Fiction.

WINNER

TREE OF SMOKE | DENIS JOHNSON: In the early 1960s, naive CIA recruit Skip Sands joins his uncle's unit in the Philippine jungle. Others--including soldier brothers from Phoenix, two Vietnamese military men on opposite sides of the conflict, and a widowed Canadian aid worker-try to find salvation amid the mayhem of war. (EXCELLENT Selection Nov/Dec 2007)

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"Denis Johnson is a true American artist, and Tree of Smoke is a tremendous book, a strange entertainment, very long but very fast, a great whirly ride that starts out sad and gets sadder and sadder, loops unpredictably out and around, and then lurches down so suddenly at the very end that it will make your stomach flop." JIM LEWIS, NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

FIELDWORK | MISCHA BERLINSKI: A fictional Mischa Berlinski, a freelance journalist in northern Thailand, investigates the suicide of an American anthropologist jailed in a Thai prison for murdering a missionary. His search for answers takes him to a Christian family and the Thai hill tribes.

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"The result is an impeccably structured novel portraying two strikingly different milieus--one fundamentalist Christian, the other the secular realm of social scientists, each trying to enter the same Dyalo mind-space as they go about their 'fieldwork.'" MICHAEL UPCHURCH, SEATLE TIMES

VARIETIES OF DISTURBANCE Stories | LYDIA DAVIS: In these 57 spare stories (some only a page or a sentence long), Davis, a noted Proust translator, considers family, octogenarian friendships, creativity, fourth graders, marital fidelity, Kafka, and a cup of coffee.

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"What holds her fiction together is the sense, on every page, of a staggering but precise intellect at work. ... With each story, it is as though Davis is logically working through the process of grief--and Varieties of Disturbance is her epiphany." KATHERINE HIL, SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

THEN WE CAME TO THE END | JOSHUA FERRIS: At a Chicago-based ad agency, the staff creatively waste time in the waning days of the 1990s Internet boom. When the company starts to lay people off, the remaining employees claim office furniture and wonder who will get the axe next. (EXCELLENT SELECTION May/June 2007)

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"Then We Came to the End is full of such brilliant miniature treatises--on the experience of time ... the hierarchies of complaint, the meaning of lunch--all heartfelt and delivered in solemn deadpan. ... What looks at first glance like a sweet-tempered satire of workplace culture is revealed upon closer inspection to be a very serious novel about, well, America." DARCY COSPER, LOS ANGELES TIMES

LIKE YOU'D UNDER STAND, ANYWAY STORIES | JIM SHEPARD: Eleven stories center on diverse themes, regions, and eras--from ancient Greece to outer space to the 19th-century Australian desert, and from the head executioner of revolutionary France to a man sent by the Third Reich to discover the Nordic-Aryan legacy. (EXCELLENT page 35)

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"Here we have an eclectic overview of human experience that reveals on both epic and intimate scales how in our struggle to move forward we just as often circle back on ourselves and collapse; a macro book told with a micro eye." TARA ISON, LOS ANGELES TIMES