This HSG comes from Roy Kesey!
The answer to the
question as to the identity of the ideal book for 
holiday gifting—that is, what
I'd get you if you were me and I (you) didn't already have it—is Brian
Evenson's The Wavering Knife. There are many, many, many reasons why
this is so, and if you are 
interested in knowing any of them, I encourage you
to track down the current issue of The Cincinnati Review, wherein all is
revealed. Seriously, all. We're not even wearing pasties.
A different question:
What books did I, having realized just in time that not everyone is me,
actually get for other people? Well, now. My sister, I thought, would enjoy a
few of those complicated sweet/bitter laughs that Lorrie Moore 
is so good at,
so she gets Birds of America. Mom's a big 
Kingsolver fan, so The Lacuna was an easy call. Dad, as much a sucker as I am
for real-life explorers who traipse interestingly into jungle and fail to
return, gets David Grann's The
Lost City of Z. And my cousin Tim, who has spent most of the past
several years dealing with sand and bullets, gets a little bit of complex
gorgeous green: Bruce Chatwin's In
Patagonia, perhaps my favorite of those travel books that need their own
nook-shelf somewhere between fiction and non-.
Roy Kesey did not supply me with a bio so I'm winging it. He currently 
resides in Peru with his lovely wife and two children. He's the author of the novella, Nothing in the World, and the short story collection, All Over, and numerous other writings both on and off of the web.
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