Bookworm

Wherever Oliver Sacks goes, the nature of consciousness is his subject...

Night Picnic: Poems (Harcourt) Pulitzer Prize-winner Charles Simic examines his work under the lens of political terror and the subsequent experience of immigration...  

The Lovely Bones (Little Brown) In Alice Sebold's eerie and fascinating first novel, a murdered girl reveals a double mystery: the nature of heaven (from where she narrates her story) and the nature of earth (where her family remembers her and her murderer remains uncaught).

Spies (Metropolitan Books) An elderly man reviews his childhood, discovering more than he could have possibly known as a child. Michael Frayn shows us that while children may play at being spies, adults are actual spies who explore the past and unearth secrets that alter their own identities.

Oscar Hijuelos gives us a sentimental rumba-and a return to his first inspiration: Cuban music.

Jonathan Safran Foer's literary debut commanded lavish praise and immediate popularity. 

A Song Flung Up to Heaven (Random House) Maya Angelou has completed her extraordinary autobiography, which began with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Here, she speaks about the people she knew when she started out as a writer, how she learned to write (she was a dancer), and who she is now.

Viken Berberian's first novel attempts to take us inside the head of a failed suicide bomber, exploring his connection to the subject and the models in music and poetry that brought him closer to this dissociated and shattered personality...

Samuel Johnson Is Indignant (McSweeney's) Lydia Davis' stories are miniatures. Acutely observed specificities are tautly rendered. Such intimate detail provides a keyhole view of how sanity gives way to obsession, and obsession gives way to wild comedy.

Atonement (Doubleday) Ian McEwan explores both the technique and passion of his novel-his extraordinary assumption of a woman's voice and her malicious acts that violate the social fabric.