Top ten bite-size books

Tim Key is the author of Instructions, Guidelines, Tuteledge, Suggestions, Other Suggestions, and Examples Etc: An Attempted Book.

For the Guardian, he named a top ten list of bite-size books. One title on the list:

Elephant by Raymond Carver

Just short stories. But the best short stories ever written. Carver's a master of the genre. Carver writes with incredible economy. Nothing much happens. And yet we watch the character's lives change irreparably before our eyes. American, too, so he uses phrases like "he fed it some gas". Nice.

Read about the other books on Key's list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five best debut novels of the decade

Brian DeLeeuw named a "five best debut novels of the decade" list for the Tin House Blog.

One title to make the grade:

The Horned Man — James Lasdun (W.W. Norton, 2002)

Does it count as a “debut” if you’ve already published three collections of poetry and three more collections of short stories? “First” novel might be more accurate, but in any case, this is a coolly brilliant work of paranoia and psychological shell-games, which also manages to deftly satirize the sexual politics of academia.

Learn about the book that changed James Lasdun's life.

Read about the other books on DeLeeuw's list.

Brian DeLeeuw is an editor at Tin House magazine and a contributor to the website ThisRecording.com. He received his BA from Princeton University and his MFA from The New School. He now lives in New York City, where he was born and raised. In This Way I Was Saved, his debut novel, was published in 2009.

Read an excerpt from In This Way I Was Saved, and learn more about the book and author at Brian DeLeeuw's website.

The Page 69 Test: In This Way I Was Saved.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten of the best child narrators

For the Guardian, John Mullan named ten of the best child narrators in literature.

One book on the list:

Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

Finn is 13 and a brilliantly imagined mixture of wiliness and innocence. On the run from his drunken father and the stern Widow Douglas ("she took me for her son, and allowed she would sivilize me"), he travels down the Mississippi with escaped slave Jim, encountering various feuding or thieving adults along the way. The story is told in his own colloquial manner.

Read about the other child narrators on the list.

Huckleberry Finn is among Katie Couric's favorite books, and is one of James Gray's six best books. It is one of Stephen King's top ten works of literature. Director Spike Jonze and the Where the Wild Things Are film team tagged Huckleberry Finn on their list of the top 10 rascals in literature.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six books that made a difference to Jay-Z

Musician-mogul Jay-Z told O, The Oprah Magazine about a few books that made a difference to him.

One book on his list:

Nigger
by Dick Gregory

I don't know who turned me on to this autobiography, but his sense of humor and the hardships he went through stayed with me—especially the scene where he started running home from school. It led to his joining thetrack team, which led to a scholarship to college. Running opened up a whole world for him.

Read about the other books on Jay-Z's list.

--Marshal Zeringue

The Financial Times' books of the year, 2009

The critics at the Financial Times picked their best books of 2009.

One title on the list:

The Match King: Ivar Kreuger and the Financial Scandal of the Century
by Frank Partnoy

Partnoy recreates the Wall Street of the 1920s to tell the story of the Swedish magnate whose death precipitated the “Kreuger crash” of 1932. A powerful reminder that today’s scandals had even more destructive predecessors. And that greed and corruption are a permanent factor in finance. Shortlisted for the 2009 FT/Goldman Sachs business book of the year.

Read about the other books on the list.

The Page 99 Test: The Match King.

--Marshal Zeringue

Quentin Blake's six best books

Quentin Blake, the artist and author best known for his illustrations of Roald Dahl’s children’s books, recently collaborated with author David Walliams on The Boy in the Dress, a children’s novel.

For The Week magazine, Blake named his six best books.

One title on the list:

Walter Sickert: The Complete Writings on Art edited by Anna Gruetzner Robins (Oxford, $140).

This is an extraordinarily rich kind of bedside book; it’s almost as though you were ­listening to this intelligent and extremely articulate painter. Sickert is undervalued, no doubt because many of his opinions are “wrong” according to contemp­orary critical orthodoxy, but all the more interesting for that.

Read about the other books on Blake's list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Salon.com's best nonfiction books of 2009

Salon.com's Laura Miller named her five best nonfiction books of 2009. One title on the list:

"Tall Man: The Death of Doomadgee" By Chloe Hooper

An utterly riveting combination of true crime, courtroom drama and social exposé, Hooper's exquisitely written book details the 2004 death of an aboriginal man while in the custody of Australian police, and that tragedy's harrowing aftermath. The setting is Palm Island on the Great Barrier Reef, a one-time paradise that for 50 years was Australia's Australia, a "tropical gulag" where uppity Aborigines were sent when they objected to the appalling treatment they received at the hands of the state. With spare, sure strokes, Hooper paints a situation that is anything but clear-cut: The material evidence was damning, but the cop accused was known for his services to the community, and many of the witnesses against him were drunk and susceptible to social pressures. Hooper, a novelist enlisted by the dead man's family and their crusading lawyer, had only the sketchiest knowledge of her nation's treatment of its indigenous people when she began the book; for an American, reading about it is a lot like looking at our own country's troubled racial history through a refracted, yet illuminating lens.

Read about the other books on Miller's list.

See Matilda's roundup of reviews of The Tall Man.

Check out: Salon.com's best fiction books of 2009.

--Marshal Zeringue

The 25 greatest Gen X books of all time

The editors at Details developed a list of the 25 greatest Gen X books of all time.

One work of nonfiction on their list:

We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda, Philip Gourevitch

The misery suffered by many Africans is one of the unrelenting realities of our times. In this book, Gourevitch adroitly chronicles the 1994 genocide in Rwanda in which 800,000 people were killed in just over three months.

Read about the other 24 books on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

TIME: top ten fiction books of 2009

Lev Grossman is Time magazine's book critic as well as the author of the new novel, The Magicians.

He named Time's top ten fiction books of 2009. Number One on his list:

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

The year's most powerful novel has a demanding premise: it's the story of Thomas Cromwell, a badass political fixer in 16th century England, a time and a place where modern realpolitik was slouching its way toward us to be born and where "man is wolf to man." The son of a blacksmith, Cromwell served under Henry VIII, who was busily seeking to sever himself from Catherine of Aragon and marry Anne Boleyn, in the hope of producing a male heir. He needed an omnicompetent and thoroughly hard-boiled man to help him do it, and that was Cromwell. Through Cromwell's eyes, Hilary Mantel strips away any scrap of romantic period glamour, laying bare the vain, cynical souls of some of English history's most familiar figures. The tragedy of Cromwell is that he's human enough to understand the cost of what he does, but he's too smart not to do it — yet still he hangs on to his vision of a more enlightened political future for England. Watching the King and Queen take the stand against each other in court, one doesn't know whom to believe. "Hush," Cromwell tells us. "Believe nobody."

Read about the other books on Grossman's list.

Also see Grossman's list of the "six greatest fantasy books of all time."

--Marshal Zeringue

Stick list: 5 books we'll still be talking about in 2020

Sam Anderson of New York magazine picked the books "that we'll still be talking about in ten years."

One novel on the list:

The Road: Cormac McCarthy’s own personal The Old Man and the Sea — a slim late-career fable that popularized a difficult writer (and apocalyptic lit in general).

Read about the other books on the list.

The Road appears on Liz Jensen's top 10 list of environmental disaster stories, the Guardian's list of books to change the climate, David Nicholls' top ten list of literary tear jerkers, and the Times (of London) list of the 100 best books of the decade.

Fans of The Road include Paulette Jiles, Joshua Clark, David Dobbs, Andrew Pyper, Dan Rather, Jim Lehrer, Michael J. Fox, Mark McGurl, and this guy.

--Marshal Zeringue

Tracy Chevalier's best books

Tracy Chevalier is the best-selling author of Girl With a Pearl Earring and other books.

For The Week magazine, she named her six best books. One title on the list.

Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison (Vintage, $15).

I read this novel when I was a college student, and it has stayed with me. It’s about the black experience in America, and coming to terms with a past steeped in slavery. It sounds heavy, but Morrison throws magic realism into the mix, as well as striking prose. Twenty-six years later, I still remember some of the descriptions from Song of Solomon—they’re that powerful.

Read about the other books on Chevalier's list.

Song of Solomon is one of Jodie Foster's favorite books.

--Marshal Zeringue

Salon: best fiction books of 2009

Salon.com's Laura Miller named her five best nonfiction books of 2009. One title on the list:

"Chronic City" by Jonathan Lethem

A great New York novel should aim for the universal by way of the parochial. The Manhattanites in Lethem's near-future/alternative-now metropolis experience all the crises and travails of 21st-century life in a slightly more concentrated form. (It takes a novelist of exceptional talent and nerve to make you believe that matters of moment can hang on the outcome of an eBay auction.) A former child star coasting on his fading fame, a brilliant but terminally eccentric rock critic, a sarcastic ghostwriter and an activist turned municipal bureaucrat stumble through a city riddled with unreliable rumors, insufficiently explained disasters, dilettante millionaires, imperious celebrities and other signs and wonders. What they -- what all of us -- yearn for in a world full of engineered appearances and emotions is the truly beautiful and the truly moving. Can they find it, and will they even recognize it when they do? On this you can count: "Chronic City" is the real thing.

Read about the other books on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue