The Big Store: Inside the Crisis and...

The Big Store: Inside the Crisis and Revolution at Sears, Donald R. Katz (Viking), follows the store’s profitable decision to emphasize retailing and the crash of America’s first major venture into world trading. “Ingeniously procured and carefully arranged, . . . its cumulative emotional impact ensures few buyer regrets” (Alexandra Lajoux).

A Southern Family, Gail Godwin (Morrow). “A brilliant new novel about one family’s regrouping in the wake of a collapse.” Through poems and letters, narrative and interior monologue, Gail Godwin “creates a complex weave of subjectivity and demonstrates the power of reflection and observation to illuminate the self” (Susan Heeger).

The Last of How It Was, T. R. Pearson (Linden Press/Simon & Schuster). “Pearson offers an original comic vision from the Piedmont region of the Southeast . . . a place so polite it continues to escape notice” (Frank Levering).

Criminal Tendencies, William O’Rourke (E. P. Dutton). This “wonderful, woolly tale of crime and character unfolds in the steamy seams of South Florida, where a burned-out free-lance journalist named Kenner is trying to jump-start his ambition, but succeeding mainly in further confounding himself” (Dan Pyne).