Unsurprisingly, there are considerably more books for which I didn’t write formal blurbs. This, however, does not mean that several did not merit it. On quite the contrary! Here is a list of a few books that came out in 2016 that I very highly suggest you check out, or perhaps give as a gift (if that is your wont this time, or any time, of year).
Poetry
** Daniel Borzutzky, The Performance of Being Human
** Tyehimba Jess, Olio
** Douglas Kearney, Buck Studies
** Alice Oswald, Falling Awake
** Solmaz Sharif, Look
** Ocean Vuong, Night Sky With Exit Wounds
Fiction
** László Krasznahorkai, The Last Wolf / Herman [trans by John Batki & George Szirtes]
** Halldor Laxness, Wayward Heroes [trans. by Phillip Roughton]
** Lina Meruane, Seeing Red [trans. by Megan McDowell]
** Daniel Saldaña Paris, Among Strange Victims [trans. by Christina Macsweeney]
** Max Porter, Grief Is the Thing With Feathers
** Guillermo Saccomanno, Gesell Dome [trans. by Andrea G. Labinger]
Non-Fiction/Essays
** Brian Blanchfield, Proxies: Essays Near Knowing
** Renee Gladman, Calamities
** Lily Hoang, A Bestiary
** Óscar Martínez, A History of Violence: Living and Dying in Central America [trans. by John B. Washington]
** Philippe Soupault, Lost Profiles: Memoirs of Cubism, Dada & Surrealism [trans. by Alan Bernheimer]
** Eliot Weinberger, The Ghosts of Birds