Stealing Buddha’s Dinner
by Bich Minh Nguyen

Paperback $14.00

As a Vietnamese girl coming of age in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Nguyen is filled with a rapacious hunger for American identity, and in the pre-PC-era Midwest (where the Jennifers and Tiffanys reign supreme), the desire to belong transmutes into a passion for American food. More exotic- seeming than her Buddhist grandmother’s traditional specialties, the campy, preservative-filled “delicacies” of mainstream America capture her imagination.

In Stealing Buddha’s Dinner, the glossy branded allure of Pringles, Kit Kats, and Toll House Cookies becomes an ingenious metaphor for Nguyen’s struggle to become a “real” American, a distinction that brings with it the dream of the perfect school lunch, burgers and Jell- O for dinner, and a visit from the Kool-Aid man. Vivid and viscerally powerful, this remarkable memoir about growing up in the 1980s introduces an original new literary voice and an entirely new spin on the classic assimilation story.

The Friendship: Wordsworth & Coleridge
by Adam Sisman

Paperback $17.00

In Adam Sisman’s previous book, the award-winning Boswell’s Presumptuous Task, he inventively recounted the making of the most distinguished biography in the English language, James Boswell’s Life of Johnson. Now, with The Friendship, Sisman details the relationship of two of the most important Romantic poets, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The first modern biography to consider them together, The Friendship is a wonderfully readable account that evokes these two extraordinary personalities and situates them in their time, exploring the influence each writer had on the other, as well as providing glimpses of the creative process itself.

Along This Way: The Autobiography of James Weldon Johnson     *NEW EDITION
by James Weldon Johnson, intro. by Sondra Kathryn Wilson

Paperback $16.00

Published just four years before his death in 1938, James Weldon Johnson’s autobiography is a fascinating portrait of an African American who broke the racial divide at a time when the Harlem Renaissance had not yet begun to usher in the civil rights movement. Not only an educator, lawyer, and diplomat, Johnson was also one of the most revered leaders of his time, going on to serve as the first black president of the NAACP (which had previously been run only by whites), as well as write the groundbreaking novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. Beginning with his birth in Jacksonville, Florida, and detailing his education, his role in the Harlem Renaissance, and his later years as a professor and civil rights reformer, Along This Way is an inspiring classic of African American literature.

The Golden Road: Notes on My Gentrification     *NEW EDITION
by Caille Millner

Paperback $14.00

Millner, a young black woman, grew up in a Chicano neighborhood in California, more than a little confused about racial identity and the lure of the state as a place of redefinition. Her parents’ wandering quest for economic stability later pulled loose her ties to Chicano culture, but she could never quite ground herself in the black middle class. The result was a cultural restlessness and longing that made her an outsider at an exclusive all-girls school and vulnerable to the allure of other rootless wanderers, including drug dealers and dabblers. Study at Harvard and travel through South Africa didn’t offer a clear sense of identity either. But her disconnectedness also gave her a sharp eye for insider-outsider status and a deep yearning to belong that made her hypersensitive to gentrification as witnessed in California, New York, Boston, and South Africa. Millner, who was first published at 16, has a keen eye for the social undercurrents and upheavals that churn cultural identity.

Mistress of the Art of Death
by Ariana Franklin

Paperback $15.00

It’s hard enough to produce a gripping thriller — harder still to write convincing historical fiction that recreates a living, breathing past. But this terrific book does both, and does it with a cast of characters so vivid and engaging that you’d be happy to read about them even if they weren’t on the track of a sexually depraved serial child-murderer.

Mistress of the Art of Death opens with a clever takeoff on Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, which introduces the central players, a group of pilgrims returning from the shrine of the newly canonized St. Thomas à Becket: a prior and a prioress (from rival abbeys); two knights, lately returned from the Crusades; an overweight but very shrewd tax collector; a gaggle of citizens; and three Gypsies, who are in fact secret investigators sent by the king of Sicily to discover the truth behind a series of gruesome murders near Cambridge.

Four children have been found dead and mutilated. The Jews of Cambridge have been blamed for the murders, the most prominent Jewish moneylender and his wife have been killed by a mob, and the rest of the Jewish community is shut up in the castle under the protection of the sheriff.

As the only group allowed to commit usury — that is, to lend money at interest — the Jews are prosperous, and thus the king of England considers them his prize cash cows. He wants them cleared of suspicion and released, so they can go back to paying him high taxes. To this end, he appeals to his cousin, the king of Sicily, to send his best master of the art of death: a doctor skilled in “reading” bodies. Enter Vesuvia Adelia Rachel Ortese Aguilar, 25, the best mistress of death that the medical school at Salerno has ever produced. With Simon of Naples, a Jewish “fixer,” and Mansur, a eunuch with a mean throwing-ax, it’s her job to find a murderer before he — or she — can kill again.

Adelia comes onstage when she meets the prior under dramatic circumstances on the road, saving him from a burst bladder caused by a swollen prostate by thrusting a hollow reed up his penis. Not every man would follow up on an introduction like this, but the prior wants the mystery solved, too — and if the solution happens to ace out the rival abbey, so much the better.

Adelia finds 12th-century England a barbarous place. England finds Adelia a jaw-dropping anomaly. And Franklin exploits the contrast brilliantly. We’re on Adelia’s side from the start, identifying with her quite modern sensibilities — but at the same time, as she begins to know the English inhabitants as people, we sympathize with them, too. And a small but nice romantic subplot develops as the celibate, married-to-science Adelia discovers to her horror that live bodies have minds of their own.

Though the story is set in Cambridge, the Crusades run through the culture. We see both the corruption and the idealistic faith of the period, and while the Jews come off by far the best, Christians and Muslims are portrayed with evenhanded understanding. Beyond this, the story’s background is a wonderful tapestry of the paradoxes and struggles of the times: Christianity and Islam, Christians and Jews, science and superstition, and the new power of Henry II’s rule of law versus the stranglehold of the Church.

There are also fascinating details of historical forensic medicine, entertaining notes on women in science (the medical school at Salerno is not fictional), and a nice running commentary on science and superstition, as distinct from religious faith. Franklin does this subtly, by showing effects, rather than by beating us over the head with her opinions. These are clear enough but expressed with artistry rather than political correctness.

Franklin likewise balances cynicism, humanity and objectivity well. Adelia feels horror, fury and sympathy on behalf of the victims and the bereaved, but she doesn’t let that get in the way of finding the truth. And the story makes it clear that the motives of those who want a solution to the crime are not necessarily purer than the motives of those who want to conceal it.

Mistress of the Art of Death is wonderfully plotted, with a dozen twists — and with final rabbits pulled out of not one hat but two, as both the mystery and the romance reach satisfactorily unexpected conclusions. It’s a historical mystery that succeeds brilliantly as both historical fiction and crime-thriller. Above all, though, Franklin has written a terrific story, whose appeal rests on the personalities of the all-too-human beings who inhabit it.

The Liar’s Diary
by Patry Francis

Paperback $14.00

Secrets and lies dominate the lives of tightly wound school secretary Jeanne Cross; her abusive physician husband, Gavin; her deeply dysfunctional son, Jamie; and her promiscuous new best friend, Ali Mather. As their friendship grows, Jeanne learns of Ali’s series of affairs, and Ali discovers a dark truth about the Cross family. Marie Caliendo’s narration is a little too exuberant for the text, frequently placing inappropriate emphasis in odd places. Her character voices, especially those requiring high energy, do the job, but overall the reading detracts from Patry Francis’s disturbing first novel by calling attention to itself. Obsession, violence, and murder are the stuff of everyday life in this grim look at the facade of the perfect family.

Consequences of Sin     *NEW EDITION
by Clare Langley-Hawthorne

Paperback $14.00

Langley-Hawthorne’s debut, billed as the first in a new Edwardian series, introduces an aspiring journalist and an Oxford-educated heiress, Ursula Marlow, who has a lot to learn about good detective work. Ursula’s sheltered life begins to unravel after she receives a frantic late-night call from her friend Winifred Stanford-Jones, who’s awakened to her lesbian lover’s bloody corpse in her bed. Ursula summons Lord Oliver Wrotham, legal adviser to her industrialist father, but she bristles at the condescending, restrictive male power structure of Edwardian London and launches her own probe into the murder—with limited success. More deaths follow, including that of Ursula’s father. Suspecting the crimes may be linked to a botanical expedition to South America, Ursula embarks for its jungles to confirm her theory. Whodunit fans may feel let down by the chance discovery of the culprit’s identity, though romance readers should appreciate the conflict between the heroine’s attraction to the dark, handsome Lord Wrotham and her sense of duty to marry the man her father intended for her.

Speaking of Faith: Why Religion Matters–and How to Talk About It *NEW EDITION
by Krista Tippett

Paperback $14.00

Tippett, host of the weekly NPR radio show Speaking of Faith, offers a challenging book that is part intellectual autobiography, part rumination on the issues of the day. It begins with a fairly detailed discussion of the death of “secularization theory” as outlined by Harvey Cox and others—not a typical opening salvo for a spiritual memoir—and then reveals Tippett’s own intellectual and spiritual formation. She discusses at length how her views were shaped not only by her Southern Baptist grandfather in Oklahoma, or by her adolescent rejection of his rigidity, but by the time she spent in East and West Germany in her 20s, first as a journalist and then as a diplomat. She followed this period with marriage and a stint in England before taking the plunge and enrolling in divinity school in the early 1990s. More than a personal chronicle, however, this is a rigorously brainy piece of work, as informed by the theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Reinhold Niebuhr, Charles Darwin and Annie Dillard as it is by Tippett’s fascinating interviews with figures like Elie Wiesel and Karen Armstrong. As Tippett takes on issues from the science-and-religion debates to the future of progressive Islam, she shows herself to possess the same “imaginative intellectual approach” that she admires in some of her interview subjects.

Wish I Could Be There: Notes from a Phobic Life
by Allen Shawn