Best Books of 2006

Fiction: Kornwolf (Grove/Atlantic), Tristan Egolf; St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves (Knopf), Karen Russell; Only Revolutions (Pantheon), Mark Z. Danielewski; Lipshitz Six, or Two Angry Blondes (Dutton), T. Cooper; Black Swan Green (Random House), David Mitchell; The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel (Scribner); What Is the What (McSweeney's), Dave Eggers; The Old Child & Other Stories (New Directions), Jenny Erpenbeck; Carte Blanche (Europa), Carlo Lucarelli; the return of the quarterly American Short Fiction (Badgerdog Literary Publishing), dormant since 1998.

Nonfiction: The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (Knopf), Lawrence Wright; Hip Deep: Opinion, Essays, and Vision From American Teenagers (Next Generation), edited by Abe Louise Young; The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), Greil Marcus; Beneath the Shadow of the Capitol (ECPrinting), Ramon Moncivais; The Scavenger's Guide to Haute Cuisine (Miramax), Steven Rinella; I Survived Cancer but Never Won the Tour de France (Hawk), Jim Chastain; Mysteries of the Middle Ages: The Rise of Feminism, Science, and Art From the Cults of Catholic Europe (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday), Thomas Cahill; Simón Bolívar: A Life (Yale), John Lynch; Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism (Norton), Michelle Goldberg; Altman on Altman (Faber & Faber), edited by David Thompson.