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.

It's an argument as old as politics itself: How do we responsibly finance the system of government that provides the basic framework of our society? Taxation without representation was at the core of forming this country. Now the rate and distribution of taxes are what's polarizing America.

Gasoline in Norway currently costs more than $9 a gallon. In Germany the price is more than $8. Prices between $6 and $10 per gallon are common throughout most EU countries. In the U.S., by comparison, the highest average per-gallon price is close to hitting $5, and we grumble about it.

Gilt Vice Chairman and former CEO Susan Lyne says Michelle Peluso is the right executive to run the business as the company focuses on flash sales. By Jennifer Reingold, senior editor FORTUNE -- Fortune’s Jennifer Reingold spoke with Gilt Vice Chairman

As Washington approaches judgment day over the fiscal cliff, the mix of tax hikes and spending cuts prompted CEOs from JPMorgan Chase's (JPM) Jamie Dimon to Honeywell's (HON) Dave Cote to march to Washington for a resolution.

In the run-up to the fiscal cliff, special dividends are being called Corporate America's answer to higher taxes. Companies are rushing, analysts say, to reward shareholders with billions in special payouts before individuals' dividend tax rates are raised in 2013.

If your Instagram photos look wonky on Twitter, remember that's not by accident. It's by design. Earlier this week, Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom announced onstage at Europe's tech conference Le Web that the popular photo-sharing start-up was killing support for "Twitter cards."

A business etiquette expert tells how to take the awkwardness out of playing Santa at the office. FORTUNE -- Dear Annie: This is my first holiday season with my current employer -- I’m in my first “real” job after college -- so

Loading up on the tech giant’s shares has been a winning strategy. By Jon Birger, contributor FORTUNE -- Just thinking about Terry and Jeanne Gregory’s portfolio can be a little scary. Retirees now living in Honolulu, the Gregorys have basically their entire

There's nothing like having a local guide. Whether you're a climber trying to scale the heights of Mount Everest or an investor exploring a stock, you can benefit from the insight of a person who spends endless hours learning a particular terrain.

What if your life's work could be measured by one simple number, and what if that number was 2.2 trillion? As in dollars. I walked into an upscale Midtown Manhattan restaurant looking for such a man. He was easy to spot.

Citigroup CEO Michael Corbat missed his chance to make a good first impression. His second impression seems to be winning more fans. Corbat took over from Vikram Pandit in mid-October in what appeared to be a chaotic mess.

"Congress is being all Congressy again," quips a youthful male anchor with a gee-whiz eye-roll as he reports on the demise of a Congressional Bill called the Sportsmen's Act of 2012. He's an anchor on NowThis News, the new mobile social video news network started by two of the Huffington Post's foun...

Delta could be making a big mistake pursuing Virgin Atlantic. While investing in an airline is a risky venture at any time, a tie-up with Virgin today looks particularly bad for the Atlanta-based carrier. The deal could jeopardize Delta's marketing and anti-trust agreements with its European partner...

This holiday, the toy aisle will be a lot quieter. Again. It seems like we haven't had a must-have holiday toy since the Furby hit stores in 1998. The plush owl-like creatures spawned a buying frenzy, drawing more than 40 million sales during its first three years.

Anyone care to run an $54 billion-a-year tech giant? Anyone have any good ideas how to get it growing again? Intel is looking for a new CEO to take the reins at the Silicon Valley icon next May, when Paul Otellini steps down from the job.

Investment-grade municipal bonds used to be Snooze City. You know, the kind of thing that we retail investors buy, stick into our portfolios, and then forget about. But these days, thanks to the Federal Reserve's holding down interest rates and the prospect of steeper income taxes facing top-bracket...

For the past year, there's been high-tech parlor game playing out in an unlikely place: the American plains. Local press in Nebraska and Iowa has been abuzz over the fate of a server farm -- yes, a server farm -- a $1.5 billion project that would almost certainly rank as one of the nation's largest.

Howard Stevenson,a professor who started the now-legendary entrepreneurship program at the Harvard Business School, was walking through the Cambridge campus one day when he suffered a massive heart attack.

Prepare for an increasingly rough ride in world stock markets as the march toward the so-called fiscal cliff continues in Washington, predicts former Sen. Alan Simpson, R-WY., who co-chaired the 2010 "National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform."

There's no question that this is one of the best desktops the company has ever shipped. The new iMac is thinner than ever. FORTUNE -- Just how thin can a computer get? Arguably not much more

During the financial crisis, several large financial institutions heavily relied on short-term borrowings to support their operations. This became a major problem. As credit markets froze, the banks were unable to renew their expiring short-term loans and thus were in danger of failing because they ...

You're hearing a lot about Lincoln these days -- not just the revered 16th president -- but also Ford Motor Co.'s luxury auto division. Ford is trying a relaunch. It is tacitly admitting that its sporadic efforts over the past 90 years to establish Lincoln as a top-tier luxury brand have failed, and...

AS china modernizes its agricultural sector over the next 25 years, the number of its farmers will shrink dramatically. And many of those workers will move to cities. Overall, it's expected that China will need to house some 300 million additional people in urban areas.

Big banks like Barclays and Deutsche Bank could soon find it a lot more expensive to do business on Wall Street. The Federal Reserve telegraphed to the markets late last week that foreign financial firms operating in the U.S. won't get a pass on all the new regulatory red tape associated with the Do...

Last week's opening salvo of "fiscal cliff" negotiations is proving what his critics have suspected ever since President Obama walked away from his own deficit-reduction commission two years ago: This White House still isn't serious about entitlement reform, specifically Medicare.

One chart from a recent World Resources Institute report shows just how major the challenge is. By Brian Dumaine, senior editor at large FORTUNE -- In the wake of the damage wrought by Sandy in the Northeast, some politicians like New