Best Ever AuthorNick Smith

"Ernest Cline wrote a nostalgia delivery system so effective it became the thing it was nostalgic for."

"Tom Leaf's oral history assembles the voices around Brian Wilson into a symphony of perspectives—finally, a Beach Boys book that understands pop genius as collaborative act."

"A missing cat, a dry well, a war crime in Manchuria. The connections never resolve. That's the point."

"Jane Austen's final completed novel is her quietest and her deepest—a story of second chances that understands what first chances cost."

"Holden Caulfield called everyone a phony in 1951 and hasn't stopped—J.D. Salinger's only novel remains the definitive text on adolescent alienation because it refuses to resolve into wisdom."

"Joseph Heller wrote a war novel so funny it makes you forget you're reading about death, and then makes you remember."

"Truman Capote invented the nonfiction novel by spending six years with two murderers—the result was a book that reads like fiction and haunts like fact."

"T.S. Eliot wrote a poem about paralysis that changed what poetry could do."

"Virginia Woolf wrote a novel where almost nothing happens, and everything changes."

"Vladimir Nabokov wrote a novel disguised as a poem with commentary, and hid a murder mystery inside."