Fiction:
- Man Gone Down, by Michael Thomas: On the eve of the unnamed narrator's thirty-fifth birthday, he finds himself broke, estranged from his white wife and three children, and living in the bedroom of a friend's six-year-old child. He has four days before he's due in Boston to pick up his family, four days to try to make some sense of his life.
- Out Stealing Horses, by Per Petterson, translated by Anne Born: Trond is living in self-imposed exile in a primitive cabin, but his solitude is interrupted when he meets his only neighbor, the brother of his childhood friend, who forces him to remember the fateful summer of 1948.
- The Savage Detectives, by Roberto Bolaño, translated by Natasha Wimmer: Bolano traces the hidden connection between literature and violence in a world where national boundaries are fluid, and death lurks in the shadow of the avant-garde.
- Then We Came to the End, by Joshua Ferris: No one knows us quite the same way as the men and women who sit beside us in department meetings and crowd the office refrigerator with their labeled yogurts. Every office is a family of sorts, and the ad agency Ferris depicts is family at its strangest and best.
- Tree of Smoke, by Denis Johnson: This is the story of William "Skip" Sands, CIA-- engaged in Psychological Operations against the Vietcong-- and the disasters that befall him. The 2007 National Book Award Winner.
Non-Fiction:
- Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone, by Rajiv Chandrasekaran: The Washington Post's former Baghdad bureau chief takes us with him into the Zone: into a bubble, cut off from wartime realities, where the task of reconstructing a devastated nation competed with the distractions of a Little America.
- Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression, by Mildred Armstrong Kalish: Filled with recipes and how-tos for everything from catching and skinning a rabbit to preparing homemade skin and hair beautifiers, apple cream pie, and the world's best head cheese, Little Heathens portrays a world of hardship and hard work tempered by simple rewards.
- The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court, by Jeffrey Toobin: Based on exclusive interviews with the justices themselves, The Nine tells the story of the Supreme Court through its outsized personalities.
- The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History, by Linda Colley: Conceived in Jamaica and possibly of mixed race, Elizabeth Marsh (1735-1785) traveled farther than the majority of men in her day. She was the first woman to publish in English on Morocco, and the first to carry out extensive explorations in eastern and southern India.
- The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, by Alex Ross: A history of the twentieth century, as seen through its music.
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