Books

'A Pocket History of Sex in the Twentieth Century'

Jane Vandenburgh’s memoir is a survival story, a tale of how she overcame a strange and sad childhood to become a strange, complicated and slightly less sad adult.

Bigger Woes for Library, as a Buyer Backs Out

A decision by Orient-Express Hotels Ltd. to back out of its plans to buy the former Donnell Library building in Midtown Manhattan is likely to deprive the New York Public Library of millions it was counting on.

Amazon to Sell E-Books for Apple Devices

Owners of iPod and iPhone Touch can download free software that will provide access to the 240,000 e-books on Amazon.com.

• The New Kindle App: Good Start, But Where’s the Downloading?

For a Weekend, Fishermen Measure Haul in Verse

At the annual Fisher Poets Gathering in Astoria, Ore., even a bad day of fishing can produce a decent rhyme.

• Fisher Poets in Astoria, Ore. | Submit a Song or Poem | Slide Show

Reconciliation at the Citadel, Through Basketball

The military college’s basketball coach is the cousin of a famous alumnus, who wrote books seen as critical.

• The Citadel 74, Georgia Southern 53
• Men’s College Roundup: Villanova Pulls Away Late Against Notre Dame

'The Believers'

“The Believers” is a somewhat scattershot production: brilliant at times; at others, oddly unfocused.

Errors Cast Doubt on a Baseball Memoir

Statistics and transaction listings contradict the recent memoir of Matt McCarthy, a minor league pitcher turned medical intern and author.

• Excerpts From a Disputed Baseball Memoir

'Spoiled'

The most successful tales in Caitlin Macy’s “Spoiled” are wise and cryptic enough to offset the collection’s clunkers.

'Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor'

Witty, obsessed and almost inhumanly brave, Flannery O’Connor was peculiar, her work even more so. But Brad Gooch’s biography strives to make it all quite normal — under the circumstances, of course.

'The House of Wittgenstein'

A history of the morbid, musical, quarrelsome, brilliant Wittgensteins.

'Frankly, My Dear'

Molly Haskell’s feminist perspective comes to the rescue of “Gone With the Wind,” a film most academics won’t touch and current critics dismiss.

'Every Man Dies Alone'

The first English version of this 1947 novel, based on a real-life German couple who mounted modest but suicidal resistance against Hitler.

• First Chapter

'The Lost City of Z'

A journalist follows the trail of Percy Fawcett’s 1925 fatal quest for a fabled city of gold in the Amazon jungle.

New Comics Collections

An anthology of the earliest superhero stories; a “serious parody” of old superhero comics by Jonathan Lethem; and the final volume of Grant Morrison’s “All-Star Superman.”

'The Book of Night Women'

Marlon James’s green-eyed protagonist believes she is better than the other slaves on a Jamaican plantation.

'The Housekeeper and the Professor'

This novel’s unlikely hero is a Japanese mathematician whose memory lasts for only 80 minutes.

'A Mad Desire to Dance'

In this novel, Holocaust survivors grapple with grim legacies.

• First Chapter

'Honeymoon in Tehran'

In this memoir, an American journalist’s fascination with an elusive Iranian mirrors her fraught relation to her parents’ homeland.