Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke (FSG); Sebastian Faulks' novel Engleby (Doubleday); Zakes Mda's novel Cion (Picador Original); Jesse Ball's novel Samedi the Deafness (Vintage Original); and Library of America's Kerouac: Road Novels 1957-1960 and On the Road: The Original Scroll (Viking).
Percival Everett's novel The Water Cure (Graywolf); Valerie Martin's novel Trespass (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday); Brock Clarke's novel An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England (Algonquin Books); David Leavitt's novel The Indian Clerk (Bloomsbury); Xiaolu Guo's novel A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday); and Edmund White's novel Hotel de Dream (Ecco/HarperCollins).
Booker Prize-winning author Graham Swift's novel Tomorrow (Knopf); Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Riverhead); Irene Nemirovsky's posthumous novel Fire in the Blood (Knopf); Paul Theroux's collection of novellas, The Elephant Suite (Houghton Mifflin); and Jim Shepard's story collection Like You'd Understand, Anyway (Knopf).
Vincent Lam's novel Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures (Weinstein Books); Gina Nahai's novel Caspian Rain (MacAdam/Cage); Northern California writer Peg Kingman's first novel, Not Yet Drown'd (Norton); Ann Patchett's novel Run (Harper); and Bay Area author Gail Tsukiyama's novel The Street of a Thousand Blossoms (St. Martin's Press).
Berkeley resident and former U.S. poet laureate Robert Hass' Time and Materials: Poems 1997-2005 (Ecco/HarperCollins); Michael White's Civil War novel, Soul Catcher (Morrow); David Peace's crime novel Tokyo Year Zero (Knopf); Oakland writer Erika Mailman's first novel, The Witch's Trinity (Crown); Adrian Tomine's graphic novel, Shortcomings (Drawn & Quarterly); Michel Faber's story collection, Vanilla Bright Like Eminem (Harcourt); Davis artist Spring Warren's first novel, Turpentine (Black Cat/Grove); Berkeley writer Don Waters' story collection, Desert Gothic (University of Iowa Press), Robert Alter's translation of The Book of Psalms (Norton); and Garrison Keillor's first Lake Wobegon novel in six years, Pontoon (Viking).
September nonfiction
Robert Reich's Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy and Everyday Life (Knopf), Michael Hoffman edits The Voyage That Never Ends: Malcolm Lowry in His Own Words - Stories, Poems, Drafts, Letters (New York Review of Books); Francisco Goldman's The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop? (Grove); Diane Ackerman's The Zookeeper's Wife: A War Story (Norton); and Gordon Johnson's Fast Cars and Frybread: Reports From the Rez (Heyday/Baytree).
John Berger's Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches of Survival and Resistance (Pantheon); Edie Kerouac-Parker's You'll Be Okay: My Life With Jack Kerouac, edited by Timothy Moran and Bill Morgan (City Lights); George Saunder's essay collection, The Braindead Megaphone (Riverhead); and John Leland's Why Kerouac Matters: The Lessons of "On the Road" (They're Not What You Think) (Viking).
Charlie Savage's Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy (Little, Brown); Edwidge Danticat's memoir, Brother, I'm Dying (Knopf); David Halberstam's final book, The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War (Hyperion); and philosopher Charles Taylor's A Secular Age (Harvard University Press), winner of the 2007 Templeton Prize.
Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (Metropolitan/Henry Holt); Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk's essay collection, Other Colors: Essays and a Story (Knopf); Janet Malcolm's book on Stein and Toklas, Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice (Yale University Press); James D. Watson's Avoid Boring People: Lessons From a Life in Science (Knopf); and Bliss Broyard's memoir, One Drop: A True Story of Family, Race and Secrets (Little, Brown).
John Bowe's Nobodies: Modern American Slave Labor and the Dark Side of the New Global Economy (Random House); James R. Gaines' For Liberty and Glory: Washington, Lafayette and Their Revolutions (Norton); and Sports Illustrated senior writer and Northern California resident Austin Murphy's ode to college football, Saturday Rules: A Season With Trojans and Domers (and Gators and Buckeyes and Wolverines) (Harper).
Charles van Onselen's The Fox and the Flies: The Secret Life of a Grotesque Master Criminal (Walker), whom van Onselen contends was Jack the Ripper; Charles Fleming and San Jose's Howard Dully's book on Dully's troubled life, My Lobotomy (Crown); Hanna Rosin's God's Harvard: A Christian College on a Mission to Save America (Harcourt); San Francisco's very own Lawrence Ferlinghetti's Poetry as Insurgent Art (New Directions); and former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan's The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World (The Penguin Press).
October fiction
Wanda Colmeman's story collection, Jazz & Twelve O'Clock Tales (Black Sparrow Books/Godine); San Francisco writer Diane Vadino's first novel, Smart Girls Like Me (Thomas Dunne/St. Martin's); Bay Area author Alice Sebold's novel The Almost Moon (Little, Brown); and Millard Kaufman's first novel, Bowl of Cherries (McSweeney's).
Richard Russo's novel Bridge of Sighs (Knopf); Tom Perrotta's novel The Abstinence Teacher (St. Martin's); Philip Roth's final Zuckerman novel, Exit Ghost (Houghton Mifflin); Fadia Faqir's novel The Cry of the Dove (Black Cat/Grove); Michal Govrin's novel Snapshots (Riverhead); and Bay Area poet Adrienne Rich's Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth: Poems: 2004-2006 (Norton).
Alan Lightman's novel, Ghost (Pantheon); Cees Nooteboom's novel Lost Paradise (Grove); Ursula Hegi's novel The Worst Thing I've Done (Touchstone/Simon & Schuster); Mario Vargas Llosa's novel The Bad Girl (FSG); Joshua Henkin's novel Matrimony (Pantheon); Caryl Phillips' novel Foreigners (Knopf); and Iain Banks' novel The Steep Approach to Garbdale (MacAdam/Cage).
Michael Chabon's Gentlemen of the Road (Del Rey), first serialized in the New York Times Magazine; William Trevor's story collection, Cheating at Canasta (Viking); W.G. Sebald's poems, accompanied by lithographs by Jan Peter Tripp, making up Unrecounted (New Directions); Law Lit: From Atticus Finch to the Practice - a Collection of Great Writing About the Law (The New Press), edited by Thane Rosenbaum; and Walter Mosley's new Easy Rawlins novel, Blonde Faith (Little, Brown).
October nonfiction
San Francisco author Susan Faludi's The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America (Metropolitan/Henry Holt); Jonathan Miles' The Wreck of the Medusa: The Most Famous Sea Disaster of the Nineteenth Century (Atlantic); Judith Jones' memoir, The Tenth Muse: My Life in Food (Knopf); and University of Chicago Professor Cass Sunstein's revisiting of where the Internet has taken us thus far in Republic.com 2.0 (Princeton University Press).
Rick Atkinson's The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944 (Henry Holt); Edmund Wilson's Literary Essays and Reviews of the 1920s and 1930s (Library of America) and his Literary Essays and Reviews of the 1930s and 1940s (Library of America); and Oakland's Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger's Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility (Houghton Mifflin).
Karen E. Bender and Nina de Gramont edit Choice: True Stories of Birth, Contraception, Infertility, Adoption, Single Parenthood, and Abortion (MacAdam/Cage); David Michaelis' Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography (Harper); Shalom Auslander's memoir, Foreskin's Lament (Riverhead); and The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates: 1973-1982 (Ecco/HarperCollins).
Half Moon Bay author Richard Rhodes' Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race (Knopf); Oliver Sacks' Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (Knopf); Marc Norman's What Happens Next: A History of American Screenwriting (Harmony); former Chronicle religion reporter Don Lattin's Jesus Freaks: A True Story of Murder and Madness on the Evangelical Edge (HarperOne); and Julie Kavanagh's Nureyev: The Life (Pantheon).
Award-winning Russian historian Simon Sebag Montefiore's Young Stalin (Knopf); John Updike's Due Consideration: Essays and Criticism (Knopf); Joseph J. Ellis' American Creation: Triumphs and Tragedies in the Founding of the Republic (Knopf); and Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark's Deception: Pakistan, the United States and the Secret Trade in Nuclear Weapons (Walker).
Orland Figes' The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia (Metropolitan/Henry Holt); Bob Drogin's Curveball: Spies, Lies and the Man Behind Them: The Intelligence Nightmare That Led to America's War in Iraq (Random House); Imam Sayid Hassan Al-Qazwini's American Crescent: A Muslim Cleric's Struggle for Islam in America (Random House); and Berkeley author Fritjof Capra's The Science of Leonardo: Inside the Mind of the Great Genius of the Renaissance (Doubleday).
Amy Silverstein's medical memoir, Sick Girl (Grove Press); Paul Krugman's The Conscience of a Liberal (Norton); Gary Wills' Head and Heart: American Christianities (The Penguin Press); UC Davis history Professor Andres Resendez's A Land So Strange: The Epic Journey of Cabeza de Vaca (Basic Books); John Lukacs' Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat: Winston Churchill and the Speech That Saved Civilization (Basic Books); and Dana Frank's Local Girl Makes History: Exploring Northern California's Kitsch Monuments (City Lights).
Venture capitalist and Hewlett-Packard board of director member Tom Perkins' memoir, Valley Boy: The Education of Tom Perkins (Gotham Books); The Emergence of Memory: Conversations With W.G . Sebald (Seven Stories Press), edited by Lynne Sharon Schwartz; Craig Unger's The Fall of the House of Bush: How a Group of True Believers Put America on the Road to Armageddon (Scribner); David Mas Masumoto's Heirlooms: Letters From a Peach Farmer (Heyday Books); and KQED "Forum" host and San Francisco State Professor Michael Krasny's Off Mike: A Memoir of Talk Radio and Literary Life (Stanford University Press).
November fiction
Michael Rothenberg edits The Collected Poems of Philip Whalen (Wesleyan University Press); John Ashbery's Notes From the Air: Selected Later Poems (Ecco/HarperCollins); and Ha Jin's novel A Free Life (Pantheon).
Ronan Bennett's literary thriller Zugzwang (Bloomsbury); Peter Ackroyd's novel The Fall of Troy (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday); Peter Hoeg's first novel in more than 10 years, The Quiet Girl (FSG); and Chris Ware's ACME Novelty Datebook: Vol. 2 1995-1999 and ACME Novelty Library No. 18 (Drawn & Quarterly).
The New Granta Book of the American Short Story (Granta), edited by Richard Ford; The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps: The Best Stories From the Pulps During Their Golden Age - the '20s, the '30s and the '40s (Vintage Original), edited by Otto Penzler; Andrea Barrett's novel, The Air We Breathe (Norton); and Steve Erickson's novel about Hollywood, Zeroville (Europa Editions).
Stewart O'Nan's novel, Last Night at the Lobster (Viking); the anthology The Book of Other People (Penguin Original), edited by Zadie Smith; and Yannick Murphy's novel Signed, Mata Hari (Little, Brown).
November nonfiction
Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food: The Myth of Nutrition and the Pleasures of Eating (The Penguin Press); Silvana Paternostro's My Colombian War: A Journey Through a Country I Left Behind (Henry Holt); Peter Gay's Modernism: The Lure of Heresy - From Baudelaire to Beckett and Beyond (Norton); Lachlan Whelan's Contemporary Irish Prison Writing: Writing and Resistance (Palgrave Macmillan); John Richardson's third volume of his Picasso biography, The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932 (Knopf); and novelist and story writer William Boyd's Bamboo: Essays and Criticism (Bloomsbury).
Ed Sikov's Dark Victory: The Life of Bette Davis (Henry Holt); San Francisco writer Alex Frankel's Punching In: My Unauthorized Adventure as a Front Line Employee (Collins); Thomas Hines' The Great Funk: Falling Apart and Coming Together (on a Shag Rug) in the Seventies (Sarah Crichton Books/FSG); Umberto Eco's essay collection, Turning Back the Clock: Hot Wars and Media Populism (Harcourt); Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris' The Ballad of Abu Ghraib (The Penguin Press); and Judith Freeman's The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved (Pantheon).
Alicia Castro and Ingrid Kummels' Queens of Havana: The Amazing Adventures of the Legendary Anacaona, Cuba's First All-Girl Dance Band (Grove Press); The Paris Review Interviews, II (Picador Original), edited by Philip Gourevitch; The Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters (Harper), edited by Charlotte Mosley; Ronald Brownstein's The Second Civil War: How Extreme Partisanship Has Paralyzed Washington and Polarized America (The Penguin Press); and Conrad Black's (yes, that Conrad Black) Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full (PublicAffairs).
