The novelist, 34, made a splash in 2007 with his debut novel,"Then We Came to the End,"a mordantly funny tale of American office culture during the Internet boom-and-bust of the late 1990s. It was chosen as a finalist for the National Book Award. His picks:
My Five Most Important Books 1. "Sylvester and the Magic Pebble" by William Steig. My father read this to me until I was too old, around senior year of college.
2. "Pale Fire" by Vladimir Nabokov. Asks: is it such a crime for a lonely bachelor to install two Ping-Pong tables in his basement?
