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FLIES By Michael Dickman. Copper Canyon. Paper, $16. Frank O'Hara once wrote this, in a poem called ''Poetry'': ''The only way to be quiet / is to be quick, so I scare / you clumsily, or surprise / you with a stab.'' It's an instructive passage, not just because it moves with that conversational, come-bounce-along-with-me rhythm that became O'Hara's signature, but because it's a poem about the odd, lovely jolt we can get from an unexpected line. In a way, O'Hara was going straight at something that has become a core quandary of contemporary poetry: How, in a texting, tweeting age that finds us drowning in freshets of language, do you deliver that stab of surprise? Sometimes, quiet and quick is the savviest course of action. That's what you find in Dickman's ''Flies,'' a hushed book that is nevertheless full of lines like fish breaking the surface of a still pond. ''My mother sits on the floor of her new kitchen carefully feeding the flies from her fingertips,'' Dickman writes, with a Sextonish sense of domestic derangement, in ''False Start.'' ''I want to hold you between my teeth,'' he offers in ''Above Love.'' The opening section of ''Emily Dickinson to the Rescue'' can't be printed in a family newspaper, but believe me, it gets your attention. One of Dickman's poems is called ''Imaginary Playground,'' and that phrase could be used to describe the book itself, which returns again and again to blue, unshakable reveries that explore the strangeness of how childhood actually feels to a child. (Especially, maybe, when you've got a twin brother who will also grow up to be a poet.) Many of them, like ''Dead Brother Superhero,'' derive their force and intimacy from a loss in the poet's own life -- the overdose death of his older brother, Darin Hull -- but they're so deftly calibrated that they manage never to be maudlin. This is only Dickman's second book, but like his twin, Matthew, he already seems a major American talent. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

SISTER, by Rosamund Lupton (Crown, $24.) In Lupton's novel, which is both tear-jerking and spine-tingling, a free-spirited sister's death -- perhaps it was murder -- forces a highly conventional woman to examine the truth of their relationship. ANDES, by Michael Jacobs (Counterpoint, paper, $24.95.) Jacobs, a somewhat unlikely adventurer, describes his trek down South America's great mountain range to its icy finish in Patagonia. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

ZOO CITY By Lauren Beukes. Angry Robot, paper, $7.99. Beukes's energetic noir phantasmagoria, the winner of this year's Arthur C. Clarke Award, crackles with original ideas. The title refers to a Johannesburg slum where the narrator, Zinzi December, lives among criminals shunned by decent people. Following an unexplained event, Zoo residents have acquired animal familiars and strange talents as physical manifestations of their guilt. (Beukes has fun imagining a documentary, ''The Warlord and the Penguin: The Untold Story of Dehqan Baiyat,'' in which a New York film student turned Afghan warlord begins to appear ''accompanied incongruously by an Antarctic bird in a flak jacket.'') December's familiar is a sloth, and her special power, which she has turned into a career, is her preternatural ability to find lost belongings by identifying the traits that link them to their owners: a hovering black tumor in one case, a ''halo of dandelion fluff'' in another. But the job goes bad when December reluctantly accepts a missing-person case from a powerful music producer who has demons of his own. As December finds herself in extreme danger, Beukes skillfully employs all the twists of first-rate noir. An ending that includes a giant crocodile may be more conventional than the setup, but it's still powerful indeed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

THE PALE KING: An Unfinished Novel, by David Foster Wallace (Little, Brown, $27.99.) Unfolding on an epic scale, this coherent, if uncompleted, portrayal of our age is a grand parable of ''late capitalism'' set in the innards of the Internal Revenue Service. FATE, TIME, AND LANGUAGE: An Essay on Free Will, by David Foster Wallace. Edited by Steven M. Cahn and Maureen Eckert (Columbia University, paper, $19.95.) Wallace's precocious undergraduate thesis on the philosopher Richard Taylor. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

GREAT SOUL: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India, by Joseph Lelyveld (Knopf, $28.95.) While Gandhi's tenets (a Muslim-Hindu alliance, an end to untouchability) remain largely unfulfilled, it is his role as a social reformer that most interests Lelyveld. FUNERAL FOR A DOG, by Thomas Pletzinger. Translated by Ross Benjamin (Norton, paper, $14.95.) In this German novel, a children's book and the dog of the title reflect the tragic history of a menage-a-trois. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A WIDOW'S STORY: A Memoir, by Joyce Carol Oates (Ecco/HarperCollins, $27.99.) The prolific author has assembled a book more painfully self-revelatory that anything Oates the fiction writer or critic has ever dared to produce. WIDOW: Stories, by Michelle Latiolais (Bellevue Literary Press, paper, $14.95.) While presenting a world wrapped in spiked barbed wire, this collection also contains passages of searing tenderness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

MOURNING DIARY Oct. 26, 1977 Sept. 15, 1979. By Roland Barthes. Translated by Richard Howard. Hill & Wang, $25. For two years following the death of his mother in 1977, Barthes, the French scholar and critic, cataloged his grief piecemeal in short, handwritten observations, sometimes collecting several comments in a day. More than 300 of these notes, made on the scraps of paper he kept on his desk, have been published in ''Mourning Diary,'' giving a writer who reveled in literary experimentation an unexpected last crack at the art 30 years past his own death. Barthes's notes capture flashes of insight into the suffering that arose from his loss. In these illuminated moments, he reveals a mourning that does not fit tidily into the Kubler-Ross ''five stages of grief,'' but might instead be categorized, in part, as guilt for indulging grief, guilt for letting grief go, acute awareness of mortality, withdrawal into suffering, a sense of ''desolate liberty,'' depression, lonesomeness, a bit more guilt and the intellect's attempt to regain control. And rather than a linear progression with an end in sight, for Barthes grief recycles itself; it is ''chaotic.'' This volume will provide fresh insight into Barthes's work and theories. But the diary also has power of its own: it is a stirring mosaic of loss as the author grasps at the void. Writing itself is a form of grieving, of trying to preserve what will otherwise be lost. Barthes expressed distaste for ''making literature'' of his mother's death, and yet, faced with crises most profound, he did what an inveterate writer must do: take notes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

FAME: What the Classics Tell Us About Our Cult of Celebrity, by Tom Payne (Picador, paper, $16.) Moving between ancient literature and today's trashy tabloids, Payne advances a persuasive, if unsettling, definition of what fame is and has ever been. THE ELEPHANT TO HOLLYWOOD, by Michael Caine (Holt, $28.) This isn't the actor's first memoir, but the stories he repeats are good ones, told with an eye for detail and a sense of humor about himself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

PLAYER ONE What Is to Become of Us. By Douglas Coupland. Anansi, paper, $15.95. Where will you be when the apocalypse drops? For the anguished strangers in this novel by the author of ''Generation X,'' the answer is the cocktail lounge of an airport hotel in Toronto. Karen, a lovelorn divorced mother, is here to meet a man from her online discussion group about peak oil. Rick, the bartender, is a recovering alcoholic who intends to give his life savings to a self-help guru. Luke, a pastor experiencing a crisis of faith, is on the run after stealing from his church. And Rachel, a ''cool Hitchcock blonde'' whose brain isn't wired to understand ''humor, beauty, voice inflection, musicality, irony, sarcasm and metaphor,'' is here because her father called her a robot and she wants to prove him wrong by finding a mate and having a baby. When the price of oil quickly and inexplicably rises, a public panic ensues, chemical explosions go off and the characters are cut off from the outside world. What is to become of them and humanity in general? Coupland warns that Rachel and her personality deficiencies portend our future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

BARNACLE LOVE By Anthony De Sa. Algonquin, paper, $13.95. De Sa's linked stories offer a double bildungsroman. In 1954, at the age of 20, Manuel Rebelo abandons his boring job at an Azores bank in favor of the risky life of a cod fisherman and a grandiose dream of escape. Rescued from the sea off the coast of Newfoundland by a fur trapper, Manuel becomes involved with the man's daughter, is betrayed by her and then abandons her. Years later, he and the new family he has started in Toronto pay a return visit to the Azores, drawn back for the funeral of his domineering mother. Manuel seems to have freed himself from his past, but in the remainder of these stories his son, Antonio, tells how his father failed in various businesses in Canada and fell into alcoholism -- and how Antonio, his sister and their mother stuck like barnacles to a Manuel who came to resemble his hateful mother. Although the book invites psychological analysis, its originality is anthropological, presented in descriptions of a Portuguese fishing community whose commonplace customs are retained even in a North American city. Yet De Sa has no nostalgia for that fishing village; it was there, after all, that Manuel's mother felt entitled to put glass in her son's marriage bed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For centuries, the most glorified fighting -- often reserved for officers and noblemen -- was mounted combat. Michael Morpurgo's superb 1982 young adult novel War Horse (Scholastic, paper, $6.99) follows Joey, a half-Thoroughbred farm horse, as he is separated from his 15-year-old owner, Albert, and taken to France in 1914 with a British cavalry unit. Albert, who is too young to enlist, vows to follow Joey into battle. Reprinted to coincide with a hit stage adaptation in London, ''War Horse'' is now being made into a film by Steven Spielberg and will be staged at Lincoln Center in the spring. Although a first-person animal narrator asks a lot of the reader, Joey's voice -- unsentimental and brave under fire -- amplifies the emotional impact of the story. He tells of an early skirmish: ''The first terrible shells fell among us and the machine guns opened up. The bedlam of battle had begun. All around me, men cried and fell to the ground, and horses reared and screamed in an agony of fear and pain.'' Flashing swords are nothing against machine guns, and graceful Joey turns out to be of more use as a cart horse than an officer's mount. The historical details in this short book powerfully ground it in its moment, but a timeless question drives the story: Will the two friends, Joey and Albert, ever see each other again? [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

REDEMPTION IN INDIGO By Karen Lord. Small Beer Press, paper, $16. Lord's first novel is a clever, exuberant mix of Caribbean and Senegalese influences that balances riotously funny set pieces (many involving talking insects) with serious drama initiated by meddlesome supernatural beings. The catalyst? Ansige, a glutton of historic proportions, travels to the hometown of his estranged wife, Paama, to persuade her to return to him. Complications ensue because of Ansige's urge to eat anything he encounters on his journey. Lord, however, also weaves into these scenes the story of Ansige's relationship with Paama, showing his charm as well as his stupidity. Ansige's visit sets off an intricate series of events: Paama's village is infiltrated by spirit-spies, Paama comes into possession of the magical Chaos Stick and a mysterious stranger readies the perfect love poem to woo her. Paama, in all her complexity and contradictions, becomes the real center of the story and a truly memorable character. What had seemed to be a novel about a husband's attempt to save his marriage escalates in ways both absurd and deadly serious. Throughout, Lord manages to compress her story while balancing the cosmic and the personal -- all with a verve that would be the envy of many veteran novelists. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

THE PEOPLE WHO WATCHED HER PASS BY By Scott Bradfield. 146 pp. Two Dollar Radio. Paper, $14.50. Bradfield supplies a scant few orienting facts in the course of this challenging, original novel. At the start, a 3-year-old girl named Sal is kidnapped by the man who fixes her parents' water heater, then taken to live with him in a dingy bungalow near Los Angeles. From there it is a billowy adventure of a book, scarcely bound to the conventions of narrative, as Sal drifts through the world and meets an array of people with wildly varying motives, values and lifestyles. Nearly everybody wants something from this little girl in a ratty pink cotton dress. Some want to worship her. Others want to sexually abuse her. Still others, fueled by compassion or self-righteousness, yearn to protect her. Sal runs from all of them; when she does choose to stay with someone or other, it is because they do not want anything from her: ''The old man never told Sal what to do or think, so it wasn't like living with someone, or hiding behind somebody else's notion of who you were.'' In a book that supplies few answers, Bradfield's lavish eloquence is the presiding constant, and over time he allows brief, quenching glimpses of little Sal's character. Here, she flips through magazines in a laundromat where she is living: ''Most of the magazines contained glossy pictures of young ladies who looked the way Sal felt. Detached, slightly petulant, gloaming with fabric and conditioners, they stood in awkward poses, their heads cocked at odd angles to perceive a world beyond the one that kept perceiving them.'' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Books about Westerners seeking enlightenment in India seem to be everywhere these days, including in India itself. In Mumbai, Elizabeth Gilbert's juggernaut of a memoir, ''Eat, Pray, Love,'' is prominently displayed in street corner bookstalls and hotel bookstores. Bootlegged copies are hawked to tourists stuck in traffic, and photographs of Julia Roberts, who plays Gilbert in the forthcoming film version, have crept into the papers next to those of Bollywood stars. To critics, ''Eat, Pray, Love,'' which has sold more than six million copies in the United States, is a symbol of the commodification of Eastern spirituality, offering a breezy primer on the kind of self-examination that is said to take a lifetime, sandwiched between narratives of more earthly pleasures. But Gilbert is hardly the first writer to mass-market the ashram experience. W. Somerset Maugham's novel ''The Razor's Edge,'' published in 1944, sold over three million copies and spent almost a year on the best-seller list. In his introduction to ''The Skeptical Romancer,'' a recent collection of Maugham's travel writings, Pico Iyer suggested that ''The Razor's Edge,'' about a young American who (like Gilbert) breaks off a relationship to seek wisdom in the East, was the prototypical hippie novel. Paramahansa Yogananda, an Indian guru who toured the United States in the 1920s and '30s, inscribed a copy of his ''Autobiography of a Yogi'' (1946) to Maugham, thanking him for ''spreading the seed of India's teachings.'' [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

HITCH-22: A Memoir, by Christopher Hitchens (Twelve, $26.99.) When the colorful, prolific journalist shares a tender memory, he quickly converts it into a larger observation about politics, always for him the most crucial sphere of moral and intellectual life. ONE DAY, by David Nicholls (Vintage, paper, $14.95.) Nicholls's nostalgic novel checks in year by year on the confused, halting romance of two children of the '80s, she an outspoken lefty, he an apolitical toff. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

It turns out America didn't plunge into the Greater-Than-Great Depression that clouded last summer, but the jams and pickles we were spooked into putting up (and giving as budget-conscious gifts) seem to have reawakened the country's can-do spirit. When a fashion-magazine writer I used to know started a home-canning blog called Saving the Season, I knew homesteader chic had come out of the larder. It's hard to be cynical about homemade jelly. And everyone likes to save money. These are the sentiments publishers are hoping will still exist a year after they put this summer's cookbooks into motion. Instead of trotting out the usual spate of celebrity grillers, this season's bookshelf instructs us to get back to basics, preferably those practiced by our great-grandmothers. I'm sure home-butchery manuals will be ready by the fall, complete with brown-paper dust covers. In the meantime, we'll be making jams and syrups from foraged berries, churning butter and clotting cream, griddling our own English muffins, mastering the fundamentals of gadgetless cooking and turning out meatballs that would make anyone's nonna proud. Even celebrity chefs have kicked it down 20 notches. When Emeril Lagasse is pushing a farm-to-fork book, you know it's Michael Pollan's world. We just cook in it. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Looks like we're back to minding our peas and kumquats. This season, gardening books will tug us into the vegetable patch, and it's but a slip of the muck boot into the chicken coop and pigpen. Where we go from there is anyone's guess, but as I recall, last time around the rural life left us hungry for . . . Big Macs and TV dinners. Perhaps, though, while we've been spinning through this great cycle of dharma, we've ratcheted ourselves up to a higher level. We'll see. The place to begin, you might think, is your own backyard, and that wouldn't be a bad idea, were it not next to impossible to learn how to farm from a book. You need a living, breathing teacher to tell you that the ground is too wet to plant just now or the nights still too cold. THE COMPLETE BOOK OF VEGETABLES: The Ultimate Guide to Growing, Cooking and Eating Vegetables (Firefly, paper, $29.95), by Matthew Biggs, might scare budding farmers off the land, though most youngsters I know are too smart to learn how to do anything by reading a book. They just dig in. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Podcast Scheduled to appear this week are Graydon Carter on Martin Amis's new novel, ''The Pregnant Widow''; Howard Bryant on his biography of the baseball great Henry Aaron; Olen Steinhauer, author of the novel ''The Nearest Exit''; 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]

The much-admired atmosphere of Donna Leon's mysteries derives from more than their pungent descriptions of Venetian life. Not that we don't appreciate the scenic walks and vaporetto rides her detective, Commissario Guido Brunetti, takes from the police station in Castello to the apartment off the Grand Canal where he lives with his wife and two children. And what reader doesn't savor those leisurely family dinners on the terrace or the stops at favorite coffee bars. If the essence of a beloved mystery series could be reduced to such sensual pleasures, you might just make do with a friendly guidebook like ''Brunetti's Venice,'' by Toni Sepeda (Grove, paper, $16.95), or the enticing ''Brunetti's Cookbook'' (Atlantic Monthly, $24.95), in which Leon collaborates with Roberta Pianaro on recipes for some of the memorable meals that have sustained her detective on his grueling homicide cases. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

LIGHTHEAD By Terrance Hayes. Penguin Poets. Paper, $18. Hayes's fourth book puts invincibly restless wordplay at the service of strong emotions: a son's frustration, a husband's love, a citizen's righteous anger and a friend's erotic jealousy animate these technically astute, even puzzlelike, lines. ''Imaginary Wedding Song'' celebrates (with an undertone of resentment) ''an onion stewing in the stew. The bored and tarnished bride / of a corset undone by what's due and what 'I do' makes you.'' As in ''Hip Logic'' (2002), Hayes here owes something to contemporary hip-hop and a great deal to old, rhyming poetic forms, even as he invents forms of his own: the ''pecha kucha,'' for example, a set of quatrains derived from a Japanese slide show. Other poems find new reactions to familiar music: Marvin Gaye, Louis Armstrong, the Nigerian bandleader and political activist Fela Kuti. Hayes makes good use of his prodigious imagination (the ''light'' in his ''head''), and he knows that all storytellers make some things up. Yet this South Carolina-born poet (who now teaches at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh) wants to keep faith with tough facts, especially with black life in the rural South, where ''You'll find salt in the eyes of anyone who kneels too long / with his head in the dirt.'' All his poems tell three (or more) stories at once: ''Liner Notes for an Imaginary Playlist'' sets Hayes's own biography, with its teenage high jinks and its real hardships, in the frame of an American history told through nonexistent songs -- '' 'The DJ's PJs' by SGP (the Stank Gangsta Prankstas),'' for example, and '' 'Mythic Blues' by Big Bruise Guitar.'' [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

SOLAR, by Ian McEwan (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, $26.95.) In McEwan's funniest novel yet, a self-deluding physicist cheats on his wives, sends an innocent man to jail and tries to cash in on another scientist's plans against global warming. VANISHING POINT: Not a Memoir, by Ander Monson (Graywolf, paper, $16.) Monson's collection, in a tradition that has been described as the ''lyric essay,'' pointillistically confronts puzzles of truth and identity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

THE COLLECTED STORIES OF DEBORAH EISENBERG 980 pp. Picador. Paper, $22 [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

WILLIE MAYS: The Life, the Legend, by James S. Hirsch (Scribner, $30.) In his long, fascinating account, Hirsch concentrates mostly on the baseball brilliance, reminding us of a time when the only performance-enhancing drug was joy. THE ABYSS OF HUMAN ILLUSION, by Gilbert Sorrentino (Coffee House, paper, $14.95.) Sorrentino's last novel (he died in 2006) collects 50 comic set pieces: here a homage to Rimbaud, there a nod to Bellow. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

THE VAGRANTS, by Yiyun Li (Random House, $15.) In Muddy River, a town 700 miles from Beijing, 80,000 people live in overcrowded shacks set among small factories. Many are illiterate, and they scheme and steal to stay alive. This novel opens in 1979 as a 28-year-old woman, a former Red Guard who repudiated her past, is about to be executed. A year later, leaflets about her case begin to circulate, and townspeople learn of a ''democratic wall'' in Beijing. Li, who was born in China, writes in English; our reviewer, Pico Iyer, praised her ''grieving and unremitting first novel.'' FRANKLY, MY DEAR: ''Gone With the Wind'' Revisited, by Molly Haskell. (Yale University, $15.) In Scarlett O'Hara, ''the post-suffragette flapper meets the post-feminist power girl,'' Haskell writes. This discursive essay on ''Gone With the Wind'' ''explores the reverberating complexities of the Margaret Mitchell franchise,'' Steve Coates wrote on the Book Review's blog, Paper Cuts. By the time ''Gone With the Wind'' was filmed, Joseph P. Kennedy had left the movie business, in which he had been a serious figure in the 1920s, the owner of several studios. Cari Beauchamp's JOSEPH P. KENNEDY PRESENTS: His Hollywood Years(Vintage, $18.95) shows him as ruthless, firing employees and cheating on his long-suffering wife. Kennedy cared about profits, not art, and he helped shift the industry's concern to short-term gains. He made a lot of money, and he also became deeply involved with Gloria Swanson. Beauchamp's smart, well-sourced book illuminates a sometimes obscure passage in Kennedy's career. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

THE MIND-BODY PROBLEM Poems. By Katha Pollitt. Random House, $23. ''Everywhere I look I see my fate,'' Pollitt writes, and she's not kidding. Studying the ragtag riders on a New York subway at night, she thinks ''of Xerxes, how he reviewed his troops / and wept to think that . . . / not one would be alive in a hundred years.'' The kitschy collectibles in a schoolyard rummage sale have crossed decades to deliver the message ''that we lose even what we never had.'' ''The Mind-Body Problem,'' Pollitt's second collection of poems (and her first in close to 30 years), is a book consumed not so much with mortality as with transience, of which mortality is one aspect. Another is the way our most casual choices come to define us, a process Pollitt likes to enact by letting casual-seeming analogies take over whole poems. ''Death can't help but look friendly / when all your friends live there,'' she writes in ''Old,'' ''while more and more / each day's like a smoky party / where the music hurts and strangers insist that they know you.'' In the poem's final lines you're still at that awful party, checking your watch and saying ''to no one in particular, / If you don't mind, I think I'll go home now.'' Pollitt knows how to pace a poem -- where it ought to turn, tense and relax. She knows how many specifics she needs to save up in order to afford an abstraction, and how to cinch off a free-verse lyric with pentametrical certainty: ''wrapped in white tissue paper, like a torch''; ''the silent, bright elms burn themselves away.'' A few of the poems feel pat and rhetorical (Pollitt, a longtime columnist for The Nation, is persuasive for a living). But ''The Mind-Body Problem'' is an affecting and satisfying book. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Kyle Baker's graphic novel SPECIAL FORCES (Image, paper, $16.99) reads at first like a nearly straightforward military fantasy, drawn with a peculiar hybrid of hyperrealistic precision and nutty exaggeration. Eventually, though, Baker bares his fangs: the book is the harshest, most serrated satire of the Iraq war yet published. These forces are ''special'' as in ''Mama says I'm special'' -- the unstoppable American soldier Zone is severely autistic, which is why he's so good at following orders. And the story's plot, it gradually becomes clear, proceeds from the premise that every lie the Bush administration told about the war was true. So terrorists declare, ''We hate your freedom''; felons forced into military service become brave tactical geniuses who wouldn't dream of hurting children; and Iraqi weapons of mass destruction are not only real but concealed in an oil refinery, where Americans would never think to look because of course the war wasn't about oil. The style and tone of Gabrielle Bell's comics are at the opposite end of the spectrum from Baker's -- flat, dry and understated -- but they allow her, too, to get away with just about anything. The brief title piece of her collection CECIL AND JORDAN IN NEW YORK: Stories (Drawn & Quarterly, $19.95) is narrated by a young woman who's just moved to the city with her filmmaker boyfriend; it's a clear-cut tale of impecunious 20-something artists until halfway through, when the narrator abruptly transforms herself into a chair, gets taken home by someone who finds her on the sidewalk and decides that her old life won't miss her. The engine of these mercilessly observed stories is squirminess: emotional awkwardness so intense that it can erupt into magic or just knot itself into scars. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

DOWN, DOWN, DOWN A Journey to the Bottom of the Sea. Written and illustrated by Steve Jenkins .Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $17. (Ages 4 to 8) Through a magical use of cut paper, Jenkins takes the reader on a voyage to the deepest part of the ocean. Multilayered and multicolored, bizarre creatures almost seem to move on the page: flying squid, cold-eyed mackerel and lacy, bioluminescent siphonophores (lighted up like Broadway bulbs). Helpful descriptions both inform and entertain. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A QUIET ADJUSTMENT, by Benjamin Markovits (Norton, $14.95.) ''I fear very much you will find out you have married a devil,'' Lord Byron confides to his new wife, Annabella Milbanke, at the start of their honeymoon -- and she does. This eloquent novel, the second in a proposed trilogy, is presented in a third-person narration that seems to arise from Annabella, a beautiful 19-year-old. Her perspective is conveyed with a hesitant formality reminiscent of Henry James, and ''phrase after phrase winks for readerly attention,'' our reviewer, Jay Parini, said. REBORN: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963,by Susan Sontag. Edited by David Rieff (Picador, $15.) These notebooks -- two more sets are planned -- open when Sontag is 14, and take her to the brink of success. Rieff, her son, writes in a moving preface that he would have preferred not to release this material but did so only because Sontag's papers had become public on her death in 2004. From the beginning, Sontag appears serious and dedicated to high culture, and although she is self-absorbed, events like her marriage and the birth of her son pass almost without mention. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

SOMETIMES WE'RE ALWAYS REAL SAME-SAME By Mattox Roesch. Unbridled, paper, $15.95. When Roesch's thoughtful first novel opens, Cesar Stone, a 17-year-old Los Angeles gang member whose brother is serving life for murder, is living alone with his financially struggling mother. Determined to make a better life, she moves the two of them back to her hometown -- Unalakleet, Alaska, a small fishing village where much of her quirky and eccentric family still lives. (Imagine the protagonist discovering he has a relative named ''Aunty Striptease.'') But the most colorful family member is Go-boy, a cousin a few years older and several inches taller than Cesar, whose ''black hair stood on end, messy, like a cloud of smoke.'' Largehearted and enchanted by life's mysteries, Go endeavors to make Cesar feel at home, showing him around and getting him a job. Nevertheless, Cesar, homesick, plans his escape -- until he meets Go-boy's beautiful stepsister. But when Go's enchanted ways darken into something more dangerous, it is Cesar who must help his cousin. Particularly in the middle stretch it feels as though Roesch, who started his career as a story writer, is still learning how to work the stick shift on a long-distance trip, lingering too long in second gear. But he deftly portrays Unalakleet, where ''every yard is littered with skeletons of four-wheelers and snow machines and fishing boats,'' and once he gets the hang of it, he delivers the narrative soundly to its climactic destination. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Say something nasty about a child -- even if it's true, and even if it's your own child -- and there's hell to pay. Geraldine Bretherick, a stay-at-home mom, does that very thing in Sophie Hannah's new psychological-suspense thriller, THE WRONG MOTHER (Penguin, paper, $15), and sure enough, she's dead before the story starts. Hannah also wrote persuasively about modern women who buckle under the stress of motherhood in ''Little Face,'' but characters in that novel felt compassion for the young mother who insisted that someone had switched newborns on her. Here, everyone hates Geraldine and recoils from the sentiments that come to light in her journal. ''There's a 'conspiracy of silence' about what motherhood is really like,'' she wrote, between her fierce and funny rants against manipulative children who torment their exhausted mothers. No wonder the police are easily persuaded that Geraldine killed herself after drowning her daughter. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

LOSING THE NEWS: Future of the News That Feeds Democracy, by Alex S. Jones (Oxford University, $24.95.) Jones affords a glimpse of the void we'll inhabit if the fundamental task of newspapers withers away with the paper they're printed on. INHERENT VICE, by Thomas Pynchon (Penguin Press, $27.95.) Psychedelic yet intellectually rigorous, this is detective fiction that winks at the era of the private eye and foresees the public eye that never blinks. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This spring a young man's -- and woman's -- fancy should turn to vegetables. Judging by the new batch of garden books, we're creeping into a back-to-the-land movement, rather like what happened in the 1970s but without the macrame. Yet -- we'll soon be making plant holders. Again. This being America, we've also found a way to cultivate that competitive edge. What the wine cellar was to the '90s, the root cellar will be to this decade. Same concept, come to think of it: Climate control. Rotation. Status. Expense. By the time you read this, of course, serious gardeners will have sown their oats and tomatoes, but determined neophytes can still catch up. If you aren't yet turned on by vegetables, there are plenty of books designed to do the job. A worthy entry to the garden-porn category is ORGANIC KITCHEN GARDEN (Conran/Octopus, paper, $16.99), by Juliet Roberts, published in association with England's Gardens Illustrated magazine and the BBC. It covers the basics in about 10 pages, including a concise chart for a four-year crop rotation. Some of us will have further questions. Like the magazine, the book doesn't disappoint visually. I have yet to figure out why beetroot is so much more handsome in England than it is here. But frankly, the mature hanging cantaloupe whose weight is supported by a hand-knit net looks like something you might see on the beach at Cannes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

WHEN I FORGOT, by Elina Hirvonen. Translated by Douglas Robinson. (Tin House, paper, $12.95.) In Hirvonen's first novel, a young Finnish woman takes solace from kindred spirits after the events of 9/11 force her to confront her brother's mental illness. NOBODY MOVE, by Denis Johnson. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $23.) Written on deadline as a Playboy magazine serial, Johnson's crime noir is a flinty piece of pop art meant to be instantly understood and enjoyed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The touchy-feely vibe of BRITTEN AND BRULIGHTLY (Metropolitan/Holt, paper, $20), an elegant graphic novel by Hannah Berry, has something to do with its format -- the tall, slim, inviting layout of a picture book -- but just as much to do with the intimate, even claustrophobic, content of its narrative. Set in London during some uneasy period when it rains without end on men in double-breasted suits and women in berets, the story tracks the metaphysical crisis of Fernandez Britten, a melancholy ''private researcher'' who has earned the nickname ''the Heartbreaker'' for confirming the suspicions of clients who hire him to spy on their cheating lovers. After a career of exposing the bestiality of human nature, Britten longs to uncover a higher truth, the kind that elevates the beast and confers nobility on his own sleazy trade. The morose P.I., whose shadow-rimmed eyes and tiny, pinched mouth convey his despondent state, thinks he's found his means of redemption when an unhappy heiress hires him to disprove the police investigation's conclusion that her fiance's death was a suicide. Instead of bringing her satisfaction or solace, Britten discovers a truth so ugly that his instinct is to suppress it. But what kind of hero would that make him? [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

With historical mysteries so thick on the ground, doesn't it sometimes feel like a horse race? (''Going into the backstretch, the Victorians are holding the lead, but the Medievalists are gaining, and heeeere comes the Age of Enlightenment!'') Maybe that's why Frank Tallis has surged to the front of the field riding his dark horse, Vienna in the last days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Opening in the Hapsburg capital at the height of the social season, FATAL LIES (Random House, paper, $15) immediately transports us back to the sophisticated world Tallis captured in ''A Death in Vienna'' and ''Vienna Blood.'' Dr. Max Liebermann (whose psychoanalytic methods give this series its peculiar fascination) and his friend Detective Inspector Oskar Rheinhardt are both at the Detectives' Ball when Rheinhardt is called away to investigate the death of a cadet at St. Florian's military academy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

ABRAHAM LINCOLN, by James M. McPherson. (Oxford University, $12.95.) In an introductory biography of just 79 pages, McPherson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of ''Battle Cry of Freedom,'' delivers a speedy narrative but no superficial treatment. A. LINCOLN: A Biography, by Ronald C. White Jr. (Random House, $35.) White's major one-volume study covers all the bases while adding newly discovered papers and exploring the religious aspects. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Podcast Scheduled to appear this week are Jennifer Baszile, author of ''The Black Girl Next Door''; Motoko Rich with notes from the field; Dalia Sofer on Daniyal Mueenuddin's ''In Other Rooms, Other Wonders''; 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]

'A LONG TIME COMING': The Inspiring, Combative 2008 Campaign and the Historic Election of Barack Obama , by Evan Thomas. (PublicAffairs, $22.95.) A perceptive, smoothly written and generally fair-minded account of both sides in the presidential race. OBAMA'S CHALLENGE: America's Economic Crisis and the Power of a Transformative Presidency, by Robert Kuttner. (Chelsea Green, paper, $14.95.) Kuttner argues that Obama is still ''a work in progress.'' [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

THE WHISPERERS: Private Life in Stalin's Russia, by Orlando Figes. (Picador, $20.) Much of what we know about life under Stalinism comes from the memoirs of intellectual dissidents, but they do not reflect the experience of millions of ordinary Russians who wound up in labor camps. Figes, a professor at Birkbeck College, University of London, used teams of researchers to interview gulag survivors and their families. The result is this ''extraordinary book,'' as our reviewer, Joshua Rubenstein, called it, which documents the ''desperate stories of individuals and families who did what they could to survive'' Stalin's campaigns of intimidation. ABC, by David Plante. (Anchor, $14.95.) This ''quiet, cerebral'' novel about the ''globalization of grief,'' as Siddhartha Deb wrote in the Book Review, concerns a family whose son died in a freak accident. The father's obsession with a piece of paper found at the scene, written in what he learns is Sanskrit, propels him into a journey to discover the language's origins, during which he meets other grieving parents. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

If there's one book that art-comics enthusiasts would be happiest to find in their stockings this year, it's probably KRAMERS ERGOT 7 (Buenaventura, $125), except for the small matter that it's bigger than an entire hearth. This is one of the grandest English-language comics artifacts ever produced -- a mammoth hardcover anthology, 16 by 21 inches, of new stories by several dozen notable cartoonists, including Daniel Clowes, Seth, Gabrielle Bell, Kevin Huizenga, Sammy Harkham (who also edited the book) and the ''Simpsons'' creator Matt Groening. Like the early-20th-century broadsheet newspaper comics pages that inspired it, ''Kramers Ergot'' occupies its readers' entire visual field, and most of its contributors have some fun with its dimensions, cramming the page with tiny details or opening it up for apocalyptically huge vistas. The cleverest gesture comes from Chris Ware, whose two-page contribution is built around a cartoon of a sleeping baby printed at the child's actual size. Few cartoonists of the moment are weirder or more original than Yuichi Yokoyama -- his work obsessively diagrams architecture and design, and just barely clings to shreds of narrative. TRAVEL (PictureBox, paper, $19.95) is remarkably entertaining, given that it's a wordless, nearly 200-page account of an uneventful train voyage. Its first quarter concerns three travelers looking for their seats, and the rest is pretty much what they see out the window as their train passes across Japan, zooming by the disturbing geometries of nature and cities. (The human characters are expressionless glyphs, differentiated only by clothing and hairstyles.) Any individual panel from the book is likely to look almost completely abstract, and the joke of Yokoyama's endnotes is that he's struggling to interpret his own images, too: ''It seems slightly strange that they would sit so close together in an empty train car.'' [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

GIRL BOY GIRL How I Became JT LeRoy. By Savannah Knoop. Seven Stories, paper, $17.95. A handful of impostors and frauds have given memoir a bad rap recently. And Knoop doesn't inspire much confidence in the genre with a preface that includes this disclaimer: ''Any factual errors are unintentional.'' Well, as long as she's upfront about it. In 2006, The New York Times revealed that the homeless adolescent prostitute turned novelist JT LeRoy (beloved by Tatum O'Neal, Courtney Love and other celebrities known for their sound judgment) never really existed. A woman named Laura Albert was the actual author. The person who had appeared publicly as LeRoy for six years -- decked out in a goofy wig and sunglasses -- was Albert's sister-in-law, Knoop, a college dropout who was busing tables before taking on the role. The reader longs to know what Knoop's friends and family thought of this arrangement, and what happened after the truth came out. But she offers little detail about the non-JT parts of her life in ''Girl Boy Girl'' and spends the bulk of her time chronicling the celebrities she fooled and the things they ate together. (Oysters Rockefeller with Gus Van Sant! Chocolate chip pancakes at Carrie Fisher's house!) She can't seem to decide whether she's a willing participant or a hapless victim, so she paints Albert as both co-conspirator and manipulative mastermind. Knoop's love of fashion provides a leitmotif and ultimately turns into a career. If this were an ''E! True Hollywood Story,'' the final minutes would have shots of her sketching dresses while a voice-over informed us that she'd finally found her calling. This sort of pat ending is hardly ever satisfying, but the woman who became notorious for portraying the surface level of LeRoy is willing to show us only so much of herself. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

THE WORLD IS WHAT IT IS: The Authorized Biography of V. S. Naipaul, by Patrick French. (Knopf, $30.) A monument truly worthy of its subject, elucidating the enduring but painfully asymmetrical love triangle at the core of Naipaul's life and work. WHAT CAN I DO WHEN EVERYTHING'S ON FIRE?, by Antonio Lobo Antunes. Translated by Gregory Rabassa. (Norton, paper, $19.95.) A novel about life as the son of a downtrodden Lisbon drag queen. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

2666, by Roberto Bolano. Translated by Natasha Wimmer. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, cloth and paper, $30.) The five autonomous sections of this posthumously published novel interlock to form an astonishing whole, a capstone to Bolano's vaulting ambition. FACTORY GIRLS: From Village to City in a Changing China , by Leslie T. Chang. (Spiegel & Grau, $26.) Chang's engrossing account delves deeply into the lives of young migrant workers in southern China. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

THE WIDOWS OF EASTWICK, by John Updike. (Knopf, $24.95.) In this ingenious sequel to ''The Witches of Eastwick,'' the three title characters, old ladies now, renew their sisterhood, return to their old hometown and contrive to atone for past crimes. HUMAN DARK WITH SUGAR, by Brenda Shaughnessy. (Copper Canyon, paper, $15.) In her second book of poems, Shaughnessy's spritzy, brainy humor gives life to a deadly serious personal agenda. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Podcast: Scheduled to appear this week are the cartoonist Jules Feiffer; James M. McPherson, author of ''Tried by War''; and Dwight Garner with best-seller news, along with news from The Times's Culture desk. 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]

This week, Claire Messud reviews Alison Light's ''Mrs. Woolf and the Servants,'' a study of Virginia Woolf's often fraught relationship with the cooks and cleaners who helped make her (and her husband's) literary work possible. Woolf said that a woman needs a room of her own in order to write fiction; does she also need someone to clean it? ''Let's put it another, even less correct, way,'' Messud, whose most recent novel is ''The Emperor's Children,'' wrote in an e-mail message. ''Everyone needs a wife. For heaven's sake, a stay-at-home mum needs a wife.'' Messud, who lives in Cambridge, Mass., with her husband, the critic James Wood, and their two children, hints at a certain level of productive chaos in her own literary household: ''The hovering domestic chores are, experience suggests, a greater burden for women than for men (it seems, somehow, that the men can more often forget about toilet paper and light bulbs); but I think it was Rebecca West who said that a house uncleaned is better than a life unlived. You've got to make choices at some point. About housecleaning and about answering e-mails or the phone, and ultimately about bigger things, too.'' Messud's review appears in this issue. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Like his novels about the Old West, Larry McMurtry's memoir ''Books'' is an elegy for a disappearing way of life. For McMurtry, selling used books was a calling, one that attracted eccentric personalities (like the store owner who hid his best books in paper sacks) and demanded esoteric knowledge, ''near to alchemy,'' of ''editions, variants, points, bindings, provenance, cost codes.'' McMurtry especially relishes the tactile aspects of the trade most threatened by the Internet. ''What fun is there in clicking,'' he asks, ''compared to the pleasure of handling a fine copy of a rare book?'' Indeed, the state of the art in used-book selling these days seems to be less about connoisseurship than about database management. With the help of software tools, so-called megalisters stock millions of books and sell tens of thousands a week through Amazon, AbeBooks and other online marketplaces. Some sellers don't even own their wares. They just copy other sellers' lists and then buy the books as necessary, pocketing the markup (though none acknowledge the practice, since it is banned on most commercial sites). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

AUGUST By Gerard Woodward. Norton, paper, $14.95. It doesn't seem possible Woodward would allow anything bad to happen to the affable members of this slightly eccentric English family, whose lives he details over the course of 15 years. That the years happen to be 1955 through 1970 offers a clue, though, that at least a few of them are going to have trouble adapting to a world where solid British manners are being tested by modernity. A good-natured art teacher named Aldous Jones looks forward each year to the month when he, his wife and children can vacation in the Welsh countryside, their arrival ''a cataloging and celebration of sameness'' that anchors them spiritually. But when his son Janus -- an aptly named piano prodigy who can't keep his creative and destructive halves in balance -- begins to fall apart, the aftershock sends another family member seeking chemical comfort, leaving Aldous to wonder whether ''the territory of madness is entered by a doorway of crystallized normality.'' Some readers may already know what becomes of the Jones family, as this novel is the first in a trilogy whose American publisher strangely saw fit to release the second and third volumes, ''I'll Go to Bed at Noon'' and ''A Curious Earth,'' before this one. No matter. What ultimately becomes of the Jones family may not be a mystery, but how it all happens is the stuff of great, if sad, suspense. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Podcast: Scheduled to appear this week are Jess Winfield, the author of ''My Name Is Will''; Charles McGrath on Miranda Seymour's memoir, ''Thrumpton Hall''; Rachel Donadio with notes from the field; and Dwight Garner 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]

Travel is often a means of escape, and this year's travel books offer plenty of it. Failed relationships, dead-end jobs and other disappointments infest the current crop like bedbugs in a youth hostel, driving their authors around the globe in search of transformation. The seekers range from bored young drifters to anxiety-stricken middle-agers, motivated by the quixotic hope that cutting loose will stimulate the mind and heal the soul. ''I was ready for Paris,'' Bryce Corbett announces at the beginning of A TOWN LIKE PARIS: Falling in Love in the City of Light (Broadway, paper, $12.95). ''Ready for a change of scene and the shedding of some emotional baggage.'' After a breakup with a longtime girlfriend, the 28-year-old Australian quits his job at Sky News in London and boards the Eurostar for a new life. What follows is a refreshing variation on a shopworn theme: the Anglophone at large in the French capital, coping with the language barrier, inaccessible Gallic women and bad plumbing. Corbett finds a job he isn't ''qualified for, much less interested in,'' lands a hideously furnished flat in the Marais and joins a circle of partygoing fellow expatriates, whom he annoyingly calls the ''Paris Posse.'' It's not quite ''A Moveable Feast,'' and the tone can be smugly self-satisfied, but Corbett's sharp observations lend the tale a dash of elan. Lamenting the decline of Shakespeare and Company into a Left Bank tourist trap, he notes that its ''literary credibility'' has ''long since been replaced by the distinct aroma of upper-middle-class America -- a mixture of Snapple Ice Tea, sweaty Teva sandals and Tommy Hilfiger cologne.'' When Corbett abandons his quest for a French girlfriend and falls in love with an Australian nightclub entertainer he calls ''the Showgirl,'' you can't help wishing him bonne chance. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]