"The Learners"

New from Scribner: The Learners by Chip Kidd.

About the book, from the publisher:

Fresh out of college in the summer of 1961, Happy lands his first job as a graphic designer (okay, art assistant) at a small Connecticut advertising agency populated by a cast of endearing eccentrics. Life for Happy seems to be -- well, happy. But when he's assigned to design a newspaper ad recruiting participants for an experiment in the Yale Psychology Department, Happy can't resist responding to the ad himself. Little does he know that the experience will devastate him, forcing a reexamination of his past, his soul, and the nature of human cruelty -- chiefly, his own.

Written in sharp, witty prose and peppered with absorbing ruminations on graphic design, The Learners again shows that Chip Kidd's writing is every bit as original, stunning, and memorable as his celebrated book jackets.

Read an excerpt from The Learners.

"The Bad Wife Handbook"

New from Wesleyan Publishing House: The Bad Wife Handbook by Rachel Zucker.

About the book, from the author's website:

Rachel Zucker's third book of poems is a darkly comic collection that looks unsparingly at the difficulties and compromises of married life. Formally innovative and blazingly direct, The Bad Wife Handbook crossexamines marriage, motherhood, monogamy, and writing itself. Her upending of grammatical and syntactic expectations lends these poems an urgent richness and aesthetic complexity that mirrors the puzzles of real life. Candid, subversive, and genuinely moving, The Bad Wife Handbook is an important portrait of contemporary marriage and the writing life, of emotional connection and disconnection, of togetherness and aloneness. It is a new kind of Confessionalism, a fearless engagement with truth and telling, a treatise on what it means to say or to keep secret, an investigation into the uncanny ways writing renders the self both more and less visible.

Visit Rachel Zucker's website.

"A Person of Interest"

New from Viking Books: A Person of Interest by Susan Choi.

About the book, from the publisher:

From an acclaimed novelist, an emotionally complex and riveting story of suspicion, innocence, and regret

When a mail bomb explodes in the campus office next door, Lee, an Asian American math professor at a second-tier university in the Midwest, comes under suspicion. The authorities believe he may be the infamous “brain bomber,” an elusive terrorist whose primary targets are prominent scientists and mathematicians.

In the midst of campus tumult and grief over the star computer scientist who was killed by the bomb, Lee receives a disturbing letter from a figure in his past. Certain he is being targeted for revenge, he begins confronting key events in his life. Misunderstood by the people around him, Lee is not conscious that his behavior has begun to heighten suspicion in the minds of his colleagues, students, and neighbors, leading the FBI to designate him “a person of interest” and pushing his life and reputation to the verge of ruin.

Intricately plotted and engrossing, A Person of Interest asks how far one man can run from his past, and explores the impact of scrutiny and suspicion in an age of terror. With its propulsive drive and vividly realized characters, Susan Choi’s latest novel is as thrilling as it is lyrical, and confirms her place as one of the most important young novelists chronicling the American experience.

Visit Susan Choi's website.

"The Commoner"

New from Nan A. Talese and Random House: The Commoner by John Burnham Schwartz.

About the book, from the publisher:

It is 1959 when Haruko, a young woman of good family, marries the Crown Prince of Japan, the heir to the Chrysanthemum Throne. She is the first non-aristocratic woman to enter the longest-running, almost hermetically sealed, and mysterious monarchy in the world. Met with cruelty and suspicion by the Empress and her minions, Haruko is controlled at every turn. The only interest the court has in her is her ability to produce an heir. After finally giving birth to a son, Haruko suffers a nervous breakdown and loses her voice. However, determined not to be crushed by the imperial bureaucrats, she perseveres. Thirty years later, now Empress herself, she plays a crucial role in persuading another young woman—a rising star in the foreign ministry—to accept the marriage proposal of her son, the Crown Prince. The consequences are tragic and dramatic.

Told in the voice of Haruko, meticulously researched and superbly imagined, The Commoner is the mesmerizing, moving, and surprising story of a brutally rarified and controlled existence at once hidden and exposed, and of a complex relationship between two isolated women who, despite being visible to all, are truly understood only by each other. With the unerring skill of a master storyteller, John Burnham Schwartz has written his finest novel yet.

Visit John Burnham Schwartz's website.

"Knock 'em Dead"

New from Kensington Publishing: Knock 'em Dead by Rhonda Pollero.

About the book, from the author's website:

Finley knows it can’t be good news when she’s awakened at 5:40 A.M. by someone knocking on her door. Her hunch proves correct. Finley’s pal Jane is hysterical and clad only in a negligee. It all started when Jane went out on a blind date with a hunk named Paolo – and ended when she woke up next to his corpse. Finley knows Jane wouldn’t hurt a fly, especially one with a zipper. Too bad the police don’t agree…

Having survived her ordeal of questioning and criminally bad coffee at the local cop shop, Finley’s got to post bail and hire an attorney for Jane. But with most of her cash tied up in credit card debt, she knows she has to do the unthinkable: hit her mother up for money. As if attempting to thaw out the Ice Queen isn’t enough, there’s the unthinkable part II: resisting McGarrity. Yes, dangerously sexy P.I. Liam McGarrity has offered his services…for a discounted rate. To prove Jane isn’t a killer, Finley will have to buckle down and work with Liam. She just has to keep reminding herself that she already has the perfect boyfriend in her FedEx pilot Patrick.

But this case is booby-trapped with more serious pitfalls than wicked temptation. For starters, there’s the fact that two knives were used to kill Paolo. Then there’s a suspicious string of robberies. And when someone tried to run Finley off the road, she’s got to act quick to find a killer who wants to see her underground.

My Book, The Movie: Knock 'em Dead.

"The Anatomy of Deception"

New from Delacorte Press: The Anatomy of Deception by Lawrence Goldstone.

About the book, from the publisher:

A mesmerizing forensic thriller that thrusts the reader into the operating rooms, drawing rooms, and back alleys of 1889 Philadelphia, as a young doctor grapples with the principles of scientific process to track a daring killer

In the morgue of a Philadelphia hospital, a group of physicians open a coffin and uncover the corpse of a beautiful young woman. What they see takes their breath away. Within days, one of them strongly suspects that he knows the woman’s identity…and the horrifying events that led to her death. But in this richly atmospheric novel–an ingenious blend of history, suspense and early forensic science–the most compelling chapter is yet to come, as young Ephraim Carroll is plunged into a maze of murder, secrets and unimaginable crimes....

Dr. Ephraim Carroll came to Philadelphia to study with a leading professor, the brilliant William Osler, believing that he would gain the power to save countless lives. As America hurtles toward a new century, medicine is changing rapidly, in part due to the legalization of autopsy–a crime only a few years before. But Carroll and his mentor are at odds over what they glimpsed that morning in the hospital’s Dead House. And when a second mysterious death is determined to have been a ruthless murder, Carroll can feel the darkness gathering around him–and he ignites an investigation of his own.

Soon he is moving between the realm of elite medicine, Philadelphia high society, and a teeming badlands of criminality and sexual depravity along the city’s fetid waterfront. With a wealthy, seductive woman clouding his vision, the controversial artist Thomas Eakins sowing scandal, and the secrets of the nation’s powerful surgeons unraveling around him, Carroll is forced to confront an agonizing moral choice–between exposing a killer, undoing a wrong, and, quite possibly, protecting the future of medicine itself….

The Anatomy of Deception was a "Pierce Pick of the Week" at January Magazine.

"The Black Dove"

New from St. Martin's Minotaur: Steve Hockensmith's The Black Dove.

About the book, from the publisher:

In the summer of 1893, Gustav “Old Red” Amlingmeyer and his brother Otto (a.k.a. “Big Red”) find themselves down and out in San Francisco. Though cowpokes by training, the brothers are devotees of the late, great Sherlock Holmes and his trademark method of “deducifying.” But when they set out to land jobs as professional detectives, they land themselves in hot water, instead.

First their friend Dr. Chan mysteriously takes a potshot at them, fatally wounding Big Red’s new hat. Then a secretive young woman from their past pops up and convinces them that Chan’s in trouble -- and they’re just the men to get him out of it. Unfortunately, they’re too late: By the time they track Chan down again, he’s dead. The police call it a suicide. Old Red calls that a lie. When he and his brother set out to prove it, they put themselves on a collision course with shady S.F.P.D. cops, brutal Barbary Coast hoodlums and the deadly Chinatown tongs.

Before long, all sides are in a race to uncover the secret that could rock the city. And their only clue to what’s actually going on is the enigmatic, exotic and extremely difficult to find “Black Dove.”

Read Big Red's blog to learn more about Steve Hockensmith and his writing.

The Page 69 Test: On the Wrong Track.

My Book, The Movie: Holmes on the Range.

"The Monsters of Templeton"

New from Hyperion: The Monsters of Templeton by Lauren Groff.

About the book, from the publisher:

“The day I returned to Templeton steeped in disgrace, the fifty-foot corpse of a monster surfaced in Lake Glimmerglass.”

So begins The Monsters of Templeton, a novel spanning two centuries: part a contemporary story of a girl’s search for her father, part historical novel, and part ghost story, this spellbinding novel is at its core a tale of how one town holds the secrets of a family.

In the wake of a wildly disastrous affair with her married archaeology professor, Willie Upton arrives on the doorstep of her ancestral home in Templeton, New York, where her hippie-turned-born-again-Baptist mom, Vi, still lives. Willie expects to be able to hide in the place that has been home to her family for generations, but the monster’s death changes the fabric of the quiet, picture-perfect town her ancestors founded. Even further, Willie learns that the story her mother had always told her about her father has all been a lie: he wasn’t the random man from a free-love commune that Vi had led her to imagine, but someone else entirely. Someone from this very town.

As Willie puts her archaeological skills to work digging for the truth about her lineage, she discovers that the secrets of her family run deep. Through letters, editorials, and journal entries, the dead rise up to tell their sides of the story as dark mysteries come to light, past and present blur, old stories are finally put to rest, and the shocking truth about more than one monster is revealed.

Visit the official The Monsters of Templeton website.

"The Age of American Unreason"

New from Pantheon Books: The Age of American Unreason by Susan Jacoby.

About the book, from the publisher:

Combining historical analysis with contemporary observation, Susan Jacoby dissects a new American cultural phenomenon--one that is at odds with our heritage of Enlightenment reason and with modern, secular knowledge and science. With mordant wit, she surveys an anti-rationalist landscape extending from pop culture to a pseudo-intellectual universe of "junk thought." Disdain for logic and evidence defines a pervasive malaise fostered by the mass media, triumphalist religious fundamentalism, mediocre public education, a dearth of fair-minded public intellectuals on the right and the left, and, above all, a lazy and credulous public.

Jacoby offers an unsparing indictment of the American addiction to infotainment -- from television to the Web -- and cites this toxic dependency as the major element distinguishing our current age of unreason from earlier outbreaks of American anti-intellectualism and anti-rationalism. With reading on the decline and scientific and historical illiteracy on the rise, an increasingly ignorant public square is dominated by debased media-driven language and received opinion.

At this critical political juncture, nothing could be more important than recognizing the "overarching crisis of memory and knowledge" described in this impassioned, tough-minded book, which challenges Americans to face the painful truth about what the flights from reason has cost us as individuals and as a nation.

Visit Susan Jacoby's website.

"Shadowbridge"

New from Del Rey Books: Gregory Frost's Shadowbridge.

About the book, from the publisher:

Sprung from a timeless dream, Shadowbridge is a world of linked spans arching high above glittering seas. It is a world of parading ghosts, inscrutable gods, and dangerous magic. Most of all, it is a world of stories.

No one knows those stories better than Leodora, a young shadow-puppeteer who travels Shadowbridge collecting the intertwining tales and myths of each place she passes through, then retells them in performances whose genius has begun to attract fame ... and less welcome attention.

For Leodora is fleeing a violent past, as are her two companions: her manager, Soter, an elderly drunkard who also served Ledora’s father, the legendary puppeteer Bardsham; and Diverus, her musical accompanist, a young man who has been blessed, and perhaps cursed, by the touch of a nameless god.

Now, as the strands of a destiny she did not choose begin to tighten around her, Leodora is about to cross the most perilous bridge of all–the one leading from the past to the future.

Read Lincoln Cho's rave endorsement of Shadowbridge at January Magazine.