45 reasons to stay inside
JUNE
The Abortionist’s Daughter
A Novel
Elisabeth Hyde
Alfred A. Knopf
The murder of the idealistic director of the Center for Reproductive Choice disrupts life in a small Colorado town.
Boudica
The Life of Britain’s Legendary Warrior Queen
Vanessa Collingridge
Overlook
The true story of the female warrior who almost drove the Romans out of Britain in AD 60.
Burning Rainbow Farm
How a Stoner Utopia Went Up in Smoke
Dean Kuipers
Bloomsbury
State and federal officers’ attempt to seize a marijuana-growing farm in southwestern Michigan ends in a lethal hail of gunfire.
Cellophane
A Novel
Marie Arana
Dial Press
An entrepreneur and his family struggle with “a plague of truth” that descends on them in the heart of the Peruvian rain forest.
Considering Genius
Writings on Jazz
Stanley Crouch
Basic Books
Collected essays by the esteemed jazz critic and co-founder of Jazz at Lincoln Center on the art and its performers.
The Fellowship
The Untold Story of Frank Lloyd Wright & the Taliesin Fellowship
Roger Friedland and Harold Zellman
ReganBooks
An expose of the dark side of the great architect’s Arizona colony.
Staying Up Much Too Late
Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks and the Dark Side of the American Psyche
Gordon Theisen
St. Martin’s/Dunne
An essay on the lonely and downtrodden underpinnings of American life as captured in Hopper’s iconic painting.
Swapping Lives
A Novel
Jane Green
Viking
A married American woman with children and a high-powered single British career woman trade places.
The Whistling Season
A Novel
Ivan Doig
Harcourt
The story of life on a farm in the dry stretches of rural eastern Montana in the early 20th century.
*
JULY
54
A Novel
Wu Ming
Harcourt
Cary Grant, Lucky Luciano, the KGB and Britain’s MI-6 are intertwined in this satire set in the Cold War era.
The Black Book
A Novel
Orhan Pamuk; translated from the Turkish by Maureen Freely
Vintage
A tale about an Istanbul lawyer whose mystery-loving wife has gone missing.
Breach of Faith
Hurricane Katrina and the Near Death of a Great American City
Jed Horne
Random House
A chronicle of the disaster and its various perpetrators, by the metro editor of the Times-Picayune in New Orleans.
Conservatives Without Conscience
John Dean
Viking
President Nixon’s legal counsel rails against Christian fundamentalists, neoconservatives and others he claims have hijacked the Republican Party.
Friendship
An Expose
Joseph Epstein
Houghton Mifflin
The noted essayist examines our ideas about friendship in its various forms.
History Lesson for Girls
A Novel
Aurelie Sheehan
Viking
Bonded by their love of horses, two teenage girls cling to each other amid the tumult in their Connecticut town in the 1970s.
The Inhabited World
A Novel
David Long
Houghton Mifflin
The ghost of a man who killed himself over his marital infidelities tries to help a Seattle-area woman in the same situation.
The Librettist of Venice
The Remarkable Life of Lorenzo Da Ponte
Rodney Bolt
Bloomsbury
A biography of the Jewish orphan from a Venice ghetto who became a priest, poet and collaborator of Mozart’s.
Forty Million Dollar Slaves
The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the Black Athlete
William C. Rhoden
Crown
An account of the virtual enslavement of black athletes in America’s money-minded sports industry.
One Mississippi
A Novel
Mark Childress
Little, Brown
A Midwestern teenager makes new friends in an Alabama town, where he encounters bullying and racism.
Pegasus Descending
A Dave Robicheaux Novel
James Lee Burke
Simon & Schuster
The New Iberia police detective tracks a grifter on the prowl in Louisiana bayou country.
River of No Reprieve
Descending Siberia’s Waterway of Exile, Death, and Destiny
Jeffrey Tayler
Houghton Mifflin
The author’s account of his harrowing 2,400-mile trip in an inflatable raft on Siberia’s Lena River.
The Ruins
A Novel
Scott Smith
Alfred A. Knopf
Young Americans lost in a Mexican jungle turn on each other as a deadly menace stalks them.
Sacco and Vanzetti Must Die!
A Novel
Mark Binelli
Dalkey Archive
The infamous anarchists are imagined as vaudevillians-turned-silent film comics a la Laurel and Hardy.
Siddhartha
A Novel
Hermann Hesse, translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky
Modern Library
A new translation of the classic story of an idealistic young Brahmin who learns life’s hardest lessons.
Spoiling for a Fight
The Rise of Eliot Spitzer
Brooke A. Masters
Times Books
A look at the New York state attorney general’s crusade against corporate and Wall Street miscreants and his bid to be governor.
Talk Talk
A Novel
T.C. Boyle
Viking
A deaf woman and her lover set out to find the con artist who stole her identity.
We
A Novel
Yevgeny Zamyatin, translated from the Russian by Natasha Randall
Modern Library
A new translation of the Russian revolutionary’s 1920s satire about a dystopian future world where all work for the collective good.
What It Used to Be Like
A Portrait of My Marriage to Raymond Carver
Maryann Burk Carver
St. Martin’s
Carver’s long-suffering wife recounts their life together through 25 years of marriage, alcoholism and infidelities.
*
AUGUST
All Aunt Hagar’s Children
Stories
Edward P. Jones
Amistad
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author (“The Known World”) presents linked stories of newly arrived country folk and hardened natives in a racially tiered Washington, D.C.
Blood Money
A Story of Wasted Billions, Lost Lives, and Corporate Greed in Iraq
T. Christian Miller
Little, Brown
A Los Angeles Times reporter describes the Bush administration’s plan to turn Iraq into a lucrative business opportunity for its supporters.
The Broken Branch
How Congress Is Failing America and How to Get It Back on Track
Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein
Oxford University Press
Galvanized majorities on both sides of the aisle have warped the way Congress was intended to operate -- but there’s still hope, the authors argue.
Dragon Fire
A Novel
William S. Cohen
Forge
An inside-the-Beltway political thriller by the former secretary of Defense.
A Fictional History of the United States (with huge chunks missing)
An Anthology of Original Stories
Edited by T Cooper and Adam Mansbach
Akashic
Amy Bloom, Valerie Miner, Paul La Farge and others offer a counter-narrative of our country’s current events.
Heat Signature
A Novel
Lisa Teasley
Bloomsbury
When he learns that his mother’s killer is getting paroled, Sam Brown leaves his home in Twentynine Palms to forget his pain on a restless trip up the Pacific coast.
I Feel Earthquakes More Often Than They Happen
Coming to California in the Age of Schwarzenegger
Amy Wilentz
Simon & Schuster
A former Jerusalem correspondent for the New Yorker flees the East Coast and embraces all the contradictions -- sun, sand and plenty of sideshows -- of living in the Golden State.
The Keep
A Novel
Jennifer Egan
Alfred A. Knopf
A pair of hip cousins renovate an Eastern European castle and hope to turn it into a luxury hotel in a novel-within-a-novel being written by a prison inmate.
LBJ
Architect of American Ambition
Randall B. Woods
Free Press
Newly released tapes and other material inform this portrait of President Johnson as a tragic hero -- a more sympathetic treatment than can be found in other recent biographies.
A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines
A Novel
Janna Levin
Alfred A. Knopf
The debut novel by a Columbia University physicist takes us inside the lives of Kurt Godel and Alan Turing, with a cameo appearance by Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Malory
The Knight Who Became King Arthur’s Chronicler
Christina Hardyment
HarperCollins
This substantial biography of Sir Thomas Malory, little-known 15th century author of “Le Morte d’Arthur,” also illuminates the life and times of medieval England.
Mask Market
A Novel
Andrew Vachss
Pantheon
Tough guy investigator Burke searches for a missing woman he’d rescued 20 years earlier from a brutal pimp. Now he wonders whether he did such a good job the first time.
New Stories From the South
2006 -- The Year’s Best
Edited by Allan Gurganus
Algonquin
Gurganus gathers together a wide range of stories about love, slavery, hunting and Hollywood by writers including Wendell Berry and Tony Earley.
The Night Gardener
A Novel
George Pelecanos
Little, Brown
Three cops confront old demons when a Washington, D.C., teenager’s murder causes an old case the trio had worked on together to resurface.
Orson Welles
Hello Americans (Vol. 2)
Simon Callow
Viking
This follow-up to Callow’s “The Road to Xanadu” charts Welles’ declining Hollywood career during the 1940s starting with “Citizen Kane” and ending with “Macbeth.”
Pound for Pound
A Novel
F.X. O’Toole
Ecco
A posthumously published novel with a prizefighting mise-en-scene, by the author of the short story “Million Dollar Baby.”
Seeing Double
A Novel
Patrick Wilmot
St. Martin’s/Dunne
A political satire skewering African governmental corruption and U.S. policy in Africa.
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