NYT's Top Reads for 2007

Stephen King, Christopher Hitchens make the cut

(NEWSER) - If you need a book recommendation for holiday reading, look no further than the New York Times ' list of the 10 best books of the year. Five are fiction and five non-fiction:

• 11/22/63 by Stephen King: A time portal sends an English teacher back to 1958 to try and stop Lee Harvey Oswald. King reflects "on questions of memory, fate, and free will as he richly evokes midcentury America."
• Swamplandia! By Karen Russell: "Exuberantly inventive language" marks this story of "a heroine who is wise beyond her years" as she tries to preserve her family's way of life. Also, an alligator theme park is involved.

...but one member of the 3-person judging panel quits in protest

(NEWSER) - Philip Roth, the Pulitzer Prize-winning American author of the 1960s cultural touchstone Portnoy's Complaint and more than two dozen other novels, was named today as the winner of the Man Booker International Prize for fiction. Roth beat 12 other short-listed authors—including Britain's John le Carre, Australia's David Malouf, and Indian-born Canadian Rohinton Mistry—for the $100,000 prize. "One of the particular pleasures I've had as a writer is to have my work read internationally despite all the heartaches of translation that that entails," Roth said in a statement. More»

Lead character based on man who later killed his mother

(NEWSER) - A Florida man confessed to killing his mother in the same fashion as a recently published novel describes: by beating her, cutting her open, and removing her inner organs. And the author of the novel admits that he based his main character partially on his friend, Beau Bruneau, 29—the man now accused of murdering his mother on Oct. 30. "It was too much of a coincidence to be a coincidence," Patrick Quéré tells the Miami Herald . "It took me a while to really believe it." More»

Fiction and nonfiction will be ranked early next year

(NEWSER) - E-books are gaining sales and credibility: The New York Times will add two e-book bestseller lists, fiction and nonfiction, beginning next year. The company has been working on a system to track and verify sales for two years, using weekly data from publishers, bookstores, and online retailers. “It was clear that e-books were taking a greater and greater share of total sales,” says an editor; sales in the first nine months of 2010 were up almost 190% from the same period of 2009, and are expected to climb to 25% of total trade sales within the next few years. More»

An editor was likely the one to polish her prose, says professor

(NEWSER) - Jane Austen is known as a “perfect stylist,” but those perfectly crafted sentences may not actually be hers. After studying 1,100 pages of Austen’s handwritten, unpublished manuscripts, an Oxford professor concluded that “the polished punctuation and epigrammatic style … is simply not there,” she tells the BBC . In its place is a more free-flowing, somewhat untidy style, featuring limited punctuation. More»