WHEN WRITER Marlene Van Niekerk was growing up in South Africa’s Overberg region, her father, who worked for the agriculture department, sometimes brought her along on visits to local farms. On one such call, she was struck by the presence of a young African girl who took care of a white family’s children. This was in the mid-1960s, when apartheid was at its height and the races rarely mixed. “I was fascinated by her,” recalls Niekerk, an Afrikaner.

The girl, Niekerk discovered, had been adopted, and she occupied an unusual position in the household— not quite daughter and not quite servant, but something in between. Years later, she has become the title character of Niekerk’s extraordinary new novel, Agaat, which no less a critic than Nobel laureate Toni Morrison deemed “as brilliant as it is haunting.” Shifting back and forth in time, the book tells the story of the psychologically charged relationship between Agaat and the Boer farmwife Milla, who plucks her out of extreme poverty, turning her into a surrogate child before exploiting her as a housemaid. Decades later, with apartheid on the wane, an aging Milla develops a progressive neurological disorder and is bedridden, unable to move or speak. In a momentous role reversal, Agaat becomes her nurse, her heir and occasionally her tormentor.

In addition to its vivid emotional resonance, Agaat is notable for the wealth of detail it imparts about rural life in South Africa before industrialized farming—everything from four-stage crop rotation to how to counteract tulip poisoning in cattle. “I see it as a way of preserving the language, the farming methods, the folklore—things that are quickly disappearing now,” Niekerk says.

The novel has been read as a political allegory, and Niekerk, whose first book, Triomf, was a scathing dark comedy about a damaged Afrikaner family, acknowledges that the legacy of apartheid is layered throughout her work. “I’m always interested in looking at how intimate power relationships between people are related to bigger forces such as race, class and gender,” she says. Niekerk adds, however, that Agaat’s uncertain status on the farm also parallels her own feelings of alienation as a progressive and a lesbian growing up in a strict Afrikaner household. A writer’s characters are always brought to life, she explains, “by one’s own psychological energies.”

Writing the book was powerful catharsis, recalls the author, who directs the master’s program in creative writing at Stellenbosch University. “I cried the whole time,” she says. “I always try to explore areas that are beyond my comfort zone.”

AARON GELL is editor in chief of Hemispheres.

BRUCE FEILER—whose books have recounted his adventures teaching in Japan, joining the circus and, in the best-selling Walking the Bible, retracing the steps of Abraham, Moses and other figures from scripture—likes to call himself an “experientialist.” But the experience recounted in his slim but moving new book, The Council of Dads: My Daughters, My Illness, and the Men Who Could Be Me, is one you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy.

In July 2008, Feiler, an inveterate walker and world traveler in his mid-40s (“I’ve sprained my ankle on six continents,” he says), was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer in his leg. Suddenly fearing he might not have long to live, the father of then-two-year-old twin daughters Tybee and Eden hit upon a unique plan: Like Danny Ocean assembling his perfect heist squad, Feiler would enlist six men, reflecting various aspects of his own personality, as his stand-ins. The hope, he writes, was that “together, collectively, they might help father my potentially fatherless daughters.”

The resulting book is a stirring hybrid: a memoir of Feiler’s cancer treatment coupled with a heartfelt meditation on parenthood, masculinity and living life to its fullest. Combining a chronicle of what he calls his “lost year” (including months of chemo and a 15-hour surgery) with portraits of Feiler’s own father figures and his Council of Dads, it’s honest, heartfelt and exceedingly raw. The book’s power comes in part from Feiler’s willingness to delve into emotions—including feelings of tenderness not only for our children and spouses but between male friends—that aren’t often spoken of with such candor. “There I am with no hair, a scar from here to here, talking to my friends,” the author explains, sitting with a cane in the Brooklyn, New York, apartment he shares with his wife, Linda Rottenberg, and the girls, surrounded by art collected during his years of globe-trotting. “The experience forced me to drop the normal trappings of contemporary life—vanity, pretense, ambition. It was very clarifying. I was still in the twilight of that feeling when I sat down to write the book. I just didn’t care. And it poured off my fingers.”

Interestingly, the result turns out to have less to do with disease than with life itself. While women will undoubtedly find the book fascinating for the light it casts on the vagaries of the male mind, men will almost certainly be moved to reexamine their own roles as fathers and as friends. “I didn’t set out to write a book about being male in America,” Feiler says, “but people keep telling me that’s what I did.”

ALSO THIS MONTH

What else to read on the go in April

PARROT & OLIVIER IN AMERICA

Australian novelist Peter Carey (Oscar and Lucinda) delivers a coming-of-age tale based loosely on the life of French historian Alexis de Tocqueville— and with it, an extended examination of the evolution of American political life.

MANDELA’S WAY: FIFTEEN LESSONS ON LIFE, LOVE AND COURAGE

Time editor Richard Stengel, who worked with Nelson Mandela on his autobiography, offers a thoughtful collection of inspirational wisdom based on Mandela’s extraordinary journey.

MOST OF US ARE surrounded by so much clutter that a book about someone else’s junk sounds, frankly, a little silly. (Where would we even put it?) But Lisa Tracy’s Objects of Our Affection goes beyond the belongings themselves into their history, which is where she found real worth.

“The impetus for the book was to discover why we hold on to this stuff,” Tracy says. “I mean, Americans are spending about twelve billion dollars annually on storage facilities.”

Tracy and her sister contributed to that total for years, paying hundreds of dollars a month to store family furniture. About 10 years after their mother’s death, they decided to auction it off. The women didn’t know what else to do with centuries of family history in the form of Chippendale sofas and cut-glass salt dishes.

Her forebears, many of whom served in the military, had picked up pieces in far-flung locations. Some items dated to the 17th century, when her ancestors first came to North America. When it came time to type up the auction catalog, an appraiser had questions about the provenance of all that furniture and bric-a-brac. For instance, did the piece her family called “the George Washington chair” ever actually belong to the first president? Tracy investigated, digging through historical society records in southern New Jersey and Philadelphia, and ultimately found ties to Washington. She took a similar approach to other items, uncovering the fascinating backgrounds of everything from a pair of antique dueling pistols to a set of Canton china.

Every piece had a story to tell. But the real takeaway was a new perspective on her own belongings, including those heirlooms she held on to. “At this point, I could really let go of it all,” she says. “We love our stuff, but I think what we really love is the stories behind it.” Take heed as you start your spring cleaning.

Associate editor LAYLA SCHLACK stores her parents’ old furniture in her living room.

MR. HOSPITALITY

A new book remembers business pioneer Fred Harvey

Long before Starbucks, McDonald’s and Marriott Hotels, a dapper Englishman named Fred Harvey invented the modern hospitality industry. Starting with a chain of restaurants serving the Santa Fe Railway in the 1880s, he created the first national brand, a sprawling empire spreading from Chicago to California. As author Stephen Fried writes in his absorbing biography, Appetite for America—which comes with recipes, including the tempting Butterscotch Pie Chantilly—he helped settle the American West along the way.

SCANDINAVIA IS CRAZY about crime. Norwegians celebrate Easter with a tradition known as Paaskekrim, which entails reading murder mysteries and watching detective shows. In Sweden a few years ago, there were slightly fewer novels about murder published (84) than actual murders (91). In Iceland, the murder rate is among the lowest in the world.

So why did Scandinavia become a hotbed of top-shelf crime fiction? Is it the gloomy frostbitten winter? The unrelenting insomniac summers? Either way, Nordic crime fiction—characterized by fast-paced plotting, smart writing and crackling atmospherics—is creeping onto shelves crowded with CSI-driven procedurals. Somehow, the unabashedly literary tone of these Nordic stories has captured our imaginations. Mssrs. Cornwell and Connelly, meet Stieg Larsson, Henning Mankell, Jo Nesbø and Arnaldur Indridason.

The breakthrough Nordic hit is Larsson’s Millennium trilogy, starting with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Larsson, a prominent journalist, died of a heart attack in 2004, before his completed series saw the light of day, but Dragon Tattoo along with sequels The Girl Who Played with Fire (2009) and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest (out in May in the U.S.) have gone on to sell 20 million copies. The trilogy’s success is surprising. Centered on the travails of a sexy young hacker, they are long, complex and slow-paced—not exactly catnip for sleuth fans.

This month, the genre’s godfather, Mankell, releases The Man from Beijing. Opening with the discovery of a puzzling multiple murder in a Swedish hamlet, the story follows judge Birgitta Roslin through a fascinating maze to China and Africa. It’s part white-knuckler, part historical fiction and part exegesis on colonialism.

“That’s a link that connects all of the Scandinavian thrillers,” says Barbara Fister, a Nordic crime aficionado at Gustavus Adolphus College in Minnesota. “These societies spend a lot of time contemplating social justice.”

Mankell, a 62-year-old Swedish icon, has been churning out crime fiction since 1977. “I use the mirror of crime to look at the whole society,” he has said. “I would never, ever think of writing a crime story for the sake of itself.”

Other spring releases include Norwegian writer Nesbø’s virtuosic The Devil’s Star, due out in March, about a brilliant alcoholic detective who follows a serial killer to the top ranks of the Oslo PD. And in May, Icelander Arnaldur Indridason’s Arctic Chill mines similar territory with the murder of a dark-skinned teenager. Stick around for the surprising ending—nearly as surprising as the way Scandinavian writers have brought heat back to a tired genre.

Executive editor MIKE GUY has never seen CSI.

BORN IN MALAYSIA and raised in London, Tash Aw is very much at home with cultural contradictions. His award-winning first novel, The Harmony Silk Factory, plumbed the 1940s saga of Johnny Lim, a ruthless Malaysian industrialist—but complicated the rags-to-oligarchy story with shifting, and sharply incompatible, narrative accounts of Lim’s life and times.

Now with Map of the Invisible World, Aw conjures the revolutionary ferment of Indonesia in 1964, as the national unity imposed by socialist leader Sukarno dissolves into the chaos that will set the stage for the Suharto regime’s brutal rule. The novel centers on Adam De Willigen, a rural Indonesian orphan trying to locate his adoptive father, a Dutchman who was jailed by Sukarno’s military police in a sweep of Communists. A clutch of other emigrés— an American anthropology professor, an Australian journalist, a U.S. embassy official—get caught up in Adam’s search, which triggers a series of unexpected revelations about the characters’ adopted homeland and their own roles in the rapidly vanishing colonial order.

The goal of the novel, the author explains, was to examine the region’s quest for an identity. “From 1500 to 1950, our history has basically been that of a colonized country,” he says. “So in a sense it wasn’t entirely ours. We were still trying to figure out who we were.” To some extent, the answer may always be elusive. Indonesia, Aw points out, “is a loosely knit association of very diff erent cultures. If you just take the major islands—Java, Sumatra, Bali—they’re completely diff erent, linguistically, religiously, ethnically.”

The 38-year-old novelist, who was educated in England, was spared the more barbed kinds of personal and political reckonings his characters face. But while pursuing his first career, as a corporate attorney, he found he had to grope his way toward his literary vocation in stages.

“I’ve always wanted to be a writer,” he says, “but no one tells you how to be one.” His problem with practicing law, Aw adds, was that he became too busy.

“What you do from day to day ultimately becomes your reality,” Aw says. “So it got to the point when, even though I was writing The Harmony Silk Factory, I started to think of myself as an attorney.

“That was the moment,” he adds with a laugh, “I realized I had to stop.”

Bookforum editor CHRIS LEHMANN is still groping his way toward his literary vocation.

ALSO THIS MONTH

What else to read on the go in January

36 Arguments for the Existence of God

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein’s shaggy-professor tale tracks the fortunes—and the romantic misadventures—of an overnight academic celebrity who’s just published a cheerfully atheistic tract.

Noah’s Compass

Equal parts Trollope and Tom Robbins, Anne Tyler’s latest follows a laid-off Baltimore school teacher and would-be philosopher who suffers a bout of amnesia. His quest to recover his memory opens out onto a set of small epiphanies.

Star: How Warren Beatty Seduced America

Author Peter Biskind examines a Hollywood career that stretches from Bonnie and Clyde to Bulworth—stopping along the way for amorous detours with everyone from Natalie Wood to Madonna.

CONSIDER THE NOT-SO-HUMBLE coffee-table book—so hefty you can barely lift the thing, and yet somehow able to transport a reader far from home.

Start your journey with the gorgeously produced Painters of Utah’s Canyons and Deserts (Gibbs Smith), which brings together a number of impressionistic images of Zion National Park and other breathtaking sites. Meanwhile, anyone who’d rather scale such peaks than paint them will love The Stone Masters: California Rock Climbers in the Seventies (Stonemaster), the story of a handful of hippies who took on some of the most dangerous climbs with little more than bandannas for protection.

Next, drop in on Charles Darwin’s favorite island getaway with Galapagos: Both Sides of the Coin (Imagine), a vivid look at the islands’ animals and humans, and how they interact (to sometimes damaging effect), and delve into China (Abbeville), a photo book nearly as overwhelming as the country itself.

Then there’s India. With its numerous castes and cultures, it’s not an easy place for outsiders to grasp, which explains why a new book simply reaches for the alphabet. Clive Limpkin’s India Exposed: The Subcontinent A-Z (Abbeville) illuminates the country in a series of pictures arranged encyclopedia-style (from astrology to zebu, a breed of cattle), and To India, With Love (Assouline) offers a collection of snapshots and memories from a passel of well-known contributors, from Adrien Brody to Zubin Mehta.

Photographer Michael Loyd Young illuminates the Mississippi River Delta region in the affecting Blues, Booze & BBQ (powerHouse), while legendary lensman William Eggleston, who made his reputation shooting the American South, ventures across the pond for a lyrical survey, William Eggleston: Paris (Steidl). And acclaimed fashion photographer Mario Testino turns his lens on Rio de Janeiro with MaRIO DE JANEIRO Testino (Taschen), sprinkling an array of humid Copacabana landscapes among his dazzling snapshots of Gisele Bundchen and other local attractions.

Somewhat more instructive is the monumental Los Angeles: Portrait of a City (Taschen), a pictorial history of the city of angels, beginning with an amazing 1891 silver print of flinty-eyed settlers on a dusty ranch in what is now Hollywood, and ending with present-day L.A.—considerably more glittering if somehow just as anxious.

Travel’s romantic past is lovingly evoked in Coast to Coast: Vintage Travel in North America (Vendome), which offers a cross-continental journey by way of vintage photographs and handpainted postcards, and in Gypset Style (Assouline), author Julia Chaplin’s breezy look at the eclectic chic of certain well-heeled global nomads.

Finally, those with a yearning to wander even farther afield will gravitate toward Michael Benson’s Far Out: A Space-Time Chronicle (Abrams), which features eye-popping imagery of nebulae, galaxy clusters and other cosmic phenomena. And to think you can see it all without even leaving the earth.

NOT LONG AGO, I was purchasing the latest newfangled gloss on Pride and Prejudice at a Borders in San Antonio. “Ever read the original?” wondered the twentysomething salesdude. “Uh, yes.” I stammered, though I refrained from mentioning how many times (I’ve lost count) or the circumstances of my first reading it (12 years old, up all night). “Hard to imagine Austen without the zombies,” he laughed. Yikes.

“Austen still inspires people to become fanatical readers,” Harold Bloom writes in his foreword to A Truth Universally Acknowledged, a new collection of essays celebrating the novelist whose six biting romances launched a thousand pastiches and parodies-not to mention items such as Mr. Darcy tea towels and Sense and Sensibility sachets. And then there are the endless “sequels” and “interpretations,” including last month’s Lady Vernon and Her Daughter, which is billed as “A Novel of Jane Austen’s Lady Susan,” though the author has two cowriters. Meanwhile, a new play, Jane Austen’s Guide to Pornography, is earning raves in London. (She didn’t write that one, either.)

Indeed, this is looking to be Jane’s most fecund year since 1995, when Colin Firth’s mutton-chopped Darcy emerged dripping from a Pemberley pond, unleashing a series of fresh spins on Austen’s oeuvre (e.g., Clueless, Bridget Jones’s Diary). This year has also seen a flurry of macabre mash-ups, spawned by the success of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies-with nearly a million copies in print-and its follow-up, Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters. Several paranormally inclined novels are slated for 2010, and Elton John’s Rocket Pictures is producing Pride and Predator.

Of course, parody is one thing; desecration is quite another, notes Austenprose blogger Laurel Ann Nattress. “We’ve evolved from laughing with Austen to laughing at her just to make money.” So WWJD? “Jane would laugh, she would cry and then want her share of the pecuniary emolument.”

Perhaps so. And with any luck, this new crop of Austen takeoffs will inspire us-including, I hope, my Borders clerk-to reread (or just read) Austen’s actual work, gimmick-free.

GILLIAN FASSEL recently purchased a “Jane Austen Is My Homegirl” hoodie.

ALSO THIS MONTH

What else to read on the go in November

Swans and Pistols

Léon Bing has been a fashion model, a mob associate and an intrepid journalist (she wrote an acclaimed exposé of the Bloods and Crips street gangs), all of which adds up to an amazing life. Her memoir is a knockout.

Cowboys Full: The Story of Poker

James McManus, whose best-selling Positively Fifth Street chronicled his performance in the World Series of Poker, offers up a colorful history of the game-and comes up aces.

You Better Not Cry

Fans of the mega-selling memoir Running with Scissors know Augusten Burroughs is hardly the most reverent author. They also know he’s very, very funny. Here, he turns his cutting wit to the holidays with predictably iconoclastic results.

“IT’S NOT SO EASY being a vampire,” says Otto Penzler, owner of New York City’s Mysterious Bookshop and the editor of the new anthology The Vampire Archives (Vintage, $25). “It’s not all blood and roses.”

Penzler should know. In The Vampire Archives, out this month, he’s compiled an exhaustive collection of vampire lit from what he calls the “Pre-Dracula” era (Edgar Allan Poe, Ambrose Bierce) to “Modern Masters” (Ray Bradbury, Peter Tremayne). Along the way he checks in with everyone from Guy de Maupassant, Arthur Conan Doyle and D.H. Lawrence to Bram Stoker, author of vampire touchstone Dracula.

Penzler’s 1,056-page tome will undoubtedly find a receptive audience. Tales of bloodsuckers have won legions of devoted readers since the Victorian era. In recent years, Stephenie Meyer’s blockbuster Twilight Saga, a series of four books originally targeted at teenagers, has proven that even a stake through the heart wouldn’t be enough to kill this genre. (The books have sold more than 40 million copies; the second film in the series, The Twilight Saga: New Moon, opens next month.) Meanwhile, The CW just premiered The Vampire Diaries, and HBO continues to gorge on True Blood, currently its most popular offering. In that series, vampires and humans are learning to coexist due to the invention of synthetic blood, which seems fitting for a culture in which social relationships are increasingly virtual. As sci-fiand fantasy writer Neil Gaiman writes in the introduction to The Vampire Archives, “We get the vampires we deserve.”

Meanwhile, Dacre Stoker takes a more traditional approach in Dracula the Un-Dead (Dutton, $26.95), also out this month.

A sequel to the most famous vampire novel of all, it’s based on the notes of his great-granduncle Bram. The story begins in 1912, a quarter century after Dracula’s “death,” when the team of vampire hunters who “killed” him begin dropping one by one.

Will vampire tales ever die? Perhaps not, but one master seems to have slaked her thirst for the genre. Interview with the Vampire author Anne Rice left bloodsuckers behind years ago and just released the first book in her new series…about angels.

DOREE SHAFRIR is a New York–based freelance writer who rarely ventures out during daylight.

ALSO THIS MONTH

What else to read on the go in October

I Am The New Black

Tracy Morgan of Saturday Night Live and 30 Rock fame finally gets serious—but not too serious—in his new memoir. The actor-comedian relates the story of his rough upbringing, his overnight success and his struggles with alcohol, demonstrating both uncommon candor and unfailing wit.

The Children’s Book

A.S. Byatt offers up a spellbinding new novel that follows Olive Wellwood, a children’s book author and expert in fairy tales who introduces a talented runaway to her privileged social circle. Set in England in the decades before the First World War, it brings the era grippingly to life.

Generosity, an Enhancement

What if happiness and goodness are genetically determined? That’s the premise of Richard Powers’ luminous novel, in which a young Algerian immigrant captivates a teacher with her unaccountably openhearted nature. After a genetic scientist gets involved, the news media pounces.

Few New Yorkers took much notice of the failed 2002 proposal by the Harlem Fifth Avenue Block Association that Collyer Brothers Park, a tiny uptown parcel, be renamed Reading Tree Park. But to E.L. Doctorow, author of Ragtime, Billy Bathgate and The March, among other historically minded novels, the bid to bury one of the city’s more fascinating chapters felt like an affront.

A pair of notorious hermits from a well-to-do family, the magnificently disheveled Homer and Langley Collyer occupied a stately Fifth Avenue brownstone filled with auto parts, pianos and other refuse scavenged from the city’s streets. Battling local authorities, bill collectors and neighbors, they became objects of intense tabloid fascination before being found dead in 1947. (Langley’s demise was especially poignant: He was felled by a booby trap of his own devising and buried under toppled bales of his newspapers.)

“They achieved a kind of mythic status,” Doctorow says of the subjects of his latest novel, Homer & Langley, sitting in his office overlooking Upper Sag Harbor Cove. “They became part of the folklore of the city.” The author bristles at the view of the brothers as “pack rats,” preferring to see them as “aggregators—sort of like Google.” In some ways, they resemble Doctorow himself, who has been known to make good literary use of scraps of history the rest of us overlook. “You do pick things up along the way and store them in your mind,” he says, admitting his home office could use tidying up. “My wife has compared me to the Collyers,” he says with a sigh.

In Doctorow’s fiction, however, there’s nary a word out of place. Homer & Langley is sparse and poetic, at times conjuring whole eras—the Jazz Age, the late ’60s—in just a few haunting passages. One of the book’s great pleasures is the way it casts a strange new light on American social history by essentially viewing it through the slats of the brothers’ shuttered windows. “I think of it as a road novel in which they don’t actually leave the house,” he says. “Instead, the world comes to them.”

Naturally, the author has taken a few liberties. For one, he’s extended the Collyers’ lives by several decades. “I’ve given them longevity,” he jokes, “and they didn’t even have to go on a diet!” He’s also relocated their townhouse a good mile south on Fifth Avenue, to the Upper East Side. The brothers’ former neighbors would surely approve.

Hemispheres editor in chief Aaron Gell really ought to straighten up his workspace.

Also this month

What else to read on the go in September

The Coral Thief – A Scottish medical student delves into the intellectual ferment in post-Revolutionary Paris in Rebecca Stott’s provocative new novel, a swirl of history, philosophy, evolutionary science and intrigue, with a bit of romance thrown 
into the mix.

No Impact Man – A couple years ago, New York–based author Colin Beavan and his family resolved to reduce their environmental footprint—to zero. In his wryly funny new memoir, he explains how they did it. (Hint No. 1: no toilet paper.)

The Year of the Flood – Global warming got you down? Cheer up! It could be much, much worse—at least if the brilliant Margaret Atwood’s latest dystopian yarn is any indication. Think humanity in peril, genetic mutants running amok and 
other treats.

“SOMETIMES YOU’VE GOT TO RUN at the Deacon.” That’s what Herb Cohen used to say whenever his son, Rich, a hockey jock growing up in the suburbs of Chicago, was facing down a big challenge. The reference wasn’t to a church official (the Cohens are Jewish) but to implacable NFL defensive end Deacon Jones. Running at the Deacon means facing an obstacle head on, confronting what scares or upsets you. It’s an approach Rich Cohen has often taken in his writing, first with the critically acclaimed 1999 history Tough Jews, which reveled in the tales of gangsters like Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Siegel that Jews of an older generation might have preferred to forget, and more recently with Sweet and Low, a notably unflattering memoir of his family’s misadventures in the artificial sweetener business, which didn’t air his relatives’ dirty laundry so much as slip into it like a hand-me-down suit. With his latest book, Israel is Real: An Obsessive Quest to Understand the Jewish Nation and its History, the author, a contributing editor for Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair, has run at the Deacon in a very big way, courting controversy in his search for catharsis.

“I think anyone being honest is going to be controversial, especially about a topic people care about,” the author explains over coffee on New York’s Lower East Side. The result is a feverishly wrought, passionate and riveting history of Jerusalem, from its origins as an ancient kingdom—sacked by Rome in 70 A.D., the Israelites scattered to the winds—to a “city of the mind,” as he puts it, detached from geography to live instead as a metaphor for two millennia, and finally to the contested capital of a modern state (hence the book’s title). “There were a lot of nation-states in the ancient world that had state religions,” Cohen observes. “After the destruction of the Second Temple, the rabbis found a way to take the Jews’ spiritual capital and turn it into a story, a book, which made it portable and indestructible. That’s why it survived.”

Cohen devours history the way a zayde (Jewish grandfather) tears into a pastrami on rye—a fact that becomes apparent on a walk through the neighborhood, once the center of Jewish life in New York. He stops abruptly on Norfolk Street. “This is the spot!” he says, gesturing at the pavement in front of us. “Right here is where Louis Lepke pulled a drive-by on Jacob ‘Little Augie’ Orgen and his bodyguard Legs Diamond.”

Tough characters all, they ran at the Deacon, too.

ALSO THIS MONTH

What else to read on the go in August

This is How

After being dumped by his fiancée, a tightly wound auto mechanic attempts to hit the reset button by moving to a small English seaside village in acclaimed Manchester-based author M.J. Hyland’s haunting third novel. But a steady drip of small humiliations sends him over the edge.

The Elephant Keeper

Christopher Nicholson’s enchanting debut novel, a sort of neo-Dumbo fairy tale set in 18th century England, is the story of a 12-year-old boy who becomes the keeper of a pair of young elephants, newly arrived from India. He befriends the female and devotes his life to her care.

The Venus Fixers

As World War II raged around them, a small group of allied officers embarked on a mission to protect the cultural treasures of Italy. Author Ilaria Dagnini Brey’s account of their exploits makes for a fascinating footnote to the war years, when the fate of civilization itself seemed to hang in the balance.

ON JULY 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong stepped onto the craggy lunar surface, demonstrating America’s great Cold War triumph and giving us perhaps the most transcendent holy cow moment of the postwar era. But what were the astronauts really thinking as they staked out the final frontier? Not much, at least to judge from Craig Nelson’s otherwise compelling and thoroughly researched account, Rocket Men: The Epic Story of the First Men On the Moon. Or not much they could readily articulate. Straitlaced Air Force test pilots and engineers, these guys weren’t exactly given to spinning yarns. “It was not within our ken to share emotions or to utter extraneous information,” astronaut Michael Collins reports. How do you extract the essence of the human race’s greatest adventure from men who say less than Marcel Marceau with a mouthful of Saltines?

Andrew Chaikin runs into the same problem in Voices from the Moon. A hard-core NASA junkie, he sat down with 23 lunar astronauts and patiently goaded them to wax poetic, with often less than stellar results. “The earth looks from the moon like the moon looks from the earth,” John Young of Apollo 16 tells him. Thanks, Commander!

The fact is, however many thrusters we deploy, the reality of space travel will probably never compare to the dream. Which is why the rerelease of M. Sasek’s vividly illustrated 1963 children’s classic, This is Cape Canaveral (retitled This is the Way to the Moon), with its charmingly naïve illustrations, is ultimately so much more transporting.

Meanwhile, engineering fans can geek out with Rick Stroud’s science-heavy The Book of the Moon, which starts at the creation of the big orb itself and details the nuts and bolts of how exactly Apollo 11 accomplished liftoff. And those itching for orbit themselves should check out Piers Bizony’s How to Build Your Own Spaceship, which examines space travel’s new commercial frontier: the launch of Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, scheduled for next year. Fasten your seatbelts.

ALSO THIS MONTH

What else to read on the go in July

The Supremes

If the Supremes haven’t been fully appreciated as a cultural force, chalk it up to their music, which presented such a dazzling surface few suspected the depths of struggle underneath. With his well-wrought new biography, Mark Ribowsky gives Detroit girls their due.

Hot House Flower and the 9 Plants of Desire

A young female ad exec gets down and dirty—in the garden, of course—in Margot Berwin’s sprightly debut novel. Journeying to the Yucatán in search of a collection of legendary botanical specimens, she encounters shamans and black-marketeers, and naturally, she blossoms in the end.

Mile-High Fever

In the 1850s, two brothers headed west to seek their fortune and found a massive silver deposit. The Comstock Lode was soon drawing schemers, dreamers and a young Mark Twain to Virginia City, Nevada. Mining the town’s history, Dennis Drabelle unearths a rich vein of his own.

“EXCUSE ME,” the pretty lady in the departures lounge says, leaning close and speaking slowly. “May I ask you what that gadget is?”

“It’s for reading,” I say. I’ve just come off a thirteen-and-a-half-hour transpacific flight and am not sure I’m fully making sense as I wait for my connection. “It’s got books in it,” I add brightly, now tapping the tablet stupidly. “Thousands of books inside.” Then I sort of wave the device in the air, as if to prove how light and portable it is and say hey, look at me, I’m reading.

“Oh…books,” she says, straightening her back. She’s got an iPhone in her hand, and I imagine she’s ready to Google Map her way to a better conversation. Clearly she expected more. It’s as if she’d asked me if those were high-tech, gel-infused, shock-absorbant, hybrid, Bluetooth-enabled cross-trainers on my feet — and I’d answered cheerily, “No, they’re corrective shoes!” Because here’s the thing: Reading is not sexy.

True, smart is a turn-on. Books themselves can be physically beautiful and their contents intellectually alluring. But literacy is never going to be the killer conversational app. And reading gear — even a slim, 3G-enabled, iPod-white thingie that holds 1,500 books and zips them magically through the ether — that’s just never going to make the gadget-fans drool. The electronic reader — a category that includes not only the Amazon Kindle in my hand but the Sony Reader and a growing list of competitors — might be the first truly ingenious, paradigm-shifting piece of technology that actually makes you feel less cool than you were without it.

“And does it have email?” she asks, kindly. Email? Lady, I want to tell her, I can send and receive email from my microwave oven. My kid’s lunchbox does email. (I don’t have a microwave or a kid, but I’m pretty sure those are standard options.) Now I’m thinking about all my Kindle has done for me. After lugging a dozen books in it across two oceans and a couple of weeks of constant travel, it occurs to me: I like this thing. Not once did it run out of power or out of pages to entertain me; nor did it strain either my back or my eyes. Sitting on a beach in New Zealand I’d caught up on two recent issues of The New Yorker, sent to the Kindle via subscription and magic (or Whispernet, as Amazon goofily insists on calling its cellular technology). The electronic ink looked great in the bright sun, no glare or reflection. And just like with the lo-fiversion, I mostly skipped the critics and turned to the comics.

On the plane I’d read James Joyce’s Ulysses. Or sort of read it. For all its black-and-white, no-frills, made-for-reading seriousness, the Kindle’s still a gadget, so it’s hard not to goof around with the features it does have. Typing “book” on the clickety keypad, I found that the word appears 103 times in Ulysses. In place of numbered pages, the Kindle has “locations.” So at location 6,439, we read “If the accused could speak he could a tale unfold — one of the strangest that have ever been narrated between the covers of a book.” Stranger still (both to Joyce and the guy in the window seat next to me), the Kindle can read to you: Hit a few buttons and you have an instant, if stiffly robotic, audiobook.

Jumping to another location, a character is described as carrying “two bloody big books tucked under his oxter.” I guide the little joystick over the unfamiliar “oxter” and the Kindle’s dictionary enlightens me: “Scottish & N. English: a person’s armpit.”

Tucking the Kindle under my own oxter, I walked back to the bathroom to read some more. There may be more serious factors to weigh in the push and pull between print and e-books, but surely the Bathroom Test is an important one, and the Kindle passes. Added plus: Nobody in line knows if you were reading a newspaper in there or hunkering down with a 900-page novel.

No flight (let alone bathroom break) is long enough to finish Ulysses, but I did have fun clicking around, and I learned some things. Maybe I was becoming iLiterate. With a Kindle you’re reading the same words you would in a “real” book, but we’re trained by our web browsing and total-access iPhones and the staccato blathering blasts of tweets and texts to think of what we see on a screen as somehow different from what’s on a printed page. Print is permanent, screens ephemeral. So it feels a little strange to be holding a sleek gadget that doesn’t map the nearest movie theater or show clips of last night’s Daily Show. The Kindle does have a rudimentary web browser. It’s in the menu under “Experimental” and it’s pokey enough that you’ll probably use it as many times as you’ll look up “oxter” in an airplane bathroom. The whole idea of e-books and electronic ink is not so much to trick the brain and eye into feeling as if they’re experiencing the same thing as with the printed page, but to get us hooked on a different way of reading. The Kindle is print-plus. It’s plain old unsexy reading with some bells and whistles under the hood. The Kindle is homely and straitlaced — and that’s what I like about it. It’s uncool in a cool way. Just like reading.

“Is it free or do you have to pay for it?” the woman asks, but by now I’ve tuned her out. It does cost a pretty hefty $359, and most of the books cost money as well, but I’m not interested in debating with her the merits of a dedicated book machine versus her flashy do-everything phone. What I’m interested in is browsing the online Kindle Store with the device itself to find something to distract me on the next leg of my trip. I read a short story in The New Yorker and think I’ll pick up a novel by the same author. Meanwhile, a free Cook’s Illustrated cookbook I preordered has come buzzing onto my homepage. On a recent trip, I’d enjoyed reading a paperback copy of G.K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday. This time, before leaving I downloaded half a dozen other Chesterton titles onto the Kindle — just in case the mood struck. The thing doesn’t have quite the tactile feel or memory sense of the creased old Penguin paperback, but it’s easy to look at and easy to fill with good things. I don’t have time to contemplate the end of the printed word. My flight’s about to leave — and I have too much reading to do.

Travel and food writer ADAM SACHS (www.adamsachs.org) rarely finishes a book, electronic or otherwise.

ALSO THIS MONTH

What else to read on the go in June

Go Like Hell
Hemingway once called auto racing one of only three true sports (“the rest are mere games”). A.J. Baime’s feverish chronicle documents the epic, ego-fueled battle between Henry Ford II and Enzo Ferrari for ontrack supremacy at Le Mans, the world’s greatest race. They developed some of the sexiest race cars ever, and spared no cost — neither in dollars nor in drivers’ lives.

The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane
Generations of middle school students know the poor unfortunates accused of witchcraft in 17th century Salem, Massachusetts, were innocent victims of Puritan hysteria. Or were they? Katherine Howe’s gripping debut, about a contemporary grad student investigating the era, gives the tale of Goody Proctor & Co. a Hogwarts twist, and in the process weaves a bewitching spell of its own.

Life Inc.
Just as our most formidable corporate institutions are stumbling, author Douglas Rushkoff offers up an eye-opening history of “corporatism,” from the Medieval rise of the burghers to the giddy “no money down” heights of the real estate boom. His central point — that “symbols and brands have come to substitute for human relation-ships” — has a timely resonance.

NOT SO LONG AGO, self publishing was a dirty word. For the serious literary artiste, there was only one route to success. First, you’d find an agent to submit your proposal — or perhaps a finished book — to the major publishing houses. Then, with any luck, an editor would take the bait, treat you to a few boozy lunches (preferably at the Four Seasons), fork over a hefty advance and enlist the marketing department to propel your masterpiece onto best seller lists. Most self-respecting authors would sooner have used their manuscripts to line hamster cages than turn them over to a vanity press, traditionally viewed as the last resort of the vain, the foolish and the hopelessly amateur. But as an increasingly mercurial economy forces the publishing industry to rethink its modus operandi, book deals (not to mention advances, lunches and expensive publicity pushes) are becoming harder to come by — and self publishing suddenly seems reputable.

While traditional publishers have seen sales fall off precipitously in recent months — a nearly 15 percent drop at Bloomsbury, for instance — dozens of self publishing houses, including iUniverse, Xlibris and Amazon’s CreateSpace, are flourishing. In the past two years, print-on-demand company Blurb has gone from booking $1 million in revenue to $30 million (authors pay prices ranging from $13 to $170). Author Solutions, the parent company of iUniverse and other self publishing imprints, put out 12,000 titles in 2007, and expects to double that figure in 2009. “Traditional publishing is imploding,” says the company’s president and CEO, Kevin Weiss, “and we’re here helping people publish in numbers we never thought we would see.”

As the chances of landing a book deal dwindle, even tweedy literary elites are whispering that self publishing might be an acceptable path to legitimacy. Here’s why:

It can actually work

Brunonia Barry’s self-published novel The Lace Reader was purchased by William Morrow in October 2007 for more than $2 million. William P. Young’s self-published Christian novel The Shack, about a mourning father who meets God (she’s black), has sold more than a million copies. Lisa Genova’s novel about Alzheimer’s, Still Alice, was originally self published via iUniverse; 10 months and a lot of hustle later, it was purchased by Simon & Schuster for six figures, debuting at No. 5 on The New York Times best seller list.

For Genova, the decision to go the self publishing route was a last resort — after she’d spent a year futilely searching for an agent. “I was scared to self publish,” she admits. “I get why there is a stigma about it: There’s no gatekeeper saying this book meets a certain standard.” Genova’s biggest worry was that the lack of a traditional publisher’s seal of approval on her book’s jacket would mark it as somehow second-rate. “But if it weren’t for self publishing,” she continues, “the book would still be in a drawer somewhere. Now it’s on the best seller list.”

Of course, not all self-published books turn into best sellers — and most probably don’t deserve to. In fact, the average self-published volume sells only about 150 copies. That isn’t quite as bad as it may sound, given the publishing industry’s usual margins: 93 percent of traditionally published books sell only 1,000 copies, according to numbers released in 2004, the last time Nielsen Bookscan updated that statistic. (No wonder the book business is in trouble, right?)

It’s the only game in town

This past November, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt stunned the industry when it instructed its editors, at least temporarily, to stop purchasing manuscripts altogether (which is, after all, primarily what editors are hired to do). For the time being, the plan would be to concentrate on pushing the backlist. Though HMH is so far the only company to deliver an edict explicitly banning the acquisition of new titles, most publishers are becoming increasingly cautious about making new purchases, especially of fiction. Nearly overnight, the publishing world’s already high barrier to entry has become, for practical purposes, insurmountable.

Meanwhile, the few lucky writers who do manage to land a deal soon discover just how little that actually gets them these days. Under the new calculus, authors are often expected to build their own websites, throw their own book parties and schedule their own tours (which likely means driving from one bookstore to another and couch-surfing with friends). Some even wind up hiring freelance editors, rather than leave the job to the increasingly overworked red-pencil squads at their publishing houses.

All of which, come to think of it, sounds like a pretty good definition of self publishing. The Massachusetts- based book publicity firm Kelley & Hall was hired by both Barry and Genova, but according to publicist Jocelyn Kelley, self-published authors account for just 30 percent of the company’s clients. The other 70 percent are authors with traditional book deals, many of whom are dipping into their meager advances to cover the company’s fee. “Publishers have 50 to 100 authors they have to represent at a time, and they can’t always give them individualized attention,” Kelley explains. “Which means some fantastic books fall through the cracks.”

In other words, if an author’s neither a name brand nor a young hotshot, a standard publisher won’t do much more for him than a self publisher will. And these days, none of them are chowing down at the Four Seasons.

It’s the future

The good news for would-be authors is that new technologies are quickly leveling the playing field in a way that would surely please Gutenberg. Personal websites, blogs and Facebook pages are allowing authors, with or without a book deal, to find their audiences.

And as digital readers like Amazon’s Kindle and Sony’s Reader find wider acceptance, one of the few advantages traditional publishers still hold — their ability to get books onto store shelves — will slip their grasp.

A similar transformation has already happened in the music industry, of course, where bands promote themselves on MySpace and peddle their songs on iTunes. And no one frowns on a director who films her own short, uploads it to the internet and submits it to Sundance.

Literary wannabes who still fear the stigma of self publishing would do well to remember the example of Walt Whitman, who not only personally set the type for Leaves of Grass, but also promoted it, hawked copies to booksellers and even wrote anonymous reviews of the work, one of which began by trumpeting the arrival of “an American bard at last!” If he did say so himself.

Willa Paskin, a journalist living in New York City, has written for Slate, The Daily Beast and Radar magazine. She has not stooped to self publishing her work. Yet.

YOU’VE HEARD THE RAP ON ANGELENOS: They don’t read, unless it’s the trades, the tabloids or—when their agent absolutely insists—the first ten pages of a screenplay. And as if the city’s longstanding literary reputation hasn’t taken enough hits (F. Scott Fitzgerald once called it a “hideous town.”), last year the hometown paper, The Los Angeles Times, shrank its once fine book review section. But if some locals have turned their backs on books, you wouldn’t know it to tour L.A.’s abundance of niche bookshops, which cater to a committed SoCal minority ready to forgo the aroma of popcorn for the simpler pleasures of words on a page.

Larry Edmunds Bookshop
(6644 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood, 323-463-3273, larryedmunds.com)
Scene: Glitz, glamour, geeks
Action: While tourists swarm the Kodak Theater, home of the Academy Awards show, true cinephiles walk a few blocks west on Hollywood Boulevard to gawk at the shelves of Larry Edmunds Bookshop. The cluttered interior is a treasure trove of showbiz artifacts, like the impossible-to-find cult companion, Film Is: The International Free Cinema, or a pristine first edition of 1981’s The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation, a holy text for cartoon aficionados. Founded in 1938, Larry Edmunds houses 20,000 carefully selected volumes, and its current co-owner, Jeff Mantor, obsesses over each one. “I love helping customers find exactly what they’ve been looking for,” he says. “Or even something they didn’t know they wanted.”

Choice find: Jack Nicholson, Face to Face, complete with Jack’s John Hancock

Bodhi Tree Bookstore

(8585 Melrose Ave., West Hollywood, 310-659-1733, bodhitree.com)
Scene: Insistently serene
Action: Founded in 1970 by aerospace engineers in a desperate search for good karma, The Bodhi Tree, the lush interior of which is redolent of eucalyptus oil, remains a sanctuary from the surrounding city. Visitors sip tea and browse volumes dedicated mostly to inner knowledge and cosmic esoterica. “This really is a magical space, where people try to put aside their bad feelings and put out good feelings,” explains owner Stan Madson, standing underneath one of many photos of gurus lining the walls. The shop’s 30,000 volumes cover the otherworldly spectrum, from Stephan Hoeller’s Gnosticism: New Light on the Ancient Tradition of Inner Knowing and Kim Sheridan’s Animal and the Afterlife to UFOs: God from Inner Space by Nahu and Beginner’s Guide to Zen Buddhism by Jean Smith.

Choice find: Shirley MacLaine’s 1983 New Age classic, Out on a Limb

Original movie posters, including one for the 1980 golf comedy Caddyshack, above, are available at Larry Edmunds Bookshop, along with a collection of scripts, books and other Industry ephemera.

The Mystery Bookstore
(1036-C Broxton Ave., Los Angeles, 310-209-0415, mystery-bookstore.com)
Scene: Private dicks and potboilers
Action: “Los Angeles is the birthplace of the American crime novel,” observes manager Bobby McCue, which may explain why this store still does record business. Two noir maniacs bought and resurrected the shop, which has become a mecca for Angelenos who geek out on Jim Thompson, Dashiell Hammett, and Agatha Christie. Staffers specialize in certain minigenres (espionage, murder thrillers). Many of Mystery’s customers are “completists,” who collect every book by certain authors; others merely browse the rare first editions of, say, Raymond Chandler’s The Little Sister. Michael Connelly and James Ellroy regularly stop by for readings. The 10,000 books on hand include recent staff recommendations like The New Annotated Dracula, edited by Leslie Klinger, and Rick Riordan’s The 39 Clues.
Choice find: Go-Go Girls of the Apocalypse, by Victor Gischler

Autobooks-Aerobooks
(3524 W. Magnolia Blvd., Burbank, 818-845-0707, autobooks-aerobooks.com)
Scene: American Graffiti–meets– “Pimp My Ride”
Action: This is the country’s largest bookstore devoted to cars. Every Saturday morning, numerous 60-something gearheads roll up in custom rides for free coffee and car talk. Burbank has long been a hotbed of professional racers, vintage collectors, and restorers, explains co-owner Tina Van Curen. Spotted browsing, a familiar-looking regular named Jay Leno—yes, that Jay Leno—says he sees the store as a great place to share ideas with other car owners. Leno, who owns more than 100 classic cars, adds, “I’m old school, and like to look over the books I’m thinking about buying. I can’t find what I need at the chain stores.” In addition to books about everything from Fiat to Zambonis, Aerobooks carries outof-print, small publishers, imports, and collectibles. “It’s important to support independent bookstores,” Leno points out.
Choice find: Besides Leno? How about the new edition of The Unfair Advantage, by Mark Donohue?

The Writers Store
(2040 Westwood Blvd., Westwood, 310-441-5151, writersstore.com)
Scene: Ink-stained scribes, spray-on tans
Action: The walls of this venerable script-writers shop are lined with movie posters signed by the works of locals who created the films (like You’ve Got Mail and Scent of a Woman). The shelves hold just 800 books—all industry-oriented—like Selling Your Story in 60 Seconds, by Michael Hauge, and the shooting script for The Constant Gardener. But the store also stocks script-related software programs and educational DVDs (The Ultimate Filmmaking Kit by Jason Tomaric), as well as such arcane supplies as a script-binding mallet. “Our staff just aren’t sales people, they’re screenwriters and filmmakers themselves,” says president Jesse Douma. Among the shop’s regular visitors are Sofia Coppola and Wes Craven, says Douma.
Choice find: Charles Dickens action figure ($9.95)

Book Soup
(8818 W. Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood, 310-659-3110, booksoup.com)
Scene: Fashionably discerning
Action: Down the street from The Viper Room and Whiskey a Go Go, Book Soup is the grandpa of independent booksellers, a multi-specialty outlet catering to writers, actors and well-heeled producer-types. The collection includes volumes focusing on showbiz, celebrity biography, Tinseltown history, art and architecture, graphic and interior design and sex, as well as plenty of fiction. “We have a reputation for going all over the world to get something for a customer,” says Tyson Cornell, marketing and publicity manager for the store. With 60,000 titles stacked floor to ceiling in a tight space, customers might easily get lost but for the—as Cornell puts it—“very opinionated recommendations of our overeducated staff.”
Choice find: Inscribed copy of Pieces of my Heart: A Life, by Robert Wagner