The Decade in Books, Piece by Piece
The 1990s was a good decade for literature: Salman Rushdie continued to write despite the fatwa, first-time novelists like Zadie Smith appeared and established writers like Margaret Atwood matured. Leslie Marmon Silko wrote the Native American woman's version of The Great American Novel, Thomas Pynchon emerged from semi-retirement with a 700+ page novel that included a talking dog and Kazuo Ishiguro baffled everyone with an experimental novel. In nonfiction, Kathleen Norris graced readers with a surprising memoir, David Remnick documented the anti-climactic collapse of the Soviet Union, and Jacques Barzun summed up 500 years of Western cultural history.
None of those authors appears on the list below.
It goes without saying that any list that aspires to record the best of anything — whether of books or film or music — leaves many well-deserving items off. There is no objective method for determining what is best; there is no list inclusive enough to encompass all that deserves attention. Of what use then to readers would be a list of books that Flak staff just happened to have read in the past 10 years and consider "best"? Rather than compile a traditional best-of-books feature (one of those Top 10 lists that dot publications around the new year), we decided to praise those books published in the last decade that did one thing exceptionally well, from cover design to punctuation use, and everything — from sentences to end notes — in between.
Cover
"Jimmy Corrigan" by Chris Ware
Copyright
"Thirst" by Ken Kalfus
Dedication
"The Gold Bug Variations" by Richard Powers
Foreword
"The Tyranny of the Majority" by Lani Guinier
Sentence
"The Hundred Brothers" by Donald Antrim
First Chapter
"A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius" by Dave Eggers
Paragraph
"The Puttermesser Papers" by Cynthia Ozick
Description
"Underworld" by Don DeLillo
Dialogue
"Interpreter of Maladies" by Jhumpa Lahiri
Ending
"The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay" by Michael Chabon
Notation
"Infinite Jest" by David Foster Wallace
Blurbs
"The Neil Pollack Anthology of American Literature" by Neil Pollack
Typography
"House of Leaves" by Mark Z. Danielewski
Punctuation
"Pure Drivel" by Steve Martin
— Jessica Chapel (jnc at flakmag dot com)
— graphic by Dan Norton
