• NEW YORK TIMES REVIEW
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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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9. THE BIG SHORT. Michael Lewis. Norton. $27.95. Our Price $19.57.
10. NOX. Anne Carson. New Directions. $29.95. Our Price $20.97.

Paperback Fiction

1. THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO (Mass Market Edition). Stieg Larsson. Random House. $7.99. Our Price $5.59.
2. TINKERS. Paul Harding. Bellevue Literary Press. $14.95. Our Price $10.47.
3. THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO (Trade Edition). Stieg Larsson. Random House. $14.95.Our Price $10.47.
4. LET THE GREAT WORLD SPIN. Colum McCann. Random House. $15.  Our Price $10.50.
5. THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE (Mass Market Edition). Stieg Larsson. Random House. $7.99. Our Price $5.59.
6. THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE (Trade Edition). Stieg Larsson. Random House. $15.95. Our Price $11.17.
7. BROOKLYN. Colm Toibin. Simon & Schuster. $15. Our Price $10.50.
8. LITTLE BEE. Chris Cleave. Simon & Schuster. $14. Our Price $9.80.
9. WALKS WITH MEN. Ann Beattie. Simon & Schuster. $10. Our Price $7.
10. ONE DAY. David Nicholls. Random House. $14.95. Our Price $10.47.

Paperback Nonfiction

1. AIA GUIDE TO NEW YORK CITY. Norval White, Elliot Willensky, Fran Leadon (Editors). Oxford University Press. $36.95. Our Price $27.97.
2. FOOD LOVERS’ GUIDE TO BROOKLYN. Sherri Eisenberg. Globe Pequot Press. $14.95. Our Price $10.47.
3. ZEITOUN. Dave Eggers. Random House. $15.95. Our Price $11.17.
4. METHLAND. Nick Reding. Bloomsbury. $15. Our Price $10.50.
5. A LITTLE HISTORY OF THE WORLD. Ernst Gombrich. Yale University Press. $14.95. Our Price $10.47.
6. ALTHOUGH OF COURSE YOU END UP BECOMING YOURSELF. David Lipsky. Random House. $16.99. Our Price $11.89.
7. BAD MOTHER. Ayelet Waldman. Random House. $14.95. Our Price $10.47.
8. WALKING BROOKLYN. Adrienne Onofri. Wilderness Press. $17.95. Our Price $12.57
9. CHEERFUL MONEY. Tad Friend. Little, Brown. $14.99. Our Price $10.49.
10. OMNIVORE’S DILEMMA. Michael Pollan. Penguin. $16. Our Price $11.20.

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1. I LEGO N.Y. Christoph Niemann. Abrams. $14.95. Our Price $10.47.
2. THE THREE LITTLE PIGS: An Architectural Tale. Steven Guarnaccia. Abrams. $18.95.Our Price $13.27.
3. MERMAIDS ON PARADE. Melanie Hope Greenberg. Penguin. $16.99. Our Price $11.89
4. SUBWAY (Board Book). Anastasia Suen. Penguin $6.99. Our Price $4.89.
5. IGGY PECK ARCHITECT. Andrea Beaty. Abrams. $16.95. Our Price $11.87.
6. THE LIGHTNING THIEF. Rick Riordan. Hyperion. $7.99. Our Price $5.59.
7. THE SEA OF MONSTERS. Rick Riordan. Hyperion. $7.99. Our Price $5.59.
8. THE CURIOUS GARDEN. Peter Brown. Little, Brown. $16.99 Our Price $11.89
9. NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC KIDS ALMANAC 2011.. Random House. $13.99. Our Price $9.79.
10. CHARLIE & THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY. Roald Dahl. Penguin $6.99. Our Price $4.89.

• 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

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2. THE NINTH STEP. Gabriel Cohen. St. Martin’s Press. $25.95. Our Price $18.07.
3. A VISIT FROM THE GOON SQUAD. Jennifer Egan. Random House. $25.95. Our Price $18.17.
4. THE PASSAGE. Justin Cronin. Random House. $27. Our Price $18.90.
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1. THE FRANKIES SPUNTINO KITCHEN COMPANION & COOKING MANUAL. Frank Falcinelli, Frank Castronova, & Peter Meehan. Artisan. $24.95.  Our Price $17.47.
2. SPECIALITES DE LA MAISON. Christine Hartley. HarperCollins. $19.99. Our Price $13.99.
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3. SAG HARBOR. Colson Whitehead. Random House. $15.95.Our Price $11.17.
4. LET THE GREAT WORLD SPIN. Colum McCann. Random House. $15. Our Price $10.50.
5. THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO (Trade Edition). Stieg Larsson. Random House. $14.95. Our Price $10.47.
6. THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE (Mass Market Edition). Stieg Larsson. Random House. $7.99. Our Price $5.59.
7. WALKS WITH MEN. Ann Beattie. Simon & Schuster. $10. Our Price $7.
8. THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE (Trade Edition). Stieg Larsson. Random House. $15.95. Our Price $11.17.
9. BROOKLYN. Colm Toibin. Simon & Schuster. $15. Our Price $10.50.
10. LITTLE BEE. Chris Cleave. Simon & Schuster. $14. Our Price $9.80.

Paperback Nonfiction

1. FOOD LOVERS’ GUIDE TO BROOKLYN. Sherri Eisenberg. Globe Pequot Press. $14.95. Our Price $10.47.
2. BAD MOTHER. Ayelet Waldman. Random House. $14.95. Our Price $10.47.
3. MANHOOD FOR AMATEURS. Michael Chabon. HarperCollins.$14.99. Our Price $10.49
4. ZEITOUN. Dave Eggers. Random House. $15.95. Our Price $11.17.
5. AIA GUIDE TO NEW YORK CITY. Norval White, Elliot Willensky, Fran Leadon (Editors). Oxford University Press. $36.95. Our Price $27.97.
6. A LITTLE HISTORY OF THE WORLD. Ernst Gombrich. Yale University Press. $14.95. Our Price $10.47.
7. THE LOST CITY OF Z. David Grann. Random House. $15.95. Our Price $11.17.
8. ALTHOUGH OF COURSE YOU END UP BECOMING YOURSELF. David Lipsky. Random House. $16.99. Our Price $11.89.
9. METHLAND. Nick Reding. Bloomsbury. $15. Our Price $10.50.
10. HOME GAME. Michael Lewis. Norton. $13.95. Our Price $9.77.

Children’s Hardcover & Paperback

1. THE RED PYRAMID. Rick Riordan. Hyperion. $17.99. Our Price $12.59.
2. OH THE PLACES YOU’LL GO. Dr. Seuss. Random House.$17.99.Our Price $12.59.
3. SUBWAY (Board Book). Anastasia Suen. Penguin. $6.99. Our Price $4.89.
4. MERMAIDS ON PARADE. Melanie Hope Greenberg. Penguin $16.99. Our Price $11.89.
5. LAYLA’S HEAD SCARF. Miriam Cohen. Star Bright Books $15.95. Our Price $11.17.
6. WHEN YOU REACH ME. Rebecca Stead. Random House. $15.99. Our Price $11.19.
7. THE DADDY BOOK. Todd Parr. Little, Brown. $6.99. Our Price $4.89.
8. BATTLE OF THE LABYRINTH. Rick Riordan. Hyperion. $7.99 Our Price $5.59.
9. COLOR OF HIS OWN (Board Book). Leo Lionni. Random House.. $6.99.  Our Price $4.89.
10. TALES FROM THE ODYSSEY (Part One). Mary Pope Osborne. Hyperion $5.99.Our Price $4.19.

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3. A VISIT FROM THE GOON SQUAD. Jennifer Egan. Random House. $25.95. Our Price $18.17.
4. THE PREGNANT WIDOW. Martin Amis. Random House. $26.95. Our Price $18.87.
5. SOLAR. Ian McEwan. Random House. $26.95. Our Price $18.87.
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8. THE HEIGHTS. Peter Hedges. Penguin. $25.95. Our Price $18.17.
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10. THE SAME RIVER TWICE. Ted Mooney. Random House. $26.95. Our Price $18.87.

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5. THE ART OF SIMPLE FOOD. Alice Waters. Random House. $35. Our Price $24.50.
6. JUST KIDS. Patti Smith. HarperCollins. $27. Our Price $18.90.
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2. THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO (Mass Market Edition). Stieg Larsson. Random House. $7.99. Our Price $5.59.
3. LET THE GREAT WORLD SPIN. Colum McCann. Random House. $15. Our Price $10.50.
4. THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO (Trade Edition). Stieg Larsson. Random House. $14.95. Our Price $10.47.
5. THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE (Trade Edition). Stieg Larsson. Random House. $15.95. Our Price $11.17.
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2. FOOD LOVERS’ GUIDE TO BROOKLYN. Sherri Eisenberg.Globe Pequot Press. $14.95. Our Price $10.47.
3. A LITTLE HISTORY OF THE WORLD. Ernst Gombrich. Yale University Press. $14.95. Our Price $10.47.
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2. OH THE PLACES YOU’LL GO. Dr. Seuss. Random House.$17.99.Our Price $12.59.
3. NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC KIDS ALMANAC 2011. National Geographic. Random House. $12.99. Our Price $9.09.
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6. SUBWAY (Board Book). Anastasia Suen. Penguin. $6.99. Our Price $4.89.
7. WHEN YOU REACH ME. Rebecca Stead. Random House. $15.99. Our Price $11.19.
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Hunger Games and its sequels are at the center of Miller’s analysis and probably the most popular books in the genre right now. Miller’s discussion of the games as high school allegory is apt and a satisfying perspective from which to approach the books, but many readers devour them simply because the plot moves breath-takingly quickly and Collins has created the epitome of a book that you can’t put down. The second installment, Catching Fire is currently available, and the final book, Mockingjay, will be available August 24th. Recommended for ages 13 and up.

The Giver is wildly popular with teachers and taught in countless 5th and 6th grade classrooms across the country, and with good reason. At turns a classic coming-of-age story and an indictment of over-regulation and conformity, it’s a 1984 for the 10-year-old set. The Giver is widely enjoyed by adults as well. At the bookstore we’ve encountered several parents who rain praises on the book, even though they never read it as children. The story of Jonah’s society actually continues in the books Gathering Blue and The Messenger, Neither quite lived up to the poignancy and urgency of the first book, but are an interesting exploration of future utopia/dystopia and the genre. Recommended for ages 10 and up.

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• MARCEL DZAMA – AUX MILLE TOURS $39.95

Published to accompany one of the largest exhibitions to date on the work of Marcel Dzama, this profusely illustrated publication provides a career overview of Dzama’s artistic practice including his dioramas, sculptures, assemblages, paintings, videos, collages and drawings. This completely bilingual (English/French) limited edition contains two original essays and writings by the artist. The sub-title, Aux mille tours, refers to the multi-faceted range of Dzama’s art.

• Paperback: 116 pages
• Publisher: Musee d’art contemporain de Montreal; First edition (February 10, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 2551238773
• ISBN-13: 978-2551238774
• Product Dimensions: 12 x 9.3 x 0.5 inches

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