HIGH WIRE The Precarious Financial Lives of American Families By Peter Gosselin | THIS LAND IS THEIR LAND Reports from a Divided Nation By Barbara Ehrenreich

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THE END OF FOOD By Paul Roberts | STUFFED AND STARVED The Hidden Battle for the World Food System | By Raj Patel

THE WAY WE'LL BE The Zogby Report on the Transformation of the American Dream By John Zogby

THE LITTLE BOOK By Selden Edwards

WHEN WE WERE ROMANS By Matthew Kneale

THE SISTER By Poppy Adams

The other day my daughter, 14, saw me hunched over a laptop, cringing at the customer reviews of my novels on Amazon.com and bn.com. "Why do you insist on tormenting yourself?" she asked. "It just...

The boy Chris Bohjalian describes as his youthful self is a sorry sight: fat, doomed to orthodontists' headgear, the perpetual new kid in town.

Michael Erard calls his book Um "a work of applied blunderology," but, more simply, it is a primer on the science and history of bungled speech. "Why do verbal blunders happen?" Erard asks, and "W...

Philip Larkin almost tried to sound unattractive and misanthropic. How'd he describe himself at Oxford? As a balding salmon. Ultra-conservative in politics and art, he praised Margaret Thatcher an...

6 P.M. Sherrilyn Kenyon , author of the bestselling "Dark-Hunter" series, reads from and signs book 12, Acheron , at Barnes & Noble-Market Common, 2800 Clarendon Blvd., Arlington, Va., 703-248-8244.

Rankings reflect sales for the week ended August 10, 2008.

In his review of Habits of Empire by Walter Nugent (Book World, Aug. 10), Michael Grunwald states "the notion of a modern U.S. invasion of Canada was never remotely plausible and is still more tha...

"No!" thundered the Russian Orthodox priest whom I had invited to participate in an oral history of Russia. The world didn't need another book about his country. "We only need two books -- the Bib...

Two writers pour their hearts into rebuilding dilapidated houses.

In this sassy memoir, Julia Reed, a contributing editor at Vogue and Newsweek, chronicles the protracted and oft-bungled renovation of her New Orleans house, a project that was interrupted -- but ...

GIORDANO BRUNO Philosopher/Heretic By Ingrid D. Rowland Farrar Straus Giroux. 335 pp. $27 (forthcoming August 26) In Rome's Campo de' Fiore, a square bustling with restaurants, markets and charmed...

HABITS OF EMPIRE A History of American Expansion By Walter Nugent

DAPHNE By Justine Picardie

THE CONVERSION By Joseph Olshan

THE 19TH WIFE By David Ebershoff

Richard Wright, "the first great Negro novelist" in the language of the day, died on Nov. 28, 1960, of a heart attack, in the Paris clinic he had entered a few days before. He was 52.

As a kid, I doubted I could ever undertake for anybody a task as grisly as my daddy's preparation of the Sunday chicken: wringing its neck, relieving the purplish, prickly body of feathers, disman...

Little Leap Forward is a slim volume, handsomely illustrated and brimming with sensory details of a Beijing neighborhood in the summer of 1966, just as the Cultural Revolution was taking a violent...

6:30 P.M. Journalist Maggie Jackson discusses and signs her new book, Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age , at Busboys and Poets (D.C.), 2021 14th St. NW, 202-387-7638.

WAITER RANT Thanks for the Tip -- Confessions of a Cynical Waiter By The Waiter

TRAFFIC Why We Drive the Way We Do (And What It Says About Us) By Tom Vanderbilt

THE GARGOYLE By Andrew Davidson Doubleday. 468 pp. $25.95 In the opening pages of The Gargoyle, Andrew Davidson's outrageous new novel, a pornographer high on cocaine runs his car off a mountain r...

MELTDOWN The Inside Story of the North Korean Nuclear Crisis

THE LAST FISH TALE The Fate of the Atlantic and Survival in Gloucester, America's Oldest Fishing Port and Most Original Town

ENLIGHTENMENT By Maureen Freely Overlook. 398 pp. $24.95

CIVIL & STRANGE By Cláir Ní Aonghusa Houghton Mifflin. 305 pp. $24

THE GUERNSEY LITERARY AND POTATO PEEL PIE SOCIETY By Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows

Captain, that's a circular run!" a crew member shouted. He was referring to a torpedo that had been shot from the U.S. Navy submarine Tang only to malfunction, turn around and head back toward the...

WHITE HEAT The Friendship of Emily Dickinson And Thomas Wentworth Higginson

David Lebedoff opens The Same Man: George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh in Love and War (Random House, $26) with dual vignettes from a night in June 1930: Waugh attends a la-di-da party at the Marlborou...

Headlines give us the general outline of the complicated choices women face today and of a range of abuses that have become increasingly routine. But a new batch of summer novels adds texture and ...

As a teenager in 1950s China, Kang Zhengguo lived for a time with his grandparents in a magical-sounding compound called Silent Garden, quietly feeding his literary passions, even decorating his r...

My first poetry teacher was a rusty-handed Mississippian named Etheridge Knight, whose first collection was printed while he was still in jail, where he'd come under the tutelage of Gwendolyn Broo...

6 P.M. Steven Shafarman discusses and signs Peaceful, Positive Revolution: Economic Security for Every American at Busboys and Poets, 2021 14th St. NW, 202-387-7638.

It seems a pity that the reviewer's assessment of my book The Terminal Spy (Book World, July 27) was based partly on some misreadings of the book and its conclusions about the death of Alexander L...

Rankings reflect sales for the week ended July 27, 2008. The charts may not be reproduced without permission from Nielsen BookScan. Copyright © 2008 by Nielsen BookScan. (The right-hand column of...

MY THREE FATHERS And the Elegant Deceptions of My Mother,

A PATH OUT OF THE DESERT A Grand Strategy for America in the Middle East By Kenneth M. Pollack

VETS UNDER SIEGE How America Deceives and Dishonors Those Who Fight Our Battles By Martin Schram

A FEW SECONDS OF PANIC A 5-Foot-8, 170-Pound, 43-Year-Old Sportswriter Plays in the NFL By Stefan Fatsis

HOSPITAL Man, Woman, Birth, Death, Infinity, Plus Red Tape, Bad Behavior, Money, God, and Diversity on Steroids By Julie Salamon

NORTHLINE By Willy Vlautin

STAND THE STORM By Breena Clarke

DORIS DAY The Untold Story of the Girl Next Door By David Kaufman

" G iulietta has put Villalonga's corpse in one of our suitcases. We are in a large hotel, they're giving us a different room, I'm afraid that the young bellhop lingering next to the big suitcase ...

HOW FICTION WORKS By James Wood

What is a character? I am thicketed in qualifications.

THE FALL AND RISE OF THE ISLAMIC STATE By Noah Feldman

Rescued from a London slum, 17-year-old Ivy begins posing as an artist's model for her savior, a minor painter and neighbor to a Pre-Raphaelite master. Sound like a fairy tale?

6:30 P.M. Veteran photography editor Leora Kahn discusses and signs Darfur: Twenty Years of War and Genocide in Sudan (featuring the work of eight distinguished photojournalists -- from Magnum Pho...

Rankings reflect sales for the week ended July 20, 2008.

Gregg Herken's failure to subject to critical scrutiny the depiction of the RAND Corporation in his review of Alex Abella's Soldiers of Reason (Book World, July 6) does a disservice to Book World ...

DRINK A Cultural History of Alcohol By Iain Gately

ROME 1960 The Olympics That Changed the World By David Maraniss

THE EAVES OF HEAVEN A Life in Three Wars By Andrew X. Pham

Lang Lang sounds as if he couldn't be more laid-back about classical music.

THE SOLOIST A Lost Dream, an Unlikely Friendship, and the Redemptive Power of Music By Steve Lopez

WE ARE NOW BEGINNING OUR DESCENT By James Meek

THE SIZE OF THE WORLD By Joan Silber

I thought we were okay once we got in our building, which was barricaded with sandbags on one side. Ernst at least knew to put on his flak jacket and helmet right away. His face was clenched and b...

THE FORGER'S SPELL A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century

Raphael -- or to give him his full name, Raffaello di Giovanni Santi (1483-1520) -- was one of those painters who could do it all: draw superbly, use color expertly, arrange his subjects skillfull...

A WRITER'S PEOPLE Ways of Looking and Feeling By V.S. Naipaul

It is wholly unnatural to wake up and sit in front of a mirror for two hours every morning, yet this is what a film actor is meant to do. If you are working on stage, at least you are spared until...

She won your notice in "Terms of Endearment," "An Officer and a Gentleman" and "Shadowlands" -- all of it years ago. But if Hollywood can be cruel to mature women, it hasn't fazed Debra Winger.

I once heard our current poet laureate, Charles Simic, tell a story about his mother in the war-ravaged Yugoslavia of his youth.

6:30 P.M. Max Sherman , former dean of the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, discusses his recent book, Barbara Jordan: Speaking the Truth with Eloqu...

Alexandra Fuller's review (Book World, July 6, 2008) of Rick Bass's Why I Came West spent more time talking about the heroic work of Nigeria's Ken Saro-Wiwa than about Bass's book. Saro-Wiwa's leg...

FOR THE LOVE OF ANIMALS The Rise of the Animal Protection Movement By Kathryn Shevelow

THE FAMILY The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power By Jeff Sharlet

THE DARK SIDE The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals By Jane Mayer

THE MYSTERIOUS MONTAGUE A True Tale of Hollywood, Golf, and Armed Robbery By Leigh Montville

PLAYING WITH THE ENEMY A Baseball Prodigy, a World at War, and a Field of Broken Dreams By Gary W. Moore

INTERCOURSE Stories By Robert Olen Butler

Horsemen hear the noise of animals doing the work they've been bred for; animal lovers hear the sound of wild creatures yearning to be free.

THE MURDER OF NIKOLAI VAVILOV The Story of Stalin's Persecution of One of the Great Scientists of the Twentieth Century By Peter Pringle

PRAGUE IN DANGER The Years of German Occupation, 1939-45 By Peter Demetz

Some read-alouds invite a cozy cuddle, others call for giggles and romps.

Sometimes I think critics resent poets who are understandable; otherwise, they'd write more about Louis Simpson's marvelous work, whose lines could put the academic interpreters out of business.

11 A.M. Children's book author and illustrator Rebecca Harrison Reed reads from and discusses The Train to Maine , a new picture book illustrated by Reed and written by Jamie Spencer, at Olsson's ...

Rankings reflect sales for the week ended July 6, 2008.

NOW THE HELL WILL START One Soldier's Flight From the Greatest Manhunt of World War II By Brendan I. Koerner

3 Ark of the Liberties By Ted Widmer Reviewed by David M. Kennedy

WHY I CAME WEST By Rick Bass