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The latest releases

"Easter Everywhere: A Memoir" by Darcey Steinke. (Bloomsbury, $14.95.) Steinke, the author of four novels, describes how she grew up as the daughter of a Lutheran minister and his depressed wife, and the spiritual rootlessness that ensued.

"This Human Season" by Louise Dean. (Harvest/Harcourt, $14.) Set in Belfast during the Troubles of the 1970s, Dean's second novel introduces us, in alternating chapters, to a local woman whose 19-year-old son is imprisoned at Long Kesh and to a retired British soldier who takes a job there as a guard.

"Thirty-Eight Witnesses: The Kitty Genovese Case" by A.M. Rosenthal. (Melville House, $14.95.) Rosenthal, who was editor of The Times from 1969 to 1986 and died in 2006, wrote this small book in 1964. It concerns an event that seemed to symbolize everything that was wrong with contemporary New York: a 30-minute attack, culminating in murder, on a young Queens woman, heard by 38 neighbors, none of whom called the police. Reissued in a series of classic works of journalism, this edition includes a preface by Samuel G. Freedman and an introduction by Arthur Ochs Sulzberger.

"Shroom: A Cultural History of the Magic Mushroom" by Andy Letcher. (Ecco/Harper Perennial, $14.95.) The 209 species of magic mushrooms are hallucinogens; their active ingredient, psilocybin, is about 100 times less potent than LSD. In this "delightful, journalistic addition to the genre known as trip lit," Letcher presents the science and history of shrooms, systematically debunking the myths that have grown up around them. (There is no evidence, for instance, that an early mushroom cult was the first religion.)

"The Communist's Daughter" by Dennis Bock. (Vintage Contemporaries, $14.) The real Norman Bethune was a Canadian Communist physician who organized the first mobile blood transfusion service during the Spanish Civil War and died several years later while working as a surgeon with the Red Army in China. Bock's novel tells his story through letters to a daughter Bethune has never seen (and did not historically have), and imagines him as a cold, conflicted figure, much like the fire-and-brimstone Presbyterian father he rejected.

"Look Both Ways: Bisexual Politics" by Jennifer Baumgardner. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $14.) Part memoir, part manifesto, this book examines the intersection of feminism and bisexuality. Baumgardner claims that the current "phase of rampant female bisexuality" has come about because young women want "freedom and power and love and pleasure."

"Acceptance" by Susan Coll. (Picador, $14.) Coll's third novel follows three striving seniors at a suburban Maryland high school, their parents and an overworked admissions officer at a newly popular university as they all struggle to survive the college admissions frenzy.