment and memory, particularly after becoming a mother—is the most apropos book to read while nursing a newborn: “He floated down the milk river toward the rest of his life.” I’m in awe of all the powerhouse female essayists (Eula Biss! Leslie Jamison!) publishing with Graywolf these days. Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric, also from Graywolf, is my next read.

Fiction-wise, I was enthralled by The Diver’s Clothes Lie Empty by Vendela Vida. The action of the first half comprises perhaps the most vertiginous, paranoia-inducing free-fall I’ve ever read.

The Beautiful Bureaucrat is indebted to far too many to share here. But to cite two somewhat different strains of influence: on the one hand, the witty/profound spareness of books like The Most of It by Mary Ruefle and Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill; on the other hand, works that pull back the curtain on the uncanny/surreal/mystical worlds lurking beneath the known world, as in Jamaica Kincaid’s collection At the Bottom of the River, and as in my favorite Kelly Link story, “Stone Animals,” from her collection Magic for Beginners.

Helen Phillips is an assistant professor of creative writing at Brooklyn College.

History

Laura Levine / Farrar, Straus, and Giroux

Luc Sante’s fascinating guide to the squalid, disorderly, dank, thrilling, dangerous underside of the Paris of the past makes for a suitably sprawling book. Sante is Baudelaire’s definition of the flâneur, a “passionate observer” ready to note every detail, pursue any detour. He has prowled through rich primary sources, in search of “vigorous prose, which is the only kind I can read for very long”—and the kind he writes himself. He makes flâneurs of us all. Strolling through his text, you won’t be able to resist side-glances at the photographs on each page. The Other Paris, officially published two weeks before horror hit the city, tapped into historical curiosity then. Sante’s closing thought that “any Paris of the future … will perforce involve fear, dirt, sloth, ruin, and accident” has more immediacy now. —A.H.

University of Chicago Press / Penguin Classics

Luc Sante: I can guess why Bengt Jangfeldt’s Mayakovsky was generally overlooked this year. Vladimir Mayakovsky’s poetry has fallen into disfavor because of the hack panegyrics he was forced to produce for several dictators, and because English translations of his work have generally not been very good. Those things obscure the greatness of his tough, daring, transcendent poems, particularly the early stuff, such as 1915’s “A Cloud in Trousers.” Jangfeldt supplies the context for both his glory and his ignominy—in fact he reaches a level of intimacy with his subject I've seldom seen in a biography. You get to know Mayakovsky to the point where you alternately want to hug him and slap him. In addition, Jangfeldt—who worked on his book for decades, interviewed all the principals who survived into old age, and had access to NKVD files and suchlike as soon as they were opened—is able to conjure up a vivid picture of the early Soviet avant-garde, a scene that combined free love and stark repression, extravagance and penury, wild ambition and enforced mediocrity, and had tumbled into death and ruin even before Stalin took the reins. Mayakovsky is at once a signal work of scholarship and a riveting narrative that will keep you reading past your bedtime.