Topic 1: Feel Good Story of the Year

Alex: It was tough for me to find a real "feel good" story this year. One thing that cheered me up a bit was the amount of resistance within the U.S. literary culture to the Bush presidency. There's always been some of this - maybe starting with the protest of poets invited to read at the White House several years ago - but with this being an election year it was a lot more prominent. 

I noticed this happening on several fronts. The American Library Association was an early leader in the fight against the Patriot Act. If the pre-election Slate poll was at all representative, most writers seemed to be lining up against Bush. Some famous ones were quite outspoken. There were a lot more anti-Bush books being published, many of them bestsellers. Dennis Johnson wrote about this in a pre-election column, "Books vs. Bush". Jon Stewart's America went on to be named the Publisher's Weekly Book of the Year. And, perhaps most dramatically, the online lit-blog community, from what I could tell, were all in opposition. 

A new respect for a lot of writers has come out of this for me. 

Yes, there were also "conservative" bestsellers. And I'm sure some prominent authors supported Bush (though I can't name any). And maybe an outspoken literary culture only feeds the vicious myth of a snobby liberal/intellectual elite. But these things count. Speaking as an outside observer (I'm the only non-U.S. citizen here), I can tell you the image of America has been suffering badly in recent years, and the election has only made things worse. And I think a Bush presidency is bad news for everyone. So I'm heartened to find so many kindred spirits among the bookish constituency.

Michael: Not much to feel good about this year, with even the literary world pre-occupied by things political. (Actually, all the author-agitation and the like seemed impressive at the time; alas, it seems to have been, at best, ineffectual - the resulting hangover is anything but feel-good.)

So what did impress? The increasing popularity of literary weblogs, the fascination with what would become of the New York Times Book Review as a new editor stepped in, and literature in translation.

The proliferation of literary weblogs has been a pleasant surprise, especially the fact that newcomers continue joining in. Whether temporary and topic-specific (the Man Booker 2004 weblog), devoted to a specific niche (numerous publishing-focused weblogs), constraint-focused (MadInkBeard), or more commentary-focused (The Reading Experience), there have been many excellent additions to what had seemed to me to be an already crowded field. As it turns out, it's not crowded at all, and it's great to see so many people willing to jump in - as well as what everybody, old-timers and new, is doing.

The NYTBR succession saga was probably more of a local interest story (local meaning the tiny American literary world), and beyond that few might have cared, but I thought it was great how impassioned debate was. I also thought it was an important debate, forcing people to defend literature and fiction and standards - even if, as with most of the debates of 2004, most of us wound up on the losing side.

As to literature in (English) translation, I don't think we exactly reached a turning point in 2004, but it seems to me that there is more out there. Not nearly enough, but definitely more. Publishers such as Vertical, Archipelago Books, Other Press, as well as some of the established houses all offered impressive selections of fiction in translation. Too little review coverage for most of these titles, of course (especially in the apparently ever-more xenophobic NYTBR), but more to choose from than usual.

Alex: I remain ambivalent about the weblogs (as opposed to the more general book sites). Some of them are great, and I'm simply amazed at the amount of time and effort people put into them. They must be full-time jobs! Then at other times they just seem like more media chatter, the proliferation of which hasn't translated into anything important. There's a lot of opinion and personality out there, but little that qualifies as original reportage. Of course, things may evolve.

Robert:  It didn’t take me long to review the emotional landscape of the recent past for the Edward P. Jones story to settle prominently as the reigning champion of a rather dubious category. Nothing else came close.

I was moved by the power and poetry of The Known World and then to meet Ed Jones - in this age of media coaches and celebrity portraiture - a man so without guile, so focused on what he does, that to learn his story, child of single mother who at one point in his life was homeless, who spent 12 years thinking about and writing a book, some how that struck me as the way stories should go. Then to be capped off by winning substantial awards - which I don't put much stock in (but as Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Gail Caldwell remarked to me, "they don’t mean much until you have one") - and then as the big pay  off, to be awarded or recognized by an accolade that I do put stock in, the MacArthur Fellowship - that just turns me to emotional putty. Hooray for Edward Jones!

Jessa: This might sound odd, but my feel good story of the year is Judy Blume winning the National Book Award. As opposed to last year, I feel she really deserves it, and I think just about every girl who grew up reading her books has nothing but good feelings about her.

She was one of the few YA authors that I read that didn't try to scare the pants back on teens, didn't talk down to her readers, and treated them like she remembered what it was like to be that age. She's absolutely indispensable, and I'm glad she got some respect after mostly dealing with having her books yanked off of school library shelves.

Maud: The rumors of fiction's demise have been greatly overstated - or so I want to believe.  Hot on the heels of Land-Grant College Review's debut last year, Leelila Strogov launched the excellent (and bi-coastal) Swink. Black Clock, given the David Kipen stamp of approval, also debuted. And let's not forget the appearance of the rigorous, unclassifiable n+1, where the editors take seriously ideas about literature and much more. While most of the offerings from n+1's print issue aren't available online, readers should track down all three "conversations with a bookseller," in which a bookstore owner grudgingly accepts a copy of n+1 for sale and ultimately gives it away to the customer who asks for it.

Beyond that, I'll second pretty much everything that's been said so far.  Judy Blume and Edward P. Jones deserve all accolades thrown their way. Archipelago put out one of my favorite books of the year: Miljenko Jergovic's Sarajevo Marlboro.  And while I've only just stopped weeping over the election results, I'm glad to see writers like Thomas Frank (What's the Matter with Kansas?) reframing the "morals" debate in economic terms.