J.K. Rowling's The Tales of Beedle the Bard is out on the shelves today with something just short of the fanfare of a typical Harry Potter launch. Still, 8 million copies were released worldwide, and the book has already begun rising to the top of all the bestseller lists.

The Tales of Beedle the Bard is a collection of fairy tales mentioned in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. According to this Associated Press article, Rowling, who both wrote and illustrated The Tales, described them as a distillation of themes from the Harry Potter books and her goodbye to that world.

Rowling is donating royalties from the book to a children's charity that she co-founded.

Set in Waynesville, North Carolina during the depression, Ron Rash's novel Serena traces the story of a wealthy lumber baron and his ruthlessly ambitious wife. Think Lady Macbeth in Appalachia... read more

_{Photo Credit: HarperCollins}

In The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell dissected the phenomena of social epidemics; and in Blink, he discussed the nature of split-second decision-making. In Outliers, Gladwell, the founding father of pop-sociology, examines high-achieving individuals and questions what makes them different from everyone else.

In debunking the Horatio Alger story, in which the disadvantaged but gifted and tenacious individual rises above his or her circumstances to achieve the American dream, Gladwell probes the social advantages, cultural influences, and auspicious timing enjoyed by those who "make it." He examines everyone - child hockey players, rock stars, and Fortune 500 executives - to illustrate that a person's success, while certainly tied to talent, owes a great deal to their circumstances.

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The release this year of Breaking Dawn, the fourth book in Stephenie Meyer's Twilight Saga coincided with the release of the film version of the saga's first book, creating a YA literary phenomenon not unlike that seen with Harry Potter. Around the world devoted teenage and adult fans have snatched up Stephenie Meyer's vampire books in record quantities sometimes even outnumbering those for J.K. Rowling's boy wizard series.

Twilight tells the story of Bella, the new teenager at school, who meets and falls in love with Edward, one of a small group of teenage vampires who keep strictly to an animal diet, having renounced human prey. Romance and horror ensue. If the YA reader on your gift list is not already firmly ensconced in the Twilight Saga, ensconce them.

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Joan Aiken (The Wolves of Willoughby Chase) published her first story collection, All You've Ever Wanted, when she was just eighteen. This collection included the first Armitage family stories, stories of a seemingly ordinary British family to whom magical things seemed to happen regularly.

In The Serial Garden, Big Mouth House has for the first time collected all of Joan Aiken's twenty-four Armitage family stories, four of which have never been published before. These short stories for children, with their mix of magic, myth, and humor, will appeal to readers of all ages.

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During the week of Thanksgiving, NPR considers what it means to be American by speaking with three authors - Junot Diaz, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Joseph O'Neill - who write about the immigrant experience. Listen to Jhumpa Lahiri speak about the stories in Unaccustomed Earth, her recent collection of short stories, and about her own immigrant experience.

Jhumpa Lahiri Biography

_{Photo Credit: Elena Seibert}

John Adams is an icon of contemporary classical music, whose name is often mentioned alongside other composers similarly rooted in the minimalist movement such as Steve Reich and Philip Glass. Adams is well known in musical circles for his 3-act opera, "Nixon in China," based on President Nixon's 1972 visit to China, and for "On the Transmigration of Souls," which commemorated the victims of the Septermber 11 attacks and won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2003. On a personal note, whenever I write I do so with non-lyrical musical playing in the background, and I happen to find John Adams' compositions to be excellent writing music.

Hallelujah Junction, John Adams' autobiography, for which an eponymous 2-disc CD set is available from Nonesuch Music, is not just a roadmap to one extraordinary composer's journey, but a roadmap through 20th century American music, part memoir and part explication and dissection of the creative process - an excellent gift for eclectic music lovers.

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"As in her previous novels featuring private detective Jackson Brodie – Case Histories and One Good Turn – Kate Atkinson has intertwined what first seem to be many separate stories, giving an added sense of mystery: you know all the characters will connect, but the how and why aren’t always obvious; and the twists to get them there can make your head spin..." read more

^{Photo Credit: Little, Brown & Co.}

O. Henry wrote some 400 short stories in his lifetime and is often credited with popularizing short fiction. Eight years after his death in1910, friends and colleagues established an award in his name, and in 1919, the first voume of the O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories was published.

The O. Henry Prize Stories 2008 upholds the tradition of terrific short prose with its eclectic mix of well-known authors like Anthony Doerr and Alice Munro and the work of relatively unknown writers that bubbled to the top of the year's entries. A must-have for short fiction lovers... read review

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André Kertész began a career in photojournalism in 1912, when he was just eighteen years old, and continued to do so until he died in 1985. Kertesz traveled the world, using his camera to find poetry in the mundane. Early on he took an interest in capturing people reading.

That work became On Reading, a book of sixty-six of Andre Kertesz's photographs taken between 1915 and 1970 all of which celebrate the universal and personal act of reading. On Reading, with its various subjects in various locales - a woman on a rooftop, an elderly man in a haphazard library, shoeless boys on a sidewalk - all connected by the act of reading, transports the viewer, much as the act of reading transported the subjects of these pictures.

_{Photo Courtesy Estate of André Kertész}

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10 Days of Giftmas: Holiday Gift Books 2008