Literary March Madness

How do the best books of the year face up in a March Madness-style tournament?  Visit The Tournament of Books by The Morning News to find out.  The staff of this publication are pitting 16 books published in 2011 against each other.  Read them for yourself and weigh in:

• Nathacha Appanah, The Last Brother
• Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending
• Teju Cole, Open City
• Helen DeWitt, Lightning Rods
• Patrick deWitt, The Sisters Brothers
• Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot
• Chad Harbach, The Art of Fielding
• Alan Hollinghurst, Stranger’s Child
• Jesmyn Ward, Salvage the Bones
• Haruki Murakami, 1Q84
• Téa Obreht, The Tiger’s Wife
• Michael Ondaatje, The Cat’s Table
• Ann Patchett, State of Wonder
• Donald Ray Pollock, Devil All the Time
• Karen Russell, Swamplandia!

Judging books by their covers

Did you know that the same book often gets a different cover when it's marketed in a different country?  This article from The Millions compares the British and American covers of eleven famous books, including the bestselling The Sense of an Ending, The Marriage Plot, The Art of Fielding, State of Wonder, and 1Q84.  So how important is cover art to you?  Comments welcome!

Can't get enough Hunger Games?

With the Hunger Games movie coming soon, your Community Library can't keep the Hunger Games trilogy (Hunger Games, Catching Fire, and Mockingjay) on the shelves!  For those of you who hunger for additional high-quality dystopias, there are plenty of great choices out there.  Try, for example, The Handmaid's Tale, in which an ultra-religious fervor ushers in a new era of misogyny; The Passage, in which a military experiment goes chillingly wrong, and The Leftovers, in which a Rapture-like event mysteriously causes some people to disappear.  1Q84, whose storyline is a nod to Orwell's classic dystopia 1984, is a bestseller in its native Japan; its English translation is on track to earn similar success.  Share your favorite dystopias by commenting!