The best (and worst) of 2007

THE WORST…

…return of a once-beloved book festival: New York Is Book Country. After a three-year hiatus, organizers have scheduled the 2008 event—on September 14, the same day as the Brooklyn Book Festival, one of the most vibrant literary happenings in the city. If NYIBC’s directors actually cared about books, they would keep the literary-festival calendar robust, and give New Yorkers the opportunity to attend both events. In other words, they’d choose another date.

Report card: Even in a mediocre year, the publishing machine will crank out plenty of books to get excited about. In 2007, there were worthy debuts, such as Joshua Ferris’s office satire Then We Came to the End; good poetry collections by Matthea Harvey, Alice Notley and Christian Hawkey; and a few novels that managed to entertain and push boundaries at the same time, like Wayne Koestenbaum’s two-column Hotel Theory. Still, publishers are playing it safe, putting energy into sure-shot scribes and ignoring truly challenging books. Here’s hoping that book companies take more chances in 2008. Early signs of promise: Rudolph Wurlitzer’s The Drop Edge of Yonder (Two Dollar Radio) and Fiona Maazel’s Last Last Chance (FSG). Watch for them.

FINAL GRADE: B