Read a lot of great books in 2013. My three favorites, which I read in the last few weeks, won’t be released officially until early 2014: Willy Vlautin’s The Free; Mary Miller’s The Last Days of California; and Dave Newman’s Two Small Birds.

From this year, I loved:
Sara Gran, Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway
Owen King, Double Feature
Richard Lange, Angel Baby
Dave Newman, The Slaughterhouse Poems
Daniel Woodrell, The Maid’s Version
Lawrence Wright, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief
Joe Hill, NOS4A2
J. David Osborne, Low Down Death Right Easy
Lori Jakiela, The Bridge to Take When Things Get Serious
Dan Fante, Point Doom
Scott McClanahan, Crapalachia and Hill William
Derrick Harriell, Ropes
Poe Ballantine, Love and Terror on the Howling Plains of Nowhere
William Todd Schultz, Torment Saint: The Life of Elliott Smith
Hosho McCreesh, A Deep and Gorgeous Thirst
Scott Phillips, Rake
Ace Atkins, The Broken Places
Tom Franklin and Beth Ann Fennelly, The Tilted World
George Saunders, Tenth of December
Shawn Vestal, Godforsaken Idaho
Michael Kimball, Michael Kimball Writes Your Life Story (on a postcard)
Noah Cicero, The Collected Works and Go to Work…
Jamie Quatro, I Want to Show You More
Karen Russell, Vampires in the Lemon Grove
Mike Tyson, Undisputed Truth
George Pelecanos, The Double
Stephen Graham Jones, The Least of My Scars
Jedidiah Ayres, Peckerwood
Pearce Hansen, Street Raised
Red Hammond, XXX Shamus
David James Keaton, Fish Bites Cop!
Jamie Iredell, I Was a Fat Drunk Catholic School Insomniac
Stephanie Barber, Night Moves
Flannery O’Connor, A Prayer Journal

My to-read pile includes some of the best of 2013 I haven’t gotten to yet: Mary Ruefle, Trances of the Blast; James Sallis, Others of My Kind; Barry Gifford, The Roy Stories; Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers; Ivy Pochoda, Visitation Street; Kelly Braffet, Save Yourself; Alissa Nutting, Tampa; Vicki Hendricks, Fur People; Tom Perrotta, Nine Inches; Marisha Pessl, Night Film; Lindsay Hunter, Don’t Kiss Me; Steve Weddle, Country Hardball; John Langan, The Wide, Carnivorous Sky and Other Monstrous Geographies; Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch; Matt Bell, In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods; Tom Piccirilli, The Last Whisper in the Dark; Laird Barron, The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All; Matthew Revert, Basal Ganglia; Kevin Sampsell, This is Between Us; Jesmyn Ward, Men We Reaped; Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane; Steve Lowe, You Are Sloth!; Morrissey, Autobiography; David Shoemaker, The Squared Circle; David Gilbert, And Sons; Jonathan Lethem, Dissident Gardens; Paul Auster, Report from the Interior; Dan Fante, Point Doom; so many more I’m forgetting right now.

Links to my reviews of some of my favorites here.