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Poser: My Life in Twenty-Three Yoga Poses by Claire Dederer. (Picador) Dederer, an essayist and book critic, began doing yoga to alleviate back pain and anxiety, and because "I wanted other people to admire my goodness." She also found an elegant structure for her memoir, in which she uses yoga positions (downward dog, triangle, headstand) to reflect on her strained marriage, the travails of hyperparenting, and her own fraught childhood.
Canti by Giacomo Leopardi. Translated and annotated by Jonathan Galassi. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) In this translation, Leopardi, the great 19th-century Italian poet, runs the entire vocal range, from public outrage ("On the Monument to Dante Being Erected in Florence") to private murmur ("Aspasia"). Galassi, a poet himself, has also translated the major works of the Nobelist Eugenio Montale in Collected Poems: 1920-1954 (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), an allusive paean to the seedy but meaningful edges of modern life.
J.D. Salinger: A Life by Kenneth Slawenski. (Random House) Slawenski's reverent biography unearths and aggregates the facts - Salinger (1919-2010) was almost as famous for his reclusiveness as for his writing - and reads them into the fiction. Among the book's achievements is its evocation of the horror of Salinger's experiences in World War II.
The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady by Elizabeth Stuckey-French. (Anchor) In this darkly funny novel, 77-year-old Marylou Ahearn's daughter long ago died of cancer as a result of a government-sponsored Cold War medical experiment. Out for blood, Marylou tracks down the physician who in 1953 conned her into taking a prenatal radioactive potion.
High on the Hog: A Culinary Journey From Africa to America by Jessica B. Harris. (Bloomsbury) Harris, a food historian and cookbook author, traces how African slaves, thrust into a strange land, carried with them the taste memories, cooking techniques and agricultural practices of their homelands and transformed the way Americans ate.
Ghost Light by Joseph O'Connor. (Picador/Frances Coady) O'Connor reimagines the love affair between the pugnacious young actress Molly Allgood and the Irish dramatist John Millington Synge (1871-1909). Much of the novel is presented in flashbacks from 1952, when an aging and broken Molly, mired in London, looks back on the early days of the Abbey Theater and her brush with greatness.
Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World by William D. Cohan. (Anchor) In "House of Cards" (2009), Cohan told the tale of Bear Stearns, the investment bank that collapsed during the financial crisis of 2008. Goldman Sachs, a "symbol of immutable global power," fared very differently, and Cohan's history of the firm examines the controversies behind its success.
The Death Instinct by Jed Rubenfeld. (Riverhead) On Sept.16, 1920, a bomb exploded on Wall Street, killing more than 30 people. That unsolved act of terrorism provides the impetus for Rubenfeld's historical thriller, which reunites the heroes of "The Interpretation of Murder" (2006): Capt. James Littlemore, a New York police officer, and the Harvard-trained physician Stratham Younger.