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For this year's Best Books of the Year list, I reject the tyranny of the decimal system. Some years it's simply more than 10. Here, then, are my top 12 books of 2014. All of the disparate books on my list contain characters, scenes or voices that linger long past the last page of their stories.

Dept. Of Speculation

by Jenny Offill

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Paperback, 179 pages, Random House Inc, $15, published October 7 2014 | purchase

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The Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill is a slim novel whose lingering emotional aftereffects belie its size. It follows a young woman as she haltingly moves through marriage and motherhood in a Brooklyn apartment raddled by the urban blight of bedbugs and the maternal torment of colic. Her husband's infidelity, however, is what slams our heroine to a full stop. Offill's departures from traditional narrative form make this age-old story feel painfully fresh again: Fragmented chapters and looping monologues accord with our heroine's shell-shocked frame of mind. For instance, a chapter titled "How Are You?" is followed by these two words hauntingly repeated by our betrayed heroine for a page and a half: "soscared soscared soscared soscared ... "

News and Reviews

In Fragments Of A Marriage, Familiar Themes Get Experimental

'Speculation' Shows Good Stories Come In Small Packages, Too

Literary Fiction

Fiction

Florence Gordon

by Brian Morton

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Hardcover, 306 pages, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $25, published September 23 2014 | purchase

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Brian Morton's superb novel Florence Gordon features a 75-year-old woman — an icon of the second wave women's movement — as its heroine. She's a self-described "difficult woman," in the intimidating Lillian Hellman, Susan Sontag, "Lioness in Winter" mode. When a glowing review of Florence's latest book appears in the Sunday New York Times, she's showered with the popular acclaim that has eluded her most of her life. Suddenly, Florence is embarking on her first-ever book tour, dealing brusquely with fawning female fans of a certain age, parrying with some patronizing younger feminists and, along the way, sensing the chill of mortality on her skin.

News and Reviews

A Feisty Writer Spars With Her Young Protege

'Florence Gordon' Isn't Friend Material, But You'll Appreciate Her

Literary Fiction

Fiction

Dear Committee Members

by Julie Schumacher

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Hardcover, 180 pages, Random House Inc, $22.95, published August 19 2014 | purchase

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One of the reasons Dear Committee Members is such a mordant minor masterpiece is that Julie Schumacher had the brainstorm to structure it as an epistolary novel. This book of letters is composed of a year's worth of recommendations that our antihero — a weary professor of creative writing and literature — is called upon to write for junior colleagues, lackluster students and even former lovers. The gem of a law school recommendation letter professor Jason Fitger writes for a cutthroat undergrad whom he's known for all of "eleven minutes" is alone worth the price of Schumacher's book.

Schumacher has a sharp ear for the self-pitying eloquence peculiar to academics like the fictional Fitger, who feel that their genius has never gotten its due. His resentment seeps out between the lines of the recommendation letters he relentlessly writes — or ineptly fills out on computerized questionnaires — urging RV parks and paintball emporiums to hire his graduating English majors for entry-level management positions. Dear Committee Members serves up the traditional satisfactions of classic academic farces like David Lodge's Small World and Kingsley Amis' immortal Lucky Jim, but it also updates the genre to include newer forms of indignity within the halls of academe.

News and Reviews

A Frustrated Professor Sounds Off To 'Committee Members'

In A Funny New Novel, A Weary Professor Writes To 'Dear Committee Members'

Literary Fiction

Fiction

10:04

by Ben Lerner

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Hardcover, 244 pages, Farrar Straus & Giroux, $25, published September 2 2014 | purchase

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Ben Lerner (Leaving the Atocha Station) is known for writing fiction that defies categories; he continues to defy — and fascinate — in this latest novel, 10:04. Bookended by two historic hurricanes that threatened New York City (Hurricane Irene and Hurricane Sandy) 10:04 projects our narrator into plotlines that feature a dire medical diagnosis as well as the joy of impending fatherhood with a woman who's a close friend. Lerner's dazzling writing connects and collapses these and other storylines into a rich and strange novel of ideas.

News and Reviews

'10:04': A Strange, Spectacular Novel Connecting Several Plotlines Sept. 3, 2014

Literary Fiction

Fiction

Let Me Be Frank With You

by Richard Ford

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Hardcover, 240 pages, HarperCollins, $27.99, published November 4 2014 | purchase

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It's been eight years since The Lay of the Land was published — the novel Richard Ford said would be the last in his Frank Bascombe trilogy. Luckily, Ford had second thoughts. Frank is now a 68-year-old retired real estate broker. The four stories herein all take place in the early winter of 2012, soon after Superstorm Sandy slammed into the Jersey Shore. The cover of Let Me Be Frank With You features a photo of the Seaside Heights roller coaster that was washed out into the Atlantic Ocean. It's the most iconic image of Sandy's wrath, and it's also an iconic image for Ford's achievement throughout his Frank Bascombe books — books that chart the whole wild roller coaster ride of life.

News and Reviews

Author Richard Ford Says 'Let Me Be Frank' About Aging And Dying

Superstorm Sandy Inspires Bleak, Poetic Landscapes In 'Let Me Be Frank'

Literary Fiction

Fiction

Something Rich And Strange

Selected Stories

by Ron Rash

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Hardcover, 434 pages, HarperCollins, $27.99, published November 4 2014 | purchase

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Ron Rash's writing is powerful, stripped down and very still: It takes you to a land apart, psychologically and geographically, since his fiction is set in Appalachia. Thirty-four of Rash's best short stories from the past 20 years have just been published in a collection called Something Rich and Strange. They are that, indeed. Some of these stories are cold to the bone; others are empathetic and even funny. A few are set during the Great Depression and the Civil War; most, though, take place in the present — an era when illegal ginseng plots and meth labs have supplanted the moonshine stills of an earlier generation, and family farms have given way to vacation home developments. Rash, however, is no nostalgic mountain minstrel bemoaning the loss of the good old days. If it's wood smoke and sylvan sentimentality you're yearning for, you'd be better off watching reruns of The Waltons. Rash's spectacular stories may originate in the peculiar soil of Appalachia, but their reach and their rewards are vast.

News and Reviews

These Tales Of Transformation Are Both 'Rich And Strange'

Set In Appalachia, This Rewarding Story Collection Is 'Rich And Strange'

Literary Fiction

Fiction

The Paying Guests

by Sarah Waters

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Hardcover, 566 pages, Penguin Group USA, $28.95, published September 16 2014 | purchase

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Sarah Waters' The Paying Guests is a knockout, which isn't a word any of her characters would use. Waters' novel opens in 1922: The Edwardian Age with its high collars and long skirts is dead; the Jazz Age is waiting to be born. At least, that's the case in the suburban backwater of London where Waters' main character, a 26-year-old spinster named Frances Wray, lives with her mother. The Wray women have decidedly come down in the world: Frances' two brothers were killed in World War I and her recently deceased papa made some bad investments. When the novel opens, the Wray women are awaiting the arrival of a necessary evil — lodgers — to help them cover the costs of keeping up their dark and drafty suburban villa. Shortly thereafter, an even more shocking intruder — sexual passion — steals into that house, and chaos erupts. The Paying Guests is one of those big novels you hate to see end — especially since you sense the end might be a very nasty one, indeed.

News and Reviews

After WWI, A Mother And Daughter Must Take In 'Paying Guests'

'Guests' Is A Story Of Mystery, Manners And Dramatic Love

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A Historic Backdrop Frames Forbidden Love In 'The Paying Guests'

Historical Fiction

Literary Fiction

Fiction

All The Light We Cannot See

by Anthony Doerr

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Hardcover, 531 pages, Simon & Schuster, $27, published May 6 2014 | purchase

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Anthony Doerr's magical adventure novel All The Light We Cannot See takes place in France and Germany in the years leading up to and during World War II. A blind French girl and her father become the hapless custodians of "The Sea of Flames," a rare (and accursed) diamond that Hitler desires for his personal treasure-trove. Meanwhile, a German orphan boy proves himself to be so ingenious at mastering higher-level mechanics that he is selected for an elite Nazi training program. Toward the end of the war, these two tempest-tossed adolescents are thrown together in a climactic twist of fate that no reader could possibly anticipate. Doerr refers to the work of Jules Verne and Alexandre Dumas, and his own sweeping plot and sumptuous language place Doerr in the same category as those master storytellers.

News and Reviews

World War II In A New 'Light': Empathy Found In Surprising Places

A Fractured Tale Of Time, War And A Really Big Diamond

Historical Fiction

Literary Fiction

Fiction

The Secret Place: A Novel

by Tana French

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Hardcover, 452 pages, Penguin Group USA, $27.95, published September 2 2014 | purchase

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The Secret Place, Tana French's fifth Dublin Murder Squad novel, pries open the world of teenagers at a girls' prep school, and the homicidal stew of hormones that lurks within could chill the toughest detective's blood. Detective Stephen Moran turns up at St. Kilda's School outside Dublin in search of answers to a cold case. One of the students has contacted Moran with teasing information about the death of Chris Harper, a Casanova from a nearby boys' school whose corpse was discovered on the grounds of St. Kilda's the previous year. French is sensitive to the look and manner of mean girls and the subtle tortures they so deftly inflict on their victims.

Mysteries, Thrillers & Crime

Fiction

Deep Down Dark

The Untold Stories of 33 Men Buried in a Chilean Mine, and the Miracle That Set Them Free

by Hector Tobar

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Hardcover, 309 pages, Farrar Straus & Giroux, $26, published October 7 2014 | purchase

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It was a miracle watched around the world on live TV. On Oct. 13, 2010, 33 Chilean miners trapped for 69 days inside the San Jose mine were raised to the surface of the earth — resurrected — through a freshly drilled escape tunnel into which a capsule was lowered and raised by a giant crane. Before they escaped, all 33 men agreed to share the proceeds of any book or movie made about them. The movie is in the works. The book, written by Hctor Tobar and which came out in October, is called Deep Down Dark. As extreme adventure tales go, this one is a doozy — the equal, if the geographical inverse, of Into Thin Air, Jon Krakauer's 1997 blockbuster about the Mount Everest climbing disaster.

News and Reviews

The Incredible Story Of Chilean Miners Rescued From The 'Deep Down Dark'

Nonfiction

History & Society

Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant?

A Memoir

by Roz Chast

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Hardcover, 228 pages, St Martins Pr, $28, published May 6 2014 | purchase

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Who would have expected that the most profound meditation yet written on the trials of caring for aging parents would arrive in the form of a graphic book? Chast's memoir is a masterpiece, describing the exhaustion and absurdity, the anger and heartbreak of this cosmic Life Switcheroo that so many of us boomer-generation readers are experiencing. From the sad looniness of having to clean out her failing parents' Brooklyn apartment (whose closets are stuffed with toasters — still in their boxes! — and old bank books) to the desperate anxieties over the astronomical costs of end-of-life care, Chast captures the totality of the "adult child of elderly parents" experience. Brava!

News and Reviews

Why Bring Up Death When We Could Talk About 'Something More Pleasant'?

A Cartoonist's Funny, Heartbreaking Take On Caring For Aging Parents

Nonfiction

Biography & Memoir

The Empire Of Necessity

Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World

by Greg Grandin

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Hardcover, 360 pages, Henry Holt & Co, $30, published January 14 2014 | purchase

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In Fordlandia, historian Greg Grandin chronicled Henry Ford's attempt to establish a utopian version of small-town America in the middle of the Brazilian rain forest. In The Empire of Necessity, Grandin shows readers the hell of the slave trade. His touchstone is the true-life slave revolt in 1805 on a ship called the Tryal. (Herman Melville drew almost exclusively upon the story of the Tryal to write his own floating Gothic masterpiece of a short novel, Benito Cereno, in 1855.) Grandin tells the harrowing story of the 72 desperate slaves aboard the Tryal to fan out and explore the explosion of the slave trade in the Americas in the early 19th century. The Empire of Necessity is a wonder of power, precision and sheer reading pleasure about human horror and degradation.

News and Reviews

On This Spanish Slave Ship, Nothing Was As It Seemed

Nonfiction

History & Society

Maureen Corrigan's Favorite Books From Years Past

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Denmark, together with Greenland, today will claim around 350,000 square miles of the continental shelf in the Arctic Ocean, in an area around the North Pole that is slightly more than the size of Texas and Oklahoma combined.

"The submission of our claim to the continental shelf north of Greenland is a historic and important milestone for the Kingdom of Denmark," Foreign Minister Martin Lidegaard said in a statement. "The objective of this huge project is to define the outer limits of our continental shelf and thereby — ultimately — of the Kingdom of Denmark." (Here is the statement in Danish.)

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A map of the area Denmark is claiming. Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Denmark hide caption

itoggle caption Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Denmark

A map of the area Denmark is claiming.

Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Denmark

Denmark contends that its data show Greenland's continental shelf is connected to the Lomonosov ridge, a ridge beneath the Arctic Ocean, The Associated Press reports. A Danish geophysicist quoted by the AP called the North Pole "a tiny, tiny abstract spot" that lies in the area.

Denmark said it would file paperwork with the U.N. to support its claim.

Under the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea, nations are entitled to a continental shelf extending to a distance of 200 nautical miles from their coast. Claims beyond that distance must be supported by scientific and technical data.

The current claim, in an area north of Greenland, is Denmark's fifth: A partial submission — north of the Faroe Islands — was presented in April 2009; another, in the area south of the Faroe Islands, was submitted in December 2010. A third partial submission was made in June 2012 for an area south of Greenland, and one in November 2013 was made for an area northeast of Greenland.

Deutsche Welle provides the background:

"Between 2007 and 2012, Danish scientists, with colleagues from Canada, Sweden and Russia, surveyed a 2,000 kilometer long (1,240 miles) underwater mountain range that runs north of Siberia. They concluded that the ridge is geologically attached to Greenland, a huge, sparsely populated island that is a semi-autonomous Danish territory."

"Submissions by many states already await consideration by CLCS, and it is therefore difficult to predict when the consideration of this Danish/Greenland submission will be initiated," the Danish statement said, referring to the U.N.'s Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf, the panel that considers such claims.

The Arctic is heavily contested. Russia and Canada have previously claimed the resource-rich region that is estimated to hold 30 percent of the world's untapped natural gas and 15 percent of its oil.

The Danish statement noted that today's claim overlaps with Norway's continental shelf beyond 200 nautical miles. It added that there is potential overlap in its claims with Canada, Russia and the U.S.

Arctic

Denmark

Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder said today that Detroit's bankruptcy, the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history, will end at 12:01 a.m. ET on Thursday.

"The financial emergency in the city of Detroit will be defined as wrapping up today," Snyder said at a news conference in Detroit.

He said paperwork to officially end the bankruptcy would be approved later today. The move comes a month after a federal judge approved a strategy for the city to exit bankruptcy.

Kevyn Orr, the city's emergency manager, said he would step down following today's announcement. Snyder tapped Orr for the job in March 2013 soon after the governor said Detroit was in a financial emergency.

"We look forward, truly, to a better time for the city going forward," Orr said at the news conference. "More importantly it's time for me now to step back and return the city to its regular order."

The city filed for bankruptcy on July 18, 2013, making it the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history.

As NPR's Scott Neuman reported, the plan put forward by Orr in November "calls for shedding $7 billion in debt, investing more than $1 billion in city services and borrowing hundreds of millions of dollars to implement the overall plan." The city had already reached deals with nearly all its creditors that at first were against the plan.

Once the city exits bankruptcy, Mayor Mike Duggan, to whom Orr handed back in September many of his extraordinary powers over the government, and the Detroit City Council will be able to regain control of governance.

Detroit bankruptcy

Kevyn Orr

Rick Snyder

Detroit

The government opens this week after a dramatic weekend. The Senate approved a $1.1 trillion spending bill despite protests from the left and the right. The bill had already passed the House.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts fought against changes to banking regulations — she's among this moment's most prominent Democrats.

Before becoming senator, she was a watchdog overseeing the bailout of the financial industry. More recently Warren has hammered both parties and the White House for being too close to Wall Street.

So people noticed when she fired up many Democrats against one provision in this giant bill.

"Republicans slipped in a provision at the last minute that would let derivatives traders on Wall Street gamble with taxpayer money and then get bailed out by the government when their risky bets threaten to blow up our financial system," she told NPR's Steve Inskeep.

The measure involves complex financial trades called derivatives which can be hugely profitable but also hugely risky.

A provision of the Dodd-Frank law entitled, "Prohibition against Federal Government Bailouts of Swap Entities," required banks to create subsidiary companies to do their trading — with their own money. The idea was to create a firewall between the banks' trading and customers' deposits, which are federally insured.

The spending bill passed over the weekend eliminates the new rules, and keeps financial trading within the banks.

STEVE INSKEEP: You said they slipped it in, which is true, it did get tacked on to this much larger legislation about something else. But isn't this a provision that did go through the regular legislative process in the House of Representatives? There were committee hearings. There were Democrats as well as Republicans who voted for it.

SENATOR ELIZABETH WARREN (D-MA): You know, it was literally never introduced in the Senate. It had no hearings. There was no discussion about this. And let's keep in mind about this provision, this is a provision that Citigroup lobbyists literally wrote. And then, just to make sure that everybody got the point, Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan, personally made phone calls to House members to push for this change. I think that tells you what was really going on here. They want to be able to juice their profits. A half dozen of the largest financial institutions in this country want to be able to take riskier bets, and hey, if it doesn't work out, they want the U.S. taxpayer to bail 'em out. I think that's a bad idea.

You mentioned that current bank executives wanted this change. But they were able to point out that over the years — there have been years of debates about this very rule — over the years that people who have thought this change would be OK have included Paul Volcker, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, who's widely respected. He is on record as long ago as 2010 saying that other parts of banking regulation take care of this issue and this seems to be needlessly complicating things.

I think that it's fair to say that this is a very complicated provision and that it was a compromise when it was put in. My view on it, however, is that we should have something stronger here, not that we should just knock it down and get rid of a provision that's designed to prevent government bailouts.

Isn't it true that whether the government directly insures the transaction or not, the government sort of is? Because these are institutions regarded as too big to fail. We're going to bail them out if they fail anyway.

Well you know, that is the risk we run right now, is that we have a handful of giant banks in this country that were too big to fail in 2008, got bailed out by the taxpayer and are now bigger than they were then, and are again loading up on risks. But you know, whichever way you think is the right answer here, I know for sure that this shouldn't be slipped into an omnibus spending bill — a bill that must pass in order to keep the government open. And what it means, if this works, is they can just kinda keep slipping grenades and attach them to, you know, must-pass spending bills and pretty soon we have no financial regulations at all.

Senator Warren, some people will know that you challenged your party's leadership on this shortly after your party added you to the Democratic Senate leadership. How did it work in this very early case in which you disagreed with the leadership?

Look, these are issues I've worked on for most of my career. I am glad to be in leadership, I am grateful to have a, a place at the table, but my priorities haven't changed. I'm gonna stand up and fight for what I believe in.

Well, what does it say about your party that the party leadership in the Senate and apparently elsewhere, including the White House, was not with you on this?

You know, actually, I want to say that differently. You know, the President said he was very much opposed to this provision. There were a lot of Democrats who were opposed to this provision. You know, once the House passed an omnibus bill with this in it and threw it over to the Senate — and then the House left town — at that point, there was very little choice but either to pass the omnibus, even with this thing in it, or shut down the government. And we didn't want to shut down the government.

Senator Warren, as you must know, that even as you were fighting over this in the Senate, there was a group called Ready for Warren that wants you to run for president, that released a letter signed by more than 300 people who describe themselves as former Obama campaign workers and staffers and aides. They want you to run. What do you say to them?

I'm, I'm not running for president. That's not what we're doing. We had a really important fight in the United States Congress just this past week. And I'm putting all my energy into that fight and to what happens after this.

Would you tell these independent groups, "Give it up!" You're just never going to run.

I told them, "I'm not running for president."

You're putting that in the present tense, though. Are you never going to run?

I am not running for president.

You're not putting a "never" on that.

I am not running for president. You want me to put an exclamation point at the end?

(laughs) OK, that's fine. Can you tell me, Senator, how you see your role over the next couple of years presuming that you don't run? You've raised your profile in a way that few Democrats have been able to do recently.

You know, I'm just here to stand up for hardworking families who just want a fighting chance. That's what I'm in this fight for and I'm in this fight all the way.

Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, thanks very much for the time.

Thank you.