Neurotic, demanding ghosts haunt a British clairvoyant in this darkly comic novel.

A neo-Nazi engages a Jewish human rights leader in this morally concerned novel, asking for help in his effort to repent.

This urbane poetry survived the age of Ginsberg, Lowell and Plath.

A muscular historical novel in which the Irish erect the Empire State Building in a cheerfully corrupt New York.

A psychoanalyst is unhappy but distant until Greek-tragedy things start happening in this novel by an ace student of sexual violation.

A novel, mostly in stories, of Middle European fanaticism and resistance to it in the World War II period.

This keen observer of the surface of life now slows down for an occasional epiphany.

In this sixth volume of the epic series, the Dark Lord, Voldemort, is wreaking havoc throughout England and Harry, now 16, is more isolated than ever.

Lipsyte's antihero, a loser but unbowed, asserts in endless letters to his alumni magazine that all the others are losers too.

Many seek fame in this rendering of America's criminal landscape in the 1930's; the title character, a killer lawman, achieves it.

A shining miscellany peopled by characters in close touch with childhood.

The stories concern a family whose members couldn't lose each other if they tried.

This postmodern, posteverything, fresh and funny novel by a young writer seems to develop a nonironic social conscience.

Two characters alternate in this dreamish novel: a boy fleeing an Oedipal prophecy and a witless old man who can talk to cats.

A novel starring a brat named Bret Easton Ellis, who knows everybody and has more fun than ever happens to real people.

Unhappy Pakistani exiles in a cold, hard Britain populate this intricate novel.

Characters in this absorbing novel are transformed by distress and destruction as Sherman marches to the sea in 1864.

A strange and luminous novel whose elderly hero pays for sex but finds love.

Half a century's work, from archaic allegories to unpointed lyrics to secular prophecy and wisdom verses.

This novel peers into the void left by a woman's sudden absence.

In his new novel, Kirn invents a religion whose believers hit the road to recruit.

In this novel an ancient family's sins are visited on its offspring, who repeat them.

This second collection conjures a postmodern landscape where folk knowledge and superstitions arrange into oddly moving litanies.

This bold novel imagines a school where clones are trained for a terrible destiny.

Women grieve, men fight in this hard-boiled Texas noir crime novel.

The author of ''White Teeth'' pounces on a place like Harvard in a cultural-politics comedy.

Politics and World War II, mediated by a major poet.

A ceremonial drum is magically linked to children and death in Erdrich's latest novel set among the Ojibwa.

When the fathers in the Rust Belt town of this novel abandon it en masse, their sons take over.

A scholarship girl at a nifty prep school is thrust into a world of privilege in this novel.

This novel traces a day off in the life of an English neurosurgeon who comes face to face with senseless violence.

Banville's new novel, which won this year's Man Booker Prize, concerns an aging art critic mourning his wife's recent death - and his blighted life.

An Australian novel so large in its concept of fiction's grasp on the world it takes seven narrators just to tell it.

Beauty loses out as Kashmir and Rushdie's characters who live there turn brutal.

The fastidious and the primal join in poems concerned with man as maker.

Crippled at 60 in a car-bike accident, instructed willy-nilly by a know-it-all female novelist, Coetzee's hero studies the diminished life.

A whodunit tragicomedy by Albania's pre-eminent novelist, about a loyal Communist who dies before succeeding to power in that unlucky land.

A bluntly erotic novel whose narrator's budding sexuality gets her driven from home.

A novel that ruminates on beauty and cruelty, told by a former Paris model now sick and poor.

A study of the unpredictable, by the chief art critic of The Times.

A memoir of a good man murdered for his decency.

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

The Times's twice-a-week Op-Ed columnist for the last decade expands her observations on the gender situation, from the Y chromosome up.

Though obviously beaten, the Germans wouldn't give up; an experienced journalist pursues the apparent paradox.

The New Yorker reporter reviews the pride and ignorance he blames for the war.

Spitz's broad, incisive chronicle breathes new life into the familiar story of the Liverpool boys who conquered the entertainment world.

A Times correspondent tells how a Minnesota lawyer became the author of the Roe v. Wade decision.

A heavyweight chronicle of good's symbolic clash with evil in the ring.

The colorful master of graft, our greatest.

Smart, lively essays on 43 poems, written without ego for a popular audience.

How the struggle availed, especially when black Haitian armies beat white French and British ones.

In "Guns, Germs, and Steel" (1997), Diamond speculated on how the world reached its present pecking order of nations; his latest book examines geographic and environmental reasons some societies have fallen apart.

A meticulous dissection of the rise and fall of Enron by a correspondent for The New York Times.

An exploration at length of de Kooning's life and work and their role in art's midcentury upheaval.

This exhaustive biography surrounds Cooke in the overlapping worlds of gospel, the civil rights movement and rock 'n' roll.

The stranger-than-fiction life story of the distinguished stage and screen director.

An intellectual autobiography: what Mishra has learned from the Buddha's legacy.

This sweeping portrait of pre-Columbian civilization argues that it was far more populous and sophisticated than previously thought.

A maverick scholar and a journalist apply economic thinking to everything from sumo wrestlers who cheat to legalized abortion and the falling crime rate.

A chronicle of the weird stuff that happens to what we discard.

Walls and her three sibs, dragged all over the country by damaged parents, thought it a glorious adventure. Tough kids.

A wise account of Benjamin Franklin's diplomatic brilliance, revealed in Paris at 70.

How a very busy man and a staff of busy assistants managed to turn out six volumes in 1948-54.

A life of the self-taught Swiss who proclaimed the noble savage and denounced conventional social distinctions.

The career of a public intellectual, ambassador and aphorist.

A narrative that captures New York City's about-face from rot to rehab.

Confessions, opinions and other people's secrets animate these missives from a fine poet.

In an era before the relentless good cheer and glad-handing of modern politicians, Lincoln passed through shadows to triumph.

The adventures of Caravaggio's "Taking of Christ," painted in 1602, rediscovered by scholar-hunters in 1990.

Clemens (born in 1973) recalls growing up working-class white in a black city losing both people and jobs.

A huge, meticulously researched biography that paints Chairman Mao in authentic Hitler-Stalin 20th-century hues.

A wise and lively biography of an American paradox, always lively, rarely wise.

The final volume of a huge, careful study of a 20th-century wizard.

A riveting and bitterly candid memoir by a seminal African-American scholar, raised and educated in an era of stifling race prejudice.

The art critic of The New Republic explores heroic Abstract Expressionism and its cool, empirical successors in New York.

An Arabic-speaking reporter on life in the Red Zone, outside American control.

A coming-of-age memoir by a writer so skillful his account of his sufferings as a rich kid never becomes insufferable.

A memoir of a complicated childhood by a former executive editor of The Times.

A skilled reconstruction by writers of The Times.

The bold writer and impostor Lev Nussimbaum (Kurban Said) (Essad Bey) and his lives from 1905 to 1942.

De Waal addresses the similarities between humans and their closest relatives, bonobos and chimpanzees.

An inquiry into why the condition of Europe is so much better than anyone would have dared hope in 1945.

Giuliani seen as the Machiavellian prophet of an alternative urban policy and as an eligible president.

A clear, readable and monumental narrative work of scholarship, full of rich detail.

A vibrant retelling of Roosevelt's postelection expedition through the Rio da Dúvida; what was supposed to be a well-provisioned safari became instead a survey of an uncharted capillary of the Amazon.

A lively work that skewers Washington's pretensions and admires citizen soldiers.

A diligent, cheerful account of efforts to learn whether science can show that there is (or isn't) life after death.

An assessment of Bill Clinton's performance in the White House; by a reporter for The Washington Post.

A memoir by the Israeli novelist, mourning the death of his mother long ago and the demise of the socialist Zion in his own time.

An elegant, incisive study of Lincoln through his relationships with his former political rivals turned cabinet members.

As an only child abandoned by his father, the author found an adoptive family in a Long Island bar (now defunct).

Gimlette explores the provincial psyche by journeying through the barren regions whose chief resource, fish, has departed.

How 38 people, mostly black, were convicted of grave drug charges on virtually no evidence but the word of a single cop.

A biography of the brilliant early feminist.

The fate of Athens, the superpower of its day, after it tried to export its political system to the rest of the Greek world.

From a Harvard physicist, advanced cosmological theories for lay folk who are a bit baffled by the idea of 10 dimensions.

Cohen thoughtfully tracks girls' boxing till she herself is converted to pugilism.

The prolific, industrious creator of Jeeves and oh so many dear others.

The New York Times columnist maps the next phase of globalization as technological forces level the world's economic playing field.

A powerful, persuasive account of the crisis of mortality after the sudden death of the author's husband.