Bookworm

A Song Flung Up to Heaven (Random House)

Maya Angelou has completed her extraordinary autobiography, which began with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Here, she speaks about the people she knew when she started out as a writer, how she learned to write (she was a dancer), and who she is now.

Viken Berberian's first novel attempts to take us inside the head of a failed suicide bomber, exploring his connection to the subject and the models in music and poetry that brought him closer to this dissociated and shattered personality...

Samuel Johnson Is Indignant (McSweeney's)

Lydia Davis' stories are miniatures. Acutely observed specificities are tautly rendered. Such intimate detail provides a keyhole view of how sanity gives way to obsession, and obsession gives way to wild comedy.

Atonement (Doubleday)

Ian McEwan explores both the technique and passion of his novel-his extraordinary assumption of a woman's voice and her malicious acts that violate the social fabric.

(Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

While writing Palladio (Doubleday) another of his complex novels of ideas, Jonathan Dee discovered his gift for creating complex human characters-and altered the course of his writing career.

In the Forest (Houghton Mifflin)

Edna O'Brien's predilection for darkness, Greek tragedy and the terrifying fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm achieves its riskiest manifestation in her new novel, In the Forest...

All Souls Day (Harcourt)