ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY

Cover of Entertainment Weekly June/July 2008

We were delighted to see Entertainment Weekly's Special Double Issue -- "Our 1000th issue" -- for June/July 2008. 
CELEBRATING THE NEW CLASSICS:  The 1000 Best Movies, TV Shows, Albums, Books, and More of the Last 25 years

You can see the lists online at:  http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20207076_20207387_20207349,00.html 

We especially appreciated this category:

Books

THE NEW CLASSICS:  BOOKS

And we felt particularly fond of Classic No. 44. Especially since there are only about 15 or 16 nonfiction titles on the list.  In the print edition of the magazine, each of the top 50 books is accompanied by a short blurb.  I don't have time to type out all 50, but... hmmm, let's see... I may be able to squeeze out a minute here to type out the text for No. 44. 

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY'S 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE LAST 25 YEARS. 

  1.  The Road by Cormac McCarthy (2006)

  2.  Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J.K. Rowling (2000)

  3.  Beloved by Toni Morrison (1987)

  4.  The Liar's Club by Mary Karr (1995)

  5.  American Pastoral by Philip Roth (1997)

  6.  Mystic River by Dennis Lehane (2001)

  7.  Maus by Art Spiegelman (1986/1991)

  8.  Selected Stories by Alice Munro (1996)

  9.  Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier (1997)

 10.  The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami (1997)

 11.  Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer (1997)

 12.  Blindness by Jose Saramago (1998)

 13.  Watchmen by Alan Moore (1986-87)

 14.  Black Water by Joyce Carol Oates (1992)

 15.  A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers (2000)

 16.  The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood (1986)

 17.  Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1988)

 18.  Rabbit at Rest by John Updike (1990)

 19.  On Beauty by Zadie Smith (2005)

 20.  Bridget Jones's Diary by Helen Fielding (1998)

 21.  On Writing by Stephen King (2000)

 22.  The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz (2007)

 23.  The Ghost Road by Pat Barker (1996)

 24.  Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry (1985)

 25.  The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan (1989)

 26.  Neuromancer by William Gibson (1984)

 27.  Possession by A.S. Byatt (1990)

 28.  Naked by David Sedaris (1997)

 29.  Bel Canto by Ann Patchett (2001)

 30.  Case Histories by Kate Atkinson (2004)

 31.  The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien (1990)

 32.  Parting the Waters by Taylor Branch (1988)

 33.  The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion (2005)

 34.  The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold (2002)

 35.  The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst (2004)

 36.  Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt (1996)

 37.  Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi (2003)

 38.  Birds of America by Lorrie Moore (1998)

 39.  Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri (2000)

 40.  His Dark Materials (The Golden Compass) by Phillip Pullman (1995-2000)

 41.  The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros (1984)

 42.  LaBrava by Elmore Leonard (1983)

 43.  Borrowed Time by Paul Monette (1988)

 44.  Praying for Sheetrock by Melissa Fay Greene (1991)
A Faulknerian nonfiction portrait of the racial complexities of the South, focusing on one Georgia county in the 1970s and '80s. 

 45.  Eva Luna by Isabel Allende (1988)

 46.  The Sandman by Neil Gaiman (1988-1996)

 47.  World's Fair by E.L. Doctorow (1985)

 48.  The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver (1998)

 49.  Clockers by Richard Price (1992)

 50.  The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen (2001)

Top 50

 51.  The Journalist and the Murderer by Janet Malcolm (1990)

 52.  Waiting to Exhale by Terry McMillan (1992)

 53.  The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon (2000)

 54.  Jimmy Corrigan by Chris Ware (2000)

 55.  The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls (2006)

 56.  The Night Manager by John Le Carre (1993)

 57.  The Bonfire of the Vanities by Thomas Wolfe (1987)

 58.  Drop City by T. Coraghessan Boyle (2003)

 59.  Krik? Krak! by Edwidge Danticat (1995)

 60.  Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich (2001)

 61.  Money by Martin Amis (1985)

 62.  Last Train to Memphis by Peter Guralnick (1994)

 63.  Pastoralia by George Saunders (2000)

 64.  Underworld by Don DeLillo (1997)

 65.  The Giver by Lois Lowry (1993)

 66.  A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace (1997)

 67.  The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini (2003)

 68.  Fun Home by Alison Bechdel (2006)

 69.  The Secret History by Donna Tartt (1992)

 70.  Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell (2004)

 71.  The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman (1997)

 72.  The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon (2003)

 73.  A Prayer of Owen Meany by John Irving (1989)

 74.  Friday Night Lights by H.G. Bissinger (1990)

 75.  Cathedral by Raymond Carver (1983)

 76.  A Sight for Sore Eyes by Ruth Rendell (1998)

 77.  The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro (1989)

 78.  Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert (2006)

 79.  The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell (2000)

 80.  Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney (1984)

 81.  Backlash by Susan Faludi (1991)

 82.  Atonement by Ian McEwan (2002)

 83.  The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields (1994)

 84.  Holes by Louis Sachar (1998)

 85.  Gilead by Marilynne Robinson (2004)

 86.  And the Band Played On by Randy Shilts (1987)

 87.  The Ruins by Scott Smith (2006)

 88.  High Fidelity by Nick Hornby (1995)

 89.  Close Range by E. Annie Proulx (1999)

 90.  Comfort Me with Apples by Ruth Reichl (2001)

 91.  Random Family by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc (2003)

 92.  Presumed Innocent by Scott Turow (1987)

 93.  A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley (1991)

 94.  Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser (2001)

 95.  Kaaterskill Falls by Allegra Goodman (1998)

 96.  The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown (2003)

 97.  Jesus' Son by Denis Johnson  (1992)

 98.  The Predators' Ball by Connie Bruck (1988)

 99.  Practical Magic by Alice Hoffman (1995)

100.  America (The Book) by Jon Stewart (2004)