The above is a photo of our desk at the office: perpetually covered in stacks of tottering books. Flat surfaces in our apartments don't look much neater. We're up to our ears in books, day in, day out, which is why we feel confident in telling you which ones this year were the best, including graphic novels, poetry, journalism, short stories and novels.

For our readers who may not be familiar with your work, what’s the most accurate thing someone else has said about it?
Matthew Savoca once said this: "Everything is Quiet is a woman sitting calmly near a glass window, hungover and smoking a cigarette in the aftermath of dealing with strange lovers who shush her, smack her, ask her to be more vocal, and for some reason, really enjoy dirty period sex. Everything is Quiet is a person riding a train alone in a big world with an open sky, trying to remember what happened last night, but not really caring." I liked it so much that now he lives with me.

"The reason we decided to do handmade books, sewing them instead of having them stapled, is because we wanted to make durable books that would be precious. When you get a Crumpled Press book, you can feel that it was handmade by somebody, you can feel slight irregularities in it. It’s a precious object that you’re not going to throw away. So if I make 250 or 1,000 copies, those books are going to carry on.

For our readers who may not be familiar with your work, what’s the most accurate thing someone else has said about it?
People have said that it’s uncompromising and honest. Or, they say the author doesn’t compromise and has integrity. I’d say I have less integrity than my writing.

For our readers who may not be familiar with your work, what’s the most accurate thing someone else has said about it?
Trying to judge the most accurate comment about my work would make me dizzy. But I can think of a really early comment that still pops up in articles a dozen years later, and it was someone comparing my style to “Isaac Bashevis Singer on crack.”

• Franklin Park Reading Series curator Penina Roth

Last night, a few days past the exact anniversary, McClanahan returned to the Franklin Park Reading Series. I brought friends this time. I had told one all about his past performance, talking it up so much I worried I had maybe oversold it. And then last night....

And so it was foretold.

For our readers who may not be familiar with your work, what’s the most accurate thing someone else has said about it?
That I’m a son of a bitch. At least that’s what my wife says. Hopefully our children think otherwise. There’s nothing different between work and life.

• photo by Julian Andrews

Chris Ware was already thought of as comics' most meticulously detailed and formally inventive artist. His ability to arrange text and images on a page goes so far beyond your standard news rack comic book, that readers are often left wondering if he's even working in the same medium. But his latest graphic novel, Building Stories, barely resembles anything we've seen from comics before. Partially inspired by Marcel DuChamp's Museum in a Box, it's a dizzying assortment of 14 separate booklets differing in size and format. The segments range from small, handheld vertical strips, to oversized table-top newspaper pages; from faux LIttle Golden Books digests, to gatefold board game cardboard. The story, which has previously run in snippets as New York Times strips, New Yorker cover fold-outs, and McSweeney's Quarterly features, took a decade to complete. Its story follows the life of one unnamed woman in glimpses of her melancholy youth and later married life. Some of its separate volumes detour to focus on the people living around her in the old apartment building of her single life (including the thoughts and feelings of the apartment building itself), and the petty agonies of a nebbish bee who gets briefly stuck inside her window.

Like all of Ware's work, it walks a thin line between laugh-out loud-but pitch-black humor and gut-punching existential dread. But unlike his previous books, which zoomed backwards and forwards through the mundane lives of their protagonists in an author-guided tour, Building Stories can be assembled and read in any number of ways. Its title doubles as a gentle pun on how the reader takes responsibility for consuming it. In both an intellectual and a physical way, it's interactive to a degree that makes clicking links on a tablet seem small and crummy.

At 7 PM this evening, Ware joins Charles Burns (author of the modern classic forest mutant/teen-sex parable comic Black Hole) at The Strand book store in Manhattan, to talk about their new work, and the current state of the graphic novel. Ahead of time, we sent him a few questions about his magic box.

No, not a great day at all.

First, the Observer brought us news of a strapped-for-cash Tao Lin selling off personal belongings (including a $99 juicer) to drum up extra funds, a tactic he's actually resorted to in the past.

• The author as a young(er) man

lmag: Though you live on the West Coast, Brooklyn and New York City are still your settings of choice. How does your hometown inspire your writing process?

nedvizzini: I think you have to live in a city for more than two and a half years to set a story there. I also haven’t experienced growing up in Los Angeles—a particular experience that involves car accidents.
One thing that I loved about growing up in Brooklyn was that once I could ride the subway, it was a world of strange possibilities. I could see people vomiting or making out at any time. That atmosphere of being amid the unexpected is good for a book.

For our readers who may not be familiar with your work, what’s the most accurate thing someone else has said about it?
A friend of mine said that it felt like a string of bells ringing separately till they were all sounding off together, something like that, and that pleased me deeply.

You live in Brooklyn, right?
I live in Crown Heights, moved to Brooklyn three years ago after grad school, started working at the Academy of American Poets when I got here, launched a small Brooklyn press focused on radical translation called Telephone Books. And I like it here.