The Season for Contemplation and Delicious Investigation

Back when I lived on the East Coast, I used to spend the winters holed up in my small apartment, burrowed in among the blankets and the books. Unless I absolutely had to be somewhere (work, jury duty, a friend’s birthday), I pretty much refused to leave the house. It was too cold outside, and it grew dark far too early, and everyone I saw on the streets looked as miserable as me. As a result, I found myself having endless time to read. For me, this became the one great consolation of winter--that I could retreat into literature and find some respite from the bitterness outside my door.

Living, as I do now, in Southern California, I no longer feel unnerved by winter’s myriad unpleasantries. But old habits, as they say, are hard to break. So from now until April, I’ll be looking for books I can climb inside of, books that will encompass me. This year, the publishers have made that easy, by staying away from blockbuster mega-sellers, or at least saving them for spring.

With the exception of Michael Connelly’s new Harry Bosch mystery, “A Darkness More Than Night” (Little, Brown), and Helen Fielding’s first non-Bridget Jones novel, “Cause Celeb” (Viking), there’s not much to be found in the way of distractions, but then, winter never was a frivolous season anyway. Instead, it’s a time to look at works like “The Presidential Recordings: John F. Kennedy, Volumes 1-3, The Great Crises” (Norton), a boxed set featuring transcriptions of newly declassified presidential recordings made between July and October 1962, and culminating with the Cuban Missile Crisis. Because the set also includes CD-ROMs of the original White House audiotapes, we can actually listen as Kennedy and his advisors discuss policy, which gives this slice of history a vivid, living edge.

For those with more radical sensibilities, Elliott Gorn’s “Mother Jones: The Most Dangerous Woman in America” (Hill & Wang), due out in March, evokes the life of the legendary labor activist, tracing both the pattern of her public career and her lesser-known early years. The same month, Los Angeles journalist and poet Michael Datcher publishes “Raising Fences: A Black Man’s Love Story” (Riverhead), which uses a personal filter to address issues of love and family among African American men. And in April, Clark Blaise’s “Time Lord” (Pantheon) tells the story of Sir Sandford Fleming, who, in 1884, developed the idea of Standard Time and then, essentially, bestowed it on the world.

Time, of course, is always of the essence, and if you find yourself a little pressed this winter, there are plenty of shorter titles geared for busy lives. In February, Viking will issue the two latest installments in the Penguin Lives series of brief biographies--Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Carol Shields’ quick take on “Jane Austen,” and Karen Armstrong’s ‘Buddha,” a mini-portrait of the man whose satori flash beneath the Bodhi Tree literally changed the world.

If biographies (even abbreviated ones) fail to move you, there’s the Nick Hornby-edited “Speaking With the Angel” (Riverhead), a collection of original short stories by 12 contemporary writers, including Roddy Doyle, Irvine Welsh, Zadie Smith and Dave Eggers. While we’re on the subject of Eggers, his “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius” (Vintage) comes out in paperback this March, with about a hundred newly added pages, including a long appendix that seeks to contextualize further the author’s work.

Tom Tiede’s “Self-Help Nation” (Atlantic Monthly Press) dissects, in just a few hundred pithy pages, our obsession with self-help books, which he derides as snake oil for the soul. Don’t worry, though; for a possible antidote, look at Don DeLillo’s “The Body Artist” (Scribner), a densely minimalist novel that explores the connection between an artist and the stranger who springs up, full-blown, in the middle of her life.

“The Body Artist” is just one of many interesting works of literature scheduled to appear this winter, by writers new and old. Perhaps the best title in the bunch belongs to “Fat Bald Jeff” (Grove) by Leslie Stella, a novel about a disaffected copy editor who engages in some long-overdue office sabotage. In March, Bart Schneider’s “Secret Love” evokes the shifting social landscape of mid-1960s San Francisco; the following month, Sylvia Brownrigg follows up her 1999 novel “The Metaphysical Touch” with “Pages for You” (FSG), which details a college freshman’s initiation into love and life by an older graduate student.

For a different take on a similar theme, check out Diane di Prima’s “Recollections of My Life as a Woman,” a record of her experiences in the New York Beat world of the 1950s, where she was one of the few women to stand as an equal in a movement overwhelmingly dominated by men. Some of this material may be familiar to readers of di Prima’s 30-year-old “Memoirs of a Beatnik,” but whereas that book bears the hyperbolic mark of its moment, this one seems to take a longer view. And speaking of long views, “The Raymond Chandler Papers” (Atlantic Monthly Press), edited by Tom Hiney and Frank MacShane, brings together an array of previously uncollected letters, early writings, and journalism to deepen our sense of this most iconic of Southern California writers by offering us a way of identifying the man embedded in the myth.

Of course, winter wouldn’t be winter without some sense of retrenchment, of reassessment, of preparing for the future by looking to the past. That, too, is what I used to do during those long months sequestered in my apartment, and this year, there’s no shortage of reissues--from J.D. Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye,” “Nine Stories,” “Franny and Zooey” and “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters,” which Little, Brown has just published for the first time in the larger-format, trade paperback, to Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” (University of California Press), which appears in April in an edition including the original 1885 illustrations and incorporating material discovered 10 years ago in the attic of a Los Angeles home--to help the process along.

Next month, Viking will release a new translation of Leo Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina,” while in March, Norton brings out “The Complete Works of Isaac Babel,” a long overdue collection that gathers everything (short stories, plays, letters, diaries, even screenplays) Babel ever wrote. Most impressive, however, is Robert and Jean Hollander’s verse translation of Dante’s “The Inferno” (Doubleday), a massive undertaking that features facing text in English and Italian and allows us to read this masterpiece of the imagination anew. It may be 600 years old, but Dante’s blistering vision of Hell is as relevant as it ever was, reminding us (as if we needed it) that what we do matters, that we leave something behind us when we go. It is the best literature has to offer us, a window into the hope and hypocrisy of existence, the raptures and disillusionments of the human soul.