Best Books of the Year

Fiction author Tim O’Brien appears at the National Book Festival. Speaker Biography: Tim O’Brien has been hailed as “the best American writer of his generation” by The San Francisco Examiner. The author of eight books, O’Brien received the National Book Award in Fiction in 1979 for his novel “Going After Cacciato.” In 2005 “The Things They Carried” was named by The New York Times as one of the 20 best books of the last quarter century. It received the Chicago Tribune Heartland Award in fiction and was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. The French edition of “The Things They Carried” received the prestigious Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger, and the title story was selected by John Updike for inclusion in The Best American Short Stories of the Century. “In the Lake of the Woods,” published in 1994, was chosen by Time magazine as the best novel of that year. The book also received the James Fenimore Cooper Prize from the Society of American Historians and was selected as one of the 10 best books of the year by The New York Times. O’Brien’s other works include “If I Die in a Combat Zone,” “Northern Lights,” “Tomcat in Love” and “July, July.” His short fiction, which has received the National Magazine Award, has appeared in numerous publications, including The New Yorker, Atlantic, Esquire, Playboy, and Harper’s.

Peter Sagal visits Google’s Mountain View, CA headquarters to discuss his book “The Book of Vice: Very Naughty Things (and How to Do Them).” This event took place on July 23, 2008, as part of the Authors@Google series. Somewhere, somebody is having more fun than you are. Or so everyone believes. Peter Sagal, a mild-mannered, Harvard-educated NPR host—the man who put the second “L” in “vanilla”—decided to find out if it’s true. From strip clubs to gambling halls to swingers clubs to porn sets—and then back to the strip clubs, but only because he left his glasses there—Sagal explores exactly what the sinful folk do, how much they pay for the privilege, and exactly how they got those funny red marks. He hosts a dinner for three of the smartest porn stars in the world, asks the floor manager at the oldest casino in Vegas how to beat the house, and indulges in molecular cuisine at the finest restaurant in the country. Meet liars and rich people who don’t think consumption is a disease, encounter the most spectacular view ever seen from a urinal, and say hello to Nina Hartley, the only porn star who can discuss Nietzsche while strangers smack her butt. With a sharp wit, a remarkable eye for detail, and the carefree insouciance that can only come from not having any idea what he’s getting into, Sagal proves to be the perfect guide to sinful behavior. What happens in Vegas—and in less glamorous places—is all laid out in these pages, a modern version of Dante’s Inferno, except …
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