值此佳节来临之际，我们将精挑细选的假期阅读书目倾情献上，以飨读者。书单中包括两部绝佳的惊悚小说、一部权威的短篇小说集和两本引人入胜的自行车骑行指南。

警察、匪徒、间谍上演的精彩大戏

    据报道，本·阿弗莱克正筹备将丹尼斯·勒翰的小说《以夜为生》（Live By Night）搬上银幕。届时，他将自编自导并担任制片、亲自出镜。如若报道属实，阿弗莱克势将有望凭借此片再夺大奖。

    原著小说围绕乔·考夫林的人生浮沉展开，考夫林是波士顿警局一位赫赫有名的警官最小的儿子。他与父亲背道而驰，从小偷小摸的街头犯罪干起，逐渐掌握了炉火纯青的犯罪艺术，后来成长为当地黑帮老大的左膀右臂，投身于轰轰烈烈的犯罪大业中。就在事业风生水起之时，他被抓入查尔斯顿监狱，服刑期间吃了不少苦头。也正是在狱中，他结识了自己的新老板，一名黑手党头目。出狱后，他奉新老板之命坐镇坦帕（美国佛罗里达州西部城市——译注），开展一起走私行动。

    时值20世纪20年代中期，全美实行禁酒令，地下酒厂、酒吧遍地开花。每一座废弃工厂的地下室里都有酿酒厂，每一片街区都有地下酒吧。黑帮暴徒们提着火光四射的冲锋枪在大街上巡逻，每一处街角都有焦头烂额的警察在指挥混乱的交通。勒翰以黑色电影的笔触描绘了一段引人入胜的历史，淋漓尽致地刻画了多姿多彩的众生百态。酒类走私贩、雪茄烟制作工、风情女郎、福音传道者、三K党成员……一个个鲜活的人物跃然纸上。前一秒烂醉如泥、称兄道弟的执法者和黑帮成员下一秒就可能反目成仇。

    这是一部扣人心弦、如电影般精彩的小说，其类似于勒翰之前的两部著作——《神秘河》（Mystic River）和《禁闭岛》（Shutter Island）。这两部小说分别被克林特·伊斯特伍德和马丁·斯科塞斯翻拍成了卖座大片。虽然乔·考夫林并非正面人物，但他完全可以称得上是一个耀眼的明星，具备一切令人喜爱和信赖的特质。他两度坠入爱河，将坦帕的走私行动开展得有声有色，和纽约的福星卢西安诺（美国知名罪犯、黑帮大哥，被称为美国“现代有组织犯罪之父”——译注）达成了一笔交易，还在卡斯特罗统治前的古巴给孩子们建了一座棒球场。

    In the spirit of the season, here's a selection of literary stocking stuffers for you or the bookworm in your life. They include two terrific thrillers, a definitive short story collection, and a pair of engrossing books about biking.

Cops, hoods, and spies

    Ben Affleck, who knows a good book when he sees one, is reportedly set to write, direct, produce, and star in the film version of Dennis Lehane's novel Live By Night. If the reports are true, he's got himself another winner.

    The book follows a bouncing ball named Joe Coughlin, the youngest son of a prominent member of the Boston police department. Joe takes off in a different direction, first mastering the art of petty street crime, then moving on to serious big-time capers as the right-hand man of a local mob boss. His journey is interrupted by a stretch in the Charleston penitentiary, where he learns a few painful facts of life. It's also where he meets his next boss, a Mafia capo who sends him to Tampa to take charge of a fledgling bootlegging operation.

    It's the mid-1920s. Prohibition is the law of the land, and that means distilleries in the basement of every deserted factory building, speakeasies on every block, gangsters patrolling the streets with blazing tommy guns and damaged cops directing traffic at every corner. As Lehane guides us through a fascinating history lesson bathed in noir, we meet rumrunners and cigar-makers, a string of fascinating women, evangelists, Ku Klux Klansmen, twisted lawmen and gangsters who can be loyal friends one minute, cruel enemies the next.

    It's an exciting, cinematic story, similar in that sense to Lehane'sMystic River, which gave Clint Eastwood some wonderful movie material, and Shutter Island, which Martin Scorsese turned into a gem. Despite the fact that Joe Coughlin lives on the wrong side of the street, he is a full-fledged star who has what it takes to win our trust and affection. He falls in love not once but twice, gets the bootlegging operation in Tampa up and running, works out a deal with Lucky Luciano in New York, and winds up building a baseball field for kids in pre-Castro Cuba.

    克里斯·帕弗恩的处女作《侨民》（The Expats）完全可以称得上是一部令人手不释卷的佳作。凯特·摩尔的丈夫戴克斯特是一个行事低调的电脑极客，他受雇给卢森堡大公国的一家银行开发安全系统。这份工作薪水丰厚，可以让凯特、戴克斯特和孩子们借故离开死气沉沉、毫无新鲜感的华盛顿，去全新的世界畅快旅行，完成他们平日里念念不忘的夙愿。

    不过这样一来，凯特就必须辞工，这稍微有些麻烦。凯特一直有个秘密隐瞒着丈夫和孩子们，那就是她做了15年CIA特工。不过话又说回来，戴克斯特也有他不为人知的一面，连凯特也被蒙在鼓里。他们在卢森堡接触到的大多数侨民也都有各自的隐情。

    这样的设定稍显牵强，但站得住脚。原因之一在于，帕弗恩对故事发生的所在地很熟。他老婆几年前曾在卢森堡工作，一家人对侨民的生活有切身的体会，帕弗恩在此期间也趁机云游四方，仔细考察了阿尔卑斯山、巴塞罗那、阿姆斯特丹、巴黎及其他在小说中起重要作用的欧洲城市。还有一个原因就是，帕弗恩在从事犯罪小说的创作之前，曾以编辑食谱为生，他显然知道如何将众多元素融会贯通，使故事的情节环环相扣，从而创作出一部扣人心弦的惊悚小说。

    出版商在宣传《侨民》时经常使用“令人手不释卷”、“间谍惊悚小说”、“悬念迭出”这类字眼，它们都很贴切。小说一开头就交代了凯特是个CIA特工，但随着故事情节的发展，读者才会慢慢发现凯特其实是个训练有素的杀手，她有个不为人知的惊天秘密。戴克斯特由于工作的缘故经常在欧洲大陆各地奔忙，他也有自己神秘的一面。至于那些FBI特工到底在探查什么，这也是个难解之谜。

    作者在有些地方稍显用力过度。故事的时间、地点跳跃很快，需要读者集中注意力；故事情节的发展常常出乎意料，令人唏嘘。但这样的代价是值得的，因为你读到的是一部绝佳之作，它具备优秀间谍小说所必需的一切惊悚元素，令人手不释卷。本·阿弗莱克或许正在紧锣密鼓地筹备《以夜为生》的翻拍，不过另有消息称，哥伦比亚电影公司（CBS Films）正打算不惜一切代价尽早将《侨民》搬上宽频荧幕。祝愿双方都能早日成功。

    Chris Pavone's first novel The Expats is everything a page-turner should be. Kate Moore's husband Dexter, a low-key computer geek, has been hired to set up a security system for a bank in the grand duchy of Luxembourg. It's a high-paying position that would give Kate, Dexter and the boys an excuse to leave dull, old Washington, D.C. and travel and do all the things they've always talked about.

    It also means that Kate will have to give up her job, and that's a bit of a problem. Unbeknownst to Dexter and the kids, Kate has spent the last 15 years as a CIA operative. But hold on a minute. Dexter also has a secret life he doesn't share with most people, including Kate, and it turns out that most of the expats they hang with in Luxembourg aren't exactly what they seem to be either.

    A little contrived, sure, but it works. One reason: Pavone knows the territory, thanks to the fact that his wife took a job in Luxembourg a few years ago, providing the family with a real-time life as expats and giving Pavone the opportunity to travel and soak up the nuances of the Alps, Barcelona, Amsterdam, Paris, and other European locations that play key roles in the book. A second reason: Before he turned to a life of crime writing, Pavone edited cookbooks for a living, and he clearly learned how to blend disparate ingredients into the multilayers needed to make a suspenseful thriller.

    The PR campaign for The Expats relies heavily on phrases like "non-stop action," "espionage thriller" and "layers of deceit," all of which are on target. We know at the start that Kate's a CIA operative, but it takes a while before we discover she's a trained killer who has a mind-blowing secret she's never shared with anyone. Dexter, whose job takes him all over the Continent, has his own set of mysterious secrets, and what about those FBI agents who seem to be following anything but the straight and narrow?

    The Expats is a little over the top at points. It's filled with time and place changes that demand your attention and developments that require you to suspend belief every now and then, but that's the price you pay for a grabber of a spy novel that touches all the cloak-and-dagger bases and is exceptionally hard to put down. Ben Affleck may be hard at work on Live By Night, but word is that CBS Films is doing all it can to bring The Expats to the big screen ASAP. Good luck to both.

老少咸宜的短篇佳作

    《牛津美国短篇小说选》（The Oxford Book of American Short Stories）不乏优秀的候选作家，乔伊斯·卡罗尔·欧茨便是其中之一。她是1992年第一版及今年新版小说选的供稿人和编辑。这一次，欧茨说，她“很高兴能够从美国经典作家的作品中发现一些不为人知、却引人入胜的佳作”。也就是说，第一版收录了厄内斯特·海明威的著作《一个干净明亮的地方》（A Clean, Well-Lighted Place），今年的新版则会收录其相对而言不那么出名的作品《白象似的群山》（Hills Like White Elephants）。这篇小说出版于1927年，通篇都是一男一女在西班牙火车站的对话，句子简洁而零散。它已经成为海明威标志性的风格，也是后人竞相模仿的对象。

    欧茨还把约翰·契弗和平克尼·本尼迪克特的旧作换成了新作。她将15名老作家剔除出候选作家名单，取而代之的是17张新面孔，其中包括朱诺特·迪亚兹。我对迪亚兹还很陌生，但《纽约客》（The New Yorker）的编辑们和普利策奖委员会都已经对她很熟悉了。迪亚兹不仅带来了一个精彩的短篇——《新泽西州，爱迪生市》（Edison, New Jersey），还留下一句箴言，我们当中有些人对这句箴言体会尤深：“作家之所以成其为作家，乃是因为即使毫无希望，即使所做的事情前途渺茫，他还是会坚持写下去。”

    《牛津美国短篇小说选》的编选初衷是为了展开全方位的研究，帮助读者形成深厚的文学功底，但它的作用远不止于此。你可以随时随地沉浸其中，又可以随时随地将它放在一边。它是一本有趣的读物，上面登载了各个入选作家鞭辟入里的背景简介。全书收录短篇小说59篇，供稿名家包括雷蒙德·卡佛、塞缪尔·克莱门斯（马克·吐温——译注）、斯蒂芬·克莱恩、威廉·福克纳、F.斯科特·菲茨杰拉德、华盛顿·欧文、伯纳德·马拉默德、赫尔曼·梅尔维尔、伊迪丝·华顿及斯蒂芬·金、安妮·普罗克斯、菲利普·罗斯、约翰·厄普代克等。

Short Stories for Everyone

    The Oxford Book of American Short Stories has lots going for it, including Joyce Carol Oates, who contributed to and edited both this edition and the original, which was published in 1992. This time around, Oates says she was "pleased to discover virtually unknown yet fascinating work by certain classic American writers." That means Ernest Hemingway's "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place," which appeared in the first edition, has been replaced by "Hills Like White Elephants," a lesser-known story, published in 1927, that consists almost entirely of a conversation between a man and a women at a train station in Spain, talking in the lean, staccato-like manner that became Hemingway's trademark and a style hundreds of others would copy.

    Oates also replaced older stories by John Cheever and Pinckney Benedict with newer ones. She totally eliminated the work of 15 other writers, but made up for the deletions with 17 new faces, including Junot Diaz, who was new to me but not to the editors at The New Yorker and the Pulitzer Prize committee. In addition to a great short story called "Edison, New Jersey," Diaz leaves us with a message that some of us have learned the hard way: "A writer is a writer because even when there is no hope, even when nothing he does shows signs of promise, he keeps writing anyway."

    Designed as a sweeping survey that touches the appropriate literary bases, The Oxford Book of American Short Stories is all that and more. It's the kind of book you can dip into and out of at will, a fun read that includes short but meaningful background on the authors. It contains 59 stories in all, including contributions from Raymond Carver, Samuel Clemens, Stephen Crane, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Washington Irving, Bernard Malamud, Herman Melville and Edith Wharton, along with Stephen King, Annie Proulx, Philip Roth, and John Updike.

骑游者的逍遥生活

    《自行车风尚》（Cycle Chic）一书收录了368张骑游者与其爱车的合照。我在纽约植物园里偶然看到了这本书，一打开就看到一张骑车妹的靓照。妹子长发长腿、身着短裙，或许这本书这么受欢迎，跟这些靓照也有关系吧。不过好戏还在后头。

    除了年轻姑娘的靓照，很多照片——确切地说是快照——拍的都是小伙子和大男孩、小屁孩和淘气鬼、带宝宝的妈妈、骑双座自行车的夫妇、把狗放在车篮子里的车手，如此等等，不一而足。大多数照片的拍摄者是米卡埃尔·科尔维尔-安德森，他是时尚博客“哥本哈根自行车风尚”（Copenhagen Cycle Chic）的博主，所以他拍摄的大多是穿着入时的自行车车手。由于照片取景于世界各地，这本书还可以作为一本不错的旅游指南。不过我最终把它买下来是因为上面的照片都是按照主题分组的，从照片上看，不管车手们身居何地，车行何处，他们的风貌和举止大体是相似的。

Biking Bliss

    Cycle Chic contains 368 photographs of people and their bicycles. I ran across it in the bookstore at the New York Botanical Garden, and the fact that it opens with a photo of a lovely young cyclist with long hair, long legs, and a short skirt probably had something to do with its attraction, but that was just for starters.

    In addition to young ladies, a large number of the photos -- they're actually snapshots -- are of men and boys, kids and toddlers, mothers with babies, couples on two-seater bikes, bikers with dogs in their baskets, and loads of other variations. Most of the photos were taken by Mikael Colville-Andersen, founder of a fashion blog called Copenhagen Cycle Chic, so the bikers tend to be well dressed. Because the pictures come from all parts of the world, the book doubles as a nice travelogue. But the fact that the photos are grouped by theme provides the real take-away: Regardless of where they live and bike, people tend to look and act pretty much alike.

    接下来再给大家推荐一本以自行车为主题的假期读物：《纽约骑行指南》（Where To Bike New York City），作者是J.P·波特兰。这本书是一套旅游指南书系列丛书中的一本。丛书的编纂目的是为了帮助车手寻找风光最秀美的骑行路线环游世界各国的城市。本书的作者生长于纽约，是一个用生命骑车的人，他知道在纽约怎么骑车最方便。

    “写这本书之前，”波特兰在序言中写道，“我曾一边骑车横穿布鲁克林桥，一边欣赏日出和日落。笔者曾在曼哈顿、布隆克斯区（美国纽约市北部的一个行政区——译注）、皇后区（纽约市东部的行政区——译注）和长岛（美国纽约州东南端岛屿——译注）骑行周游，找到了无数条环游北新泽西的路径。”

    本书有一部分章节专门介绍安全骑游的基本知识，上面讲解了骑游设备、自行车知识及出行前的重要准备。最重要的是，书中附有地图和58条旅游线路的详细的指南，帮助骑游者全方位感受“城市中的建筑、美食、人文、古董及各种新奇、神秘的事物。”这本书是骑游者的宝贵资源，对于不爱骑车的步行背包客来说也是不可多得的宝贝。

    译者：Nasca

    Here's another bike-themed stocking stuffer: Where To Bike New York City, by J.P. Partland. It's part of a series of guidebooks designed to help bike riders find the most picturesque ways around various cities throughout the world. The author is a native New Yorker, lives to bike, and knows the best ways to get from here to there on two wheels.

    "By the time I got around to writing this book," Partland says in the introduction, "I had seen both the sunrise and sunset from the saddle while cruising over the Brooklyn Bridge. I had circumnavigated Manhattan, toured the Bronx, made my way through Queens and Long Island, and discovered countless routes around northern New Jersey."

    The book contains a section of basics that spell out the ground rules of safe biking. It goes into equipment, the key things you need to know about bikes and the important things to do before you take off. Most important, it contains maps and detailed instructions for 58 specific trips that uncover "the incredible diversity in architecture, food, people, old stuff, new stuff and arcane stuff that can be found in the city." The book is a great resource for bikers. It's an equally valuable tool for the less adventuresome among us who like to do our exploring by foot.