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The news about Walter Berglund wasn’t picked up locally-he and Patty had moved away to Washington two years earlier and meant nothing to St. Paul now-but the urban gentry of Ramsey Hill were not so loyal to their city as not to read the New York Times. According to a long and very unflattering story in the Times, Walter had made quite a mess of his professional life out there in the nation’s capital. His old neighbors had some difficulty reconciling the quotes about him in the Times (“arrogant,” “high-handed,” “ethically compromised”) with the generous, smiling, red-faced 3M employee they remembered pedaling his commuter bicycle up Summit Avenue in February snow; it seemed strange that Walter, who was greener than Greenpeace and whose own roots were rural, should be in trouble now for conniving with the coal industry and mistreating country people. Then again, there had always been something not quite right about the Berglunds.

Walter and Patty were the young pioneers of Ramsey Hill-the first college grads to buy a house on Barrier Street since the old heart of St. Paul had fallen on hard times three decades earlier. They paid nothing for their Victorian and then killed themselves for ten years renovating it. Early on, some very determined person torched their garage and twice broke into their car before they got the garage rebuilt. Sunburned bikers descended on the vacant lot across the alley to drink Schlitz and grill knockwurst and rev engines at small hours until Patty went outside in sweatclothes and said, “Hey, you guys, you know what?” Patty frightened nobody, but she’d been a standout athlete in high school and college and possessed a jock sort of fearlessness. From her first day in the neighborhood, she was helplessly conspicuous. Tall, ponytailed, absurdly young, pushing a stroller past stripped cars and broken beer bottles and barfed-upon old snow, she might have been carrying all the hours of her day in the string bags that hung from her stroller. Behind her you could see the baby-encumbered preparations for a morning of baby-encumbered errands; ahead of her, an afternoon of public radio, the Silver Palate Cookbook, cloth diapers, drywall compound, and latex paint; and then Goodnight Moon, then zinfandel. She was already fully the thing that was just starting to happen to the rest of the street.

In the earliest years, when you could still drive a Volvo 240 without feeling self-conscious, the collective task in Ramsey Hill was to relearn certain life skills that your own parents had fled to the suburbs specifically to unlearn, like how to interest the local cops in actually doing their job, and how to protect a bike from a highly motivated thief, and when to bother rousting a drunk from your lawn furniture, and how to encourage feral cats to shit in somebody else’s children’s sandbox, and how to determine whether a public school sucked too much to bother trying to fix it. There were also more contemporary questions, like, what about those cloth diapers? Worth the bother? And was it true that you could still get milk delivered in glass bottles? Were the Boy Scouts OK politically? Was bulgur really necessary? Where to recycle batteries? How to respond when a poor person of color accused you of destroying her neighborhood? Was it true that the glaze of old Fiestaware contained dangerous amounts of lead? How elaborate did a kitchen water filter actually need to be? Did your 240 sometimes not go into overdrive when you pushed the overdrive button? Was it better to offer panhandlers food, or nothing? Was it possible to raise unprecedentedly confident, happy, brilliant kids while working full-time? Could coffee beans be ground the night before you used them, or did this have to be done in the morning? Had anybody in the history of St. Paul ever had a positive experience with a roofer? What about a good Volvo mechanic? Did your 240 have that problem with the sticky parking-brake cable? And that enigmatically labeled dashboard switch that made such a satisfying Swedish click but seemed not to be connected to anything: what was that?

For all queries, Patty Berglund was a resource, a sunny carrier of sociocultural pollen, an affable bee. She was one of the few stay-at-home moms in Ramsey Hill and was famously averse to speaking well of herself or ill of anybody else. She said she expected to be “beheaded” someday by one of the windows whose sash chains she’d replaced. Her children were “probably” dying of trichinosis from pork she’d undercooked. She wondered if her “addiction” to paint-stripper fumes might be related to her “never” reading books anymore. She confided that she’d been “forbidden” to fertilize Walter’s flowers after what had happened “last time.” There were people with whom her style of self-deprecation didn’t sit well-who detected a kind of condescension in it, as if Patty, in exaggerating her own minor defects, were too obviously trying to spare the feelings of less accomplished homemakers. But most people found her humility sincere or at least amusing, and it was in any case hard to resist a woman whom your own children liked so much and who remembered not only their birthdays but yours, too, and came to your back door with a plate of cookies or a card or some lilies of the valley in a little thrift-store vase that she told you not to bother returning.

It was known that Patty had grown up back East, in a suburb of New York City, and had received one of the first women’s full scholarships to play basketball at Minnesota, where, in her sophomore year, according to a plaque on the wall of Walter’s home office, she’d made second-team all-American. One strange thing about Patty, given her strong family orientation, was that she had no discernible connection to her roots. Whole seasons passed without her setting foot outside St. Paul, and it wasn’t clear that anybody from the East, not even her parents, had ever come out to visit. If you inquired point-blank about the parents, she would answer that the two of them did a lot of good things for a lot of people, her dad had a law practice in White Plains, her mom was a politician, yeah, a New York State assemblywoman. Then she would nod emphatically and say, “Yeah, so, that’s what they do,” as if the topic had been exhausted.

A game could be made of trying to get Patty to agree that somebody’s behavior was “bad.” When she was told that Seth and Merrie Paulsen were throwing a big Halloween party for their twins and had deliberately invited every child on the block except Connie Monaghan, Patty would only say that this was very “weird.” The next time she saw the Paulsens in the street, they explained that they had tried all summer to get Connie Monaghan’s mother, Carol, to stop flicking cigarette butts from her bedroom window down into their twins’ little wading pool. “That is really weird,” Patty agreed, shaking her head, “but, you know, it’s not Connie’s fault.” The Paulsens, however, refused to be satisfied with “weird.” They wanted sociopathic, they wanted passive-aggressive, they wanted bad. They needed Patty to select one of these epithets and join them in applying it to Carol Monaghan, but Patty was incapable of going past “weird,” and the Paulsens in turn refused to add Connie to their invite list. Patty was angry enough about this injustice to take her own kids, plus Connie and a school friend, out to a pumpkin farm and a hayride on the afternoon of the party, but the worst she would say aloud about the Paulsens was that their meanness to a seven-year-old girl was very weird.

Excerpted from Freedom: A Novel by Jonathan Franzen. Copyright 2010 by Jonathan Franzen. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Many of us go through life saying nothing quotable for posterity. Mark Twain produced a bookful of amusing and insightful quotes, hundreds of memorable quips and comments on life, love, history, culture, travel and dozens of other topics.

All of that wit and wisdom comes to life in what many consider the Publishing Event of 2010. It happens  in November when the University of California Press takes the wraps off of the first volume of Mark Twain’s century-old autobiography. For those who have seen or heard excerpts from Volume 1, there is no question about the authenticity of this memoir from the man many consider the author of the Great(est) American Novel.

“I’ve struck it!” Mark Twain wrote in a 1904 letter to a friend. “And I will give it away—to you. You will never know how much enjoyment you have lost until you get to dictating your autobiography.” Thus, after dozens of false starts and hundreds of pages, Twain embarked on his “Final (and Right) Plan” for telling the story of his life. His innovative notion—to “talk only about the thing which interests you for the moment”—meant that his thoughts could range freely. The strict instruction that these texts remain unpublished for 100 years meant that when they came out, he would be “dead, and unaware, and indifferent,” and that he was therefore free to speak his “whole frank mind.”

This is the 100th anniversary of Twain’s death. In celebration of this important milestone UC Press is publishing for the first time Mark Twain’s uncensored autobiography in its entirety and exactly as he left it. In the publisher’s own words, this book “presents Mark Twain’s authentic and unsuppressed voice, brimming with humor, ideas, and opinions, and speaking clearly from the grave as he intended.”

You don’t have to wait the nearly three months for the full autobiography. You can sample Twain writing about his childhood in this month’s Granta literary magazine.

In the excerpt called “The Farm,” Twain vividly describes his experiences as a young boy on his Uncle John A. Quarles’ farm near the town of Florida, Mo. Twain spent a few months a year there for several years until he was about 12. It was there Twain met the slave known as Uncle Dan’l, who became the model for the great character Jim in “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” The voice, with his biting wit, is clearly Twain’s.

As curator Steve Dietz has observed, new media art is like contemporary art—but different. New media art involves interactivity, networks, and computation and is often about process rather than objects. New media artworks, difficult to classify according to the traditional art museum categories determined by medium, geography, and chronology. These works present the curator with novel challenges involving interpretation, exhibition, and dissemination. Rethinking Curating: Art After New Media views these challenges as opportunities to rethink curatorial practice. It helps curators of new media art develop a set of flexible tools for working in this fast-moving field, and it offers useful lessons from curators and artists for those working in such other areas of art as distributive and participatory systems.

One of the greatest living painters and portraitists, Lucian Freud (born 1922) brings a powerfully obsessive scrutiny to bear upon his subjects. “I want the painting to be flesh,” Freud has avowed, and through this aspiration he achieves almost devastatingly unsentimental and revelatory portraits of his sitters, as he translates the act of scrutiny into strokes of paint. Lucian Freud: The Studio is the essential book on the artist.
Grandson of Sigmund Freud, born in Germany in 1922, and permanently relocated to London in 1933 during the ascent of the Nazi regime. After seeing brief service during the Second World War, Freud had his first solo exhibition in 1944 at the Alex Reid & Lefevre Gallery in London. Despite exhibiting only occasionally over the course of his career, Freud’s 1995 portrait “Benefits Supervisor Sleeping” was sold at auction, at Christie’s New York in May 2008, for $33.6 million—setting a world record for sale value of a painting by a living artist.

Every five years or thereabouts, the renowned Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco finds itself with a number of unrelated works of photography that stand out as special, and which ultimately get collected in one of the gallery’s award-winning and sought-after quintannual publications. These publications, every one of which has been a masterpiece of photography publishing, and swiftly becomes a rarity, constitute a kind of ultimate connoisseur’s survey of photographic gems. As with previous anniversary publications, the present trove, collected in Furthermore, includes a fantastic collection of images by photographers unknown, such as an X-ray of a change purse, a Polaroid from a prison yard, a collage of the moon’s surface radioed to earth from an unmanned spacecraft–all of which appear, as usual, alongside several dozen photographs made by serious artists with complicated intentions.

Rachel Whiteread: Drawings accompanies the first museum survey of drawings by this artist, tracing her career from the late 1980s to the present. While Whiteread’s public works such as House, the monumental cast of a 19th-century terraced house in the East End of London that earned her the Turner Prize, Water Tower, which graced the skyline of downtown New York, and Untitled Monument in Trafalgar Square are renowned, her works on paper have remained largely unknown to the general public. This book explores Whiteread s draftsmanship, a lesser-known yet fundamentally important aspect of the
artist’s creative process. “My drawings are a diary of my work,” Whiteread explains, and like the passages in a diary her drawings range from fleeting ideas to labored reflections.

When Frida Kahlo died in 1954, her husband Diego Rivera asked the poet Carlos Pellicer to turn her family home, the fabled Blue House, into a museum. Pellicer selected some paintings, drawings, photographs, books and ceramics, maintaining the space just as Kahlo and Rivera had arranged it to live and work in. The rest of the objects, clothing, documents, drawings and letters, as well as over 6,000 photographs collected by Kahlo over the course of her life, were put away in bathrooms that had been converted into storerooms. This incredible trove remained hidden for more than half a century, until, just a few years ago, these storerooms and wardrobes were opened up. Kahlo’s photograph collection was a major revelation among these finds, a testimony to the tastes and interests of the famous couple, not only through the images themselves but also through the telling annotations inscribed upon them. Frida Kahlo: Her Photos allows us to speculate about Kahlo’s and Rivera’s likes and dislikes, and to document their family origins; it supplies a thrilling and hugely significant addition to our knowledge of Kahlo’s life and work.

Cartographies of Time is the first comprehensive history of graphic representations of time in Europe and the United States from 1450 to the present. Authors Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton have crafted a lively history featuring fanciful characters and unexpected twists and turns. From medieval manuscripts to websites, this volume features a wide variety of timelines that in their own unique ways—curving, crossing, branching—defy conventional thinking about the form. A 54-foot-long timeline from 1753 is mounted on a scroll and encased in a protective box. Another timeline uses the different parts of the human body to show the genealogies of Jesus Christ and the rulers of Saxony. Ladders created by missionaries in eighteenth-century Oregon illustrate Bible stories in a vertical format to convert Native Americans. Also included is the April 1912 Marconi North Atlantic Communication chart, which tracked ships, including the Titanic, at points in time rather than by their geographic location, alongside little-known works by famous figures, including a historical chronology by the mapmaker Gerardus Mercator and a chronological board game patented by Mark Twain.

The wonderful thing about New Art is that it may be old, depending on how you—as the interested party—may want to define the term, or phrase as it may be.

Beat Memories: The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg is a revealing photographic look at the counterculture as chronicled by the movement’s great poet. Ginsberg began photographing in the late 1940s when he purchased a small, second-hand Kodak camera. For the next 15 years he took photographs of himself, his friends, and lovers, including the writers and poets Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, and Gregory Corso as well as Beat personality Neal Cassady. He abandoned photography in 1963 and took it up again in the 1980s, when he was encouraged by photographers Berenice Abbott and Robert Frank to reprint his earlier work and make new portraits; these included more images of longtime friends as well other acquaintances such as painters Larry Rivers and Francesco Clemente and musician Bob Dylan. Ginsberg’s photographs form a compelling portrait of the Beat and counterculture generation from the 1950s to the 1990s.

For five years, noted Paris-based portrait photographer Lillian Birnbaum documented a group of girls during their transition from childhood to young womanhood, examining their initial, innocent awakenings to their own feminine allure. This is a state that is particularly difficult to capture, according to essayist Doris van Drathen, in Lillian Birnbaum: Transition, for Birnbaum’s photographs “present that delicate space between the unconscious and the conscious; the passage from a world of dreams, chaos and fantasy into a world more and more contained by the forces of reality.”

Enduring icons of American culture, the car and the highway remain vital as auguries of adventure and discovery, and a means by which to take in the country’s vast scale. Lee Friedlander is the first photographer to make the car an actual “form” for the photographer. Driving across most of the country’s 50 states in an ordinary rental car, Friedlander applied the brilliantly simple conceit of deploying the sideview mirror, rearview mirror, the windshield and the side windows as a picture frame within which to record the country’s eccentricities and obsessions at the turn of the century. Presented in the square crop format that has dominated his look in recent series, and taken over the past decade, the nearly 200 images in Lee Friedlander: America by Car are easily among Friedlander’s finest, full of virtuoso touch and clarity, while also revisiting themes from older bodies of work.

Our relationship with the ocean is undergoing a profound transformation. Whereas just three decades ago nearly everything we ate from the sea was wild, rampant overfishing combined with an unprecedented bio-tech revolution has brought us to a point where wild and farmed fish occupy equal parts of a complex and confusing marketplace. We stand at the edge of a cataclysm; there is a distinct possibility that our children’s children will never eat a wild fish that has swum freely in the sea. In Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food, award-winning writer and lifelong fisherman Paul Greenberg takes us on a culinary journey, exploring the history of the fish that dominate our menus—salmon,  sea bass, cod and tuna—and examining where each stands at this critical moment in time.

The Castle in Transylvania is a never-before translated tale by Jules Verne, the master of science fiction, and one of his few writings about the supernatural. This eerie gothic story set in a forgotten valley in the mountains of Transylvania, where demons and vampires menace the populace, pits a young stranger against the forces of evil and superstition.

Over the course of his 60 years, Christopher Hitchens has been a citizen of both the United States and the United Kingdom. He has been both a socialist opposed to the war in Vietnam and a supporter of the U.S. war against Islamic extremism in Iraq. He has been both a foreign correspondent in some of the world’s most dangerous places and a legendary bon vivant with an unquenchable thirst for alcohol and literature. He is a fervent atheist, raised as a Christian, by a mother whose Jewish heritage was not revealed to him until her suicide. In other words, Christopher Hitchens contains multitudes. He sees all sides of an argument. And he believes the personal is political. Hitch-22 is the very entertaining story of his eventful life.

James Salter is an author with an impassioned following among contemporary readers, writers, and critics, and Dusk and Other Stories is among his signal achievements. First published nearly a quarter-century ago, and one of the very few short-story collections to win the PEN/Faulkner Award, this is American fiction at its most vital—each narrative a masterpiece of sustained power and seemingly effortless literary grace. These stories chart the myriad moments and details that, taken together, shape a fate. Two New York attorneys newly flush with wealth embark on a dissolute tour of Italy. A divorced woman learns that she is about to lose the last thing of real value to her. An ambitious young screenwriter unexpectedly discovers the true meaning of art and glory. A rider, far off in the fields, is involved in an horrific accident—night is falling, and she must face her destiny alone.

Tad Friend’s family is nothing if not illustrious: His father was president of SwarthmoreCollege, and at Smith his mother came in second in a poetry contest judged by W.H. Auden—to Sylvia Plath.  For centuries, Wasps like his ancestors dominated American life.  But then, in the ‘60s, their fortunes began to fall.  As a young man, Tad noticed that his family tree, for all its glories, was full of alcoholics, depressives, and reckless eccentrics.  Yet his identity had already been shaped by the family’s age-old traditions and expectations.  Part memoir, part family history, and part cultural study of the long swoon of the American Wasp, Cheerful Money Me, My Family, and the Last Days of Wasp Splendor is a captivating examination of a cultural crack-up and a man trying to escape its wreckage.

In taut, exquisite prose, Kevin Canty explores the largest themes of life—work, love, death, destruction, rebirth—in the middle of the everyday, in Everything: A Novel. On the 5th of July, RL and June go down to the river with a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red to commemorate Taylor’s 50th and last birthday. Taylor was RL’s boyhood friend and June’s husband, but after 11 years, June, a childless hospice worker, finally declares she’s “nobody’s widow anymore.” Anxious for a new beginning, June considers selling her beloved house. RL, a divorced  empty-nester, faces a major change, too, when he agrees to lodge his college girlfriend, Betsy, while she undergoes chemotherapy. Caught between Betsy’s anguish and June’s hope, the cynical RL is brought face-to-face with his own sense of futility, and the longing to experience the kind of love that “knocks you down.” Set in Montana, reflecting the beauty of its landscape and the independence of its people, this is a shimmering novel about unexpected redemption by a writer of deep empathy and prodigious talents.

In Jazz Age New York, there was no place hotter than the Clarkstown Country Club, where celebrities such as Leopold Stokowski mingled with Vanderbilts, Goodriches, and Great War spies. They came for the club’s circuses and burlesques but especially for the lectures on the subject at the heart of the club’s mission: yoga. Their guru was the notorious Pierre Bernard, who trained with an Indian master and instructed his wealthy followers in the asanas and the modern yogic lifestyle. In The Great Oom, Robert Love traces this American obsession from moonlit Tantric rituals in San Francisco to its arrival in New York, where Bernard’s teachings were adopted by Wall Streeters and Gilded Age heiresses, who then bankrolled a luxurious ashram on the Hudson River-the first in the nation. Though today’s practitioners know little of Bernard, they can thank his salesman’s persistence for sustaining our interest in yoga despite generations of naysayers.

Nineteen-year-old Nayeli works at a taco shop in her Mexican village and dreams about her father, who journeyed to the US when she was young. Recently, it has dawned on her that he isn’t the only man who has left town. In fact, there are almost no men in the village–they’ve all gone north. While watching The Magnificent Seven, Nayeli decides to go north herself and recruit seven men—her own “Siete Magníficos”—to repopulate her hometown and protect it from the bandidos who plan on taking it over. Filled with unforgettable characters and prose as radiant as the Sinaloan sun, Luis Alberto Urrea’s Into the Beautiful North is the story of an irresistible young woman’s quest to find herself on both sides of the fence.

The Periodic Table is one of man’s crowning scientific achievements. But it’s also a treasure trove of stories of passion, adventure, betrayal, and obsession. The infectious tales and astounding details in The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements by Sam Kean,  follow carbon, neon, silicon, and gold as they play out their parts in human history, finance, mythology, war, the arts, poison, and the lives of the (frequently) mad scientists who discovered them. We learn that Marie Curie used to provoke jealousy in colleagues’ wives when she’d invite them into closets to see her glow-in-the-dark experiments. And that Lewis and Clark swallowed mercury capsules across the country and their campsites are still detectable by the poison in the ground. Why did Gandhi hate iodine? Why did the Japanese kill Godzilla with missiles made of cadmium? And why did tellurium lead to the most bizarre gold rush in history?

In 1837, after years of struggling with alcoholism and depression, the great nature poet John Clare finds himself in High Beach—a mental institution located in Epping Forest on the outskirts of London. It is not long before another famed writer, the young Alfred Tennyson, moves nearby and grows entwined in the catastrophic schemes of the hospital’s owner, the peculiar, charismatic Dr. Matthew Allen, as well as with his lonely, adolescent daughter, and a coterie of mysterious local characters. With remarkable lyrical grace, the cloistered world of High Beach and its residents are richly brought to life in The Quickening Maze by Adam Foulds, an affecting and enchanting book.

In a deeply compelling debut novel, The Canal, Lee Rourke tells the tale of a man who finds his life so boring it frightens him. So he quits his job to spend some time sitting on a bench beside a quiet canal in a placid London neighborhood, watching the swans in the water and the people in the glass-fronted offices across the way while he collects himself. However his solace is soon interrupted when a jittery young woman begins to show up and sit beside him every day. Although she won’t even tell him her name, she slowly begins to tell him a chilling story about a terrible act she committed, something for which she just can’t forgive herself—and which seems to have involved one of the men they can see working in the building across the canal. Torn by fear and pity, the man becomes more immersed in her tale, and finds that boredom has, indeed, brought him to the most terrifying place he’s ever been.

Humor Me is a literary cavalcade of contemporary American funnymen—and funnywomen—of the page. Selected by the renowned humorist Ian Frazier and featuring more than 50 pieces of the greatest comic writing of our time, the book includes such masters of the form as Roy Blount, Jr., Bruce Jay Friedman, Veronica Geng, Jack Handey, Garrison Keillor, Steve Martin, and Calvin Trillin, as well as work by newer comic stars like Andy Borowitz, Larry Doyle, Simon Rich, George Saunders, and David Sedaris. The pieces were published in the past 30 years in such popular magazines as The New Yorker, McSweeney’s, The Atlantic, National Lampoon, and Outside. But the book also includes a handful of older comic masterpieces that nobody in need of a laugh should ever be without, among them classics by Bret Harte, Elizabeth Bishop, Donald Barthelme, and Mark Twain.

Doug Glanville, a former major league outfielder and Ivy League graduate, draws on his nine seasons in the big leagues to reveal the human side of the game and of the men who play it in a very special book that will interest even the most knowledgeable fan. In The Game from Where I Stand, Glanville shows us how players prepare for games, deal with race and family issues, cope with streaks and slumps, respond to trades and injuries, and learn the joyful and painful lessons the game imparts. We see the flashpoints that cause misunderstandings and friction between players, and the imaginative ways they work to find common ground. And Glanville tells us with insight and humor what he learned from Jimmy Rollins, Alex Rodriguez, Randy Johnson, Barry Bonds, Curt Schilling, and other legendary and controversial stars.

Ron Darling, who does TV commentary on Mets games, is another Ivy Leaguer, and he gives readers an erudite and  inside look at one of the most demanding and strategic positions in all of sports: the pitcher. Drawing on vivid situations from his playing days for the Mets and the Oakland Athletics, and from moments he has observed as a broadcaster, Darling offers an engaging look at the art, strategy, and psychology of pitching. Throughout, we get a glimpse of what it feels like to stand alone on the mound, the center of attention for thousands of fans. No other book examines the position in such compelling depth—The Complete Game, now in paperback, will be an essential book for every fan and aspiring player.

In the 34 years since his retirement, Henry Aaron’s reputation has only grown in magnitude: he broke existing records (rbis, total bases, extra-base hits) and set new ones (hitting at least 30 home runs per season 15 times, becoming the first player in history to hammer 500  home runs and 3,000 hits). But his influence extends beyond statistics, and at long last here is the first definitive biography of one of baseball’s immortal figures
Based on meticulous research and interviews with former teammates, family, two former presidents, and Aaron himself, The Last Hero chronicles Aaron’s childhood in segregated Alabama, his brief stardom in the Negro Leagues, his complicated relationship with celebrity, and his historic rivalry with Willie Mays—all culminating in the defining event of his life: his shattering of Babe Ruth’s all-time home-run record.
In this exemplary biography, Howard Bryant also examines Aaron’s more complex second act: his quest to become an important voice beyond the ball field when his playing days had ended, his rediscovery by a public disillusioned with today’s tainted heroes, and his disappointment that his career home-run record was finally broken by Barry Bonds during the steroid era, baseball’s greatest scandal.

Dirk Hayhurst is not a superstar. “Top prospect” is also not a label that attached itself to his name as he toiled away in the minor leagues over the years. In the game of baseball, if you don’t fit in either of those categories, it can almost be as if you don’t exist. In The Bullpen Gospels: Major League Dreams of a Minor League Veteran, Hayhurst tackles this issue head-on, the issue of labels and identity and the problems that come along with them. As one reviewer said of Dirk Hayhurst’s memoir, “If Holden Caulfield could dial up his fastball to 90 mph, he might have written this funny, touching memoir about a ballplayer at a career—and life—crossroads. He might have called it Pitcher in the Rye. Instead, he left it to Dirk Hayhurst, the only writer in the business who can make you laugh, make you cry and strike out Ryan Howard.” Another described the book as “a bit of Jim Bouton, a bit of Jim Brosnan, a bit of Pat Jordan, a bit of Crash Davis, and a whole lot of Dirk Hayhurst.” It’s all of those things, and more, and a look inside the game that is not to be missed.

In the town of San Pedro in the Dominican Republic, baseball is not just a way of life. It’s the way of life. By the year 2008, we learn from The Eastern Stars, 79 boys and men from San Pedro have gone on to play in the Major Leagues—one in six Dominican Republicans who have played in the Majors have come from one tiny, impoverished region. Manny Alexander, Sammy Sosa, Tony Fernandez, and legions of other San Pedro players who came up in the sugar mill teams flocked to the United States, looking for opportunity, wealth, and a better life. As with Mark Kurlansky’s earlier books, Cod and Salt, this small story, rich with anecdote and detail, becomes much larger than ever imagined. Kurlansky reveals two countries’ love affair with a sport and the remarkable journey of San Pedro and its baseball players. In his distinctive style, he follows common threads and discovers wider meanings about place, identity, and, above all, baseball.

Everyone knows that baseball is a game of intricate regulations, but it turns out to be even more complicated than we realize. What truly governs the Major League game is a set of unwritten rules, some of which are openly discussed (don’t steal a base with a big lead late in the game), and some of which only a minority of players are even aware of (don’t cross between the catcher and the pitcher on the way to the batter’s box). In The Baseball Codes, old-timers and all-time greats share their insights into the game’s most hallowed—and least known—traditions. For the learned and the casual baseball fan alike, the result is illuminating and thoroughly entertaining. At the heart of this book by Jason Turbow and Michael Duca are incredible and often hilarious stories involving national heroes (like Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays) and notorious headhunters (like Bob Gibson and Don Drysdale) in a century-long series of confrontations over respect, honor, and the soul of the game. Here,  we see for the first time the game as it’s actually played, through the eyes of the players on the field.

The Major Leagues witnessed more dramatic stories and changes in the ‘70s than in any other era. The American popular culture and counterculture collided head-on with the national pastime, rocking the once-conservative sport to its very foundations. Outspoken players embraced free agency, openly advocated drug use, and even swapped wives. Controversial owners such as Charlie Finley, Bill Veeck, and Ted Turner introduced Astroturf, prime-time World Series, garish polyester uniforms, and outlandish promotions such as Disco Demolition Night. Hank Aaron and Lou Brock set new heights in power and speed while Reggie Jackson and Carlton Fisk emerged as October heroes and All-Star characters like Mark “The Bird” Fidrych became pop icons. For the millions of fans who grew up during this time, and especially those who cared just as much about Oscar Gamble’s afro as they did about his average, Big Hair and Plastic Grass: A Funky Ride Through Baseball and America in the Swinging ’70s by Dan Epstein

First, the homework.

An unforgettably charming memoir, Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer is full of hilarious moments, fascinating farmer’s tips, and a great deal of heart. When Novella Carpenter—captivated by the idea of backyard self-sufficiency—moved to inner city Oakland and discovered a weed-choked, garbage-strewn abandoned lot next door to her house, she closed her eyes and pictured heirloom tomatoes and a chicken coop. The story of how her urban farm grew from a few chickens to one populated with turkeys, geese, rabbits, ducks, and two three-hundred-pound pigs will capture the imagination of anyone who has ever considered leaving the city behind for a more natural lifestyle.

Farmer Jane: Women Changing the Way We Eat profiles 30 women in the sustainable food industry, describing their agriculture and business models and illustrating the amazing changes they are making in how we connect with food. These advocates for creating a more holistic and nurturing food and agriculture system also answer questions on starting a community-supported agriculture program, how to get involved in policy at local and national levels, and how to address the different types of renewable energy and finance them. Sustainable food activist Temra Costa shows how you can join these women, whether you want to start a farm, open a food business, found an organization, or simply become a sustainable-food consumer.

Food safety is a matter of intense public concern, and for good reason. Millions of annual cases of food “poisonings” raise alarm not only about the food served in restaurants and fast-food outlets but also about foods bought in supermarkets. The introduction of genetically modified foods only adds to the general sense of unease. Finally, the events of September 11, 2001, heightened fears by exposing the vulnerability of food and water supplies to attacks by bioterrorists. How concerned should we be about such problems? Who is responsible for preventing them? Who benefits from ignoring them? Who decides? Marion Nestle argues in Safe Food: The Politics of Food Safety that ensuring safe food involves more than washing hands or cooking food to higher temperatures. It involves politics. When it comes to food safety, billions of dollars are at stake, and industry, government, and consumers collide over issues of values, economics, and political power–and not always in the public interest. Although the debates may appear to be about science, Nestle maintains that they really are about control: Who decides when a food is safe?

Nearly all invitations begin with steak (though many if not most will not end there). Fed up with one too many mediocre steaks, journalist Mark Schatzker set out to track down, define, and eat the perfect specimen. His journey described in Steak takes him to all the legendary sites of steak excellence-Texas, France, Scotland, Italy, Japan, Argentina, and Idaho’s Pahsimeroi Valley-where he discovers the lunatic lengths steak lovers will go to consume the perfect cut. After contemplating the merits of Black Angus, Kobe, Chianina, and the prehistoric aurochs—a breed revived by the Nazis after 400years of extinction—Schatzker adopts his own heifer, fattens her on fruit, acorns, and Persian walnuts, and then grapples with ambivalence when this near-pet appears on his plate.

So where do we go from there? The Lost Art of Real Cooking heralds a new old-fashioned approach to food-laborious and inconvenient, yet extraordinarily rewarding and worth bragging about. From jam, yogurt, and fresh pasta to salami, smoked meat, and strudel, Ken Albala and Rosanna Nafziger arm you with the knowledge and skills that let you connect on a deeper level with what goes into your body. Ken and Rosanna celebrate the patience it takes to make your own sauerkraut and pickles. They divulge the mysteries of capturing wild sourdoughs and culturing butter, the beauty of rendering lard, making cheese, and brewing beer, all without the fancy toys that take away from the adventure of truly experiencing your food.

Eating for Beginners: An Education in the Pleasures of Food from Chefs, Farmers and One Picky Kid details the year Melanie Rehak spent discovering what how to be an eater and a parent in today’s increasingly complicated world. She joined the kitchen staff at Applewood, a small restaurant owned by a young couple committed to using locally grown food, and worked on some of the farms that supplied it. Between prepping the nightly menu, milking goats, and sorting beans, the author gained an understanding of her own about what to eat and why. (It didn’t hurt that, along the way, even the most dedicated organic farmers admitted that their children sometimes ate McDonald’s.) And as we follow her on her quest to find the pleasure in doing the right thing–and become a better cook in the bargain–we too will make our peace with food.

In the winter of 1879, Mark Twain paused during a tour of Europe to compose a fantasy menu of the American dishes he missed the most. He was desperately sick of European hotel cooking, and his menu, made up of some eighty regional specialties, was a true love letter to American food: Lake Trout, from Tahoe. Hot biscuits, Southern style. Canvasback-duck, from Baltimore. Black-bass, from the Mississippi. When food writer Andrew Beahrs first read Twain’s menu in the classic work A Tramp Abroad, he noticed the dishes were regional in the truest sense of the word-drawn fresh from grasslands, woods, and waters in a time before railroads had dissolved the culinary lines between Hannibal, Missouri, and San Francisco. These dishes were all local, all wild, and all, Beahrs feared, had been lost in the shift to industrialized food. In Twain’s Feast, Beahrs sets out to discover whether eight of these forgotten regional specialties can still be found on American tables, tracing Twain’s footsteps as he goes. Twain’s menu, it turns out, was also a memoir and a map. The dishes he yearned for were all connected to cherished moments in his life-from the New Orleans croakers he loved as a young man on the Mississippi to the maple syrup he savored in Connecticut, with his family, during his final, lonely years.

Trevor Corson takes us behind the scenes at America’s first sushi-chef training academy, as eager novices strive to master the elusive art of cooking without cooking. He delves into the biology and natural history of the edible creatures of the sea, and tells the fascinating story of an Indo-Chinese meal reinvented in nineteenth-century Tokyo as a cheap fast food. He reveals the pioneers who brought sushi to the United States and explores how this unlikely meal is exploding into the American heartland just as the long-term future of sushi may be unraveling. The Story of Sushi: An Unlikely Saga of Raw Fish and Rice is at once a compelling tale of human determination and a delectable smorgasbord of surprising food science, intrepid reporting, and provocative cultural history.

The guests are about to arrive, and how to greet them. One part celebration, one part history, two parts manifesto, Bernard DeVoto’s The Hour is a comic and unequivocal treatise on how and why we drink—properly. The Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning author turns his shrewd wit on the spirits and attitudes that cause his stomach to turn and his eyes to roll—warning: this book is not for rum drinkers. DeVoto instructs his readers on how to drink like gentlemen and sheds new light on the simple joys of the cocktail hour. Daniel Handler’s introduction to this reprint of the 1950s classic provides a humorous framework for the modern reader.

A Pint of Plain is Bill Barich’s witty, deeply observant portrait of an Ireland vanishing before our eyes. Drawing on the wit and wisdom of O’Brien, Joyce, Behan, and Synge, Barich explores how Irish culture has become a commodity for export. While Irish pubs in the countryside are closing at the alarming rate of one per day, replicas are being born in foreign countries at the same rate. From the famed watering holes of Dublin to tiny village pubs, Barich introduces a colorful array of characters, and engages in an unvarnished yet affectionate discussion about what it means to be Irish today.

But it’s hot out tonight, and maybe a good novel with food as the theme—albeit tangentially—might be the easiest way out.

On the eve of her ninth birthday, unassuming Rose Edelstein, a girl at the periphery of schoolyard games and her distracted parents’ attention, bites into her mother’s homemade lemon-chocolate cake and discovers she has a magical gift: she can taste her mother’s emotions in the cake. She discovers this gift to her horror, for her mother—her cheerful, good-with-crafts, can-do mother—tastes of despair and desperation. Suddenly, and for the rest of her life, food becomes a peril and a threat to Rose. The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake is a luminous tale about the enormous difficulty of loving someone fully when you know too much about them. It is heartbreaking and funny, wise and sad, and confirms Aimee Bender’s place as “a writer who makes you grateful for the very existence of language.”

David Pepin has been in love with his wife, Alice, since the moment they met in a university seminar on Alfred Hitchcock. After 13 years of marriage, he still can’t imagine a remotely happy life without her—yet he obsessively contemplates her demise. Soon she is dead, and David is both deeply distraught and the prime suspect. The detectives investigating Alice’s suspicious death have plenty of personal experience with conjugal enigmas: Ward Hastroll is happily married until his wife inexplicably becomes voluntarily and militantly bedridden; and Sam Sheppard is especially sensitive to the intricacies of marital guilt and innocence, having decades before been convicted and then exonerated of the brutal murder of his wife. Still, these men are in the business of figuring things out, even as Pepin’s role in Alice’s death grows ever more confounding when they link him to a highly unusual hit man called Mobius. Mesmerizing, exhilarating, and profoundly moving, Mr. Peanut is a police procedural of the soul, a poignant investigation of the relentlessly mysterious human heart—and a first novel of the highest order.

But we still have to eat.  Take out the To Go Box: Takeout Menu Holder, a handy bound portfolio for those of us tired of finding a mass of takeout menus in the  bottom drawer.

• In My Queer War, James Lord tells the story of a young man’s exposure to the terrors, dislocations, and horrors of armed conflict. In 1942, a timid, inexperienced 21-year-old Lord reports to Atlantic City, New Jersey, to enlist in the U.S. Army. His career in the armed forces takes him to Nevada and California, to Boston, to England, and eventually to France and Germany, where he witnesses firsthand the ravages of total war on Europe’s land and on its people. Along the way he comes to terms with his own sexuality, experiences the thrill of first love and the chill of disillusionment with his fellow man, and in a moment of great rashness makes the acquaintance of the world’s most renowned artist, who will show him the way to a new life. Lord’s books include A Giacometti Portrait and Picasso and Dora, both available in paperback.

• From elementary school on, Walter Kirn knew how to stay at the top of his class: He clapped erasers, memorized answer keys, and parroted his teachers’ pet theories. But when he launched himself eastward to an Ivy League university, Kirn discovered that the temple of higher learning he had expected was instead just another arena for more gamesmanship, snobbery, and social climbing. In this whip-smart memoir of kissing-up, cramming, and competition, Lost in the Meritocracy reckons the costs of an educational system where the point is simply to keep accumulating points and never to look back—or within. Walter Kirn is the author of six previous works of fiction, including Thumbsucker, which is available in paperback.

• He was a brilliant teller of tales, one of the most widely read authors of the 20^th century, and at one time the most famous writer in the world, yet W. Somerset Maugham’s own true story has never been fully told. At last, the fascinating truth is revealed in a landmark biography by the award-winning writer Selina Hastings. Granted unprecedented access to Maugham’s personal correspondence and to newly uncovered interviews with his only child, Hastings portrays the secret loves, betrayals, integrity, and passion that inspired Maugham to create such classics as The Razor’s Edge and Of Human Bondage. An epic biography of a hugely talented and hugely conflicted man, The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham is the definitive account of Maugham’s extraordinary life.

• What is it that leads an exceptional young mind want to disappear? Bill Clegg makes stunningly clear the attraction of the drug that had him in its thrall, capturing in scene after scene the drama, tension, and paranoiac nightmare of a secret life—and the exhilarating bliss that came again and again until it was eclipsed almost entirely by doom. He also explores the shape of addiction, how its pattern–not its cause–can be traced to the past. Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man is an utterly compelling narrative—lyrical, irresistible, harsh, honest, and beautifully written–from which you simply cannot look away. Bill Clegg is a literary agent in New York, and this memoir is his first book.

• Whether she is contemplating the history of walking as a cultural and political experience over the past 200 years, as she did in Wanderlust, or using the life of photographer Eadweard Muybridge as a lens to discuss the transformations of space and time in late 19-century America, in River of Shadows, Rebecca Solnit has emerged as an inventive and original writer whose mind is daring in the connections it makes. A Field Guide to Getting Lost draws on emblematic moments and relationships in Solnit’s own life to explore the issues of wandering, being lost, and the uses of the unknown. The result is a distinctive, stimulating, and poignant voyage of discovery.

• Evelyn Waugh was already famous when Brideshead Revisited was published in 1945. Written at the height of the war, the novel was, he admitted, of no “immediate propaganda value.” Instead, it was the story of a household, a family and a journey of religious faith—an elegy for a vanishing world and a testimony to a family he had fallen in love with a decade earlier. The Lygons of Madresfield were every bit as glamorous, eccentric and compelling as their counterparts in Brideshead Revisited. In this engrossing biography, Mad World: Evelyn Waugh and the Secrets of Brideshead, Paula Byrne takes an innovative approach to her subject, setting out to capture Waugh through the friendships that mattered most to him. She uncovers a man who, far from the snobbish misanthrope of popular caricature, was as loving and as complex as the family that inspired him.

• Here, from the incomparable John Waters, is a paean to the power of subversive inspiration that will delight, amuse, enrich—and happily horrify readers everywhere. Role Models is, in fact, a self-portrait told through intimate profiles of favorite personalities—some famous, some unknown, some criminal, some surprisingly middle-of-the-road. From Esther Martin, owner of the scariest bar in Baltimore, to the playwright Tennessee Williams; from the atheist leader Madalyn Murray O’Hair to the insane martyr Saint Catherine of Siena; from the English novelist Denton Welch to the timelessly appealing singer Johnny Mathis—these are the extreme figures who helped the author form his own brand of neurotic happiness. John Waters is an American filmmaker, actor, writer, and visual artist best known for his cult films, including Hairspray, Pink Flamingos, and Cecil B. DeMented.

• Pearl Buck in China: Journey to The Good Earth is described by one reviewer as “a compelling study of a woman who tried to make sense of the poverty, violence and suffering she saw as a child in rural China by setting down everything that happened to her, stripping away both the lies of her family and society in her search for self-identity and truth.” Hilary Spurling is the author of The Unknown Matisse, unearths the life and work of the Nobel Prize winner whose novels captured ordinary life in China.

• Gretchen Rubin had an epiphany one rainy afternoon in the unlikeliest of places: a city bus. “The days are long, but the years are short,” she realized. “Time is passing, and I’m not focusing enough on the things that really matter.” In that moment, she decided to dedicate a year to her happiness project. In this lively and compelling account of that year, entitled, appropriately, The Happiness Project, Rubin carves out her place alongside the authors of bestselling memoirs such as Julie and Julia, The Year of Living Biblically, and Eat, Pray, Love. With humor and insight, she chronicles her adventures during the twelve months she spent test-driving the wisdom of the ages, current scientific research, and lessons from popular culture about how to be happier.

• A shy manifesto, an impractical handbook, the true story of a fabulist, an entire life in parts and pieces, Manhood for Amateurs is the first sustained work of personal writing from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Chabon. In these insightful, provocative, slyly interlinked essays, one of our most brilliant and humane writers addresses with his characteristic warmth and lyric wit the all-important question: What does it mean to be a man today? Chabon is the bestselling author of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, and several other works of fiction.

• When Michael Lewis became a father, he decided to keep a written record of what actually happened immediately after the birth of each of his three children. This book, Home Game: An Accidental Guide to Fatherhood, is that record. But it is also something else: maybe the funniest, most unsparing account of ordinary daily household life ever recorded, from the point of view of the man inside. The remarkable thing about this story isn’t that Lewis is so unusual. It’s that he is so typical. The only wonder is that his wife has allowed him to publish it. Lewis, is the author of Liar’s Poker, Moneyball, and The Blind Side.

• From the author of the sensational bestseller I Was Told There’d Be Cake comes a new book of personal essays brimming with all the charm and wit that have earned Sloane Crosley widespread acclaim, award nominations, and an ever-growing cadre of loyal fans. In that book, readers were introduced to the foibles of Crosley’s life in New York City-always teetering between the glamour of Manhattan parties, the indignity of entry-level work, and the special joy of suburban nostalgia-and to a literary voice that mixed Dorothy Parker with David Sedaris and became something all its own. As always, Crosley’s voice is fueled by the perfect witticism, buoyant optimism, flair for drama, and easy charm in the face of minor suffering or potential drudgery. But in How Did You Get This Number it has also become increasingly sophisticated, quicker and sharper to the point, more complex and lasting in the emotions it explores. And yet, Crosley remains the unfailingly hilarious young Everywoman, healthily equipped with intelligence and poise to fend off any potential mundanity in maturity.

• In Things I’ve Been Silent About: Memories of a Prodigal Daughter a stunning personal story of growing up in Iran, Azar Nafisi shares her memories of living in thrall to a powerful and complex mother against the backdrop of a country’s political revolution. A girl’s pain over family secrets, a young woman’s discovery of the power of sensuality in literature, the price a family pays for freedom in a country beset by upheaval—these and other threads are woven together in this beautiful memoir as a gifted storyteller once again transforms the way we see the world and “reminds us of why we read in the first place. Azar Nafisi is a visiting professor and the director of the Dialogue Project at the Foreign Policy Institute of Johns Hopkins University.

• Not long after Rhoda Janzen turned 40, her world turned upside down. It was bad enough that her husband of 15 years left her for Bob, a guy he met on Gay.com, but that same week a car accident left her injured. Needing a place to rest and pick up the pieces of her life, Rhoda packed her bags, crossed the country, and returned to her quirky Mennonite family’s home, where she was welcomed back with open arms and offbeat advice. (Rhoda’s good-natured mother suggested she get over her heartbreak by dating her first cousin—he owned a tractor, see.) Written with wry humor and huge personality—and tackling faith, love, family, and aging—Mennonite in a Little Black Dress is an immensely moving memoir of healing, certain to touch anyone who has ever had to look homeward in order to move ahead. Rhoda Janzen teaches English and creative writing at Hope College in Holland, Michigan.other p

• After struggling for 20 years to get home to Ithaca, Odysseus finally arrives on his homeland. Among other disturbing sights, he finds his faithful dog Argos lying neglected on a pile of cow manure, infested with lice, old, and very tired. This scene in Homer’s Odyssey may not be the first canine character in literature, but it is close to the most enduring.  Since then, there have been hundreds of dogs featured in books, fiction and nonfiction. Here are a few of them.

• Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles may be as well-known as Homer’s Argos is ancient. “Never in the delirious dream of a disordered brain could anything more savage, more appalling, more hellish be conceived than that dark form and savage face.” The coroner may have ruled death by natural causes. but Sherlock Holmes knows there’s something more sinister behind Sir Charles Baskerville’s demise. The question is, could he really have fallen victim to the legendary phantom hound, the curse said to have haunted his ancestors for generations? Or is this the work of a very real and calculating murderer?

Based on the presumption that one cannot read, or even know about everything that is written, here is a selection of fiction that might be of interest to the discerning reader.

• Jack Hopkins, an ill-fated real-estate agent with an unhappy past, doesn’t like what he does for a living. Luckily, though, he has two new job offers: Darlene Hunt wants to pay him $10 million  to kill her husband, and her husband wants to hire him to kill Darlene Hunt. Before he can figure out who to work for, though, or how a private island off the coast of Mexico fits into it all, the dead bodies have already started piling up. What’s as interesting as the story line for Misadventure is the author himself, Millard Kaufman, who is 93, co-created Mr. Magoo, and wrote the screenplay for the legendary 1956 film Bad Day at Black Rock.

• Ilustrado begins with a body. On a clear day in winter, the battered corpse of Crispin Salvador is pulled from the Hudson River—taken from the world is the controversial lion of Philippine literature. Gone, too, is the only manuscript of his final book, a work meant to rescue him from obscurity by exposing the crimes of the Filipino ruling families. Miguel, his student and only remaining friend, sets out for Manila to investigate. To understand the death, Miguel scours the life, piecing together Salvador’s story through his poetry, interviews, novels, polemics, and memoirs. The result is Miguel Syjuco’s rich and dramatic family saga of four generations, tracing 150 years of Philippine history forged under the Spanish, the Americans, and the Filipinos themselves.

• 1941. Loyal Ledford works the swing shift tending furnace at the Mann Glass factory in Huntington, West Virginia. He courts Rachel, the boss’s daughter, a company nurse with spike-straight posture and coal-black hair. But when Pearl Harbor is attacked, Ledford, like so many young men of his time, sets his life on a new course. Upon his return from service in the war, Ledford starts a family with Rachel, but he chafes under the authority at Mann Glass. He is a lost man, disconnected from the present and haunted by his violent past, until he meets his cousins, the Bonecutter brothers. Their land, mysterious, elemental Marrowbone Cut, calls to Ledford, and it is there, with help from an unlikely bunch, that The Marrowbone Marble Company is slowly forged in this novel of the same name by Glenn Taylor. Over the next two decades, the factory grounds become a vanguard of the civil rights movement and the war on poverty, a home for those intent on change. Such a home inevitably invites trouble, and Ledford must fight for his family.

*autographed copies in-stock

Harding’s outstanding debut unfurls the history and final thoughts of a dying grandfather surrounded by his family in his New England home. George Washington Crosby repairs clocks for a living and on his deathbed revisits his turbulent childhood as the oldest son of an epileptic smalltime traveling salesman. The descriptions of the father’s epilepsy and the “cold halo of chemical electricity that encircled him immediately before he was struck by a full seizure” are stunning, and the household’s sadness permeates the narrative as George returns to more melancholy scenes. The real star is Harding’s language, which dazzles whether he’s describing the workings of clocks, sensory images of nature, the many engaging side characters who populate the book, or even a short passage on how to build a bird nest. This is an especially gorgeous example of novelistic craftsmanship. (publishers weekly)

Robert Adams: Tree Line

• This volume commemorates Robert Adams’ receipt of the Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography for 2009. Described by the Swedish foundation as “one of the most important and influential photographers of the last 40 years,” Adams joins a very distinguished line of contemporary photographers who have won the award, such as Graciela Iturbide (2008) and Nan Goldin (2007). The Foundation singled out Adams’ ability to consolidate the medium’s history: “as photography has altered and fragmented, he has refined and reaffirmed its inherent language, adapting the legacies of nineteenth-century and modernist photography to his own very singular purpose. Precise and undramatic, Adams’ accumulative vision of theWest now stands as a formidable document, reflecting broader, global concerns about the environment,while consistently recognizing signs of human aspiration and elements of hope, across a particular changing landscape.”

Sidney Goodman: Man in the Mirror

• Since the 1960s, Sidney Goodman has helped to maintain the vitality of American figurative art. Making the figure in the modern urban landscape his ongoing subject, Goodman collages images into compositions that are both clear and disquieting. Man in the Mirror documents the first major exhibition of Goodman’s works on paper.

Jon Pylypchuk

• Canadian artist Jon Pylypchuk (born 1972) has a unique talent for marrying the abject and the sublime. In his work, desperation and exhilaration, ugliness and beauty, tragedy and comedy are joined in images and words that declare that that life is a messy affair and we are the ones making it so. Like many before him who playfully expose the darker side of existence, Pylypchuk delves into the world of children’s books and characters, where inanimate objects come to life or animals live the lives of people. Endowed with human attributes, the creatures populating his paintings, drawings and sculpture speak powerfully of the pathetic banality and stubborn optimism that define our path through life as a tragicomedy of epic proportion. Copublished with the Austellungskunsthalle zeitgenössiche Kunst Münster on the occasion of a ten-year survey of Pylypchuk’s work, this book provides a comprehensive look at an artist who movingly summons the frailty of human existence.

Tom Munro

• One of today’s foremost fashion and celebrity photographers, Tom Munro has been making defining images since the mid-1990s. Munro achieves his results by encouraging his subjects to reinterpret their personalities for his lens, reveling in seductive roleplay or darkly-lit melodrama. The subjects gathered here include some of the biggest names in pop culture today—Ashton Kutcher, Brooke Shields, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Christina Ricci, Courtney Love, Daniel Craig, Dustin Hoffman, Ewan McGregor, Isabella Rossellini, Jake Gyllenhaal, Jennifer Aniston, Johnny Depp, Jude Law, Julianne Moore, Justin Timberlake, Lauren Hutton, Leonardo DiCaprio, Linda Evangelista, Madonna, Marion Cotillard, Matt Dillon, Matthew McConaughey, Naomi Campbell, Patrick Dempsey, Rob Lowe, Scarlett Johansson, Stephanie Seymour and Tom Cruise, to name only a few. This volume—Munro’s first monograph—affirms his status as a portraitist of the first rank.English by birth, Tom Munro moved to New York in 1990, embarking on his own career as a photographer in 1997, and achieving overnight success with his early editorial shoots for British Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. Over the last ten years, Munro has contributed to some of the world’s most prestigious magazine publications including Vogue, Italian Vogue, L’Uomo Vogue, Russian Vogue, China Vogue and Details. Munro’s dedication to his craft has attracted some of the fashion and beauty industries’ most prestigious names, including Armani, Banana Republic, Burberry, Calvin Klein, Converse, Gap, Givenchy, Hugo Boss, Lacoste, L’Oreal, Moschino, as well as music icons such as Beyoncé, Justin Timberlake and Madonna. Most recently Munro directed Madonna’s music video “Give it to Me,” the success of which led to him directing a second video, “Die Another Day,” and shooting the book for her Sticky and Sweet world tour.

Allora & Calzadilla

• Jennifer Allora (born 1974) and Guillermo Calzadilla (born 1971) bring various media to bear upon a range of territories for which they evolve their own concrete political correlations. This publication documents the video works “A Man Screaming Is Not a Dancing Bear” (2008), on post-Katrina New Orleans, and “How To Appear Invisible” (2009) on the collapse of the Palast der Republik in Berlin.

Karl Lagerfeld: Chanel’s Russian Connection

• Peripatetic Chanel head designer, book publisher, photographer–and now, film director–Karl Lagerfeld founded Métiers d’Arts in 2002 to showcase the talents of Chanel’s seven specialist ateliers (that provide the couture house with costume jewelry, embroidery and millinery). This volume focuses on Chanel’s 2008-2009 Métiers d’Arts collection Paris-Moscow. If Paris-Moscow indulges Lagerfeld’s fascination for Russia through fashion, then Russian Connection is that fascination embodied in book form. Lagerfeld’s images evoke Imperial Russia, Constructivism, Catherine the Great, Fabergé, Russian folklore and Coco Chanel’s own passion for Russia, via the great Ballets Russes, Byzantine jewelry and her affair with the Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich. Included here is a DVD featuring Lagerfeld’s directorial debut, Coco 1913/Chanel 1923, a silent black-and-white film depicting Chanel’s flirtation with Russian-Parisian émigré society in the 1910s and 1920s.

The Düsseldorf School of Photography

• The German photographic movement commonly known as the Düsseldorf School of Photography has become synonymous with artistic excellence and innovation. It began in the mid-1970s at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, under the instruction of the photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher, known for their comparative grids of mundane industrial buildings captured with an objective and clinical eye. This school has not only birthed some of today’s most important and successful photographers, but has also had a fundamental and lasting influence on the history of the medium. The Düsseldorf School of Photography presents over 160 images in a spectacular overview of the breadth of the Düsseldorf School from the early 1970s to today. This impeccable survey is filled with superb reproductions of the best-known photographs by three generations of key Düsseldorf artists: Bernd and Hilla Becher, Laurenz Berges, Elger Esser, Andreas Gursky, Candida Höfer, Axel Hütte, Simone Nieweg, Thomas Ruff, Jörg Sasse, Thomas Struth and Petra Wunderlich. With a scholarly text, extensive artist bios and a plate section dedicated to each of these artists, The Düsseldorf School of Photography offers the first comprehensive assessment of this important photographic movement—one that dominates the salesrooms and museums of our times.

Starburst: Color Photography in America 1970-1980

• It is hard to imagine today that the artistic value of color photography was once questioned and controversial, even as recently as the 1980s. William Eggleston’s watershed exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1976, generated plenty of scorn and confusion, as spectators struggled to accept his seemingly ordinary-looking color images of Southern life as art. Early photographs by Stephen Shore, Helen Levitt, Joel Meyerowitz and others received similarly hostile or ambivalent reviews. Color photography also had opponents within photography, most notoriously in Henri Cartier-Bresson. But as color processes both diversified and grew more sophisticated, and further approaches to the medium developed, the floodgates were opened wide. Starburst examines the first great practitioners of artistic color photography in the United States: Eggleston, Shore, Levitt, Meyerowitz, plus Joel Sternfeld, William Christenberry, John Divola, Mitch Epstein, Jan Groover, Robert Heinecken, Barbara Kasten, Les Krims, Richard Misrach, John Pfahl, Leo Rubinfien, Neal Slavin, Eve Sonneman and many more. Grounded in reviews of sources from the 1970s, and with an abundance of images, this survey makes a thorough assessment of this paradigm shift in the history of art photography.

Mary Ellen Carroll: Causes, Place, Mistakes, Boredom, Lies, Resemblance, Pleasure, Nothing, Temporality, Affect, Inscription, Envy/Imitation, Utilitarianism, Disappearance, Literalness, Thingness

• Despite an oeuvre spanning more than 20 years and a disavowal of any signature style, Mary Ellen Carroll has throughout her career been investigating a single, fundamental question: What is a work of art? The resulting multifarious, provocative and often wry outpouring in architecture, writing, performance, photography, filmmaking, printmaking, sculpture and painting has been collected into this book–the New York conceptual artist’s long-awaited first monograph. Carroll’s work interrogates the relationship between subjectivity, language and power; at its core is a dedication to political and social critique. The touchstones of her practice are the double, the imitation and the copy, and these motifs are applied to a range of ends–from conjuring the unheimlich to probing the means of distribution and interpretation of the work of art. A Carroll piece may involve something as seemingly effortless as trademarking an idea by another artist or as complex and bold as walking out the door penniless with only her passport and the clothes on her back to spend six weeks in a foreign country. Carroll imbues all her work with a strong performative element; even a new opus, involving the rotation of a Houston tract home on its foundation, is conceived as a way of making architecture perform.

• Fifty years and many changes have ensued since the paper (that resembles the International Herald Tribune) was founded by an enigmatic millionaire, and now, amid the stained carpeting and dingy office furniture, the staff’s personal dramas seem far more important than the daily headlines. As the era of print news gives way to the Internet age and this imperfect crew stumbles toward an uncertain future, the paper’s rich history is revealed, including the surprising truth about its founder’s intentions. Spirited, moving, and highly original, The Imperfectionists will establish Tom Rachman as one of our most perceptive, assured literary talents.

• Excitement and romance are abundant in Zoo Station, a beautifully crafted and compelling thriller with a heart-stopping ending minus the movie-treatment feel of some many books of this genre. By 1939, Anglo-American journalist John Russell has spent 15 years in Berlin, where his German-born son lives. He writes human-interest pieces for British and American papers, avoiding the investigative journalism that could get him deported. But as war approaches, he faces the prospect of having to leave his son and his longtime girlfriend. Then, an acquaintance from his communist days approaches him to do some work for the Soviets. Russell is reluctant but ultimately unable to resist. He becomes involved in other dangerous activities, helping a Jewish family and an idealistic American reporter. The book by David Downing is the first of three (so far) featuring John Russell, followed by Silesian Station and Stettin Station, which is new this month.

• In My Paper Chase, renowned writer and editor Harold Evans brings us back to the real-life newsroom, recounting the wild and wonderful tale of newspapering life. His story stretches from the 1930s to his service in WWII, through towns big and off the map. He discusses his passion for the crusading style of reportage he championed, his clashes with Rupert Murdoch, and his struggle to use journalism to better the lives of those less fortunate. There’s a star-studded cast and a tremendously vivid sense of what once was: the lead type, the smell of the presses, eccentrics throughout, and angry editors screaming over the intercoms. My Paper Chase tells the story of Evans’s great loves: newspapers and Tina Brown, the bright, young journalist who became his wife.

• Evans’ book ends, more or less, with his disdainful relationship with Murdoch, and War at the Wall Street Journal picks up there with a tale about big business, an imploding dynasty, a mogul at war, and a deal that sums up an era of change. The main character, rocked by feuding factions and those who would remake it, is the Wall Street Journal, which affects the thoughts, votes, and stocks of two million readers daily. Sarah Ellison, while at the Journal, won praise for covering the $5 billion acquisition that transformed the pride of Dow Jones and the estimable but eccentric Bancroft family into the jewel of Murdoch’s kingdom. Here she expands her work, using her knowledge of the paper and its people to go deep inside the landmark transaction, as no outsider has or can, and also far beyond it, into the rocky transition when Murdoch’s crew tussled with old Journal hands and geared up for battle with the New York Times. With access to all the players, Ellison moves from newsrooms (where editors duel) to estates (where the Bancrofts go at it like the Ewings). She shows Murdoch, finally, for who he is—maneuvering, firing, undoing all that the Bancrofts had protected.

• The Death and Life of American Journalism is a superlative account of a deal with reverberations beyond the news, told with the storytelling savvy that transforms big stories into timeless chronicles of American life and power. Daily newspapers are closing across America. Washington bureaus are shuttering; whole areas of the federal government are now operating with no press coverage. International bureaus are going, going, gone. Journalism, the counterbalance to corporate and political power, the lifeblood of American democracy, is not just threatened. It is in meltdown. In The Death and Life of American Journalism, Robert W. McChesney, an academic, and John Nichols, a journalist, who together founded the nation’s leading media reform network, Free Press, investigate the crisis. They propose a bold strategy for saving journalism and saving democracy, one that looks back to how the Founding Fathers ensured free press protection with the First Amendment and provided subsidies to the burgeoning print press of the young nation.

• Like Alfred Nobel, Joseph Pulitzer is better known today for the prize that bears his name than for his contribution to history. Yet, in 19th-century industrial America, while Carnegie provided the steel, Rockefeller the oil, Morgan the money, and Vanderbilt the railroads, Pulitzer ushered in the modern mass media. In Pulitzer: A Life in Politics, Print, and Power, James McGrath Morris traces the epic story of this Jewish Hungarian immigrant’s rise through American politics and into journalism where he accumulated immense power and wealth, only to fall blind and become a lonely, tormented recluse wandering the globe. But not before Pulitzer transformed American journalism into a medium of mass consumption and immense influence. Pulitzer used his influence to advance a progressive political agenda and his power to fight those who opposed him. The course he followed led him to battle Theodore Roosevelt who, when President, tried to send Pulitzer to prison. The grueling legal battles Pulitzer endured for freedom of the press changed the landscape of American newspapers and politics.

• Acclaimed historian Alan Brinkley gives us a sharply realized portrait of Henry Luce, arguably the most important publisher of the 20th century. Luce’s creations were not newspapers, but were grounded nonetheless in the headlines of the day, and became as important as the daily press in communicating events to a news-hungry world. As the founder of Time, Fortune, and Life magazines, Luce changed the way we consume news and the way we understand our world. Born the son of missionaries, Henry Luce spent his childhood in rural China, yet he glimpsed a milieu of power altogether different at Hotchkiss and later at Yale. While working at a Baltimore newspaper, he and Brit Hadden conceived the idea of Time: a “news-magazine” that would condense the week’s events in a format accessible to increasingly busy members of the middle class. They launched it in 1923, and young Luce quickly became a publishing titan. In 1936, after Time’s unexpected success—and Hadden’s early death—Luce published the first issue of Life, to which millions soon subscribed. In The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century, Brinkley shows how Luce reinvented the magazine industry in just a decade. The Publisher tells a great American story of spectacular achievement—yet it never loses sight of the public and private costs at which that achievement came.

• On Feb. 15, 1898, the American ship USS Maine mysteriously exploded in the Havana Harbor. News of the blast quickly reached U.S. shores, where it was met by some not with alarm but great enthusiasm. A powerful group of war lovers agitated that the United States exert its muscle across the seas. Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge were influential politicians dismayed by the “closing” of the Western frontier. William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal falsely heralded that Spain’s “secret infernal machine” had destroyed the battleship as Hearst himself saw great potential in whipping Americans into a frenzy. The Maine would provide the excuse they’d been waiting for. Bestselling historian Evan Thomas (and assistant managing editor of Newsweek magazine) brings us the full story of this monumental turning point in American history. Epic in scope and revelatory in detail, The War Lovers: Roosevelt, Lodge, Hearst, and the Rush to Empire, 1898 takes us from Boston mansions to the halls of Congress to the beaches of Cuba and the jungles of the Philippines. It is landmark work with an unforgettable cast of characters-and provocative relevance to today.

• Named for his great-uncle, a prominent newspaperman, St. Clair McKelway was born with journalism in his blood. And in 36 years at the New Yorker, he made “fact-writing” his career. His prolific output for the magazine was defined by its incomparable wit and a love of New York’s rough edges. He had a deep affection for the city’s “rascals”: the junkmen, con men, counterfeiters, priests, beat cops, and fire marshals who colored life in old New York. And he wrote with levity and insight about his own life as well, a life marked by a strict Presbyterian childhood, a limited formal education, five marriages and divorces, and sometimes debilitating mental illness. Reporting at Wit’s End: Tales from the New Yorker collects McKelway’s most memorable work from the 1930s through the 1960s, creating a portrait of a long-forgotten New York and of one of its consummate chroniclers.

• THE NEW ISSUE OF BIDOUN

• Bidoun magazine is a quarterly publication founded in 2004 with the intention of filling a gaping hole in the arts and culture coverage of the Middle East and its Diaspora. Check out information on the new issue here.

• THE NEW ISSUE OF THE PARIS REVIEW

• Founded in Paris by Harold L. Humes, Peter Matthiessen, and George Plimpton in 1953, The Paris Review began with a simple editorial mission: “Dear reader,” William Styron wrote in a letter in the inaugural issue, “The Paris Review hopes to emphasize creative work—fiction and poetry—not to the exclusion of criticism, but with the aim in mind of merely removing criticism from the dominating place it holds in most literary magazines and putting it pretty much where it belongs, i.e., somewhere near the back of the book. I think The Paris Review should welcome these people into its pages: the good writers and good poets, the non-drumbeaters and non-axe-grinders. So long as they’re good.” Check out information on the new issue here.

• THE NEW ISSUE OF GIGANTIC

• Gigantic is published twice a year. Subscriptions and single issues are available for online purchase. Single issues are available in select bookstores. VISIT THEIR WEBSITE AND LEARN MORE ABOUT ALL OF IT.

• THE NEW ISSUE OF ESOPUS

• Esopus is a twice-yearly arts magazine featuring fresh, unmediated perspectives on contemporary culture from a wide range of creative professionals. It includes artists’ projects, critical writing, fiction, poetry, visual essays, interviews, and, in each issue, a themed CD of new music. Published by the non-profit Esopus Foundation Ltd., the magazine has a simple mission: to provide an unfiltered, non-commercial space in which creative people and the public can connect in meaningful, productive ways.

• THE NEW ISSUE OF MCSWEENEY’S

• Today, McSweeney’s has grown to be one of the country’s best-read and widely-circulated literary journals, with an expanding, loyal subscriber base and strong independent bookstore following. As a small publishing house, McSweeney’s is committed to finding new voices—Gabe Hudson, Paul Collins, Neal Pollack, J.T. Leroy, John Hodgman, Amy Fusselman, Salvador Plascencia and Sean Wilsey are among those whose early work appeared in McSweeney’s—and promoting the work of gifted but underappreciated writers, such as Lydia Davis and Stephen Dixon. VISIT MCSWEENEY’S HERE.

• THE NEW ISSUE OF BLIND SPOT

• Blind Spot is a triannual art journal that publishes unseen work by living photographers. In Blind Spot, images are given primacy and published collaboratively rather than curatorially, unaccompanied by introductory, biographical or explanatory text. Blind Spot is not about photography, our content is photography. Blind Spot bridges the gap between emerging and established artists, and creates a new context where each can benefit from the company of the other. By publishing accomplished artists on an intimate scale, we strive to enrich and provide direction to our culture. Since its launch in 1993, Blind Spot has featured over 300 living photographers including Uta Barth, Gregory Crewdson, Tim Davis, Rineke Dijkstra, Adam Fuss, and Vik Muniz, many of whom have gained critical and audience acclaim through their exposure in the magazine. Learn more about the new issue here.

• THE NEW ISSUE OF WAXPOETICS

• At Wax Poetics, we put music in context. Since December 2001, Wax Poetics has filled the once noticeable gap in music journalism—an editorial void between contemporary artists and classic greats. Through meaty, insightful commentary, Wax Poetics educates the masses about the origins of their musical interests. With the changes in the music and media industries in recent times, Wax Poetics has evolved to meet the demands of this volatile market by transitioning from a small quarterly magazine to a well-diversified music media group. What first began as a magazine has now grown into a multi-tiered resource for music aficionados and general listeners alike. Now eight years after its inception, Wax Poetics continues to revolutionize the way we educate ourselves on music. Check out the new issue here.

• THE NEW ISSUE OF 6X6

• Every issue of 6×6 contains six poets who are each given six pages to present their work; we encourage projects that specifically explore the format. 6×6 publishes poets of all ages from all over the U.S. and abroad, and we aim to include a poet in translation in every issue. We put out three issues a year, and submissions are encouraged year round. 6×6 Editors: Rotating editorial staff comprised of UDP Collective members and Volunteers. View 6×6 issues.

• THE NEW ISSUE OF N+1

• n+1 is a twice-yearly print journal of politics, literature, and culture. Issue Nine is now available in bookstores everywhere and by subscription.

• THE NEW ISSUE OF ARTFORUM

• Artforum is an international monthly magazine specializing in contemporary art.

• THE PREMIRER ISSUE OF COUSIN CORINNE’S REMINDER

• Cousin Corinne widens the scope of artistic representation within the printed world by combining literary and visual presences in a biannual publication entitled Cousin Corinne’s Reminder, which features new writing, comix, and photography in each issue. Cousin Corinne works in loving partnership with BookCourt. Learn more about the first issue here.

• With irresistibly persuasive vigor, David Shenk debunks in The Genius in All of Us: Why Everything You’ve Been Told About Genetics, Talent, and IQ Is Wrong the long-standing notion of genetic “giftedness,” and presents dazzling new scientific research showing how greatness is in the reach of every individual. DNA does not make us who we are. “Forget everything you think you know about genes, talent, and intelligence,” he writes. “In recent years, a mountain of scientific evidence has emerged suggesting a completely new paradigm: not talent scarcity, but latent talent abundance.”

• Dr. Louann Brizendine, founder of the first clinic in the country to study gender differences in brain, behavior, and hormones, turns her attention to the male brain, showing how, through every phase of life, the “male reality” is fundamentally different from the female one. The Male Brain overturns the stereotypes. Impeccably researched and at the cutting edge of scientific knowledge, this is a book that every man, and especially every woman bedeviled by a man, will need to own.

• Wisdom: From Philosophy to Neuroscience is a compelling investigation into one of our most coveted and cherished ideals, and of the efforts of modern science to penetrate the mysterious nature of this timeless virtue. We all recognize wisdom, but defining it is more elusive. In this fascinating journey from philosophy to science, Stephen S. Hall gives us a dramatic history of wisdom, from its sudden emergence in four different locations (Greece, China, Israel, and India) in the 5^th century B.C. to its modern manifestations in education, politics, and the workplace. Hall explores the neural mechanisms for wise decision making; the conflict between the emotional and cognitive parts of the brain; the development of compassion, humility, and empathy; the effect of adversity and the impact of early-life stress on the development of wisdom; and how we can learn to optimize our future choices and future selves.

• Ideas can, and do, change the world. Just as Marxism, existentialism, and feminism shaped the last century, so fundamentalism, globalization, and bioethics are transforming our world now. In Ideas that Matter: The Concepts that Shape the 21st Century, renowned philosopher A.C. Grayling provides a personal dictionary of the ideas that will shape our world in the decades to come. With customary wit, fire, and erudition, Grayling ranges across the gamut of essential theories, movements, and philosophies—from animal rights to neurophilosophy to war crimes—provoking and elucidating throughout. Ideas are the cogs that drive history, and in explaining the most complex and influential ones in laymen’s terms, Ideas that Matter will help every engaged citizen better understand it.

• Something is profoundly wrong with the way we think about how we should live today. In Ill Fares The Land, Tony Judt, one of our leading historians and thinkers, reveals how we have arrived at our present dangerously confused moment. Judt masterfully crystallizes what we’ve all been feeling into a way to think our way into, and thus out of, our great collective dis-ease about the current state of things. As the economic collapse of 2008 made clear, the social contract that defined postwar life in Europe and America—the guarantee of a basal level of security, stability and fairness—is no longer guaranteed; in fact, it’s no longer part of the common discourse. Judt offers the language we need to address our common needs, rejecting the nihilistic individualism of the far right and the debunked socialism of the past.

• In Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self , Marilynne Robinson applies her astute intellect to some of the most vexing topics in the history of human thought—science, religion, and consciousness. Crafted with the same care and insight as her award-winning novels, Absence of Mind challenges postmodern atheists who crusade against religion under the banner of science. In Robinson’s view, scientific reasoning does not denote a sense of logical infallibility, as thinkers like Richard Dawkins might suggest. Instead, in its purest form, science represents a search for answers. It engages the problem of knowledge, an aspect of the mystery of consciousness, rather than providing a simple and final model of reality.

• Reality TV dominates broadband. YouTube and Facebook dominate the web. In Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, his landmark new book, David Shields argues that our culture is obsessed with “reality” precisely because we experience hardly any. Most artistic movements are attempts to figure out a way to smuggle more of what the artist thinks is reality into the work of art. The questions Reality Hunger explores—the bending of form and genre, the lure and blur of the real—play out constantly all around us. Drawing on myriad sources, Shields takes an audacious stance on issues that are being fought over now and will be fought over far into the future.

Too many of us are in a cycle of shame and guilt. We spend countless hours worrying about what we ate or if we exercised enough, blaming ourselves for actions that we can’t undo. We are stuck in the past and unable to live in the present—that moment in which we do have the power to make changes in our lives.

• With Savor, world-renowned Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh and Harvard nutritionist Dr. Lilian Cheung show us how to end our struggles with weight once and for all. Offering practical tools, including personalized goal setting, a detailed nutrition guide, and a mindful living plan, the authors help us to uncover the roots of our habits and then guide us as we transform our actions. Savor teaches us how to easily adopt the practice of mindfulness and integrate it into eating, exercise, and all facets of our daily life, so that being conscious and present becomes a core part of our being.

• Women, Food and God If you suffer about your relationship with food—you eat too much or too little, think about what you will eat constantly or try not to think about it at all—you can be free. Just look down at your plate. The answers are there. Don’t run. Look. Because when we welcome what we most want to avoid, we contact the part of ourselves that is fresh and alive. We touch the life we truly want and evoke divinity itself. Since adolescence, Geneen Roth has gained and lost more than a thousand pounds. She has been dangerously overweight and dangerously underweight. She has been plagued by feelings of shame and self-hatred and she has felt euphoric after losing a quick few pounds on a fad diet. Then one day, on the verge of suicide, she did something radical: She dropped the struggle, ended the war, stopped trying to fix, deprive and shame herself. She began trusting her body and questioning her beliefs. It worked. And losing weight was only the beginning. Now, after more than three decades of studying, teaching and writing about what drives our compul-sions with food, Roth adds a profound new dimension to her work in Women, Food and God. She begins with her most basic concept: The way you eat is inseparable from your core beliefs about being alive. Your relationship with food is an exact mirror of your feelings about love, fear, anger, meaning, transformation and, yes, even God. But it doesn’t stop there. She shows how going beyond both the food and feelings takes you deeper into realms of spirit and soul to the bright center of your own life.

• From the prominent New York Times food writer Kim Severson comes Spoon Fed, a memoir recounting the tough life lessons she learned from a generation of female cooks-including Marion Cunningham, Alice Waters, Ruth Reichl, Rachael Ray, and Marcella Hazan. Somewhere between the lessons her mother taught her as a child and the ones she is now trying to teach her own daughter, Kim Severson stumbled. She lost sight of what mattered, of who she was and who she wanted to be, and of how she wanted to live her life. It took a series of women cooks to reteach her the life lessons she forgot-and some she had never learned in the first place. Some as small as a spoonful, and others so big they saved her life, the best lessons she found were delivered in the kitchen. Told in Severson’s frank, often funny, always perceptive style, Spoon Fed weaves together the stories of eight important cooks with the lessons they taught her-lessons that seemed to come right when she needed them most.

• Jonathan Safran Foer spent much of his teen-age and college years oscillating between omnivore and vegetarian. But on the brink of fatherhood-facing the prospect of having to make dietary choices on a child’s behalf-his casual questioning took on an urgency. His quest for answers ultimately required him to visit factory farms in the middle of the night, dissect the emotional ingredients of meals from his childhood, and probe some of his most primal instincts about right and wrong. Brilliantly synthesizing philosophy, literature, science, memoir and his own detective work, Eating Animals explores the many fictions we use to justify our eating habits-from folklore to pop culture to family traditions and national myth-and how such tales can lull us into a brutal forgetting. Marked by Foer’s profound moral ferocity and unvarying generosity, as well as the vibrant style and creativity that made his previous books, Everything is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, widely loved, Eating Animals is a celebration and a reckoning, a story about the stories we’ve told-and the stories we now need to tell.

• Alice Waters has been a champion of the sustainable, local cooking movement for decades.  To Waters, good food is a right, not a privilege. In the Green Kitchen: Techniques to Learn by Heart presents her essential cooking techniques to be learned by heart plus more than 50 recipes—for delicious fresh, local, and seasonal meals—from Waters and her friends.  She demystifies the basics including steaming a vegetable, dressing a salad, simmering stock, filleting a fish, roasting a chicken, and making bread. An indispensable cookbook, she gives you everything you need to bring out the truest flavor that the best ingredients of the season have to offer.

• Tom Fitzmorris covers the New Orleans food scene like powdered sugar covers a beignet. For more than 35 years he’s written a weekly restaurant review, but he’s best known for a long-running, daily radio talk show devoted to New Orleans restaurants and cooking. In Tom Fitzmorris’s Hungry Town, Fitzmorris movingly describes the disappearance of New Orleans’s food culture in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and its triumphant comeback—an essential element in the city’s recovery. He leads up to it with a recent history of New Orleans dining before the hurricane, from the Creole craze of the 1980s to the opening of restaurants by big-name chefs like Paul Prudhomme and Emeril Lagasse. Fitzmorris’s coverage of the heroic return of the city’s chefs after Katrina highlights the importance of local cooking traditions to a community. The book includes recipes for some of the dishes mentioned in the story, and numerous sidebars informed by Fitzmorris’s long career writing about this delicious city.

• Encyclopedic in scope and heroically audacious, The Novel: An Alternative History is the first attempt in over a century to tell the complete story of our most popular literary form. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the novel did not originate in 18th-century England, nor even with Don Quixote, but is coeval with civilization itself. After a pugnacious introduction, in which author Steven Moore defends innovative, demanding novelists against their conservative critics, the book relaxes into a world tour of the premodern novel, beginning in ancient Egypt and ending in 16th-century China, with many exotic ports-of-call.

• “Long live the King” hailed “Entertainment Weekly”upon the publication of Stephen King’s On Writing. Part memoir, part master class by one of the bestselling authors of all time, this superb volume is a revealing and practical view of the writer’s craft, comprising the basic tools of the trade every writer must have. King’s advice is grounded in his vivid memories from childhood through his emergence as a writer, from his struggling early career to his widely reported near-fatal accident in 1999—and how the inextricable link between writing and living spurred his recovery.

• In The Spooky Art: Thoughts on Writing, Norman Mailer discusses with signature candor the rewards and trials of the writing life, and recommends the tools to navigate it. Addressing the reader in a conversational tone, he draws on the best of more than fifty years of his own criticism, advice, and detailed observations about the writer’s craft.

• Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life is Ann Lamott’s step-by-step guide to writing and managing the writer’s life, covering each portion of a written project, addressing such concerns as writer’s block and getting published, and offering awareness and survival tips. Anne Lamott is author of the novels Hard Laughter, Rosie, Joe Jones, and All New People as well as Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year.

• The world’s best contemporary writers—from Michael Chabon and Claire Messud to Jonathan Lethem and Amy Tan—engage in a wide-ranging, insightful, and often- surprising roundtable discussion on the art of writing fiction in Secret Miracle: The Novelist’s Handbook edited by Daniel Alarcon. Drawing back the curtain on the mysterious process of writing novels, The Secret Miracle brings together the foremost practitioners of the craft to discuss how they write. Paul Auster, Roddy Doyle, Allegra Goodman, Aleksandar Hemon, Mario Vargas Llosa, Susan Minot, Rick Moody, Haruki Murakami, George Pelecanos, Gary Shteyngart, and others take us step by step through the alchemy of writing fiction

• In David Lipsky’s view, David Foster Wallace was the best young writer in America. Wallace’s pieces for “Harper’s” magazine in the ’90s were, according to Lipsky, “like hearing for the first time the brain voice of everybody I knew: Here was how we all talked, experienced, thought. It was like smelling the damp in the air, seeing the first flash from a storm a mile away. You knew something gigantic was coming.” Then “Rolling Stone” sent Lipsky to join Wallace on the last leg of his book tour for Infinite Jest, the novel that made him internationally famous. Amid everyday events, Wallace tells Lipsky remarkable things—everything he can about his life, how he feels, what he thinks, what terrifies and fascinates and confounds him—in the writing voice Lipsky had come to love. Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace is the product of that adventure.

• The Making of a Story: A Norton Guide to Creative Writing is a fresh and inspiring guide to the basics of creative writing—both fiction and creative nonfiction. Its hands-on, completely accessible approach walks writers through each stage of the creative process, from the initial triggering idea to the revision of the final manuscript. It is unique in combing the three main aspects of creative writing instruction: process (finding inspiration, getting ideas on the page), craft (specific techniques like characterization), and anthology (learning by reading masters of the form). Succinct, clear definitions of basic terms of fiction are accompanied by examples, including excerpts from masterpieces of short fiction and essays as well as contemporary novels. This impressive volume was edited by Alice LaPlante, who teaches creative writing at San Francisco State University and Stanford University.

We can turn now to a look behind the curtain, or under the hood, whatever your preference.

• With a language disappearing every two weeks and neologisms springing up almost daily, an understanding of the origins and currency of language has never seemed more relevant. In A Little Book of Language, a narrative history written explicitly for a young audience, expert linguist David Crystal proves why the story of language deserves retelling. From the first words of an infant to the peculiar modern dialect of text messaging, A Little Book of Language ranges widely, revealing language’s myriad intricacies and quirks. In animated fashion, Crystal sheds light on the development of unique linguistic styles, the origins of obscure accents, and the search for the first written word. He discusses the plight of endangered languages, as well as successful cases of linguistic revitalization.

• The Weekend Novelist Rewrites the Novel: A Step-by-Step Guide to Perfecting Your Work by Robert J. Ray, a follow-up to Ray’s The Weekend Novelist will guide writers of all levels through the next phase in crafting their novel: the rewrite. You’ve finished your first draft—congratulations! Think it’s ready for publication? Think again. The next stage is all about revising and reworking your manuscript—fine-tuning the plot, adding or improving subplots, and fleshing out characters; in short, addressing important structural issues that make or break a novel.

• A New Handbook of Literary Terms offers a lively, informative guide to words and concepts that every student of literature needs to know. David Mikics’s definitions are essayistic, witty, learned, and always a pleasure to read. They sketch the derivation and history of each term, including especially lucid explanations of verse forms and providing a firm sense of literary periods and movements from classicism to postmodernism. The Handbook also supplies a helpful map to the intricate and at times confusing terrain of literary theory at the beginning of the twenty-first century: the author has designated a series of terms, from New Criticism to queer theory, that serves as a concise but thorough introduction to recent developments in literary study.

• Drawing on Oxford’s unrivalled dictionary research program and language monitoring, The Insect that Stole the Butter? Oxford Dictionary of Word Origins captures the often odd and unexpected stories behind many of our most curious expressions, offering a rich account that far exceeds what can be found in a general dictionary. Indeed, this alphabetically organized resource edited by Julia Creswell contains a wealth of information on the history of English words, in a delightful roadmap tracing the curious twists and turns that words take as their meanings evolve over the centuries. We learn, for instance, that “:abracadabra,” just a fun word said by magicians today, was once believed to actually be a magic word that was supposed to be a charm against fever and was often engraved on an amulet worn around the neck.

• The Latin language has been the one constant in the cultural history of the West for more than two millennia. It has defined the way in which we express our thoughts, our faith, and our knowledge of how the world functions, its use echoing on in the law codes of half the world, in the terminologies of modern science, and, until 40 years ago, in the liturgy of the Catholic Church.  In his erudite and entertaining book called Ad Infinitum: A Biography of Latin, Nicholas Ostler shows how and why Latin survived and thrived even as its creators and other languages failed. Originally the dialect of Rome and its surrounds, Latin supplanted its neighbors to become, by conquest and settlement, the language of all Italy, and then of Western Europe and North Africa.  After the empire collapsed, spoken Latin re-emerged as a host of new languages, from Portuguese and Spanish in the west to Romanian in the east, while a knowledge of Latin lived on as the common code of European thought, and inspired the founders of Europe’s New World in the Americas.