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Books in brief

YOUNG ADULT Wonder Show by Hannah Barnaby; Houghton Mifflin Books, 267 pages ($16.99) Ages 12 and up.

Christie amuses with dig chronicle

Agatha Christie warned the reader not to expect too much out of her story of life on an archaeological dig. “This is not a profound book,” Christie writes. “It will give you no interesting sidelights on archaeology, there will be no beautiful descriptions of scenery, no treating of economic problems, no racial reflections, no history.

Editor’s Choice

As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals, Notebooks 1964-1980 by Susan Sontag, edited by David Rieff; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 523 pages ($30). “In my more extravagant moments,” writes David Rieff in his preface, “I sometimes think that my mother’s journals, of which this is the second of three volumes, are not just the autobiography she never got around to writing (had she done so, I imagine something highly literary and episodic, a cousin to Updike’s ‘Self-Consciousness,’ which was a book she admired greatly), but the great autobiographical novel she never cared to write.”

In another meaningful novel, Toni Morrison goes ‘Home’

Toni Morrison’s characters take on a life of their own. Who can forget Sula and Beloved from the heart-wrenching novels of the same names, Milkman from “The Song of Solomon” and Pecola from “The Bluest Eye”?

Best Sellers

Compiled from data from independent and chain bookstores, book wholesalers and independent distributors nationwide. FICTION

Wildly popular ‘Grey’ trilogy is 100 shades of awful

I was frankly afraid to review the controversial yet staggeringly popular “Fifty Shades of Grey” S&M-erotica trilogy. Really afraid.

Poetry and Literature Calendar

A list of readings and workshops (May 13 -19)

Book Review

Getting a read on Lillian Hellman: playwright, screenwriter -- and liar

The adjective "difficult" in the title of Alice Kessler-Harris' biography of Lillian Hellman is apt but too kind. Implicitly at least, Kessler-Harris is attempting a partial rehabilitation of Hellman's reputation.

Think of the time when

you were truly yourself, that age before the mask was pulled tight before the roles were welded like armor to your skin.

Affluence blunts the edge on Jen Lancaster’s humor

I can imagine that, for Jen Lancaster, time has turned into something of a problem. Lancaster earned countless readers — and a place on the New York Times best-seller list — by writing pithy, sarcastic, bitter memoirs-cum-social commentaries on the stuff of which her life, as a 20-and 30-something, was made.

Books in brief

YOUNG ADULT The Drowned Cities by Paolo Bacigalupi; Little Brown, $17.99. 434 pages. Ages 12 and up.

Editor’s Choice

Farther Away: Essays by Jonathan Franzen, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 321 pages, $26. David Foster Wallace haunts this book of essays. But then, how could he not? Franzen and Wallace were friends—loving literary siblings in the most volatile way (no Daddy for both to go Oedipal on).

Profiling music man who saw the beauty in ‘Bomp’

Imagine a pair of young, little-known musicians walking into the offices of a music publishing firm and trying to pitch a wacky song called “Who Put the Bomp” to the company’s owner.

Richard Ford’s ‘Canada’ is a tragedy in three acts

“Canada” is an American tragedy. Pulitzer Prize-winning fiction writer Richard Ford’s first novel in six years conveys both the vast sweep of the interior lowlands that stretch from Mexico to the American Great Plains and up through Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba, and the mundane but tectonic faults, mostly in DNA and bad ideas, that, on those plains and elsewhere, shape the course of human lives.