Fiction
Man Gone Down, by Michael Thomas
Out Stealing Horses, by Per Petterson
The Savage Detectives, by Roberto Bolaño
Then We Came to the End, by Joshua Ferris
Tree of Smoke, by Denis Johnson
Nonfiction
Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone, by Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression, by Mildred Armstrong Kalish
The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court, by Jeffrey Toobin
The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: a Woman in World History, by Linda Colley
The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, by Alex Ross
For explanations, visit the New York Times website.