READING MATERIAL

READING MATERIAL
What's available
MORE NEW FICTION
Novelists as characters
"Lunar Park" (Knopf), Bret Easton Ellis' tale of the rise and fall of a novelist who shares his name.
"The Zahir" (HarperCollins) by Paulo Coelho, in which a novelist searches for his wife, a war correspondent who has disappeared in Iraq.
New fantasy titles
"Spell of the Highlander" (Delacorte) by Karen Marie Moning, about a young woman who is unaware that the handsome man she is trying to free from his 13-century entrapment in a mirror has sinister plans for her."Straken" (Del Rey), the concluding volume in Terry Brooks' "High Druid of Shannara" trilogy.
Short stories
"Tooth and Claw" (Viking) by T.C Boyle, with 14 pieces including the title tale about a man whose payoff of a bet is a vicious cat.
"The Turning" (Scribner) by Tim Winton, containing 17 related stories, some with recurring characters, set in Winton's native Australia.
Miscellaneous themes
"Dancing in the Dark" (Knopf)": Caryl Phillips' fictionalized account of the life of Bert Williams, Ziegfeld's Follies performer and the first black entertainer to achieve stardom in the United States.
"An Atomic Romance" (Random House): The discovery of radioactive contamination in their town has an unexpected effect on the relationship of an atomic plant engineer and his biologist girlfriend in Bobbie Ann Mason's story.
MORE NEW NONFICTION
Volumes of memoirs
"The Tender Bar" (Hyperion), Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter J.R. Moehringer's recollection of his New York childhood with a single mother and the local barflies who served as surrogate fathers. "Solo: My Adventures in the Air" (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill), Clyde Edgerton's account of his longtime love for flying and his experiences as a combat pilot in Vietnam. "Herding Cats" (ReganBooks), a chronicle of 30 years in politics by U.S. Sen. Trent Lott, R-Miss.
Various topics
"Imperial Grunts" (Random House): Robert D. Kaplan reports on how U.S. ground forces around the world are fighting the war on terror; and in "I Is for Infidel" (Public Affairs), Kathy Gannon chronicles her 18 years as a journalist in Afghanistan.
"Where God Was Born" (Morrow): Bruce Feiler's account of his visits to biblical sites on a 10,000-mile trek throughout the Middle East.
"Wild Ducks Flying Backward" (Bantam): Travel writing is among the short pieces collected by Tom Robbins, along with poems, essays, lyrics and personality profiles.
"Henry Adams and the Making of America" (Houghton Mifflin): A historian, Gary Wills, writes about a historian, Henry Adams, who died in 1918, and of his important, prolific and often overlooked writings.
"Bait and Switch" (Metropolitan Books): "Nickel and Dimed" author Barbara Ehrenreich goes undercover to explore the plight of unemployed white-collar job-seekers.
NEW FIRST NOVELS
"Confessions of a Super Mom" (Dutton), Melanie Lynne Hauser's comic tale about a single mother who acquires superpowers after she inhales fumes from the cleansers she's using on a stubborn bathroom stain.
"The Highest Tide" (Bloomsbury) by Jim Lynch, in which a 13-year-old boy in Washington state becomes a local celebrity after he discovers exotic sea creatures while kayaking on Puget Sound.
"The Holding" (Norton) by Merilyn Simonds, which tells in alternating chapters the stories of two women who lived on the same plot of land in the wilds of Canada a century apart.
"Indecision" (Random House), Benjamin Kunkel's comic novel about an indecisive 28-year-old New Yorker who decides to go to Ecuador in search of his high school heartthrob, Natasha.
"In the Province of Saints" (Little, Brown) by Thomas O'Malley, in which a boy in 1970s rural Ireland becomes troubled by rumors that his father had had an affair with a neighbor who died mysteriously.
"The Widow of the South" (Warner Books), Robert Hicks' historical novel about a Tennessee woman who turns her plantation house into a field hospital for Confederate soldiers and establishes a Confederate cemetery on her grounds.
Source: Associated Press