Best of Boston

This year, Boston’s literary world hit the jackpot with national success stories in local writers Erin Morgenstern and Jack Gantos. Morgenstern’s fantastical debut novel about dueling magicians, The Night Circus, won raves (and a movie deal). But Gantos, a veteran author and former Emerson professor, soared to even greater heights when he won the Newbery Medal—the kid-lit version of the Best Picture Oscar—for his quirky, semi-autobiographical Dead End in Norvelt, about a boy growing up writing obituaries in an increasingly eerie town.