DISCOVERIES

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The House of Paper

A Novel

Carlos Maria Dominguez

Translated from the Spanish by Nick Caistor

Harcourt: 104 pp., $18

SOME books are a little creepy, a little too powerful, although the best of them have the unnerving effect of making the world, as a favorite 9-year-old once told me, “all crackly with meaning.” Carlos Maria Dominguez’ fable “The House of Paper” is such a work.

“Books change people’s destinies,” warns the novel’s narrator just after professor Bluma Lennon is hit by a car while reading a secondhand copy of Emily Dickinson’s poems. Papers are written and lectures are given on the subject: Was the professor killed by the poems or by the car?

Months later, a mysterious package arrives for Lennon from Argentina. It is opened by her friend and lover, our nameless narrator. The package contains a copy of “The Shadow Line” by Joseph Conrad, with a cryptic dedication to “Carlos,” a former lover of Lennon’s and a fellow book collector who, it turns out, has been swallowed by his own passions. Carlos Brauer has built himself a house on a remote spit of land on the coast of Uruguay, using his extensive collection of books as bricks. The narrator travels there, only to find Brauer’s house of books destroyed, the collector gone.

This reader looks up from “The House of Paper.” Suddenly my bookshelves seem to tower and loom.

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On the Road With Francis of Assisi

A Timeless Journey Through Umbria and Tuscany, and Beyond

Linda Bird Francke

Random House: 270 pp., $25.95

GIVEN the number of people who revere and follow the teachings of St. Francis of Assisi, surprisingly few readable books about him have been written. Great gaps exist in the story of his life.

What is known seems to boil down to a string of miracles and oft-told parables that focus on the mystic rather than the 13th century man: Francis kissing the leper, Francis giving a sermon to the birds, Francis shaming the wild wolf.

Linda Bird Francke’s Francis is refreshingly real, as are her descriptions of the places in which the man lived, preached and set up monasteries. She follows the trail of relics and the stories, often with a skeptical eye. She combs Francis Bernadone’s birthplace in the Umbrian town of Assisi and his childhood home for clues.

Francke, a former editor at Newsweek and the author of “Ground Zero: The Gender Wars in the Military” and “Growing Up Divorced,” is fascinated by the accounts of miraculous events in Francis’ life but also by his legacy and the ways in which those stories live on in town squares and village side streets throughout his native Italy.

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Virginia Woolf

An Inner Life

Julia Briggs

Harcourt: 528 pp., $30

UNLIKE St. Francis’ life, Virginia Woolf’s has been so often analyzed, so picked over, that any new biography bears the burden of proving its originality. Julia Briggs’ focus is on the genesis of Woolf’s fiction and some of her criticism. In “Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life,” Briggs moves through Woolf’s books, establishing her frame of mind at the time each was written, her passions and annoyances as well as her mental health. Each book is its own ecosystem, its own culture, with threads and recurring characters that change in the light of Woolf’s precarious, deeply engaged life.

Briggs gives us new bits: Woolf’s fierce pride in her erudition (she read classical Greek, typically the province of educated males in her day) and her feelings about the clumsiness of the novel form compared with experimental stories she wrote for Hogarth, the press she and her husband, Leonard, started and ran.

Briggs also carefully examines Woolf’s sensitivity to the violence of her time, a point that has often been written about, but never with such attention to specific quotes from the author’s letters and essays, particularly those that refer to the shaping of Septimus Smith, the young soldier in “Mrs. Dalloway.”

Woolf continues to echo down the generations. Briggs’ contribution is dissecting the spark that fueled each book.