The Rain in Portugal: Poems

by Billy Collins

Appetites: A Cookbook

by Anthony Bourdain
Appetites, his first cookbook in more than ten years, boils down thirty-plus years of professional cooking and globe-trotting to a tight repertoire of personal favorites, dishes that everyone should (at least in Mr. Bourdain's opinion) know how to cook. The result is a home-cooking, home-entertaining cookbook like no other, with personal favorites from his own kitchen and from his travels, translated into an effective battle plan that will help you terrify your guests with your breathtaking efficiency.

Marrow: A Love Story

by Elizabeth Lesser

[Harper Wave, $25.99]

Linda says:  Elizabeth Lesser has succeeded in touching the deepest, most human emotions in this beautiful autobiography of herself and her sister in the face of a bone marrow transplant. When she writes, it is as if she is speaking to you, almost as though she is writing about you. Her poignant prose shares the experience as the two rediscover each other, affirming, supporting and experiencing life .

[Atria Books, $27.00]

We know Jennifer Weiner as many things: a bestselling author, a Twitter phenomenon, and "an unlikely feminist enforcer" ( The New Yorker). She's also a mom, a daughter, and a sister; a former rower and current runner; a best friend and a reality TV junkie. Here, in her first foray into nonfiction, she takes the raw stuff of her personal life and spins it into a collection of essays.

[Crown Publishing Group, $27.00]

Fifth-generation New Yorker, third-generation bartender, and first-generation author Tara Clancy was raised in three wildly divergent homes: a converted boat shed in working class Queens, a geriatric commune of feisty, Brooklyn-born Italians, and a sprawling Hamptons estate she visited every other weekend. This childhood triptych comes to life in this electric, one-of-a-kind memoir. [read more]

[Clarkson Potter Publishers, $22.00]

This collection of seventy-five of the most cherished bookstores from around the world features evocative paintings by Eckstein paired with colorful anecdotes about each shop, featuring a roster of great thinkers and artists of our time. Page by page, Eckstein perfectly captures our lifelong love affair with books, bookstores, and booksellers that is at once heartfelt, bittersweet, and cheerfully confessional.

[Nation Books, $25.99]

On an average day in America, seven children and teens will be shot dead. Here award-winning journalist Gary Younge tells the stories of the lives lost during one such day. Black, white, and Latino, aged nine to nineteen, they fell at sleepovers, on street corners, in stairwells, and on their own doorsteps. From the rural Midwest to the barrios of Texas, the narrative crisscrosses the country over a period of twenty-four hours to reveal the full human stories behind the gun-violence statistics and the brief mentions in local papers of lives lost.  What emerges in these pages is a searing and urgent portrait of youth, family, and firearms in America today.

[Doubleday Books, $30.00]

At the height of the Korean War, President Truman committed a gaffe that sent shock waves around the world. When asked by a reporter about the possible use of atomic weapons in response to China's entry into the war, Truman replied testily, "The military commander in the field will have charge of the use of the weapons, as he always has." This suggested that General Douglas MacArthur, the willful, fearless, and highly decorated commander of the American and U.N. forces, had his finger on the nuclear trigger. A correction quickly followed, but the damage was done: Two visions for America's path forward were clearly in opposition, and one man would have to make way.

[read more]

[St. Martin's Press, $27.99; Oct. 18]

Paris in the 1940s was a place of fear, power, aggression, courage, deprivation, and secrets. While Parisian men were either fighting at the front or captured and forced to work in German factories, the women of Paris were left behind where they would come face to face with the German conquerors on a daily basis, as waitresses, shop assistants, or wives and mothers, increasingly desperate to find food to feed their families as hunger became part of everyday life.