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''True Life,'' a collection of verse by the Polish poet Adam Zagajewski, arrives in English translation almost exactly two years after his death. TRUE LIFE, by Adam Zagajewski. Translated by [...]

KEATSA Brief Life in Nine Poems and One EpitaphBy Lucasta Miller Early in her book about John Keats, Lucasta Miller calls Lord Byron an ''aristocratic megastar.'' That funny epithet is [...]

BLIND SPOTBy Teju ColeIllustrated. 332 pp. Random House. $40. Teju Cole has composed a lyrical essay in photographs paired with texts, with each set identified by its locale, including -- [...]

SAVE ROOM FOR PIEFood Songs and Chewy RuminationsBy Roy Blount Jr.279 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $26. ''Comedy is music,'' Sid Caesar wrote in his autobiography. The great comic follows [...]

THE RETROSPECTIVE By A. B. Yehoshua Translated by Stuart Schoffman 336 pp. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $26. Narrative imagination is its own thing: the muscular yet uncanny gift of the storyteller. [...]

CAIN By Jose Saramago. Translated by Margaret Jull Costa 159 pp. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $24. God is a petulant, small-minded tyrant in Jose Saramago's final novel. Its protagonist, Cain, is [...]

TEACH US TO SIT STILL A Skeptic's Search for Health and Healing By Tim Parks Illustrated. 322 pp. Rodale. $25.99. The appeal of conversion stories often depends on descriptions of [...]

THE BOOK IN THE RENAISSANCE By Andrew Pettegree Illustrated. 421 pp. Yale University Press. $40 ''The humanist mythology of print.'' With this phrase the British scholar Andrew Pettegree indicates the [...]

WIDE AWAKE A Memoir of Insomnia By Patricia Morrisroe 276 pp. Spiegel & Grau. $25 Sleep is a mystery. No one is sure why we sleep, how it evolved or [...]

COWBOYS FULL The Story of Poker By James McManus Illustrated. 516 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $30 Richard Nixon played poker well. His winnings in the Navy (there is no [...]

ROAD DOGS By Elmore Leonard 262 pp. William Morrow/HarperCollins Publishers. $26.99 The virtuoso storyteller Elmore Leonard has been rightly praised for his technique: hot, fast narrative, tasty dialogue, strokes of [...]

WHILE THEY SLEPT An Inquiry Into the Murder of a Family. By Kathryn Harrison. 290 pp. Random House. $25. The violations that destroy human lives, or maim them, seem to [...]

SOLDIER'S HEART Peace and War at West Point. By Elizabeth D. Samet. 259 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $23. In 2003, when Gen. Colin Powell, then the secretary of state, [...]

DANCING IN THE STREETS A History of Collective Joy. By Barbara Ehrenreich. 320 pp. Metropolitan Books/ Henry Holt & Company. $26. Take me out with the crowd,'' goes the old [...]

The Year of Magical Thinking By Joan Didion. 227 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $23.95. ''O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall / Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap [...]

WHAT EVERY PERSON SHOULD KNOW ABOUT WAR By Chris Hedges. 175 pp. New York: Free Press. Paper, $11. HERE is a noble, flawed effort to deepen our American understanding of [...]

POEMS SEVEN New and Complete Poetry. By Alan Dugan. 422 pp. New York: Seven Stories Press. $35. REAT lyric poetry can begin not only in celebration or ec-stasy -- it [...]

DANTE By R. W. B. Lewis. 205 pp. New York: Lipper / Viking. $19.95. GENIUS is enigmatic: in the English language, this truism reinforced by the bland, oval face of [...]

ROBERT PINSKY Readers and reviewers have made Thom Gunn's The Man With Night Sweats one of the most admired poetry books of recent years. Affirming that response, the judges for [...]

The Happy Man The judges for the Lenore Marshall Prize selected Donald Hall's The Happy Man unanimously, from among nearly 200 books published in 1986. This book is the ninth [...]