3 ‘Summer Crossing,’ by Truman Capote
(Random House) Harp all you want about this being no Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Capote’s rediscovered first novel, published for the first time, makes a great breezy read. His story of Upper East Side debutante Grady’s sultry affair with a lower-class Brooklyn Jew teems with Capote’s trademark wit, but also with genuine youthful awe at the exhilaration of late-forties New York.
— Boris Kachka

Best Academic Book
‘The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the circulation of Cultural Value,’ by James F. English
(Harvard) English, the chair of guess which department at the University of Pennsylvania, has written a book about the manufacture of cultural prestige that is both intellectually shrewd and consistently entertaining. The main currency of this prestige, he submits, is the wildly proliferating number of prizes in the arts—the 4,500 feature films released every year compete for some 9,000 of them. As at least one critic (A. O. Scott) has commented, English’s book deserves to win some sort of award itself, and now it has.

2 ‘The Evolution-Creation Struggle,’ by Michael Ruse
(Harvard) How can intellectually sophisticated blue-staters like us bear to live in a nation where more than half the citizens are benighted enough to think God created man in his present form a few thousand years ago? Michael Ruse, a philosopher of science at Florida State University, is one of the most stimulating writers on the never-ending cultural debate over evolution. Here, this self-professed “ardent Darwinian” arrives at a surprisingly sympathetic view of the anti-Darwin crowd. They may be wrong, but they’re not quite as crazy as we smugly imagine.

3 ‘We Who Are Dark: The Philosophical Foundations of Black Solidarity,’ by Tommie Shelby (Harvard). Shelby, a rising star who teaches African-American studies at Harvard, argues for black solidarity without black racial identity. If that seems paradoxical at first blush, it won’t after you have read this account of black political thought from W.E.B. Du Bois to Malcolm X. Bonus book: Shelby is the co-editor of Hip Hop and Philosophy: Rhyme 2 Reason (Open Court), which improbably lays down a line from Plato to the Notorious B.I.G.
— Jim Holt

Gigi Levangrie Grazer, chronicler of adulterous Hollywood.   (Photo: Patrick McMullan)

Commercial Books
‘The Starter Wife,’ by Gigi Levangie Grazer
(Simon & Schuster) Long before rumors started flying about the breakup of Jessica and Nick (did she really give him the boot by e-mail?), Gracie Pollock, heroine of Gigi Levangie Grazer’s screwball comedy The Starter Wife, got her walking papers by cell phone. Her studio-executive husband was leaving her . . . for Britney Spears. Gracie gets her revenge in a Hollywood minute, when she meets a grizzled hunk in the surf at Malibu, and Britney gives her cheating ex the heave-ho. Grazer’s novel shows a sharp eye for contemporary foibles and an acute ear for dialogue. Her delectable fantasy is cliché—but name a fantasy that’s not.

Belushi: A Biography,’ by Judith Belushi Pisano and Tanner Colby
(Rugged Land) The list of contributors to this oral history of the comedian John Belushi—put together by his widow and Colby—reads like a Burke’s Peerage of American comedy: Bill Murray, Steve Martin, Christopher Guest, Buck Henry, Dan Aykroyd (who calls Belushi “the only man I could ever dance with”), and so on. Unlike other oral histories, which too often amount to hagiography or simple rambling, this one is suspenseful: Its pieces come together like a puzzle, forming a portrait of a man who was less than a saint and more than a sinner.

3 ‘Lipstick Jungle,’ by Candace Bushnell
(Hyperion) Like the heroines of Clare Boothe Luce’s The Women, with their Jungle Red nails and city-sharpened fangs, the women in Candace Bushnell’s newest novel sniff out power with delicately flared nostrils. They know how to hunt for it and won’t surrender it without a struggle. Unlike Luce’s women, though, their power lies in holding on to their careers, not their husbands. Is this as diverting as Carrie and her Manolos, or Charlotte and her Rabbit? In a word, um, no. But after turning thirtysomething single women into a hot commodity with Sex and the City, Bushnell now is making a damned good effort at turning fortysomething women into the next fetish age group. So here’s to her, for that service to humanity.
— Liesl Schillinger

The Short List

Best Brooklyn Novelist
Nicole Krauss, The History of Love. Krauss’s pitch-perfect rendition of the desperate loneliness of old age bested other, more strenuously sentimental efforts.

Best Queens Novelist
Sam Lipsyte. The insider’s outsider, Astoria’s own Lipsyte finally broke through with his little slacker masterpiece, Home Land.

Mary Gaitskill   (Photo: George Pitts)

Best Depressing Novel
‘Veronica,’ by Mary Gaitskill. Happy endings may be de rigueur in the movies, but for literature’s high practitioners, grief is usually the way to go. This year, among the new books from Nobel winners alone, protagonists included a very lonely old man (Márquez), an amputee photographer (Coetzee), and a cancer patient (Gordimer). But Gaitskill’s Alison, an ex-model dying of hepatitis C, has more to offer than contemplations of mortality. The mistress of human loss and longing, Gaitskill puts Alison on a hard road to redemption that’s as beautiful as it is painful to watch.