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In "The Company We Keep," Robert and Dayna Baer reveal how they romanced each other while spying for the CIA.

In "The Trinity Six," Charles Cumming takes a brilliant fictional look at the greatest spy scandal of the 20th century.

In his memoir, "An Improvised Life," Alan Arkin explains his techniques for acting and training other actors.

In "History of a Suicide," Jill Bialosky probes the suicide of her half-sister and searches for catharsis, even absolution.

In "Liberty's Exiles," Maya Jasonoff tells the tale of the British Loyalists who opposed the American revolution.

In "The Globalization Paradox," Dani Rodrik examines what economists overlook.

The second novel in Thomas E. Kennedy's Copenhagen Quartet is a satire of men and women at work.

lincoln lawyer; the lincoln lawyer; lincoln lawyer michael connelly; michael connelly lincoln laywer; matthew mcconaughey; mcconaughey lawyer; marisa tomei; william h. macy; ryan phillippe; lakeshore entertainment; tom rosenberg

It's been 17 years since Carol Edgarian's best-selling, critically acclaimed first novel, "Rise the Euphrates," announced the arrival of a gifted and ambitious young writer. Yet that long pause feels right when you read "Three Stages of Amazement," her rueful, wholly adult second novel. It's not ...

By Del Quentin Wilber

Yan Lianke's 2006 novel "Dream of Ding Village" - about a Chinese AIDS village and banned by the Communist Party - is now available in an English translation.

Hats off, please, to Mat Johnson, author of this wonderful, black-humored novel - part social satire, part meditation on race in America, part metafiction and, just as important, a rollicking fantasy adventure. "Pym" is outrageously entertaining, a book that brilliantly re-imagines and extends Ed...

The heroine of Sarah Pekkanen's second novel, "Skipping a Beat," is a 30-something party planner who lives in a multimillion-dollar mansion in Northern Virginia. When we first meet Julia Dunhill, she is finalizing the details for a fundraising event. Clad in three-inch Stuart Weitzman heels while...

The finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry, which will be given Thursday night, have little in common, except that each employs a distinct tool or perspective that pushes the margins of the genre. The result is like a smorgasbord, with flavors ranging from strong to subtle...

Tea Obreht's swirling first novel, "The Tiger's Wife," draws us beneath the clotted tragedies in the Balkans to deliver the kind of truth that histories can't touch. Born in Belgrade in 1985 - no, that's not a typo - she captures the thirst for consecration that a century of war has left in that ...

In a certain kind of story, life is altered by one degree: A man awakens one morning to find he has become an insect; everyone in a city suffers a plague of blindness; the perfect knight turns out to be an empty suit of armor. The fabulist changes one detail from our everyday existence as a way o...

As I read "Twice a Spy," Keith Thomson's stab at a humorous spy novel, I kept thinking of the old actor's last words: "Dying is easy. Comedy is hard."

It was August of 2006 when Dalia Ziada, a young Egyptian writer, discovered her favorite comic-book action hero. He trumpeted justice. He preached of nonviolent pressure. And he had dreams of a promised land that protest might bring.

7 MONDAY | Noon. Regina A. Root, an associate professor of Hispanic studies at the College of William and Mary, discusses and signs her new book, "Couture and Consensus: Fashion and Politics in Postcolonial Argentina," at the Library of Congress, James Madison Bldg., Pickford Theater, 101...

Molly Allgood, the heroine of Joseph O'Connor's moving new novel, was the lover of playwright John Synge; they were engaged to be married when he died from Hodgkin's disease at age 37. Under the stage name Maire O'Neill, she created the role of Pegeen in the original Abbey Theatre production of S...

Book review by It's hard to imagine a world in which all you can do with a thought is recall it: a world in which written words do not exist and the only way to hoard knowledge is to remember. That may sound like an extravagantly imagined story by Philip K. Dick, but once upon a time, long ago, b...

At a dingy shop in downtown Fluxion City, you can buy, for only $29.95, the suitcase of a desperate man. It's no Samsonite: 56 inches but made of cardboard, staples and glue, guaranteed for a mere six weeks, it's a valise for people who need to get out of town in a hurry and need a case big enoug...

"I Love New York" is not only a popular ad campaign to promote tourism in the Empire State. It also sums up the affection felt by millions who call the Big Apple home. Three new titles explore the city's diverse neighborhoods, history and charm.

THE WRONG WAR Grit, Strategy, and the Way Out of Afghanistan By Bing West Random House. 307 pp. $28 In a new book about the war in Afghanistan, distinguished military affairs writer Bing West argues that hazy objectives, bad political assumptions and a long strategic muddle have burned away wh...

REVOLUTION The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the War By Deb Olin Unferth Henry Holt. 208 pp. $24 Deb Olin Unferth met George at an anti-CIA protest. She quickly fell in love. When George, a passionately devout Christian and communist sympathizer, asked if she wanted to go to Nicaragua and ...

MAD AS HELL The Crisis of the 1970s and the Rise of the Populist Right By Dominic Sandbrook Knopf. 506 pp. $35 Dominic Sandbrook is a young British historian whose first book, the well-received "Eugene McCarthy: The Rise and Fall of Postwar American Liberalism" (2004), established the theme th...

Townie A Memoir By Andre Dubus III Norton. 387 pp. $25.95 If you've ever been harassed or hurt by a bully, if you've ever dreamed of revenge, if you've ever crossed the line from dreaming to hitting back and felt a rush of relief and joy as you punished your enemy, then you're going to find a lot...

AN EXTRAVAGANT HUNGER The Passionate Years of M.F.K. Fisher By Anne Zimmerman Counterpoint. 261 pp. $26 M.F.K. Fisher's life was tumultuous. She never stayed in one place very long, had no shortage of marital strife and family tensions, and battled an oft-recurring sadness. But throughout, there ...

BEYOND THE CRASH Overcoming the First Crisis of Globalization By Gordon Brown Free Press. 314 pp. $26 For a brief, shining moment, the world stood together, and Gordon Brown was its voice. On an April afternoon in 2009, as global markets stared down the abyss and the specter of a second Great ...

THE LAST GREATEST MAGICIAN IN THE WOR LD Howard Thurston versus Houdini & the Battles of the American Wizards By Jim Steinmeyer Tarcher/Penguin. 377 pp. $26.95 Roll over, Houdini, and tell Orson Welles the news: Howard Thurston was the best magician of them all. Or so suggests Jim Steinme...

Chef Gabrielle Hamilton's lyrical memoir, "Blood, Bones & Butter," lives up to the hype.

Surprisingly uplifting novel by Rebecca Hunt about Winston Churchill and the depression he suffered from most of his life, which he referred to as "the black dog."

Shane W. Evans's picture book "Underground" evokes the Underground Railroad for very young readers.

Sue Macy's children's book "Wheels of Change" explores the vast ways that bicycles affected women's lives in the 19th century.

National Book Award winner Judy Blundell returns with an intense young adult mystery.

In the 1940s and '50s, Montana writer A.B. Guthrie Jr. (1901-1991), was more than just a regional figure. His 1947 novel, "The Big Sky," earned him popular and critical acclaim; his next, "The Way West," won a Pulitzer Prize; and he wrote the screenplay for "Shane," one of the first "adult Wester...

Wesley Stace's new novel, "Charles Jessold, Considered as a Murderer," is at first glance a straightforward period thriller. On a summer night in 1923, three people are found dead in a London flat. Charles Jessold, a celebrated young composer, has apparently poisoned his wife and her lover and th...

In "Pleasure Bound," Deborah Lutz takes readers on a tour of the eroticism of Victorian England.

Philip K. Dick isn't really Hollywood's favorite dead author. It only seems that way.

AND FURTHERMORE By Judi Dench as told to John Miller St. Martin's. 268 pp. $26.99 Suddenly, every time I point my TV remote, out jumps Dame Judi Dench. She twinkles as elderly ingenue Jean Hardcastle in the sitcom "As Time Goes By." She bosses crisply as "M," scolding James Bond as "a sexist mi...

It is 1974, and 13-year-old Petra Williams of South Wales is worshipfully in love with far-off pop idol David Cassidy. Along with her kindest friend, Sharon, beneath posters of their androgynous heartthrob, they devour every adjective, every investigative nugget (favourite colour: brown; favourit...

In "Crazy U," Andrew Ferguson tries to reconcile the conflicting advice he and his son get on navigating the college admissions process.

THE NATURAL NAVIGATOR A Watchful Explorer's Guide to a Nearly Forgotten Skill

WILD BILL DONOVAN The Spymaster Who Created the OSS and Modern American Espionage By Douglas Waller Free Press 466 pp. $30 On the eve of the Normandy invasion in 1944, Gen. George C. Marshall, the Army chief of staff, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower and Navy secretary James Forrestal all ordered Wi...

TOUGH WITHOUT A GUN The Life and Extraordinary Afterlife of Humphrey Bogart By Stefan Kanfer Knopf. 288 pp. $26.95 In 1997, the American Film Institute named Humphrey Bogart the "Greatest Male Star" in cinema history. The same year, Entertainment Weekly christened him the "Number One Movie Leg...

INHERENTLY UNEQUAL The Betrayal of Equal Rights by the Supreme Court, 1865-1903 By Lawrence Goldstone Walker. 242 pp. $26 "Constitutional law," Lawrence Goldstone says toward the end of "Inherently Unequal," "is . . . simply politics made incomprehensible to the common man." It's meant to be a...

LASTINGNESS The Art of Old Age By Nicholas Delbanco Grand Central 261 pp. $24.99 Nicholas Delbanco's new book examines creative achievement in old age, though the author acknowledges that our culture concerns itself primarily with the young. We seem, nonetheless, ambivalent about age, expecti...

Beware of people who say they "love to travel," especially when they invite you on some glamorous excursion. My first husband, when we studied for a year in France, couldn't pronounce pamplemousse, and yet he craved grapefruit for breakfast. Every morning, I'd brave the contemptuous sneers of gre...

Charles Baxter's short stories easily satisfy the genre's one nonnegotiable requirement: The central characters, through an encounter or an epiphany, must undergo some kind of transformation. What's most pleasurable, however, about the work-in-miniature by this celebrated American novelist ("The ...

On Sept. 16, 1920, a bomb hidden inside a horse-drawn carriage exploded in the heart of Manhattan's financial district, killing dozens of people. That long-forgotten bombing was the deadliest terrorist attack in New York's history until Sept. 11, 2001, when it became a renewed subject of curiosity.

In his superbly marketed blockbuster "Freedom," Jonathan Franzen lectured at us for a long time about the dire plight of the environment. Readers who had been busy in another room during the past 50 years learned from his earnest hero that the population is exploding, pollution is poisoning rive...

Elena Gorokhova had many compelling reasons for fleeing the Soviet Union in 1980, but the one that finally pushed her over the edge was rather mundane: "It has to do with my mother," she explains in her memoir, A Mountain of Crumbs (Simon & Schuster, $15). Mundane perhaps, but also loaded...

WE, THE DROWNED By Carsten Jensen Translated from the Danish by Charlotte Barslund with Emma Ryder Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 678 pp. $28 When was the last time you relished sitting down with a 678-page Danish novel? "We, the Drowned" might just be too much book to tote to the beach next summer, ...

The monstrous, horrible Tiger Mother has reportedly entered the building, and the audience is getting restless.

Immacolata Borelli, the quasi-heroine of Gerald Seymour's powerful new novel, is 25, tough, gorgeous and exceedingly spoiled. She's spoiled because she's the beloved daughter of the leaders of one of Naples's most powerful and ruthless crime families.

Berlin, the least storied of the great European capitals, not much more than an oversize village as late as the 18th century, is today one of the most vibrant cities on the continent, though it has a ferocious 20th-century past: Nazi headquarters, Allied aerial bombardment, destruction by the Rus...

The interaction of African Americans with American presidents and the first family is explored in two books, "The Black History of the White House" by Clarence Lusane and "Family of Freedom" by Kenneth T. Walsh.

"Against All Odds," the new memoir from Scott Brown, the Massachusetts senator who took Ted Kennedy's seat, reveals a troubled childhood filled with abuse.

J. D. SALINGER A Life By Kenneth Slawenski Random House. 450 pp. $27 Kenneth Slawenski broadens our understanding of the personal and literary life of a remarkable American writer in his biography "J.D. Salinger." Although sometimes careless with language and facts, Slawenski unearths new deta...

HARLEM The Four Hundred Year History from Dutch Village to Capital of Black America By Jonathan Gill Grove. 520 pp. $29.95 In September 1609 the English explorer Henry Hudson, en route - or so he hoped - to China in a ship belonging to the Dutch East India Company and called the Half Moon, ste...

SWALLOW Foreign Bodies, Their Ingestion, Inspiration, and the Curious Doctor Who Extracted Them By Mary Cappello New Press. 292 pp. $27.95 A 7-year-old girl has been unable to drink liquids for a week after she burned her throat by swallowing lye. Gently working his forceps, Dr. Chevalier Jackson...

THE LONGEST WAR The Enduring Conflict Between America and al-Qaeda By Peter L. Bergen Free Press 473 pp. $28 Is al-Qaeda still a threat to America? In his important history of the war on terrorism, "The Longest War," Peter Bergen aims to reassure his readers that al-Qaeda is significantly wea...

Brimming with both vagueness and import, the label "iconic" has been slapped on everything from fashion to corporate logos, public buildings to television characters. When applied to art, which actually brings us back to the word's Greek and Latin roots, the term takes on an added luster. In the ...

GEORGE GERSHWIN By Larry Starr Yale Univ. 194 pp. $45 It is a truth universally acknowledged that George Gershwin (1898-1937) wrote some irresistible melodies. After that, the debate begins. Was Gershwin an inspired tunesmith, pure and simple, who nevertheless remained a rank amateur when he at...

WHEN THE WORLD CALLS The Inside Story of the Peace Corps and Its First Fifty Years By Stanley Meisler Beacon. 272 pp. $26.95 In 2008 Christiane Amanpour illustrated America's declining role in the world by telling a foreign policy conference, "There was a Peace Corps." After the session a form...

J.R.R. Tolkien once described "Beowulf" - and by extension much of Anglo-Saxon, or Old English, poetry - as "a drink dark and bitter: a solemn funeral-ale with the taste of death." He further emphasized - in his scholarly essay "The Monsters and the Critics" - what he called the "unrecapturable m...

This smart, hopeful novel by Washington-born author Eleanor Brown will be the winter's tale for any book lover who likes her entertainment laced with a touch of Shakespeare. A family drama, gracefully costumed in academic garb and lit with warm comedy, 'tis a consummation devoutly to be wished. F...

Want to create an impromptu singalong? Just stand in a room of Gen X adults and let loose with "Conjunction Junction." I had a mom I'd never spoken with belting out, "What's your function? Hooking up words and phrases and clauses," baffling my son's young teacher. "Schoolhouse Rock" aside, though...

The first time I went to Afghanistan, a woman I met told me about her grandfather, who had been dragged from her side and arrested in Kabul during the time of communist rule. He reappeared two years later, his nails ripped from his fingers, a hole burned through his tongue. Broken but brave, he m...

The late Kurt Vonnegut was one of the great humanist voices of the 20th century. A former prisoner of war and a witness to the firebombing of Dresden in 1945, he was also a profoundly pessimistic man with a bleak worldview fueled by what he described as "disgust with civilization." Paradoxically,...

Like books on tape? What about books in song? Azar Nafisi's bestselling memoir " Reading Lolita in Tehran " has been made into an opera by University of Maryland doctoral student and composer Elisabeth Mehl Greene. Nafisi's book and the opera chronicle a reading group the author started for female...

The cover of Mo Hayder's latest novel, "Gone," shows the back of a little girl on a tricycle, pedaling off into the void. Not promising. Putting together the other available clues (the none-too-subtle title of the book, the plot summary on the book jacket), I deduced that this was yet another sus...

Andrew Taylor's brooding thriller opens with two tantalizing vignettes. First, a distraught, unnamed woman flees through the dark streets of Cambridge, England, fumbling for the key to a garden refuge. Then the scene shifts to a blasphemous "Last Supper" on the evening of Feb. 16, 1786, at which ...

Here at the Marriott Wardman Park, site of CPAC, the largest annual gathering of conservatives in the nation, there are many intriguing sessions. Should you pop in on "Engaging America Through Conservative Pop Culture" led by Stephen Baldwin (a.k.a. the chunky one)? Should you have a chat with th...

I BEAT THE ODDS From Homelessness to the Blind Side and Beyond By Michael Oher with Don Yaeger Gotham. 250 pp. $26 By the time Michael Oher got around to telling it, The Michael Oher Story was already well-known and seemingly devoid of new angles. Oher, an African American who plays offensive ...

THE MAGNETIC NORTH Notes from the Arctic Circle By Sara Wheeler Farrar Straus Giroux. 315 pp. $26 THE GREAT WHITE BEAR A Natural and Unnatural History of the Polar Bear By Kieran Mulvaney Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 251 pp. $26 The Arctic, which is the subject of Sara Wheeler's smashing new...

A WIDOW'S STORY A Memoir By Joyce Carol Oates Ecco. 415 pp. $27.99 Is it perverse to suggest that Joyce Carol Oates's memoir of widowhood is as enthralling as it is painful? Oates has always focused her writing so intensely that virtually all her prose is compelling, but this brave account of ...

THE SUBLIME ENGINE A Biography of the Human Heart By Stephen Amidon and Thomas Amidon Rodale. 242 pp. $24.99 More than any other body part, the human heart has both baffled and awed generations of doctors, priests, poets and ordinary people. Not even the brain evokes such complex reactions, Step...

UNDER THE SUN The Letters of Bruce Chatwin Selected and edited by Elizabeth Chatwin and Nicholas Shakespeare Viking. 554 pp. $35 With the publication in 1977 of his first book, "In Patagonia," the virtually unknown British writer Bruce Chatwin became an instant literary celebrity, and remained...

THE HEMLOCK CUP Socrates, Athens, and the Search for the Good Life By Bettany Hughes Knopf. 484 pp. $35 When Bettany Hughes published her study of Helen of Troy in 2005, skeptics had good cause for doubt that anything worthwhile could be made out of such a hackneyed and intangible subject - an...

SPOUSONOMICS Using Economics to Master Love, Marriage, and Dirty Dishes By Paula Szuchman and Jenny Anderson Random House. 332 pp. $26 Comparing marriage to a business doesn't sound very romantic. But in "Spousonomics" journalists Paula Szuchman and Jenny Anderson make a convincing - and creative...

MORNING, NOON, AND NIGHT Finding the Meaning of Life's Stages Through Books By Arnold Weinstein Random House. 442 pp. $27 If there is a riddle attached to the riddle of the Sphinx, it is why no one but Oedipus was smart enough to solve it. Luckily for readers, Arnold Weinstein has made more of...

Books, as we know, make perfect presents, but sometimes our friends and family aren't as perfect as the books are. Relatives tend to be unnervingly idiosyncratic, and they often like our carefully chosen titles about as much as they like broccoli.

Geniuses are thick on the ground - just ask the MacArthur Foundation , which chooses a couple of dozen new ones each year. Any field, after all, has its divas, maestros, "chers maitres" and award-winners. Every so often, though, truly original, almost mutant talents appear, of such power and...

Sometimes the news makes us sad. That's certainly the case today because a great children's author, Brian Jacques, died last week. He was 71.

These are hairy times for fans of simian fiction. The autobiography of Tarzan's sidekick , " Me Cheeta ," was mildly amusing, but Sara Gruen's silly " Ape House " left me dragging my knuckles on the floor, and Laurence Gonzales's " Lucy " read like something thrown out between the bars. Now, though,...

It's almost upon us: the most romantic day of the year - or the biggest con job since P.T. Barnum, depending on your view of Feb. 14. (Still, some of us will accept any excuse to eat chocolate.) It's also the season for love stories, poems and cards dripping glitter and sentiment. While these fiv...

In her 2005 blockbuster, "Labyrinth," Kate Mosse plunged her protagonist into a cave in the French Pyrenees that turned out to be a portal to the medieval past. The plot abounded in skeletons and secret symbols that eventually revealed the fate of the region's Cathar people and - somewhat predict...

By definition, memoirists get to tell their stories the way they remember them. The retellings can be gentle or scorching, illuminating or concealing.

It is tempting at first to dismiss "Donald" as a mere literary guerrilla action, a publication-day ambush by two clever writers whose narrative voice, to their credit, may sound more authentically like Donald Rumsfeld than the former defense secretary's memoir.

Allison Pearson, author of the blockbuster "I Don't Know How She Does It," has a new work, "I Think I Love You," in which she explores the early crushes that shape what woman become.

Early crime fiction often invited the reader to match wits with the writer. Edgar Allan Poe invented the detective genre with his 1841 story " The Murders in the Rue Morgue ," in which his hero deduces how two women were brutally slain in a fourth-floor room in which the windows and doors were...

MONDAY Nora Titone book signing The author of "My Thoughts Be Bloody," a biography of John Wilkes Booth, reads and signs copies of her book at the same theater where Booth assassinated President Lincoln. 7 p.m. Ford's Theatre, 511 10th St. NW. 202-397-7328. www.fordstheatre.org . TUESDAY 'Whisk...

In his memoir "Twin," Allen Shawn ponders the life of his twin autistic sister, Mary.