Books & Literature

In a single monologue, the protagonist of Mohsin Hamid's sophomore novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, tells his life story to an American stranger over dinner in a Pakistani cafe. Hamid's first novel, Moth Smoke, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.

Novelist A.M. Homes writes about her real life — including her reunion with her biological parents, 31 years after they gave her up for adoption — in a memoir called The Mistress's Daughter.

Celebrated Japanese crime writer Natsuo Kirino made her American debut in 2005, when the novel Out was translated into English, and became a finalist for an Edgar award.

Out told the weird story of an abused wife who strangles her husband and then seeks the aid of her coworkers in a boxed lunch factory in covering up the murder. The novel was a sensation not simply because it lured American readers out of the tourist precincts of Japan, but because of its distinctive worldview and tone.

Another Kirino novel, Grotesque, has just been translated into English.

Maureen Corrigan reviews "Seabiscuit: An American Legend."

Record producer Joe Boyd has worked with Eric Clapton, Pink Floyd, Nick Drake, Richard and Linda Thompson, R.E.M. and many other musical acts. He has a new memoir, called White Bicycles: Making Music in the 1960s.

The Other Side of You is a new novel by Salley Vickers.

Retired CIA field officer Larry Devlin was appointed CIA station chief in Zaire in the Congo in 1960, following the Congo's independence from Belgium. It was also a time when the Congo was a significant pawn in the Cold War.

Devlin has written a memoir about his experiences, Chief of Station, Congo: Fighting the Cold War in a Hot Zone.

Author Jonathan Lethem. His new novel is “You Don’t Love Me Yet” (Doubleday). He is also the author of the semi-autobiographical novel, "The Fortress of Solitude" (Doubleday 2003) about a white kid growing up in an African-American and Latino neighborhood in New York. His novel, "Motherless Brooklyn" (Doubleday 1999) won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. His other books include "Girl in Landscape" (Doubleday 1998) and "Amnesia Moon" (Harcourt 1995).

Navy Cmdr. Richard Jadick earned a Bronze Star with a "V" for valor for his service as a doctor during the Battle of Fallujah, which featured some of the worst street fighting seen by Americans since Vietnam. His new memoir, written with Thomas Hayden, is On Call in Hell: A Doctor's Iraq War Story.

ABC News Chief White House Correspondent Martha Raddatz has been to Iraq 12 times since the American invasion. She has a new book about a battle that was a turning point in the war, an April 2004 fight in Baghdad's Sadr City. Raddatz says it was then that American troops realized they were facing an insurgency.

The Long Road Home: A Story of War and Family is about the soldiers who fought that battle, and their families. One of the soldiers in the battle was Casey Sheehan, the son of antiwar activist Cindy Sheehan.

ABC news correspondent and former anchor Bob Woodruff was nearly killed by a roadside bomb on Jan. 29, 2006 in Iraq. He suffered a severe brain injury and was in a coma for over a month. He and his wife Lee have written a new memoir about his recovery: In an Instant: A Family's Journey of Love and Healing.

Woodruff has just returned to work at ABC with the special report "To Iraq and Back." It tells the story of his recovery, and the plight of brain-injured Iraq veterans. He and his wife have also set up a new foundation to help soldiers recovering from brain

Ben Yagoda is the author of When You Catch an Adjective, Kill It. It's a guide to writing that capitalizes on the lively advice of writers from Mark Twain (author of the title quote) to Stephen King.

Hisham Nitar's semi-autobiographical debut novel In the Country of Men was short-listed for the 2006 Mann Booker Prize.

Matar was born in New York City in 1970 to Libyan parents and spent his childhood in Tripoli, Libya, and later in Cairo, Egypt. He has lived in Great Britain since 1986.

Matar's father, a critic of the Libyan regime, was arrested in 1990. Matar has been unable to find out what happened to him.

Ishmael Beah has written a memoir about his years as a child soldier in Sierra Leone. Orphaned by the civil war there, he was carrying an AK-47 by the age of 12. Pumped up by drugs, he was forced to kill or be killed.

When he was 15, UNICEF took Beah to a rehabilitation center. He was eventually adopted by an American woman and brought to the United States, where he attended high school and graduated from Oberlin College.

His book is A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier.

Composer and writer Allen Shawn is the author of the new memoir, Wish I Could Be There. The book documents his many phobias. Shawn is deathly afraid of a lot of things, including heights, water, fields, parking lots and unknown streets.

Journalist Matt Beynon Rees is now a crime novelist, too. The Collaborator of Bethlehem follows a Palestinian schoolteacher who turns detective to solve a murder set in the violence-ridden West Bank. Rees was based in Jerusalem as a Middle East reporter for Time magazine for more than a decade, serving as bureau chief from 2000 to 2006.

Writer Nuruddin Farah's new novel, Knots, is about the terrible conditions for women in Somalia. The central character is a Somali-Canadian woman who returns to Mogadiscio, her native city.

Underground comic book artist Robert Crumb created ZAP COMIX and is the artist behind such 1960s and 1970s icons as Mr. Natural, Fritz the Cat, and Keep-on-Truckin. His wife, Aline Kominsky Crumb, was one of the earliest underground female cartoonists. Her new book, Need More Love: A Graphic Memoir, chronicles her life and career. Robert's new book is The Sweeter Side of R. Crumb.

When Elif Shafak's novel The Bastard of Istanbul was published in her home country, the best-selling author was was accused of "public denigration of Turkishness." She was eventually acquitted. As many as 60 writers, journalists, publishers, scholars and intellectuals have been prosecuted under the Turkish penal code. One of them was editor Hrant Dink, who was assassinated last month by a Turkish fanatic.

The new novel by Vikram Chandra is about the mob in India.