Random Book News

[Fievel]

Elmore Leonard has a sequel to Out Of Sight coming out!!

From his website (March 18, 2008).

[quote]
ROAD DOGS

The New Elmore Leonard Novel

Cundo Rey says Jack Foley is the only white guy in prison he can talk to, Foley a celebrity, the most famous low-key bank robber in America. Cundo even pays a hot young female lawyer 30 grand to get Foley’s sentence down from 30 years to 30 months, and Foley is released two weeks ahead of Cundo.

On the scene is FBI special agent Lou Adams, who takes time off to watch Foley, convinced he won’t be able to resist robbing another bank.

Waiting for Cundo Rey in Venice, California is Dawn Navarro, a professional psychic who can actually read minds, though Dawn has her own aspirations: can’t wait for Cundo’s release so she can get at his wealth.

While he’s in stir Cundo has his money-man Little Jimmy watching over Dawn. Little Jimmy’s Dumbledore, so Cundo trusts him.

But when Foley is released from the Florida prison two weeks ahead of Cundo, why does Cundo pay Foley’s way to Venice, Dawn’s home, where she’s waiting seven years for Cundo’s release? Why give Foley this chance to betray him when he’s positive Dawn is fooling around? “Not being his little saint.â€

[WinslowLeach]

A new book all about Ralph Bakshi's art. I gotta get this one!

http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2008/01/ ... -pt-1.html

[The Todd]

LISTS-FIVE!!!!!

From the New York Times:
The 10 Best Books of 2008
&
100 Notable Books of 2008

From Slate
The Best Books of 2008

[TheButcher]

From MTV: Guillermo Del Toro Unveils Plots For His ‘Epic’ Vampire Novels

When news was came recently that director Guillermo del Toro was writing a series of vampire novels with author Chuck Hogan, headlines and columns across the internet rang out in chorus: committed for the next four years to “The Hobbit” and some half dozen projects after that, del Toro was already straining, spreading himself too thin. He would never — how could he ever — possibly find the time?

Problem is, the story isn’t true, del Toro told MTV News. He’s not writing a series of vampire books with Chuck Hogan – he wrote them.

“It looks incredibly busy and baroque, but everything has its own place. These things seem to happen simultaneously, but the reality is they are announced simultaneously,” the affable and visionary director said. “The novels – it’s been written already. Chuck Hogan and I have been collaborating for over a year. I wrote the outline for that novel almost two years ago.”

It’s a good thing too, given the “epic” scope del Toro envisions for the project, which traces the lore of vampires all the way from antiquity to the modern age – the type of vampire story that isn’t really told anymore, the type that owes as much to Mesopotamian myths as it does to Bram Stoker.

Indeed, even just a cursory search of vampires on Wikipedia reveals legends and tales of the undead from nearly every culture in history – stories of deceased Eastern Europeans rising from their graves or Old Testament bloodsuckers hungry for a next meal.

And if those ancient stories aren’t really told anymore, well, that’s exactly what attracts them to del Toro, the director said, adding that the release of the trilogy will culminate a lifetime’s worth of fascination with and love for those myths, ideas he’s been “keeping in [his] notebooks ever since the mid-90s.”

“I wanted to find a place to create a vampiric epic that takes you all the way to the modern day, to find out when the vampires started - going beyond Mesopotamian myth, going beyond all of that,” del Toro grinned. “Not the attractive, Brad Pitt-esque, decadent lovers that have sex. I wanted to make them like an alternate species and an alternate spiritual creature to man, and the idea is that the series will flesh out that re-invented vampiric myth - respectful of the lore, but taking you through the ages.”

But while the story will go through history, it’ll start in modern times, del Toro said, revealing details about the first novel’s plot for the first time.

“The first novel is sort of a procedural horror novel, which starts at an investigation of a plane that is essentially like the ship in [Stoker’s] ‘Dracula’ - it just stopped and everybody on board was dead,” del Toro teased, referencing “The Dementer,” a ship Dracula boards to London which arrives with just the Captain alive – the rest of the crew victim to the winged one’s thirst for blood. “And an investigation ensues.

“And what happens is an epidemic,” he continued, connecting disease to the first novel’s title, “The Strain.” “But it’s an epidemic unlike I believe the stuff that is [big] in vampiric fiction.”

“The Strain” will get released sometime next summer.

[darkjedijaina]

Wasn't sure where to put this, but wanted to know if anyone has read/heard of Night Talk, by Elizabeth Cox?

Apparently, a mother in a local school district wants the book banned.

The book, "Night Talk" by Elizabeth Cox, is about a friendship between a black and a white girl during the civil rights movement. But parent Laura Booth says the book contains graphic sex scenes and "reads like pornography."

A committee at South Gwinnett High School denied Booth's request in November, saying the book's instructional value outweighs her concerns. The Snellville mother is scheduled to make her case before a districtwide committee in February.

[The Todd]

the book contains graphic sex scenes and "reads like pornography."

Now that sounds like The Todd's kind of book! Pornography-FIVE!!!!!

[darkjedijaina]

book of the month for february?

[The Todd]

EDIT - SPOILERS-FIVE!!!!!

The Twilight series, as broken down by someone with more than a passing knowledge of Mormonism:

Twilight
New Moon
Eclipse
Breaking Dawn

[Maui]

HATER-FIVE!!!

[havocSchultz]

EDIT - SPOILERS-FIVE!!!!!

The Twilight series, as broken down by someone with more than a passing knowledge of Mormonism:

Twilight
New Moon
Eclipse
Breaking Dawn

Those were actually quite hilarious to read...
And now I don't need to read the books...

Which is happiness in itself...

[The Todd]

2 Posthumous Michael Crichton Novels on the Way

[Fievel]

2 Posthumous Michael Crichton Novels on the Way

The pirate novel sounds interesting!
But I'd hate to be the poor sap that gets to finish the second book. If it's even mediocre, the co-writer will get pummeled for it.
And who wants to live up to Michael Crichton's legacy like that?

[Fievel]

Road Dogs by Elmore Leonard set to release on May 12!

Amazon link

Jack Foley, the charming bank robber from Out of Sight, is serving a thirty-year sentence in a Miami penitentiary, but he's made an unlikely friend on the inside who just might be able to do something about that. Fellow inmate Cundo Rey, an extremely wealthy Cuban criminal, arranges for Foley's sentence to be reduced from thirty years to three months, and when Jack is released just two weeks ahead of Cundo, he agrees to wait for him in Venice Beach, California.

Also waiting for Cundo is his common-law wife, Dawn Navarro, a professional psychic with a slightly ulterior motive for staying with Cundo: namely, she wants his money. And with the arrival of Jack, she sees the perfect partner in a plan to relieve Cundo of his fortune. Cundo may be Jack's friend, but does that mean he can trust him? And can either of them trust Dawn?

Road Dogs is Elmore Leonard at his best—with his trademark tight plotting and pitch-perfect dialogue—and readers will love seeing Cundo, Jack, and Dawn back in action and working together . . . or are they?

[The Todd]

Scott Turow Switches Publishers for Sequel to Presumed Innocent

Two decades after Scott Turow wrote the blockbuster courtroom thriller “Presumed Innocent” he is writing a sequel and switching hardcover publishers for the new book.

In May 2010 Grand Central Publishing, which has released seven of Mr. Turow’s novels in paperback, will publish the hardcover edition of the sequel to “Presumed Innocent,” originally published in hardcover by Farrar Straus & Giroux in 1987.

The new book opens with a prologue in which Rusty Sabich, the protagonist of “Presumed Innocent” and now the chief judge of an appellate court, sits on a bed where his dead wife, Barbara, lies. She has died under suspicious circumstances, which triggers a plot that again pits Rusty, now 60, against Tommy Molto, the district attorney who tried to prosecute him for the murder of his lover in the first novel.

Mr. Turow said in an interview that it no longer made sense to have one house publishing his books in hardcover and another releasing them in paperback. Such arrangements were common when he first sold the rights to “Presumed Innocent” in 1986 but are much rarer now, especially for a bestselling author. Terms of the new deal were not disclosed.

Mr. Turow said he was in no way disappointed with his relationships at Farrar, Straus or with his longtime editor, Jonathan Galassi. Mr. Galassi said there were no hard feelings over the departure. “He’s had to make another arrangement,” Mr. Galassi said. “I’m very sorry to lose him.”

Gail Hochman, Mr. Turow’s agent, said splitting editions between two houses made it more difficult for an author to achieve the best possible financial arrangement. “We’re not unhappy with anything we’ve gotten, but it stretches the boundaries of the business,” she said. “Any publisher will acknowledge that if they are going to pay a significant advance for a significant author, they can make their money back and work harder on the book if they have two editions.”

“Presumed Innocent” has been Mr. Turow’s most successful novel by far, selling close to four million copies in hardcover and paperback in the United States alone. It was adapted into a movie starring Harrison Ford. Mr. Turow has consistently hit the best-seller lists with titles like “Reversible Errors” and “Ordinary Heroes,” though they have not sold anywhere close to the numbers of “Presumed Innocent.”

The seed of the sequel had been sitting on Mr. Turow’s desk for months, in the form of a Post-it note on which he had written: “A man is sitting on a bed in which the dead body of a woman lies.” Eventually the image that appeared to him was of Rusty sitting on the bed with Barbara.

Mr. Turow said he had long insisted that he would never write a sequel to “Presumed Innocent,” although Rusty has appeared tangentially in other novels. But, he said, “once your own story seems to beckon to you, then whatever stop signs you hold up for yourself, you tend to blow through them.”

Writing the sequel — for which he has a working title of “Innocent” — “seems to dare the Olympian gods to go back there,” Mr. Turow said. “But I found myself really interested in the fate of this man who is a year or two older than I am.” Mr. Turow turns 60 on Sunday.

Deb Futter, editor in chief for hardcovers at Grand Central, said the company would most likely issue new editions of Mr. Turow’s other novels. She said the publisher also hoped to release a special edition of “Presumed Innocent” to capitalize on the sequel. “ ‘Presumed Innocent’ was the big kahuna,” she said, “which is why the sequel is so exciting.”

[psychedelic]

Sorry to say, but J.G. Ballard has died. I've only read Crash. I think it's a fine excellent book and highly recommend it. Cronenberg's adaptation is one case where the movie is as good as the book. Read and compare. At some point I definitely want to read his early and/or prime science fiction novels. The below was posted on IMDb.
----------------------------------------------
Empire Of The Sun Author Dies
20 April 2009 12:15 AM, PDT


Cult author J.G. Ballard has died following a longrunning battle with ill health. He was 78.

The novelist, most famous for writing Crash and Empire of the Sun, on which the 1987 Steven Spielberg movie was based, passed away on Sunday.

His agent, Margaret Hanbury, confirmed his death, stating Ballard had been ill "for several years".

Empire of the Sun was his most revered work, based on his childhood in a Japanese prison camp in China, and was transformed into a big screen film starring Christian Bale and John Malkovich.

He penned 15 novels and a selection of short stories throughout his career, which started when he moved to Britain from Shanghai, China in the 1960s.

[Tyrone_Shoelaces]

New Dan Brown novel coming in September
By HILLEL ITALIE, AP National Writer

NEW YORK – The book world has a stimulus plan: a new Dan Brown novel.

Six years after the release of his mega-selling "The Da Vinci Code," the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group announced that Brown's "The Lost Symbol," a thriller set during a 12-hour period and featuring "Da Vinci Code" symbolist Robert Langdon, will come out in September.

"This novel has been a strange and wonderful journey," Brown said in a statement issued Monday by his publisher. "Weaving five years of research into the story's twelve-hour time frame was an exhilarating challenge. Robert Langdon's life clearly moves a lot faster than mine."

The first printing will be 5 million copies, Knopf Doubleday said, the highest in the publisher's history but well below the opening 10 million-plus print run for the final "Harry Potter" book. "The Da Vinci Code" has sold more than 80 million worldwide and inspired a spin-off community of travel books, diet books, conspiracy books, parodies and religious works.

A film version, starring Tom Hanks, came out in 2006 and made more than $700 million at the box office. Hanks will again be seen as Langdon when the adaptation of Brown's "Angels & Demons" debuts in May.

By Monday night, "The Lost Symbol" was No. 1 on Barnes & Noble.com and approaching the top 100 on Amazon.com. In a sign of likely price wars to come, both sites were offering discounts of 40 percent and higher for the $28.95 novel.

Brown, 44, had kept his readers and the struggling book industry in suspense as year after year passed without a new novel. As far back as 2004, Doubleday had hinted that a follow up was coming, tentatively titled "The Solomon Key" and widely believed to be about Freemasons in Washington, D.C. (Brown has been spotted over the years in Washington, researching Masonic temples.)

Anticipation for "The Solomon Key" was so high that a "guide" to the novel was published in 2005 and remains in print.

Monday's announcement did not say where the story was set or who it would be about, and Doubleday spokeswoman Suzanne Herz declined to offer further information. In "The Da Vinci Code," a murder at the Louvre museum in Paris sets Langdon on an investigation that includes secret religious cults and speculation that Jesus had fathered a child with Mary Magdalene — a scenario that enraged scholars, critics and religious officials, all of it only bringing the book more readers.

Eager for success, but unprepared for obsession, Brown became increasingly reluctant to make public appearances or talk to the media. His reserve was only magnified by a copyright infringement lawsuit that was decided in his favor, but not before Brown was forced to testify in London and prepare an in-depth brief about his career, writing process and the fury he faced when promoting "The Da Vinci Code."

"I recall feeling defenseless because more than a year had passed since I'd researched and written the novel, and the precise names, dates, places and facts had faded somewhat in my memory," Brown wrote.

The trial, too, only made his book sell more.

Inspired in part by the commercial fiction of Sidney Sheldon, Brown is an Amherst College graduate who has said he long gave up on the idea of being a literary writer and instead wanted to write novels read by many. But neither the author nor his publisher nor booksellers expected such a boom for "The Da Vinci Code," his fourth novel, which remained on best-seller lists for more than three years and made million sellers out of such previous books as "Deception Point" and "Angels & Demons."

The long silence after "The Da Vinci Code," far longer than the time spent between his previous books, led to speculation that Brown was hopelessly blocked, as staggered by fame as "Forever Amber" author Kathleen Winsor or Grace Metalious of "Peyton Place," novelists who never again approached the heights of their controversial best-sellers.

Brown is a native of Exeter, N.H., who still lives in his home state with his wife, Blythe Brown, whom the novelist cited during the London trial as a virtual co-author, an energetic researcher who brought an invaluable "female perspective" to a book immersed in "the sacred feminine, goddess worship and the feminine aspect of spiritually."

Let's see how long it takes Ron Howard to hack this into theaters too.

[Hermanator X]

Let's see how long it takes Ron Howard to hack this into theaters too.

From Chud

Sony isn't waiting to see if Angels and Demons, the sequel to The Da Vinci Code, does well this summer. According to Variety they've already jumped all over The Lost Symbol and will now attempt to get Ron Howard and Tom Hanks back on board for the threepeat.

Not long it seems.

Angels and Demons was one of the only books I have ever quit part way through. A friend loaned it to me, and I thought I would give it a go, to see what all of the fuss was about.
It was shit. Im sure this will be more of the same.

[TheButcher]

From /film: The Art of Tim Burton

Subscribers to Tim Burton’s official website have tonight received an e-mail announcing The Art of Tim Burton, a limited edition hard cover book that will feature over 1000 illustrations on over 400 pages.

[Maui]

Announced April 20th at Columbia University: The 2009 Pulitzer Prize Winners for Fiction.

[The Todd]

Newly Released Books - 05/20

One book stood out on the list, and that's Dark Places by Gillian Flynn. The former Entertainment Weekly writer who penned the Zone's BotM selection, Sharp Objects - for those of you who liked that book.

[Maui]

Newly Released Books - 05/20

One book stood out on the list, and that's Dark Places by Gillian Flynn. The former Entertainment Weekly writer who penned the Zone's BotM selection, Sharp Objects - for those of you who liked that book.

It looks like another investigative whodunit that's following a similar plot line from her first book.

[papalazeru]

Thought this would be quite funny for y'all.

Generation Dead

WTF!!! Stupid idea.

[so sorry]

J.D. Salinger emerges...

Interesting story.

[TheButcher]

From io9: First Glimpse Inside Mark Wernham's Dystopian 1965 Saga

[TheButcher]

Supergods: Our World in the Age of the Superhero by Grant Morrison
From Bookseller.com: Cape swoops for superhero

Jonathan Cape editor Alex Bowler has over-powered rival publishers to buy a book on superheroes by Scottish ­comics "legend" Grant Morrison. Bowler bought EU, UK and Commonwealth rights (excluding Canada) to Supergods: Our World in the Age of the Superhero from Caspian Dennis at Abner Stein on behalf of Peter McGuigan at Foundry.

Bowler described Supergods as "the definitive history of the superhero", from the invention of Superman in 1938, through to the movie versions of "Watchmen" and "Wolverine".

Morrison has been a comics writer for more than 20 years, writing superhero stories for DC Comics and Marvel, and creating the adult comic book series The Invisibles and follow-up The Filth. His comics sold in the region of three million copies in the US alone last year, said Cape, as well as 200,000 copies of his collections and graphic novels. Bowler said that Morrison was "a comics legend and the one person you would want to write this book," calling him "the ultimate comic-book insider, [with] an irrepressible pop-culture mind, and a consummate raconteur."

He also promised Supergods would be a book "like no other", adding: "Our world and the world of the superhero are going to be fed into the brilliant blender of Grant's brain, so expect philosophy, anthropology, Buddhism, mad ­science, capes and punk rock."

Supergods will be published in August 2010.

The US deal has just been confirmed: Supergods will be published by Christopher Jackson at Spiegel & Grau (Doubleday).

[Fievel]

Amazon.com and WalMart are in a book price war.
Many of the new releases (in hardcover) are being sold and pre-sold for $9!!!

(this includes the new books by Stephen King, John Grisham, Michael Crichton, and more!)

[Ribbons]

Oh yeah, I heard about this. And other, smaller retail stores who don't sell e-books (like Barnes & Noble, etc.) are complaining that they can't afford to drop prices that low.

Here's an article on the whole thing: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13506_3-10377054-17.html

Just solidifies the "Wal-Mart is evil" theory...

[Al Shut]

And I'm stuck with fixed book prices

[Ribbons]

It's okay; the retail industry can't really afford to set prices that low. I'm not even sure the book industry can afford to set prices that low. Walmart is just hoping to attract enough business to crush the competition, so that they can fix their own prices.

[Maui]

I don't buy books anymore. Not sure whether it's the economic times or I'm just not in awe of my bookshelves anymore.

Library is the way to go!!!!! FREE!

[Tyrone_Shoelaces]

Nabokov's unfinished -- and unburned -- novel reappears
by Paola Messana – Sat Nov 7, 2:05 pm ET
NEW YORK (AFP) – Vladimir Nabokov wanted it burned on his death, but "The Original of Laura" survived and now, 32 years later, the unfinished novel is about to be published for the first time.

Despite Nabokov's dying wish, publication of the manuscript, which was compiled on index cards, is set for November 17 in New York and London, giving what many hope will be an unexpected glimpse of his genius.

The Russian-born writer's widow Vera had already saved his most famous work, "Lolita," from the flames, and their son Dmitry, 75, followed suit by preserving "Laura."

Yet the family hesitated for 30 years before finally going to literary agent Andrew Wylie who negotiated a deal with Knopf/Random House in the United States and Penguin in Britain.

The manuscript -- 138 index cards -- until now has been locked in a bank vault in Montreux, Switzerland, where Nabokov died in 1977.

Like "Lolita", "The Original of Laura" is in English. The author was born in Saint Petersburg and emigrated with his family at the time of the 1917 revolution, but began to write in English from 1941.

The contents of the book are known only to a highly restricted circle including the family, but debate has raged for three decades over whether or not the author's wishes should be respected.

"Dmitry made the right decision. Had his father wanted it destroyed, he would have done so himself," Gavriel Shapiro, Russian literature professor at Cornell University and an author of several books on Nabokov, told AFP.

Shapiro noted that Nabokov, who taught at Cornell between 1948 and 1959, had also wanted to burn "Lolita," the book that made him world famous in 1955.

"At one point, Nabokov wanted to destroy Lolita. He was on his way to the incinerator, but Vera stopped him."

Nabokov's wish to have his work destroyed was not the only case of literary self-sabotage. Franz Kafka asked his friend Max Brod to destroy all his unpublished work, including "The Trial."

But instead the book was published posthumously.

There has been huge speculation about the contents of "The Original of Laura" and its quality.

Shapiro, who met Dmitry Nabokov several times, is one of the few who have had a glimpse.

"I happened to read that book several years ago, with Dmitry's kind permission. I don't remember the details," Shapiro said, "but had Nabokov had the time to complete the novel, it could have been his crowning achievement."

Dmitry Nabokov has also alluded to the potential greatness of the book.

In a BBC television interview in 2008, he said, "My father told me what his most important books were. He alluded to Laura as one of them. One doesn't refer to (a) book one intends to destroy.

"He would have reacted in a sober and less dramatic way if he didn't see death staring him in the face," Dmitry Nabokov told the BBC. "He certainly would not have wanted it destroyed. He would have finished it."

What is not clear is how polished the unfinished book is or whether it could fail to meet the high standards of already published Nabokov novels.

In an interview with the BBC, Vladimir Nabokov himself discussed his unusual writing methods and perhaps gave ammunition to those who say the text is not ready for publication.

"I use these index cards, and I don't write consecutively, from the beginning to the next chapter, till the end," he said. "I just sort of fill in the gaps."

The speculation is that the novel contains even more sex than "Lolita," the story of an elderly, literary pedophile and a manipulative young girl.

Dmitry Nabokov says only that the story concerns a neurologist who has great intellect, but is physically unappealing, and contemplates suicide after becoming oppressed by his much younger wife's infidelity.

"Sex? Not much, that's not the point," he said.

Readers won't have to wait entirely until November 17. An extract is to be published on November 10 -- in Playboy magazine.

[Maui]

New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2009

I'd also like to point out that Margaret Atwood's Year of the Flood is on this list.

[St. Alphonzo]

New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2009

I'd also like to point out that Margaret Atwood's Year of the Flood is on this list.

Wow. By my count, I've read about 32 books this year... and not one of 'em is on that list.

Where the hell is "Born To Run" by Christopher McDougall? Damn that was an enjoyable read.

[Tyrone_Shoelaces]

New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2009

I'd also like to point out that Margaret Atwood's Year of the Flood is on this list.

Feh, not a pop-up among them.

[TheBaxter]

elitist snobs. they also ignored every single calendar with pictures of cute puppies or kittens.

[Maui]

Feh, not a pop-up among them.

Just for you. Looks like Chuck Murphy is a literary genius.

[The Todd]

According to the NY Times, the Barnes & Noble Nook e-book reader is a bust

[The Todd]

Random House tries to steal e-book rights for pre-1994 novels

[TheButcher]

From The NY Times:
The Man Behind Boy, Dog and Their Adventures

For some reason, the comic-book character Tintin, beloved just about everywhere else, has never quite caught on in America. This may change in 2011, when Steven Spielberg brings the first of three planned Tintin adventures to the movie screen, but for now he remains underappreciated — a little too odd and earnest, perhaps, in a landscape ruled by superheroes.

Tintin, a virginal, 15-year-old journalist with a perpetually upswept quiff of reddish-blond hair and a wire-haired fox terrier named Snowy, is the hero of 23 book-length adventures — what we now call graphic novels — completed by the Belgian artist Hergé, who died in 1983 at the age of 75. Most of them are little masterpieces of the form, combining inventive and suspenseful comic storytelling with drawings that are clear, precise and as thrilling as movie stills. Andy Warhol was a big fan, and so was Roy Lichtenstein.

Regrettably, though Pierre Assouline summarizes the books in great detail, his biography of their creator, “Hergé: The Man Who Created Tintin,” is unillustrated, so if you don’t already know the work, this is not the place to start. And even if you do, the story is a little depressing. Hergé here is frequently reminiscent of the Charles Schulz depicted in David Michaelis’s recent biography: an artist far happier and more interesting in his work than he ever was in life. Mr. Assouline, a journalist and film producer who has also written a biography of Georges Simenon, manages to misspell Schulz’s name and also that of the great Winsor McCay, creator of Little Nemo, but is generally judicious and fair, determined to make his subject sympathetic. Ultimately, though, he reveals far more about Hergé’s publishing life and business affairs than about what made him tick.

[thomasgaffney]

Barnes & Noble: Best Books of the Decade (00s)

10) Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser - Investigative journalist Eric Schlosser looked at how America feeds itself, and his sobering revelations had us rethinking such beloved staples as soda, beef, and fast food as we know and love it. Rarely has a work of reportage hit so close to home. Schlosser's book has made the old adage “You are what you eat” a concrete reality for millions of Americans, and in the process altered the way we approach food.

9) White Teeth by Zadie Smith - Zadie Smith beheld a teeming and volatile social environment, and she ran with it in this acclaimed story of Bangladeshi and British families living in fragile harmony in London. Spreading her web wide, Smith revealed the tensions within disparate cultures -- a condition that exemplifies contemporary life in the global age. No novel of our time captures so perfectly the cracks and fissures that spread so widely in the rosy picture of globalism that dominated the early 1990s.

8) The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell - The Malcolm Gladwell phenomenon began with a riveting study of interconnectedness that touched on, among other things: Paul Revere and Kevin Bacon, syphilis and social psychology, economics and the nature of rumor. In Gladwell’s masterly hands, contemplating the Big Picture took on new dimensions of wonder and fun. His book shines so brightly still, along with those that followed, because Gladwell not only alerted us to startling chains of cause and effect but provided a manual for thinking differently.

7) Life of Pi by Yann Martel - A novel of ideas that never loses its sense of wonder, Yann Martel’s bestseller won the British Man Booker Prize for Fiction in 2002. A story of survival, spirituality, and the bonds between humans and animals, its fantastic vision revealed primal truths while embracing an unfailing sense of entertainment. Martel has said he began the book in a state of inchoate malaise; as Pi himself says at one point, “The lower you are, the higher your mind will want to soar.” So, more than anything, The Life of Pi is a hymn to the human imagination and its transformative power.

6) Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood by Marjane Satrapi - The graphic novel exploded in the 1990s, and few examples of its contained power were more evident than this autobiographical account of a young girl’s maturation as she endured life in Iran under a socially repressive regime. A gripping political and personal coming-of-age story, Persepolis was a milestone for an influential new literary genre that began erasing the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction in fascinating ways.

5) The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright - Lawrence Wright won a well-deserved Pulitzer Prize for his detailed telling of the story of the decade. Delving deeply into the political narrative that led to the national tragedy of 2001, Wright, with clarity and unwavering focus, made an unthinkable event comprehensible. And though the literature surrounding 9/11 and its far-reaching consequences has grown immense, The Looming Tower remains the fundamental work on the subject and the place to begin for anyone who wants to understand the events set in motion that day.

4) The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen - There was no thinking small for author Jonathan Franzen. In a grandly conceived book that made Time magazine's list of the 100 best English-language novels, and earned its author a National Book Award, Franzen casts a cold eye on American life through the lens of a magnificently dysfunctional family. While domestic dramas have long been the stuff of great literature, in The Corrections Franzen transforms them through wit and empathy and luminous prose into something all his own.

3) The Road by Cormac McCarthy - One of our most acclaimed living writers, Cormac McCarthy has brilliantly mixed the visceral with the poetic into a singular literary vision. But with The Road, he delivered what many consider a modern masterpiece. Unfolding in a terrifying future where Armageddon has been waged and lost, this Pulitzer Prize-winning story traces the odyssey of a father and his young son through a desolate landscape of devastation and danger. Powerful, moving, and extraordinary by any standard, this is McCarthy at his greatest and gravest.

2) The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion - In a Pulitzer Prize-winning account of the sudden death of her beloved husband and fellow writer, John Gregory Dunne, and her daughter's illness, acclaimed novelist and playwright Joan Didion stared down tragedy with honesty and power, offering an unflinching look at traumatic loss, and the mind's attempts to cope with the unfathomable. Her crystalline prose is every bit as magical as the year of "magical thinking" she describes.

1) Gilead by Marilynne Robinson - Twenty-four years after her stunning fiction debut with Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson was back with a sweeping novel of American life spanning three generations from the Civil War to the 20th century. At once a powerful tale about fathers and sons and a spiritual journey steeped in the great tradition of 19th-century Transcendentalism beginning with Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman, Gilead won this writer’s writer both a National Book Critics Circle Award and a Pulitzer Prize.

[Pacino86845]

Not that I have read most of those books, but somehow I am nonplussed by that list... those were the best of the decade? I mean, Persepolis is a comic. Yes it's good, but it wasn't seminal or influential (see Time Magazine's brilliant decision to include Watchmen last century).

White Teeth and The Road are the only ones I've read besides Persepolis, and I have The Corrections on my frighteningly large stack of to-read books.

[thomasgaffney]

The Corrections was a great read (thanks for the recommendation, Maui!). And probably one of the best I've read in the past 10 years.

Fast Food Nation is on my to-read shelf. And Persepolis is something that I've been meaning to pick up forever. Same with Life of Pi.

The Road, however, I was vastly disappointed with. Considering all the awards it garnered (including the Pulitzer), I expected to put it down at the end, thinking, "Wow! Now, that's changed my life." And that did not happen. But critics LOVE The Road and Cormac.

White Teeth seems like something I would check out.

[Pacino86845]

White Teeth is most excellent IMO, you should all read that book tomorrow!

[Maui]

The Corrections was a great read (thanks for the recommendation, Maui!). And probably one of the best I've read in the past 10 years.

Cheers! Both my sisters read it and recommended it to me. They figured I would appreciate the dysfunctional family storyline.

Do check out White Teeth - it's an excellent book. I found it more engaging then Smith's other novel, On Beauty.

[The Todd]

Holy shit, this made The Todd ipampilash.....

Stereotyping People by Their Favorite Author

[stereosforgeeks]

Holy shit, this made The Todd ipampilash.....

Stereotyping People by Their Favorite Author

Thats awesome!

Haruki Murakami - People who like good music.

[Maui]

Haruki Murakami - People who like good music, cats, Cutty Sark, wells and lemon drops.

I've modified the above statement slightly.

You did know that Murakami owned a jazz bar for many years (see The Trilogy of the Rat).

[The Todd]

Haruki Murakami - People who like good music, cats, Cutty Sark, wells and lemon drops.

I've modified the above statement slightly.

You did know that Murakami owned a jazz bar for many years (see The Trilogy of the Rat).

Hahahahaha! Well, The Todd was quite partial to shots of the Cutty in college, so I might have to check out some Murakami.

[thomasgaffney]

National Book Critics Circle Announces Finalists

Autobiography:
Diana Athill, Somewhere Towards the End (Norton)
Debra Gwartney, Live Through This: A Mother's Memoir of Runaway Daughters and Reclaimed Love (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
Mary Karr, Lit (Harper)
Kati Marton, Enemies of the People: My Family's Journey to America (Simon & Schuster)
Edmund White, City Boy, Bloomsbury

Biography:
Blake Bailey, Cheever: A Life (Knopf)
Brad Gooch, Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor (Little, Brown)
Benjamin Moser, Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector (Oxford University Press)
Stanislao G. Pugliese, Bitter Spring: A Life of Ignazio Silone (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Martha A. Sandweiss, Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line (Penguin Press)

Criticism:
Eula Biss, Notes From No Man's Land: American Essays (Graywolf Press)
Stephen Burt, Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry (Graywolf Press)
Morris Dickstein, Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression (Norton)
David Hajdu, Heroes and Villains: Essays on Music, Movies, Comics, and Culture (Da Capo Press)
Greg Milner, Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music (Faber)

Fiction:
Bonnie Jo Campbell, American Salvage (Wayne State University Press)
Marlon James, The Book of Night Women (Riverhead)
Michelle Huneven, Blame (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall (Holt)
Jayne Anne Phillips, Lark and Termite (Knopf)

Nonfiction:
Wendy Doniger, The Hindus: An Alternative History (Penguin Press)
Greg Grandin, Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City (Metropolitan Books)
Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science (Pantheon)
Tracy Kidder, Strength in What Remain (Random House)
William T. Vollmann, Imperial (Viking)

Poetry:
Rae Armantrout, Versed (Wesleyan)
Louise Glück, A Village Life (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
D.A. Powell, Chronic (Graywolf Press)
Eleanor Ross Taylor, Captive Voices: New and Selected Poems, 1960–2008 (Louisiana State University Press)
Rachel Zucker, Museum of Accidents (Wave Books)


Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing
Joan Acocella

Finalists:
Michael Antman
William Deresiewicz
Donna Seaman
Wendy Smith

Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award
Joyce Carol Oates

[Hermanator X]

Dictionary banned in californian schools because it contained a description of oral sex.

The dictionary's online definition of the term is "oral stimulation of the genitals". "It's hard to sit and read the dictionary, but we'll be looking to find other things of a graphic nature," district spokeswoman Betti Cadmus told the paper.

I hate the term, but LOL at this.

Words fail me. (See what I did there?)