2000s decade

bergg: The Biafran War of the late 1960s is seen through the eyes of Ugwu, a 13-year-old peasant houseboy, and the beautiful, passionate twin sisters Olanna and Kainene. This stunning piece of writing won the 2007 Orange Prize. -aggsliterature.wordpress.com

bergg: Aravind Adiga on The White Tiger “The White Tiger is set in one of the fastest-changing societies on Earth — modern-day India — but the story it tells is an old one: of a man’s quest to be free. One afternoon I was in the zoo in New Delhi, and saw a white tiger in its cage, and I thought, ‘A man who is prepared to do anything for his freedom — sacrifice his family, kill another man — would be as rare as that animal” -http://aggsliterature.wordpress.com

bergg: Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, the book follows Oscar Wao, an overweight Dominican boy growing up in New Jersey. The book deals with themes of isolation and nostalgia while blending comedy and tragedy. -dailyiowan.com

bergg: At the suggestion of an editor, journalist Barbara Ehrenreich attempted to live for two years on the wages of the average unskilled American worker. She worked as a waitress, maid and Wal-Mart clerk, shacking up in dives and dining on fast food, in an effort to find out how America’s working poor make it. Her answer: A lot of them don’t. If her efforts to suggest remedies are often rebuffed by her own subjects, her visceral dispatches from the ragged fringe of the American dream remain indispensable. -salon.com

bergg: A strange gender changing, time spanning complicated novel. Past and present combine to give this novel literary force. -randomnonsenseaboutthings.blogspot.com

bergg: Recounts the lives and experiences of two Afghan women Laila and Mariam starting with their separate lives as children and how they came to be best friends as two wives of a local shoe maker named Rasheed. During a time of war, poverty, gender issues, and abuse, this creatively written novel still offers a bit of hope.

bergg: A father and son travel through a post-apocalyptic America, half-starved, choking on a never-ending stream of ash sifting down from the sky, and with no hope for an end to their suffering beyond dissolution and death. -A.V. Club

bergg: A girl with a big imagination thinks she sees something. She is wrong, but she sticks to her guns. Lives are ruined. As an old woman, she wonders if she can repair her irreparable mistake. -pastemagazine.com

bergg: a six part novel, each part divided into two and connected with the next, with the first half chronological, the second half inverse chronological, so the middle of the novel is the whole sixth tale -fantasybookcritic.blogspot.com

bergg: Munro’s tenth short story collection is a pitch-perfect meditation on circumscribed lives and the longing for escape. -http://aggsliterature.wordpress.com

bergg: The book that revealed Barack Obama as not just an ambitious politician, but also as an eloquent writer and deep thinker. The fascinating story of his early life, first published in 1995, was reissued in 2004 and became a worldwide bestseller as momentum for the presidency built. -http://aggsliterature.wordpress.com

bergg: In New York City, following 9/11, Hans, a banker from the Netherlands, finds himself marooned among the occupants of the Chelsea Hotel after his English wife and son return to London. Alone, untethered, and feeling lost in the country he'd come to regard as home, Hans stumbles upon the vibrant New York subculture of cricket, where, thanks to a friendship with Trinidadian, Chuck Ramkissoon, Hans begins to reconnect with his life and his adopted country. Ramkissoon, a Gatsby-like figure - part idealist and part operator - introduces Hans to an "other" New York populated by immigrants and strivers of every race and nationality. Hans is alternately seduced and instructed by Chuck's ability to a hold fast to a sense of possibility in which Hans has come to lose faith. (summary from ISBN 1602853142)

bergg: There are six stories in this collection. Four of them are very good, and the other two are at least good -- a success average that is highly unusual for a short-story collection. If, like your humble reviewer, you had to regularly review short-story collections, you would soon discover that they almost always suck -- tinseling suburban dullness with some distant derivative of the Joycean epiphany until you want to scream: Basta! That Saunders stories are on such a high level is close to miraculous. -The Austin Chronicle, Roger Gathman (May 19, 2000)

bergg: A 21st-century book about the 20th century. The writer's fourth and final novel was told through a pastiche of memoir, invention, winding sentences, black-and-white photographs, architectural plans, and reproduced stamps. The Holocaust is the book's central trauma, but the novel anticipated fresher wounds, too. -villagevoice.com

bergg: With all the elements of a penny dreadful – orphans, double-crossing, madness and pornography – this Victorian tale could have sunk to the level of picaresque pastiche, but while much ink has been spilled on Waters’s lesbian characters it is her ability to summon up the past in palpable, brooding detail that is her most striking characteristic. This is a novel that seems easy to categorise but doesn’t fit into any obvious genre. -telegraph.co.uk

bergg: A sweeping narrative history of the events leading to 9/11, a groundbreaking look at the people and ideas, the terrorist plans and the Western intelligence failures that culminated in the assault on America. Lawrence Wright's book is based on five years of research and hundreds of interviews that he conducted in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Sudan, England, France, Germany, Spain, and the United States. (summary from ISBN 0713999764)

bergg: Two nice, mid-20th-century Jewish boys go to work in the nascent comic book industry, where the dreams and nightmares of the real world manifest themselves in the extravagant guise of entertainment for children. This buoyant tragicomic adventure story remains one of the most persuasive and gorgeously written depictions (and vindications) of the way popular culture transfigures our lived experience to become the modern-day equivalent of myth and folklore. -Laura Miller, Salon.com

bergg: Following letters written by Rev. John Ames, this winner of the Pulitzer Prize centers on the memories and legacy of his life. Taking place in fictional Gilead, Iowa, Robinson explores themes of religion, family, love, and doubt. -dailyiowan.com

bergg: Retelling the story of Australian folk hero Ned Kelly where he writes the story for his daughter. Although set in Australia, you could say this is one of the best Westerns in a while. -randomnonsenseaboutthings.blogspot.com

bergg: tells the tale of fifty-nine people that were held hostage in an unnamed country in South America. The hostages, which include international ambassadors, Japanese businessmen, an opera singer, and local government officials, had gathered together to celebrate Katsumi Hosokawa's birthday. Hosokawa was being courted by local politicians to build a plant in their country. Bel Canto isn't the usual blood-and-guts tale of a hostage situation; instead, the novel focuses on the various hostages and terrorists and the relationships that grow amongst them all. -Charlotte Mecklenburg Library, cmlibrary.org

bergg: ...a rich story about secrets, ghosts, winter, books and family. The Thirteenth Tale is a book lover's book, with much of the action taking place in libraries and book stores, and the line between fact and fiction constantly blurred. It is hard to believe this is Setterfield's debut novel (released in 2006), for she makes the words come to life with such skill that some passages even gave me chills. -Erin Miller

bergg: A peculiar, chilling fantasy. In an alternative America, the Aryan supremacist and aviator Charles Lindbergh becomes President in 1940 and persecution of the Jews begins — as narrated by an alternative Philip Roth. -http://aggsliterature.wordpress.com

bergg: A brilliantly plotted tale of an outsider who finds himself sitting at the high table of Thatcherism. His young turks have a high — and gay — old time while the twin shadows of Aids and of being found out loom over them. -http://aggsliterature.wordpress.com

bergg: Just when you thought the Vietnam War and the 1960s had been thoroughly bled of all potential for artistic exploration, along comes Denis Johnson. Tree of Smoke somehow manages to crack new ground over what, in a lesser writer’s hands, would be thoroughly decimated territory. -thebrowntweedsociety.com