 Hardcover Fiction
Top 5 at a Glance
1. THE SEARCH, by Nora Roberts
2. THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNET’S NEST, by Stieg Larsson
3. PRIVATE, by James Patterson and Maxine Paetro
4. SIZZLING SIXTEEN, by Janet Evanovich
5. THE HELP, by Kathryn Stockett
Hardcover Nonfiction
Top 5 at a Glance
1. ---- MY DAD SAYS, by Justin Halpern
2. MEDIUM RAW, by Anthony Bourdain
3. COMING BACK STRONGER, by Drew Brees with Chris Fabry
4. SLIDING INTO HOME, by Kendra Wilkinson
5. THE BIG SHORT, by Michael Lewis
 Paperback Trade Fiction
Top 5 at a Glance
1. THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO, by Stieg Larsson
2. THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE, by Stieg Larsson
3. LITTLE BEE, by Chris Cleave
4. UNDER THE DOME, by Stephen King
5. SWIMSUIT, by James Patterson and Maxine Paetro
 Paperback Mass-Market Fiction
Top 5 at a Glance
1. THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO, by Stieg Larsson
2. THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE, by Stieg Larsson
3. AUSTIN, by Linda Lael Miller
4. KNOCKOUT, by Catherine Coulter
5. THE LUCKY ONE, by Nicholas Sparks
 Paperback Nonfiction
Top 5 at a Glance
1. EAT, PRAY, LOVE, by Elizabeth Gilbert
2. THREE CUPS OF TEA, by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin
3. MY HORIZONTAL LIFE, by Chelsea Handler
4. ARE YOU THERE, VODKA? IT'S ME, CHELSEA, by Chelsea Handler
5. THE GLASS CASTLE, by Jeannette Walls
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 Hardcover Advice
Top 5 at a Glance
1. WOMEN FOOD AND GOD, by Geneen Roth
2. DELIVERING HAPPINESS, by Tony Hsieh
3. THE LAST LECTURE, by Randy Pausch with Jeffrey Zaslow
4. THE SECRET, by Rhonda Byrne
5. COME TO WIN, by Venus Williams with Kelly E. Carter
 Paperback Advice
Top 5 at a Glance
1. THE TWILIGHT SAGA: ECLIPSE, by Mark Cotta Vaz
2. WHAT TO EXPECT WHEN YOU’RE EXPECTING, by Heidi Murkoff and Sharon Mazel
3. THE FIVE LOVE LANGUAGES, by Gary Chapman
4. THE LOVE DARE, by Stephen and Alex Kendrick with Lawrence Kimbrough
5. SKINNY BITCH, by Rory Freedman and Kim Barnouin
 Children's Books
Top 5 at a Glance
1. THE VERY FAIRY PRINCESS, by Julie Andrews and Emma Walton Hamilton
2. LEGO STAR WARS, by Simon Beecroft
3. OOH LA LA! IT’S BEAUTY DAY, by Jane O’Connor
4. STAR WARS, written and illustrated by Rufus Butler Seder
5. LADYBUG GIRL AT THE BEACH, by David Soman and Jacky Davis
 Graphic Books
Top 5 at a Glance
1. TWILIGHT: THE GRAPHIC NOVEL, VOL. 1, by Stephenie Meyer and Young C. Kim
2. BATWOMAN: ELEGY, by Greg Rucka, J. H. Williams and J. G. Jones
3. COVER RUN: THE DC COMICS ART OF ADAM HUGHES, by Adam Hughes
4. KICK-ASS, by Mark Millar and John Romita Jr.
5. ARKHAM ASYLUM: MADNESS, by Sam Kieth
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DANGEROUS LAUGHTER
Thirteen Stories
By Steven Millhauser.
Alfred A. Knopf, $24.
In his first collection in five years, a master fabulist
in the tradition of Poe and Nabo¬kov invents spookily
plausible parallel universes in which the deepest human
emotions and yearnings are transformed into their monstrous
opposites. Millhauser is especially attuned to the purgatory
of adolescence. In the title story, teenagers attend sinister
“laugh parties”; in another, a mysteriously
afflicted girl hides in the darkness of her attic bedroom.
Time and again these parables revive the possibility that
“under this world there is another, waiting to be
born.” (Excerpt)
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A MERCY
By Toni Morrison.
Alfred A. Knopf, $23.95.
The fate of a slave child abandoned by her mother animates
this allusive novel — part Faulknerian puzzle, part
dream-song — about orphaned women who form an eccentric
household in late-17th-century America. Morrison’s
farmers and rum traders, masters and slaves, indentured
whites and captive Native Americans live side by side,
often in violent conflict, in a lawless, ripe American
Eden that is both a haven and a prison — an emerging
nation whose identity is rooted equally in Old World superstitions
and New World appetites and fears. (First Chapter)
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NETHERLAND
By Joseph O’Neill.
Pantheon Books, $23.95.
O’Neill’s seductive ode to New York —
a city that even in bad times stubbornly clings to its
belief “in its salvific worth” — is
narrated by a Dutch financier whose privileged Manhattan
existence is upended by the events of Sept. 11, 2001.
When his wife departs for London with their small son,
he stays behind, finding camaraderie in the unexpectedly
buoyant world of immigrant cricket players, most of them
West Indians and South Asians, including an entrepreneur
with Gatsby-size aspirations. (First Chapter) ~Photo here
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2666
By Roberto Bolaño. Translated by Natasha Wimmer.
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, cloth and paper, $30.
Bolaño, the prodigious Chilean writer who died
at age 50 in 2003, has posthumously risen, like a figure
in one of his own splendid creations, to the summit of
modern fiction. This latest work, first published in Spanish
in 2004, is a mega- and meta-detective novel with strong
hints of apocalyptic foreboding. It contains five separate
narratives, each pursuing a different story with a cast
of beguiling characters — European literary scholars,
an African-American journalist and more — whose
lives converge in a Mexican border town where hundreds
of young women have been brutally murdered. (Excerpt)
~Photo here
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UNACCUSTOMED EARTH
By Jhumpa Lahiri.
Alfred A. Knopf, $25.
There is much cultural news in these precisely observed
studies of modern-day Bengali-Americans — many of
them Ivy-league strivers ensconced in prosperous suburbs
who can’t quite overcome the tug of traditions nurtured
in Calcutta. With quiet artistry and tender sympathy,
Lahiri creates an impressive range of vivid characters
— young and old, male and female, self-knowing and
self-deluding — in engrossing stories that replenish
the classic themes of domestic realism: loneliness, estrangement
and family discord. (Excerpt) ~Photo here
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THE DARK SIDE
The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into
a War on American Ideals By Jane Mayer. Doubleday, $27.50.
Mayer’s meticulously reported descent into the depths
of President Bush’s anti¬terrorist policies
peels away the layers of legal and bureaucratic maneuvering
that gave us Guantánamo Bay, “extraordinary
rendition,” “enhanced” interrogation
methods, “black sites,” warrantless domestic
surveillance and all the rest. But Mayer also describes
the efforts ofunsung heroes, tucked deep inside the administration,
who risked their careers in the struggle to balance the
rule of law against the need to meet a threat unlike any
other in the nation’s history.
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THE FOREVER WAR
By Dexter Filkins.
Alfred A. Knopf, $25.
The New York Times correspondent, whose tours of duty
have taken him from Afghanistan in 1998 to Iraq during
the American intervention, captures a decade of armed
struggle in harrowingly detailed vignettes. Whether interviewing
jihadists in Kabul, accompanying marines on risky patrols
in Falluja or visiting grieving families in Baghdad, Filkins
makes us see, with almost hallucinogenic immediacy, the
true human meaning and consequences of the “war
on terror.” (First Chapter)
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NOTHING TO BE FRIGHTENED OF
By Julian Barnes.
Alfred A. Knopf, $24.95.
This absorbing memoir traces Barnes’s progress from
atheism (at age 20) to agnosticism (at 60) and examines
the problem of religion not by rehashing the familiar
quarrel between science and mystery, but rather by weighing
the timeless questions of mortality and aging. Barnes
distills his own experiences — and those of his
parents and brother — in polished and wise sentences
that recall the writing of Montaigne, Flaubert and the
other French masters he includes in his discussion. (First
Chapter)
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THIS REPUBLIC OF SUFFERING
Death and the American Civil War
By Drew Gilpin Faust.
Alfred A. Knopf, $27.95.
In this powerful book, Faust, the president of Harvard,
explores the legacy, or legacies, of the “harvest
of death” sown and reaped by the Civil War. In the
space of four years, 620,000 Americans died in uniform,
roughly the same number as those lost in all the nation’s
combined wars from the Revolution through Korea. This
doesn’t include the thousands of civilians killed
in epidemics, guerrilla raids and draft riots. The collective
trauma created “a newly centralized nation-state,”
Faust writes, but it also established “sacrifice
and its memorialization as the ground on which North and
South would ultimately reunite.” (First
Chapter)
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THE WORLD IS WHAT IT IS
The Authorized Biography of V. S. Naipaul
By Patrick French.
Alfred A. Knopf, $30.
The most surprising word in this biography is “authorized.”
Naipaul, the greatest of all postcolonial authors, cooperated
fully with French, opening up a huge cache of private
letters and diaries and supplementing the revelations
they disclosed with remarkably candid interviews. It was
a brave, and wise, decision. French, a first-rate biographer,
has a novelist’s command of story and character,
and he patiently connects his subject’s brilliant
oeuvre with the disturbing facts of an unruly life. (First
Chapter)
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