Holiday books: Critics' choice top 10 of the year

By Gerald Murnane. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $22.)

In Gerald Murnane's ruminative novel, an elderly man is obsessed with stained glass. Although he's not particularly religious, he seeks out church windows because the refracted sunlight triggers memories that he's otherwise unable to retrieve: "I have learned to trust the promptings of my mind, which urges me sometimes to study in all seriousness matters that another person might dismiss as unworthy, trivial, childish." It's a beautiful, mournful book, by a 79-year-old Australian who's considered a Nobel Prize contender.

KEVIN CANFIELD

By Adam Nicolson. (Henry Holt, $32)

In this wondrous book, Adam Nicolson describes the way of life and strange powers of 10 groups of birds found off the coast of Scotland. He captures glimpses of their avian minds and shows their presence and often mischievous doings in folklore and art. Beautifully written, haunting in imagery and filled with marvels, the book is also a farewell salute to a once teeming dimension of the natural world, now increasingly devastated by human environmental malfeasance.

KATHERINE A. POWERS

By Diana Khoi Nguyen. (Omnidawn, $17.95.)

ELIZABETH HOOVER

By Christopher Bonanos. (Henry Holt, $32.)

In the 1930s and '40s, Arthur Fellig came to personify the hardworking, hard-as-nails, cop-chasing news photographer. With his Speed Graphic camera and his almost supernatural instincts that put him at the right place at the right time (and might have earned him the nickname Weegee, as in Ouija), Fellig photographed hundreds of murders, accidents, fires and other tragedies. Over time, his work evolved from straight journalism to a kind of moody art. Christopher Bonanos' lively biography places Fellig squarely in his time and his city, and the reader watches New York and the culture change along with the man.

LAURIE HERTZEL

By Julie Schumacher. (Doubleday, $25.95.)

ELLEN AKINS

By Deborah Eisenberg. (Ecco, $26.99.)

A clique of retired film stars gossips over a tell-all book. A troubled painter seeks solace in a tropical retreat. A young man fixates on a human rights worker. In just six stories, a contemporary master guides us into a looking glass version of our lives, glimpsed through funhouse mirrors and fogged in gloom, an autopsy of the American dream but with a patina of transcendence, "light coursing between our clasped hands and the sun's warmth … with night idling where it was, half a world away."

HAMILTON CAIN

Edited by Viet Thanh Nguyen. (Harry N. Abrams, $25.)

Angela Ajayi

By Lauren Groff. (Riverhead, $27.)

In Lauren Groff's dazzling second story collection, her prose is as rich, dense and glossy as ever. Her characters live under threats of wild weather and total abandonment; more than once, children discover they've been left alone in a sinister landscape, or with a parent too compromised to protect them. Bookishness, though often present in these characters, is flimsy salvation at best. "Florida" is an ode to the power and the endangerment of the natural world.

Jackie Thomas-Kennedy

By Pat Barker. (Doubleday, $27.95.)

MALCOLM FORBES

By Zora Neale Hurston. (Amistad, $24.99.)

Nearly 70 years after her death comes Zora Neale Hurston's exceptional biography of Oluale Kossula, kidnapped in 1860 at age 19 from his West African town and imprisoned in a "barracoon" (barracks) with other slaves awaiting passage on the last slave ship to the United States. In 1927, Hurston began her meticulous interview of 86-year-old Cudjo Lewis (his slave name) at his home in Alabama, where he vividly recalled his 5½ years of enslavement and the founding of Africatown, a settlement in Alabama.

ANJALI ENJETI