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Best of 2011 Books
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By Tina Fey, 2011
ISBN 0316056863
Before Liz Lemon, before "Weekend Update," before "Sarah Palin," Tina Fey was just a young girl with a dream: a recurring stress dream that she was being chased through a local airport by her middle-school gym teacher. She also had a dream that one day she would be a comedian on TV.
- 11/22/63
By Stephen King, 2011
ISBN 1451627289
On November 22, 1963, three shots rang out in Dallas, President Kennedy died, and the world changed. What if you could change it back? Stephen King's heart-stoppingly dramatic new novel is about a man who travels back in time to prevent the JFK assassination.
- The Night Circus
By Erin Morgenstern, 2011
ISBN 0385534639
The circus arrives without warning. No announcements precede it. It is simply there, when yesterday it was not. Within the black-and-white striped canvas tents is an utterly unique experience full of breathtaking amazements. It is called Le Cirque des Rêves, and it is only open at night.
- 1Q84
By Haruki Murakami, 2011
ISBN 9780307593313
The year is 1984 and the city is Tokyo. A young woman named Aomame follows a taxi driver's enigmatic suggestion and begins to notice puzzling discrepancies in the world around her. Meanwhile, an aspiring writer named Tengo takes on a suspect ghostwriting project.
- The Tiger's Wife
By Tea Obreht, 2011
ISBN 0297859013
Set in war-torn Yugoslavia, The Tiger's Wife is a tale steeped in local fables and driven by one woman's experience of the never-ending violence that swept the Balkans. As Natalia and a friend travel across the former Yugoslavia, immunizing villagers, the body of her grandfather turns up in a...
- Hemingway's Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost, 1934-1961
By Paul Hendrickson, 2011
ISBN 1400041627
Focusing on the years 1934 to 1961 -- from Hemingway's pinnacle as the reigning monarch of American letters until his suicide -- Paul Hendrickson traces the writer's exultations and despair around the one constant in his life during this time: his beloved boat, Pilar.
- Life Itself
By Roger Ebert, 2011
ISBN 0446584975
Roger Ebert is the best-known film critic of our time. He has been reviewing films for the Chicago Sun-Times since 1967, and was the first film critic ever to win a Pulitzer Prize. He has appeared on television for four decades, including twenty-three years as cohost of Siskel & Ebert at the Movies.
- Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman
By Robert K. Massie, 2011
ISBN 0679456724
Born into a minor noble family, Catherine transformed herself into Empress of Russia by sheer determination. Possessing a brilliant mind and an insatiable curiosity as a young woman, she devoured the works of Enlightenment philosophers and, when she reached the throne, attempted to use their...
- The Most Dangerous Thing
By Laura Lippman, 2011
ISBN 0061706515
Some secrets can't be kept... Years ago, they were all the best of friends. But as time passed and circumstances changed, they grew apart, became adults with families of their own, and began to forget about the past -- and the terrible lie they all shared.
- Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World
By Michael Lewis, 2011
ISBN 0393081818
The tsunami of cheap credit that rolled across the planet between 2002 and 2008 was more than a simple financial phenomenon: it was temptation, offering entire societies the chance to reveal aspects of their characters they could not normally afford to indulge.
- The Swerve: How the World Became Modern
By Stephen Greenblatt, 2011
ISBN 0393064476
Nearly six hundred years ago, a short, genial, cannily alert man in his late thirties took a very old manuscript off a library shelf, saw with excitement what he had discovered, and ordered that it be copied. That book was the last surviving manuscript of an ancient Roman philosophical epic, On the...
- Thinking, Fast and Slow
By Daniel Kahneman, 2011
ISBN 0374275637
In the highly anticipated Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman takes us on a groundbreaking tour of the mind and explains the two systems that drive the way we think. System 1 is fast, intuitive, and emotional; System 2 is slower, more deliberative, and more logical.
- The Devil All the Time
By Donald Ray Pollock, 2011
ISBN 038553504X
Set in rural southern Ohio and West Virginia, The Devil All the Time follows a cast of compelling and bizarre characters from the end of World War II to the 1960s. There's Willard Russell, tormented veteran of the carnage in the South Pacific, who can't save his beautiful wife, Charlotte, from an...
- The Stranger's Child
By Alan Hollinghurst, 2011
ISBN 0307272761
In the late summer of 1913, George Sawle brings his Cambridge schoolmate -- a handsome, aristocratic young poet named Cecil Valance -- to his family's modest home outside London for the weekend. George is enthralled by Cecil, and soon his sixteen-year-old sister, Daphne, is equally besotted by him...
- There But For The
By Ali Smith, 2011
ISBN 9780375424090
At a dinner party in the posh London suburb of Greenwich, Miles Garth suddenly leaves the table midway through the meal, locks himself in an upstairs room, and refuses to leave. An eclectic group of neighbors and friends slowly gathers around the house, and Miles's story is told from the points of...
- The President and the Assassin: McKinley, Terror, and Empire at the Dawn of the American Century
By Scott Miller, 2011
ISBN 1400067529
In 1901, as America tallied its gains from a period of unprecedented imperial expansion, an assassin's bullet shattered the nation's confidence. The shocking murder of President William McKinley threw into stark relief the emerging new world order of what would come to be known as the American...
- Blue Nights
By Joan Didion, 2011
ISBN 0307267679
Blue Nights opens on July 26, 2010, as Didion thinks back to Quintana's wedding in New York seven years before. Today would be her wedding anniversary. This fact triggers vivid snapshots of Quintana's childhood -- in Malibu, in Brentwood, at school in Holmby Hills.
- Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention
By Manning Marable, 2011
ISBN 0670022209
Of the great figure in twentieth-century American history perhaps none is more complex and controversial than Malcolm X. Constantly rewriting his own story, he became a criminal, a minister, a leader, and an icon, all before being felled by assassins' bullets at age thirty-nine.
- Swamplandia!
By Karen Russell, 2011
ISBN 0307263991
The Bigtree alligator-wrestling dynasty is in decline, and Swamplandia!, their island home and gator-wrestling theme park, formerly #1 in the region, is swiftly being encroached upon by a fearsome and sophisticated competitor called the World of Darkness. Ava's mother, the park's indomitable...
- In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin
By Erik Larson, 2011
ISBN 9780307408846
The time is 1933, the place, Berlin, when William E. Dodd becomes America's first ambassador to Hitler's Germany in a year that proved to be a turning point in history. A mild-mannered professor from Chicago, Dodd brings along his wife, son, and flamboyant daughter, Martha.
- Started Early, Took My Dog
By Kate Atkinson, 2010
ISBN 0385608020
Tracy Waterhouse leads a quiet, ordered life as a retired police detective-a life that takes a surprising turn when she encounters Kelly Cross, a habitual offender, dragging a young child through town. Both appear miserable and better off without each other-or so decides Tracy, in a snap decision...
- Blood, Bones, and Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef
By Gabrielle Hamilton, 2011
ISBN 140006872X
Before Gabrielle Hamilton opened her acclaimed New York restaurant Prune, she spent twenty fierce, hard-living years trying to find purpose and meaning in her life. Above all she sought family, particularly the thrill and the magnificence of the one from her childhood that, in her adult years...
- The Tragedy of Arthur
By Arthur Phillips, 2011
ISBN 1400066476
The Tragedy of Arthur is an emotional and elaborately constructed tour de force from bestselling and critically acclaimed novelist Arthur Phillips, "one of the best writers in America" (The Washington Post). Its doomed hero is Arthur Phillips, a young man struggling with a larger-than-life father...
- The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood
By James Gleick, 2011
ISBN 9780375423727
The story of information begins in a time profoundly unlike our own, when every thought and utterance vanishes as soon as it is born. From the invention of scripts and alphabets to the long-misunderstood talking drums of Africa, Gleick tells the story of information technologies that changed the...
- Arguably: Essays by Christopher Hitchens
By Christopher Hitchens, 2011
ISBN 1455502774
The first new book of essays by Christopher Hitchens since 2004, Arguably offers an indispensable key to understanding the passionate and skeptical spirit of one of our most dazzling writers, widely admired for the clarity of his style, a result of his disciplined and candid thinking.
- Townie
By Andre Dubus III, 2011
ISBN 0393064662
After their parents divorced in the 1970s, Andre Dubus III and his three siblings grew up with their exhausted working mother in a depressed Massachusetts mill town saturated with drugs and crime. To protect himself and those he loved from street violence, Andre learned to use his fists so well...
- The Marriage Plot
By Jeffrey Eugenides, 2011
ISBN 0307401863
It's the early 1980s -- the country is in a deep recession, and life after college is harder than ever. In the cafés on College Hill, the wised-up kids are inhaling Derrida and listening to Talking Heads. But Madeleine Hanna, dutiful English major, is writing her senior thesis on Jane Austen and...
