Ten Older But Recently Translated Books I Would Add to the New York Times “Best Books of the 21st Century” List

(Lists like this—the 100 Best Books of the 21st Century, as determined by a New York Times survey of “503 novelists, nonfiction writers, poets, critics and other book lovers, with a little help from the staff of The New York Times Book Review”—seem tailor-made to aggravate me. Someone is out there recommending the wrong books. It drives me crazy. I’m sure many of the individual ballots are more surprising (and better) than the list would suggest, and I hope the NYT will eventually publish a complete catalogue of the several thousand titles that must have been nominated, but anytime you rely on 500-some ballots to aggregate a list, it’s bound to favor the expected: the odds-on favorites, the crowd-pleasers, the non-eccentric; the prizewinners and the book club picks; in short, the already famous. Some of those books will be very good, of course, but few of them will be the particular books that made essential additions to the life of any one individual reader—and therefore might make an essential addition to yours. Of the books on the list, I’ve read 42, and alternate titles by most of the other authors. Of those 42, I like roughly twenty, am indifferent to about fourteen, and loathe exactly eight. Listed below, alphabetically by author, are the ten pre-21st Century books that weren’t translated into English until this century that would make my ballot if they were eligible. You’ll find a separate ballot, without any of these gray-area books, here, and a list of my ten favorite books that actually made the cut at the Times here.)

 

  • Ghosts by César Aira

  • The Other City by Michal Ajvaz

  • Palafox by Éric Chevillard

  • The Jokers by Albert Cossery

  • Yesterday by Juan Emar

  • All My Cats by Bohumil Hrabal

  • Metropole by Ferenc Karinthy

  • Centuria: One Hundred Ouroboric Novels by Giorgio Manganelli

  • Panics by Barbara Molinard

  • Microfictions by Ana María Shua

— July 12, 2024


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