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  • An Acceptable Time
    by Madeleine L'Engle
    ISBN 0312368585 (0-312-36858-5)
    Softcover, Square Fish

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    Book summary:

    A flash of lightning, quivering ground, and, instead of her grandparents' farm, Polly sees mist and jagged mountains -- and coming toward her, a group of young men carrying spears.

    Why has a time gate opened and dropped Polly into a world that existed 3,000 years ago? Will she be able to get back to the present before the time gate closes -- and leaves her to face a group of people who believe in human sacrifice?
    [via]

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  • Smiley, Jane: The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton : A Novel
    The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton : A Novel
    by Jane Smiley
    ISBN 0375702237 (0-375-70223-7)
    Softcover, Random House Large Print

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  • Attitudes Toward Sex in Antebellum America: A Brief History With Documents
    by Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz
    ISBN 0312412266 (0-312-41226-6)
    Softcover, Bedford/st Martins

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    Book summary:

    With this colorful collection of documents, Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz overturns the monolithic picture of Victorian sexual repression to reveal four contending views at play during the antebellum period: earthy American folk wisdom, the anti-flesh teachings of evangelical Christianity, moral reform grounded in science, and the utopian free love movement. Horowitz's introduction discusses how these diverse views shaped the antebellum conversation about the moral, social, and physical implications of sex and reflected the larger cultural and economic changes of this period of rapid industrialization and urban migration. Helpful headnotes contextualize this selection of hard-to-find documents, which includes scientific manuals, religious pamphlets, advertisements, and popular fiction. Contemporary illustrations, a chronology, and a bibliography foster students' understanding of antebellum sexual attitudes.
    [via]

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  • The Autobiography of Malcolm X
    by Alex Haley, Malcolm X, M. S. Handler
    ISBN 0345376714 (0-345-37671-4)
    Softcover, Ballantine Books

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    Malcolm X's searing memoir belongs on the small shelf of great autobiographies. The reasons are many: the blistering honesty with which he recounts his transformation from a bitter, self-destructive petty criminal into an articulate political activist, the continued relevance of his militant analysis of white racism, and his emphasis on self-respect and self-help for African Americans. And there's the vividness with which he depicts black popular culture--try as he might to criticize those lindy hops at Boston's Roseland dance hall from the perspective of his Muslim faith, he can't help but make them sound pretty wonderful. These are but a few examples. The Autobiography of Malcolm X limns an archetypal journey from ignorance and despair to knowledge and spiritual awakening. When Malcolm tells coauthor Alex Haley, "People don't realize how a man's whole life can be changed by one book," he voices the central belief underpinning every attempt to set down a personal story as an example for others. Although many believe his ethic was directly opposed to Martin Luther King Jr.'s during the civil rights struggle of the '60s, the two were not so different. Malcolm may have displayed a most un-Christian distaste for loving his enemies, but he understood with King that love of God and love of self are the necessary first steps on the road to freedom. --Wendy Smith [via]

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  • The Autobiography of Malcolm X
    by Malcolm X, Alex Hailey
    ISBN 0345350685 (0-345-35068-5)
    Softcover, Ballantine Books

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    Book summary:

    Malcolm X's searing memoir belongs on the small shelf of great autobiographies. The reasons are many: the blistering honesty with which he recounts his transformation from a bitter, self-destructive petty criminal into an articulate political activist, the continued relevance of his militant analysis of white racism, and his emphasis on self-respect and self-help for African Americans. And there's the vividness with which he depicts black popular culture--try as he might to criticize those lindy hops at Boston's Roseland dance hall from the perspective of his Muslim faith, he can't help but make them sound pretty wonderful. These are but a few examples. The Autobiography of Malcolm X limns an archetypal journey from ignorance and despair to knowledge and spiritual awakening. When Malcolm tells coauthor Alex Haley, "People don't realize how a man's whole life can be changed by one book," he voices the central belief underpinning every attempt to set down a personal story as an example for others. Although many believe his ethic was directly opposed to Martin Luther King Jr.'s during the civil rights struggle of the '60s, the two were not so different. Malcolm may have displayed a most un-Christian distaste for loving his enemies, but he understood with King that love of God and love of self are the necessary first steps on the road to freedom. --Wendy Smith [via]

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  • Bad Land
    by Jonathan Raban
    ISBN 0330346210 (0-330-34621-0)
    Hardcover, Picador

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    Part history, part modern-day travelogue, Bad Land attempts to locate the dry plains of eastern Montana and the Dakotas in the American imagination. Jonathan Raban (author of the best-selling Old Glory) explores deserted homesteads and listens to the persevering descendants of the rugged pioneers who settled this territory. Toward the end of his eclectic book, Raban tries to explain why a place like this would appeal to people like Ted Kaczynski, a.k.a. the Unabomber. The best passages recall Paul Theroux in top form. [via]

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  • The Bell Jar
    by Sylvia Plath, Diane W. Middlebrook
    ISBN 0375404635 (0-375-40463-5)
    Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group

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    Plath was an excellent poet but is known to many for this largely autobiographical novel. The Bell Jar tells the story of a gifted young woman's mental breakdown beginning during a summer internship as a junior editor at a magazine in New York City in the early 1950s. The real Plath committed suicide in 1963 and left behind this scathingly sad, honest and perfectly-written book, which remains one of the best-told tales of a woman's descent into insanity. [via]

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  • Beloved
    by Toni Morrison
    ISBN 0375704140 (0-375-70414-0)
    Softcover, Ballantine Books

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    In the troubled years following the Civil War, the spirit of a murdered child haunts the Ohio home of a former slave. This angry, destructive ghost breaks mirrors, leaves its fingerprints in cake icing, and generally makes life difficult for Sethe and her family; nevertheless, the woman finds the haunting oddly comforting for the spirit is that of her own dead baby, never named, thought of only as Beloved.

    A dead child, a runaway slave, a terrible secret--these are the central concerns of Toni Morrison's Pulitzer Prize-winning Beloved. Morrison, a Nobel laureate, has written many fine novels, including Song of Solomon, The Bluest Eye, and Paradise--but Beloved is arguably her best. To modern readers, antebellum slavery is a subject so familiar that it is almost impossible to render its horrors in a way that seems neither clichéd nor melodramatic. Rapes, beatings, murders, and mutilations are recounted here, but they belong to characters so precisely drawn that the tragedy remains individual, terrifying to us because it is terrifying to the sufferer. And Morrison is master of the telling detail: in the bit, for example, a punishing piece of headgear used to discipline recalcitrant slaves, she manages to encapsulate all of slavery's many cruelties into one apt symbol--a device that deprives its wearer of speech. "Days after it was taken out, goose fat was rubbed on the corners of the mouth but nothing to soothe the tongue or take the wildness out of the eye." Most importantly, the language here, while often lyrical, is never overheated. Even as she recalls the cruelties visited upon her while a slave, Sethe is evocative without being overemotional: "Add my husband to it, watching, above me in the loft--hiding close by--the one place he thought no one would look for him, looking down on what I couldn't look at at all. And not stopping them--looking and letting it happen.... And if he was that broken then, then he is also and certainly dead now." Even the supernatural is treated as an ordinary fact of life: "Not a house in the country ain't packed to its rafters with some dead Negro's grief. We lucky this ghost is a baby," comments Sethe's mother-in-law.

    Beloved is a dense, complex novel that yields up its secrets one by one. As Morrison takes us deeper into Sethe's history and her memories, the horrifying circumstances of her baby's death start to make terrible sense. And as past meets present in the shape of a mysterious young woman about the same age as Sethe's daughter would have been, the narrative builds inexorably to its powerful, painful conclusion. Beloved may well be the defining novel of slavery in America, the one that all others will be measured by. --Alix Wilber [via]

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  • Blade Runner
    by Philip K. Dick
    ISBN 0345350472 (0-345-35047-2)
    Softcover, Ballantine Books

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    Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is a book that most people think they remember and almost always get more or less wrong. Ridley Scott's film Blade Runner took a lot from it, and threw a lot away. Wonderful in itself, the film is a flash thriller, whereas Dick's novel is a sober meditation. As we all know, bounty hunter Rick Deckard is stalking a group of androids who have returned from space with short life spans and murder on their minds--where Scott's Deckard was Harrison Ford, Dick's is a financially strapped municipal employee with bills to pay and a depressed wife. In a world where most animals have died, and pet keeping is a social duty, he can only afford a robot imitation, unless he gets a big financial break.

    The genetically warped "chickenhead" John Isidore has visions of a tomb-world where entropy has finally won. And everyone plugs in to the spiritual agony of Mercer, whose sufferings for the sins of humanity are broadcast several times a day. Prefiguring the religious obsessions of Dick's last novels, this book asks dark questions about identity and altruism. After all, is it right to kill the killers just because Mercer says so? --Roz Kaveney, Amazon.co.uk [via]

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  • The Bonfire of the Vanities
    by Tom Wolfe
    ISBN 0374115346 (0-374-11534-6)
    Hardcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux

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    After Tom Wolfe defined the '60s in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers and the cultural U-turn at the turn of the '80s in The Right Stuff, nobody thought he could ever top himself again. In 1987, when The Bonfire of the Vanities arrived, the literati called Wolfe an "aging enfant terrible."

    He wasn't aging; he was growing up. Bonfire's pyrotechnic satire of 1980s New York wasn't just Wolfe's best book, it was the best bestselling fiction debut of the decade, a miraculously realistic study of an unbelievably status-mad society, from the fiery combatants of the South Bronx to the bubbling scum at the top of Wall Street. Sherman McCoy, a farcically arrogant investment banker (dubbed a "Master of the Universe," Wolfe's brilliant metaphorical co-opting of a then-important toy for boys), hits a black guy in the Bronx with his Mercedes and runs--right into a nightmare peopled by vicious mistresses, thin wives like "social x-rays," slime-bag politicos, tabloid hacks, and Dantesque denizens of the "justice" system. If the Coen and Marx brothers together dramatized The Great Gatsby, Wolfe's Bonfire would probably be funnier. Many think his second novel, A Man in Full, is deeper, but Bonfire will never die down.

    You might find it interesting to compare the film The Bonfire of the Vanities, a fascinating calamity perpetrated by the geniuses Brian De Palma and Tom Hanks, with The Right Stuff, one of the very best films of the '80s. --Tim Appelo [via]

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  • The Book of Illusions
    by Paul Auster
    ISBN 0312421818 (0-312-42181-8)
    Softcover, St Martins Pr

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    Vermont professor David Zimmer is a broken man. The protagonist of Paul Auster's 10th novel, The Book of Illusions, hits a period in which life seemed to be working aggressively against him. After his wife and sons are killed in an airplane crash, Zimmer becomes an alcoholic recluse, fond of emptying his bottle of sleeping pills into his palm, contemplating his next move. But one night, while watching a television documentary, Zimmer's attention is caught by the silent-film comedian Hector Mann, who had disappeared without a trace in 1929 and who was considered long-dead. Soon, Zimmer begins work on a book about Mann's newly discovered films (copies of which had been sent, anonymously, to film archives around the world). The spirit of Hector Mann keeps David Zimmer alive for a year. When a letter arrives from someone claiming to be Hector Mann's wife, announcing that Mann had read Zimmer's book and would like to meet him, it is as if fate has tossed Zimmer from one hand to the other: from grief and loss to desire and confusion.

    Although film images are technically "illusions," this deft and layered novel is not so much about conscious illusion or trickery as about the traces we leave behind us: words, images, memories. Children are one obvious trace, but in this book, they are not allowed to carry their parents forward. They die early: Hector Mann losing his 3-year-old son to a bee sting just as David Zimmer has lost his two sons in the crash. The second half of The Book of Illusions is given over to a love affair, and to Zimmer's attempt to save something of Hector Mann, and of the others he has loved. In the end, what really survives of us on earth--what flickering immortality we are permitted--is left to the reader to surmise. --Regina Marler [via]

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  • City Of Glass
    by Paul Karasik, Paul Auster, David Mazzucchelli, Art Spiegelman
    ISBN 0312423608 (0-312-42360-8)
    Softcover, St Martins Pr

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    I cannot possibly offer enough praise for David Mazzucchelli and Paul Karasik 's adaptation of City of Glass. While some critics found it to be a dry choice of books to turn into a comics, I think the interplay between image and text only heightens the original metafictional narrative. The treatment of the first speech by the crazy antagonist, Peter Stillman--in which the word balloons trail from random objects such as a broken television and a bottle of ink--is brilliant. Neon Lit: Paul Auster's City of Glass deftly illustrates why comics is a perfect format for exploring fictions about text: the words become visible objects of the story. [via]

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

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    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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  • A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
    by Mark Twain, Daniel Carter Beard, Roy Blount
    ISBN 0375757805 (0-375-75780-5)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    Hank Morgan awakens one morning to find he has been transported from nineteenth-century New England to sixth-century England and the reign of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. Morgan brings to King Arthur's utopian court the ingenuity of the future, resulting in a culture clash that is at once satiric, anarchic, and darkly comic. Critically deemed one of Twain's finest and most caustic works, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court is both a delightfully entertaining story and a disturbing analysis of the efficacy of government, the benefits of progress, and the dissolution of social mores. It remains as powerful a work of fiction today as it was upon its first publication in 1889. [via]

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  • Ruiz, Vicki L.: Created Equal: A Social And Politcal History of the United States To 1877
    Created Equal: A Social And Politcal History of the United States To 1877
    by Vicki L. Ruiz, Thomas Borstelmann, Peter H. Wood, Jacqueline Jones, Elaine Tyler May
    ISBN 0321195078 (0-321-19507-8)
    Softcover, Longman Pub Group

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    In its comprehensive and inclusive view of American history, Created Equal provides an accurate, broad, deep, and compelling view of the nation's past. Emphasizing social historyincluding the lives and labors of women, immigrants, working people, and persons of color in all regions of the countryCreated Equal also delivers the basics of political and economic history, thoughtfully examining the roles that all peoples have played in creating and defining those aspects of the nation's past.

    Created Equal explores an expanding notion of American identityone that encompasses the stories of diverse groups of people, territorial growth and expansion, the rise of the middle class, technological innovation and economic development, and engagement with other nations and peoples of the world.

    [via]

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  • The Da Vinci Code
    by Dan Brown
    ISBN 0375432302 (0-375-43230-2)
    Hardcover, Random House Large Print

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  • Dangerous Nation
    by Robert Kagan
    ISBN 0375411054 (0-375-41105-4)
    Hardcover, Alfred a Knopf Inc

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    From the author of the immensely influential and best-selling Of Paradise and Powera major reevaluation of Americas place in the world from the colonial era to the turn of the twentieth century.

    Robert Kagan strips away the myth of Americas isolationist tradition and reveals a more complicated reality: that Americans have been increasing their global power and influence steadily for the past four centuries. Even from the time of the Puritans, he reveals, America was no shining city up on a hill but an engine of commercial and territorial expansion that drove Native Americans, as well as French, Spanish, Russian, and ultimately even British power, from the North American continent. Even before the birth of the nation, Americans believed they were destined for global leadership. Underlying their ambitions, Kagan argues, was a set of ideas and ideals about the world and human nature. He focuses on the Declaration of Independence as the document that firmly established the American conviction that the inalienable rights of all mankind transcended territorial borders and blood ties. American nationalism, he shows, was always internationalist at its core. He also makes a startling discovery: that the Civil War and the abolition of slaverythe fulfillment of the ideals of the Declarationwere the decisive turning point in the history of American foreign policy as well. Kagan's brilliant and comprehensive reexamination of early American foreign policy makes clear why America, from its very beginning, has been viewed worldwide not only as a wellspring of political, cultural, and social revolution, but as an ambitious and, at times, dangerous nation. [via]

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  • The Death and Life of Great American Cities
    by Jane Jacobs
    ISBN 0375508732 (0-375-50873-2)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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    Book summary:

    This book is an attack on current methods of city planning and re-building. It is also an explanation of new principles and an argument for different methods from those now in use. It is the first real alternative to conventional city planning that we have had in this century. Its author, herself a city dweller and an editor of Architectural Forum, is direct and practical in her approach. What, she asks, makes cities work? Why are some neighborhoods full of things to do and see and why are others dull? Why does the crime rate soar in our public housing developments and why are some of our older neighborhoods, despite their evident pov-erty, so much more safe, stable and congenial? Why do some neighborhoods attract interested and responsible populations and why do others degenerate? Why are Boston's North End and the eastern and western extremes of Greenwich Village good neighborhoods and why do orthodox city planners consider them slums? What alternatives are there to current city planning and rebuilding?

    Conventional city planning holds that cities decline because they are blighted by too many people, by mixtures of commercial, industrial and residential uses, by old buildings and narrow streets and by small landholders who stand in the way of large-scale development. Such neighborhoods, they insist, breed apathy and crime, discourage investment and contaminate the areas around them. The response of con-ventional city planning is to tear them down, scatter their inhabitants, lay out super-blocks, and rebuild the area accord-ing to an integrated plan, with the result, as often as not, that the crime rate rises still higher, the new neighborhood is more lifeless than the old one, and the surrounding areas deteriorate even more, until the life of the whole city is threatened.

    But Mrs. Jacobs observes that in any number of cases these very conditions--mixed uses, dense population, old buildings, small blocks, decentralized ownership--create the very opposite of slums, neighborhoods that regenerate themselves spontaneously, that are full of variety and diversity, that attract large numbers of casual visitors and responsible new residents, that encourage investment and revitalize the areas around them. Boston's North End (condemned as a slum by or-thodox planners) is such a neighborhood, and so is Greenwich Village. Rittenhouse Square and Telegraph Hill are others. Nearly every large city can produce still other examples.

    Why then do some city neighborhoods die and why do others flourish? And what can city planners do to avoid the death and encourage the life of our great American cities? The solutions proposed by Mrs. Jacobs in this book represent a sharp break with conventional thinking on the subject and they carry with them the ring of simple truth which marks this book as an inevitable classic of social thought.

    This edition is set from the first American edition of 1961 and commemorates the seventy-fifth anniversary of Random House. [via]

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  • Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?
    by Philip K. Dick
    ISBN 0345404475 (0-345-40447-5)
    Softcover, Ballantine Books

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    Book summary:

    Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is a book that most people think they remember and almost always get more or less wrong. Ridley Scott's film Blade Runner took a lot from it, and threw a lot away. Wonderful in itself, the film is a flash thriller, whereas Dick's novel is a sober meditation. As we all know, bounty hunter Rick Deckard is stalking a group of androids who have returned from space with short life spans and murder on their minds--where Scott's Deckard was Harrison Ford, Dick's is a financially strapped municipal employee with bills to pay and a depressed wife. In a world where most animals have died, and pet keeping is a social duty, he can only afford a robot imitation, unless he gets a big financial break.

    The genetically warped "chickenhead" John Isidore has visions of a tomb-world where entropy has finally won. And everyone plugs in to the spiritual agony of Mercer, whose sufferings for the sins of humanity are broadcast several times a day. Prefiguring the religious obsessions of Dick's last novels, this book asks dark questions about identity and altruism. After all, is it right to kill the killers just because Mercer says so? --Roz Kaveney, Amazon.co.uk [via]

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  • Empire
    by Gore Vidal
    ISBN 037570874X (0-375-70874-X)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    "Mr. Vidal demonstrates a political imagination and insider's sagacity equaled by no other practicing fiction writer I can think of. And like the earlier novels in his historical cycle, Empire is a wonderfully vivid documentary drama." The New York Times Book Review

    In this extraordinarily powerful epic Gore Vidal recreates America's Gilded Agea period of promise and possibility, of empire-building and fierce political rivalries. In a vivid and beathtaking work of fiction, where the fortunes of a sister and brother intertwine with the fates of the generation, their country, and some of the greatest names of their day, including President McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, William Jennings Bryan, William and Henry James, the Astors, the Vanderbilts, and the Whitneys, Gore Vidal sweeps us from the nineteenth century into the twentieth, from the salvaged republic of Lincoln to a nation boldly reaching for the world. [via]

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  • Foundation
    by Isaac Asimov
    ISBN 0345336275 (0-345-33627-5)
    Softcover, Ballantine Books

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    Foundation marks the first of a series of tales set so far in the future that Earth is all but forgotten by humans who live throughout the galaxy. Yet all is not well with the Galactic Empire. Its vast size is crippling to it. In particular, the administrative planet, honeycombed and tunneled with offices and staff, is vulnerable to attack or breakdown. The only person willing to confront this imminent catastrophe is Hari Seldon, a psychohistorian and mathematician. Seldon can scientifically predict the future, and it doesn't look pretty: a new Dark Age is scheduled to send humanity into barbarism in 500 years. He concocts a scheme to save the knowledge of the race in an Encyclopedia Galactica. But this project will take generations to complete, and who will take up the torch after him? The first Foundation trilogy (Foundation, Foundation and Empire, Second Foundation) won a Hugo Award in 1965 for "Best All-Time Series." It's science fiction on the grand scale; one of the classics of the field. --Brooks Peck [via]

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  • Fourth Hand
    by John Irving
    ISBN 0345449347 (0-345-44934-7)
    Softcover, Ballantine Books

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    Book summary:

    Like new! [via]

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  • Ellis, Bret Easton: Glamorama
    Glamorama
    by Bret Easton Ellis
    ISBN 0375703845 (0-375-70384-5)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    Glamorama is a satirical mass-murder opus more ambitious than Bret Easton Ellis's 1990 American Psycho. It starts as a spritz-of-consciousness romp about kid-club entrepreneur Victor Ward, "the It boy of the moment," an actor-model up for Flatliners II. Ellis has perfect pitch for glam-speak, and he gives nightlife the fizz, pace, and shimmer it lacks in drab reality. Anyone could cite the right celeb names and tunes, but like a rock-polishing machine, his prose gives literary sheen to fame-chasing air-kissers. He's coldly funny: when Victor's girl tries to argue him out of a breakup, she angrily snorts six bumps of coke, stops, mutters, "Wrong vial," snorts four corrective doses from whatever she has in her other fist, then objects to a rival at the party wearing the same dress she's wearing.

    You had to be there; Ellis makes you feel you are. But such satire is a very smart bomb targeting a very large barn. Models' status anxiety doesn't merit Ellis's Tom Wolfe-esque expertise. Glamorama gets better when Victor gets drafted into a mysterious group of model-terrorists who bomb 747s and the Ritz in Paris, wearing Kevlar-lined Armani suits. Oh, they still behave like shallow snobs, pronouncing "cool" as if it had 12 o's. But now when somebody swills Cristal, it's apt to be poisoned, to horrific effect, which Ellis expertly, affectlessly describes. His enfant-terrible debut, Less Than Zero, aped Joan Didion. Now Ellis has grown into a lesser Don DeLillo--and that's high praise. --Tim Appelo [via]

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  • Hand to Mouth: A Chronicle of Early Failure
    by Paul Auster
    ISBN 0312422326 (0-312-42232-6)
    Softcover, Picador USA

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    Book summary:

    It's no wonder that Paul Auster (The Music of Chance, Leviathan, Mr. Vertigo) creates such singular characters. While his youth comprised a series of failures too unbelievable for fiction, it also equipped him with a range of experiences to draw from that most fiction writers only dream of. He worked with Bowery bums at a summer camp, had a childhood friend join the Weather Underground, and was a student at Columbia in 1968 at the height of the student uprisings there (and at which point, he boasts, he knew seven of the FBI's ten most wanted men). He worked on an oil tanker, for a French Mafia-style film producer in Paris, and for a rare-book organization in New York. He translated the North Vietnamese constitution from French into English (don't ask). His work brought him in contact to varying extents with Jean Genet, Mary McCarthy, Jerzy Kosinski, Sartre, Foucault, and John Lennon. The encounters and experiences must have been fascinating, failure aside, but Auster's prose here, sadly, lacks the tightness and luster of his fiction. The remainder--and major portion--of the volume consists of three plays, a baseball card game, and a detective novel, all written during this time. [via]

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  • House of Leaves
    by Mark Z. Danielewski
    ISBN 0375703764 (0-375-70376-4)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    Had The Blair Witch Project been a book instead of a film, and had it been written by, say, Nabokov at his most playful, revised by Stephen King at his most cerebral, and typeset by the futurist editors of Blast at their most avant-garde, the result might have been something like House of Leaves. Mark Z. Danielewski's first novel has a lot going on: notably the discovery of a pseudoacademic monograph called The Navidson Record, written by a blind man named Zampanò, about a nonexistent documentary film--which itself is about a photojournalist who finds a house that has supernatural, surreal qualities. (The inner dimensions, for example, are measurably larger than the outer ones.) In addition to this Russian-doll layering of narrators, Danielewski packs in poems, scientific lists, collages, Polaroids, appendices of fake correspondence and "various quotes," single lines of prose placed any which way on the page, crossed-out passages, and so on.

    Now that we've reached the post-postmodern era, presumably there's nobody left who needs liberating from the strictures of conventional fiction. So apart from its narrative high jinks, what does House of Leaves have to offer? According to Johnny Truant, the tattoo-shop apprentice who discovers Zampanò's work, once you read The Navidson Record,

    For some reason, you will no longer be the person you believed you once were. You'll detect slow and subtle shifts going on all around you, more importantly shifts in you. Worse, you'll realize it's always been shifting, like a shimmer of sorts, a vast shimmer, only dark like a room. But you won't understand why or how.
    We'll have to take his word for it, however. As it's presented here, the description of the spooky film isn't continuous enough to have much scare power. Instead, we're pulled back into Johnny Truant's world through his footnotes, which he uses to discharge everything in his head, including the discovery of the manuscript, his encounters with people who knew Zampanò, and his own battles with drugs, sex, ennui, and a vague evil force. If The Navidson Record is a mad professor lecturing on the supernatural with rational-seeming conviction, Truant's footnotes are the manic student in the back of the auditorium, wigged out and furiously scribbling whoa-dude notes about life.

    Despite his flaws, Truant is an appealingly earnest amateur editor--finding translators, tracking down sources, pointing out incongruities. Danielewski takes an academic's--or ex-academic's--glee in footnotes (the similarity to David Foster Wallace is almost too obvious to mention), as well as other bogus ivory-tower trappings such as interviews with celebrity scholars like Camille Paglia and Harold Bloom. And he stuffs highbrow and pop-culture references (and parodies) into the novel with the enthusiasm of an anarchist filling a pipe bomb with bits of junk metal. House of Leaves may not be the prettiest or most coherent collection, but if you're trying to blow stuff up, who cares? --John Ponyicsanyi [via]

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  • The House of Mirth
    by Edith Wharton
    ISBN 0375753753 (0-375-75375-3)
    Softcover, Modern Library

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  • Countryman, Edward: How Did American Slavery Begin: Readings
    How Did American Slavery Begin: Readings
    by Edward Countryman
    ISBN 0312182619 (0-312-18261-9)
    Softcover, Bedford/st Martins

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  • I Married a Communist
    by Philip Roth
    ISBN 0375707212 (0-375-70721-2)
    Softcover, Vintage Books

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    Book summary:

    Iron Rinn (né Ira Ringold) is a self-educated radio actor, married to a spoilt, rags-to-riches beauty, silent-film star Eve Frame (née Chave Fromkin). He is a Communist, and a "sucker for suffering," locked into the cycle of violence from which he has emerged. She has risen by assiduous imitation of what is "classy"--which seems to include a wide swathe of anti-Semitism--and ultimately denounces her husband as a Soviet spook. And who would be the narrator of this McCarthy-era meltdown? None other than Philip Roth's longtime alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman, who learns the full tragedy several decades later, owing to a chance encounter with Ira's brother: "I'm the only person living who knows Ira's story," 90-year-old Murray Ringold tells Nathan, "you're the only person still living who cares about it."

    Characteristically, Nathan also discovers that his own story was bound up with the blacklistings and ruined careers of the immediate postwar period. It seems that he had been tainted by his association with the Ringolds--Murray was in fact his high-school teacher--and was denied the Fulbright scholarship he deserved. "They had you down for Ira's nephew," Murray tells Nathan. "The FBI didn't always get everything right." Roth's acerbic style and keen eye for emotional detail goes to the heart of this moment of high tragedy in which the American dream was damaged beyond repair. --Lisa Jardine [via]

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  • Isaac's Storm
    by Erik Larson, Isaac Monroe Cline
    ISBN 0375708278 (0-375-70827-8)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    On September 8, 1900, a massive hurricane slammed into Galveston, Texas. A tidal surge of some four feet in as many seconds inundated the city, while the wind destroyed thousands of buildings. By the time the water and winds subsided, entire streets had disappeared and as many as 10,000 were dead--making this the worst natural disaster in America's history.

    In Isaac's Storm, Erik Larson blends science and history to tell the story of Galveston, its people, and the hurricane that devastated them. Drawing on hundreds of personal reminiscences of the storm, Larson follows individuals through the fateful day and the storm's aftermath. There's Louisa Rollfing, who begged her husband, August, not to go into town the morning of the storm; the Ursuline Sisters at St. Mary's orphanage who tied their charges to lengths of clothesline to keep them together; Judson Palmer, who huddled in his bathroom with his family and neighbors, hoping to ride out the storm. At the center of it all is Isaac Cline, employee of the nascent Weather Bureau, and his younger brother--and rival weatherman--Joseph. Larson does an excellent job of piecing together Isaac's life and reveals that Isaac was not the quick-thinking hero he claimed to be after the storm ended. The storm itself, however, is the book's true protagonist--and Larson describes its nuances in horrific detail.

    At times the prose is a bit too purple, but Larson is engaging and keeps the book's tempo rising in pace with the wind and waves. Overall, Isaac's Storm recaptures at a time when, standing in the first year of the century, Americans felt like they ruled the world--and that even the weather was no real threat to their supremacy. Nature proved them wrong. --Sunny Delaney [via]

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  • Reynolds, David S.: John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, And Seeded Civil Rights
    John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights
    by David S. Reynolds
    ISBN 0375726152 (0-375-72615-2)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    A cultural biography of John Brown,  the controversial abolitionist who used violent tactics against slavery and single-handedly changed the course of American history.  Reynolds brings to life the Puritan warrior who gripped slavery by the throat and triggered the Civil War.  Reynolds demonstrates that Browns most violent actsincluding his killing of proslavery settlers in Kansas and his historic raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia--were inspired by the slave revolts, guerilla warfare, and revolutionary Christianity of the day.  He shows how Brown seized public attention, polarizing the nation and fueling the tensions that led to the Civil War. Reynolds recounts how Brown permeated American culture during the Civil War and beyond, and how he planted the seeds of the civil rights movement by making a pioneering demand for complete social and political equality for Americas ethnic minorities. [via]

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  • The Jungle
    by Christopher Phelps, Upton Beall Sinclair
    ISBN 0312400373 (0-312-40037-3)
    Softcover, Bedford/st Martins

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    Book summary:

    Upton Sinclairs novel The Jungle, which inspired passage in 1906 of the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act, stands as a classic of twentieth-century American literature and social protest. In this accessible and thorough edition by Christopher Phelps, a critical introduction addresses the wide range of issues raised by the text, including early twentieth-century working conditions, immigrant community, race and gender, political reform, and the continuing relevance of Sinclairs investigation. This edition uses the most widely recognized text of The Jungle  the Doubleday, Page edition published in 1906  and provides an illuminating supporting document: President Theodore Roosevelts delivery to Congress of the official report that confirmed The Jungles shocking allegations about the Chicago meatpacking industry. Questions for consideration, a chronology, and a selected bibliography help contextualize Sinclairs novel and provide students with resources for further study.
    [via]

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  • The Last of the Mohicans
    by James Fenimore Cooper
    ISBN 0375757643 (0-375-75764-3)
    Softcover, Modern Library

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    Book summary:

    Cooper's famous adventure brings the wilds of the American frontier and the drama of the French-Indian war to vivid life. Featuring the classic character Natty Bumppo, it is a moving, memorable depiction of courage, passion, and forbearance, and a precursor to the Western genre. [via]

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  • Foner, Eric: Liberty and Power: The Politics of Jacksonian America
    Liberty and Power: The Politics of Jacksonian America
    by Eric Foner, Harry L. Watson
    ISBN 0374521964 (0-374-52196-4)
    Softcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux

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  • Macbeth
    by William Shakespeare, William C. Carroll
    ISBN 0312144547 (0-312-14454-7)
    Softcover, Bedford/st Martins

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    Book summary:

    This teaching edition of Shakespeare's Macbeth reprints the Bevington edition of the play accompanied by six sets of primary documents and illustrations thematically arranged to offer a richly textured understanding of early modern culture and Shakespeare's work within that culture. The texts include facsimiles of period documents, excerpts from King James's writings on politics, contemporary writings on the nature of kingship and tyrannicide, Puritan and Catholic tracts, conduct book literature, and contemporary witchcraft pamphlets. [via]

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  • Main Street : The Story of Carol Kennicott
    by Sinclair Lewis
    ISBN 0375753141 (0-375-75314-1)
    Softcover, Random House Publishing Group

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    Book summary:

    With Commentary by E. M. Forster, Dorothy Parker,
    H. L. Mencken, Lewis Mumford, Rebecca West,
    Sherwood Anderson, Malcolm Cowley, Alfred Kazin, Constance Rourke, and Mark Schorer

    Main Street is the climax of civilization," Sinclair Lewis declared with a typical blend of seriousness and irony. "That this Ford car might stand in front of the Bon Ton Store, Hannibal invaded Rome and Erasmus wrote in Oxford cloisters." Main Street, the story of an idealistic young woman's attempts to reform her small town, brought Lewis immediate acclaim when it was published in 1920. It remains one of the essential texts of the American scene. Lewis Mumford observed: "In Main Street an American had at last written of our life with something of the intellectual rigor and critical detachment that had seemed so cruel and unjustified [in Charles Dickens and Matthew Arnold]. Young people had grown up in this environment, suffocated, stultified, helpless, but unable to find any reason for their spiritual discomfort. Mr. Lewis released them."

    Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951), was born in Sauk Centre, Minne-sota, and graduated from Yale in 1907; in 1930 he became the first American recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Main Street (1920) was his first critical and commercial success. Lewis's other noted books include Babbitt (1922), Arrowsmith (1925), Elmer Gantry (1927), Dodsworth (1929), and It Can't Happen Here (1935). [via]

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  • The March
    by E.L. Doctorow
    ISBN 0375506713 (0-375-50671-3)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    As the Civil War was moving toward its inevitable conclusion, General William Tecumseh Sherman marched 60,000 Union troops through Georgia and the Carolinas, leaving a 60-mile-wide trail of death, destruction, looting, thievery and chaos. In The March, E.L. Doctorow has put his unique stamp on these events by staying close to historical fact, naming real people and places and then imagining the rest, as he did in Ragtime.

    Recently, the Civil War has been the subject of novels by Howard Bahr, Michael Shaara, Charles Frazier, and Robert Hicks, to name a few. Its perennial appeal is due not only to the fact that it was fought on our own soil, but also that it captures perfectly our long-time and ongoing ambivalence about race. Doctorow examines this question extensively, chronicling the dislocation of both southern whites and Negroes as Sherman burned and destroyed all that they had ever known. Sherman is a well-drawn character, pictured as a crazy tactical genius pitted against his West Point counterparts. Doctorow creates a context for the march: "The brutal romance of war was still possible in the taking of spoils. Each town the army overran was a prize... There was something undeniably classical about it, for how else did the armies of Greece and Rome supply themselves?"

    The characters depicted on the march are those people high and low, white and black, whose lives are forever changed by war: Pearl, the newly free daughter of a white plantation owner and one of his slaves, Colonel Sartorius, a competent, remote, almost robotic surgeon; several officers, both Union and Confederate; two soldiers, Arly and Will, who provide comic relief in the manner of Shakespeare's fools until, suddenly, their roles are not funny anymore.

    Doctorow has captured the madness of war in his description of the condition of a dispossessed Southern white woman: "What was clear at this moment was that Mattie Jameson's mental state befitted the situation in which she found herself. The world at war had risen to her affliction and made it indistinguishable." And later, " This was not war as adventure, nor war for a solemn cause, it was war at its purest, a mindless mass rage severed from any cause, ideal, or moral principle."

    As we have come to expect, Doctorow puts the reader in the picture; never more so than in recalling "The March" and letting us see it as a cautionary tale for our times. --Valerie Ryan [via]

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  • Mason & Dixon
    by Thomas Pynchon
    ISBN 0312423209 (0-312-42320-9)
    Softcover, St Martins Pr

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    Book summary:

    A sprawling, complex, and comic work from one of the country's most celebrated and idiosyncratic authors, Mason & Dixon is Thomas Pynchon's Most Magickal reinvention of the 18th-century novel. It follows the lifelong partnership and adventures of the English surveyors Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon (of Mason-Dixon Line fame) as they travel the world mapping and measuring through an uncharted pre-Revolutionary America of Native Americans, white settlers, taverns, and bawdy establishments of ill-repute. Fans of the postmodern master of paranoia will recognize Pynchon's personality in the novel's first phrase: "Snow-Balls have flown their Arcs," a brief echo of the rockets that curve across the skies in the writer's masterpiece Gravity's Rainbow. [via]

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  • Miracle at Philadelphia
    by Catherine Drinker Bowen
    ISBN 0316103985 (0-316-10398-5)
    Softcover, Little Brown & Co

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    Book summary:

    This book is a history of the Federal Convention in Philadelphia that resulted in the Constitution of the United States. [via]

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  • Motherless Brooklyn
    by Jonathan Lethem
    ISBN 0375724834 (0-375-72483-4)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    Pop quiz. Please complete the following sentence: "There are days when I get up in the morning and stagger into the bathroom and begin running water and then I look up and I don't even recognize my own _." If you answered face, then your name is obviously not Jonathan Lethem. Instead of taking the easy out, the genre-busting novelist concludes this by-the-numbers string of words with toothbrush in the mirror.

    This brilliant sentence and a lot of other really excellent ones compose Lethem's engaging fifth novel, Motherless Brooklyn. Lionel Essrog, a detective suffering from Tourette's syndrome, spins the narrative as he tracks down the killer of his boss, Frank Minna. Minna enlisted Lionel and his friends when they were teenagers living at Saint Vincent's Home for Boys, ostensibly to perform odd jobs (we're talking very odd) and over the years trained them to become a team of investigators. The Minna men face their most daunting case when they find their mentor in a Dumpster bleeding from stab wounds delivered by an assailant whose identity he refuses to reveal--even while he's dying on the way to the hospital.

    Detectives? Brooklyn? Is this the same Lethem who danced the postapocalypso in Amnesia Moon? Incredibly, yes, and rarely has such a departure been pulled off with this much aplomb. As in the "toothbrush" passage above, Lethem sets himself up with the imposing task of making tired conventions new. Brooklyn accents? Fuggetaboutit. Lethem's dialogue is as light on its feet as a prize fighter. Lionel's Tourette's could have been an easy joke, but Lethem probes so convincingly into the disorder that you feel simultaneously rattled, sympathetic, and irritated by the guy. Sure, the story is a mystery, but Motherless Brooklyn could be about flower arranging, for all we care. What counts is Lionel's tic-ridden take on a world full of surprises, propelling this fiction forward at edgy, breakneck speed. --Ryan Boudinot [via]

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  • The Narrows
    by Michael Connelly
    ISBN 0316000736 (0-316-00073-6)
    Hardcover, Little Brown & Co

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    FBI agent Rachel Walling finally gets the call she's dreaded for years.The Poet has returned.Years earlier she worked on the famous case tracking the serial killer who wove lines of poetry into his hideous crimes. Rachel has never forgotten the Poet-and apparently he has not forgotten her. Former LAPD detective Harry Bosch gets a call, too, from an old friend whose husband recently died.The death appeared natural, but this man's ties to the hunt for the Poet make Harry dig deep.What he finds leads him into the most terrifying situation he has ever encountered. So begins the most deeply compelling, frightening, and masterful novel Michael Connelly has ever written, placing Harry Bosch squarely in the path of the most ruthless and ingenious murderer in Los Angeles's history. This spectacularly dramatic and shocking novel will have Michael Connelly's readers desperately hungry for the next book from 'one of America's best writers' (Cleveland Plain Dealer). [via]

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  • Of Paradise and Power : America and Europe in the New World Order
    by Robert Kagan
    ISBN 0375432914 (0-375-43291-4)
    Hardcover, Random House Large Print

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    Book summary:

    From a leading scholar of our countrys foreign policy, the brilliant essay about America and the world that has caused a storm in international circles now expanded into book form.

    European leaders, increasingly disturbed by U.S. policy and actions abroad, feel they are headed for what the New York Times (July 21, 2002) describes as a moment of truth. After years of mutual resentment and tension, there is a sudden recognition that the real interests of America and its allies are diverging sharply and that the trans-atlantic relationship itself has changed, possibly irreversibly. Europe sees the United States as high-handed, unilateralist, and unnecessarily belligerent; the United States sees Europe as spent, unserious, and weak. The anger and mistrust on both sides are hardening into incomprehension.

    This past summer, in Policy Review, Robert Kagan reached incisively into this impasse to force both sides to see themselves through the eyes of the other. Tracing the widely differing histories of Europe and America since the end of World War II, he makes clear how for one the need to escape a bloody past has led to a new set of transnational beliefs about power and threat, while the other has perforce evolved into the guarantor of that postmodern paradise by dint of its might and global reach. This remarkable analysis is being discussed from Washington to Paris to Tokyo. It is esssential reading. [via]

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  • Wolff, Tobias: Old School
    Old School
    by Tobias Wolff
    ISBN 0375701494 (0-375-70149-4)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    Tobias Wolff's Old School is at once a celebration of literature and delicate hymn to a lost innocence of American life and art. Set in a New England prep school in the early 1960s, the novel imagines a final, pastoral moment before the explosion of the Civil Rights movement, the Vietnam War, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and the suicide of Ernest Hemingway.

    The unnamed narrator is one of several boys whose life revolves around the school's English teachers, those polymaths who seemed to know "exactly what was most worth knowing." For the boys, literature is the center of life, and their obsession culminates in a series of literary competitions during their final year. The prize in each is a private audience with a visiting writer who serves as judge for the entries.

    At first, the narrator is entirely taken with the battle. As he fails in his effort to catch Robert Frost's attention and then is unable--due to illness--to even compete for his moment with Ayn Rand, he devotes his energies to a masterpiece for his hero, Hemingway. But, confronting the blank page, the narrator discovers his cowardice, his duplicity. He has withheld himself, he realizes, even from his roommate. He has used his fiction to create a patrician gentility, a mask for his middle class home and his Jewish ancestry. Through the competition for Hemingway, fittingly, all of his illusions about literature dissolve.

    Old School is a small, neatly made book, spare and clear in its prose. Each chapter is self-contained and free of anything extraneous to the essentials of plot, mood, and character. Near the end of the novel, the narrator, now a respected writer, imagines that he might one day write about his school days. But he is daunted. "Memory," he says, "is a dream to begin with, and what I had was a dream of memory, not to be put to the test." Old School enters this interplay between dreams and the adult interrogation of memory. Risking sentimentality, Wolff confronts a golden age that never was. From the confrontation, he distills a powerful novel of failed expectations and, ultimately, redemptive self-awareness. --Patrick O'Kelley [via]

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  • Wolfe, Gene: Peace
    Peace
    by Gene Wolfe
    ISBN 0312890338 (0-312-89033-8)
    Softcover, Tor Books

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  • Portnoy's Complaint
    by Philip Roth
    ISBN 0375507930 (0-375-50793-0)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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    Book summary:

    Portnoy's Complaint n. [after Alexander Portnoy (1933-)] A disorder in which strongly-felt ethical and altruistic impulses are perpetually warring with extreme sexual longings, often of a perverse nature. Spievogel says: "Acts of exhibitionism, voyeurism, fetishism, auto-eroticism and oral coitus are plentiful; as a consequence of the patient's "morality," however, neither fantasy nor act issues in genuine sexual gratification, but rather in overriding feelings of shame and the dread of retribution, particularly in the form of castration." (Spielvogel, O. "The Puzzled Penis," Internationale Zeitschrift fur Psychoanalyse, Vol. XXIV p. 909.) It is believed by Spielvogel that many of the symptoms can be traced to the bonds obtaining in the mother-child relationship. [via]

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  • Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour
    by J. D. Salinger
    ISBN 0316766941 (0-316-76694-1)
    Softcover, Little Brown & Co

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    Book summary:

    The author writes: The two long pieces in this book originally came out in The New Yorker ? RAISE HIGH THE ROOF BEAM, CARPENTERS in 1955, SEYMOUR ? An Introduction in 1959. Whatever their differences in mood or effect, they are both very much concerned with Seymour Glass, who is the main character in my still-uncompleted series about the Glass family. It struck me that they had better be collected together, if not deliberately paired off, in something of a hurry, if I mean them to avoid unduly or undesirably close contact with new material in the series. There is only my word for it, granted, but I have several new Glass stories coming along ? waxing, dilating ? each in its own way, but I suspect the less said about them, in mixed company, the better. Oddly, the joys and satisfactions of working on the Glass family peculiarly increase and deepen for me with the years. I can't say why, though. Not, at least, outside the casino proper of my fiction. [via]

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  • A Rumor of War
    by Philip Caputo
    ISBN 0345331222 (0-345-33122-2)
    Softcover, Ballantine Books

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    Book summary:

    The extraordinary betseller that provides a close-up look unlike any other, at the American experience in Vietnam. Powerful, vivid, compassionate, and heartbreaking, here is a very personal and yet universal grunt's-eye-view of the hopeless brutality and the ultimate, and seemingly endless horror where men and governments sacrificed their morality and the souls of their nation. [via]

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  • The Scarlet Letter
    by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ross C. Murfin
    ISBN 0312256930 (0-312-25693-0)
    Softcover, Bedford/st Martins

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    Book summary:

    Bedford College Editions reprint enduring literary works in a handsome, readable, and affordable format. The text of each work is lightly but helpfully annotated. Prepared by eminent scholars and teachers, the editorial matter in each volume includes a chronology of the life of the author; an illustrated introduction to the contexts and major issues of the text in its time and ours; an annotated bibliography for further reading (contexts, criticism, and Internet resources); and a concise glossary of literary terms. This title is available in print or as a Bedford e-Book to Go.

    [via]

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  • Seizure of Power
    by Czeslaw Milosz
    ISBN 0374257884 (0-374-25788-4)
    Hardcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux

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    Book summary:

    Interrelated essays by the Nobel Laureate on his adopted home of California, which Lewis Hyde, writing in The Nation, called "remarkable, morally serious and thought-provoking essays, which strive to lay aside the barren categories by which we have unders
    [via]

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  • Speak, Memory
    by Vladimir Nabokov, Brian Boyd
    ISBN 0375405534 (0-375-40553-4)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    Even if you already own Nabokov's earthy, otherworldly account of his astounding life, you must buy this 1999 edition. And if you've never read Speak, Memory, you must do so at once. This volume is essential because it includes the unpublished last chapter, a pseudo-review comparing Speak, Memory with another, nonexistent memoir called When Lilacs Last. (That title refers to Whitman's poem on Lincoln's assassination and to the lilacs of Nabokov's childhood home) Chapter 16 is a key to what the imaginary reviewer accurately calls a "unique freak as autobiographies go," revealing its novel-like nature and unifying themes and images (chess, puzzles, spirals, jewels, rainbows, exile, the stained-glass shadow patterns that the future casts on the present). Maybe Nabokov thought he gave too much away, and one sees the formal superiority of ending the book with chapter 15. But the added essay is a gem that dazzles and illuminates.

    You have to consult biographies like Brian Boyd's for the full, remarkable facts of Nabokov's life. A millionaire at 17 (his sister danced in Diaghilev gowns with Fabergé gems at the Winter Palace), repeatedly exiled, forced to bust out of one chrysalis after another into new lives, the writer retained only the infinite wealth of his memory and art. This book is a mosaic shaped by a mind so metaphorical that, as a babe, Nabokov perceived letters as colors, the alphabet as a rainbow.

    The loss of his father is at Speak, Memory's core. This memoir is worth owning for a single paragraph alone, about the sight of Nabokov senior being tossed aloft by grateful peasants he'd been generous to--a dozen or so with locked arms flinging him up in a hip-hip-hooray ritual.

    There, for an instant, the figure of my father in his wind-rippled white summer suit would be displayed, gloriously sprawled in midair.... Thrice, to the mighty heave-ho of his invisible tossers, he would fly up ... and then there he would be, on his last and loftiest flight, reclining, as if for good, against the cobalt blue of the summer noon, like one of those paradisiac personages who comfortably soar, with such a wealth of folds in their garments, on the vaulted ceiling of a church while below, one by one, the wax tapers in mortal hands light up to make a swarm of minute flames in the mist of incense, and the priest chants of eternal repose, and funeral lilies conceal the face of whoever lies there, among the swimming lights, in the open coffin.
    Nabokov recaptures the paradise of his youth, and acquits himself of the coldness of which some accuse him. He plays literary games, but he plays for keeps. --Tim Appelo [via]

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  • Mead, Walter Russell: Special Providence : American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World
    Special Providence : American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World
    by Walter Russell Mead
    ISBN 0375412301 (0-375-41230-1)
    Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group

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  • Specimen Days
    by Michael Cunningham
    ISBN 0312425023 (0-312-42502-3)
    Softcover, St Martins Pr

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    Book summary:

    Book Description: In each section of Michael Cunningham's bold new novel, his first since The Hours, we encounter the same group of characters: a young boy, an older man, and a young woman. "In the Machine" is a ghost story that takes place at the height of the industrial revolution, as human beings confront the alienating realities of the new machine age. "The Children's Crusade," set in the early twenty-first century, plays with the conventions of the noir thriller as it tracks the pursuit of a terrorist band that is detonating bombs, seemingly at random, around the city. The third part, "Like Beauty," evokes a New York 150 years into the future, when the city is all but overwhelmed by refugees from the first inhabited planet to be contacted by the people of Earth.

    Presiding over each episode of this interrelated whole is the prophetic figure of the poet Walt Whitman, who promised his future readers, "It avails not, neither time or place ... I am with you, and know how it is." Specimen Days is a genre-bending, haunting, and transformative ode to life in our greatest city and a meditation on the direction and meaning of America's destiny. It is a work of surpassing power and beauty by one of the most original and daring writers at work today.

    More from Michael Cunningham


    The Hours
    A Home at the End of the World
    Flesh and Blood

    Whitman Sampler


    The Portable Walt Whitman
    Specimen Days & Collect
    Walt Whitman: Poetry and Prose

    Whitman Sampler
    [via]

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  • Standing in the Rainbow
    by Fannie Flagg
    ISBN 0345452887 (0-345-45288-7)
    Softcover, Ballantine Books

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    Book summary:

    Good news! Fannies back in town--and the town is among the leading characters in her new novel.

    Along with Neighbor Dorothy, the lady with the smile in her voice, whose daily radio broadcasts keep us delightfully informed on all the local news, we also meet Bobby, her ten-year-old son, destined to live a thousand lives, most of them in his imagination; Norma and Macky Warren and their ninety-eight-year-old Aunt Elner; the oddly sexy and charismatic Hamm Sparks, who starts off in life as a tractor salesman and ends up selling himself to the whole state and almost the entire country; and the two women who love him as differently as night and day. Then there is Tot Whooten, the beautician whose luck is as bad as her hairdressing skills; Beatrice Woods, the Little Blind Songbird; Cecil Figgs, the Funeral King; and the fabulous Minnie Oatman, lead vocalist of the Oatman Family Gospel Singers.

    The time is 1946 until the present. The town is Elmwood Springs, Missouri, right in the middle of the country, in the midst of the mostly joyous transition from war to peace, aiming toward a dizzyingly bright future.

    Once again, Fannie Flagg gives us a story of richly human characters, the saving graces of the once-maligned middle classes and small-town life, and the daily contest between laughter and tears. Fannie truly writes from the heartland, and her storytelling is, to quote Time, "utterly irresistible." [via]

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  • Maupin, Armistead: Tales of the City
    Tales of the City
    by Armistead Maupin
    ISBN 0345351908 (0-345-35190-8)
    Softcover, Random House Publishing Group

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  • James, Henry: Turn of the Screw
    Turn of the Screw
    by Henry James
    ISBN 0312138334 (0-312-13833-4)
    Softcover, Palgrave Macmillan

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  • The Turn of the Screw: A Case Study in Contemporary Criticism
    by Peter G. Beidler, Henry James
    ISBN 0312406916 (0-312-40691-6)
    Softcover, Bedford/st Martins

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    Book summary:

    This volume presents the text of the New York Edition of Jamess classic 1898 short novel along with critical essays that read The Turn of the Screw from contemporary reader-response, psychoanalytic, gender, and Marxist perspectives. An additional essay demonstrates how several critical perspectives can be combined. As in the first edition, the text and essays are complemented by biographical and critical introductions, bibliographies, and a glossary of critical and theoretical terms. Two of the six essays are new to the second edition, as is a selection of cultural documents and illustrations.
    [via]

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  • Typee
    by Herman Melville, Holly Dugan, Robert Sullivan
    ISBN 0375757457 (0-375-75745-7)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    Melville's first and most popular novel during his lifetime, Typee is a provocative and lively account of his exploits in the exotic South Seas during the early 1840s, where he journeyed as a young sailor. This edition includes notes on the text. [via]

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  • Uncle Tom's Cabin
    by Harriet Beecher Stowe
    ISBN 0312446519 (0-312-44651-9)
    Softcover, Bedford/st Martins

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    Book summary:

    When Uncle Tom's Cabin was published in 1852, it became an international blockbuster, selling more than 300,000 copies in the United States alone in its first year. Progressive for her time, Harriet Beecher Stowe was one of the earliest writers to offer a shockingly realistic depiction of slavery. Her stirring indictment and portrait of human dignity in the most inhumane circumstances enlightened hundreds of thousands by revealing the human costs of slavery, which had until then been cloaked and justified by the racist misperceptions of the time. Langston Hughes called it "a moral battle cry," noting that "the love and warmth and humanity that went into its writing keep it alive a century later," and Tolstoy described it as "flowing from love of God and man." [via]

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  • Brautigan, Richard: An Unfortunate Woman
    An Unfortunate Woman
    by Richard Brautigan
    ISBN 0312277105 (0-312-27710-5)
    Softcover, Griffin

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  • Until I Find You
    by John Irving
    ISBN 0345479726 (0-345-47972-6)
    Softcover, Ballantine Books

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    Book summary:

    At over 800 pages, John Irving's Until I Find You is a daunting proposition at best. Anyone who finishes it will have acquired forearm muscles, sore shoulders, and not much else. The story is self-indulgent, repetitive and, ultimately, boring, that cardinal sin that readers can't forgive. Longtime Irving readers have stayed with him through a few hits and a miss or two, but this is an all-time low. We are accustomed to Irving's work as quirky, bizarre, and off-the-wall and have forgiven all by calling such high-jinks and characters "imaginative" or "absolutely original." The only thing original about this tome is the descent into soft porn.

    Jack Burns, the hero of the tale, is four years old when it all begins. He is the illegitimate son of Daughter Alice, a tattoo artist and, guess what, daughter of a tattoo artist. She takes Jack on a pilgrimage to find his womanizing father, William, a church organist and "ink addict." By seeking out church organs and tattoo parlors, she expects to find him. She doesn't, and by now we have spent more than a hundred pages in Northern European cities doing an imitation of Groundhog Day. Same story, different day: a little prostitution for Alice, a few questions asked; alas, no daddy.

    Alice and Jack return to Toronto so that Jack may enter a previously all-girls school, which will admit little boys for the first time. There begins another 200 pages of the girls and the teachers abusing Jack, over and over again. By now, he is five and is, for some unfathomable reason, eminently interesting to girls and women. His "friend" Emma keeps careful track of "the little guy," as she calls Jack's penis, looking for signs of life. The worst part of all this is that none of it is funny or sad or even clever. There are wrestling vignettes, of course, and prep school tedium, but no bears. Maybe bears would have saved it. There were funny parts in The World According to Garp and The Cider House Rules as well as poignant, horrific parts in both of those and other Irving novels. This story is flat. The voice never changes; it just drones on.

    Jack becomes an actor. First, he is a boy in drag because he is so pretty, then he takes transvestite parts. He and Emma, now a published novelist, live together in LA, which provides endless opportunity for name-dropping. His career eventually takes off and he gets recognition and awards, but still no daddy. Irving, it turns out, never knew his father, either. Perhaps this exercise will exorcise that demon once and for all and Irving's next book will be about something more compelling than a little boy's penis and his trashy mother's antics. If you do make it through to the book's snapper of an ending, you deserve to find out what it is on your own. Call it a reward. --Valerie Ryan [via]

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  • Vineland
    by Thomas Pynchon
    ISBN 0316724440 (0-316-72444-0)
    Hardcover, Little Brown & Co

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    Book summary:

    In his first novel for 17 years, the author tells the story of a group of Americans living in the 1980s who are still struggling with the consequences of their lives in the 1960s. "Gravity's Rainbow" shared the National Book Award in 1973. [via]

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  • Visions From San Francisco Bay
    by Czeslaw Milosz, Richard Lourie
    ISBN 0374517630 (0-374-51763-0)
    Softcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux

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    Book summary:

    Interrelated essays by the Nobel Laureate on his adopted home of California, which Lewis Hyde, writing in The Nation, called "remarkable, morally serious and thought-provoking essays, which strive to lay aside the barren categories by which we have understood and judged our state . . . Their subject is the frailty of modern civilization."
    [via]

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  • Irving, John: The Water-Method Man
    The Water-Method Man
    by John Irving
    ISBN 0345367421 (0-345-36742-1)
    Softcover, Ballantine Books

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    Book summary:

    The main character of John Irving's second novel, written when the author was twenty-nine, is a perpetual graduate student with a birth defect in his urinary tract--and a man on the threshold of committing himself to a second marriage that bears remarkable resemblance to his first....
    "Three or four times as funny as most novels."
    THE NEW YORKER


    From the Paperback edition. [via]

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  • White Jazz
    by James Ellroy
    ISBN 0375727361 (0-375-72736-1)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    Los Angeles, 1958. Killings, beatings, bribes, shakedowns--it's standard procedure for Lieutenant Dave Klein, LAPD. He's a slumlord, a bagman, an enforcer--a power in his own small corner of hell. Then the Feds announce a full-out investigation into local police corruption, and everything goes haywire.

    Klein's been hung out as bait, "a bad cop to draw the heat," and the heat's coming from all sides: from local politicians, from LAPD brass, from racketeers and drug kingpins--all of them hell-bent on keeping their own secrets hidden. For Klein, "forty-two and going on dead," it's dues time.

    Klein tells his own story--his voice clipped, sharp, often as brutal as the events he's describing--taking us with him on a journey through a world shaped by monstrous ambition, avarice, and perversion. It's a world he created, but now he'll do anything to get out of it alive.

    Fierce, riveting, and honed to a razor edge, White Jazz is crime fiction at its most shattering. [via]

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  • Winesburg, Ohio
    by Sherwood Anderson
    ISBN 0375753133 (0-375-75313-3)
    Softcover, Modern Library

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    Book summary:

    Library Journal praised this edition of Sherwood Anderson's famed short stories as "the finest edition of this seminal work available." Reconstructed to be as close to the original text as possible, Winesburg, Ohio depicts the strange, secret lives of the inhabitants of a small town. In "Hands," Wing Biddlebaum tries to hide the tale of his banishment from a Pennsylvania town, a tale represented by his hands. In "Adventure," lonely Alice Hindman impulsively walks naked into the night rain. Threaded through the stories is the viewpoint of George Willard, the young newspaper reporter who, like his creator, stands witness to the dark and despairing dealings of a community of isolated people. [via]

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  • The World Is Flat 3.0: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century
    by Thomas L. Friedman
    ISBN 0312425074 (0-312-42507-4)
    Softcover, Picador USA

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    Book summary:

    The World Is Flat 3.0: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century [Paperback] [via]

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  • The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century
    by Thomas L. Friedman
    ISBN 0374292795 (0-374-29279-5)
    Hardcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux

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    Book summary:

    When scholars write the history of the world twenty years from now, and they come to the chapter "Y2K to March 2004," what will they say was the most crucial development? The attacks on the World Trade Center on 9/11 and the Iraq war? Or the convergence of technology and events that allowed India, China, and so many other countries to become part of the global supply chain for services and manufacturing, creating an explosion of wealth in the middle classes of the world's two biggest nations, giving them a huge new stake in the success of globalization? And with this "flattening" of the globe, which requires us to run faster in order to stay in place, has the world gotten too small and too fast for human beings and their political systems to adjust in a stable manner?In this brilliant new book, the award-winning New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman demystifies the brave new world for readers, allowing them to make sense of the often bewildering global scene unfolding before their eyes. With his inimitable ability to translate complex foreign policy and economic issues, Friedman explains how the flattening of the world happened at the dawn of the twenty-first century; what it means to countries, companies, communities, and individuals; and how governments and societies can, and must, adapt. The World Is Flat is the timely and essential update on globalization, its successes and discontents, powerfully illuminated by one of our most respected journalists. [via]

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