Fiction

Birds of America
By Lorrie Moore
Excerpt_|_Review

The Voyage of the Narwhal
By Andrea Barrett
Excerpt_|_Review

Blindness
By José Saramago
Excerpt_|_Review

Starting Out in the Evening
By Brian Morton
Excerpt_|_Review

Thirst
By Ken Kalfus
Excerpt_|_Review

Nonfiction

The Professor and the Madman
By Simon Winchester
Excerpt_|_Review

A Beautiful Mind
By Sylvia Nasar
Excerpt_|_Review

At Home With the Marquis de Sade
By Francine du Plessix Gray
Excerpt_|_Review

A Slant of Sun
By Beth Kephart
Excerpt_|_Review

We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families
By Philip Gourevitch
Excerpt_|_Review

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Table Talk

Join the Books discussion in Table Talk.

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Salon's editors salute
our favorite books of 1998:

f__i__c__t__i__o__n

- Birds of America By Lorrie Moore
- The Voyage of the Narwhal By Andrea Barrett
- Blindness By José Saramago
- Starting Out in the Evening By Brian Morton
- Thirst By Ken Kalfus

n__o__n__f__i__c__t__i__o__n

- The Professor and the Madman By Simon Winchester
- A Beautiful Mind By Sylvia Nasar
- At Home With the Marquis de Sade By Francine du Plessix Gray
- A Slant of Sun By Beth Kephart
- We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families By Philip Gourevitch

BY DWIGHT GARNER AND LAURA MILLER | In 1998, a series of major purchases and mergers rocked the publishing industry, but compared to 1997 it was a placid year for readers. Last year, we seemed to stumble over an utterly original near-masterpiece or an irresistible page turner every time we idly opened a book. This year, at least two dozen very fine works vied for the five spots in each of our two categories, fiction and nonfiction, which didn't make it any easier to pick 10 favorites. It was just as hard, but in a different way.

We found ourselves underwhelmed by overthick books this year, whether they were massive biographies, histories or epic novels by assorted grand old men of letters. At least one of our fiction choices, Brian Morton's "Starting Out in the Evening," snuck up on us like a familiar friend with whom you suddenly realize you've fallen in love. We preferred reading about the relatively obscure John Nash (in Sylvia Nasar's absorbing "A Beautiful Mind") to digging into the latest exhaustive take on some much-debated public figure.

It was also a year without any obvious new trends, although tales of life-threatening adventure (preferably at sea or on glaciers) are still keeping nonfiction readers up late at night -- and Andrea Barrett's "Voyage of the Narwhal" offers a provocative fictional take on our appetite for tales of ice and death.

We did notice more and more literati reading (make that admitting to reading) Stephen King, and his latest novel, "Bag of Bones," while not on our list, shows a popular writer in the process of deepening his vision. We also detect an increasing interest in nonfiction books that bear witness to horrific political events, from Adam Hochschild's "King Leopold's Ghost" to the newly published diaries of John Rabe (the "Schindler of Nanking") to the many fine books on the war in the former Yugoslavia to our own choice, Philip Gourevitch's harrowing account of the genocide in Rwanda.