Reviewed: Cooperstown Confidential by Zev Chafets
A new book about baseball’s Hall of Fame builds an argument that steroid use shouldn’t be a barrier to gaining entry — in fact, it should be embraced as the latest way of getting ahead. READ MORE >

Reviewed: The Essays of Leonard Michaels by Leonard Michaels
After his death in 2003, the fiction of Leonard Michaels was reissued and newly appreciated. Now comes a group of essays as sharp and provocative as the fiction. In dealing with the power of language, the necessity of imagination and the influence of family, these pieces blur the distinction between the personal and the critical. READ MORE >

Reviewed: Four Freedoms by John Crowley
John Crowley is best known for erudite fantasies, but his new novel is set at a bomber plant in Oklahoma during World War II, where ordinary Americans come together to be transformed by work and community. READ MORE >

Reviewed: Do Not Deny Me by Jean Thompson
Jean Thompson returns with another strong collection of darkly comic stories about everything from financial scams to midlife crises to the occasional allure of psychics. READ MORE >

Reviewed: The Blue Hour: A Life of Jean Rhys by Lilian Pizzichini
This biography of Jean Rhys tends toward pop psychology and melodrama, but the details of the writer’s life — her tumultuous childhood, her many lovers, and her spare, brilliant novels — remain fascinating. READ MORE >

Reviewed: Love and Obstacles by Aleksandar Hemon
Aleksandar Hemon’s work has always been concerned with bridging personal and cultural distances. In this strong new collection, his characters have a harder time doing it than ever before.
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Reviewed: Brooklyn by Colm Tóibín
In the spare follow-up to his universally acclaimed fictional portrait of Henry James, Colm Tóibín lowers his always delicate voice yet another register to capture the life of a young Irish immigrant in 1950s Brooklyn. READ MORE >

Reviewed: Nothing Right by Antonya Nelson
Like most of us, the characters in these stories by Antonya Nelson, an all-star of the form, go through life hoping for dramatic change — but spend most of their time coping with the way things stay the same. READ MORE >

Reviewed: La Culture en clandestins. L’UX by “Lazar Kunstmann”
Over many years, a group in Paris that calls itself UX has restored a giant clock, infiltrated government buildings to perform theater inside and fixed up many of the city’s vast underground spaces — all without anyone knowing. Jon Lackman sat down with the group’s leader to discuss the mystery. READ MORE >

Reviewed: Once a Runner by John L. Parker, Jr.
Once a Runner, a cult classic long hard to find and now reissued, has been called “the best novel ever written about running,” but that may say more about the sport’s literature (and the sport’s very nature) than about this book. READ MORE >

Reviewed: Gabriel García Márquez: A Life by Gerald Martin
Written with the approval — if not the strenuous cooperation — of its subject, this biography illuminates the life, work, and many self-made mysteries of a literary giant. READ MORE >

Reviewed: As They See ‘Em by Bruce Weber
In this entertaining, Plimpton-esque chronicle of an author’s immersion in a sporting subculture, Bruce Weber tries to do the impossible: Make umpires sympathetic. READ MORE >

Reviewed: Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi by Geoff Dyer
In Geoff Dyer’s latest, two narrators seek transcendence in very different ways. The result is a beautifully observed, provocatively ambiguous novel. READ MORE >

Reviewed: Selected Poems by Thom Gunn
This wisely chosen selection of snapshots from Gunn’s career shows the brilliant poet equally at home with traditional forms and bold new experiences. READ MORE >

Reviewed: Don’t Cry by Mary Gaitskill
Most renowned for the more provocative elements of her stories, Mary Gaitskill’s latest collection makes even clearer the compassion and familial concerns that are also her great strengths.

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Reviewed: The Life You Can Save by Peter Singer
In his latest book, in a tone both accessible and confrontational, Peter Singer again wants to make you feel bad about how little you do for the world’s poor. Most of the time, he succeeds. READ MORE >

Reviewed: The Accordionist’s Son by Bernardo Atxaga
In a novel that wears its serious themes lightly — sometimes too lightly — a Basque man reckons with his father’s involvement in the Spanish Civil War. READ MORE >

Reviewed: Forever Blue by Michael D’Antonio
For more than half a century, Brooklyn Dodgers fans have blamed and hated Walter O’Malley for moving the franchise to California. In this history of the team (and of the broader moment in baseball), Michael D’Antonio argues that they’ve been fixated on the wrong guy. READ MORE >

Reviewed: All the Living by C. E. Morgan
In this atmospheric debut novel, which gently explores the question of religious faith, a young woman in Kentucky feels the conflicting pulls of independence and passionate love. READ MORE >

Reviewed: Cheever: A Life by Blake Bailey
John Cheever was America’s foremost suburban anthropologist, and the most interesting character on those seemingly calm streets may have been himself. In this biography of Cheever, Blake Bailey makes good use of the author’s astonishingly revealing journals.

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Reviewed: Lowboy by John Wray
John Wray’s third novel follows a 16-year-old schizophrenic through the subway tunnels of New York. The admirable stylistic skill on display in his previous novels remains, but this time it’s harder to care about the story he tells. READ MORE >

Reviewed: Why Us? by James Le Fanu
James Le Fanu is rightfully suspicious of excessive faith in science. But when he argues that scientists should grant the “non-material reality” of our souls, he follows his suspicions too far. READ MORE >

Reviewed: Flannery by Brad Gooch
In this new biography of Flannery O’Connor, Brad Gooch paints a vivid portrait of the artist as a young girl. But whether he — or anyone else — can plumb the grown woman’s famously mysterious and guarded depths is another question.
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Reviewed: The Book of Dead Philosophers by Simon Critchley
Philosophy has given us world-changing ideas about ethics, logic, beauty, language, and politics, to name a few. But does it offer any special insight about death? This lively compendium of deep thinkers and their exits seeks to find out. READ MORE >

Reviewed: Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned: Stories by Wells Tower
In this inventive debut collection of short stories, Wells Tower charts the lives and “chaotic troubles” of self-destructive characters who live on the margins of society. Tower’s careful attention and style bring them vividly to life. READ MORE >

Reviewed: The Gamble by Thomas E. Ricks
In Fiasco, veteran reporter Thomas Ricks gave readers a tour of the bungled opening stages of the war in Iraq. Now, in The Gamble, he expertly uses his deep access to provide the full story of “the surge,” or “the least bad option.” READ MORE >

Reviewed: The Believers by Zoë Heller
Zoë Heller’s first two novels were closely observed psychological dramas. In her third, she uses a wider lens to address the story of an entire family and tackle larger themes of religious and political belief. READ MORE >