Between the Lines

Pantheon

The Corpse Walker is a compilation of twenty-seven oral histories that opens a window onto the lives of ordinary, often outcast, Chinese men and women. Author Liao Yiwu (one of the best-known writers in China because he is also one of the most censored) chose his subjects from the bottom of Chinese society: people for whom the “new” China—the China of economic growth and globalization—-is no more beneficial than the old. By asking challenging questions with respect and empathy, he manages to get his subjects to talk openly about their lives. Liao crafted the interviews with sensitivity and patience, working both from notes and from his own memory of these remarkable conversations. The result is a revealing portrait of a people, a time, and a place we might otherwise have never known. Liao Yiwu is a poet, novelist, and screenwriter. In 1989, he published an epic poem, “Massacre,” that condemned the killings in Tiananmen Square and for which he spent four years in prison. In 2003, he received a Human Rights Watch Hellman-Hammett Grant, and in 2007, he received a Freedom to Write Award from the Independent Chinese PEN Center. Translator Yen Huang is a writer and freelance journalist whose articles and translations have appeared in The Wall Street Journal Asia, the Chicago Tribune, the South China Morning Post, The Christian Science Monitor, and The Paris Review.

Harcourt Books

Life of Pi, winner of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction, became an international bestseller since its first publication in 2002. Pi Patel, the son of a zookeeper, has an encyclopedic knowledge of animal behavior and a fervent love of stories. When Pi is sixteen, his family emigrates from India to North America aboard a Japanese cargo ship, along with their zoo animals bound for new homes. The ship sinks. Pi finds himself alone in a lifeboat, his only companions a hyena, an orangutan, a wounded zebra, and a 450-pound Bengal tiger. Soon the tiger has dispatched all but Pi, whose fear, knowledge, and cunning allow him to coexist with the tiger for 227 days lost at sea. In 2005 an international competition was held to find the perfect artist to illustrate Yann Martel’s prize—winning novel. From thousands of entrants, Croatian artist Tomislav Torjanac was chosen. This lavishly produced edition features forty of Torjanac’s four-color illustrations, bringing Life of Pi to life.

Harper Collins

Louise Erdrich’s new novel centers on a compelling mystery. The unsolved murder of a farm family haunts the small, white, off-reservation town of Pluto, North Dakota. The vengeance exacted for this crime and the subsequent distortions of truth transform the lives of Ojibwe living on the nearby reservation and shape the passions of both communities for the next generation. The descendants of Ojibwe and white intermarry, their lives intertwine; only the youngest generation, of mixed blood, remains unaware of the role the past continues to play in their lives. Erdrich’s narrators unravel the stories of different generations and families in this corner of North Dakota. Bound by love, torn by history, the two communities’ collective stories finally come together in a wrenching truth revealed in the novel’s final pages. Louise Erdrich is the author of twelve novels as well as volumes of poetry, children’s books, and a memoir of early motherhood. Her novel Love Medicine won the National Book Critics Circle Award.

St. Martin’s Press

In 1939 Tokyo, two orphaned brothers are growing up with their grandparents, who inspire them to dream of a future firmly rooted in tradition. The older boy, Hiroshi, shows unusual skill at the national obsession of sumo wrestling, while Kenji is fascinated by the art of creating hard-carved masks for actors in the Noh theater. Across town, a renowned sumo master, Sho Tanaka, lives with his wife and their two young daughters: the delicate, daydreaming Aki and her independent sister, Haru. Life seems full of promise as Kenji begins an apprenticeship with the most famous mask-maker in Japan and Hiroshi receives an invitation to train with Tanaka. But then Pearl Harbor changes everything. As the ripples of war spread to both families’ quiet neighborhoods, all of the generations must put their dreams on hold—-and then find their way in a new Japan.

Gail Tsukiyama is a lecturer in Creative Writing at San Francisco State University, as well as a freelance book reviewer for the San Francisco Chronicle.

Random House

The vivid voices that speak from these pages are not those of historians or scholars. They are the voices of ordinary men and women who experienced — and helped to win — the most devastating war in history, in which between 50 and 60 million lives were lost. Focusing on citizens of four towns, The War follows more than forty people from 1941 to 1945. Woven largely from their memories, the narrative unfolds month by bloody month, with the outcome always in doubt. All the iconic events are here, from Pearl Harbor to the liberation of the concentration camps, but we also move among prisoners of war and Japanese American internees, defense workers and schoolchildren, and families who struggled simply to stay together while their men shipped off to Europe, the Pacific, and North Africa.

Ken Burns, producer and director of the film series The War, founded his own documentary company, Florentine Films, in 1976. His films include Jazz, Baseball, and The Civil War, which was the highest-rated series in the history of American public television. His work has won numerous prizes, including the Emmy and Peabody Awards, and two Academy Award nominations.

Shaye Areheart Books

Alice Hoffman’s stunningly original story follows three women in love with the wrong men. Headstrong Madeline Heller finds herself hopelessly attracted to her sister’s fiancé…Frieda Lewis, a doctor’s daughter who has run off to London, becomes the muse of an ill-fate rock start… and beautiful, reckless Bryn Evans is set to marry an Englishman while she’s secretly obsessed with her ex-husband, a dangerous and love-besotted New Yorker. At the heart of the novel is Lucy Green, who blames herself for a tragic accident she witnessed at the age of twelve in the same London hotel where the others have found themselves. Lucy has spent four decades searching out the Third Angel, the angel on Earth who will renew her faith. Evoking the worlds of Notting Hill, Kings Road, and Kensington while moving back and forth in time from the 90s, to the 60s, and then to the 50s, The Third Angel charts the unique, alchemical nature of love. Alice Hoffman is the author of nineteen novels, two books of short stories, and eight books for children and young adults. Her work has been published in more than twenty translations and in more than one hundred foreign editions.

Farrar, Strauss and Giroux

So, what do you do?” Whenever people asked him, Eric Cash used to have a dozen answers. Artist, actor, screenwriter … But now he’s thirty-five years old and he’s still living on the Lower East Side, still in the restaurant business, still serving the people he wanted to be. What does Eric do? He manages. Not like Ike Marcus. Ike was young, good-looking, people liked him. Ask him what he did, he wouldn’t say tending bar. He was going places—until two street kids stepped up to him and Eric one night and pulled a gun. At least, that’s Eric’s version. In Lush Life, Richard Price tears the shiny veneer off the “new” New York to show us the hidden cracks, the underground networks of control and violence beneath the glamour. Lush Life is an Xray of the street in the age of no broken windows and “quality of life” squads, from a writer whose “tough, gritty brand of social realism … reads like a movie in prose” (Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times). Richard Price is the author of seven novels, including Clockers, Freedomland, and Samaritan. He won a 2007 Edgar Award for his writing on the HBO series The Wire.

Farrar, Strauss & Giroux

In the years between World War II, American popular culture as we know it was first created—in the pulpy, boldly illustrated pages of comic books. No sooner had this new culture emerged than it was beaten down by church groups, community bluestockings, and a McCarthyish Congress—only to resurface with a crooked smile on its face in Mad magazine. The story of the rise and fall of those comic books has never been fully told—until The Ten-Cent Plague. David Hajdu’s new book opens up the lost world of comic books, its creativity, irreverence, and suspicion of authority. When we picture the 1950s, we hear the sound of early rock and roll. The Ten-Cent Plague shows how—years before music—comics brought on a clash between children and their parents, between prewar and postwar standards. Created by outsiders from the tenements, garish and often shocking comics spoke to young people and provided the guardians of mainstream culture with a big target. Parents, teachers, and complicit kids burned comics in public bonfires. Cities passed laws to outlaw comics. Congress took action with hearings that nearly destroyed the careers of hundreds of artists and writers. The Ten-Cent Plague revises common notions of popular culture, the generation gap, and the divide between “high” and “low” art. David Hajdu is music critic for The New Republic and teaches at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism.

McAdam Cage

From the best-selling author of Moonlight on the Avenue of Faith, a tale that offers American readers unique insight into the inner workings of Iranian society. In the decade before the Islamic Revolution, Iran is a country on the brink of explosion. At once a cultural exploration of an as-yet-unfamiliar society and a psychological study of the effects of loss, Caspian Rain takes the reader inside the tragic and fascinating world of a brave young girl struggling against impossible odds.

Gina B. Nahai has lived in Iran, Switzerland, and the United States. Gina B. Nahai is the author of Cry of the Peacock, Moonlight on the Avenue of Faith, and Sunday’s Silence. Her novels have been translated into sixteen languages, and her writing has also appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune amd San Francisco Chronicle. She is a former consultant for the Rand Corporation, and has studied the politics of pre- and post-revolutionary Iran for the United States Department of Defense. Nahai currently is a professor of Creative Writing at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

Viking (Penguin Group)

In Susan Choi’s new novel A Person of Interest, Professor Lee, an Asian-born mathematician, would seem the last person likely to attract the attention of FBI agents. Yet after a popular young colleague becomes the latest victim of a serial bomber, Lee’s detached response and maladroit behavior lead the FBI, the national news media, and even his own neighbors to regard him with damning suspicion. Amid campus-wide grief over the murder, Lee receives a cryptic letter from a figure out of his past. The letter unearths a lifetime of shortcomings — toward his dead wife, his estranged only daughter, and a long-denied son. Caught between his guilty recollections and the scrutiny of the murder investigation, determined to face his tormentor and exonerate himself, Lee sets off on a journey that will bring him face-to-face with his past. Susan Choi’s first novel, The Foreign Student, won the Asian-American Literary Award for fiction, and her second novel, American Woman, was a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize.

Little Brown and Company

For years Helen Knightly has given her life to others: to her haunted mother, to her enigmatic father, to her husband and now grown children. When she finally crosses a terrible boundary, her life comes rushing in at her in a way she never could have imagined. Unfolding over the next twenty-four hours, this fast-paced novel explores the complex ties between mothers and daughters, wives and lovers, the meaning of devotion, and the line between love and hate. As Alice Sebold relates in her memoir Lucky, she was considered fortunate for surviving a violent, devastating rape in her freshman year at Syracuse University. The woman before her had not been so “lucky”: She was murdered and dismembered. The shadow of this fact survives in Sebold’s acclaimed novel The Lovely Bones, which is narrated by another not-so-lucky victim from beyond the grave.

Sebold is married to author Glen David Gold, author of Carter Beats the Devil. The two met when Sebold was in the fiction writing program at University of California, Irvine.

Author Jerome Charyn reanimates a war-torn Manhattan overrun by Redcoats and deserted by all but the Loyalists—and Mrs. Gertrude Jennings, the tempestuous, redheaded queen of Manhattan’s most spectacular bordello. When the novel opens, young double agent John Stocking is being interrogated by Washington, a rebel commander far removed from the dour, silent man of most history books. As Johnny seeks to unlock the mystery of his birth and grapples with his allegiances, he falls in love with Clara, a gorgeous, green-eyed octoroon, the most coveted harlot of Gertrude’s house. The wild parade of characters he encounters includes Benedict Arnold, the Howe brothers, “Sir Billy” and “Black Dick,” and a manipulative Alexander Hamilton.

Jerome Charyn has lived in Barcelona, Houston, Austin, and San Francisco, and now shuttles back and forth between New York and Paris, where he teaches film theory at the American University and regularly writes for the Cahiers du Cinema. He is currently working on a novel about Stalin and his deeply ambiguous relationship with writers, actors, and other artists during the 1930s.

Nowhere has the drama of American slavery played itself out with more tension than in the swamps of Maryland’s eastern shore, where abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman faced off against slave traders in a catch-me-if-you-can game that fueled fear in both white and black families. Trapped in the middle were the watermen, a group of America’s most original pioneers, poor oystermen who often found themselves caught between the needs of rich plantation owners and the roaring Chesapeake, which often claimed their lives. In James McBride’s latest novel, Song Yet Sun, the web of relationships in a small Chesapeake Bay town collapses as two souls face off in a gripping page-turner. McBride’s memoir, The Color of Water, is an American classic, and is required reading in high schools and colleges across America. It has sold almost two million copies worldwide, spent more than two years on the New York Times bestseller list and is published in more than 16 languages.

Chelsea Green Publishing In a stunning indictment of the Bush administration and Congress, best-selling author Naomi Wolf lays out her case for saving American democracy. In authoritative research and documentation Wolf explains how events of the last six years parallel steps taken in the early years of the 20th century’s worst dictatorships such as Germany, Russia, China, and Chile. The book cuts across political parties and ideologies and speaks directly to those among us who are concerned about the ever-tightening noose being placed around our liberties. In this timely call to arms, Naomi Wolf compels us to face the way our free America is under assault. She warns us—with the straight-to-fellow-citizens urgency of one of Thomas Paine’s revolutionary pamphlets—that we have little time to lose if our children are to live in real freedom.

Naomi Wolf was born in San Francisco in 1962. She was an undergraduate at Yale University and did her graduate work at New College, Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar. Her essays have appeared in various publications including: The New Republic, The Wall Street Journal, Glamour, Ms., Esquire, The Washington Post, and The New York Times. She also speaks widely to groups across the country.

It is 1959 when Haruko, a young woman of good family, marries the Crown Prince of Japan, the heir to the Chrysanthemum Throne. She is the first non-aristocratic woman to enter the longest-running, almost hermetically sealed, and mysterious monarchy in the world. Met with cruelty and suspicion by the Empress and her minions, Haruko is controlled at every turn. The only interest the court has in her is her ability to produce an heir. After finally giving birth to a son, Haruko suffers a nervous breakdown and loses her voice. However, determined not to be crushed by the imperial bureaucrats, she perseveres. Thirty years later, now Empress herself, she plays a crucial role in persuading another young woman—a rising star in the foreign ministry—to accept the marriage proposal of her son, the Crown Prince. The consequences are tragic and dramatic.

John Burnham Schwartz is the author of the novels Claire Marvel, Bicycle Days, and Reservation Road, which was made into a motion picture based on his screenplay, starring Joaquin Phoenix, Mark Ruffalo, and Jennifer Connelly. His books have been translated into more than fifteen languages, and his writing has appeared in many publications, including the New York Times and The New Yorker. He lives with his wife and their son in Brooklyn, New York.

From the bestselling author of She’s Not There comes another buoyant, unforgettable memoir—I’m Looking Through You is about growing up in a haunted house…and making peace with the ghosts that dwell in our hearts.

For Jennifer Boylan, creaking stairs, fleeting images in the mirror, and the remote whisper of human voices were everyday events in the Pennsylvania house in which she grew up in the 1970s. But these weren’t the only specters beneath the roof of the mansion known as the “Coffin House.” Jenny herself—born James—lived in a haunted body, and both her mysterious, diffident father and her wild, unpredictable sister would soon become ghosts to Jenny as well.

Jenifer Finney Boylan is Professor of English at Colby College and the author of the bestseller She’s Not There, as well as the acclaimed novels The Planets and Getting In. A three-time guest of The Oprah Winfrey Show, she has also appeared on Larry King Live, Today, and 48 Hours, and has played herself on ABC’s All My Children. She lives in Belgrade Lakes, Maine.

New Page Books

In dreams, he foresaw his sudden death. He consulted oracles, and at age 22 was told by a seer that he would become President of the United States.

Obscurantists and historians have dismissed Abraham Lincoln’s psychic involvements which, in his own time, were profound state secrets. But Lincoln’s rise to power coincided with the Great Age of Spiritualism and, as a Mystical Unionist, he felt he was controlled by “some other power.”

Susan B. Martinez, Ph.D., is an independent scholar, journalist, and activist who received her doctorate in Anthropology from Columbia University in the 1970s. Raised by agnostic/intellectual parents in Brooklyn, New York, she found her way to Spiritualism in the early 1980s and has since researched and wrote on psychic phenomena, specializing in modern spiritualism in the Victorian era. Currently Book Review Editor at the Academy of Spirituality and Paranormal Studies, she lives in the north Georgia mountains.

Amistad (an imprint of Harper Collins)

In fourteen stories, five of which have been published in The New Yorker, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Edward P. Jones shows that his grasp of the human condition is firmer than ever. Returning to the city that inspired his first prizewinning book, Lost in the City, Jones has filled this new collection with people who call Washington, D.C., home. Yet it is not the city’s power brokers that most concern him but rather its ordinary citizens. All Aunt Hagar’s Children turns an eye to the men, women, and children caught between the old ways of the South and the temptations that await them further north, people who emerge as fully human and morally complex, whether they are country folk used to getting up with the chickens or people with centuries of education behind them.

New York Times bestselling author Edward P. Jones has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and the Lannan Literary Award for The Known World. His first collection of short stories, Lost in the City, won the PEN/Hemingway Award and was short-listed for the National Book Award. He has taught fiction writing at a range of universities, including Princeton.

Viking Penguin

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of March comes an ambitious novel that traces the journey of a rare Hebrew manuscript from Spain to the ruins of Sarajevo, from the Silver Age of Venice to the sunburned rock faces of northern Australia. Inspired by the true story of a mysterious codex known as the Sarajevo Haggadah, People of the Book is an adventure through five centuries of history. From its creation in Muslim-ruled, medieval Spain, the illuminated manuscript makes a series of perilous journeys: through Inquisition-era Venice, fin-de-siecle Vienna, and the Nazi sacking of Sarajevo.

Australian-born Geraldine Brooks is an author and journalist who grew up in the Western suburbs of Sydney, and attended Bethlehem College Ashfield and the University of Sydney. In 1982 she won the Shackleton Australian Correspondents scholarship at Columbia University. Later she worked for The Wall Street Journal, where she covered crises in the the Middle East, Africa, and the Balkans. She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in fiction in 2006 for her novel March, and her novel Year of Wonders is an international bestseller.

Random House

The vivid voices that speak from these pages are not those of historians or scholars. They are the voices of ordinary men and women who experienced — and helped to win — the most devastating war in history, in which between 50 and 60 million lives were lost. Focusing on citizens of four towns, The War follows more than forty people from 1941 to 1945. Woven largely from their memories, the narrative unfolds month by bloody month, with the outcome always in doubt. All the iconic events are here, from Pearl Harbor to the liberation of the concentration camps, but we also move among prisoners of war and Japanese American internees, defense workers and schoolchildren, and families who struggled simply to stay together while their men shipped off to Europe, the Pacific, and North Africa.

Ken Burns, producer and director of the film series The War, founded his own documentary company, Florentine Films, in 1976. His films include Jazz, Baseball, and The Civil War, which was the highest-rated series in the history of American public television. His work has won numerous prizes, including the Emmy and Peabody Awards, and two Academy Award nominations.

Penguin Press

Catch a special broadcast of Between the Lines on Sunday, January 20 at 3:00pm as Valerie speaks with Dave Isay, author of Listening is an Act of Love: A Celebration of American Life from the StoryCorps Project, taped live on January 8 at the Georgia Pacific Auditorium.

From more than ten thousand interviews, StoryCorps-the largest oral history project in the nation’s history-presents a tapestry of American stories, told by the people who lived them to the people they love.

In Listening Is an Act of Love, StoryCorps founder and legendary radio producer Dave Isay selects some of the most remarkable stories from the already vast collection and arranges them thematically into a moving portrait of American life. The voices here connect us to real people and their lives-to their experiences of profound joy, sadness, courage and despair, to good times and hard times, to good deeds and misdeeds.

Isay is the founder of StoryCorps and its parent company, Sound Portraits Productions. Over the past two decades his radio documentary work has won nearly every award in broadcasting, including five Peabody awards. Dave has also received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a MacArthur Fellowship, and a United States Artists Fellowship. He is the author (or coauthor) of four books based on Sound Portraits radio stories, including Our America: Life and Death on the South Side of Chicago and Flophouse. He and his wife, Jennifer Gonnerman, live in Brooklyn.

Picador

The hero of Zakes Mda’s beloved Ways of Dying,Toloki, sets down with a family in Middle America and uncovers the story of runaway slaves who were their ancestors. Toloki, the professional mourner, has come to live in America. Lured to Athens, Ohio, by an academic at the local university, Toloki makes friends with an angry young man he meets at a Halloween parade and soon falls in love with the young man’s sister. Toloki endears himself to a local quilting group and his quilting provides a portal to the past, a story of two escaped slaves seeking freedom in Ohio. Making their way north from Virginia with nothing but their mother’s quilts for a map, the boys hope to find a promised land where blacks can live as free men. Their story alternates with Toloki’s, as the two narratives cast a new light on America in the twenty-first century and on an undiscovered legacy of the Underground Railroad. Zakes Mda, novelist and playwright, has won every major South African literary prize. Born in 1948, he is the author of five previous novels and is currently a professor of creative writing at Ohio University.

W.W. Norton

While Gustave Eiffel was changing the skyline of Paris, large parts of France were still terra incognita. Even in the age of railways and newspapers, France was a land of ancient tribal divisions, prehistoric communication networks, and pre-Christian beliefs. Author Graham Robb describes that unknown world, recounting the epic journeys of mapmakers, scientists, soldiers, administrators, and intrepid tourists, of itinerant workers, pilgrims, and herdsmen. We learn how France was explored, charted, and colonized, and how the imperial influence of Paris was gradually extended throughout a kingdom. The Discovery of France explains how the modern nation came to be and how poorly understood that nation still is today.

Graham Robb is the author of award-winning biographies of Balzac, Victor Hugo, and Rimbaud, each one selected by the New York Times as one of the best books of the year.

Friday, December 7, 2007, 7:00 PM Saturday, December 8, 2007, 5:30pm

Algonquin Books

It was never Sam Pulsifer’s intention to torch an American landmark, and he certainly never planned to kill two people in the blaze. To this day, he wonders why that young couple was upstairs in bed in the Emily Dickinson House after hours. After serving ten years in prison for his crime, Sam is determined to put the past behind him. He finishes college, begins a career, falls in love, gets married, has two adorable kids, and buys a home. His life is chugging along nicely until the past comes crashing through his front door. As the homes of Robert Frost, Edith Wharton, Herman Melville, and Nathaniel Hawthorne go up in smoke, Sam becomes the number one suspect.

Brock Clarke is author of three previous books: The Ordinary White Boy and two story collections. His stories and essays have appeared in the Virginia Quarterly Review, OneStory, the Believer, the Georgia Review, and the Southern Review and have appeared in the annual Pushcart Prize and New Stories from the South anthologies and on NPR’s Selected Shorts.

McAdam Cage

From the best-selling author of Moonlight on the Avenue of Faith, a tale that offers American readers unique insight into the inner workings of Iranian society. In the decade before the Islamic Revolution, Iran is a country on the brink of explosion. At once a cultural exploration of an as-yet-unfamiliar society and a psychological study of the effects of loss, Caspian Rain takes the reader inside the tragic and fascinating world of a brave young girl struggling against impossible odds.

Gina B. Nahai has lived in Iran, Switzerland, and the United States. Gina B. Nahai is the author of Cry of the Peacock, Moonlight on the Avenue of Faith, and Sunday’s Silence. Her novels have been translated into sixteen languages, and her writing has also appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune amd San Francisco Chronicle. She is a former consultant for the Rand Corporation, and has studied the politics of pre- and post-revolutionary Iran for the United States Department of Defense. Nahai currently is a professor of Creative Writing at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

Harcourt Books

Life of Pi, winner of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction, became an international bestseller since its first publication in 2002. Pi Patel, the son of a zookeeper, has an encyclopedic knowledge of animal behavior and a fervent love of stories. When Pi is sixteen, his family emigrates from India to North America aboard a Japanese cargo ship, along with their zoo animals bound for new homes. The ship sinks. Pi finds himself alone in a lifeboat, his only companions a hyena, an orangutan, a wounded zebra, and a 450-pound Bengal tiger. Soon the tiger has dispatched all but Pi, whose fear, knowledge, and cunning allow him to coexist with the tiger for 227 days lost at sea. In 2005 an international competition was held to find the perfect artist to illustrate Yann Martel’s prize—winning novel. From thousands of entrants, Croatian artist Tomislav Torjanac was chosen. This lavishly produced edition features forty of Torjanac’s four-color illustrations, bringing Life of Pi to life.

Atlantic Monthly Press

The first biography of one of the most politically influential women of the twentieth century, Madame Chiang Kai-shek tells the story of an extraordinary woman who has become a symbol of America’s long, vexed love affair with China and China’s own struggle to define itself as a world power.

Madame Chiang Kai-shek is the first biography of one of history’s most intriguing and controversial political figures. Beautiful, brilliant, and captivating, Madame Chiang Kai-shek wielded unprecedented official and unofficial power during China’s long and violent civil war. She spoke out tirelessly against Chinese Communism in the international arena and influenced decades of Sino-American relations and modern Chinese history.

Fluent in Mandarin, Laura Tyson Li spent a decade living in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan as a business reporter for the South China Morning Post and Taiwan correspondent for The Financial Times. She also has written for The Economist.

Little Brown and Company

For years Helen Knightly has given her life to others: to her haunted mother, to her enigmatic father, to her husband and now grown children. When she finally crosses a terrible boundary, her life comes rushing in at her in a way she never could have imagined. Unfolding over the next twenty-four hours, this fast-paced novel explores the complex ties between mothers and daughters, wives and lovers, the meaning of devotion, and the line between love and hate. As Alice Sebold relates in her memoir Lucky, she was considered fortunate for surviving a violent, devastating rape in her freshman year at Syracuse University. The woman before her had not been so “lucky”: She was murdered and dismembered. The shadow of this fact survives in Sebold’s acclaimed novel The Lovely Bones, which is narrated by another not-so-lucky victim from beyond the grave.

Sebold is married to author Glen David Gold, author of Carter Beats the Devil. The two met when Sebold was in the fiction writing program at University of California, Irvine.

Simon and Schuster

Jimmy Carter has lived the most admired and productive post-presidency in the nation’s history. Through The Carter Center, which he and Rosalynn Carter founded in 1982, President Carter has fought neglected diseases, waged peace in war zones, and built hope among some of the most forgotten and needy people in the world. Serving in more than seventy nations, he has led peacekeeping efforts for Ethiopia, North Korea, Haiti, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Uganda and Sudan. With his colleagues from The Carter Center, he has monitored more than sixty-five elections in troubled nations, from Palestine to Indonesia. Carter’s bold initiatives, undertaken with dedicated colleagues, have eliminated, prevented, or cured an array of diseases that have been characterized as “neglected” by WHO and that afflict tens of millions of people unnecessarily. The Carter Center has taught millions of African families how to increase the production of food grains, while Rosalynn Carter has led a vigorous war against the stigma of mental illness around the world. Beyond the White House is the story of Jimmy Carter’s post-presidency

Jimmy Carter was born in Plains, Georgia, and served as thirty-ninth President of the United States. He and his wife, Rosalynn, founded The Carter Center, a nonprofit organization that prevents and resolves conflicts, enhances freedom and democracy, and improves health around the world. He is the author of numerous books, including Palestine Peace Not Apartheid, An Hour Before Daylight and Our Endangered Values.

Chelsea Green Publishing

In a stunning indictment of the Bush administration and Congress, best-selling author Naomi Wolf lays out her case for saving American democracy. In authoritative research and documentation Wolf explains how events of the last six years parallel steps taken in the early years of the 20th century’s worst dictatorships such as Germany, Russia, China, and Chile. The book cuts across political parties and ideologies and speaks directly to those among us who are concerned about the ever-tightening noose being placed around our liberties. In this timely call to arms, Naomi Wolf compels us to face the way our free America is under assault. She warns us—with the straight-to-fellow-citizens urgency of one of Thomas Paine’s revolutionary pamphlets—that we have little time to lose if our children are to live in real freedom.

Naomi Wolf was born in San Francisco in 1962. She was an undergraduate at Yale University and did her graduate work at New College, Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar. Her essays have appeared in various publications including: The New Republic, The Wall Street Journal, Glamour, Ms., Esquire, The Washington Post, and The New York Times. She also speaks widely to groups across the country.

Harper Collins

Michael Tolliver, the sweet-spirited Southerner in Armistead Maupin’s classic Tales of the City series, is arguably one of the most widely loved characters in contemporary fiction. Now, almost twenty years after ending his ground-breaking saga of San Francisco life, Maupin revisits his all-too-human hero, letting the fifty-five-year-old gardener tell his story in his own voice.

Having survived the plague that took so many of his friends and lovers, Michael has learned to embrace the random pleasures of life, the tender alliances that sustain him in the hardest of times. Michael Tolliver Lives follows its protagonist as he finds love with a younger man, attends to his dying fundamentalist mother in Florida, and finally reaffirms his allegiance to a wise octogenarian who was once his landlady.

Though this is a stand-alone novel—accessible to fans of Tales of the City and new readers alike—a reassuring number of familiar faces appear along the way. As usual, the author’s mordant wit and ear for pitch-perfect dialogue serve every aspect of the story—from the bawdy to the bittersweet. Michael Tolliver Lives is a novel about the act of growing older joyfully and the everyday miracles that somehow make that possible.

Armistead Maupin is the author of Tales of the City, More Tales of the City, Further Tales of the City, Babycakes, Significant Others, Sure of You, Maybe the Moon, and The Night Listener. Three television miniseries starring Olympia Dukakis and Laura Linney were made from the first three Tales novels. The Night Listener became a feature film starring Robin Williams and Toni Collette. Maupin lives in San Francisco with his husband, Christopher Turner.

St. Martin’s Press

In 1939 Tokyo, two orphaned brothers are growing up with their grandparents, who inspire them to dream of a future firmly rooted in tradition. The older boy, Hiroshi, shows unusual skill at the national obsession of sumo wrestling, while Kenji is fascinated by the art of creating hard-carved masks for actors in the Noh theater. Across town, a renowned sumo master, Sho Tanaka, lives with his wife and their two young daughters: the delicate, daydreaming Aki and her independent sister, Haru. Life seems full of promise as Kenji begins an apprenticeship with the most famous mask-maker in Japan and Hiroshi receives an invitation to train with Tanaka. But then Pearl Harbor changes everything. As the ripples of war spread to both families’ quiet neighborhoods, all of the generations must put their dreams on hold—-and then find their way in a new Japan.

Gail Tsukiyama is a lecturer in Creative Writing at San Francisco State University, as well as a freelance book reviewer for the San Francisco Chronicle.

Random House

The vivid voices that speak from these pages are not those of historians or scholars. They are the voices of ordinary men and women who experienced — and helped to win — the most devastating war in history, in which between 50 and 60 million lives were lost. Focusing on citizens of four towns, The War follows more than forty people from 1941 to 1945. Woven largely from their memories, the narrative unfolds month by bloody month, with the outcome always in doubt. All the iconic events are here, from Pearl Harbor to the liberation of the concentration camps, but we also move among prisoners of war and Japanese American internees, defense workers and schoolchildren, and families who struggled simply to stay together while their men shipped off to Europe, the Pacific, and North Africa.

Ken Burns, producer and director of the film series The War, founded his own documentary company, Florentine Films, in 1976. His films include Jazz, Baseball, and The Civil War, which was the highest-rated series in the history of American public television. His work has won numerous prizes, including the Emmy and Peabody Awards, and two Academy Award nominations.

Amistad (an imprint of Harper Collins)

In fourteen stories, five of which have been published in The New Yorker, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Edward P. Jones shows that his grasp of the human condition is firmer than ever. Returning to the city that inspired his first prizewinning book, Lost in the City, Jones has filled this new collection with people who call Washington, D.C., home. Yet it is not the city’s power brokers that most concern him but rather its ordinary citizens. All Aunt Hagar’s Children turns an eye to the men, women, and children caught between the old ways of the South and the temptations that await them further north, people who emerge as fully human and morally complex, whether they are country folk used to getting up with the chickens or people with centuries of education behind them.

New York Times bestselling author Edward P. Jones has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and the Lannan Literary Award for The Known World. His first collection of short stories, Lost in the City, won the PEN/Hemingway Award and was short-listed for the National Book Award. He has taught fiction writing at a range of universities, including Princeton.

Picador

The hero of Zakes Mda’s beloved Ways of Dying,Toloki, sets down with a family in Middle America and uncovers the story of runaway slaves who were their ancestors. Toloki, the professional mourner, has come to live in America. Lured to Athens, Ohio, by an academic at the local university, Toloki makes friends with an angry young man he meets at a Halloween parade and soon falls in love with the young man’s sister. Toloki endears himself to a local quilting group and his quilting provides a portal to the past, a story of two escaped slaves seeking freedom in Ohio. Making their way north from Virginia with nothing but their mother’s quilts for a map, the boys hope to find a promised land where blacks can live as free men. Their story alternates with Toloki’s, as the two narratives cast a new light on America in the twenty-first century and on an undiscovered legacy of the Underground Railroad. Zakes Mda, novelist and playwright, has won every major South African literary prize. Born in 1948, he is the author of five previous novels and is currently a professor of creative writing at Ohio University.

Harper Collins

In 1936 the Schwarts, an immigrant family desperate to escape Nazi Germany, settle in a small town in upstate New York, where the father, a former high school teacher, is demeaned by the only job he can get: gravedigger and cemetery caretaker. After local prejudice and the family’s own emotional frailty result in unspeakable tragedy, the gravedigger’s daughter, Rebecca, begins her astonishing pilgrimage into America, an odyssey of erotic risk and imaginative daring, ingenious self-invention, and, in the end, a bittersweet—but very “American”—triumph. “You are born here, they will not hurt you”—so the gravedigger has predicted for his daughter, which will turn out to be true. In The Gravedigger’s Daughter, Oates has created a masterpiece of domestic yet mythic realism, at once emotionally engaging and intellectually provocative: an intimately observed testimony to the resilience of the individual to set beside such predecessors as The Falls, Blonde, and We Were the Mulvaneys.

Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Book Award and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction. She is also the recipient of the 2005 Prix Femina for The Falls. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University, and she has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978.