Special Issue: Favorite Books 2008: Fiction and Poetry

By Linda Gregg

Graywolf

Though these poems -- influenced by the poet's years in Greece -- find Gregg alone in a landscape deserted by a man, she isn't despairing but contemplative, wry, amused.

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A Mercy

By Toni Morrison

Alfred A. Knopf

Morrison looks at America in the 1680s and 1690s, "a young, wild country where a fog, often slightly mephitic, envelops the world," our reviewer wrote, and orphans and other outcasts struggle to build lives for themselves.

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Anathem

By Neal Stephenson

William Morrow

Scientific scholarship is restricted to a select few, cloistered from a society that gorges on consumer distractions. Yet when a crisis threatens, these ascetics must find a solution.

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The Boat

By Nam Le

Alfred A. Knopf

A diverse debut story collection that traverses the globe and follows characters who are in transit, people who, for one reason or another, have come unmoored.