A young American-educated Russian with an ill-gotten fortune waits to return to the United States in this darkly comic novel.

In her effectively elliptical novel, McDermott continues to scrutinize the lives of Irish Catholics on Long Island.

In Pynchon's globe-trotting tale, set (mostly) on the eve of World War I, anarchic Americans collide with quasi-psychic European hedonists and a crew of boyish balloonists, anticipating the shocks to come.

Ali's second novel revolves around the inhabitants of a southern Portuguese village.

Several characters from Jones's first story collection return in this one, set mostly in Washington, D.C.

In this parablelike novel, a commercial "nomenclature consultant" is hired to name a Midwestern town, and his task turns into an exploration of the corruption of language.

A metaphysical mystery starring Arthur (Conan Doyle), spiritual detective.

Poems inspired by the underworld of myth confront our most intractable fears.

A first novel set in an unidentified West African land; its hero finds himself corrupted by contagious violence.

The magic of being a 13-year-old boy and exploring the world intersects, eventually, with the trials of real life.

A tale of 18th-century sisters, one with a dream to bridge the East River.

A hefty, brilliant volume that shows Ginsberg (1926-97) to be not only a legendary protest writer but also a lyric poet preoccupied with passion, place and fate.

The themes of Hempel's unsettling and blackly funny vignettes — mortality, desire and fear of human connection — are threaded with only the slenderest hopes of redemption.

Stories of understated realism centered on the charged relations between fathers and sons, drifters or workers.

In Tyler's new novel, two families — one recently arrived Iranian-American, the other all-American — begin an unlikely friendship after both adopt Korean babies.

A Chinese artist is a guest of a dysfunctional Beverly Hills family in this debut novel of global misunderstanding.

A Soviet artist sacrifices his talent for the party in this first novel.

After years underground, '70's radicals who are haunted by the past and insecure in the present reunite and face their crime's consequences.

This novel's heroine tries to help her brother after a mysterious truck crash leaves him with a rare form of amnesia.

The shocks of 9/11 disrupt the privileged lives of a group of young urban media types in this nimble, satirically chiding novel.

A nameless protagonist grapples with aging, physical decline and impending death in this slender, elegant novel.

In this novel, one of Just's best, a small-time American spy uneasily revisits his earlier life after his French wife is murdered.

McGuane's portraits of American manhood have the capacity to astonish.

A rich novel of the Arab experience, full of pain but tempered by hope.

In this debut novel, two Jewish families seek material success and social acceptance across the decades of the 20th century.

A novel about sisters caught in the horrors of the Biafran War.

A coherent overview of Oates's work, mixing classic with new stories.

This novel's hero, a ghost, looks back ruefully on his suicide and longs to help a woman survive her own despair.

The poised story, set in northern India, of disparate characters united by the toxic legacy of colonialism.

A cancer researcher's dubious finding sets off a tidal wave that carries many people away.

Old grievances drive the plot of this novel, set in a castle and a prison. Egan deftly weaves threads of sordid realism and John Fowles-like magic.

The Pinochet years haunt these stories by a Chilean writer who died in 2003.

Frank Bascombe, the mundane hero of Ford's earlier novels "The Sportswriter" and "Independence Day," finds himself afflicted with intimations of mortality.

In this haunting love story, the widow of a celebrated writer takes up arms against a murderous stalker in this world and a blood-hungry beast in the world beyond.

Poetry of politics and diversity, suffused with humor.

The fictional tale of a Raj orphan whose acronymic nickname (from "Failed in London, Try Hong Kong") tells only part of the story.

An Edinburgh road-rage incident sets off a string of murders in this deft thriller.

A structurally experimental road-trip novel with a road like a Möbius strip.

In this new novel from the French author, a radical libertine becomes the progenitor of a line of clones.

A man and his son travel across a post-apocalyptic landscape in this terrifying parable.

A white farm family is the foreground of this novel; behind it, the sins of South Africa.

A motherless waif whose life has been shaped by road trips with her father joins a circle of students around a charismatic teacher with a tragic secret.

Motifs from Gordon's life, particularly the pain of childhood grief, resurface throughout this collection.

Kinnell's first collection of new poems in more than a decade revisits themes of marriage, friendship and death, with long, loose lines reminiscent of Whitman.

Before dying at Auschwitz in 1942, Némirovsky wrote these two exquisitely shaped novellas about France in defeat. But the manuscripts came to light only in the late '90s.

Updike's latest novel knits together preoccupations that have been with him for some 50 years — sex, death, religion — as an American high school boy, half-Irish, half-Egyptian, is intoxicated by Islamic radicalism.

A Muslim widow's love for an agnostic Scottish Islamic scholar allows her to nourish a hope for happiness.

A contemporary master of the short story leavens familial angst with mordant humor in her fifth collection in 20 years.

A teenage girl is either a victim or a false accuser in this dark-humored novel of psychoanalysis and prep school angst.

This novel's hero journeys to return a woman's body to her family in a remote former Soviet Republic.

Antrim's memoir reckons with his complicated grief at the death of his emotionally volatile, alcoholic mother.

Parting ways with fellow neocons, Fukuyama censures their blunders and those of the Bush administration, and offers advice for the future.

The first full biography of the atom bomb's father -- rich in new revelations.

Nasaw's colorful biography reveals a far from conventional capitalist.

The third volume, remarkable for its breadth and detail, in the Pulitzer Prize-winning author's history of the life and times of Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement.

A fond reckoning of her marriages, affairs, friendships and movies.

From the mean streets to salvation by football: a schoolboy's story.

A history of this country's brutal Westward expansion, with Kit Carson at its center.

A memoir of Hampl's quest for art with transcendent power.

A Pulitzer Prize winner whose previous subjects have included Vince Lombardi and Bill Clinton turns to baseball's first Latino superstar.

Magazine articles with a moral framework.

An unlikely page-turner about a 17th-century metaphysical duel, fought in deceit and intrigue, that continues to this day.

Essays by the author of "The Corrections" focus on formative experiences of his youth.

A charismatic but troubled traveler seeks a balance of pleasure and devotion — and finds romance.

With affection, respect and humor, a daughter tries to make sense of the demons her father brought home from the Vietcong's subterranean labyrinth.

A comprehensive account, by a veteran Pentagon correspondent for The Washington Post, of how a bungled occupation fed a ballooning insurgency.

A global tour of the evidence, with scientists the author meets along the way doing most of the talking.

The man behind "Madame Bovary" is brought to life as a romantic and a realist, a dreamer and a debunker.

A lesbian comes to terms with the life and death of her closeted gay father in this graphic memoir.

How John Snow answered the riddle of cholera in 1854.

A historian's account of the horrors spawned by the infamous storm, many of them man-made.

The Times columnist indicts the Bush administration's approach to message management.

A tour of Western philosophy and its efforts to understand that sought-after yet most elusive of states.

The former New Yorker fiction editor's life-altering culinary apprenticeship at Babbo and beyond.

The Nobel laureate tells her life story, from growing up in pre-revolutionary Iran to taking on the authorities as a foremost defender of human rights.

A biography of the complex woman who, as James Tiptree Jr., found in science fiction the perfect genre for telling her own story.

A meticulous portrait of the pioneering researcher whose years of observing chimpanzees changed the way we see our fellow primates.

Mann's biography takes some complicated sexual algebra into account.

She was a muse to artists like Man Ray, and an artist herself, photographing the horror of war; that work, though, was ultimately her undoing.

How a few men mounted a catastrophic assault on America, even as another group of men and women tried desperately to stop it.

Grappling with the Holocaust in both its personal and geopolitical dimensions, Mendelsohn reconstructs the story of his great-uncle's family.

Philbrick's vivid account of the earnest band of English men and women known as America's founders offers perspectives of both the Pilgrims and the Indians.

A rich portrait of the 19th-century Protestant reformer renowned for his preaching — and for an adultery scandal.

Pollan embarks on four separate eating adventures, each of which begins at the very beginning — in the soil — and ends with a cooked, finished meal.

The New Yorker's Beijing correspondent describes a country in constant motion and reveals its historical underpinning.

The author recounts his walk across Afghanistan, in the dead of winter.

The one-sided friendship of a onetime Israeli immigrant and a onetime Palestinian prisoner.

An M.I.T. professor seeks to explain the fundamental workings of the universe by equating it with a new device called a quantum computer.

Weber suggests that the queen miscalculated in dressing to project an image of power.

How to read with writerly sensitivity, with reference to the masters.

The story of the demise of Reconstruction in Mississippi, retold in all its terrible gore.

An artful journalist cross-dresses to learn otherwise unavailable truths.

Part 3 of the "Bush at War" cycle, by the longtime Washington Post reporter and editor, describes the inept conduct of the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Jentz's enraging account of her search for a maniac who viciously attacked her with an ax in 1977.

A disinherited member of the Sweet'N Low clan digs up dirt.

The struggle of ancient societies to define themselves as Western influences encroach.

Writing after a near-fatal car crash, the Australian art critic describes his formative years and the evolution of his craft.

On-the-job portraits of men who drive big transport machines.

Personalities from Julia Child to Emeril Lagasse drive this lively history of the postwar revolution in American gastronomy.

A panoramic moral analysis of an age of military-industrial slaughter.

What happened to those who stayed put in the 1930s while the very earth itself blew away.