Books Ive Read This Year II (2008)
Explore my 2008 reading list with this curated collection of books I've read this year. Discover top picks, hidden gems, and literary favorites from 2008.
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How We Are Hungry
by Dave Eggers
“These tales reinvigorate…the short story with a jittery sense of adventure.” —San Francisco Chronicle Dave Eggers—Pulitzer Prize finalist for A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and author of What Is the What and The Circle, among other books—demonstrates his mastery of the short story. "Another" "What It Means When a Crowd in a Faraway Nation Takes a Soldier Representing Your Own Nation, Shoots Him, Drags Him from His Vehicle and Then Mutilates Him in the Dust" "The Only Meaning of the Oil-Wet Water" "On Wanting to Have Three Walls Up Before She Gets Home" "Climbing to the Window, Pretending to Dance" "She Waits, Seething, Blooming" "Quiet" "Your Mother and I" "Naveed" "Notes for a Story of a Man Who Will Not Die Alone" "About the Man Who Began Flying After Meeting Her" "Up the Mountain Coming Down Slowly" "After I Was Thrown in the River and Before I Drowned"
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A Model World and Other Stories
by Michael Chabon
By the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.
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The Water-Method Man
by John Irving
“John Irving, it is abundantly clear, is a true artist.”—Los Angeles Times Fred "Bogus" Trumper has troubles. A divorced, broke graduate student of Old Norse in 1970s New York, Trumper is a wayward knight-errant in the battle of the sexes and the pursuit of happiness: His ex-wife has moved in with his childhood best friend, his life is the subject of a tell-all movie, and his chronic urinary tract infection requires surgery. Trumper is determined to change. There's only one problem: it seems the harder he tries to alter his adolescent ways, the more he is drawn to repeating the mistakes of the past. . . . Written when Irving was twenty-nine, Trumper's tale of woe is told with all the wit and humor that would become Irving's trademark. “Three or four times as funny as most novels.”—The New Yorker Praise for The Water-Method Man “Friendship, marriage, and family are his primary themes, but at that blundering level of life where mishap and folly—something close to joyful malice—perpetually intrude and distrupt, often fatally. Life, in [John] Irving's fiction, is always under siege. Harm and disarray are daily fare, as if the course of love could not run true. . . . Irving's multiple manner . . . his will to come at the world from different directions, is one of the outstandint traits of The World According to Garp, but this remarkable flair for . . . stories inside stories . . . isalready handled with mastery . . . and with a freedom almost wanton in The Water-Method Man [which is Garp's predecessor by six years].”—Terrence Des Pres “Brutal reality and hallucination, comedy and pathos. A rich, unified tapestry.”—Time
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The Complete Stories
by Flannery O'Connor
Winner of the National Book Award The publication of this extraordinary volume firmly established Flannery O'Connor's monumental contribution to American fiction. There are thirty-one stories here in all, including twelve that do not appear in the only two story collections O'Connor put together in her short lifetime--Everything That Rises Must Converge and A Good Man Is Hard to Find. O'Connor published her first story, "The Geranium," in 1946, while she was working on her master's degree at the University of Iowa. Arranged chronologically, this collection shows that her last story, "Judgement Day"--sent to her publisher shortly before her death—is a brilliantly rewritten and transfigured version of "The Geranium." Taken together, these stories reveal a lively, penetrating talent that has given us some of the most powerful and disturbing fiction of the twentieth century. Also included is an introduction by O'Connor's longtime editor and friend, Robert Giroux.
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The Zigzag Kid
by David Grossman
The picaresque adventures of Annon Feuerberg, 12, an Israeli policeman's son kidnaped by his father's arch-enemy, a master thief. The thief takes Annon on a number of jobs and introduces him to beauty in the person of a young actress.
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The Sot-weed Factor
by John Barth
A parody of life in colonial America relates the adventures of Ebenezer Cooke who became the poet laureate of Maryland.
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Lost in the Funhouse
by John Barth
John Barth's lively, highly original collection of short pieces is a major landmark of experimental fiction. Though many of the stories gathered here were published separately, there are several themes common to them all, giving them new meaning in the context of this collection. As the characters search, each in his own way, for their purpose and the meaning of their existence, Lost in the Funhouse takes on a hiliarious, often moving significance.
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The Complete Stories
by Franz Kafka
The complete stories of one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, the author of The Metamorphosis and The Trial. “An important book, valuable in itself and absolutely fascinating. The stories are dreamlike, allegorical, symbolic, parabolic, grotesque, ritualistic, nasty, lucent, extremely personal, ghoulishly detached, exquisitely comic, numinous, and prophetic.” —The New York Times The Complete Stories brings together all of Kafka’s stories, from the classic tales such as “The Metamorphosis,” “In the Penal Colony,” and “A Hunger Artist” to shorter pieces and fragments that Max Brod, Kafka’s literary executor, released after Kafka’s death. With the exception of his three novels, the whole of Kafka’s narrative work is included in this volume. “[Kafka] spoke for millions in their new unease; a century after his birth, he seems the last holy writer, and the supreme fabulist of modern man’s cosmic predicament.” —from the Foreword by John Updike
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The Confessions of Nat Turner
by William Styron
Presents a fictionalized account of the 1831 slave revolt led by Nat Turner in Southampton County, Virginia.
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Franny and Zooey
by J.D. Salinger
Two children of the Glass family appear in separate stories set in twentieth-century New York.