A Year in Reading: Adam Dalva

There was a before, I think, and back then I read well. I read on subways and trains. I read in bars while I waited for blessedly late friends. I read without monitoring the faces of people around me, without constantly assessing the implications of every cleared throat.

I started the year with Cleanness by Garth Greenwell, which set a high bar. Cleanness looks like a short story collection but functions as a novel, accumulating tension as it goes. The radiant core of the book, a cycle titled “Loving R,” is especially marvelous. I followed it up with a little contemporary French novel called Exposed by Jean-Philippe Blondel. Is it weird that I often try to find a little contemporary French book after I read something I love? Exposed is an especially good one—an aging high school English teacher is asked to pose for one of his former students, a famous painter, and the heat of the situation gets slowly turned up until you’re in the boil.

I also read new books by two brilliant writers. by , a hybrid work of essays and short stories that examines tricksters through time, is possibly my favorite of hers yet, up on the plinth with and . I also enjoyed ’s , a career-spanning collection that shows off the talent established by her masterpiece , especially in the short story “Bombay Gin.”