The History of Love. W.W. Norton & Company, 2005; 252 pages; $23.95. FROM THE DUST JACKET: A long-lost book reappears, mysteriously connecting an old man searching for his son and a girl seeking a cure …

Rules for Old Men Waiting. Random House, 2005; $21.95; 210 pages. FROM THE DUST JACKET: A brief, lyrical novel with a powerful emotional charge, Rules for Old Men Waiting is about three wars of the …

The Poet of Tolstoy Park. Ballantine Books, 2005; $21.95; 274 pages. FROM THE DUST JACKET: "The more you transform your life from the material to the spiritual domain, the less you become afraid of death." …

American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer. Alfred A. Knopf, 2005; 752 pages; $35. FROM THE DUST JACKET: American Prometheus is the first full-scale biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer, "father of the …

Do You Hear What I Hear? Religious Calling, the Priesthood, and My Father. Viking, 2005; 304 pages; $25.95. FROM THE DUST JACKET: At the first revelation that her father, a sixtyish university professor, wants to …

The Poet's Guide to Life: The Wisdom of Rilke. Written by Rainer Maria Rilke; edited and translated by Ulrich Baer; Modern Library, 2005; 215 pages; $19.95. FROM THE DUST JACKET: In this treasury of uncommon …

Theodore Roethke: Selected Poems. Edited by Edward Hirsch; The Library of America, American Poets Project, 2005; 158 pages; $20. FROM THE DUST JACKET: From the recollections of his youth in Michigan to the visionary longings …

The Poetry Home Repair Manual: Practical Advice for Beginning Poets. University of Nebraska Press; 2005; 163 pages; $19.95. FROM THE DUST JACKET: "Kooser's Poetry Home Repair Manual is marked by impeccable clarity and focus of …

Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil. Copper Canyon Press, 2005; 108 pages; $15. FROM THE DUST JACKET: An unruly paean to American poetry, Cooling Time blurs the divisions between poem, memoir, and essay, while borrowing …

Mad Mary Lamb: Lunacy and Murder in Literary London. W.W. Norton, 2005; 314 pages; $24.95. FROM THE DUST JACKET: Mary Lamb -- a dutiful daughter, well liked by just about everyone -- killed her own …

Wrong About Japan: A Father's Journey with His Son. Alfred A. Knopf, 2005; 158 pages; $17.95. FROM THE DUST JACKET: The recipient of two Booker Prizes, Peter Carey expands his extraordinary achievement with each new …

Leaving the Saints: How I Lost the Mormons and Found My Faith. Crown Publishers, 2005; 320 pages; $24.95. FROM THE DUST JACKET: In a thoughtful examination of faith, Martha Beck chronicles her decision to leave …

I wrote Fat Girl because I'd read books that other fat women wrote about how they were fat. Most fat women didn't write the truth about fat. They didn't write about fat fat fat fat …

February House: The Story of W. H. Auden, Carson McCullers, Jane and Paul Bowles, Benjamin Britten, and Gypsy Rose Lee, Under One Roof In Wartime America. North Point Press, 2005; 166 pages; $22. FROM THE …

In Fond Remembrance of Me: A Memoir of Myth and Uncommon Friendship in the Arctic FROM THE DUST JACKET: Howard Norman spent the fall of 1977 in Churchill, Manitoba, translating into English two dozen "Noah …

Five Quarts: A Personal and Natural History of Blood. Ballantine Books; 2005; 309 pages; $23. FROM THE DUST JACKET: "We're born in blood. Our family histories are contained in it, our bodies nourished by it …

American Writers at Home. Text by J.D. McClatchy; Photographs by Erica Lennard; Library of America and The Vendome Press, 2004; 224 pages; $50. FROM THE DUST JACKET: American Writers at Home affords an unprecedented opportunity …

Bound for Freedom: Black Los Angeles in Jim Crow America (George Gund Foundation Imprint in African American Studies). University of California Press; January 2005; 472 pp.; $29.95 FROM THE DUST JACKET: Paul Bontemps decided to …

GI Jews: How World War II Changed a Generation. Harvard University Press; 368 pages; $25.95. FROM THE DUST JACKET: Whether they came from Sioux Falls or the Bronx, over half a million Jews entered the …

Pink Steam. Suspect Thoughts Press, 2004; 190 pages; $16.95. FROM THE DUST JACKET: Pink steam rises from the vats of melting goo in the Vincent Price 3-D horror classic, House of Wax. Railroad buffs know …

Open House: Of Family, Friends, Food, Piano Lessons, and the Search for a Room of My Own. Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 272 pages; $24. FROM THE DUST JACKET: Open House gathers observations, reminiscences, anecdotes, and …

Dust of Snow The way a crow Shook down on me The dust of snow From a hemlock tree Has given my heartA change of mood And saved some partOf a day I had rued. …

Christmas letters. I don't know their history, who first wrote one, or where and why. I suspect they began to be written in the I Love Lucy Eisenhower years when all Americans, even though in …

FROM THE DUST JACKET: A cigar-smoking proponent of free-verse modernism in open rebellion against her distinguished Boston lineage, Amy Lowell (1874-1925) cut an indelible public figure. But in the words of editor Honor Moore, "What …

FROM THE DUST JACKET: Jack Kerouac is best known through the image he put forth in his autobiographical novels. Yet it is only in his private journals, in which he catalogued his innermost feelings, that …

Spirit and Flesh: Life in a Fundamentalist Baptist Church. Alfred A. Knopf, 2004; 435 pages; $27.95. FROM THE DUST JACKET: In an attempt to understand the growing influence of the Christian Right, sociologist and documentary …

FROM THE DUST JACKET: Truman Capote was hailed as one of the most meticulous writers in American letters — a part of the Capote mystique is that his precise writing seemed to exist apart from …

A Reading Diary: A Passionate Reader's Reflections on a Year of Books. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2004; 208 pages; $20. FROM THE DUST JACKET: While traveling in Calgary, Alberto Manguel was struck by how the …

Inner Voices: Selected Poems, 1963-2003 Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2004. 420 pages; $35. Paper Trail: Selected Prose, 1965-2003 446 pages; $35. FROM THE DUST JACKET: Inner Voices: Selected Poems, 1963-2003: The poems of Pulitzer Prize-winner …

“I was in Sierra Leone, right next door, and in its history bears the same relationship to England that Liberia bears to the United States. That was when the bodies started piling up in Monrovia.”

Karl, of course, was into blood sports. I learned a lot from him about that world of anonymous sex and violence.” “Karl” is Karl Keller, for 20 years a professor in San Diego State’s English …

Someone I look up to once told me I should always try to write as if I were writing to someone who had six months to live. Think of your reader, I was told, as …

“Linda Vista, with its rows of yellow houses, is where we eventually washed to shore. Before Linda Vista, we lived in the Green Apartment on Thirtieth and Adams, in Normal Heights. Before the Green Apartment, …

Frank Doubleday, in Europe at the time Norris bought Dreiser’s novel, on his return home read the manuscript and hated it. Not only did Doubleday not wish to publish it, he thought it filthy and morally wanting.

Robert Penn Warren’s “Function of Blizzard” - back when I lived where snow fell every winter, a friend and I, on the occasion of the year’s first snow, would get together to recite this poem.

The Roberts Book Company on Canal Street reputedly paid the junkman S55 for the canvases. Soon “piles of unstretched canvases and large sheets of mural cartoons, began to greet the surprised visitors to the Roberts Book Company.

The Art of Burning Bridges Alfred A. Knopf, 2003; 373 pages; $30 FROM THE DUST JACKET: An enigma of 20th-century literature — a writer accorded great importance in his time, if less than in his …

One of the most pleasurable aspects of Geoffrey Wolff’s O’Hara biography is the voice. I said, “It’s a confiding voice, as if we were on some country weekend, in the mid-1930s, before the start of World War II.

"I sent them to Juris Jurjevics at Soho Press in New York. He’d been James Baldwin’s editor at Dial Press. Juris is respected in New York as an ambassador from a more thoughtful, writerly era in publishing."

“It’s been a long and difficult journey,” I said, “from Sun Up San Diego to Kafka’s Last Love: The Mystery of Dora Diamant.” “I know,” said former KFMB-TV Sun Up cohost Kathi Diamant, the author …

T. Jefferson Parker stares out the window of his Fallbrook office. What he sees is eucalyptus. “And then,” he said, “beyond the eucalyptus, there’s the tangerine tree and the two orange trees and a lemon …

“She told me stories that revolved around Point Loma Nazarene University. Eric’s mother’s mother first met Paramhansa Yogananda. Eric’s mom also met him, and she said he was the sexiest man who ever lived."

"My mother read to us every night of my childhood. My becoming a writer in part was because of that. You should have seen how my mother would become rapturous when she read a book she loved."

"Luria Sukenick, professor of English and comparative literature at San Diego State, refused to teach Dickinson because of the horrible things that students say. She was upset by the things that people said about Dickinson’s poems."

"I think Chateaubriand is the only man who met both George Washington and Napoleon. He came to the United States and wrote about Niagara Falls. He may be the first person who described the falls for a European audience."

Why Rossetti asked that Siddal’s body be exhumed was that, in a melodramatic gesture, he’d tossed into her coffin the manuscript of his poems. When he decided he wanted the manuscript back, he had the body dug up.

"1 really wanted to try and get a pure sensation of what it felt like to have the thing on, to feel that that was the only recourse, was to wear this thing, to be driven to wear it.”

Solana Beach Presbyterian Church members felt hurt and betrayed and outraged and surprised when they learned that for more than ten years their former pastor, a trim and handsome married man, had been sexually intimate …

Eileen Jackson's daughter, Jerry Williamson, told me that her father had once said that Miller had “the soul of a poet.” Mrs. Williamson confessed that when she was a child Miller terrified her.

As I read Chekhov stories about which Ms. Malcolm wrote, that I began to feel that these subtle stories, which on the last page often seem to evanesce rather than conclude, are wasted on the young.