Finalists: Joe Meno, Tobias Wolff, Jhumpa Lahiri

Quoted: For a literary honor that didn’t exist before 2004, the Story Prize — which recognizes the best story collection to be published each year — has quickly established itself as a nifty jewel in a writer’s crown.

Quoted: “I wanted it to be an art object,” he explained. “I really saw it as the anti-Kindle.” When Dark asked him about the book’s illustrations

Quoted: The Book Review has selected this list from books reviewed since Dec. 2, 2007, when we published our previous Notables list.

James Woods reviews Rivka Galchen's first novel.

Quoted: That was the stage of loss I was in then I suppose, like the first days after someone dies, when you bend down to pick up every piece of lint, and you wonder what the dead person, when you meet her next, might have to say about her death (or about lint), and you worry, a little bit, about how that is going to be a very awkward conversation, the conversation with the recently dead.

Quoted: “The antidote to Puritanism isn’t licentiousness, but the recognition of what goes on inside human beings,” Kureishi wrote in the title essay of “The Word and the Bomb.” He added: “Fundamentalism is dictatorship of the mind, but a live culture is an exploration, and represents our endless curiosity about our own strangeness and impossible sexuality: wisdom is more important than doctrine; doubt more important than certainty. Fundamentalism implies the failure of our most significant attribute, our imagination.”

quoted: “effective multiculturalism”: not a superficial exchange of festivals and foods driven by liberal guilt, but something else entirely — an encounter with human desires in all their complexity. Or, as he wrote, “a robust and committed exchange of ideas — a conflict, which is worth enduring, rather than a war.”

Quoted: Enter what you're reading or your whole library—it's an easy, library-quality catalog. LibraryThing also connects you with people who read the same things.

From hknapp's faves.

Quoted: The seven stories display an amazing confidence and range for so young an author, moving from a religious festival in Tehran to the days before an atomic bomb is dropped on Hiroshima to the cardboard shantytowns of Colombia where 14-year-old boys yearn to get “an office job,” slang for work as a hired assassin.

Quoted:too used to freedom to accept the rituals and conventions of home, and yet too steeped in tradition to embrace American mores fully. These Indian-born parents want the American Dream for their children — name-brand schools, a prestigious job, a roomy house in the suburbs — but they are cautious about the pitfalls of life in this alien land, and isolated by their difficulties with language and customs. Their children too are often emotional outsiders: having grown up translating the mysteries of the United States for their relatives, they are fluent navigators of both Bengali and American culture but completely at home in neither;..

Quoted: On-demand publisher Lulu.com has churned out 236,000 paperbacks since it opened in 2002, and its volume of new paperbacks has risen each month this year, hitting 14,745 in November. Retail giant Amazon.com got into the game this summer, offering on-demand publishing through its CreateSpace,