What if you asked 125 top writers to pick their favorite books? Which titles would come out on top? You'll find the answer in The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books : the ultimate guide to the world's greatest books. As writers such as Norman Mailer, Annie Proulx, Stephen King, Jonathan Franzen, Claire Messud, Margaret Drabble, Michael Chabon and Peter Carey name the ten books that have meant the most to them, you'll be reminded of books you have always loved and introduced to works awaiting your discovery. The Top Ten includes summaries of 544 books―each of which is considered to be among the ten greatest books ever written by at least one leading writer. In addition to each writer's Top Ten List, the book features Top Ten Lists tabulated from their picks, including: • The Top Ten Books of All Time • The Top Ten Books by Living Writers • The Top Ten Books of the Twentieth Century • The Top Ten Mysteries • The Top Ten Comedies The Top Ten will help readers answer the most pressing question of all: What should I read next? J. Peder Zane is the book-review editor of the Raleigh News & Observer and the editor of Norton’s Remarkable Reads . His syndicated column received the ASNE Distinguished Writing Award for Commentary. Operating on the theory that no one knows more about great books than great writers, J. Peder Zane, book editor of the Raleigh News & Observer, asked 125 British and American writers (Andrea Barrett, Edwidge Danticat, Ha Jin, Reynolds Price and Tom Wolfe, among them) to "provide a list, ranked, in order, of what you consider the ten greatest works of fiction of all time." Zane suggests that these lists (and reconfigurations of the most often cited titles into various categories -- top ten works of the 19th century, living writers, comic works and so on) are "detailed road maps to the land of literary possibilities": "Part Rand-McNally, part Zagat's . . . it takes the anxiety out of bibliophilia by offering a comprehensive and authoritative guide to the world's best books." This is a readers' service of the first order, a guidebook to the resulting 544 titles for those tortured by too much choice and looking for what to read next. Each of the 125 responses appears in Zane's book -- some in short answer form, some just titles, some annotated -- along with a few essays, helping steer you through what Zane calls the "yin and yang of the modern reader: opportunity and befuddlement." To get you started, here's "The Top Top Ten": 1. Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy 2. Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert 3. War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy 4. Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov 5. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain 6. Hamlet, by William Shakespeare 7. The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald 8. In Search of Lost Time, by Marcel Proust 9. The stories of Anton Chekhov 10. Middlemarch, by George Eliot Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.