BOOK WHORE >> 9.09.08

She's back, pimpin' out notable new releases to place on your radar! PHILIP ROTH: NOVELS AND OTHER NARRATIVES 1986-1991 edited by Ross Miller — This fifth volume of The Library of America’s definitive edition of Roth’s collected works presents four books. THE COUNTERLIFE (1986) is a novel told from conflicting perspectives about people enacting drastic dreams of renewal and escape. THE FACTS (1988) — the first of the “Roth Books” — is a novelist’s autobiography in which the author presents his own battles defictionalized and unadorned. In the second Roth book, DECEPTION (1990), a married American named Philip, living in London, and the married Englishwoman who is his mistress meet sporadically in a secret trysting place where the woman eloquently reveals herself to her lover as they talk before and after making love. In the third Roth book, PATRIMONY (1991), the author watches as his 86-year-old father, Herman Roth, battles a fatal brain tumor. YELLOW MOON by Jewell Parker Rhodes — A jazzman, a wharf worker, a prostitute, all murdered. Wrists punctured, their bodies impossibly drained of blood. What connects them? Why are they rising as ghosts? Marie Levant, the great-great granddaughter of the Voodoo Queen, Marie Laveau, knows better than anyone New Orleans's brutal past — the legacy of slavery, poverty, racism and sexism — and as a doctor at Charity Hospital's ER, she treats its current victims. The struggle becomes personal, as the wazimamoto is intent on destroying her and all the Laveau descendants. Marie fights to protect her daughter, lover, and herself from the wazimamoto's seductive assault on both body and spirit. SCATTERSHOT: MY BIPOLAR FAMILY by David Lovelace — Four out of the five people in poet David Lovelace’s immediate family have experienced bipolar disorder, including David himself. His relationship with the disease began with his artist mother’s severe depressions during his boyhood in the 1960s and continued through decades of his preacher father’s increasingly eccentric behavior. The family’s battle with the disorder reached its apex in 1986, the year that his father, his brother, and David himself were all committed in quick succession. Only his sister has escaped unscathed. This is Lovelace’s account of the disease’s effects on his family, and his exploits as he spent his life running from — and finally learning to embrace — the madness imprinted on his genes. TAKEOVER by Lisa Black — Forensic scientist Theresa MacLean is called to the scene of a gruesome murder. Although it's not the best start to her day, Theresa has been through worse. What unfolds during the next eight hours, though, is nothing she could ever have imagined. Downtown at the Federal Reserve Bank, her police detective fiancé is taken hostage with six others in a robbery masterminded by two clever criminals. When she arrives at the scene, Theresa discovers that the police have brought in the city's best hostage negotiator: high-profile Chris Cavanaugh. He hasn't lost a victim yet, but Theresa wonders if he might be too arrogant to save the day this time around. Buy them at Amazon.