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Best Book of 1965: Everything That Rises Must Converge

April Ayers Lawson

‘O’Conner has for me the effect of nailing and then blowing up one’s most casual illusions’

The Price You See Reflects the Poor Quality of the Item and Your Lack of Desire for It

Melissa Lee-Houghton

‘I walk away from you / without glancing back, in case you see in me something I don’t.’

Five Things Right Now: Melissa Lee-Houghton

Melissa Lee-Houghton

‘It thrills and delights me that I can now watch concerts I would’ve given several fingers to go to in the ’90s, albeit wonky though these videos are.’

The Heart Compared to a Seed, c.1508 (after Leonardo da Vinci)

Sylvia Legris

‘noce, the heart—the nut that gestates the tree of veins.’

Three Poems

Sylvia Legris

‘Narcotic, / unworldly, a toxic doctrine / of undivine retribution.’

All that Offers a Happy Ending Is a Fairy Tale

Yiyun Li

‘If you were like me, you would know the obsession of the compulsive reader: every street sign; every bottle label’

Swimming Underwater

Merethe Lindstrøm

‘When I picture my childhood, it’s like I’m swimming underwater.’ Merethe Lindstrøm’s story is translated from the Norwegian by Marta Eidsvåg, and is the winner of Harvill Secker’s Young Translators’ Prize 2016.

The Tenant

Victor Lodato

‘She’d gotten so used to her loneliness, she didn’t want to fall from it now.’

Our Private Estate

Dave Lordan

‘Dozens of votive candles held aloft by mourners in white suits in procession. So much white, as if death could be engulfed in it, as if death itself was not an all-engulfing whiteness.’

Best Book of 1998: 253

Carmen Maria Machado

Carmen Maria Machado on why Geoff Ryman’s 253 is the best book of 1998.

The Weak Spot

Sophie Mackintosh

‘There was a certain kind of teenage girl who would relish not just the killing, but the trophy taking, choosing a tooth and using the pliers herself.’

Best book of 1983: The Piano Teacher by Elfriede Jelinek

Sophie Mackintosh

‘After 2016 I’m done with sentimentality, and it’s hard to think of a less sentimental book than The Piano Teacher, objectively a masterpiece, subjectively a book that changed my life.’

The Neighborhood

Kelly Magee

‘Can bad mothers be taught to be good? Or maybe, can we be incentivized to bond? To love?’