Amis at his most gleefully scabrous. In other words, his best.

Anguished, sad, funny, and as finely observed as his classic stories.

The 1988 campaign (Bush-Dukakis!) might seem an unlikely subject for a 1,000-page book that many consider the finest on modern politics.

Gaitskill's first collection of stories holds up as well as ever, for its frankness, its style, its willingness to wade into the depths of human behavior—bad and otherwise.

I chose this as an Old Book of the Week and have quoted from it in our diary slot a couple of times, but no one yet has taken home this biting, snobby, observant, and compulsively readable record of decades of Paris artistic life.

The Portland Trailblazers' '79-'80 season was a dud, as the team that won the title three years before slowly drifted apart, except that it became the subject of one of the best books on professional sports (in which the money and fame at stake seem almost quaint by now).

We made Jones's first story collection, Lost in the City, a Phinney by Post pick last year, but his second collection is every bit as good as a complex and human portrait of Washington, D.C.

Quite a few folks spotted LeBlanc's acclaimed portrait of poverty in the Bronx when we made it one of our first cover quiz subjects, but perhaps everyone has a copy at home already.

A great, quiet novel by the perennially rediscovered British master.

Choosing this as an Old Book of the Week wasn't enough to get any of Robinson's many fans to try her nearly forgotten nonfiction book on nuclear power and the welfare state in Britain.

It took us most of a year after we opened to sell any Philip Roth. A few copies (mostly of my favorite, The Ghost Writer) have found homes since, but not yet this one, one of his most inventive, funny, and challenging.

We have a whole shelf of Seuss, where we try to keep almost all his books in stock, but this inventive item, his very first book for kids, has yet to be adopted.