From Catch-22 to the Book of Job, the author of Hope: A Tragedy picks his favourite books that ‘look into the abyss, smile, and give the abyss the finger’.

The Guardian’s top ten for today includes a piece by Shalom Auslander, author of a story collection, Beware of God, and the memoir Foreskin’s Lament.

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“There is a clothing brand in the United States named ‘Life Is Good’, a monstrous lie which is emblazoned on all their products. It is an enormously successful brand, and I’ll tell you why: because life isn’t good. ‘They give birth astride of a grave,’ wrote Samuel Beckett, ‘the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.’ He was only half-right; he left out the part about there being banana peels on the ground beside the grave, so that from the moment we are born, we slip, and drop our coffee, and everyone points at us and laughs, and then there’s a Holocaust, and then, and only then, is it dark once more. Books that cry at the tragedy are easy and, in my view, lazy; these books look into the abyss, smile, and give the abyss the finger. That’s much more difficult.”

Read the full list here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/feb/29/shalom-auslander-top-10-comic-tragedies?CMP=twt_gu