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THE COMICS The Complete Collection [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Ben Macintyre contributes a weekly column to The Times of London on history, art, politics, foreign affairs -- and espionage. Although he has never written a novel, his books are filled with colorful characters, from Adam Worth (''the real Professor Moriarty'') to Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond. The first volume of Macintyre's World War II espionage /trilogy, ''Agent Zigzag,'' featured a real-life criminal and double agent who played a pivotal role in the early part of the war. The second, ''Operation Mincemeat,'' told the story of a secret plan involving a corpse carrying forged papers in the run-up to the invasion of Sicily in 1943, a deception made famous by the film ''The Man Who Never Was.'' As Macintyre notes in his review of ''An American Spy,'' Olen Steinhauer's latest thriller, spying and fiction have always been intertwined. ''Spies often behave as if they're the actors in some peculiar drama of their own,'' he remarked in an e-mail. ''And their spymasters often think like novelists.'' Researching the final volume of his espionage trilogy, ''Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies,'' in the newly declassified files of M.I.5, the British secret service (which, as recently as 1997, ''did not, officially speaking, exist''), Macintyre discovered ample proof of this connection. ''The D-Day spies sound as if they have emerged from some particularly fantastic novel of the period: a bisexual Peruvian playgirl, a tiny Polish fighter pilot, a Serbian seducer, a wildly imaginative Spaniard with a diploma in chicken farming and a hysterical Frenchwoman whose obsessive love for her pet dog very nearly wrecked the entire deception.'' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When an adviser to President Obama was quoted in The New Yorker as saying that the administration's policy in Libya was ''leading from behind,'' he initiated a season of hand-wringing about American decline, as if he had announced that the president was implementing a secret plan to make a second-rate country even worse. But whether America is leading from -- or falling -- behind affects more than our foreign policy. It also affects how it feels to be an American, which is a central concern of American novelists. LEAVING THE ATOCHA STATION (Coffee House Press, paper, $15), Ben Lerner's remarkable first novel, published last year, is a bildungsroman and meditation and slacker tale fused by a precise, reflective and darkly comic voice. It is also a revealing study of what it's like to be a young American abroad. The plotting is scant. Adam Gordon, a poet, having bluffed his way into a fellowship in Madrid, makes friends, struggles with Spanish, smokes hash, wanders around, writes poetry, doubts poetry and has two low-energy love affairs. But the real action of the novel is interior. Gordon has two struggles: the classic one, to live authentically, and an aesthetic one, to represent ''the texture of et cetera itself,'' with a poetry that transcends mere snapshots of localized events and attempts to capture the hum and buzz of ''life's white machine.'' To Gordon, these struggles are the same: ''I wondered if the incommensurability of language and experience was new, if my experience of my experience issued from a damaged life of pornography and privilege, if there were happy ages when the starry sky was the map of all possible paths, or if this division of experience into what could not be named and what could not be lived just was experience, for all people for all time.'' [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

So these two guys walk into a bar . . . and find themselves in George Pelecanos's great shaggy dog story, WHAT IT WAS (Reagan Arthur/Little, Brown, $35; paper, $9.99). Derek Strange, the African-American private eye from one series of Pelecanos novels, and his drinking buddy Nick Stefanos, the featured character in yet another Pelecanos series, get to talking about the summer of 1972, which burned itself into the collective memory of their Washington neighborhood as the summer when Robert Lee Jones (known on the street as Red Fury, after the car he bought for his girlfriend) went on a legendary killing spree. Punching in some appropriate jukebox tunes, Strange proceeds to spin this breathless yarn, which Pelecanos says he wrote ''in a fever'' last summer. When the story opens, 26-year-old Strange is fresh off the police force, establishing himself as a newly minted P.I. (Cue ''Mr. Big Stuff.'') And already he realizes that he's ''in the midst of something, a music, dress, and cultural revolution that was happening with his people, in his time.'' All he has to do is survive the casual violence of his world and live down the fashion fads of stacked shoes, bell-bottom pants and loud-print rayon shirts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nobody knows a man better than his ex-wife. So Moe Prager's ex-wife, Carmella, is wise to this veteran private eye, accepting the fact that no matter how many times he marries, his first love will always be Brooklyn. ''When you die, they should just bury you right here, under the boardwalk,'' she tells him in HURT MACHINE (Tyrus, $24.95; paper, $15.95), Reed Farrel Coleman's latest book in a series heavily saturated with local color. Since Prager has recently been told he has stomach cancer, that day may come sooner than Carmella thinks. But this stubborn old shamus is determined to do two things before his ashes are consigned to the sands of Coney Island: Attend his daughter's wedding, and find the person who murdered Carmella's older sister, Alta. Alta Conseco and Maya Watson, emergency medical technicians with the New York Fire Department, became pariahs after walking away from a dying man who was stricken at a trendy Manhattan bistro. Although Alta's death was clearly a retribution killing, her fellow E.M.T. (surely the murderer's next target) refuses to offer any explanation for their behavior. This silent treatment forces Prager to do exactly what we want him to do: Travel the length and breadth of the city talking to cops, firemen, gangsters and restaurateurs in their picturesque natural habitats. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

''I need a time machine,'' the leader of a terrorist group mutters midway through DUNCAN THE WONDER DOG (AdHouse, paper, $24.95). ''Go back to Olduvai -- flood it when there's still a chance.'' In this ambitious, beautiful, mystifying first graphic novel by Adam Hines, the unhinged villain has a better reason than most to wipe humanity from the earth: She's not human. She's a Barbary macaque who goes by the name Pompeii, and she's just set off a bomb at a California university. ''Duncan the Wonder Dog'' tweaks the old song into a provocative new question: What if we could walk with the animals, talk with the animals -- and the animals fought back? This nearly 400-page volume is, according to its 26-year-old author, the first of a nine-book series. As with so many contemporary graphic novels, its high-concept story sounds like a movie pitch waiting to happen (''Dr. Dolittle'' meets the Baader-Meinhof gang) -- but in this case, the deliberate pace and embrace of elision discourage casual reading. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When a book insists, ''Take art lessons from a monkey!'' the only appropriate response, if you ask me, is ''O.K.!'' Two years ago, in her Eisner Award-winning coming-of-art memoir, ''What It Is,'' Lynda Barry prodded would-be writers to pick up a pen (or a brush) and put it to paper. Her latest book, PICTURE THIS (Drawn & Quarterly, $29.95), taps into something more elemental -- the fuzzy-wuzzy part of the brain that sees elephants in clouds (or in this case, rabbits in water stains) -- and asks, ''Do you wish you could draw?'' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Podcast Scheduled for this week: a conversation about two new Vietnam war novels, with Tatjana Soli, the author of ''The Lotus Eaters,'' and Sebastian Junger, who discusses Karl Marlantes's ''Matterhorn''; the Book Review's Julie Just talks about the rise of bad parents in young adult fiction; Motoko Rich presents notes from the field; and Jennifer Schuessler reports on best-seller news. Sam Tanenhaus, the editor of the Book Review, is the host. Paper Cuts The Book Review's blog covers books and other forms of printed matter. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

THE LABRADOR PACT, by Matt Haig. (Viking, $23.95.) In ''Henry IV, Part 1,'' Falstaff much prefers survival (and a good breakfast) to honor and duty: ''What is that word honor? ... Who hath it? He that died o' Wednesday. Doth he feel it? No.'' The demands of virtue are also a problem for Prince, the canine narrator of Haig's curiously affecting take on ''Henry,'' which tells the story of a loyal Labrador's efforts to hold his human family together. If only he follows the pact of his breed, Prince tells himself, he can save these people from themselves -- from ''all their lies and tensions and betrayals and injustices.'' His friend Falstaff, a chubby mixed-breed he meets in the park, begs to differ. ''Duty schmooty,'' he bays (or however fictional dogs utter their dialogue) when faced with Prince's insistence on ''duty over all.'' Dark, comic and quite brilliantly adult, Haig's thinking animals never stray into the sickly sweet zone. As the duplicities mount (among both species), Prince's Labrador dogma proves inadequate to the task: ''Whereas dogs can learn to suppress their instincts,'' he realizes, ''for humans there is no hope.'' THE DIVING POOL: Three Novellas, by Yoko Ogawa. (Picador, paper, $13.) Still waters run dark in these bright yet eerie novellas, whose crisp, almost guileless prose hides unexpected menace. In the title story, Aya, a high school student, is obsessed with the graceful body of a young diving enthusiast and the suffering of a child on whom she unleashes a strangely calm cruelty: ''I wanted to savor every one of Rie's tears, to run my tongue over the damp, festering, vulnerable places in her heart and open the wounds even wider.'' Another novella is the perplexing account of two sisters, one apparently keeping a record of the other's pregnancy. At first, the mother-to-be seems the more troubled, with her bizarre cravings and visits to a psychiatrist. Then again, perhaps it's the diarist we should be keeping an eye on. In the final novella, a lonely woman helps settle her young cousin into her old college residence, which has fallen into disrepair since the unexplained disappearance of a student. This nameless narrator can't stay away from the dorm or its spooky manager, who is missing a leg and both arms and says he is dying. She begins visiting every day, only belatedly wondering why her cousin never seems to be around. Stephen Snyder's elegant translations from the Japanese whet the appetite for more. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]