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INSIDE THE STALIN ARCHIVES Discovering the New Russia [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

THE FINDER By Colin Harrison. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Reviews the book 'A Box of Matches,' by Nicholson Baker.

Reviews the book 'City,' by Alessandro Baricco.

Reviews the book 'The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews, 1971-2001,' by Martin Amis.

Reviews the book 'Author Unknown: On the Trail of Anonymous,' by Don Foster.

The article reviews several books including "The Insurgents: David Petraeus and the Plot to Change the American Way of War," by Fred Kaplan, "The Inventor and the Tycoon: A Gilded Age Murder and the Birth of Moving Pictures," by Edward Ball, and "The Marlowe Papers," by Ros Barber.

Podcast Scheduled to appear this week are Katie Roiphe on sex and the American male novelist; Lorraine Adams on ''Beneath the Lion's Gaze''; Motoko Rich with notes from the field; and Jennifer Schuessler with 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]

GIRLIGAMI A Fresh, Fun, Fashionable Spin on Origami. By Cindy Ng. Watson-Guptill. $16.95. (Ages 10 and up) In clear chapters, Ng describes the enticing items that can be made with origami: miniature shoes, purses, hearts, animals. (Practice may be required to make the fashionable high heels on the striking cover.) Packaged with bright papers to tear out and fold. Julie Just [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Presents several reviews of recommended paperback books. 'Learning Human: Selected Poems,' by Les Murray; 'The Plato Papers: A Prophecy,' by Peter Ackroyd; 'Horse Heaven,' by Jane Smiley; 'They're Cows, We're Pigs,' by Carmen Boullosa; Others.

Reviews the book `The Great Wall and the Empty Fortress: China's Search for Security,' by Andrew J. Nathan and Robert S. Ross.

Reviews the book `Science on Trial,' by Marcia Angell.

Reviews the novel `Everyone's Gone to the Moon,' by Philip Norman.

Reviews the book `The Modern Madame Butterfly: Fantasy and Reality in Japanese Cross-Cultural Relationships,' by Karen Ma.

The look of a typeface can determine how readers perceive a word or phrase. Take the common seasonal greeting ''Happy holidays.'' When set in an ornamented Latin style, the words appear jolly and joyous, while spiky Old English or German Fraktur reads as dour -- Scrooge-like. Various typefaces symbolize the holidays, and not just those goofy novelty faces with dangling icicles or sprigs of holly. Ecclesiastical gothics, bifurcated Tuscans and filigreed slab serifs are fitting styles for this season. Display types are designed to convey a host of notions and emotions. They are as versatile (and functional) as articles of clothing -- and as with clothing, some types are basic black, while others go in and out of fashion like hemlines. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, American and European type foundries -- the factories where type was designed and cast for commercial and industrial use -- churned out literally tons (since type came in lead and wood) of eccentrically decorative typefaces and typographic ornaments, most of it bought by printers. Advertising was a burgeoning industry, and the more outlandish display styles were conceived in equal measure to attract the public's eye and to distinguish one merchant from the next. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

To call Jack O'Connell's novels imaginative, or even original, doesn't begin to say it. Offbeat and eerie, they open as standard crime stories set in Quinsigamond, a depressed New England factory town where citizens and criminal lowlifes perform to type -- for a while. But somewhere in the telling, his tales hurl themselves into some narrative black hole where logic breaks down and genre conventions no longer apply. In keeping with the new rules of O'Connell's game book, someone might come up with a drug that causes insanity by overstimulating linguistic comprehension and verbal skills. Or start a guerrilla war by hijacking talk-radio shows. Or attempt to expand human consciousness by altering classic movies. There's something both exciting and unnerving about this kind of hallucinatory writing. O'Connell's previous novels were laced with lunatic humor, but his latest, THE RESURRECTIONIST (Algonquin, $24.95), is as dark as the bottom of a well. Unlike O'Connell's usual manic, misanthropic protagonists, Sweeney is mostly just depressed. A pharmacologist, he has given up his job in Cleveland to install his comatose young son, Danny, in Quinsigamond's Peck Clinic, ''the finest long-term care and research facility for patients trapped inside coma and persistent vegetative state.'' As in O'Connell's other books, a popular art form mirrors and eventually interacts with the quasi-realistic narrative, but this time it's the comic book -- a form too deadly serious to take a lot of ribbing. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Presents short reviews of several new and noteworthy paperback books. "Drop City," by T. Coraghessan Boyle; "A Box of Matches," by Nicholson Baker; "A Ship Made of Paper," by Scott Spencer.

Offers brief reviews of several paperback books. `Everything Your Know,' by Zoe Heller; `Darwin's Worms,' by Adam Phillips; `A Conspiracy of Paper,' by David Liss; `The Blind Side of the Heart,' by Michael C. White; `The Magic Kingdom,' by Stanley Elkin; Others.

Reviews the books `A History of US,' by Joy Hakim, `America Alive: A History,' by Jean Karl, illustrated by Ian Schoenherr, `Brown Paper School USKids History,' by Marlene Smith-Baranzini and Howard Egger-Bovet, `Young Reader's Companion to American History,' edited by John A. Garraty, and `Hand in Hand: An American History Through Poetry,' edited by Lee Bennet Hopkins and illustrated by Peter M. Fiore.

Reviews the books `Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime,' by Richard Pipes and `The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia, 1917-1991,' by Martin Malia. Two versions of Soviet history; Debates about nature of Soviet regime; Study of papers of Leon Trotsky; Analysis of entire period of Soviet experience. INSET: Bolshevism, a native product (excerpt)..

HEAR ME ROAR:''Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother,'' Amy Chua's paean to take-no-prisoners hyperparenting, cruises to No. 5 on the hardcover nonfiction list this week, trailing charges of stereotype-baiting, shameless hucksterism and worse. An excerpt that appeared in The Wall Street Journal under the fire-breathing title ''Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior'' generated more than 7,000 comments, more than any other article in the history of that paper's Web site. Since then, Chua -- a second-generation Chinese-American and Yale law professor previously known for scholarly volumes like ''Day of Empire: How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance, and Why They Fall'' -- has been backpedaling hard, insisting that readers, along with The Journal's headline writers, had missed her self-mockery. The novelist and self-described ''Bad Mother'' Ayelet Waldman certainly didn't see any. Waldman delivered a counterblast on The Journal's Web site, though she found a silver lining in her two teenage children's outraged response to Chua's article. ''I say with confidence that neither of my children has ever before bothered to read a single word of The Wall Street Journal,'' she wrote. ''I don't think that I could have screamed or threatened them into doing so, not even if I'd tossed them outside in the middle of winter, to cower barefoot and freezing on the front step. So to Ms. Chua I express my gratitude. It seems to take a Chinese mother to force my Western kids to read the paper.'' CRIMSON TRIUMPH: Asian-American bloggers may not be showing Chua's book a lot of love, but recent publishing history suggests that it would be met with knowing nods -- and lots of pirated editions -- in China. Back in 2000, a young woman named Liu Yiting published ''Harvard Girl,'' a memoir of her path from the provincial capital of Chengdu to Cambridge, Mass. That book sold millions of copies, inspired copycat versions like ''Yale Girl'' and ''Stanford Silver Bullet,'' and convinced a generation of Chinese students that an American college education was within their grasp, even if the techniques Liu described sound quaint by the standards of today's meritocratic ''Mommy Dearest'' types. Liu's parents apparently never threatened to burn her stuffed animals if she didn't play a piano piece perfectly, as Chua boasts of doing, but then Chua probably never made her daughters practice math by copying numbers from the phone book. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When Harvard announced last month that it had found the psychologist Marc Hauser ''solely responsible'' for eight instances of scientific misconduct, the news generated front-page headlines and streams of schadenfreude-laced commentary in the blogosphere. Hauser, an expert on human and animal cognition, is a star of the Harvard faculty and the author of scores of scientific papers, as well as the book ''Moral Minds'' (2006), a popular study of the evolutionary underpinnings of human morality. The irony of that last part -- and of the title of Hauser's book-in-progress, ''Evilicious: Why We Evolved a Taste for Being Bad'' -- wasn't lost on some observers. Evolutionary psychology itself is in need of a ''morality check,'' The Wall Street Journal declared. The editor of the journal that published one of Hauser's disputed papers said some data seemed to be ''fabricated,'' a sin ''as serious as it gets.'' Meanwhile, the eminent primatologist Frans de Waal called the scientific impact of the affair ''disastrous.'' [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

WALKS WITH MEN, by Ann Beattie (Scribner, cloth, $17; paper, $10.) Set in the early '80s, Beattie's novella is the story of an older man instructing a young literarily inclined woman in the ways of the world, even though she soon begins to see through him. THREE DELAYS, by Charlie Smith (Harper Perennial, paper, $14.99.) Smith has written a hallucinatory novel whose central characters spiral through a demonic, cataclysmic romance that burns all it touches. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Who doesn't remember the simpler days of fake news, when front-page headlines announced that President Clinton had taken a leave of office to stand in line for tickets to ''Star Wars: Episode I -- The Phantom Menace,'' or that a disaster at a Snak-Tyme pudding factory had brought creamy, mouthwatering devastation to the town of Centralia, Ill.? The year was 1999, and the news source was The Onion, then still in Madison, Wis. Back then fake news wasn't supposed to be more real than real news, just funnier. Its target was real news's mannerisms -- the stodgy self-importance and contrived graphics that go into a daily newspaper. Fake news took for granted that the content of real news was less than compelling. If you were going to read straight-faced newspaper accounts of the events in Kosovo (and chances are, you weren't), you might as well read ''Data-Entry Clerk Reapplies Carmex at 17-Minute Intervals.'' Fake news reminded you why you didn't read the paper. But 1999 was also the year that Jon Stewart took over ''The Daily Show'' and changed the nature of fake news. Stewart's targets, and later Stephen Colbert's, were not only the media's manners but also its newsmakers (who were sometimes also members of the news media). For Stewart, current events mattered, and they were being bungled by public officials and the purveyors of real news. He made you feel better about not reading the paper or watching CNN because his take was more real. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

GAME SIX Cincinnati, Boston, and the 1975 World Series: The Triumph of America's Pastime [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Reviews two books by Richard Rorty. `Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers: Volume One'; `Essays on Heidigger and Others: Philosophical Papers: Volume Two'.

Reviews books of fiction and poetry. `The Fennel Family Papers' by William Baldwin; `E-Mail: A Love Story' by Stephanie D. Fletcher; `Honorable Amendments: Poems' by Michael S. Harper; More books mentioned; Reviewers including Elizabeth Gaffney, Dwight Garner, and Bruce Allen.

Focuses on journalists who criticze literature and who write papers for their own kind to hear. What journalist prefer to write about; Criticism on various books and authors.

Reviews the book `Merry Men,' by Carolyn Chute. Portrait of the tar-paper town of Egypt; Choppy concreteness of prose with idiosyncratic elegance; Air of populist propaganda; Rhetoric romanticism. INSET: The dog wore a print shirt (excerpt from the book)..

Reviews the book `Cocaine True Cocaine Blue,' photographs and text by Eugene Richards with additional reporting by Edward Barnes. Dominance of the view of cocaine as a harmless substance for nearly a century after the publication of Sigmund Freud's scientific paper `Uber Coca'; Notion that cocaine brings with it a transcendent reality.

Reviews the book `Atget's Seven Albums,' by Molly Nesbit, a collection of paper volumes of 60 photographs each, pasted in and captioned by Eugene Atget and sold by him to various libraries in Paris. Molly Nesbit calculates that Atget sold 16,748 prints to the nation in the course of his career. Atget systematically targeted his private clientele; Analysis and interpretation of each album; The book reproduces all the images from the seven volumes.

Reviews the non-fiction book 'Songs of the Doomed: More Notes on the Death of the American Dream. Gonzo Papers,' volume three, by Hunter S. Thompson.

DON'T PANIC: When Douglas Adams, the author of ''The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy,'' died of a heart attack 11 years ago this month, a group of fans organized an impromptu ''Towel Day'' celebration in his memory. Why Towel Day? Because a towel, as readers of Adams's delirious novel will remember, ''is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have.'' (Suggested uses: beach-lounging on Santraginus V, sailing a miniraft down the River Moth, hiding from the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal and, ''if it still seems to be clean enough,'' drying yourself off.) The tribute caught on, and this year people in at least 15 countries will observe May 25 by carrying towels to readings, movie screenings and other events related to ''The Hitchhiker's Guide,'' which spent a cumulative 11 weeks on our paper/back list. In 1981, when the first American edition was released, Gerald Jonas praised it in the Book Review. ''Humorous science-fiction novels have notoriously limited audiences,'' he wrote. ''They tend to be full of 'in' jokes understandable only to those who read everything from Jules Verne to Harlan Ellison. The 'Hitchhiker's Guide' is a delightful exception.'' And yes, he mentioned the towels. VAMPIRE CENTRAL: Charlaine Harris's 12th Sookie Stackhouse novel, ''Deadlocked,'' goes straight to the top of the hardcover fiction list this week. Harris has been writing for a long time -- we reviewed her first mystery in 1981, the same year as ''Hitchhiker's Guide'' -- but she didn't crack the best-seller list until 2005, after she had abandoned two conventional detective series and written five books about Sookie, a telepathic small-town waitress who consorts with vampires and other unsavory oddballs. (The HBO show ''True Blood'' is based on the series, and has magnified its success considerably.) Not everybody understood Harris's initial shift to the supernatural, she told one interviewer after the first Sookie Stackhouse novel came out. ''When someone in my family was reading the book, she said: 'Where did you find out all this about vampires?' And I said: 'I made it up. It's not like there was a vampire code of conduct or something, that you could call Vampire Central and say, Would you send me that pamphlet, please? They're not real, you know.' '' That's not to say that Harris never conducts research. The acknowledgments to ''Deadlocked'' end with this sentence: ''My sincere gratitude to Stefan Diamante of Body Roxx for his Male Strippers 101 course.'' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

THIS ISN'T THE SORT OF THING THAT HAPPENS TO SOMEONE LIKE YOU Stories. By Jon McGregor. Bloomsbury, paper, $16. If a sugar beet falls off a truck in a story by McGregor, it's safe to assume things won't go well for the car directly behind. In these 30 electric tales of menace, however, this wicked British writer is less interested in how things pan out than in capturing that awful moment when someone recognizes he is powerless to undo his fate. (For one luckless character, the real threat looms after she has survived a smashed windshield and been rescued by two seemingly model citizens.) This is a book of ominous preludes and chilling aftermaths: the incantatory account of a vacationer at a war-ravaged resort in the minutes before he drowns; the Pinteresque power play of a vicar's wife whose husband offers shelter to a gallingly manipulative stranger. McGregor stealthily commands our active engagement, scattering crumbs of data for us to pick through, gumshoe-style. The technique shrewdly exposes the disconnection of transgressive characters, like the miscreant father refused entry to his daughter's Nativity pageant, or the man who wreaks terrible vengeance on a noisy neighbor. The neighbor's punishment? McGregor puts faith in the cruelty of his readers' imaginations, leaving that to us. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

NO ONE By Gwenaelle Aubry. Translated by Trista Selous. Tin House, paper, $12.95. The question of identity haunts Aubry's slim, tough novel about a Parisian lawyer suffering from bipolar disorder and the havoc he causes in the lives of those close to him. Written from a daughter's perspective after her father's death (and with names unchanged to create a blurry fictional boundary), ''No One'' takes the unusual form of a memoir-as-alphabet-book, with each letter illustrating a different aspect of Francois-Xavier Aubry's life and illness. ''H,'' for example, is for ''Hoffman (Dustin),'' whom her father strongly resembled. The writer recalls watching ''Kramer vs. Kramer'' and ''thinking, looking at this father alone in an apartment with his child, that he had done just that for us too, . . . keeping his ghosts and delusions at bay to perform the actions that cradle childhood.'' The elder Aubry's madness manifested itself in a 200-page manuscript on which he scrawled the words ''To be novelized,'' an injunction the author honors by liberally quoting from her father's own words. The lives of the mentally ill and those who care for them are inevitably visited by repetition and exhaustion, and Aubry's meticulous explication of her father's condition can't help containing instances of both. Yet her virtuosic sentences and ingenious structure make up for the narrative stasis. The reader feels privileged to gain access to these troubled minds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

THE LIFESPAN OF A FACT, by John D'Agata and Jim Fingal (Norton; paper, $17.95.) An essayist insists that his only responsibility is to truth and beauty, not factual accuracy. His fact checker begs to differ. A fiery argument ensues. BRINGING UP BEBE: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting, by Pamela Druckerman (Penguin Press, $25.95.) Why French children sleep through the night and eat like adults. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

BERLIN STORIES By Robert Walser. New York Review Books; paper, $14. ''Let us be merry, rich, light, earnest, courteous, virtuous and well mannered,'' Walser exhorts, as if invoking a scout's oath for the well-rounded metropolitan. Add ''arch'' and ''awe-struck'' and you've mined the cheerier impulses of this troubled Swiss writer as he recorded his experiences in the Berlin of the early 1900s. These essayish ''stories,'' most appearing in English for the first time, reveal the exuberance (and, in a heart-rending coda, the defeat) of a young artist initiating himself into the glorious bustle of his adopted city. Everything is observed in language that asserts his professed posture as ''a perfumed and mincing know-it-all and write-it-all.'' To Walser, Berlin's architecture ''errs perhaps on the side of the drastic'' and theater should be ''shameless,'' since ''it must after all be reckoned among the secret pleasures of a theatergoer to be permitted to find sufficient grounds to blush.'' Having exalted the gifts of a critic friend, he mutters, ''Did you catch the undercurrent of vindictive envy?'' Not to be outdone, Walser deploys his own criticism with panache. As he derides ''the princely Homburgly nature'' of a pompous actor, you can almost hear the collection's principal translator, Susan Bernofsky, laughing into her laptop. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

HAITI: The Aftershocks of History, by Laurent Dubois (Metropolitan/Holt, $32.) Foreign meddling, the lack of a democratic tradition, a humiliating American occupation and cold-war support of a brutal dictator all figure in a scholar's well-written analysis. SMUT: Stories, by Alan Bennett (Picador/Frances Coady/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, paper, $14.) A master of the long short story presents two tales in which prim characters harbor dirty secrets. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

THE THIRD REICH, by Roberto Bolano. Translated by Natasha Wimmer (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25.) A German vacationing in Spain plays a World War II strategy game with a mysterious burn victim in a novel found among Bolano's papers after his death. THE FOLLY OF FOOLS: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life, by Robert Trivers. (Basic Books, $28.) An intriguing argument that deceit is a beneficial evolutionary ''deep feature'' of life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

THE BETRAYAL By Helen Dunmore. Black Cat. Paper, $14.95. Dunmore gamely returns to Soviet Russia with her follow-up to ''The Siege,'' which captured the frenzy of Leningrad ravaged by German forces in 1941. Eleven years later, the fear and distrust that poisoned relations between war-torn residents has only been amplified. Among the survivors are the members of a family pressed back into service from the earlier novel: a nursery teacher named Anna; her younger brother, Kolya; and her husband, Andrei, a pediatrician who agrees to treat the cancer-ridden son of a high-ranking secret police officer. Not a good idea. Dunmore has also written children's books and poetry, a resume that reveals itself in the economic architecture of her storytelling, which at its most effective can make manifest the bleakness of a totalitarian landscape and at its least seems to read like a starchy translation of Pushkin. But she's good at planting unobtrusive walk-on characters who step upsettingly to the forefront as Andrei's predicament careers toward its preordained crash. ''The Betrayal'' pulls readers along with the queasy allure of long-anticipated bad news. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

RIFFTIDE The Life and Opinions of Papa Jo Jones. As told to Albert Murray. University of Minnesota, paper, $18.95. With a pronounced irascible streak to match his heterodox approach to drumming, Papa Jo Jones (1911-85) was an ideal candidate to star in the kind of book that delights jazz fans: the straight-talking, defiantly espousing firsthand record. Anyone interested in authenticity of voice is going to be on the verge of fist-pumping the air throughout, or else exclaiming, ''You tell it like it is, baby,'' as if partaking in a call-and-response with the book. A confident and self-aware man -- but a sensitive one all the same -- Jones details his adventures with the likes of Duke Ellington, Count Basie and just about every swing giant. One gets the sense that as pleased as he was to play with one legend after another, they should have been (at least) as pleased to have played with him. Swing enthusiasts who have long delighted in Jones's subtle and complex ride cymbal patterns might be taken aback by his less nuanced approach to family dynamics. ''I told my sister when I was 14 and she was 16: I said if you ever become a colored mammy, I'll kill ya.'' Jones speaks as he drummed, with one melodic line looping back and joining up with another. After about 10 pages, you start hearing those vocal rhythms in your head, and Jones the hothead gives way to Jones the pundit. By the time he gets to his relationship with Satchel Paige, it's as though ''Hear Me Talkin' to Ya,'' the ever/green oral history of jazz, has merged with its baseball analogue, ''The Glory of Their Times,'' and popped in for a cameo in this tough but charming little book. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Wouldn't it be nice, Leonard Rosen asks in his first novel, ALL CRY CHAOS (Permanent Press, $29), if the broken world we live in could be mended by the application of some universal mathematical formula? James Fenster, a Harvard professor who's in Amsterdam to deliver a paper before the World Trade Organization, has been working on that very thing. But before he can deliver his remarks on ''The Mathematical Inevitability of a One-World Economy,'' a bomb charged with rocket fuel delivers a surgical strike on his hotel room. Henri Poincare, a veteran Interpol agent, seems the ideal man to investigate the murder, since he's the great-grandson of the mathematician Jules Henri Poincare and something of a brain himself. ''So who kills a mathematician, other than another mathematician?'' his young protege wants to know. Poincare turns up some promising candidates, one of them a financier who funded some of Fenster's work in hopes of applying it to the stock market, another a brilliant economist turned political provocateur. There's even a group of religious fundamentalists intent on creating the chaos that would hasten the Second Coming. With the exception of the victim's former fiancee, whose suspicious behavior has also made her a person of interest, these suspects are all sold on the idea that ''human behavior can be modeled mathematically, just as any complex, dynamic system in nature can be modeled.'' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]