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  • Absalom, Absalom!
    by William Faulkner
    ISBN 0375508724 (0-375-50872-4)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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    Book summary:

    Absalom! Absalom! is William Faulkners major work--his most important and ambitious contribution to American literature. In the dramatic texture of this story of the founding, flourishing and decay of the plantation of Sutpen's Hundred, and of the family that demonic Stephen Sutpen brought into the world a generation before the Civil War, there rises the lament of the South for its own vanished splendor. From its magnificent and bold inception, when with his wild Negroes the founder of the great plantation appeared out of nowhere to seize his hundred square miles of land and build his mansion, through the destruction of the Civil War and its aftermath, and the drab beginnings of the new South, the narrative is colored by the authors glowing imagery, his command of a powerful and magical prose style. Beneath its brilliant surface and dark undercurrents, the novel sweeps backward and forward through time. The story in all its ramifications becomes crystallized in the mind of a relative of this strange family, young Quentin Compson, a Harvard student. At the terrifying and abrupt end of the tale there remain in the crumbling shell of the old house only the dying son of its builder, an ancient Negro woman who had been his slave, and the idiot mulatto youth who was to be the only direct descendant of the Sutpen blood.

    This edition is set from the first American edition of 1936 and commemorates the seventy-fifth anniversary of Random House. [via]

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  • After the Rain
    by Norma Fox Mazer
    ISBN 0380750252 (0-380-75025-2)
    Softcover, Harpercollins Childrens Books

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    Book summary:

    At fifteen, Rachel is a worrier. She worries about whether her family understands her, whether her friends like her, and whether she'll get her first kiss before she turns sixteen. And she worries about whether she can handlehaving a real boyfriend if he does come along.

    But it takes a dying old man -- her grandfather -- who has never been easy for anyone to handle, to show Rachel she has very special abilities. With love and compassion, she reaches the heart of an old tyrant who has always been unreachable. And in so doing, she comes to a better understanding of her family, her friends, and herself.

    [via]

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  • The Awakening
    by Kate Chopin
    ISBN 0380002450 (0-380-00245-0)
    Softcover, Avon Books

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    Book summary:

    "She grew daring and reckless. Overestimating her strength. She wanted to swim far out. Where no woman had swum before." [via]

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  • Big Stone Gap
    by Adriana Trigiani
    ISBN 0345438329 (0-345-43832-9)
    Softcover, Ballantine Books

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    Book summary:

    In the town of Big Stone Gap, Virginia, not much happens. The highlight of 35-year-old Ave Maria Mulligan's week comes on Friday, with the arrival of the Bookmobile, the sight of which sends her into raptures. Her favorite book concerns the ancient Chinese art of reading faces. Through her face-readings, we come to understand the hostilities simmering within her family: her father whose small eyes are the clear "sign of a deceptive nature." Her aunt who "has a small head and thin lips. (That's a terrible combination.)" Adriana Trigiani's first novel concerns the family scandals that befall Ave Maria in this seemingly uneventful town. Greed, lust, envy--all the ancient emotional elements--manifest themselves even in this hamlet of "ordinary folk." Fans of Fannie Flagg or Rebecca Wells will enjoy this down-home tale, full of small, everyday details and colloquial revelations. The writing is often awkward, but so too are the characters who inhabit this place: the Bookmobile lady who thinks of herself as the sexiest woman alive; the amateur actors in the local Outdoor Drama who bristle with ambition when they hear that Elizabeth Taylor is coming to visit. In Big Stone Gap, her visit is so anticipated, it's like she's an angel sent from heaven. --Ellen Williams [via]

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  • Birthday Letters
    by Ted Hughes
    ISBN 0374525811 (0-374-52581-1)
    Softcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux

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    Book summary:

    Ted Hughes's Birthday Letters--88 tantalizing responses to Sylvia Plath and the furies she left behind--emerge from an echo chamber of art and memory, rage and representation. In the decades following his wife's 1963 suicide, Hughes kept silent, a stance many have seen as guilty, few as dignified. While an industry grew out of Plath's life and art, and even her afterlife, he continued to compose his own dark, unconfessional verses, and edited her Collected Poems, Letters Home: Correspondence 1950-1963, and Journals. But Hughes's conservancy (and his sister Olwyn's power as Plath's executrix) laid him open to yet more blame. Biographers and critics found his cuts to her letters self-interested, and decried his destruction of the journals of her final years--undertaken, he insisted, for the sake of their children.

    In Birthday Letters we now have Hughes's response to Plath's white-hot mythologizing. Lost happiness intensifies present pain, but so does old despair: "Your ghost," he acknowledges, "inseparable from my shadow." Ranging from accessible short-story-like verses to tightly wound, allusive lyrics, the poems push forward from initial encounters to key moments long after Plath's death. In "Visit," he writes, "I look up--as if to meet your voice / With all its urgent future / that has burst in on me. Then look back / At the book of the printed words. / You are ten years dead. It is only a story. / Your story. My story." These poems are filled with conditionals and might-have-beens, Hughes never letting us forget forces in motion before their seven-year marriage and final separation. When he first sees Plath, she is both scarred (from her earlier suicide attempt) and radiant: "Your eyes / Squeezed in your face, a crush of diamonds, / Incredibly bright, bright as a crush of tears..." But Fate and Plath's father, Otto, will not let them be. In the very next poem, "The Shot," her trajectory is already plotted. Though Hughes is her victim, her real target is her dead father--"the god with the smoking gun."

    Of course, "The Shot" and the accusatory "The Dogs Are Eating Your Mother" are an incitement to those who side (as if there is a side!) with Plath. Newsweek has already chalked up the reaction of poet and feminist Robin Morgan to the book: "My teeth began to grind uncontrollably." But Hughes makes it clear that his poems are written for his dead wife and living children, not her acolytes' bloodsport. He has also, of course, written them for himself and the reader. Pieces such as "Epiphany," "The 59th Bear," and "Life After Death" are masterful mixes of memory and image. In "Epiphany," for instance, the young Hughes, walking in London, suddenly spots a man carrying a fox inside his jacket. Offered the cub for a pound, he hesitates, knowing he and Plath couldn't handle the animal--not with a new baby, not in the city. But in an instant, his potent vision extends beyond the animal, perhaps to his and Plath's children:

    Already past the kittenish
    But the eyes still small,
    Round, orphaned-looking, woebegone
    As if with weeping. Bereft
    Of the blue milk, the toys of feather and fur,
    The den life's happy dark. And the huge whisper
    Of the constellations
    Out of which Mother had always returned.
    Other poems are more influenced by Plath's "terrible, hypersensitive fingers," including "The Bee God" and "Dreamers," which is apparently a record of Plath's one encounter with Hughes's mistress: "She fascinated you. Her eyes caressed you, / Melted a weeping glitter at you. / Her German the dark undercurrent / In her Kensington jeweller's elocution / Was your ancestral Black Forest whisper--" This exotic woman, "slightly filthy with erotic mystery," seems a close relation to Plath's own Lady Lazarus, and the poem would be equally powerful without any biographical information. This is the one paradoxical pity of this superb collection. These poems require no prior knowledge--but for better or worse, we possess it. [via]

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  • The Book of Joe
    by Jonathan Tropper
    ISBN 0385338104 (0-385-33810-4)
    Softcover, Bantam Dell Pub Group

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    Book summary:

    Right after high school, Joe Goffman left sleepy Bush Falls, Connecticut and never looked back. Then he wrote a novel savaging everything in town, a novel that became a national bestseller and a huge hit movie. Fifteen years later, Joe is struggling to avoid the sophomore slump with his next novel when he gets a call: his father's had a stroke, so it's back to Bush Falls for the town's most famous pariah. His brother avoids him, his former classmates beat him up, and the members of the book club just hurl their copies of Bush Falls at his house. But with the help of some old friends, Joe discovers that coming home isn't all badand that maybe the best things in life are second chances.

    Fans of Nick Hornby and Jennifer Weiner will love this book, by turns howling funny, fiercely intelligent, and achingly poignant. As evidenced by The Book of Joe's success in both the foreign and movie markets, Jonathan Tropper has created a compelling, incredibly resonant story.


    From the Hardcover edition. [via]

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  • The Boy Who Fell Out of the Sky: A True Story
    by Ken Dornstein
    ISBN 0375503595 (0-375-50359-5)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    In this stunning, emotionally charged memoir, Ken Dornstein interweaves the moving story of his own coming-of-age with the promise of greatness his brother never lived to fulfill. The Boy Who Fell Out of the Sky is a heartbreaking but profoundly hopeful book about finding beauty in the midst of tragedy and making sense of it.
    David Dornstein was twenty-five years old, a handsome, charismatic young man on the verge of becoming an extraordinary writer, when he boarded Pan Am Flight 103 from London on the evening of December 21, 1988. Thirty-eight minutes after takeoff, he died, along with the 258 other passengers and crew, when a terrorists plastic explosive ripped the plane apart over Lockerbie, Scotland.
    Davids brother, Ken, was nineteen, a college sophomore home on winter break, when the call came. All his life Ken had looked up to David, confided in him, followed where he led. Davids death left Ken with a void that both crushed and consumed him. What were his brothers plans when he died? Was David really carrying home a draft of the great novel everyone knew was in him? Was he in love with the woman he was living with overseas? Ken Dornstein needed to learn the truth about his brothers life and death. In this harrowing and affecting memoir, he records what he found out.
    It was years before Ken could bring himself to confront the stacks of notebooks and letters David left behind, but once he began to read he was drawn deep into his brothers world. From Davids early obsession with writing down his every thought to his misadventures on the streets of New York, from an unraveling love affair in Israel to a devastating childhood secret, piece by piece Ken assembles a complex, disturbing portrait of an artist struggling to find a voice for passions that often threatened to tear him apart. Then, by chance, Ken runs into Davids college girlfriend on a train and everything changes once again. He starts to question his motives and his memories, and finally sets off on a complicated journey to finish the book that his brother started.
    As haunting as a dream, as electrifying as the days news, The Boy Who Fell Out of the Sky is an incandescent and unforgettable account of one mans struggle to find inspiration in his brothers life and create a life of his own. What begins as a tragedy turns into a love story of deeply affirming power. [via]

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  • Can't Wait to Get to Heaven
    by Fannie Flagg
    ISBN 0375432140 (0-375-43214-0)
    Hardcover, Random House Large Print

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    Book summary:

    Combining southern warmth with unabashed emotion and side-splitting hilarity, Fannie Flagg takes readers back to Elmwood Springs, Missouri, where the most unlikely and surprising experiences of a high-spirited octogenarian inspire a town to ponder the age-old question: Why are we here?

    Life is the strangest thing. One minute, Mrs. Elner Shimfissle is up in her tree, picking figs, and the next thing she knows, she is off on an adventure she never dreamed of, running into people she never in a million years expected to meet. Meanwhile, back home, Elners nervous, high-strung niece Norma faints and winds up in bed with a cold rag on her head; Elners neighbor Verbena rushes immediately to the Bible; her truck driver friend, Luther Griggs, runs his eighteen-wheeler into a ditchand the entire town is thrown for a loop and left wondering, What is life all about, anyway? Except for Tot Whooten, who owns Tots Tell It Like It Is Beauty Shop. Her main concern is that the end of the world might come before she can collect her social security.

    In this comedy-mystery, those near and dear to Elner discover something wonderful: Heaven is actually right here, right now, with people you love, neighbors you help, friendships you keep. Cant Wait to Get to Heaven is proof once more that Fannie Flagg was put on this earth to write (Southern Living), spinning tales as sweet and refreshing as iced tea on a summer day, with a little extra kick thrown in. [via]

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  • Satrapi, Marjane: Chicken With Plums
    Chicken With Plums
    by Marjane Satrapi
    ISBN 0375424156 (0-375-42415-6)
    Hardcover, Pantheon Books

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  • Cold Mountain
    by Charles Frazier
    ISBN 0375700757 (0-375-70075-7)
    Softcover, Knopf Publishing Group

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    Book summary:

    NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE

    One of the most acclaimed novels in recent memory, Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain is a masterpiece that is at once an enthralling adventure, a stirring love story, and a luminous evocation of a vanished American in all its savagery, solitude, and splendor.

    Sorely wounded and fatally disillusioned in the fighting at Petersburg, Inman, a Confederate soldier, decides to walk back to his home in the Blue Ridge Mountains and to Ada, the woman he loved there years before. His trek across the disintegrating South brings him into intimate and sometimes lethal converse with slaves and marauders, bounty hunters and witches, both helpful and malign. At the same time, Ada is trying to revive her father's derelict farm and learn to survive in a world where the old certainties have been swept away. As it interweaves their stories, Cold Mountain asserts itself as an authentic American Odyssey--hugely powerful, majestically lovely, and keenly moving. [via]

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  • The Colossus
    by Sylvia Plath
    ISBN 0375704469 (0-375-70446-9)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    With this startling, exhilarating book of poems, which was first published in 1960, Sylvia Plath burst into literature with spectacular force. In such classics as "The Beekeeper's Daughter," "The Disquieting Muses," "I Want, I Want," and "Full Fathom Five," she writes about sows and skeletons, fathers and suicides, about the noisy imperatives of life and the chilly hunger for death. Graceful in their craftsmanship, wonderfully original in their imagery, and presenting layer after layer of meaning, the forty poems in The Colossus are early artifacts of genius that still possess the power to move, delight, and shock. [via]

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  • Andersen, H. C.: The Complete Fairy Tales and Stories
    The Complete Fairy Tales and Stories
    by H. C. Andersen, Erik Christian Haugaard
    ISBN 0385019017 (0-385-01901-7)
    Hardcover, Random House Childrens Books

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    Book summary:

    Translated by Erik Hougaard, this is the only version available in trade paperback that presents the fairy tales exactly as Andersen collected them in the original Danish edition in 1874.  His notes accompany the text. [via]

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  • Count of Monte Cristo
    by Alexandre Dumas
    ISBN 037576030X (0-375-76030-X)
    Softcover, Modern Library

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    Book summary:

    Set against the tumultuous years of the post-Napoleonic era, The Count of Monet Cristo recounts the swashbuckling adventures of Edmond Dantes, a dashing young sailor falsely accused of treason. The story of his long imprisonment, dramatic escape, and carefully wrought revenge offers up a vision of France that has become immortal.


    From the Hardcover edition. [via]

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  • Stegner, Wallace Earle: Crossing to Safety
    Crossing to Safety
    by Wallace Earle Stegner, Watkins, T. H. (AFT), Terry Tempest Williams
    ISBN 037575931X (0-375-75931-X)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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  • The Dante Club
    by Matthew Pearl
    ISBN 034549038X (0-345-49038-X)
    Softcover, Ballantine Books

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    Book summary:

    A New York Times Bestseller
    Words can bleed.

    In 1865 Boston, the literary geniuses of the Dante Clubpoets and Harvard professors Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, and James Russell Lowell, along with publisher J. T. Fieldsare finishing Americas first translation of The Divine Comedy and preparing to unveil Dantes remarkable visions to the New World. The powerful Boston Brahmins at Harvard College are fighting to keep Dante in obscurity, believing that the infiltration of foreign superstitions into American minds will prove as corrupting as the immigrants arriving at Boston Harbor.

    The members of the Dante Club fight to keep a sacred literary cause alive, but their plans fall apart when a series of murders erupts through Boston and Cambridge. Only this small group of scholars realizes that the gruesome killings are modeled on the descriptions of Hells punishments from Dantes Inferno. With the lives of the Boston elite and Dantes literary future in America at stake, the Dante Club members must find the killer before the authorities discover their secret.

    Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes and an outcast police officer named Nicholas Rey, the first black member of the Boston police department, must place their careers on the line to end the terror. Together, they discover that the source of the murders lies closer to home than they ever could have imagined.

    The Dante Club is a magnificent blend of fact and fiction, a brilliantly realized paean to Dantes continued grip on our imagination, and a captivating thriller that will surprise readers from beginning to end. [via]

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  • The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
    by Jean-Dominique Bauby, Jeremy Leggatt
    ISBN 0375701214 (0-375-70121-4)
    Softcover, Vintage Books

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    Book summary:

    In December of 1995, Jean-Dominique Bauby, 43 year old editor in chief of Elle magazine in France, suffered a stroke which severely damaged his brain stem. After several weeks in a coma, he woke to find that he was one of the rare victims of a condition called "locked-in syndrome" or LIS, which had left his mind functioning but his body almost completely paralyzed. In a perverse sense he actually got fairly lucky because, unlike most victims, he was still able to move one eyelid. This allowed him to work out, with a speech therapist, a system of communication which entailed winking as someone slowly read through the alphabet. By using this code, he could painstakingly spell out words, sentences, paragraphs and, finally, this memoir. The title of the book refers to the metaphors he uses to describe his situation. The physical paralysis leaves him feeling as if he was trapped within a diving bell, as if there is constant pressure pinning his body into immobility. However, at the same time, his mind remains as free as a butterfly and it's flights are as random. In fact, he calls the chapters of this book his "bedridden travel notes" and, indeed, they eloquently relate his journey through memory. [via]

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  • Zelazny, Roger: Donnerjack
    Donnerjack
    by Roger Zelazny, Jane Lindskold
    ISBN 0380770229 (0-380-77022-9)
    Softcover, HarperCollins Publishers

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  • Dracula
    by Bram Stoker, Peter Straub
    ISBN 0375756701 (0-375-75670-1)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    Of the many admiring reviews Bram Stokers Dracula received when it first appeared in 1897, the most astute praise came from the author's mother, who wrote her son: 'It is splendid. No book since Mrs. Shelley's Frankenstein or indeed any other at all has come near yours in originality, or terror.'

    A popular bestseller in Victorian England, Stoker's hypnotic tale of the bloodthirsty Count Dracula, whose nocturnal atrocities are symbolic of an evil ages old yet forever new, endures as the quintessential story of suspense and horror. The unbridled lusts and desires, the diabolical cravings that Stoker dramatized with such mythical force, render Dracula resonant and unsettling a century later.
    [via]

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  • Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft: Dracula
    Dracula
    by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Bram Stoker
    ISBN 0385095805 (0-385-09580-5)
    Hardcover, Doubleday

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  • Dragons in the Waters
    by Madeleine L'Engle
    ISBN 0374318689 (0-374-31868-9)
    Hardcover, Farrar, Straus & Giroux

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    A thirteen-year-old boy's trip to Venezuela with his cousin culminates in murder and the discovery of an unexpected bond with an Indian tribe, dating from the days of Simâon Bolâivar. [via]

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  • Enduring Love
    by Ian McEwan
    ISBN 0385491123 (0-385-49112-3)
    Hardcover, Bantam Dell Pub Group

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    Book summary:

    Joe Rose has planned a postcard-perfect afternoon in the English countryside to celebrate his lover's return after six weeks in the States. To complete the picture, there's even a "helium balloon drifting dreamily across the wooded valley." But as Joe and Clarissa watch the balloon touch down, their idyll comes to an abrupt end. The pilot catches his leg in the anchor rope, while the only passenger, a boy, is too scared to jump down. As the wind whips into action, Joe and four other men rush to secure the basket. Mother Nature, however, isn't feeling very maternal. "A mighty fist socked the balloon in two rapid blows, one-two, the second more vicious than the first," and at once the rescuers are airborne. Joe manages to drop to the ground, as do most of his companions, but one man is lifted sky-high, only to fall to his death.

    In itself, the accident would change the survivors' lives, filling them with an uneasy combination of shame, happiness, and endless self-reproach. (In one of the novel's many ironies, the balloon eventually lands safely, the boy unscathed.) But fate has far more unpleasant things in store for Joe. Meeting the eye of fellow rescuer Jed Parry, for example, turns out to be a very bad move. For Jed is instantly obsessed, making the first of many calls to Joe and Clarissa's London flat that very night. Soon he's openly shadowing Joe and writing him endless letters. (One insane epistle begins, "I feel happiness running through me like an electrical current. I close my eyes and see you as you were last night in the rain, across the road from me, with the unspoken love between us as strong as steel cable.") Worst of all, Jed's version of love comes to seem a distortion of Joe's feelings for Clarissa.

    Apart from the incessant stalking, it is the conditionals--the contingencies--that most frustrate Joe, a scientific journalist. If only he and Clarissa had gone straight home from the airport... If only the wind hadn't picked up... If only he had saved Jed's 29 messages in a single day... Ian McEwan has long been a poet of the arbitrary nightmare, his characters ineluctably swept up in others' fantasies, skidding into deepening violence, and--worst of all--becoming strangers to those who love them. Even his prose itself is a masterful and methodical exercise in defamiliarization. But Enduring Love and its underrated predecessor, Black Dogs, are also meditations on knowledge and perception as well as brilliant manipulations of our own expectations. By the novel's end, you will be surprisingly unafraid of hot-air balloons, but you won't be too keen on looking a stranger in the eye. [via]

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  • Eternal Life: Life after Death As a Medical, Philosophical and Theological Program
    by Hans Kung
    ISBN 0385199104 (0-385-19910-4)
    Softcover, Doubleday Publishing

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    Book summary:

    Eternal Life? Life After Death as a Medical, Philosophical, and T, by Kung, Hans [via]

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  • Minot, Susan: Evening
    Evening
    by Susan Minot
    ISBN 0375700269 (0-375-70026-9)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    As Ann Lord lies on her deathbed, her daughter delivers a balsam pillow from the attic. At first the ailing woman is confused, but suddenly the scent reminds her of the "wild tumult" she experienced 40 years earlier:

    Something stole into her as she walked in the dark, a dream she'd had long ago. The air was so black she was unable to see her arms, it was a warm summer night. Above her she could make out the dark line of the tops of spruce trees and a sky lit with stars. She felt the warm tar through the soles of her shoes. The boy beside her took her hand.
    In the porous world between conscious and unconscious the protagonist of Evening revisits the great passions of her life, along with its considerable disappointments. The boy in the dark remains the fixed point--not so much because he is the most important man in her life, but because of the untapped possibilities he represents. Meanwhile, friends and relations come to sit by Ann Lord's side as she veers between clarity and feverish recollection.

    In her third novel, Susan Minot takes some new risks--her narrative spanning seven decades of memory and her style ranging from Stegneresque particularity to the exquisite abstraction Virginia Woolf perfected in To the Lighthouse. Equal parts memory and desire, fiction and poetry, Evening is a seductive story made more so by the measured pace of details emerging, one by one, like stars. --Cristina Del Sesto [via]

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  • Longaker, Christine: Facing Death and Finding Hope: A Guide to the Emotional and Spiritual Care of the Dying
    Facing Death and Finding Hope: A Guide to the Emotional and Spiritual Care of the Dying
    by Christine Longaker
    ISBN 0385483325 (0-385-48332-5)
    Softcover, Doubleday

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  • Fairy Tales and Legends
    by H.C. Andersen, Rex Whistler
    ISBN 0370010388 (0-370-01038-8)
    Hardcover, Bodley Head

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  • Final Exit: The Practicalities of Self-Deliverance and Assisted Suicide for the Dying
    by Derek Humphry
    ISBN 0385336535 (0-385-33653-5)
    Softcover, Bantam Dell Pub Group

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    Book summary:

    Published  2002, the revised, 3rd edition of the bestseller "Final Exit" describes the ways in which a dying person may consider hastening the end of their life if suffering is unbearable. Laws and ethics are outlined in a straightforward fashion. Drug dosage tables and the latest inert gas technique of 'self-deliverance' are explained, with illustrations.

    Bantam Dell published an updated version in April 2010, known as edition 3.1 [via]

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  • Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe
    by Fannie Flagg
    ISBN 0375508414 (0-375-50841-4)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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    Book summary:

    Shes one of Americas fairest and funniest ladies. Actress and screenwriter, director and comedienne, Fannie Flagg is also a most accomplished and high-spirited author. Said Kirkus of her first book, Coming Attractions: Its subtitled A wonderful novel and thats exactly what it is. Here is her second. Get ready, because its going to make you laugh (a lot), cry (a little), and care (forever).

    What is it? Its first the story of two women in the 1980s, of gray-headed Mrs. Threadgoode telling her life story to Evelyn, who is in the sad slump of middle age. The tale she tells is also of two womenof the irrepressibly daredevilish tomboy Idgie and her friend Ruthwho back in the thirties ran a little place in Whistle Stop, Alabama, a Southern kind of Cafe Wobegon offering good barbecue and good coffee and all kinds of love and laughter, even an occasional murder.

    And as the past unfolds, the presentfor Evelyn and for uswill never quite be the same.

    Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe is folksy and fresh, endearing and affecting, with humor and dramaand with an ending that would fill with smiling tears the Whistle Stop Lake...if they only had a lake.... [via]

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  • Powers, Richard: Gain
    Gain
    by Richard Powers
    ISBN 0374159963 (0-374-15996-3)
    Hardcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux

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  • Spiegel, Maura: The Grim Reader: Writings on Death, Dying, and Living on
    The Grim Reader: Writings on Death, Dying, and Living on
    by Maura Spiegel, Richard Tristman
    ISBN 0385485271 (0-385-48527-1)
    Softcover, Bantam Dell Pub Group

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  • Andersen, H. C.: Hans Andersen
    Hans Andersen
    by H. C. Andersen, Michael Foreman, Erik Christian Haugaard
    ISBN 0385133642 (0-385-13364-2)
    Hardcover, Random House Childrens Books

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  • Hans Christian Andersen the Complete Fairy Tales and Stories
    by H. C. Andersen, Virginia Haviland
    ISBN 0385189516 (0-385-18951-6)
    Softcover, Anchor Books

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    Book summary:

    Translated by Erik Hougaard, this is the only version available in trade paperback that presents the fairy tales exactly as Andersen collected them in the original Danish edition in 1874.  His notes accompany the text. [via]

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  • Stevenson, Laura C.: Happily After All
    Happily After All
    by Laura C. Stevenson
    ISBN 038071549X (0-380-71549-X)
    Softcover, Harpercollins Childrens Books

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  • His Dark Materials
    by Philip Pullman
    ISBN 0375823360 (0-375-82336-0)
    Softcover, Alfred a Knopf Inc

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    Book summary:

    In the epic trilogy His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman unlocks the door to worlds parallel to our own. Dæmons and winged creatures live side by side with humans, and a mysterious entity called Dust just might have the power to unite the universes--if it isn't destroyed first. The three books in Pullman's heroic fantasy series, published as trade paperbacks, are united here in one dazzling boxed set that includes The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass. In these new editions, each chapter opens with artwork by Pullman himself, along with chapter quotations from the likes of Milton, Donne, Black, Byron, and the Bible that did not appear in earlier editions. Join Lyra, Pantalaimon, Will, and the rest as they embark on the most breathtaking, heartbreaking adventure of their lives. The fate of the universe is in their hands. (Ages 13 and older) [via]

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  • His Dark Materials Omnibus: The Golden Compass / the Subtle Knife / the Amber Spyglass
    by Philip Pullman
    ISBN 0375847227 (0-375-84722-7)
    Softcover, Alfred a Knopf Inc

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    Book summary:

    In the epic trilogy His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman unlocks the door to worlds parallel to our own. Dæmons and winged creatures live side by side with humans, and a mysterious entity called Dust just might have the power to unite the universes--if it isn't destroyed first. The three books in Pullman's heroic fantasy series, published as trade paperbacks, are united here in one dazzling boxed set that includes The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass. In these new editions, each chapter opens with artwork by Pullman himself, along with chapter quotations from the likes of Milton, Donne, Black, Byron, and the Bible that did not appear in earlier editions. Join Lyra, Pantalaimon, Will, and the rest as they embark on the most breathtaking, heartbreaking adventure of their lives. The fate of the universe is in their hands. (Ages 13 and older) [via]

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  • The Hotel New Hampshire
    by John Irving
    ISBN 034541795X (0-345-41795-X)
    Softcover, Ballantine Books

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    Book summary:

    The first of my fathers illusions was that bears could survive the life lived by human beings, and the second was that human beings could survive a life led in hotels. So says John Berry, son of a hapless dreamer, brother to a cadre of eccentric siblings, and chronicler of the lives lived, the loves experienced, the deaths met, and the myriad strange and wonderful times encountered by the family Berry. Hoteliers, pet-bear owners, friends of Freud (the animal trainer and vaudevillian, that is), and playthings of mad fate, they dream on in a funny, sad, outrageous, and moving novel by the remarkable author of A Prayer for Owen Meany and Last Night in Twisted River.

    [via]

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  • A House Like a Lotus
    by Madeleine L'Engle
    ISBN 0374333858 (0-374-33385-8)
    Hardcover, Farrar, Straus & Giroux

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    Book summary:

    "Seventeen-year-old Polly can accept her dying patron's lesbianism until Max, overcome by pain and alcohol, attempts to seduce her. While on a working trip to Greece and Cyprus, previously arranged by Max, Polly learns what forgiveness and love really are. Polly is a remarkable heroine." --Children's Book Review Service

    "Compelling." --Starred, Booklist
    [via]

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  • In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences
    by Truman Capote
    ISBN 0375507906 (0-375-50790-6)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    "Until one morning in mid-November of 1959, few Americans--in fact, few Kansans--had ever heard of Holcomb. Like the waters of the river, like the motorists on the highway, and like the yellow trains streaking down the Santa Fe tracks, drama, in the shape of exceptional happenings, had never stopped there." If all Truman Capote did was invent a new genre--journalism written with the language and structure of literature--this "nonfiction novel" about the brutal slaying of the Clutter family by two would-be robbers would be remembered as a trail-blazing experiment that has influenced countless writers. But Capote achieved more than that. He wrote a true masterpiece of creative nonfiction. The images of this tale continue to resonate in our minds: 16-year-old Nancy Clutter teaching a friend how to bake a cherry pie, Dick Hickock's black '49 Chevrolet sedan, Perry Smith's Gibson guitar and his dreams of gold in a tropical paradise--the blood on the walls and the final "thud-snap" of the rope-broken necks. [via]

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  • Egan, Jennifer: The Invisible Circus
    The Invisible Circus
    by Jennifer Egan
    ISBN 0385473796 (0-385-47379-6)
    Hardcover, Bantam Dell Pub Group

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  • The Irrational Season
    by Madeleine L'Engle
    ISBN 0374177333 (0-374-17733-3)
    Hardcover, Farrar, Straus & Giroux

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    Book summary:

    The third volume of L'Engle's autobiography is a gifted and courageous writer's personal odyssey through the seasons of the Christian year. A great evil of our time, she convincingly asserts, is the ever-widening rift between intellect and intuition, sadly reflected in the division of Christendom, the breaking up of our families, and the loss of community everywhere.
    [via]

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  • Jude the Obscure
    by Thomas Hardy
    ISBN 0375757414 (0-375-75741-4)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    Upon its first appearance in 1895, Thomas Hardys Jude the Obscure shocked Victorian critics and readers with a frank depiction of sexuality and an unbridled indictment of the institutions of marriage, education, and religion, reportedly causing one Angli-can bishop to order the book publicly burned. The experience so exhausted Hardy that he never wrote a work of fiction again.

    Rich in symbolism, Jude the Obscure is the story of Jude Fawley and his struggle to rise from his station as a poor Wessex stonemason to that of a scholar at Christminster. It is also the story of Judes ill-fated relationship with his cousin Sue Bridehead, and the ultimate tragedy that causes Judes undoing and Sues transformation. Jude the Obscure explores mans essential loneliness and remains one of Hardys most widely read novels. [via]

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  • Kit's Wilderness
    by David Almond
    ISBN 0385326653 (0-385-32665-3)
    Hardcover, Delacorte Pr

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    Book summary:

    Like David Almond's 1998 Whitbread-winning Skellig, this powerful, eerie, elegantly written novel celebrates the magic that is part of our existence--the magic that occurs when we dream at night, the magic that connects us to family long gone, the magic that connects humans to the land, and us all to each other. As Kit's grandfather puts it, "the tales and memories and dreams that keep the world alive."

    It seems fated that 13-year-old Christopher Watson, nicknamed Kit, would move to Stoneygate, an old English coal-mining village where his ancestors lived, worked, and died. Evidence of the ancient coal pit is everywhere--depressions in the gardens, jagged cracks in the roadways, in his grandfather's old mining songs. A monument in the St. Thomas graveyard bears the name of child workers killed in the Stoneygate pit disaster of 1821, including Kit's own name--Christopher Watson, aged 13--the name of a distant uncle. At the top of this high, narrow pyramid-shaped monument is the name John Askew, the same name of Kit's classmate who takes the connection between this monument and life--and death--very seriously.

    The drama unfolds as the haunted, hulking, dark-eyed John Askew draws Kit and other classmates into the game of Death, a spin-the-knife, pretend-to-die game that he hosts in a deep hole dug in the earth, with candles, bones, and carved pictures of the children of the old families of Stoneygate. Kit the writer and Askew the artist belong together, Askew keeps telling him. "Your stories is like my drawings, Kit. They take you back deep into the dark and show it lives within us still.... You see it, don't you? You're starting to see that you and me is just the same." Are they, though?

    Kit's Wilderness conjures a world where the past is alive in the present and creeps into the future--a world where ancestral ghosts and even the slow-changing geology of the landscape are as tangible as lunch. Powerful images of darkness exploding into "lovely lovely light" filter throughout the story, as Almond boldly explores the dark side and unearths a joyful message of redemption. (Ages 11 and much, much older) --Karin Snelson [via]

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  • Grisham, John: Le Testament / the Testament
    Le Testament / the Testament
    by John Grisham
    ISBN 0385339585 (0-385-33958-5)
    Softcover, Delta

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  • Life Expectancy
    by Dean Koontz
    ISBN 0375434364 (0-375-43436-4)
    Hardcover, Ballantine Books

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    Book summary:

    With his bestselling blend of nail-biting intensity, daring artistry, and storytelling magic, Dean Koontz returns with an emotional roller coaster of a tale filled with enough twists, turns, shocks, and surprises for ten ordinary novels. Here is the story of five days in the life of an ordinary man born to an extraordinary legacya story that will challenge the way you look at good and evil, life and death, and everything in between.

    Jimmy Tock comes into the world on the very night his grandfather leaves it. As a violent storm rages outside the hospital, Rudy Tock spends long hours walking the corridors between the expectant fathers' waiting room and his dying father's bedside. It's a strange vigil made all the stranger when, at the very height of the storm's fury, Josef Tock suddenly sits up in bed and speaks coherently for the frist and last time since his stroke.

    What he says before he dies is that there will be five dark days in the life of his grandsonfive dates whose terrible events Jimmy will have to prepare himself to face. The first is to occur in his twentieth year; the second in his twent-third year; the third in his twenty-eighth; the fourth in his twenty-ninth; the fifth in his thirtieth.

    Rudy is all too ready to discount his father's last words as a dying man's delusional rambling. But then he discovers that Josef also predicted the time of his grandson's birth to the minute, as well as his exact height and weight, and the fact that Jimmy would be born with syndactylythe unexplained anomal of fused digitson his left foot. Suddenly the old man's predictions take on a chilling significance.

    What terrifying events await Jimmy on these five dark days? What nightmares will he face? What challenges must he survive? As the novel unfolds, picking up Jimmy's story at each of these crisis points, the path he must follow will defy every expectation. And with each crisis he faces, he will move closer to a fate he could never have imagined. For who Jimmy Tock is and what he must accomplish on the five days when his world turns is a mystery as dangerous as it is wondrousa struggle against an evil so dark and pervasive, only the most extraordinary of human spirits can shine through. [via]

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  • Segal, Erich W.: Love Story
    Love Story
    by Erich W. Segal
    ISBN 0380017601 (0-380-01760-1)
    Softcover, Avon Books

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  • White, Edmund: The Married Man
    The Married Man
    by Edmund White
    ISBN 0375400052 (0-375-40005-2)
    Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group

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  • The Neverending Story
    by Michael Ende, Ralph Manheim
    ISBN 0385176228 (0-385-17622-8)
    Hardcover, Bantam Dell Pub Group

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    Book summary:

    In this classic fantasy novel from author Michael Ende, small and insignificant Bastian Balthazar Bux is nobody's idea of a hero, least of all his own. Then, through the pages of an ancient, mysterious book, he discovers the enchanted world of Fantastica, and only Bastian himself can save the fairy people who live there. Shy, awkward Bastian is amazed to discover that he has become a character in the mysterious book he is reading and that he has an important mission to fulfill.
    [via]

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  • Odd Thomas
    by Dean Koontz
    ISBN 0375433341 (0-375-43334-1)
    Hardcover, Random House Large Print

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    The dead don't talk. I don't know why. But they do try to communicate, with a short-order cook in a small desert town serving as their reluctant confidant. Odd Thomas thinks of himself as an ordinary guy, if possessed of a certain measure of talent at the Pico Mundo Grill and rapturously in love with the most beautiful girl in the world, Stormy Llewellyn. Maybe he has a gift, maybe its a curse, Odd has never been sure, but he tries to do his best by the silent souls who seek him out. Sometimes they want justice, and Odds otherworldly tips to Pico Mundo's sympathetic police chief, Wyatt Porter, can solve a crime. Occasionally they can prevent one. But this time it's different.

    A mysterious man comes to town with a voracious appetite, a filing cabinet stuffed with information on the world's worst killers, and a pack of hyena-like shades following him wherever he goes. Who the man is and what he wants, not even Odds deceased informants can tell him. His most ominous clue is a page ripped from a day-by-day calendar for August 15.

    Today is August 14.

    In less than twenty-four hours, Pico Mundo will awaken to a day of catastrophe. As evil coils under the searing desert sun, Odd travels through the shifting prisms of his world, struggling to avert a looming cataclysm with the aid of his soul mate and an unlikely community of allies that includes the King of Rock 'n' Roll. His account of two shattering days when past and present, fate and destiny converge is the stuff of our worst nightmaresand a testament by which to live: sanely if not safely, with courage, humor, and a full heart that even in the darkness must persevere. [via]

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  • Shute, Nevil: On the Beach
    On the Beach
    by Nevil Shute
    ISBN 0345420195 (0-345-42019-5)
    Softcover, Random House Publishing Group

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  • One True Thing
    by Anna Quindlen
    ISBN 0385319207 (0-385-31920-7)
    Softcover, Dell Publishing

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    Book summary:

    One True Thing is a film starring Meryl Streep as the cancer-stricken homemaker mother, Renee Zellweger as the daughter who quits her top-dog job to care for her, and William Hurt as the chilly professor who lets the women in the family do the heavy emotional lifting dying requires. But the real star of the project remains former New York Times everyday-life columnist Anna Quindlen, who quit her top-dog job to write novels (and who took time off from college to nurse her own dying mother).

    Quindlen hit a nerve with One True Thing, which captures an experience seldom dealt with in popular culture. (One exception: the sensitive 1996 film with Streep and Leonardo DiCaprio of the play Marvin's Room.) Though the heroine of One True Thing, Ellen Gulden, is a golden girl with two brothers who'll lose her career the instant she steps off the fast track, society concurs with her dad, who says, "It seems to me another woman is what's wanted here."

    The book is a mother-daughter tale that should please fans of, say, The Joy Luck Club. It's not flashy, but it has a deep feel for the way children often discover, just before it's too late, who their parents really are. "Our parents are never people to us," Ellen writes, "they're always character traits.... There is only room in the lifeboat of your life for one, and you always choose yourself, and turn your parents into whatever it takes to keep you afloat." The mercy-killing subplot isn't gripping, but the palpable sense of deepening family intimacy certainly is. --Tim Appelo [via]

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  • The Optimist's Daughter
    by Eudora Welty
    ISBN 037550835X (0-375-50835-X)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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    Book summary:

    The Optimist's Daughter is a compact and inward-looking little novel, a Pulitzer Prize winner that's slight of page yet big of heart. The optimist in question is 71-year-old Judge McKelva, who has come to a New Orleans hospital from Mount Salus, Mississippi, complaining of a "disturbance" in his vision. To his daughter, Laurel, it's as rare for him to admit "self-concern" as it is for him to be sick, and she immediately flies down from Chicago to be by his side. The subsequent operation on the judge's eye goes well, but the recovery does not. He lies still with both eyes heavily bandaged, growing ever more passive until finally--with some help from the shockingly vulgar Fay, his wife of two years--he simply dies. Together Fay and Laurel travel to Mount Salus to bury him, and the novel begins the inward spiral that leads Laurel to the moment when "all she had found had found her," when the "deepest spring in her heart had uncovered itself" and begins to flow again.

    Not much actually happens in the rest of the book--Fay's low-rent relatives arrive for the funeral, a bird flies down the chimney and is trapped in the hall--and yet Welty manages to compress the richness of an entire life within its pages. This is a world, after all, in which a set of complex relationships can be conveyed by the phrase "I know his whole family" or by the criticism "When he brought her here to your house, she had very little idea of how to separate an egg." Does such a place exist anymore? It is vanishing even from this novel, and the personification of its vanishing is none other than Fay--petulant, graceless, childish, with neither the passion nor the imagination to love. Welty expends a lot of vindictive energy on Fay and her kin, who must be the most small-minded, mean-mouthed clan since the Snopeses hit Frenchman's Bend. There's more than just class snobbery at work here (though that surely comes into it too). As Welty sees it, they are a special historical tribe who exult in grieving because they have come to be good at it, and who seethe with resentment from the day they are born. They have come "out of all times of trouble, past or future--the great, interrelated family of those who never know the meaning of what has happened to them."

    Fay belongs to the future, as she makes clear; it's Laurel who belongs to the past--Welty's own chosen territory. In her fine memoir, One Writer's Beginnings, Welty described the way art could shine a light back "as when your train makes a curve, showing that there has been a mountain of meaning rising behind you on the way you've come." Here, in one of her most autobiographical works, the past joins seamlessly with the present in a masterful evocation of grief, memory, loss, and love. Beautifully written, moving but never mawkish, The Optimist's Daughter is Eudora Welty's greatest achievement--which is high praise indeed. --Mary Park [via]

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  • Wilder, Thornton Niven: Our Town: A Play in Three Acts
    Our Town: A Play in Three Acts
    by Thornton Niven Wilder
    ISBN 0380005573 (0-380-00557-3)
    Softcover, Harpercollins

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  • Morrison, Toni: Paradise
    Paradise
    by Toni Morrison
    ISBN 0375702172 (0-375-70217-2)
    Softcover, Random House Large Print

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  • Leibovitz, Annie: A Photographer's Life, 1990-2005
    A Photographer's Life, 1990-2005
    by Annie Leibovitz
    ISBN 0375505091 (0-375-50509-1)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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  • The Picture of Dorian Gray
    by Oscar Wilde
    ISBN 0375751513 (0-375-75151-3)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    A lush, cautionary tale of a life of vileness and deception or a loving portrait of the aesthetic impulse run rampant? Why not both? After Basil Hallward paints a beautiful, young man's portrait, his subject's frivolous wish that the picture change and he remain the same comes true. Dorian Gray's picture grows aged and corrupt while he continues to appear fresh and innocent. After he kills a young woman, "as surely as if I had cut her little throat with a knife," Dorian Gray is surprised to find no difference in his vision or surroundings. "The roses are not less lovely for all that. The birds sing just as happily in my garden."

    As Hallward tries to make sense of his creation, his epigram-happy friend Lord Henry Wotton encourages Dorian in his sensual quest with any number of Wildean paradoxes, including the delightful "When we are happy we are always good, but when we are good we are not always happy." But despite its many languorous pleasures, The Picture of Dorian Gray is an imperfect work. Compared to the two (voyeuristic) older men, Dorian is a bore, and his search for ever new sensations far less fun than the novel's drawing-room discussions. Even more oddly, the moral message of the novel contradicts many of Wilde's supposed aims, not least "no artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style." Nonetheless, the glamour boy gets his just deserts. And Wilde, defending Dorian Gray, had it both ways: "All excess, as well as all renunciation, brings its own punishment." [via]

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  • Princess Bride
    by William Goldman
    ISBN 0345418263 (0-345-41826-3)
    Softcover, Ballantine Books

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    Book summary:

    The Princess Bride is a true fantasy classic. William Goldman describes it as a "good parts version" of "S. Morgenstern's Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure." Morgenstern's original was filled with details of Florinese history, court etiquette, and Mrs. Morgenstern's mostly complimentary views of the text. Much admired by academics, the "Classic Tale" nonetheless obscured what Mr. Goldman feels is a story that has everything: "Fencing. Fighting. Torture. Poison. True love. Hate. Revenge. Giants. Hunters. Bad men. Good men. Beautifulest ladies. Snakes. Spiders. Beasts of all natures and descriptions. Pain. Death. Brave men. Coward men. Strongest men. Chases. Escapes. Lies. Truths. Passion. Miracles."

    Goldman frames the fairy tale with an "autobiographical" story: his father, who came from Florin, abridged the book as he read it to his son. Now, Goldman is publishing an abridged version, interspersed with comments on the parts he cut out.

    Is The Princess Bride a critique of classics like Ivanhoe and The Three Musketeers, that smother a ripping yarn under elaborate prose? A wry look at the differences between fairy tales and real life? Simply a funny, frenetic adventure? No matter how you read it, you'll put it on your "keeper" shelf. --Nona Vero [via]

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  • Alighieri, Dante: The Purgatorio
    The Purgatorio
    by Dante Alighieri
    ISBN 0375708391 (0-375-70839-1)
    Softcover, Alfred a Knopf Inc

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    Book summary:

    In the foreword to his version of the Purgatorio, W.S. Merwin dwells on the quasi-insuperable hurdles that any translator of Dante must face. Choosing just a single line from the first canticle, he asks: "How could that, then, really be translated? It could not, of course." This makes Dante's masterpiece sound like the literary equivalent of Mission: Impossible ("Your mission, Mr. Merwin, should you choose to accept it...") Happily, however, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet decided to give it a try. He spent several years wrestling with Dante's inexhaustible tercets, and rather than applying himself to the fire-and-brimstone-scented thrills of the Inferno, Merwin turned to the middle and most humane portion of the entire work: Purgatorio. It's here, in a kind of spiritual halfway house between heaven and hell, that the poem reaches a peak of tenderness and regret--and rises quite literally from the dead.

    Merwin's version must be measured against a good many predecessors, from John Ciardi's reader-friendly approach to Allen Mandelbaum's free-versifying to Charles Singleton's prosaic trot. How does this Purgatorio stack up? Very decently indeed. Merwin is something of a strict constructionist, who wants to hew as closely as possible to the syntax and sound of the original Italian. Yet he's no Nabokovian naysayer, slapping himself on the wrist every time he deviates from Dante's text, and he's wisely thrown the rhymes overboard. That leaves him with enough flexibility to echo some of the poem's loveliest effects:

    A sweet air that within itself was
    unvarying struck me on the forehead,
    a stroke no rougher than a gentle breeze,

    at which the trembling branches all together
    bent at once in that direction where
    the holy mountain casts its first shadow,

    without ever leaning over so far from
    the upright as to make the small birds stop
    the practice of their art in the treetops...

    Merwin also does a good job capturing Dante's asperity, including his near-proverbial response to a rebuke from main squeeze Beatrice in Canto XXX: "As a mother may seem harsh to her child, / she seemed to me, because the flavor / of raw pity when tasted is bitter." There are moments, of course, when the translator's taste for literalism gets him in trouble. When, for example, Dante is surrounded by a crowd of souls in the second canto, who are astonished to see one of the living among them, he describes them as "quasi oblïando d'ire a farsi belle." A difficult phrase to translate, yes, but Merwin's solution--"forgetting, it seemed, to go and see to their own beauty"--makes it sound as though they're late for an appointment at the hairdresser's. Still, these are minor flaws in a major and often marvelous piece of work. Can we look forward to a paradisiacal follow-up? --James Marcus [via]

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  • The Red Badge of Courage
    by Stephen Crane
    ISBN 0380641135 (0-380-64113-5)
    Softcover, Harpercollins

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    Book summary:

    A young man's experiences in the Civil War are retold through this new edition which includes passages that had been cut from the 1895 edition. [via]

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  • Watson, Lyall: The Romeo Error: A Matter of Life and Death
    The Romeo Error: A Matter of Life and Death
    by Lyall Watson
    ISBN 0385097697 (0-385-09769-7)
    Softcover, Anchor Press

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  • Slaughter House Five
    by Kurt Vonnegut
    ISBN 0385333846 (0-385-33384-6)
    Softcover, Bantam Dell Pub Group

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    Book summary:

    Kurt Vonnegut's absurdist classic Slaughterhouse-Five introduces us to Billy Pilgrim, a man who becomes unstuck in time after he is abducted by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore. In a plot-scrambling display of virtuosity, we follow Pilgrim simultaneously through all phases of his life, concentrating on his (and Vonnegut's) shattering experience as an American prisoner of war who witnesses the firebombing of Dresden.

    Don't let the ease of reading fool you--Vonnegut's isn't a conventional, or simple, novel. He writes, "There are almost no characters in this story, and almost no dramatic confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick, and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces. One of the main effects of war, after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters..." Slaughterhouse-Five (taken from the name of the building where the POWs were held) is not only Vonnegut's most powerful book, it is as important as any written since 1945. Like Catch- 22, it fashions the author's experiences in the Second World War into an eloquent and deeply funny plea against butchery in the service of authority. Slaughterhouse-Five boasts the same imagination, humanity, and gleeful appreciation of the absurd found in Vonnegut's other works, but the book's basis in rock-hard, tragic fact gives it a unique poignancy--and humor. [via]

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  • O'Nan, Stewart: Snow Angels
    Snow Angels
    by Stewart O'Nan
    ISBN 0385475748 (0-385-47574-8)
    Hardcover, Doubleday Publishing

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  • A Sorrow beyond Dreams
    by Peter Handke
    ISBN 0374267200 (0-374-26720-0)
    Hardcover, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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    Book summary:

    Peter Handke's mother was an invisible woman. Throughout her lifewhich spanned the Nazi era, the war, and the postwar consumer economyshe struggled to maintain appearances, only to arrive at a terrible recognition: "I'm not human any more." Not long after, she killed herself with an overdose of sleeping pills.

    In A Sorrow Beyond Dreams her son sits down to record what he knows, or thinks he knows, about his mother's life and death before, in his words, "the dull speechlessnessthe extreme speechlessness" of grief takes hold forever. And yet the experience of speechlessness, as it marks both suffering and love, lies at the heart of Handke's brief but unforgettable elegy. This austere, scrupulous, and deeply moving book is one of the finest achievements of a great contemporary writer. [via]

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  • Lissner, Caren: Starting from Square Two
    Starting from Square Two
    by Caren Lissner
    ISBN 0373250525 (0-373-25052-5)
    Softcover, Harlequin Enterprises, Limited

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  • McDonald, Joyce: Swallowing Stones
    Swallowing Stones
    by Joyce McDonald
    ISBN 0385323093 (0-385-32309-3)
    Hardcover, Random House Children's Books

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  • Swear to Howdy
    by Wendelin Van Draanen
    ISBN 0375825053 (0-375-82505-3)
    Hardcover, Random House Childrens Books

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    Book summary:

    Russell Cooper is lucky. When he and his family move to Lost River, a toothy-grinned boy named Joey Banks takes him under his wing. Joey makes everything into an adventure--cavorting in his favorite swimming hole, target practice with his .22, catching frogs, and playing tricks on his annoying older sister Amanda Jane. When their boyish pranks would go awry, as they often did, Joey would swear "Rusty-boy" to secrecy: "Seems like Joey and me were always making pacts. Lots of pacts, leading up to that last one. 'Rusty,' he'd say to me. 'I swear to howdy, if you tell a soul...'" Van Draanen's tales of boyhood antics told by a boy with a down-home way of talking, brings back the spirit of Huck Finn, and, as in Huckleberry Finn, darker themes lurk beneath the surface.

    Joey lives in fear of his father's temper (and the switch), and he creates elaborate schemes to conceal anything that might cause his dad to blow, from replacing a dead pet goldfish to burying the body of the family cat he accidentally kills when his dad orders him to shoot some pesky squirrels. When one of Joey and Rusty's pranks turns tragic, the two boys are eaten alive by their horrible secret, kept so by a sacred blood oath of friendship. Author of the award-winning Sammy Keyes mysteries series and Flipped, Van Draanen knows how to tell a story--keeping the narrative light on its feet while dramatically portraying the idea that actions have consequences and keeping secrets can be deadly. (Ages 12 and older) --Karin Snelson [via]

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  • Talk Before Sleep
    by Elizabeth Berg
    ISBN 0345491254 (0-345-49125-4)
    Softcover, Ballantine Books

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    Book summary:

    What do women talk about when they know they don't have forever? They talk about what they have always talked about, only they go deeper and more honest: with outrageous humor they try to mitigate pain. Intimate and uncensored sharing, the kind of connection women prize, is at the heart of this deeply moving novel about the grit and power of female friends.



    Ann and Ruth have always talked as only great friends can--honestly, and about everything: husbands and marriages, sex lives and children, their work, their hopes, their disappointments, and their dreams. For Ann, cautious and conventional, her closeness to the outspoken and eccentric Ruth brings about discovery and liberation, a chance to say whatever she wants, and, most important, under the insistent tutelage of Ruth, to become herself. Over the years, the women have shared recipes, quilting patterns, child care, delicate and dangerous secrets. Each rests secure in the knowledge that they will be friends forever. Then something happens that will change their lives forever, and the women begin to share something more profound than either of them might have predicted.



    Written with an unerring ear for how women talk, laugh, and cry together, and with a gift for capturing the uniqueness of personality, Talk Before Sleep is sure to find a place in readers' hearts. [via]

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  • The Testament
    by John Grisham
    ISBN 0375433538 (0-375-43353-8)
    Hardcover, Random House Large Print

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    Troy Phelan, a 78-year-old eccentric and the 10th-richest man in America, is about to read his last will and testament, divvying up an estate worth $11 billion. Phelan's three ex-wives, their grasping spawn, a legion of lawyers, several psychiatrists, and a plethora of sound technicians wait breathlessly, all eyes glued to digital monitors as they watch the old man read his verdict. But Phelan shocks everyone with a bizarre, last-gasp attempt to redistribute the spoils, setting in motion a legal morality tale of a contested will, sin, and redemption.

    Our hero, Nate O'Riley--a washed-up, alcoholic litigator with two ruined marriages in his wake and the IRS on his tail--is dispatched to the Brazilian wetlands in search of a mysterious heir named in the will. After a harrowing trip upriver to a remote settlement in the Pantanal, he encounters Rachel Lane, a pure-hearted missionary living with an indigenous tribe and carrying out "God's work." Rachel's grave dedication and kindness impress the jaded lawyer, so much that a nasty bout of dengue fever leads him to a vision that could change his life.

    Back in the States, the legal proceedings drag on and Grisham has a high time with Phelan's money-hungry descendents, a regrettable bunch who squandered millions, married strippers, got druggy, and befriended the Mob. The youngest son, Ramble, is a multi-pierced, tattoo-covered malcontent with big dreams for his rock band, the Demon Monkeys. Will Nate get straight with Rachel's aid? Do the greedy heirs get theirs? What's the real legacy of a lifetime's work? The Testament is classic Grisham: a down-and-out lawyer, a lot of money, an action-packed pursuit, and the highest issues at stake. It's not just about great characters; it's about the question of what character is. --Rebekah Warren [via]

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  • Glass, Julia: Three Junes
    Three Junes
    by Julia Glass
    ISBN 0375421440 (0-375-42144-0)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    Three Junes is a vividly textured symphonic novel set on both sides of the Atlantic during three fateful summers in the lives of a Scottish family. In June of 1989, Paul McLeod, the recently widowed patriarch, becomes infatuated with a young American artist while traveling through Greece and is compelled to relive the secret
    sorrows of his marriage. Six years later, Pauls death reunites his sons at Tealing, their idyllic childhood home, where Fenno, the eldest, faces a choice that puts him at the center of his familys future. A lovable, slightly repressed gay man, Fenno leads the life of an aloof expatriate in the West Village, running a shop filled with books and birdwatching gear. He believes himself safe from all emotional entanglementsuntil a worldly neighbor presents him with an extraordinary gift and a seductive photographer makes him an unwitting subject. Each man draws Fenno into territories of the heart he has never braved before, leading him toward an almost unbearable loss that will reveal to him the nature of love.

    Love in its limitless formsbetween husband and wife, between lovers, between people and animals, between parents and childrenis the force that moves these characters lives, which collide again, in yet another June, over a Long Island dinner table. This time it is Fenno who meets and captivates Fern, the same woman who captivated his father in Greece ten years before. Now pregnant with a son of her own, Fern, like Fenno and Paul before him, must make peace with her past to embrace her future. Elegantly detailed yet full of emotional suspense, often as comic as it is sad, Three Junes is a glorious triptych about how we learn to live, and live fully, beyond incurable grief and betrayals of the hearthow family ties, both those were born into and those we make, can offer us redemption and joy. [via]

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  • Minot, Eliza: The Tiny One
    The Tiny One
    by Eliza Minot
    ISBN 037570633X (0-375-70633-X)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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  • Kapleau, Roshi P.: Wheel of Life and Death
    Wheel of Life and Death
    by Roshi P. Kapleau
    ISBN 0385234139 (0-385-23413-9)
    Softcover, Knopf Publishing Group

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  • When Bad Things Happen to Good People
    by Harold S. Kushner
    ISBN 038067033X (0-380-67033-X)
    Softcover, HarperCollins Publishers

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    Book summary:

    Rarely does a book come along that tackles a perennially difficult human issue with such clarity and intelligence. Harold Kushner, a Jewish rabbi facing his own child's fatal illness, deftly guides us through the inadequacies of the traditional answers to the problem of evil, then provides a uniquely practical and compassionate answer that has appealed to millions of readers across all religious creeds. Remarkable for its intensely relevant real-life examples and its fluid prose, this book cannot go unread by anyone who has ever been troubled by the question, "Why me?" [via]

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  • Where the Red Fern Grows
    by Wilson Rawls
    ISBN 0385323301 (0-385-32330-1)
    Hardcover, Random House Childrens Books

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    Author Wilson Rawls spent his boyhood much like the character of this book, Billy Colman, roaming the Ozarks of northeastern Oklahoma with his bluetick hound. A straightforward, shoot-from-the-hip storyteller with a searingly honest voice, Rawls is well-loved for this powerful 1961 classic and the award-winning novel Summer of the Monkeys. In Where the Red Fern Grows, Billy and his precious coonhound pups romp relentlessly through the Ozarks, trying to "tree" the elusive raccoon. In time, the inseparable trio wins the coveted gold cup in the annual coon-hunt contest, captures the wily ghost coon, and bravely fights with a mountain lion. When the victory over the mountain lion turns to tragedy, Billy grieves, but learns the beautiful old Native American legend of the sacred red fern that grows over the graves of his dogs. This unforgettable classic belongs on every child's bookshelf. (Ages 9 and up) [via]

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  • Who Owns Death: Capital Punishment, the American Conscience and the End of Executions
    by Robert J. Lifton, Greg Mitchell
    ISBN 0380974983 (0-380-97498-3)
    Hardcover, HarperCollins Publishers

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    Book summary:

    Capital punishment is popular in the United States: the public supports it overwhelmingly, skeptical politicians are afraid to challenge it publicly, and the execution rate continues to soar (it increased by about 800 percent during the 1990s). So authors Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell will raise eyebrows when they write: "We believe [capital punishment] will come to an end fairly soon." They're advocates of abolition ("We have opposed capital punishment for many years"), but they've tried hard to become dispassionate analysts on these pages. After four years of research, they're convinced that Americans are deeply conflicted on the issue rather than cheerleaders for death. "The public embraces the death penalty in theory, but in practice they look at it with an increasingly critical eye," the authors write.

    Lifton and Mitchell begin by examining how three states--California, Massachusetts, and Missouri--handle the death penalty. In succeeding chapters, they provide a history of state-sponsored execution in the United States and describe the various ways the killing is done, from lethal injection (the most common form of execution) to hanging (yes, hanging--that's how Delaware, New Hampshire, and Washington put people to death) and firing squads (in Idaho, Oklahoma, and Utah). They also provide an in-depth look at the people involved in executions, from the criminals themselves to the families of murder victims to the folks in the criminal-justice system: prosecutors, judges, wardens, chaplains, and so on. The opponents of capital punishment often make the mistake of appearing to champion evildoers, either by denying their guilt or minimizing the harm they have done. Who Owns Death? avoids this fatal flaw (it is dedicated, in part, "to the families of murder victims"). Open-minded readers who want to explore what the death penalty really is--and Lifton and Mitchell think there are many more of these people than is commonly assumed--may walk away from it rethinking their own beliefs. --John J. Miller [via]

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  • Who Owns Death?: Capital Punishment, the American Conscience, and the End of Executions
    by Greg Mitchell, Robert Jay Lifton
    ISBN 038079246X (0-380-79246-X)
    Softcover, Harpercollins

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    Book summary:

    Capital punishment is popular in the United States: the public supports it overwhelmingly, skeptical politicians are afraid to challenge it publicly, and the execution rate continues to soar (it increased by about 800 percent during the 1990s). So authors Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell will raise eyebrows when they write: "We believe [capital punishment] will come to an end fairly soon." They're advocates of abolition ("We have opposed capital punishment for many years"), but they've tried hard to become dispassionate analysts on these pages. After four years of research, they're convinced that Americans are deeply conflicted on the issue rather than cheerleaders for death. "The public embraces the death penalty in theory, but in practice they look at it with an increasingly critical eye," the authors write.

    Lifton and Mitchell begin by examining how three states--California, Massachusetts, and Missouri--handle the death penalty. In succeeding chapters, they provide a history of state-sponsored execution in the United States and describe the various ways the killing is done, from lethal injection (the most common form of execution) to hanging (yes, hanging--that's how Delaware, New Hampshire, and Washington put people to death) and firing squads (in Idaho, Oklahoma, and Utah). They also provide an in-depth look at the people involved in executions, from the criminals themselves to the families of murder victims to the folks in the criminal-justice system: prosecutors, judges, wardens, chaplains, and so on. The opponents of capital punishment often make the mistake of appearing to champion evildoers, either by denying their guilt or minimizing the harm they have done. Who Owns Death? avoids this fatal flaw (it is dedicated, in part, "to the families of murder victims"). Open-minded readers who want to explore what the death penalty really is--and Lifton and Mitchell think there are many more of these people than is commonly assumed--may walk away from it rethinking their own beliefs. --John J. Miller [via]

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  • Berg, Elizabeth: The Year of Pleasures : A Novel
    The Year of Pleasures : A Novel
    by Elizabeth Berg
    ISBN 0375434569 (0-375-43456-9)
    Hardcover, Random House Large Print

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