GENERAL LIT

An eclectic volume introduced by Guillermo del Toro and compiled by Dave Eggers and students of his San Francisco writing center, who don’t leave a stone unturned in their search for nonrequired gems. Learn More

The Best American series is the premier annual showcase for the country’s finest short fiction and nonfiction. Learn More

A ferocious firefight with Iraqi insurgents at "the battle of Al-Ansakar Canal"—three minutes and forty-three seconds of intense warfare caught on tape by an embedded Fox News crew—has transformed the eight surviving men of Bravo Squad into America's most sought-after heroes. Learn More

A transvestite assassin with a fur-fetish, on the run from both police and the mob, buys a run-down travelling carnival and goes into hiding with a small-town hooker while his twin personalities - Glen and Glenda - continually vie for psychological supremacy. Learn More

A sinewy, meditative novel of boyhood on the cusp of adulthood and the old on the cusp of the new. Black Swan tracks a single year in what is, for thirteen-year-old Jason Taylor, the sleepiest village in muddiest Worcestershire in a dying Cold War England, 1982. Learn More

Following the best-selling triumph of Kafka on the Shore ó 'daringly original,' wrote Steven Moore in The Washington Post Book World, 'and compulsively readable' ó comes a collection that generously expresses Murakami's mastery. Learn More

An epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America's westward expansion, Blood Meridian brilliantly subverts the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the 'wild west.' Learn More

In this unusual “collaborative novel,” Jake Yoder, a precocious boy caught between Amish culture and the modern world, sits in his middle-school classroom writing stories at the behest of a stern but charismatic teacher. Learn More

Hailed as a great Latin American literary event, this stylistically innovative, elliptically told tale of a young man and his love who mysteriously disappears is, as the narrator tells us, “a simple story that becomes complicated.” Learn More