Magill's Literary Annual 2010

Magill's Literary Annual 2010: Essay-reviews of 200 Outstanding Books Published in the United States During 2009 With an Annotated List of Titles
By John D. Wilson, Steven G. Kellman
Number Of Pages: 1016
Publication Date: 2010-06-04
ISBN-10: 1587656558
ISBN-13: 9781587656552

Magill’s Literary Annual, 2010 is the fifty-sixth publication in a series that began in 1954. Critical essays for the first twenty-two years were collected and published in the twelve-volume Survey of Contemporary Literature in 1977; since then, yearly sets have been published. Each year,Magill’s Literary Annual seeks to evaluate critically 200 major examples of serious literature, both fiction and nonfiction, published during the previous calendar year. The philosophy behind our selection process is to cover works that are likely to be of interest to general readers, that reflect publishing trends, that add to the careers of authors being taught and researched in literature programs, and that will stand the test of time. By filtering the thousands of books published every year down to 200 notable titles, the editors have provided busy librarians with an excellent reader’s advisory tool and patrons with fodder for book discussion groups and a guide for choosing worthwhile reading material. The essay-reviews in the Annual provide a more academic, "reference" review of a work than is typically found in newspapers and other periodical sources.
The reviews in the two-volume Magill’s Literary Annual, 2010 are arranged alphabetically by title. At the beginning of both volumes is a complete alphabetical list, by category, of all covered books that provides readers with the title, author, and a brief description of each work. Every essay is approximately four pages in length.
Each one begins with a block of reference information in a standard order:
• Full book title, including any subtitle
• Author: Name, with birth and death years, where available
• First published: Original foreign-language title, with year and country, when pertinent
• Original language and translator name, when pertinent
• Introduction, Foreword, etc., with writer’s name, when pertinent
• Publisher: Company name and city, number of pages, retail price
• Type of work: (chosen from standard categories)