Four Books on the Top of My Stack

Even as I happily trudge through the last couple hundred pages of Infinite Jest, the stack of books on my night table is getting higher with the addition of a handful of new releases about which I'm very excited.

On deck is The Wild Things, Dave Eggers’ novelization of Maurice Sendak’s well-loved children’s story. The Wild Things is being published in concert with the release of the movie adaptation of Sendak’s book on October 16, and from what I’ve seen of the trailers, the movie looks sensational, so I have high hopes for the book.

November sees the release of Eating Animals, a nonfiction in which Jonathan Safran Foer attempts to uncover the what he finds to be a questionable ethical practice, and thus throws his hat into the ring with the numerous other popular food and eating books we’ve seen of late. I very much enjoyed Safran Foer’s novels, Everything is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, and I expect creativity on par with those in the author’s nonfiction.

Also released in November is Douglas Coupland’s Generation A, which is being billed as a sequel to Generation X, the 1991 debut novel that accidentally named a generation and put Coupland on the literary map. I enjoyed much of Coupland’s earlier work, especially Generation X and Microserfs, so this should be a treat.

Finally, I fell in love last year with the cast of ad agency cubicle dwellers in Joshua Ferris' debut novel, And Then We Came to the End, which is why I have high hopes for The Unnamed, Ferris' follow-up novel about marriage and family, due out in January.