1. The Golden Age, Written by: Dustin
(Staff Picks/Fiction)

By Michal Ajvaz (Dalkey Archive Press, $14.95) Ajvaz is a literary bully. He has Eco in a headlock. He's stolen Calvino's lunch money, sent him home crying. He knocked over Popper's mailbox. He's le

2. Duties of an English Foreign Secretary, Written by: Dustin
(Staff Picks/Poetry)

By MacGregor Card (Fence Books, $16.00) This is already one of my favorite books of the year, poetry or otherwise. Card plays a delicate game here, using written words as objects, as voices, as broo

3. Your Presence is Requested at Suvanto, Written by: Dustin
(Staff Picks/Fiction)

By Maile Chapman (Graywolf Press, $23.00) This book has the perfect setting for a horror novel: a sanatorium somewhere in postwar Finland. A reader cannot but expect the ice to crack, the axe to fal

4. Insectopedia, Written by: Dustin
(Staff Picks/Nonfiction)

By Hugh Raffles (Pantheon, $29.95) The title of this book is a lie. The cover of this book is a lie. Every fact about insects in here is a lie, camouflage, to hide what is easily the most human book

5. A Time For Everything, Written by: Dustin
(Staff Picks/Fiction)

By Karl O. Knausgaard (Archipelago, $20.00) I've been describing this massive book by Norwegian Knausgaard as a cross between Frances Yates' inquiries into medieval philosophy and Thomas Mann's astu

6. Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters, Written by: Dustin
(Staff Picks/Nonfiction)

By Louis Begley (Yale UP, $24.00) I've come by my knowledge of the Dreyfus affair as, I suppose, have many of us a century and an ocean away, through Proust and his contemporaries. What we know, the

7. Finding a Form, Written by: Dustin
(Staff Picks/Nonfiction)

By William Gass (Dalkey, $15.95) I know, I recommend far too many books that are themselves about writing and books. Let's have done with that, shall we? The title piece of this book is one of the o

8. Summertime, Written by: Dustin
(Staff Picks/Fiction)

By J.M. Coetzee (Viking, $25.95) Coetzee has been working since Elizabeth Costello or earlier to Trollope the contemporary novel so hard it'll knock the jade right out of our eyes. If anything was lac

9. If I Were Another, Written by: Dustin
(Staff Picks/Poetry)

By Mahmoud Darwish (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $28.00) After Mahmoud Darwish's recent death a number of books of his poetry and letters were issued by small presses. They are all worthwhile, I think

10. The Other City, Written by: Dustin
(Staff Picks/Fiction)

By Michal Ajvaz (Dalkey Archive Press, $13.95) There are a couple of ways for a book to earn itself the sobriquet "Borgesian". One is to be slim, recursive and literary. The other is to feat

11. Active Boundaries, Written by: Dustin
(Staff Picks/Poetry)

By Michael Palmer (New Directions, $19.95) Michael Palmer is a poet of excellent range and precision, but these collected essays and lectures feel more like my dream of pub chatter; they're erudite,

12. Star Maker, Written by: Dustin
(Staff Picks/Fiction)

By Olaf Stapledon (Wesleyan, $26.95) New rule: you haven't read science fiction until you've read Stapledon. His prose is a little dated feeling, but his imagination, his passion for inventing strange

13. On the Commerce of Thinking, Written by: Dustin
(Staff Picks/Nonfiction)

By Jean-Luc Nancy (Fordham, $16.00) This is filthy stuff, erotica for booksellers and readers in general. "Oh Jean-Luc," you'll cry, "tell me more about the illegible! Yes, that's it,

14. Chronic City, Written by: Dustin
(Staff Picks/Fiction)

By Jonathan Lethem (Doubleday, $27.00) It's difficult, sometimes, to read later work by an author who's written some of my favorite novels. Difficult, it seems, unless that author is Jonathan Lethem.

15. Anathem, Written by: Dustin
(Staff Picks/Fiction)

by Neal Stephenson (Harper, $7.99)  This is your new favorite novel about pre-Socratic philosopher monks, kung-fu, and trans-dimensional colony ships.

16. Seven Tenths, Written by: Dustin
(Staff Picks/Nonfiction)

by James Hamilton-Paterson (Europa, $16.00) This book is magnificent--one of the most sustained arguments for the vitality of literary non-fiction I ever hope to read. Hamilton-Paterson's topic here

17. Death in Spring, Written by: Dustin
(Staff Picks/Fiction)

by Merce Rodoreda (Open Letter, $14.95) This book may have been written as a loose allegory of fascist Spain, but I love it for being the best depiction of my dreams--good and bad--that I've ever ha

18. Ghosts, Written by: Dustin
(Staff Picks/Fiction)

by Cesar Aira (New Directions, $12.95) Cesar Aira doesn't write novels. No, he's perfected something new and brash -- small stories about small folks that are perfect in every detail but obviate tho

19. Dura, Written by: Dustin
(Staff Picks/Poetry)

by Myung Mi Kim (Nightboat, $14.95) When reactionaries and grandparents mock poetry this is the exact book they have in mind. It is dangerous; subversive, playful, dramatic and self-aware in equal p

20. In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, Written by: Kat
(Staff Picks/Fiction)

by Daniyal Mueenuddin (Norton, $23.95) Daniyal Mueenuddin's linked stories offer intimate glimpses into the lives of people connected by an aging member of Pakistan's fading aristocracy. From servan