talks about the effects of a traffic accident during high school, in which a classmate on a bicycle swerved in front of his car, and was killed. Although he could not have avoided the accident, and was not at fault, he still felt guilty, and it affected him for decades. His next book, Half a Life is a memoir concerning that traffic accident; it was published by McSweeney's in September 2010, and was excerpted in GQ magazine, and This American Life, and also in The Times and The Daily Mail (UK). Half a Life was named an Entertainment Weekly Must Read and a The New York Times Editor's Pick—and a Best Book of the Year by NPR, Amazon.com, The Plain Dealer, and The San Francisco Chronicle, among many others. A critical favorite in the UK, Half a Life was called "a masterpiece" by Robert McCrum in The Guardian, "one of the best books I have ever read" by Ali Catterall on The BBC, as well as "precise, elegantly written, fresh, wise, and very sad ... indicative not only of a very talented writer, but of a proper human being" by Nick Hornby. Half a Life won the 2011 National Book Critics Circle Award (Autobiography). The Queen of Tuesday His most recent book, The Queen of Tuesday, is a hybrid of fiction, biography, and memoir, focused around an imagined love-affair between the author's grandfather and Lucille Ball. Another critical success, it has received favorable reviews in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, the New Yorker, the Los Angeles Times, among many others. The Millions declared, of the novel, "The best book yet from one of our best writers." In "New Pop Lit," Karl Wenclas wrote, "If Darin Strauss isn't the best contemporary American writer, he's near the top ... No one could write a better book!" On NBC News, Bill Goldstein said "I love this book ... Brilliant." The novel was a Washington Post Best Book of the Year, a The Millions and Lit Hub Best Book of the Year, and a finalist for the Joyce Carol Oates Literary Prize, as well as being featured on CBS Sunday Morning. Critical reception Strauss has been called "a brave new voice in literature" by The Wall Street Journal, and "one of the most sharp and spirited of his generation," by Powells Books, "sublime" and "brilliant" by The Boston Globe.