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Publishers Weekly today released its list of the 100 Best Books of 2014, for the first time including three translations among its top 10 books, which were written by Hassam Blasim, Elena Ferrante, Marlon James, Lorrie Moore, Joseph O’Neill, Héctor Tobar, Eula Biss, Leslie Jamison, Lawrence Wright, and Emmanuel Carrère.

The three translations include two works of fiction: The Corpse Exhibition by Hassan Blasim, translated from the Arabic by Jonathan Wright (Penguin), and Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay by Elena Ferrante, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein (Europa). Limonov: The Outrageous Adventures of the Radical Soviet Poet Who Became a Bum in New York, a Sensation in France, and a Political Antihero in Russia by Emmanuel Carrère, is nonfiction translated from the French by John Lambert (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).

“Every year when we put together our best books list, we understand why we’re in this business,” Publishers Weekly review editor Louisa Ermelino said. “It’s not just about the best books, but the fact that there are so many good books being published that we have to struggle to choose. We consider the game-changers, the brilliantly written pure entertainment, the clever, the well researched.”

Publishers Weekly’s selects for the best Young Adults books include: Meg Wolitzer’s Belzhar, We Were Liars by E. Lockhart, Beyond Magenta by Susan Kuklin, and Half Bad by Sally Green, among other titles.

Plenty More by Yotam Ottolenghi and Redefining Girly by Melissa Atkins Wardy are two of its best Lifestyle books of 2014.

Marlon James, featured on PW’s cover, is author of A Brief History of Seven Killings (Riverhead), a sweeping saga with the attempted assassination of Bob Marley at its center.

Descriptions of Publishers Weekly’s “100 Best Books of 2014” are available here.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Authors and musicians are coming together for a benefit that will raise money to rebuild Red Hook, a water-front community in Brooklyn that was badly damaged by Hurricane Sandy.

Novelist/journalist Kurt Andersen will host the event, which is called “Defiance: A Literary Benefit to Rebuild Red Hook,” and will take place on November 14th at Littlefield at 7pm. Musicians Steve Earle and Stew will perform and novelists Joseph O’Neill, Sam Lipsyte, and Rivka Galchen will do readings, as will non-fiction writers Phillip Lopate, Chuck Klosterman, Philip Gourevitch, Meghan O’Rourke, Deborah Baker, and Robert Sullivan will also participate.

Tickets for the event cost $50, and can be purchased at this link. All proceeds from the event will be split between two charities who are helping to rebuild Red Hook post-Sandy — Red Hook Initiative and Restore Red Hook.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

A client canceled a late afternoon phone call, and I might have been distressed (deadlines, I should have thought, promises), but the fact is that I was already comfortable in my overstuffed chair and Joseph O'Neill's Netherland was balanced enticingly within reaching distance. I didn't even have to stand up. I turned. Stretched. Fit the book in my hands. Found page 177. Plunged back into the story where I'd left it, a few days before. Utterly irresponsible, but there it is. I sat here and read a book of my own choosing. I dove beneath the radar.

I like this book. I am, in fact, amazed by long stretches of it—by how O'Neill, in this novel about displacement (I'll call it that; others have called it elsewise) slides all around the map of time, defusing the Big Questions early on so that readers never wonder what has happened; they only wonder why. The book is pure erudition. It's New York City post 9/11. It's cricket. It's The Chelsea Hotel. It's phantasmagoria and a marriage on the rocks. It's deep dives into stuff I knew not a single thing about. It's not easy, but neither are we human beings easy. We want to hold to the illusion that every life suggests a story, when in fact life is a jumble that works quite like the tumble and tangle of Netherland.

By the time I put the book down, there were three inches at least of new snow on the ground, and it was dark. I had dinner to cook, in other words, but I wanted to stay with Netherland a bit longer, and so I ambled over to Amazon to see what other readers had to say. My thinking being: I'll hang out in this little club of Netherlanders for a while before returning to real life. Some 76 reviewers had weighed in, and the book had four stars, and that was fine, it didn't much matter.

What impressed me, though, was the utter self-confidence of the naysayers. The certainty they shared that this book—acclaimed by so many, likened to The Great Gatsby by more than one—was, in a word, "bad." Bad. Boring and bad. Or pretentious and bad. Interesting combinations of bad. And I thought of how almost impossible it is to write well and how ready one must always be for those who will inevitably dismiss you.