The Best Twelve Books I Read in 2015, Month by Month (plus runners-up and honorable mentions)



JANUARY
    One of the Children is Crying ~ Coleman Dowell (1968)


FEBRUARY
   Heavy Daughter Blues ~ Wanda Coleman (1987)


MARCH
   The Book of Dolores ~ William T. Vollmann (2013)
 

APRIL
   Asylum Piece ~ Anna Kavan (1940)






















MAY
   The Climb: Tragic Ambitions on Everest ~ Anatoli Boukreev & G. Weston DeWalt (1997)


JUNE
   Beyond Life: Dizain des Démiurges ~ James Branch Cabell (1919)


JULY
   Hell House ~ Richard Matheson (1971)


AUGUST
   Metrophage ~ Richard Kadrey (1988)


SEPTEMBER
   
   Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs ~ Ted Morgan (1988, 2012)

OCTOBER              
   A Fabulous Opera ~ Tropic of Ideas (2015; edited & illustrated by Solla Carrock)























NOVEMBER
   Nakamura Reality ~ Alex Austin (2016)


DECEMBER
   Ice ~ Anna Kavan (1967)


~~~~~~~~~~~~
RUNNERS-UP

January ... Telling Stories by Joan Didion (1978)
February ... The Award Avant-Garde Reader* edited by Gil Orlovitz (1965)
March ... The Encyclopedia of the Dead by Danilo Kis (1983)
April ... The Body by William Sansom (1949)
May ... Crooning: A Collection by John Gregory Dunne (1990)
June ... Revolt in Aspromonte by Corrado Alvaro (1930)
July ... Rashomon and Other Stories by Ryunosuke Akutagawa (1952, posthumous)
August ... Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Fiction** edited by Larry McCaffery (1991)
September ... The Blue Hammer by Ross MacDonald (1976)
October ... Kamikaze L'amour by Richard Kadrey (1995)
November ... La-bas by Joris-Karl Huysmans (1891)
December ... Naomi's Room by Jonathan Ayecliffe (1991)

included in the fiction anthology are the following stories:
"Proclaim Present Time Over" by William S. Burroughs // "Passage De Milan" by Michael Butor // "The Fantom of Marseilles" by Jean Cocteau // "The Open House of Asmodeus the Tortoise" by Peter Jones // "Wakerobin" by Thomas McEvilley III // "I'm Just in Sparta on a Visit" by Gil Orlovitz // "Ravenna" by Antonio Pizzuto // "Capricio Italiano" by Edoardo Sanguinetti // "Someone Just Like Me" by Sol Yurick.

** included in the anthology are short stories, novel excerpts, poetry, essays, and literary criticism; all of the works of fiction are listed below: 

—"Beyond the Extinction of Human Life" (from Empire of the Senseless) ~ Kathy Acker
— excerpt from Crash ~ J. G. Ballard
—"Mother and I Would Like to Know" (from The Wild Boys) ~ William S. Burroughs
—"Rock On" ~ Pat Cadigan
—"Among the Blobs" ~ Samuel R. Delany
— excerpt from White Noise ~ Don Delillo
— excerpt from Neuromancer ~ William Gibson
—"Fistic Hermaphrodites" // "Microbes" // "Penetrabit: Slime Temples" // "nerve terminals" ~ Rob Hardin
—"Max Headroom" ~ Harold Jaffe
— excerpt from Straight Fiction ~ Thom Jurek
—"The Toilet was Full of Nietzsche" (from Metrophage) ~ Richard Kadrey
—"Office of the Future" (from Dad's Nuke) ~ Marc Laidlaw
—"I was an Infinitely Hot and Dense Dot" (from My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist) ~ Mark Leyner
— excerpt from Plus ~ Joseph McElroy
—"Wire Movement #9" // "Wire for Two Tims" ~ Misha
— excerpt from Easy Travel to Other Planets ~ Ted Mooney
—"Frame 137" ~ Jim O'Barr
— excerpt from The Crying of Lot 49 ~ Thomas Pynchon
— excerpt from Software ~ Rudy Rucker
— excerpt from Life During Wartime ~ Lucius Shepard
—"Stoked" ~ Lewis Shiner
—"Wolves of the Plateau" ~ John Shirley
—"Twenty Evocations" // "The Mare Tranquillitatis People's Circumlunar Zaibatsu: 2-1-'16" (from Schismatrix) ~ Bruce Sterling
—"The Indigo Engineers" (from The Rainbow Stories) ~ William T. Vollmann

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Honorable Mentions, 2015

American Stories by Nagai Kafai (2000, posthumous)
Burnt Sienna by David Morrell (2000)
Painted Devils: Strange Stories by Robert Aickman (1979)
The Nihilesthete by Richard Kalich (1987)
The Unseen by Joseph Citro (1990)


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