NEW YORK – With more than 100,000 books published each year, it’s hard to know what works best for a holiday gift. A few “experts,” from a prize-winning historian to some best-selling children’s authors, have suggestions:
James McBride, whose novel The Good Lord Bird was this year’s fiction winner of the National Book Award: And the Earth Did Not Swallow Him, by Tomas Rivera. “It’s a short group of vignettes,” McBride says, “but I like the writing, imagery, voice and story.”
Brian Selznick, whose The Invention of Hugo Cabret was adapted into a feature film by Martin Scorsese: Ballad, by Blexbolex. “This book is unlike anything I’ve ever seen before,” Selznick wrote. “It’s a puzzle, a fairy tale, an adventure, a love story, made with words and pictures used in a new, utterly beguiling way. ”
Rachel Kushner, author of the acclaimed novel The Flamethrowers: Manning Marable’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Malcolm X. “I think it’s absolutely incredible,” she says. “An impeccable work of history about a very important American figure.”
Alan Taylor, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian whose latest book is The Internal Enemy, about slavery in colonial and post-colonial Virginia: A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling Over the Memory of Sand Creek, by Ari Kellman, the story of a bloody 1864 battle in Colorado that left more than 150 Native Americans dead and the debate surrounding a memorial site dedicated in 2007. “A book about how different people can remember an event in very different ways,” Taylor says.
Ann Martin, author of The Babysitters Club series: In the Company of the Courtesan, by Sarah Dunant. “A mesmerizing story set in 16th-century Venice,” Martin says.
Mark Halperin, co-author of Double Down, the best-seller about the 2012 presidential election: Monsters: The 1985 Chicago Bears and the Wild Heart of Football, by Rich Cohen. Halperin praises the book’s “nostalgia, great storytelling, and larger-than-life characters.”
Goosebumps author R.L. Stine: Fun Home, by Alison Bechdel. “This brilliant graphic novel was turned into the best musical theater play I saw all year,” Stine says.
