15 Writers Share Their Must-Reads

Peter Rock's The Bewildered(MacAdam/Cage) is a book that took me for a walk around my neighborhood, pointed out nineteen things I'd never noticed, led me to a bar with a great jukebox, listened while I blabbed all my secrets, got me into a fight, let me sleep it off on the lawn, put a slab of meat on my black eye, made me a big, greasy breakfast and sent me on my merry, bleary way. If you want anything more from a writer than Peter Rock gives you, you ought to be ashamed of yourself.

STEPHEN ELLIOTT(author of Happy Baby and other novels)

There is zero doubt for me that the best book I read in 2005 was The Assassins' Gateby George Packer(Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Packer is the New Yorker correspondent in Iraq and his book traces the war from its ideological beginnings (when he was a supporter) to its current manifestation as the disaster of our time. His writing combines a nuanced understanding of the most obscure foreign-policy journals along with heart-racing narratives based on his own experiences in country. The two threads combine to form the most unlikely bond, as if Packer were the love child of Janet Malcolm and Ryszard Kapuscinski, with the notable difference that he's writing about Iraq and Iraq is happening now.

EVAN WRIGHT (author of Generation Kill: Devil Dogs, Iceman, Captain America, and the New Face of American War)

Tokyo housewives armed with power saws and flesh-chopping shears are the heroines of Out, the thriller by Japan's Natsuo Kirino (Vintage International), and a book that does more than its share to dispel the myth of the submissive Asian housewife. Kirino's award-winning novel achieves a tight balance between creepy noir and bitter commentary on working women stuck beyond the fringes of Japan's postindustrial affluence.

PETER GADOL (author of the novels Light At Dusk and The Long Rain)

It takes a great writer to connect the events of September 11 with the Dresden firebombing without reducing historical moments to facile metaphors, one for the other, but in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close(Houghton Mifflin), Jonathan Safran Foerdoes just that, translating public catastrophes into private affairs of love and loss. In Foer's novel about a brainiac boy-picaro wandering New York City in an extravagant attempt figuratively and literally to unlock a mystery about his lost father, everyone is always writing — notes pressed against windows, unread letters, desperate posters, scrapbooks, tattoos, scribbling when speech fails — as if narrative itself is the searched-for thing, narrative as rich and transient as life, narrative as redemption. Against a century of mourning, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close remains, in the end, deeply affirmative.

MIKE DAVIS (author of, most recently, The Monster At Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu)

Okay, I am fudging dates by a few months, but Don West'sNo Lonesome Road: Selected Prose and Poems(Univ. of Illinois Press) is the most unfashionable, soul-stirring, and brave book that I have read in years. The radical "voice of the Southern Cracker," West was a hillbilly preacher and communist labor organizer whose lean and aching poetry — "the child of hope and hurt and solidarity" — spoke for generations of forgotten toil and struggle. The cover photo shows the young West — more fiercely handsome than Brando — mounted on the famous Indian motorcycle that kept him one step ahead of lynch mobs and KKK posses.