Lost Men: A Novel
by Brian Leung

Paperback $13.00

From Booklist
Soon after 12-year-old Westen Chan’s American mother dies in an accident, his Chinese father leaves the boy with his mother’s aunt and uncle and says he’ll be back. Two decades later, his father “returns” and suggests that father and son visit China together. Westen has grown to adulthood tormented by his abandonment, his failed relationships, his lack of familial and cultural roots. His father, who has spent his middle age tormented by abandoning his son and by childhood memories of his family’s flight from revolution in China, now also faces a terminal illness. Father and son are truly lost men, and the trip to China doesn’t provide the reconciliation and redemption both men desire. Lost Men is an accomplished first novel by the author of World Famous Love Acts (2004), an award-winning book of short stories. Written in the plainest of language, Lost Men is a powerful, universal story of inchoate fathers and sons.

The Jewish Writings    
by Hannah Arendt

Although Hannah Arendt is not primarily known as a Jewish thinker, she probably wrote more about Jewish issues than any other topic. As a young adult in Germany, she wrote about German Jewish history. After moving to France in 1933, she helped Jewish youth immigrate to Palestine. During her years in Paris, her principle concern was the transformation of antinomianism from prejudice to policy, which would culminate in the Nazi “final solution.” After France fell, Arendt escaped from an internment camp and made her way to America. There she wrote articles calling for a Jewish army to fight the Nazis. After the war, she supported the creation of a Jewish homeland in a binational (Arab-Jewish) state of Israel.

Arendt’s original conception of political freedom cannot be fully grasped apart from her experience as a Jew. In 1961 she attended Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem. Her report, Eichmann in Jerusalem, provoked an immense controversy, which culminated in her virtual excommunication from the worldwide Jewish community. Today that controversy is the subject of serious re-evaluation, especially among younger people in the United States, Europe, and Israel.

The publication of The Jewish Writings–much of which has never appeared before–traces Arendt’s life and thought as a Jew. It will put an end to any doubts about the centrality, from beginning to end, of Arendt’s Jewish experience.

The Mule
by Juan Eslava Galan, translated by Lisa Dillman

Paperback $12.00

From Publishers Weekly
This light Spanish Civil War story follows the romantic and military misadventures of a perennially put-upon muleteer stuck fighting for a cause he doesn’t believe in. Juan Castro Pérez stumbles on a stray mule (he names her Valentina) and smuggles her into his army regiment; his plan is to bring her to his family once the war is over. Though Castro sympathizes with the nationalist forces, his region is solidly Communist and he’s forced to enlist on that side, where he, like many of his comrades, does his utmost to avoid combat and get back home; one of his more engaging exploits involves wooing a pensioner’s daughter. He eventually defects to the nationalists, and when Castro and Valentina inadvertently cross paths with a group of Communist soldiers, an unarmed Castro thinks he’s doomed until the soldiers order him at gunpoint to take them prisoner so they can survive the war. A journalist catches wind of the incident and twists the story into a morale-boosting puff piece that turns Castro into a poster boy for Franco’s cause. Castro’s dedication to Valentina provides the heartfelt through line to this winsome war story and adds a dose of heartbreak at the novel’s close.

Walking on Eggshells: Navigating the Delicate Relationship Between Adult Children and Parents
by Jane Isay

Paperback $14.00

From Publishers Weekly
As baby boomer parents age, they’re discovering the empty-nest syndrome is nothing compared to what happens when their kids graduate from college and start leading lives of their own. To a generation famous for being involved in every aspect of their children’s lives, it can be upsetting to find that those children no longer need or welcome your advice. How does one parent children who no longer need parenting? Publishing veteran Isay, an editor and mother of two grown sons, interviews scores of parents and adult children of all ages to see how they are doing it. The stories are heartwarming, and Isay recounts them with intelligence and compassion. What does she find? Nothing Ann Landers hasn’t already told us. Mainly: don’t give advice; make friends with your children’s significant others; and remember that love heals. The most compelling story is Isay’s own. One wishes it were the centerpiece of the book rather than tacked on as an epilogue. Her experience is an example of her most interesting discovery: children are quick to forgive and often the ones who take the initiative in forging a new brand of closeness between themselves and their parents—a closeness that is best described as adult.

Nim Chimpsky: The Chimp Who Would Be Human
by Elizabeth Hess

Hardcover $23.00 - 10%

From Publishers Weekly
In what is surely one of the most memorable and intelligent recent books about animal-human interaction, Hess (Lost and Found: Dogs, Cats and Everyday Heroes at a Country Animal Shelter) tells the story of Nim Chimpsky, who in the 1970s was the subject of an experiment begun at the University of Oklahoma to find out whether a chimp could learn American Sign Language—and thus refute Noam Chomsky’s influential thesis that language is inherent only in humans. Nim was sent to live with a family in New York City and taught human language like any other child. Hess sympathetically yet unerringly details both the project’s successes and failures, its heroes and villains, as she recounts Nim’s odyssey from the Manhattan town house to a mansion in the Bronx and finally back to Oklahoma, where he was bounced among various facilities as financial, personal and scientific troubles plagued the study. The book expertly shows why the Nim experiment was a crucial event in animal studies, but more importantly, Hess captures Nim’s legendary charm, mischievous sense of humor, and keen understanding of human beings. This may well be the only book on linguistics and primatology that will leave its readers in tears over the life and times of its amazing subject.

Remember Me?
by Sophie Kinsella

Hardcover $25.00 - 10%

From Publishers Weekly
Shopaholicpowerhouse Kinsella delights again with her latest, a winning if unoriginal tale of amnesia striking an ambitious shrew and changing her life for the better. After taking a nasty bump on the head, Lexi Smart awakens in a hospital convinced that it’s 2004 and that she’s just missed her father’s funeral. It’s actually three years later, and she no longer has crooked teeth, frizzy hair and a loser boyfriend. Initially wowed by what she’s become—a gorgeous, cut-throat businesswoman—Lexi soon finds herself attempting to figure out how it happened. As her personality change and lost memory threaten her job, Lexi tries to dredge up some chemistry with her handsome albeit priggish husband, Eric, though the effort is unnecessary with Eric’s colleague Jon, who tells Lexi that she was about to leave Eric for him. Amnesia tales may be old hat, but Kinsella keeps things fresh and frothy with workplace politicking, romantic intrigue and a vibrant (though sometimes caricatured) cast. Though the happy ending won’t come as a surprise, readers will be rooting for Lexi all along.

A Life at Work: The Joy of Discovering What You Were Born to Do
by Thomas Moore

Hardcover $24.95 - 10%

From Publishers Weekly
In this slender volume, bestselling spiritual guru Moore (Care of the Soul) says that finding the right work, finding one’s vocation, is also part of the care of the soul. Often Moore proves astute; for instance, he urges people to think about having not just one but a variety of callings. His consideration of the pleasures and foibles of friendship in the workplace is especially insightful. Although confident that even the most mundane job can be enjoyable and life-giving, Moore sets the question of vocation in a broader frame, suggesting that it is best addressed as a part of fashioning lives that are organically whole and meaningful. Though still influenced by Jung, Moore draws inspiration from a delightful array of sources, including Yeats, Socrates, and Rapunzel. The book’s governing metaphor, alchemy, is often apt; Moore notes that both alchemy and finding a life’s work require patience through a long refining process, and both are about the process, not just the end result. Often the comparison works; at other times, it’s heavy-handed, and Moore also lapses into clichés (take the past and own it). Nonetheless, this will be of use to many people who seek joyful work and integrated lives.

American-Made: The Enduring Legacy of the WPA: When FDR Put the Nation to Work
by Nick Taylor

Hardcover $27.00 - 10%

From Publishers Weekly
Launched in 1935, at the bottom of the Great Depression, the Works Progress Administration (WPA) served as a linchpin of FDR’s New Deal. Through the WPA, Roosevelt put millions of unemployed Americans to work on public construction projects, from dams and courthouses to parks and roads. The WPA’s Federal Writers Project employed a host of artists and writers (among them Jackson Pollock, Saul Bellow, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston and Studs Terkel); theater and musical artists also received funding. Taylor (Ordinary Miracles: Life in a Small Church) vividly and painstakingly paints the full story of the WPA from its inception to its shutdown by Congress in 1943, at which point the war boom in manufacturing had made it unnecessary. In an eloquent and balanced appraisal, Taylor not only chronicles the WPA’s numerous triumphs (including New York’s LaGuardia Airport) but also its failures, most notably graft and other chicanery at the local level. Taylor details as well the dicey intramural politics in Congress over which states and districts would get the largest slice of the WPA pie. All told, Taylor’s volume makes for a splendid appreciation of the WPA with which to celebrate the upcoming 75th anniversary of the New Deal’s beginnings in 1933.

My Liar: A Novel
by Rachel Cline

Hardcover $23.00 - 10%

Rachel Cline’s debut novel, What to Keep, was praised as “striking . . . lovely” (Entertainment Weekly), “tangibly real” (Los Angeles Times), and “eminently readable” (Salon). Set in 1990s Hollywood, My Liar portrays the complex connection between two talented women, each striving to realize her own vision of success in work and in love.

Annabeth Jensen, thirty-three, is a film editor. A native Minnesotan, she is most comfortable playing nice and working behind the scenes, even after ten years in Los Angeles. Then she crosses paths with up-and-coming director Laura Katz. Self-confident, assertive, and alluring, Laura seems to be the perfect mentor and the ideal best friend–especially after she hires Annabeth to edit her new film, Trouble Doll.

Yet as Annabeth cuts and recuts the film that both women hope will assure their futures, she finds herself wanting creative control almost as badly as she craves Laura’s approval. Meanwhile, Laura, who trusts almost no one (certainly not her slippery producer, her brittle screenwriter, or her wayward husband), finds herself increasingly reliant on Annabeth. And when Trouble Doll emerges from their collaboration, uncomfortable truths about both women’s lives are forced into the light.

Rachel Cline illuminates the world of moviemaking with keen insight and wry wit. But My Liar looks far beyond the HOLLYWOOD sign. Its real subject is self-deception–in friendship, art, and life–and the enmeshed nature of communication and competition between women.

The Post-Birthday World: A Novel
by Lionel Shriver

Paperback $14.95

From Publishers Weekly
The smallest details of staid coupledom duel it out with a lusty alternate reality that begins when a woman passes up an opportunity to cheat on her longtime boyfriend in Shriver’s latest (after the Orange Prize–winning We Need to Talk About Kevin). Irina McGovern, a children’s book illustrator in London, lives in comfortable familiarity with husband-in-everything-but-marriage-certificate Lawrence Trainer, and every summer the two have dinner with their friend, the professional snooker player Ramsey Acton, to celebrate Ramsey’s birthday. One year, following Ramsey’s divorce and while terrorism specialist “think tank wonk” Lawrence is in Sarajevo on business, Irina and Ramsey have dinner, and after cocktails and a spot of hash, Irina is tempted to kiss Ramsey. From this near-smooch, Shriver leads readers on a two-pronged narrative: one consisting of what Irina imagines would have happened if she had given in to temptation, the other showing Irina staying with Lawrence while fantasizing about Ramsey. With Jamesian patience, Shriver explores snooker tournaments and terrorism conferences, passionate lovemaking and passionless sex, and teases out her themes of ambition, self-recrimination and longing. The result is an impressive if exhausting novel.

The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy
by Adam Tooze

Paperback $20.00

From Booklist
Tooze’s economic history of the Third Reich is, in a word, monumental. Lately, social and ideological analyses of Hitler’s strategic choices have prevailed; in part because of the volume and complexity of available data, even the most economically savvy historians of World War II have generally provided only fragmentary glimpses of the myriad ways in which economics influenced German rearmament and aggression. As Tooze argues, however, the choices made by the Nazi war machine were as economically driven as they were Hitler driven. The author challenges a number of commonly held assumptions, among them the notion that successful rearmament was caused by the Nazi state’s job-creation efforts and the idea that Hitler did not intend to start a continental war in attacking Czechoslovakia. Tooze also addresses the relationship between economics and ideology at Auschwitz. The net result, emerging from more than 800 pages of genuinely readable macroeconomic analysis, is an original and comprehensive thesis that couches the strategic choices of the Third Reich firmly within an increasingly American twentieth century. Originally released to broad acclaim in the UK in 2006, Tooze’s tome sets a high bar for the historians of the twenty-first century.

Ireland Since 1939: The Persistence of Conflict
by Henry Patterson

Paperback $16.00

The Ireland of today is a place poised between the divisiveness of deep-seated conflict and the modernizing pull of material prosperity. Though each state’s history is strikingly divergent, the mirroring ideologies that fuel them are remarkably symbiotic. With Ireland Since 1939, one of the most distinguished Irish historians working today casts a fresh and unpredictable eye to Ireland’s history from World War II up through the present to show how—by putting aside its North/South conflict—Ireland can look forward to a prosperous economic future.

Reading Judas: The Gospel of Judas and the Shaping of Christianity
by Elaine Pagels & Karen L. King

Paperback $15.00

From Publishers Weekly
The Gospel of Judas represents the most baffling in a series of recently unearthed noncanonical manuscripts that bring to light divergent accounts of Christ’s life and ministry. Robertson Dean reads King’s translation of the ancient text with frequent pauses to note gaps of missing or untranslatable words and sentences. The main section of Pagels and King’s book, narrated by Justine Eyre with occasional support from Dean who gives voice to individual historical figures, offers compelling insights about why the Gospel of Judas threatened the burgeoning religious hierarchy of the second century A.D. and how this often unsettling narrative ultimately manages to provide a surprising vision of heavenly grace amid the ravages of flawed earthly spiritual leadership. Drawing from their extensive expertise regarding contemporary understandings of the Gnostic gospels, the analysis the authors present will no doubt generate valuable theological dialogue. Yet the enigmatic nature of the source material may remain a stumbling block for listeners, and general audiences hoping for Gnosticism 101 may need to search elsewhere.

Kindness Goes Unpunished
by Craig Johnson

Paperback $14.00

Craig Johnson ’s mystery series —starring Walt Longmire, the straight-shooting sheriff of Absaroka County, Wyoming—is attracting more and more fans with its distinctive blend of humor and action. In Kindness Goes Unpunished, Walt’s pleasure trip to Philadelphia to visit his daughter, Cady, turns into a nightmare when she is the victim of a vicious attack that leaves her near death. Walt is forced to unpack his saddlebag of tricks to mete out some Western-style justice, and the result is another action-packed thriller from this up-and-coming star of crime fiction.

The Geography of Wine: How Landscapes, Cultures, Terroir, and the Weather Make a Good Drop
by Brian J. Sommers

Paperback $16.00

A fun and fascinating examination of a vineyards geography, this book takes connoisseurs–and would-be connoisseurs–on a tour of wine regions and explains the principles geographers use to understand the critical factors that make up the wine character of a place.

Metamorphosis and Other Stories     *Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition
by Franz Kafka, translated by Michael Hofmann

Paperback $14.00

For all his fame, Franz Kafka published only a small number of stories in his lifetime. This new translation of those stories, by Michael Hofmann, one of the most respected German-to-English translators at work today, makes Kafka’s best-known works available to a new generation of readers. Metamorphosis gives full expression to the breadth of Kafka’s literary vision and the extraordinary depth of his imagination.

Burning Bright
by Tracy Chevalier

Paperback $14.00

Tracy Chevalier, author of the international bestseller Girl With a Pearl Earring, returns with another brilliantly rendered historical tale set in the waning days of eighteenth-century London. Poet, artist, and printer William Blake works in obscurity as England is rocked by the shock waves of the French Revolution. Next door, the Kellaway family has just moved in, and country boy Jem Kellaway strikes up a tentative friendship with street�“savvy Maggie Butterfield. As their stories intertwine with Blake’s, the two children navigate the confusing and exhilarating path to adolescence, and inspire the poet to create the work that enshrined his genius.

Brother One Cell
by Cullen Thomas

Paperback $15.00

From Booklist
In 1994, Thomas was a bright young man just out of college, looking to satisfy his wanderlust by teaching English in South Korea. His taste for adventure was formed in early childhood when he and his brother invented an imaginary character named the “Jolly Marauder,” a pirate-nobleman with a fearless heart and a take-no-prisoners attitude. Thomas claimed the Jolly Marauder as his life model, which influenced his decisions to accept the teaching job in Seoul, work there illegally without a contract, and buy a cheap kilo of hashish in the Philippines to sell back in Seoul for a cool 10 grand. The fantasy ended, however, when Thomas was caught by the police and sentenced to three and a half years in a South Korean prison. In his memoir, Thomas explains how that time of incarceration represented his real education. Surprisingly, he found little brutality (no rape) in Korea’s penal institutions, but there were language barriers, unfamiliar foreign customs, extreme codes of social hierarchy, and almost no individual freedoms. He had to overcome all of this, as well as his own personal demons, to get to a place of higher understanding–something that, amazingly, he seemed to accomplish. His account of that journey is gripping.

Grace (Eventually): Thoughts on Faith
by Anne Lamott

Paperback $14.00

The world, community, the family, the human heart: these are the beautiful and complicated arenas in which our lives unfold. Wherever you look, there’s trouble and wonder, pain and beauty, restoration and darkness — sometimes all at once.

Yet amid the confusion, if you look carefully, in nature or in the kitchen, in ordinariness or in mystery, beyond the emotion muck we all slog through, you’ll find it eventually: a path, some light to see by, moments of insight, courage, or buoyancy. In other words, grace.

Anne Lamott knows and lives by this belief, most of the time. In Grace (Eventually), her brilliant new collection, she recounts the missteps, detours, and roadblocks in her walk of faith.

It’s been and erratic journey, and some days go better than others. “I wish grace and healing were more abracadabra kinds of things,” she writes. “Also, that delicate silver bells would ring to announce grace’s arrival. But no, it’s clog and slog and scotch, on the floor, in the silence, in the dark.”

In Grace (Eventually), Lamott describes how she copes. The challenges seem alternately inconsequential and insurmountable — the anger engendered by an obstinate carpet salesman or president; the engulfing envy at friend’s professional success; the bewilderment at discovering that a child has grown up or that a friend wants to die on his own terms — and they are also universal.

Wise and irreverent, poignant and funny, Grace (Eventually) is a primer in faith, as we come to discover what it means to be fully human and alive.