The 2008 Believer Book Award Reader Survey postcard came this year in the Fifty-Eighth issue: “Aroma Prom,” an art issue (including a somewhat cantankerous interview with Frank Stella; an engaging interview with cartoonist Keith Knight; Weschler interesting on Hockney and Irwin; very much enjoyed the “This is Corporate America” article).
Our postcard choices this year (following the postcard instructions to name “three works of fiction, each published in 2008, to be the finest of the year. By ‘finest’ I mean the most affecting and the best-written”) are as follows:
The City and the Mountains by Eca de Queiros: A break from high tech city wealth of 1895 to the mountains of Portugal.
On A Day Like This by Peter Stamm: A sense of self-impending doom that begins and ends in the enormity of the ordinary.
A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz: The numerator is 530.
We have this year again added a bit of drawing to the poor featureless face of the mid-60’s student on the cover of the postcard (this year, using acrylic paints, giving her a sailboat face).
The Coming of the Toads 
