More non-fiction, & poetry

We asked our contributors from this year to choose their favourite books of 2010. See yesterday’s post for recommendations by Fatima Bhutto, V. V. Ganeshananthan, Basharat Peer and Colin Grant. Today we complete the list of non-fiction, with meditations on history and the future: of cancer, of the internet, of our planet. Poetry choices are also below.

Non-fiction part 2

In the subtle, playful, yet quietly devastating You Are Not a Gadget, Jaron Lanier examines two articles of faith of early Internet enthusiasts: 1. That the Web would unleash a heretofore untapped explosion of human creativity and collaborative possibility. 2. That our new connectedness would allow artists of all stripes to find manifold new income sources, increasing our empowerment and financial independence. Lanier, the inventor of the term ‘virtual reality’, was a true believer at the beginning, which is what makes his systematic dismantling of these wild (and, it turns out, wildly naïve) hopes all the more persuasive and nerve-wracking.
– Jennifer Egan

Buy the Sex issue now to read Jennifer Egan’s short story, ‘The Gold Cure’

If you are diagnosed with cancer it is easy to find words on websites (soothing or otherwise) about your own personal invader. But to understand the manifold nature of all the various cancer family members, the deadly grannies, kinder uncles, psychopathic sons and slothful nieces, is much harder. Siddhartha Mukherjee’s biography, The Emperor of All Maladies, tells the little-told beginnings of the thing (What exactly is it? Is it exactly something?) that now consumes so many minds and so many lives. Some patients are prescribed perplexing mixtures of radiation, chemicals and knives without ever wanting to know where and how each treatment came to be tried. For those who do want to know, or at least to catch some glancing glimpse of their ‘enemy within’, this is a magnificent, highly readable book. Nor is it necessary to be ill to find this a fascinating set of medical detective stories with, in some chapters, a potential movie script on every page.
– Peter Stothard

Peter Stothard’s ‘Essex Clay’, an extract from his memoir The Spartacus Road, was published in Granta 109: Work and is free to read online.

Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us. This is the book E.O. Wilson would have written if he’d grown up playing violent video games. Weisman dispenses with mankind in his introduction, perhaps so the tree-hugging flagellants among us might be relieved of our guilt in time to enjoy the decay of civilization. From there we watch with a nearly pornographic glee as wild things demolish our post-industrial misdeeds, starting with the suburbs. And when a fifty-mile swath of carcinogenic petrochemical refineries in Texas is engulfed by a colossal fireball of its own making, what should sprout from the ashes? Wildflowers, naturally. Where Wilson has his paternal Harvard charm, Barry Lopez his Fabergé egg lyricism and dear old Ed Abbey his feverish misanthropy and his shotgun, Weisman writes with a cinematographer’s eye for movement. I can still see his giant ground sloths humping across North America, the billion teeny granules of plastic in our whitening toothpaste making their way to the ocean, that Houston delta of oil and asphalt exploding. The book’s an act of reclamation, regeneration and an absolute blast to read.
– Claire Vaye Watkins

‘My father first came to Death Valley because Charles Manson told him to...’: read Claire Vaye Watkins’s ‘Keeping it in the Family’, an exlcusive for Granta.com. Her short story, ‘The Last Thing We Need’, from Granta 111: Going Back, is also free to read here.

I’d like to recommend Zbigniew Herbert’s The Collected Prose 1948-1998. Translated by Alissa Valles, this is an essential collection by one of Poland's and the world’s great poets. Essay after essay is stunning, whether he is writing about Dutch painters, torture, poetry, Montaigne … The section of short prose includes a remarkable three page text on Hamlet called ‘Hamlet on the Border of Silence’. This piece alone is worth the hefty thirty-five dollar list price. In trying to explain the unusual way time flows in the play, Herbert writes: ‘Hamlet accelerates time by his own existence, by the pain of his remembrance, the effort of his thought.’ – Peter Orner

Peter Orner’s ‘Dyke Bridge’, a short story, was published in Granta 111: Going Back. Buy the issue here.

Poetry

I had a friend, a poet, who had a terrible accident and ended up in the hospital in New York with a severe brain trauma. He’s a poet and a screenwriter. Suddenly there he was without words. For the two weeks he was in a coma I read to him every day from Seamus Heaney’s new collection, Human Chain. An appropriate title. My friend is recovering now and we read the poems back and forth. We are, in this way, linked, and always tethered to the original voice. These poems of Heaney’s will forever be with me.
– Colum McCann

Heaney’s poem ‘The Door Was Open and the House Was Dark’, from Human Chain, was published in the print edition of Granta 111: Going Back. Colum McCann contributed to the Work issue. Buy a subscription to our digital archive to read his piece ‘Looking for the Rozziner’ now.

It’s frustrating how many reputedly great poets from different languages remain untranslatable into English. Goethe, Schiller and Holderlin in German; Pushkin, Tsvetaeva and Mandlestam in Russian … And there are many more. One of the most lauded has been Giacomo Leopardi. Considered the greatest poet in Italian after Dante, his work, though often cast in English by gifted poets and scholars, has never in translation offered more than an inkling of its monumentality. Now Jonathan Galassi has published a volume of the Canti, which includes remarkably lively and pure translations of the poems, as well as an informative introduction and extensive notes that finally bring to English poetry the essence of this unique poet. – C.K. Williams

C.K. Williams’s poem ‘Bianca Burning’ was published in our Sex issue.

Shaikh Ayaz (1923-97) is to Sindh what Lorca is to Spain or Hikmet to Turkey. I can only read Sindhi (my father tongue) with the aid of a crib, but this morning The Storm’s Call For Prayers, a volume of Ayaz’s late poems translated into English, arrived in my postbox; though it doesn’t include the original texts, it does convey their beauty and power. Few poems are longer than a page; many only span two or three lines, their imagery ranging from rain, rocks and cacti in rural Sindh to Karachi seascapes, Van Gogh’s sunflowers, snow on Akhmatova’s Neva. ‘Every poet who writes of love’, Ayaz notes, ‘is a poet of the revolution.’ – Aamer Hussein

Read an interview with Aamer Hussein on Urdu literature here.

Christopher Sunset by Geoffrey Nutter, out from Wave Books this year

Rather than any particular volume I’d like to praise the entire line-up of Wave Books for 2010, not only because they consistently present authors of intelligence and high invention but also because the books are offered in plain covers, not plastered with that absurd hyperbolic blurbspeak most other publishers insist on. There is something to be said for allowing a book to keep its dignity.
– Anne Carson

Anne Carson’s poem ‘Hang It Up’ was published in our Sex issue.

Read also... non-fiction recommendations from Fatima Bhutto, V. V. Ganeshananthan, Basharat Peer and Colin Grant. And look out for the best novels of 2010 on Thursday.