DISCOVERIES

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Are My Blinkers Showing?

Adventures in Filmmaking

in the New Russia

Michael York

Da Capo Press: 160 pp., $22

WHAT a delight to read Michael York’s account of the summer he spent in 2003 on location for “Moscow Heat”! York’s writing is gentle and elegant, his observations keen and strangely selfless, the kind of vision that ideally settles calmly over the ego after 40 years of practicing one’s art. York, whose wife was long the travel editor of Glamour magazine, admits being “easily seduced by locations” and to a lifelong fascination with Russia, particularly its literature. When he first went there in 1971 to attend the Moscow Film Festival, he felt as though he’d been there before.

“Are My Blinkers Showing?” (“blinkers,” we’re told, refers to both the “device to ensure monodirectional vision” and an unidentified Russian garment) includes comparisons of Russian and American filmmaking and reflections on changes in the actor’s life over the course of his career. After his summer in “beguiling, infuriating, irresistible” Russia, he went off to film in Barcelona, Spain, then Bulgaria. Ahh, the actor’s life, well used.

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X Out of Wonderland

A Saga

David Allan Cates

Steerforth: 152 pp., $17.95

X(so named to “protect him from unwanted commercial solicitations”) is a modern Candide, a traveler to strange shores with even stranger customs like human kindness and life without shopping. The government of Wonderland, his home, demands devotion to the “Global Free Market.” It is a land of toxic deaths, grief counselors, insurance companies that file for bankruptcy on the eve of natural disasters -- where people peddle their memoirs and their souls to keep shopping.

When X brings Doubt to his company (with ill effects on Profits), he goes to sea, his girlfriend’s words ringing in his ears: “There is no connection between virtue and well-being.” He’s gone for decades. “Why?” he asks God. “Why?” And God says, “Because.”

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All the Fishes Come Home to Roost

An American Misfit in India

Rachel Manija Brown

Rodale: 352 pp., $23.95

WHEN Rachel Manija Brown was 7, her Baba-worshiping parents took her from Los Angeles (pet rats, pet toads, pet rabbits, goodbye!) to live on an ashram in Ahmednagar, India. Brown’s mother, obsessed and fearful, believed that this was best for her child, who spent five years completely miserable in a school called Holy Wounds, run by British nuns, where she was punished and picked on by other students. When she was 12, her father left the “bizarro ashram,” and Brown persuaded him to take her back to Southern California. She returned to India every summer until she was 17, then not again until she was in her mid-20s, when questions about her mother’s and her own childhood demanded answers. “All the Fishes” is equal parts brave modern humor and bravely met sadness. No family ghosts will be banished by a mere 30-year-old wielding a pen.

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First Love

A Novel

Adrienne Sharp

Riverhead: 352 pp., $24.95

HERE is a novel (strangely and unfortunately titled) infused with the author’s expertise; she was a ballerina in a previous life. Readers will feel they have a backstage pass to the lives of young dancers.

Sandra, four years in the corps of the American Ballet, is at a pivotal point in her career. She dreams of catching the attention of Mr. B. (of course, Balanchine) and being his last muse, and this dream comes true, but not without a price. Tension builds with her father’s mental breakdown and the increasing demands of her lover, Adam, also a dancer. The parameters of the dancer’s world -- Lincoln Center, the Empire Hotel, the West 60s, the Eldorado and other great landmarks -- loom like bumpers on a pool table as Sandra is tossed from one desire to the next.