Challenge this statement if you can: No one writes more, and with greater variety, than William T. Vollmann.

$27.99 hardcover / harper collins

• Coming in March is Kissing the Mask: Beauty, Understatement and Femininity in Japanese Noh Theater, with Some Thoughts on Muses (Especially Helga Testorf), Transgender Women, Kabuki Goddesses, Porn Queens, Poets, Hou. The title speaks not only for itself, but for the range of Vollmann’s interests. This mouthful of scholarship he manages to relate in fewer than 550 pages.

$16.95 hardcover / harper collins

• In that broad category, Rising Up and Rising Down: Some Thoughts on Violence, Freedom and Urgent Means, is the granddaddy at 3,300 pages in seven volumes, which was nominated for the National Book Critic’s Circle Award when it was published in 2004. Before the end of the year, Ecco Press published an abridged edition at one-fifth the length, which Vollmann said he consented to for the money. Rising Up and Rising Down is Vollmann’s meditation on the age-old conundrum: when is violence justified? Vollmann writes: ‘”My own aim in beginning this book was to create a simple and practical moral calculus which would make it clear when it was acceptable to kill, how many could be killed and so forth.” Vollmann consulted hundreds of sources, and visited more than a dozen countries and war zones to witness violence firsthand. The result was a deeply personal book, full of insight.

$55.00 hardcover / penguin

• Imperial is hardly as prodigious in size (at only 1,344 pages) but nearly as sprawling in content, and profound in argument. For generations of migrant workers, from Okies fleeing the Dust Bowl of the 1930s to Mexican laborers today, Imperial County in Southern California has held the promise of paradise—and the reality of hell. It is a land beautiful and harsh, enticing and deadly, rich in history and heartbreak. Across the border, the desert is the same but there are different secrets. In Imperial, Vollmann takes us deep into the heart of this haunted region, and by extension into the dark soul of American imperialism.

$18.00 paperback / penguin

• Vollman won the 2005 National Book Award for Fiction for the 832-page Europe Central, in which he considered the authoritarian cultures of Germany and the USSR in the 20^th century. Assembling a composite portrait of these two warring leviathans and the terrible age they defined, the narrative intertwines experiences both real and fictional—a young German who joins the SS to expose its crimes, two generals who collaborate with the enemy for different reasons, the Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich laboring under Stalinist oppression. Through these and other lives, Vollmann offers a daring and mesmerizing perspective on human actions during wartime.

$16.95 paperback / harper collins

• Poverty was the focus of Vollman’s sharp eye and probing mind in Poor People, in which the author confront s the subject in all its hopelessness and brutality, its pride and abject fear, its fierce misery and quiet resignation, allowing the poor to explain the causes and consequences of their impoverishment in their own cultural, social, and religious terms. With intense compassion and a scrupulously unpatronizing narrative, Vollmann invites his readers to recognize in our fellow human beings their full dignity, fallibility, pride, and pain, and the power of their hard-fought resilience.

$18.00 paperback / penguin

• The Atlas is set in locales from Phnom Penh to Sarajevo, from Jerusalem to New York, from which Vollmann provocatively combines autobiography with invention in 53 interconnected tales that examine poverty, violence, and loss, even as they celebrate the beauty of landscape, the thrill of the alien, and the infinitely precious pain of love.

$17.95 paperback / simon and schuster

• Expelled from Eden: A William T. Vollmann Reader is a an atypical “best-of” collection, intended both as an introduction for the curious reader, and as a necessary addition to the existing fan’s collection. With excerpts from all of Vollmann’s novels, journalistic pieces, essays, correspondence, and poetry, this volume creates a unique, kaleidoscopic portrait of one of America’s most notorious, protean, devastating, and necessary writers.

$17.95 paperback / penguin

• As if to prove his facility with fiction, sort of, here in The Rainbow Stories are 13 innovative tales dealing with “skinheads, x-ray patients, whores, lovers, fetishists, and other lost souls” who populate landscapes as diverse as ancient Babylon, India, and contemporary San Francisco. Part fiction, part reportage, these narratives are laced with a bleak and bitter humor, and portray a dazzling array of characters.

$14.00 paperback / penguin

• Whores for Gloria is a very short, for Vollmann (160 pages) novel about an alcoholic Vietnam veteran, who devotes his government check and his waking hours to the search for a beautiful and majestic street whore—a woman who may or may not really exist.

$14.99 paperback / harper collins

• Others have done it, from Graham Greene to Paul Theroux, but no one takes to the rails as Vollmann does in Riding to Everywhere, his analytical but skeptical eye on the romance of the hobo lifestyle. With the more experienced Steve as company, he provides us with a moving, strikingly modern vision of the American dream, brilliantly exploring both our deeply ingrained romanticizing of “freedom” and the myriad ways we restrict the very freedoms we profess to admire.

• “This issue of Lapham’s Quarterly doesn’t trade in divine revelation, engage in theological dispute, or doubt the existence of God,” the editor says in introducing the Winter 2010 issue. “What is of interest are the ways in which religious belief gives birth to historical event,  makes law and prayer and politics, accounts for the death of an army or the life of a saint.” It is difficult to imagine a more enticing invitation to the subject of religion, and the writings of nearly 100 thinkers, deep and accessible, Laphams’s “Voices in Time,” grouped in categories of faith—declarations, acts, crises. LAPHAM’S QUARTERLY COMES TO BOOKCOURT TONIGHT TO CELEBRATE THE NEW ISSUE.
  

$27.95 hardcover

• Lapham’s will more than whet the appetite for the more detailed examinations of  God and faith that are current today, including a new novel called 36 Arguments for the Existence of God by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein that is a a brilliant, amusing and compelling examination of the clash between faith and reason. After Cass Seltzer’s book becomes a surprise best seller, he’s dubbed “the atheist with a soul” and becomes a celebrity. He wins over the stunning Lucinda Mandelbaum, “the goddess of game theory,” and loses himself in a spiritually expansive infatuation. A former girlfriend appears: an anthropologist who invites him to join in her quest for immortality through biochemistry. And he is haunted by reminders of the two people who ignited his passion to understand religion: his mentor and professor—a renowned literary scholar with a suspicious obsession with messianism—and an angelic six-year-old mathematical genius who is heir to the leadership of a Hasidic sect. Each encounter reinforces Cass’s theory that the religious impulse spills over into life at large.

$27.95 hardcover

• Moving from the Paleolithic age to the present, Karen Armstrong details the great lengths to which humankind has gone in order to experience a sacred reality that it called by many names, such as God, Brahman, Nirvana, Allah, or Dao. Focusing especially on Christianity but including Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Chinese spiritualities, Armstrong examines in The Case for God the diminished impulse toward religion in our own time, when a significant number of people either want nothing to do with God or question the efficacy of faith. Why has God become unbelievable? Why is it that atheists and theists alike now think and speak about God in a way that veers so profoundly from the thinking of our ancestors? Karen Armstrong is the author of numerous other books on religious affairs—including A History of God, Islam and Buddha.

$12.95 paperback

• In a sweeping narrative that takes us from the Stone Age to the Information Age, Robert Wright unveils an astonishing discovery: there is a hidden pattern that the great monotheistic faiths have followed as they have evolved. Through the prisms of archaeology, theology, and evolutionary psychology, Wright’s findings articulated in The Evolution of God overturn basic assumptions about Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and are sure to cause controversy. He explains why spirituality has a role today, and why science, contrary to conventional wisdom, affirms the validity of the religious quest. And this previously unrecognized evolutionary logic points not toward continued religious extremism, but future harmony. Robert has taught in the philosophy department of Princeton University and the psychology department at the University of Pennsylvania.

$25.95 hardcover

• Noted science writer Nicholas Wade offers in The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved and Why It Endures a convincing case based on a broad range of scientific evidence for the evolutionary basis of religion. For at least the last fifty thousand years, and probably much longer, people have practiced religion. Yet little attention has been given, either by believers or atheists, to the question of whether this universal human behavior might have an evolutionary basis. Did religion evolve, in other words, beacause it helped people in early societies survive? In this original and controversial book, Wade gathers new evidence showing why religion became so essential in the course of human evolution, and how an instinct for faith has been hardwired into human nature.

$16.00 paperback

• Timothy Keller, the founding pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City, addresses in The Reason for God the frequent doubts that skeptics and non-believers bring to religion. Using literature, philosophy, anthropology, pop culture, and intellectual reasoning, Keller explains how the belief in a Christian God is, in fact, a sound and rational one. To true believers he offers a solid platform on which to stand against the backlash toward religion spawned by the Age of Skepticism. And to skeptics, atheists, and agnostics he provides a challenging argument for pursuing the reason for God.

$35.00 hardcover

• A Jewish sage once said of the original Bible, “Turn it and turn it, for everything is in it.”David Rosenberg has done just this and thus created A Literary Bible, a breathtaking translation that sets a new standard for reading and interpreting the Hebrew Scriptures. Until the present moment, translators have presented a homogeneous Bible in uniform style—even as the various books within it were written by different authors, in diverse genres and periods, stretching over many centuries. Now, Rosenberg’s artful translation restores what has been left aside: the essence of imaginative creation in the Bible. In A Literary Bible, Rosenberg presents for the first time a synthesis of the literary aspect of the Hebrew Bible— howing how, when, and by whom the various books of the Bible were written, and allowing the reader to experience each book in discrete and contemporary idiom, as if it were written in modern times.

$27.00 – 30% (current best seller)

• Read Wolf Hall and chances are you’ll end this engrossing novel wishing for more. Well, there is more, in The Lady in the Tower, which very coincidentally seems to pick up where the first ends. The setting is England in the first half of the 16^th century, and Henry VIII wants a male heir, badly enough so that he is determined to annual his marriage to Katherine of Aragon so he can marry Anne Boleyn. The pope and most of Europe opposes him, and Thomas Cromwell is there to help the king triumph, though at what cost? When this part of the story ends, Queen Anne has been no more successful than her predecessor. The second book follows Anne through her imprisonment in the Tower of London and her terrible end,  all the while protesting her innocence. Hilary Mantel won Britain’s Man Booker Prize for fiction with Wolf Hall. The Lady in the Tower is non-fiction by Alison Weir, but the distinction hardly matters in this gripping story of politics and religion, passion and despair.

$27.99 – 30% (current best seller)

• It’s exactly a year since Barack Obama took office as 44^th president of the United States, and though volumes have been written about the man., his meteoric rise and historic triumph, most of us know very little of the story behind the story. Until now. In Game Change, John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, two of the country’s leading political reporters, use their unrivaled access to pull back the curtain on the Obama, Clinton, McCain, and Palin campaigns. How did Obama convince himself that, despite the thinness of his résumé, he could somehow beat the odds to become the nation’s first African American president? How did the tumultuous relationship between the Clintons shape—and warp—Hillary’s supposedly unstoppable bid? What was behind her husband’s furious outbursts and devastating political miscalculations? Why did McCain make the novice governor of Alaska his running mate? And was Palin merely painfully out of her depth—or troubled in more serious ways? Never before has a presidential campaign been dissected quite as Heilemann and Halperin do here, and just when you though you were tired of the story, this compelling work of political journalism comes along.

$25.00 hardcover / walker

• In a playground in Brooklyn, Artie Cohen is led to a dead girl tied up in duct tape on a children’s swing. He soon realizes the killer murdered the wrong girl—the intended victim was Valentina S verdloff, his friend Tolya’s daughter, long adored by Artie. Londongrad is the eighth Artie Cohen mystery by Reggie Nadelson, all of them with links to Russia and Brooklyn. This one may be the best, but others in the series, including Fresh Kills, Red Hook and Disturbed Earth, are entertaining and evocative of our home town.

$14.95 paperback / pegasus

• Reggie Nadelson was not the first to write about crime with a Russian angle. A Night in the Cemetery: And Other Stories of Crime and Suspense is an appeal collection of stories by Anton Chekhov, best known as one of his homeland’s foremost dramatists. Chekhov began his literary career as a crime and mystery writer. Scattered throughout periodicals and literary journals from 1880-1890, these early psychological suspense stories provide a fresh look into Chekhov’s literary heritage and his formative years as a writer.

$15.00 paperback / random house

• Still in the realm of classic Russian literature, when encounter Leo Tolstoy torn between his professed doctrine of poverty and chastity and the reality of his enormous wealth, his 13 children, and a life of relative luxury. In The Last Station by Jay Parini, Tolstoy makes a dramatic flight from his home but is too ill to continue beyond the tiny rail station at Astapovo. He believes that he is dying alone, while over 100 newspapermen camp outside awaiting hourly reports on his condition. A brilliant re-creation of the mind and tortured soul of one of the world’s greatest writers, The Last Station is a richly inventive novel that dances between fact and fiction.

$15.00 paperback / FSG … on sale date 2/16/10

• Before leaving Tolstoy . . . no one who read Elif Batuman’s first article (in the journal n+1) will ever forget it. “Babel in California” told the true story of various human destinies intersecting at Stanford University during a conference about the enigmatic writer Isaac Babel. In The Possessed, we watch Batuman investigate a possible murder at Tolstoy’s ancestral estate. We go with her to Stanford, Switzerland, and St. Petersburg; retrace Pushkin’s wanderings in the Caucasus; learn why Old Uzbek has one hundred different words for crying; and see an eighteenth-century ice palace reconstructed on the Neva.

$15.00 paperback / penguin

• Stepping ahead in time, vanishings and apparitions, nightmares and twists of fate, mysterious ailments and supernatural interventions haunt the stories by the Russian master Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, heir to the spellbinding tradition of Gogol, in  There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby: Scary Fairy Tales. Blending the miraculous with the macabre, and leavened by a mischievous gallows humor, these bewitching tales are like nothing being written in Russia-or anywhere else in the world-today. The awesome collection is translated by Keith Gessen and Anna Summers.

$14.95 paperback / alma

• As the political intrigue of phantasmagorical post-communist reality develops into nightmare, the greed, cunning, and malice of the humans more and more resemble the behavior of the large communities of destructive rodents, while the rats acquire more and more human features. While clearly in the classical Russian tradition, The Rat Killer by Alexander Terekhov incorporate the more experimental and satirical aesthetic of Soviet writers such as Bulgakov, and as the narrator’s perception of reality becomes increasingly warped, so does our experience of the almost comically grotesque landscape around him.

$18.95 paperback / tin house

• Few countries have undergone more radical transformations than Russia has since the fall of the Soviet Union. The stories in Rasskazy: New Fiction from a New Russia present 23 depictions of the country from its most talented young writers. Selected from the pages of the top Russian literary magazines and written by winners of the most prestigious literary awards, most of these stories appear here in English for the first time. Says author Francine Prose in the introduction: “What’s new is the rhythm and snap of the hip, modern, contemporary voices that we would expect to hear rattling into a cell phone in the booth next to ours, and the rendering of that voice into an English that’s as idiomatic and confident as we imagine these speakers to be.”

$15.00 paperback / UDP

• Ugly Duckling Presse has presented us with translations of contemporary Russian poetry, among them The Life and Opinions of DJ Spinoza, a cycle of fast, tragic, unsettling, hilarious poems about the shortcomings of reason by Eugene Ostashevsky, and Red Shifting by Aleksandr Skidan. All are expertly translated with facing pages in Russian and English.