Jenny Offill’s 10 favorite books of the decade
As part of The A.V. Club’s best of the 2010s coverage, we asked some of our favorite authors to share their 10 favorite books of the decade. Concluding the series is novelist and children’s book author Jenny Offill. Offill’s novel Last Things, which follows a young girl as she observes the dissolution of her family, was a finalist for the 1999 L.A. Times First Book Award. Dept. Of Speculation, named one of The New York Times’ 10 Best Books Of 2014, tells the story of a courtship and marriage in a series of disquieting, perfectly condensed vignettes. Her upcoming novel, Weather (February 2020), unfolds in the same precise, spare prose—radiating a similar feeling of hushed dread, this time about the future of the planet—and further solidifies Offill as a sentence-level writer of the highest order. Here, in Offill’s own words, are her favorite books of the 2010s.
The New Yorker Stories by Ann Beattie (2010, Scribner)
Accumulation is a kind of plot, she said once. Here she shows how.
Hour Of The Star by Clarice Lispector (trans. by Benjamin Moser, 2011, New Directions)
Lispector’s brilliant last novel. I hate twist endings, but I think about the one in this novel all the time. Look what she could do in 128 pages!
Madness, Rack, And Honey by Mary Ruefle (2012, Wave Books)
“I have all of eternity to be humble, but I have but a few short years to be pretentious,” Ruefle writes under the heading “Lectures I Will Never Give.” This book will remind you why you like to read books.
The Examined Life: How We Lose And Find Ourselves by Stephen Grosz (2013, W.W. Norton)
Brief, parable-like stories about psychoanalysis. Sounds terrible but because of Grosz’s wit and humility and his (thank god) choice to forgo the jargon of the discipline, this book reads like the best kind of philosophy. I think about it often, especially the phrase “The bigger the front, the bigger the back.” You have to read it to learn the riddle but it will help you the next time you look at someone’s merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream… Instagram feed.