*As we wrestle this issue to press from a watertight off-site bunker, lower Manhattan, including our 23rd street office, is still dark. Days after Hurricane Sandy, the subways remain crippled; bridges, now open, are clogged with traffic; some tunnels remain off limits to all but the best swimmers (rats love a good dip). Even without hurricanes, assembling the Best Books issue is tough. To decide on our top 10, we went back to our tavern annex this year, editor after editor making their case for what should and shouldn't make it. In 2011 we all rallied around a popular novel; this time we threw that love at Chris Ware, who designed and hand-lettered our cover (featuring the first alteration of the PW logo in the company's history) based on his brilliant book-in-a-box, Building Stories, plus nine other amazing books in our top 10, plus more than a hundred others that made 2012 an amazing year for books.
Building Stories
Chris Ware (Pantheon)
Bring Up the Bodies
Hilary Mantel (Holt)
The Round House
Louise Erdrich (Harper)
Happiness Is a Chemical in the Brain
Lucia Perillo (Norton)
The Devil in Silver
Victor LaValle (Spiegel & Grau)
Detroit City Is the Place to Be: The Afterlife of an American Metropolis
Mark Binelli (Metropolitan)
All We Know: Three Lives
Lisa Cohen (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
The People Who Eat Darkness: The True Story of a Young Woman Who Vanished from the Streets of Tokyo
Richard Lloyd Parry (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600–1675
Bernard Bailyn (Knopf)
Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944–1956
Anne Applebaum (Doubleday)
*http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/best-books/2012/top-10#list
