Hudson Booksellers, operator of the ubiquitous Hudson News stands so familiar to travelers, recently announced their picks for the best books published in 2008. Seeking out works that embodied "achievements ranging from literary style and innovation, entertainment and readability, to timeliness and treatment of subjects and themes," a panel of the company's salespeople and managers selected titles in the categories of fiction and nonfiction, as well as children's books and business interest.
The fiction picks are:
The Hakawati (Knopf) by Rabih Alameddine
2666 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) by Roberto Bolaño, translated by Natasha Wimmer
All About Lulu (Soft Skull Press) by Jonathan Evison
The Lazarus Project (Riverhead Books) by Aleksander Hemon
The Hour I First Believed (HarperCollins) by Wally Lamb
The Given Day (William Morrow) by Dennis Lehane
A Mercy (Knopf) by Toni Morrison
Lush Life (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) by Richard Price
The Art of Racing in the Rain (Harper) by Garth Stein
The Story of Edgar Sawtelle (Ecco) by David Wroblewski
The nonfiction picks are:
The Animal Dialogues (Little, Brown) by Craig Childs
Hot, Flat, and Crowded (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) by Thomas Friedman
The Ayatollah Begs to Differ (Center Point Publishing) by Hooman Majd
Out of Mao’s Shadow (Simon & Schuster) by Philip P. Pan
In Defense of Food (Penguin Press) by Michael Pollan
The Unthinkable (Crown Publishers) by Amanda Ripley
Beautiful Boy (Houghton Mifflin) by David Sheff
The Way of the World (Harper) by Ron Suskind
The Post-American World (Norton) by Fareed Zakaria
David Sedaris's essay collection When You Are Engulfed in Flames (Little, Brown) was named Book of the Year.
All of the titles will be promoted at the company's sixty bookstores and four hundred newsstands beginning on December 1. Also starting on that date, Hudson Booksellers will invite readers to vote for their own preferred titles of the year on the Hudson Group Web site, offering each voter a chance to win all thirty of the recommended books of the year.
