FICTION
DANGEROUS LAUGHTER
Thirteen Stories
By Steven Millhauser.
Alfred A. Knopf, $24.
In his first collection in five years, a master fabulist in the tradition of Poe and Nabokov invents spookily plausible parallel universes in which the deepest human emotions and yearnings are transformed into their monstrous opposites. Millhauser is especially attuned to the purgatory of adolescence. In the title story, teenagers attend sinister “laugh parties”; in another, a mysteriously afflicted girl hides in the darkness of her attic bedroom. Time and again these parables revive the possibility that “under this world there is another, waiting to be born.” (Excerpt)
A MERCY
By Toni Morrison.
Alfred A. Knopf, $23.95.
The fate of a slave child abandoned by her mother animates this allusive novel — part Faulknerian puzzle, part dream-song — about orphaned women who form an eccentric household in late-17th-century America. Morrison’s farmers and rum traders, masters and slaves, indentured whites and captive Native Americans live side by side, often in violent conflict, in a lawless, ripe American Eden that is both a haven and a prison — an emerging nation whose identity is rooted equally in Old World superstitions and New World appetites and fears. (First Chapter)
NETHERLAND
By Joseph O’Neill.
Pantheon Books, $23.95.
O’Neill’s seductive ode to New York — a city that even in bad times stubbornly clings to its belief “in its salvific worth” — is narrated by a Dutch financier whose privileged Manhattan existence is upended by the events of Sept. 11, 2001. When his wife departs for London with their small son, he stays behind, finding camaraderie in the unexpectedly buoyant world of immigrant cricket players, most of them West Indians and South Asians, including an entrepreneur with Gatsby-size aspirations. (First Chapter)
2666
By Roberto Bolaño. Translated by Natasha Wimmer.
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, cloth and paper, $30.
Bolaño, the prodigious Chilean writer who died at age 50 in 2003, has posthumously risen, like a figure in one of his own splendid creations, to the summit of modern fiction. This latest work, first published in Spanish in 2004, is a mega- and meta-detective novel with strong hints of apocalyptic foreboding. It contains five separate narratives, each pursuing a different story with a cast of beguiling characters — European literary scholars, an African-American journalist and more — whose lives converge in a Mexican border town where hundreds of young women have been brutally murdered. (Excerpt)
UNACCUSTOMED EARTH
By Jhumpa Lahiri.
Alfred A. Knopf, $25.
There is much cultural news in these precisely observed studies of modern-day Bengali-Americans — many of them Ivy-league strivers ensconced in prosperous suburbs who can’t quite overcome the tug of traditions nurtured in Calcutta. With quiet artistry and tender sympathy, Lahiri creates an impressive range of vivid characters — young and old, male and female, self-knowing and self-deluding — in engrossing stories that replenish the classic themes of domestic realism: loneliness, estrangement and family discord. (Excerpt)
NONFICTION
THE DARK SIDE
The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals
By Jane Mayer.
Doubleday, $27.50.
Mayer’s meticulously reported descent into the depths of President Bush’s antiterrorist policies peels away the layers of legal and bureaucratic maneuvering that gave us Guantánamo Bay, “extraordinary rendition,” “enhanced” interrogation methods, “black sites,” warrantless domestic surveillance and all the rest. But Mayer also describes the efforts ofunsung heroes, tucked deep inside the administration, who risked their careers in the struggle to balance the rule of law against the need to meet a threat unlike any other in the nation’s history.
THE FOREVER WAR
By Dexter Filkins.
Alfred A. Knopf, $25.
The New York Times correspondent, whose tours of duty have taken him from Afghanistan in 1998 to Iraq during the American intervention, captures a decade of armed struggle in harrowingly detailed vignettes. Whether interviewing jihadists in Kabul, accompanying marines on risky patrols in Falluja or visiting grieving families in Baghdad, Filkins makes us see, with almost hallucinogenic immediacy, the true human meaning and consequences of the “war on terror.” (First Chapter)
NOTHING TO BE FRIGHTENED OF
By Julian Barnes.
Alfred A. Knopf, $24.95.
This absorbing memoir traces Barnes’s progress from atheism (at age 20) to agnosticism (at 60) and examines the problem of religion not by rehashing the familiar quarrel between science and mystery, but rather by weighing the timeless questions of mortality and aging. Barnes distills his own experiences — and those of his parents and brother — in polished and wise sentences that recall the writing of Montaigne, Flaubert and the other French masters he includes in his discussion. (First Chapter)
THIS REPUBLIC OF SUFFERING
Death and the American Civil War
By Drew Gilpin Faust.
Alfred A. Knopf, $27.95.
In this powerful book, Faust, the president of Harvard, explores the legacy, or legacies, of the “harvest of death” sown and reaped by the Civil War. In the space of four years, 620,000 Americans died in uniform, roughly the same number as those lost in all the nation’s combined wars from the Revolution through Korea. This doesn’t include the thousands of civilians killed in epidemics, guerrilla raids and draft riots. The collective trauma created “a newly centralized nation-state,” Faust writes, but it also established “sacrifice and its memorialization as the ground on which North and South would ultimately reunite.” (First Chapter)
THE WORLD IS WHAT IT IS
The Authorized Biography of V. S. Naipaul
By Patrick French.
Alfred A. Knopf, $30.
The judges of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2007 have announced this year’s six shortlisted novels.
The six titles shortlisted are:
Attracted by his breadth of interests, ranging from schizophrenia to music, Columbia University has appointed Oliver Sacks, the neurologist and writer, as its first Columbia artist, a newly created designation.
Beginning next week, Dr. Sacks, who has been a clinical professor of neurology at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx for the past 42 years, is leaving to become a professor of clinical neurology and clinical psychiatry at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, a post he will occupy in addition to the new artist position.
The new appointment will allow Dr. Sacks, the author of 10 books and a frequent contributor to The New Yorker, to range freely across Columbia’s departments, teaching, giving public lectures, conducting seminars, seeing patients and collaborating with other faculty members. Many of the details of his appointment have yet to be worked out, but among other things, he will be teaching in the university’s creative writing department as well as at the medical school.
“My first year at Columbia is going to be, to some extent, a year of experiment and exploration,” Dr. Sacks said. “I very much look forward to meeting students and faculty and doing classes that could be about almost anything, from music to psychiatry to whatever.”
Dr. Sacks, 74, was born in London and moved to the United States in the early 1960s. He is perhaps best known as the author of “Awakenings,” which chronicles his treatment of patients with encephalitic lethargica (otherwise known as sleeping sickness) and was made into a 1990 movie starring Robert De Niro and Robin Williams.
Another well-known book is “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat,” a 1985 collection of essays about various patients with neurological problems. There are more than one million copies of all his books in print in the United States, and his work has been translated into more than 20 languages. His latest book, “Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain,” is being published by Alfred A. Knopf in October.
Lee C. Bollinger, president of Columbia, said Dr. Sacks’s appointment exemplified the university’s effort to bridge the gap between the study of neuroscience and other disciplines in which scholars work to understand human behavior, including economics, law and art history.
Dr. Sacks’s appointment is “a commitment both to having one of the great clinical neuroscientists in our midst and one of the great writers about this subject, but also a commitment to try to take that and reach out to other fields and human activities,” Mr. Bollinger said.
The university has committed $20 million to expanding the study of neuroscience to include an interdisciplinary approach, and last year it received a donation worth more than $200 million from Dawn M. Greene and the Jerome L. Greene Foundation to build a new center to house the university’s Mind, Brain and Behavior Initiative, which will help apply neuroscience to multiple areas of scholarship.
For his part, Dr. Sacks said he was looking forward to returning to the classroom. At Albert Einstein, he said, he had not taught formally since 1973. “I’ve actually missed it,” he said. He added: “In a way, for me, this is a real entrance into university life such as I’ve never had, rather than a part-time medical appointment. I’m excited, because, in a way, I’ve been a sort of an outsider or freelancer or maverick for the last 40 years, and here I think it will be quite an intense sort of full relationship with Columbia.”
Dr. Sacks said that although he was looking forward to exploring disciplines outside medicine, his clinical work would remain a focus, not least because it inspires so much of his writing.
“The medical part of my life is very, very central,” he said, recalling that his father, also a physician, kept coming out of retirement to go back to work. “When he was 90, we said, ‘Pop, at least stop the house calls,’ and he said, ‘I’ll stop everything else but keep the house calls.’ I want to see patients as long as I am able.”
The appointment grew out of conversations that Dr. Sacks had with several people, including Eric Kandel, a Nobel laureate in medicine and a professor at Columbia, and Gregory Mosher, director of the Arts Initiative at Columbia, which aims to incorporate an interdisciplinary approach to the arts into the undergraduate experience. Dr. Sacks, Mr. Mosher said, is an exemplar of the “Hey, kids, you can do more than one thing at a time” message.
Dr. Sacks’s appointment at the medical school is being financed by a $1 million donation made over five years by the Gatsby Charitable Foundation, one of several foundations financed by the Sainsbury family of Britain, which owns a grocery chain.
On Friday Dr. Sacks will give his first lecture, at Columbia’s psychiatry department, where he will talk about music and neuroscience. He said the move to Columbia capped a gradual transition he has been making over the past decade.
“I used to be more withdrawn or isolated,” he said. “Now I love meeting colleagues and finding out what other people are doing.”
