Bent Country's Top Ten Books of 2025

I've let go of preamble here in my fifth decade wandering here on the earth. Here are the ten books that hit me the hardest over the past year, in particular order /

1. 

The Ballad of the Sad Cafe and Other Stories by Carson McCullers

Had wanted to read this one for a long time, and it didn't disappoint. The characters are vivid and unforgettable. Best of all, it's set in the South but doesn't rely on it; it's not one of those books in the South where people say after reading it, "The setting was just like a character." It doesn't have to be in order to be a wicked good setting. This book proves that.

2. 

Red Pyramid by Vladimir Sorokin

Discovered Sorokin by doing nothing more than scrolling through "You Might Like These" type of thing on Amazon. I can't remember which book where this was listed like that, but I'm glad I came across it. Sorokin is fearless, but he's not for everyone; if you're easily offended, or possibly not easily offended, just normally offended, then do not read this book. Ever.

3. 

At the Bottom of the River by Jamaica Kincaid

If I hadn't read Sad Cafe and Sorokin this year this would be the one. I guess the order of these alone says that, but I wanted to restate it. How did Kincaid manage to write really short short stories and only a handful, at that, and manage to write a book that would be a career-maker for anyone who would have written it? Just a perfect book.

4.

American Kings by Seth Wickersham

First football nonfiction book I've read and I immediately corrected that by starting Wickersham's other football book Better to Be Feared. This book will not appeal to folks who ain't sports fans, but if you are, then it's a MUST read.

5.

Becoming Dr. Seuss by Brian Jay Jones

I worshipped this man's books while growing up. They are by far and away the best children's books ever written. He might have had a dud I'm not aware of, but I didn't read about it in this book. And, yep, it touches on the badness the man became infamous for later on. All of it interesting.

6.

Streets of Laredo by Larry McMurtry

Read this to finish up the Lonesome Dove set. Loved it. Plain and simple. Oh, also, you'll like it even if you don't like reading westerns.

7.

Day of the Oprichnik by Vladimir Sorokin

My introduction to Sorokin. My jaw legitimately dropped several times within the first quarter of this book. How did this guy write such shocking material and pull this off, write this amazing novel? I generally can't stand fiction that has large political platforms, but Sorokin approaches that so brazenly and bravely and with such a straight punch, messy and insane and with a knee in a what some would consider the gutter but is anything but.

8.

Dead Man's Walk by Larry McMurtry

Just really dig Larry. His writing is pure and without irony or all those other little social motives that turns my stomach after enough of it. Sometimes you just want to sit around a campfire, have a couple hotdogs, and listen to a guy who can tell it straight and true and, well, perfectly.

9.

Don Quixote by Miguel Cervantes 

I honestly thought, at around page 50 of this novel of all novels, that I had become lost in a new universe, and not in the lost-in-the-fictive-dream sort of way. I listened to it on Audible and there would be long periods while driving that I drifted away, staring at passing billboards or thinking about the last time I ate. Then, at around the halfway point, it all started to happen, whatever that IT was. I know this: what came together for me right then has never came together so solidly for me while reading any other novel. By the time I finished, I knew I'd read the first novel ever written. It was like waking up inside the Great Pyramid of Giza. Can't put it anywhere but here in the list, though, because realizing you've just read the first novel ever written doesn't mean it was as enjoyable as some others.

10.

The Life of Rocks by Rick Bass

If I were to pitch an Obvious Shirt for Rick Bass it would be this: Rick Bass Crushes Short Stories. Some writers just know pacing, the elegant rise to the the climax, how to add a brushstroke or two to a character's heart perfect enough to break yours, setting, and all the rest. They put their arm on the table, tap a vein, and what comes out are stories like "Pagans." 

Three Studies of Love / Green Mother

I once again changed the title of my novel-in-progress. It's now called Three Studies of Love, but that may change before long, too. I'm having more trouble titling work than I used to.

Also, I've taken a break from writing it. It's too painful to work on for large stretches the way I have my last few books. It's painful, hard to write so truthfully about such difficult things. 

Love is the most significant subject we can give our attention. And I'm writing three intertwined sections for the novel that can be best summed up like this: 

Love Lost

Love Destroyed 

The Absence of Love for Lust

It's just too hard to work on right now. I started it the first of September and wrote just under 150 pages and then cut t to 90 pages during a single two-hour work session and then set both those drafts aside as what I've started calling "pull drafts" and started over. I'm 20 pages in now and I'm just exhausted. And sad and grieving and guilt-shattered and overwhelmed and dragging my confidence along like a broken toy. 

But I always keep a couple novels or collections going for times like this, because a lot of my writing is dark and stormy. I picked up one back up I'd started last year called Green Mother. It's a folk horror novel set in eastern Kentucky. And, best of all, I don't find myself crying uncontrollably while writing it.

/

“We’ll never survive!”

“Nonsense. You’re only saying that because no one ever has.”

— William Goldman, The Princess Bride

What, you all think about things other than reading and writing?

Ahh, here again in my little room in this profound space of darkness wavering like fire.

Right?

Hello, dear readers. We should get together for a card game soon.

This novel...Oh, this novel of mine. I'm reading maximalist novels these days. Recently finished Gaddis' JR and Eco's Foucault's Pendulum and now reading the second book of Karl Ove Knausgard's grand set of five novels My Struggle.

I do not write these kinds of novels. But I'd like to write one. Just one, not many. It's outside my comfort zone by continents, so I want to push there, precisely because of this.

But I'm not good enough to do it, unfortunately. Still going to do it, just not well. 

It seems...crazy?...It seems crazy to commit that amount of time (it took me four years to write my first published novel Brown Bottle before it was put out in 2012) to something that cannot turn out good. There's some reasoning to it.

I'm well into my publishing career...Wait, check that...I'm far on the other side of my publishing career. When you're 49 there's an occasional mind check you have to do. I'll be 50 in April and my health has been failing rapidly for the past five years. I'll only be able to write a few more books that have something to say, and then it's writing for the honorable sake of writing, which is great by me. 

I have one book slated for publication in May and another completed novel in my publisher's hands now. There's two books, if they publish the novel. So those few books left with something to say is possibly already 33.3 percent in the bag (I think...I recall some grade school teacher saying that was the percentage on a third. But I'm disgusting at math).

The third book will certainly not be the big novel I'm going to write. The Oubliette will not be the one; I can say that with confidence. It's going to be short, likely right at 200 pages. So the maximalist novel will be the last one I write. 

Pretty fatalistic, I know. It's what it's, though.

/

“We’ll never survive!”

“Nonsense. You’re only saying that because no one ever has.”

— William Goldman, The Princess Bride

The Oubliette

I've changed the title of the novel I'm working on from The Box to The Oubliette. Sounds pretentious but it's what it's.

The old title was one of my favorites when I came up with it before beginning the book. It happens like that for me. I think of a title and then the story or novel comes, and the whole thing's taken a different direction and that road was leading more and more away from The Box.

I had 143 pages finished when I sat down to work on it last week. When I got up after a four-hour session, it stood at 90 pages. The entire fabric changed in that session; I've never had that happen with any piece of writing.

Once those pages were cut, I decided to set the 90 pages aside and use it as a well and started over at page one. So now I'm on page 21 but the road to the end is so much clearer. I have a renewed interest and, with this as potentially my seventh novel written, I'm getting more comfortable with the form. Never thought that would happen, if I'm being honest.

I wrote ten or so short stories while finishing my last novel, The Old Invisible and I struggled to keep those under 15 or 20 pages. It was like I was a horror writer sending in solicited stories for anthologies. Ever notice those things are 20 or 30 pages each? It's a thing. But that wasn't my goal.

I wrangled it back in and now I've had a handful of stories published over the past four maybe five months, so I'm glad that I didn't get permanently suspended and left with the knack for only writing novels. Also, I finished several others besides those recently published to include in an upcoming new story collection.

/

If The Old Invisible and this one, The Oubliette, were to be published, I'd be sitting on seven published novels compared to four short story collection and one collection of prose poems. I do have a fifth short story collection that will appear from Cowboy Jamboree in May called Fallujah Boy and Other Stories, which will bring the story collection total to five, so I guess I'm keeping pretty good pace in both forms.

Sounds like a lot of bragging. Maybe it is, I'm not sure when I search my heart of hearts. But I can say this: I don't talk to anyone in my everyday life about even being a novelist or short story writer or prose poet, an author. Not at all, ever. It makes this little space I've pecked around in since 2009 important to me in that way.

My readership here is small, intimate, with zero engagement, much the way it was in October 2009 when I could only offer text because I wasn't savvy enough with blogging to even know how to link text to other websites, etc. Or, for that matter, paste photographs. Being here, writing here, feels like 2009 again, when it was all new and exciting and I was far more unknown than I am now. And I'm not saying I don't want engagement, I'm only saying that sometimes it lifts some of the constant awareness a published author keeps balanced across their shoulders.

/

“We’ll never survive!”

“Nonsense. You’re only saying that because no one ever has.”

— William Goldman, The Princess Bride

The Boy, The Tree, The Sky, The Toy, The Sun, The Song

I was four when I started writing stories. Mom said I would take a piece of college ruled paper, fold it in half, turn it sideways, draw a picture on the front (usually of a boy's face), write a title beneath that (something like The Boy), and then open it to write the story on the two inner "pages" (something like The boy cried love Mom), and then present it to her as the book I'd written for her. She kept each one. I counted them a couple weeks ago. There are four dozen such books, give or take.

I was thirty-two when I first started sending my stories out to journals and magazines. Now I'm forty-nine and I've had a lot of books published - novels, story collections, poetry, memoir - but it's still the same. I'm still writing books and handed them to people hoping they'll like them.

/

Mom has my twelve published books on a shelf in her living room. But the shelf doesn't start with my first published book, the 2012 short story collection The Same Terrible Storm. No, sir. It starts with those handcrafted, often crayon-based titles from 1980. 

The Boy, The Tree, The Sky, The Toy, The Sun, The Song.

And that grounds me.

It does. It grounds me every time I see them. 

More lately than ever before, I've needed something to do that, to pull me to the side, ease me into a chair, put an arm around my shoulder, and say, "Here's why you do this. Here's why you do this thing you do by yourself in a quiet room unsure if anyone will ever read what you've written." 

I have to be told, "Don't forget how it felt when you finished The Sun or The Tree and handed it to her and how happy she was to see it, to read it, to hug you when she was done."

I need to know that the reasons I do what I do remain as pure and honest as when I first started. Because if I lose that uncontaminated clarity, the last word I'll ever write will be this one.

My short story "Flipped" appears at BULL today

My short story "Flipped" appeared today at BULL. This has been one of my very favorite journals for more than a decade. Thank you Ben Drevlow; there is no other like you.

"Flipped"

Stumbling Stones: The Story of My Friend

I went to see a play tonight, my first. 

Stumbling Stones: The John Rosenberg Story is about my good friend, and many, many peoples' good friend, John.

I can't relay to you here all that John's done in his life, but it's probably enough to say that he and his family were survivors of the Holocaust. That is, his immediate family, though he, his brother, and his parents were sent to an interment camp before finally boarding passage to New York City.

JOHN ROSENBERG

He's a champion here in Eastern Kentucky. When he got here in 1970 he started foundation for free legal representation for poor people who couldn't afford attorneys. He was also instrumental in getting rid of the broad form contract that enabled coal companies to steal land from hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands, of Appalachians. Companies in the late 1800s bought mineral rights (for the extraction of coal) from land owners here and later came to collect.

The law gave these fuckers a shield for a long time, but thanks to Rosenberg, the broad form contract is no more. 

John was also one of the civil rights lawyers who was in Mississippi during what would be called Mississippi burning (later made into a film of the same name) that began after three voting registration workers were murdered there.

I could keep going with how important John is to me and to everyone here in my hometown through his achievements as a lawyer and civil rights activist, but the main thing to know about John is that he is a good person, truly good, during a time when the very idea of a good person has been so distorted it's no longer recognizable under the same definition.

How much impact does John have on how I live my life? After the play, I went to McDonald's (only because Hardee's was closed for some reason at 9 PM on Saturday night). Just before pulling up to give them my order, I thought I should throw out my cigarette. I shouldn't smoke, but I also shouldn't throw my butts out the window. I never think about it when I do - never. I won't lie. But I did tonight: I thought about how I shouldn't litter. There is only one reason why I worried about that tonight.

John Rosenberg.

That's what John, now 94, does better than anybody I know. He makes you want to be a better person in every respect.