New in paperback

Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life, by Steve Martin. (Scribner, $ 15.) Martin's engaging "biography ... about someone I used to know" revisits his 18 years as a stand-up comedian. In a memoir that is "smart, serious, heartfelt and confessional without being maudlin," as Janet Maslin described it in The New York Times,

Sons and Other Flammable Objects, by Porochista Khakpour. (Grove, $14.) This first novel, about a family who fled revolutionary Iran to settle in a Southern California apartment complex, deals with familiar themes -- father versus son, assimilation versus cultural allegiance. But Khakpour's biting humor and acute observations bring her characters to vivid life.

The Prince of Darkness: 50 Years Reporting in Washington, by Robert D. Novak. (Three Rivers, $18.95.) Novak's career as a political reporter, syndicated columnist, television commentator and leading character in the outing of the CIA officer Valerie Plame is the subject of this book. It "dishes gossip and delivers payback to enemies for ancient slights," The Times' reviewer, Jack Shafer, said.

Pontoon: A Novel of Lake Wobegon, by Garrison Keillor. (Penguin, $14.) Keillor's fictional town "has always sat a little closer to Winesburg than Mayberry," Thomas Mallon wrote in The New York Times Book Review, and readers who venture in search of nostalgia will "be brought up short by surprisingly large measures of sadness and dread."

Good Calories, Bad Calories: Fats, Carbs, and the Controversial Science of Diet and Health, by Gary Taubes. (Anchor, $16.95.) The low-fat-diet orthodoxy was first challenged by Taubes in The New York Times Magazine in 2002. In this book, Taubes shows that the hypothesis that dietary fat causes heart disease, which gathered strength in the 1970s and '80s, was based on flimsy science. Taubes thinks that a diet rich in protein and fat and low in carbohydrates is best and that weight gain is not determined only by "calories in minus calories out."

The Indian Clerk, by David Leavitt. (Bloomsbury, $16.) When S. Ramanujan, a clerk from Madras who was a gifted mathematician, went to Cambridge at the invitation of the brilliant G.H. Hardy, he became a celebrity, with various dons competing for his society. Leavitt is keenly interested in class, and his seventh novel explores the betrayal of an outsider by an insider.

The Mascot: Unraveling the Mystery of My Jewish Father's Nazi Boyhood, by Mark Kurzem. (Plume, $16.) When Kurzem was an Oxford student, his father revealed that he was Jewish, and asked his son to help him uncover his Holocaust past. Kurzem discovered that his father, who was 5 when he witnessed his mother's murder, had become the mascot of a troop of Nazi soldiers. "This is a book to keep you up at night," Dinitia Smith wrote in The Times. An equally absorbing story of survival is told in The Zookeeper's Wife: A War Story, by Diane Ackerman. (Norton, $14.95.) The keeper of the Warsaw Zoo -- a lieutenant in the clandestine Polish Army -- and his wife smuggled Jews out of the ghetto and hid them in the zoo, saving 300 lives. One who did not survive was Petr Ginz, a teenager from Prague who kept a diary of his life in that city until he was taken to Theresienstadt. The voice in The Diary of Petr Ginz: 1941-1942, edited by Chava Pressburger, translated by Elena Lappin (Grove, $16), is different from Anne Frank's; Petr offers an unsentimental perspective on his changing world, with a sense of alarm occasionally slipping through. (Pressburger is Ginz's sister.)