One of the great -- and sadly rare -- pleasures of reading fiction comes when we recognize our lives in the actions and decisions of fictional characters.

A book about the rise and stunning decline of former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer is being published by Penguin Group (USA).

The latest releases.

Heroes don't come much more unlikely than Leo Demidov, the investigator at the center of Tom Rob Smith's debut thriller "Child 44." Sure, plenty of detectives drink, or sleep around, or get a little rough with a suspect. Demidov is in a class all his own among unsympathetic heroes, though: As a fast-rising officer in the Soviet Union's state security force, the NKVD, Leo has arrested and sent to death scores, perhaps hundreds, of innocent people.

Spoken Out Loud:A bibliophile can move the stacks, but she can never overcome the pull.

Sunday Reader:Now, when I see teenage girls laughing. When I see them loosed on a summer evening -- their limbs tanned and gossamer, their imagined freedom radiating like nuclear light -- I can't help but fast-forward two decades or more. I know the curve of their bones has already made an imperceptible bow to gravity. I see the decay in slow motion, even or especially through those stunning and immortal years.

Writing in 1921, newspaperman Herbert J. Seligmann reported that decades after emancipation, white Southern judges routinely sold African-Americans into peonage or quasi-slavery for such "crimes" as debt and vagrancy. Courts leased blacks convicted of petty offenses to local governments, planters and private corporations to work off their fines on chain gangs or in mines, lumber camps, quarries, farms and factories. Abused, whipped and frequently murdered, "in any full sense the Negro is not considered a human being," Seligmann charged.

It seems an odd idea, perhaps a dose of postmodern humor: Give the most modern of writing forms an old-fashioned forum.

Here is the ensnaring opener of Louise Erdrich's potent new novel: "The gun jammed on the last shot and the baby stood holding the crib rail, eyes wild, bawling." We stare at the final moment of a murder spree that has taken the lives of five family members on a North Dakota farm close to a Chippewa reservation.

Now here is a subject one doesn't see addressed in poetry all that often -- especially with such a warm, complicated embrace. To Philip Schultz, recent co-winner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, failure is not a pejorative but a state of being.

In 'Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They are Making,' Washington insider David Rothkopf provides an interesting new take on elites.

'Warriors' series for young readers takes on life's big issues with feline feistiness.

Robert Hass' collection "Time and Materials" shared the 2008 Pulitzer for Poetry with Philip Schultz. Other Pulitzer-winning books in 2008 are below.

Youngest daughter finds the humor in her famous family's legacy.

Under the Radar:Many universities in the United States have active presses. Unlike profit-driven publishing houses, university presses focus on areas of limited popular appeal.

A collection of writings about the environment reveals passion and prescience.

Sunday Reader:My husband Don and I celebrated our 50th anniversary last summer. This poem came along soon after as I was thinking of moons he and I had gazed at, kissed under, wept under, marveled under, yelled at each other under.

This book is misnamed. "The 10,000 Most Beautiful Experiments" would have been more accurate.