Each year the editors of the Believer generate a short list of the novels they thought were the strongest and, in their opinion, the most undervalued of the year. The 2007 list appears below, along with several writers’ citations. In the last issue, we asked our readers to send in their nominations for the best work of fiction from 2007; their answers, along with the winner from the following short list, will appear in the June issue.

The Short list

• Samedi the Deafness, Jesse Ball (Vintage)
• Sunless, Gerard Donovan (Overlook)
• Zeroville, Steve Erickson (Europa Editions)
• Generation Loss, Elizabeth Hand (Small Beer)
• African Psycho, Alain Mabancko (Soft Skull)
• Remainder, Tom McCarthy (Vintage)
• The Revisionist, Miranda Mellis (Calamari)
• The Power of Flies, Lydie Salvayre (Dalkey Archive)
• The Meat and Spirit Plan, Selah Saterstrom (Coffee House Press)
• An Ordinary Spy, Joseph Weisberg (Bloomsbury)

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Rivka Galchen
Maybe by seducing me into giddy bitter commiseration and then swiftly making those feelings seem deeply misguided, or maybe by repeatedly startling me with unsought (even deeply resisted) compassion and grace—somehow or other the stories in Rebecca Curtis’s collection Twenty Grand keep haunting me. I didn’t want to love a fat “ex-psychiatrist,” or a repellently depressed law student, or a whiny teen. Curtis’s prose left me no choice, though, and I even felt myself welcoming fiction’s old nineteenth-century aspiration to make us better people. I seriously doubt moral improvement was Curtis’s intention, but there you go. Her work reminded me that the seemingly ordinary house of the short story is still capacious enough to hold, well, yes, a cathedral. And Lydia Davis’s gorgeously uncomfortable story collection published this year, Varieties of Disturbance, reminded me that apparently this cathedral can even be contained in a closet. Also: even though they aren’t really 2007 books, they did come to us in English in 2007, and modern literature now feels immeasurably smarter, funnier, and tastier to me for the presence of Roberto Bolaño’s Savage Detectives and (finally) the collected translated poems of Zbigniew Herbert.

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Dean Young
It’s hard to come down to one book so I’m cheating and proposing two. Robert Hass’s Time and Materials, an extraordinarily various book, deep and inquiring of the world and poetry. Ron Padgett’s How to Be Perfect, marvelously daffy while being somehow wise.

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Amanda Eyre Ward
“Mall traffic on a gray winter’s day, stalled.” So begins the most beautiful book I read this year, Last Night at the Lobster by Stewart O’Nan....