My favorite book of the year will need to be a tie between Derek McCormack’s architectural astonishment of a novel Castle Faggot (Semiotext[e]), set in a horror-house-cum-brothel-cum-boutique in a scarified Montmartre amid a fever-dreamed-up Paris, and Harrow (Knopf), the first novel in more than twenty years by probably my favorite American writer, Joy Williams, which is a disorientingly constructed avalanche of genius sentences, fucked-up sentiment, and scrambled great ideas radiating outward at readers from a ragged set of environmental activists meticulously losing their shit at the end of the world.
Dennis Cooper is a contributing editor of Artforum.