Editor’s Choice
Man in the Dark, by Paul Auster, $23. The “parallel worlds” visited and occupied by an aging intellectual’s troubled mind and heart assume intriguing metafictional form in Auster’s challenging novel. Probably Auster’s best novel, and a plaintive summa of all the books that — we now see — have gone into its making. Kirkus
FICTION
Leather Maiden, by Joe R. Lansdale, $23.95. With its mysterious disappearances, abandoned houses, midnight trysts and hidden culverts, Lansdale’s latest is a contemporary Hardy Boys story on crank, read to best advantage late at night under the covers, with the aid of a flashlight. Library Journal
Legally Dead, by Edna Buchanan, $26. A disillusioned U.S. marshal leaves the Witness Protection Program to freelance. The case that puts Michael Venturi over the top is the rape and murder of two children by Gino Salvi, a witness in a union-corruption case whose fondness for little girls was well-known to the federal agents. Kirkus
NONFICTION
Dry Storeroom No. 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum, by Richard Fortey, $27.50. An insider’s tour of one of the world’s great museums. Hired as the “trilobite man” at London’s Natural History Museum in 1970, Fortey (“Earth,” 2004, etc.) intimately knows its collections and many of the scientists who worked on them during his tenure. Kirkus
Dumbfounded: Big Money. Big Hair. Big Problems. Or Why Having It All Isn’t for Sissies, by Matt Rothschild, $23.95. Growing up heavy, Jewish and effeminate on the Upper East Side. Rothschild’s dialogue is so sassy, his characters’ exits so perfectly executed, that the average reader might be forgiven for assuming his sparklingly witty debut memoir was the draft script for a new HBO series on dysfunctional family life.Kirkus
White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson & Henry Wentworth Higginson, by Brenda Wineapple, $27.95. Brenda Wineapple, award-winning author of biographies of Janet Flanner, Gertrude and Leo Stein, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, brings a scholar’s diligence and a novelist’s imagination to her account of Dickinson and Higginson’s relationship, crafting a tour de force. Kirkus
PAPERBACKS
Right Livelihoods, by Rick Moody, $13.99. What do nasty office politics, the travails of a hard-drinking xenophobe and a mind- blowing drug that eases survivors in bombed-out Manhattan have in common? Each figures in one of these novellas by Moody. Library Journal
Seizing Destiny: The Relentless Expansion of American Territory, by Richard Kluger, $17.95. This is a story that has been told many times, not infrequently in the most labored fashion and usually from the sole point of view of the victors. Thankfully, Richard Kluger’s “Seizing Destiny” does not fall into that category. The Washington Post
A Book of Memories, by Peter Nadas, $18. First published in Budapest in 1986 after a five-year struggle with censors, this remarkable novel uses three narrators to tell the story of a young Hungarian writer tormented by his past. Publishers Weekly
COMING UP
The Brass Verdict, by Michael Connelly, $26.99. Connelly’s newest novel brings together two of his most popular characters — Mickey Haller and Harry Bosch — in another murder mystery. (October)
Liberty, by Garrison Keillor, 25.95. Let’s all return to Lake Wobegon and its eccentric characters in this new tale set during a Fourth of July celebration. (September)
