In the Shadow of No Towers
by Art Spiegelman (Pantheon) review by D. Hsieh

New Nonfiction

Exuberance
by Kay Redfield Jamison (Knopf)

According to Jamison, whose life’s work is the study of mood disorders, exuberance is an emotion of unrestrained, irrepressible joy, abundant and unbridled, a source of energy and a wellspring of passion. Examining Teddy Roosevelt, Richard Feynman, Tigger, and others, the author discusses their personalities and their propensity for exuberance. In doing so, she investigates the importance of play in child and adult for its spontaneity and joy. This is a fascinating analysis of how this profound, joyous emotion fuels creativity and exploration. -H. Myers

Another Bullshit Night in Suck City
by Nick Flynn (Norton)

When people have asked me lately what new book I am excited about, I have unhesitatingly spewed the delicious title of Nick Flynn’s memoir, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City. It’s undeniably a fun title to throw around. But this book is not to be taken lightly. They should teach it in writing classes as the standard for when you’ve earned the right to write a memoir. It is the testament of a boy from Boston whose agonizing search for, and flight from, his homeless father turns him into a poet. -L. Brock

Lucrezia Borgia
by Sarah Bradford (Viking)

It has never been uncommon for a woman to have to shoulder the weight of undue scandal. An excellent example of this is Lucrezia Borgia, the Italian noblewoman and daughter of Pope Alexander VI. Lucrezia withstood rumors of incest, papal sexual abuse, and the misfortune of being a pawn for her family’s power lust. Sarah Bradford has painstakingly recreated Renaissance Europe, eloquently and effortlessly escorting her readers through Lucrezia’s darkened early days of marriages and political scheming to her triumphs in the Court of Ferrara as a leader of fashion and docent to the arts. -C. Joyner

Toast
by Nigel Slater (Gotham)

Toast is no ordinary book about food. Nigel Slater’s memoir is a naughty, rambunctious look back on his childhood growing up in England and the dishes that marked his days. It’s all here. Everything from his great love for his mother, and her untimely death, to his introduction to puberty and his new stepmother is included, wrapped around the meal that matched the memory. This unusual, decadent, coming-of-age story is a delight from start to finish. Just don’t sit down to read it on an empty stomach! -T. Nisly

My Kind of Place
by Susan Orlean (Random House)

From Cuba to Bhutan, from a bucket of bear noses at a taxidermy convention to the surreal slopes of cloud-covered Mount Fuji, and from a day in the life of a neighborhood grocery to the saga of Keiko the killer whale, this wonderful travel book shows our world to be both familiar and fascinatingly alien.

One piece hilariously constructs Orlean’s life as a "performance piece" while another invokes the sad impermanence of trailer parks. Every kind of unexpected place we are taken to is a true adventure, deftly and often delightfully revealing the exotic seam hidden just below the mundane. -E. Dorfman

West of Then
by Tara Bray Smith (Simon & Schuster)

Tara Bray Smith returns to her native Hawaii in search of her mother who has relapsed into a life of drug addiction and homelessness. As she begins the search, Tara’s life story unfolds. She weaves her disjointed past of broken home, family fortune and loss, into a revealing history of Hawaii. The parallel between her mother’s fall and the pollution of Hawaii is both troubling and bittersweet, because beneath it all there remains the pure beauty of a paradise and a child’s love for her mother. -A.C. Jennings

Fork It Over: The Intrepid Adventures of a Professional Eater
by Alan Richman (HarperCollins)

Alan Richman, food critic for the magazine GQ, doesn’t hide the fact that he has one of the best jobs out there, but he lets his knowledgeable and creative work prove why he is one of the most celebrated food writers. In this collection, which gives insight into his personal and professional life, he tromps around the world eating the most exciting meals and meeting the most interesting people. It’s all described with humor and warmth, and is ultimately just plain good eating+I mean good reading. -A.P. King

Queenan Country: A Reluctant Anglophile's Pilgrimage to the Mother Country
by Joe Queenan (Henry Holt)

Queenan writes a hilarious and cranky travel book of his "reluctant" love affair with Great Britain, the homeland of his wife and his ancestors. Queenan has an eye for the unusual and the absurd. He reveals his preference for Beatle Paul McCartney through his bizarre, magical mystery cab tour through Liverpool, and the things he hates about Britain, for example the Pre-Raphaelites. Joe Queenan is a very amusing man of many opinions which he is never shy about sharing with his readers. -G. Berry

The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir
by Toni Bentley (HarperCollins)

As a former dancer, Toni Bentley is well acquainted with her body. The Surrender is Bentley’s yoga-like meditation on the spiritually transformative power of the ultimate submissionary position: sodomy. It is accurate to say that Bentley becomes a willing slave to her "A-Man". Her rendezvous with godhead comes through the back door, as it were. Bentley captures the zeitgeist of our times—public revelations of the most personal kind, divorced from shame and propriety. This is a sexually explicit, obsessive, compulsively readable, and very well-written book, which belongs on the shelf next to de Sade. -G. Berry

Pure Chocolate
by Fran Bigelow (Broadway)

Cooking is one of the most gratifying experiences, and reading a good cookbook is nearly as rewarding. Seattleite Fran Bigelow offers recipes for some of her most delicious chocolate concoctions, along with her lifetime of knowledge, procuring delectable ingredients and understanding different chocolate-making styles. Sensuously illustrated, this book provides more than enough recipes to allow readers to create a different chocolate marvel every week for over a year. The only thing this wonderful cookbook lacks is fragrance—but a little imagination will fill in that gap. -H. Myers

Cutty, One Rock: Low Characters and Strange Places, Gently Explained
by August Kleinzahler (Farrar Straus & Giroux)

Reading these intoxicating autobiographical miniatures is like drinking an impeccably mixed jick. Like the vodka component of a jick, Kleinzahler’s language is grounded and clear. However, as these stories are often painfully honest accounts of his life, he frequently offsets their gravity with splashes of acidic whimsicality and a razor-sharp sense of humor (like the citrus juices in a jick.) A skillful poet, Kleinzahler imbues his work with a sense of poignant, intelligent wonderment (the Midori). Perfectly constructed and achingly charming, this volume, like a good jick, is over much too soon. Another round of jicks, please! -M. Stearns

Common Sense on Weapons of Mass Destruction
by Thomas Graham Jr. (University of Washington Press)

Ambassador Thomas Graham Jr. worked for decades on arms control. His goal was to prevent a world in which every conflict could escalate into a nuclear confrontation and terrorist groups or rogue states could easily acquire weapons of mass destruction. This readable, informative, and essential guide introduces a general readership to these issues and encourages an informed public to take back the power of its votes and link electoral support to the support of nonproliferation treaties. -K.M. Allman

Outwitting History: How One Man Rescued a Million Books and Saved a Civilization
by Aaron Lansky (Algonquin)

A Massachusetts teenager’s love of Yiddish literature eventually takes him and his friends into libraries, warehouses, and community centers around the world in Outwitting History, the story of the National Yiddish Book Center. The heroes of his charming true-life adventure story travel miles in the middle of a rainy night to empty dumpsters filled with potential treasures, smuggle trucks past hostile border guards, and meet many elderly caretakers of the cultural legacy. Booklovers, regardless of background, will treasure this book. -K.M. Allman

We Are All the Same
by Jim Wooten (Penguin Press)

A huge gulf separates a squatter’s camp from a wealthy Johannesburg neighborhood. Daphne Khamalo and her son, Xolani Nkosi, both sick with AIDS, crossed that divide to save Xolani’s life.

In one of the neighborhood’s mansions, there was a hospice for infected gay men. No children lived there, until Daphne entered with her small son and persuaded the director to accept him as part of that community. Her determined and courageous spirit survived for twelve years in her son, who became Nkosi Johnson and gave a voice to the children who die of AIDS all over the world. -J. Brown

A Reading Diary
by Alberto Manguel (Farrar Strauss & Giroux)

Alberto Manguel knows that reading can go beyond the dialogue between writer and reader to become a fabulous party, and it’s an open house. He’s the perfect host, smart, generous, witty, and he knows absolutely everyone. His encounter with Sei Shonagon draws in Victor Hugo, Jane Austen, Borges, Margaret Atwood, and you. The 164 lists of The Pillow Book elicit Alberto’s own enchanting lists, and probably a few of yours as well.

A Reading Diary is a year’s worth of wonderful celebrations, and a brilliant examination of how reading can transform and illuminate "the dismal chaos of the world." -J. Brown

The Owner's Box

by Peter Aaron

The Pacific and Other Stories
by Mark Helprin (Penguin Press)

Mark Helprin’s writing makes me wonder about the generative relationship between language and imagination. Does an extraordinary gift for language—mastery of sound and nuance, command of vast armies of words, their origins, connections and variations across languages—permit imagination to traverse heretofore inconceivable realities, propelling the artist across time and space, blasting through the gravitational pull of everyday logic? Or the reverse: imaginative virtuosity finding the words to transport it to the utmost reaches of dream-vision?

Whatever the dynamic, Helprin is that rare combination: mastery of language coupled with an imagination of galactic scope and light-speed velocity. Almost ten years after his last book, and twenty years since the publication of his masterpiece novel Winter’s Tale, the stories comprising this new collection reveal an artist who has continued to hone his talent over the years, without any taming or tiring of his gift of wonder.

The stories range in time from World War II to post-9/11; the situations spanning from (outwardly) quiet domestic drama to the clash of armies. My favorite is "Perfection," in which a puny Hasidic teenager who has never seen, let alone played, baseball sets out to save the faltering 1958 New York Yankees. But each of the sixteen stories is memorable, each demanding pause for absorption and consideration before the reader moves on to the next. And, despite their immense diversity, the stories all share a celebration of the often surprising, and almost limitless human capacity for grace.

New Fiction

The Normals
by David Gilbert (Bloomsbury)

Gilbert’s first novel is a witty, hyperactive ride through the life of one Billy Schine—neuroses by the handful—who still passes himself off as an average member of society. When Billy enters a two-week anti-psychotic drug-testing program, he doesn’t realize how much his life will change.

Gilbert loves to play with language, and his satire of our over-medicated society and pop culture is right on. So much wisecracking would be tiresome, if it weren’t for moments of genuine, disarming pathos. This is one of the funniest, smartest, and most touching books I’ve read in a long time. -V. Verano

The Red Queen
by Margaret Drabble (Harcourt)

A good British novel always seems ready-made for the winter months, and Margaret Drabble’s latest is no exception. Drabble was haunted by a memoir about Korean Crown Princess Hyegyong and recaptures her obsession in this well-crafted novel. Dr. Barbara Halliwell, traveling to Korea for the first time, is anonymously given a memoir that Hyegyong wrote two hundred years ago. As Halliwell reads this memoir, she reflects on her own life and the threads that weave the princess and herself together. Full of court intrigue, family politics, and tragedy, this may be Margaret Drabble’s best work to date. -T. Taylor

The Courage Consort
by Michael Faber (Harcourt)

Acclaimed novelist Michel Faber presents three novellas filled with sensuous prose and vivid, eccentric characters.

In the title story, members of a vocal ensemble retreat to a country house to rehearse a complicated piece. There the soprano, struggling with depression, finds her way back to solid ground.

A solitary archeologist, in the second story, on a dig at an ancient abbey, finds an unlikely companion to help her rebound from past tragedy and loneliness.

Finally, living in the Arctic in a fantastical self-made world, twin children, like Faber’s other distinctive characters, summon the courage to define their destinies. -E. Dorfman

We Should Never Meet
by Aimee Phan (St. Martin's)

The fate of orphaned Vietnamese children brought to the U.S. during "Operation Babylift" and those who cared for them is explored in We Should Never Meet, a collection of interlinked stories set both just before the fall of Saigon and in today’s West Coast "Little Saigon." These powerful stories about gangsters, rescuers, foster children, and adoptees take the reader past superficial considerations of war to consider the long-term effects of violence and abandonment, the considerable risks involved in reconciliation. -K.M. Allman

Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell
by Susanna Clarke (Bloomsbury)

Whereas there are some first novels that are indifferently written, meandering and nearly plotless, Clarke’s novel explodes with wit, imagination, and a historicity that entertains, amuses, and educates in equal degrees.

Set during the Napoleonic wars, this is the story of a most unusual revival, the return of Magic to England via the efforts of two very odd men. Stodgy, jealous, intellectual Mr. Norrell and brilliant, if erratic, Jonathan Strange are the protagonists of this mature fantasy that delights and surprises the reader with its depth of character and originality of content. -S. Bigler

The Darling
by Russell Banks (HarperCollins)

Exploding genres—writers like John Fowles, Robert Stone, and Graham Greene are skilled practitioners of this dangerous trade. With The Darling, Russell Banks confirms his rightful place in that pantheon. His novel traces the near-epic trajectory of Hannah Musgrave, an activist with the notorious Weather Underground, as her life veers from the civil unrest of ‘60s and ‘70s America to the political chaos of Liberia in the ‘80s. Along the way, she is forced to come to terms with conflicting senses of loyalty, family, and meaning in this tumultuous, sweeping narrative, which Banks handles with gripping agility. -M. Stearns

The Etched City
by K.J. Bishop (Spectra)

This is one of the most astonishing novels I have ever read. Set in the phantasmagorical city of Ashamoil, the story reveals itself like Russian dolls nesting inside one another.

Two renegades attempt to lose themselves in Ashamoil’s complex morass of politics, theology, crime, lust, dreams, despair, and magiccbut ultimately their past overwhelms them like a tidal wave.

Exquisite prose and breathtaking imagery transport the reader to an elsewhen so overpowering, it hijacks the mind’s eye. The Etched City is like the Arabian Nights blended with the imagery from Pieter Bruegel, Hieronymus Bosch, and William Blake. -V. Verano

The Zigzag Way
by Anita Desai (Houghton Mifflin)

Rich in detail, Desai’s fourth novel uncovers the colorful world of Mexico and the struggle between modern industry and native cultures. Leaving the promise of a dull future, Eric follows his girlfriend to the heart of Mexico. He’s searching for a fresh idea to kick-start his novel, but instead encounters his family’s past in a small mining town. Struggling with a new setting, he meets an eccentric older woman who seeks redemption by devoting her life to help restore a dwindling Indian culture. Unfortunately for them both, they must first learn about the past to continue in the present. -A.P. King

Men and Cartoons
by Jonathan Lethem (Doubleday)

A reader of Lethem’s work may wonder if he was picked on as a child, singled out as a geeky teenager, or haunted by these torments as an adult. Upon reading this collection of short stories, you will still be left with wonder, but of a different sort. The nine stories jump around his usual expansive territory of the slightly odd and strikingly familiar, but often have undercurrents of loss, loneliness, and longing that every reader can identify with. Lethem is not just a skilled novelist, but, as these stories show, he is a master of many voices as well. -S. Winter

Birds Without Wings
by Louis de Bernières (Knopf)

A decade ago, Corelli’s Mandolin stood as a leap from the previous work of this British novelist, a tale of enduring love amidst the upheavals of war. His newest novel is another leap in depth and dimension. Set in an early 20th century Anatolian village, it starts with the lives of Muslims, Armenians, and Christians who live there in the complex, tolerant way that people who depend on each other do. It also tells of external forces which come in the form of war, and some of the century’s first "ethnic cleansing". Throughout, de Bernières doesn’t flinch from horrors, but keeps threads of hope and longing achingly alive. -R. Simonson

Casanova in Bolzano
by Sándor Márai (Knopf)

There are rediscovered writers and there is Hungarian novelist Sándor Márai (1900-1989). His works had all but disappeared until Italian publisher and writer Roberto Calasso encountered one buried in a publisher’s backlist. European readers have since been the better for it, as his novels have been translated, acclaimed, and read across the continent. Here we’ve been treated to Embers, a taut, terrific, small novel. And now we have the sumptuous Casanova. Márai again works erotic tension and the passage of time to powerful, psychologically compelling effect. -R. Simonson

Author, Author
by David Lodge (Viking)

David Lodge has written a stirring novel of the life of the great novelist Henry James. Lodge focuses on James’s middle years, when he was trying to become a popular success through his entry into the arena of playwriting. There are portraits of his close friendships with American novelist Constance Fenimore Woolson and George du Maurier, the Punch cartoonist and author of the international sensation of the time, Trilby. Lodge’s James is full of literary ambition, desperately wanting widespread literary fame, which eludes his grasp. -G. Berry

Confessions of a Teen Sleuth
by Chelsea Cain (Bloomsbury)

Carolyn Keene, "creator" of the Nancy Drew mystery series, was a real woman, who, it turns out, was the college roommate of Nancy Drew—Nancy Drew-Nickerson, to be exact. While Nancy did enjoy many daring adventures with her steadfast crew of friends (including teen brothers Frank and Joe, and a plucky nurse named Cherry), Carolyn (who suffered from a cough-syrup addiction) plagiarized Nancy’s life story, and got a lot of the details very wrong. Anyone who has read a single volume about this stylish, titian-haired sleuth will laugh uproariously at this perfectly toned parody. -H. Myers

Poetry

Return to the City of White Donkeys
by James Tate (HarperCollins)

The first poem I read by James Tate was about degrees of loneliness. In "Epithalamium for Tyler", a man thought he was lonely until his friend Tyler went to the stockyards, got a cow’s ear, and sewed it onto his couch for company.

If you have a particular love for ordinary language transformed by the dreamscapes of gentle geniuses, please read the poems of James Tate. Return to the City of White Donkeys is a perfectly marvelous place to start. No previous appreciation of poetry is required. -L. Brock

Strike Sparks: Selected Poems, 1980-2000
by Sharon Olds (Knopf)

This is Sharon Olds’s best work, her most vivid and provocative, transgressing social stigmas with the self-assured passion of a woman in her prime. Olds serves her every morsel at the page, leaving no body part unmentioned. And we should bless her for it. Read this collection in the presented order and witness Olds transform herself again and again, revisiting family dysfunctions and sexual ecstasies until they become one erotic blend of joy and pain. Read these poems out of order and find yourself plunged into Olds’s naked universe, where we are all hungry and unashamed. -J. Rockers

Second Space
by Czeslaw Milosz (HarperCollins)

When the great Polish Nobel laureate died this past August in Krakow, at the age of 93, he left behind not only the legacy of a massive and brilliant body of poetry and essays published during his lifetime, but also this final, posthumous collection of new verse. These are poems of the human lifespan—poems of aging and mortality, and the process of arrival. The poems of Second Space achieve a simplicity and luminosity, a combination, looking back and looking forward, of clarity and acceptance, that are new to Milosz’s poetry—a final ascension, transcendence. -P. Aaron

Children's & Young Adult Books

Pinduli
by Janell Cannon (Harcourt)

Pinduli is a young hyena who becomes very self-conscious after all the other wild animals start picking on her appearance. Her mother has always told her how beautiful she looks, but the zebra, lion, and wild dogs leave Pinduli attempting to cover up her unattractive hyena traits. When, after rolling around in the dust, she is mistaken for a ghost, she is finally able to have some fun with her tormenters. Janell Cannon has created another brilliant picture book, following in the footsteps of her previous successes, Verdi and Stellaluna. -C. Reid

Jungle Gym Jitters
by Chuck Richards (Walker)

Jerry’s father is really a genius, and the jungle gym he builds out of scraps from his garage is a testament to this fact. But when the additions start to take on a life of their own and the jungle gym gets taller and larger and more elaborate, Jerry starts to look on the creation with a genuine sense of unease.

The illustrations in this picture book are sure to astound; muted tones and amazing kinetic details are reminiscent of Jumanji and other picture book wonders. -H. Myers

Crank
by Ellen Hopkins (Simon Pulse)

Meth, speed, crystal, crank, or as sixteen-year-old Kristina knows it, the monster. The love-hate relationship of Kristina to this powerful addiction comes searingly through in this novel. Written stunningly in spare, provocative verse, this work will captivate readers with the voice of Kristina, who transforms from good-girl, good-student, good-daughter to her alter-ego Bree, free-wheeling, free-loving, free-falling addict. Even though it is fiction, Crank is a warning to teens, parents, or anyone, about the emotional and physical pain caused by this drug. -H. Myers

Bambert's Book of Missing Stories
by Reinhardt Jung (Knopf)

Bambert is a queer fellow who lives an exciting life through the stories that he writes. Upon reaching the last few pages of his book of stories, Bambert decides to send each off in little hot-air balloons, hoping they will find their true beginnings. People around the world discover his stories and send them back to Bambert so he knows the specific settings for each one.

Reinhardt Jung combines multiple vignettes into a magical and multi-layered tale for young readers. Children will recognize the power of words and learn to appreciate the art of storytelling. -C. Reid

New Winter Paperbacks

Fiction

Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You by Alice Munro (Vintage) October
Sewer, Gas and Electric by Matt Ruff (Grove) October
One Last Look by Susanna Moore (Vintage) October
Oracle Night by Paul Auster (Picador) November
As Cool As I Am by Pete Fromm (Picador) November
Deafening by Frances Itani (Grove) December

Non-Fiction

Chasing the Sea by Tom Bissell (Vintage) October
The Storyteller's Daughter by Saira Shah (Anchor) October
Christmas in Plains by Jimmy Carter (Simon & Schuster) October
A Hundred Little Hitlers by Elinor Langer (Picador) November
Gods and Monsters by Peter Biskind (Nation Books) November
American Music by Annie Leibovitz (Random House) November