Italian journalist Rastello follows an anonymous smuggler (Mr. Market) through the world of cocaine trafficking. Despite the title, this is not a how-to book, kids.

To Sound in the Know: Rastello writes for La Reppublica, an Italian newspaper that follows how crime affects the international community.

The Tiger’s Wife By Téa Obreht, out March 8

A young doctor goes in search of her grandfather’s past and finds, besides that history, a deafmute woman who befriended a tiger a half century earlier.

To Sound in the Know: Despite this being her debut novel, Obreht has already made The New Yorker’s 20 Under 40 List. Nowhere to go but up!

Everyone Loves You When You’re Dead: Journeys Into Fame and Madness By Neil Strauss, out March 15

The journalist who has written about Mtley Cre and Jenna Jameson looks back through years of material at the clusterfuck and madness that is stardom.

To Sound in the Know: Strauss wrote the bestseller The Game about the world of pick-up artists and continues to run StyleLife Academy, an online dating tool for tools who can’t get dates.

Unfamiliar Fishes By Sarah Vowell, out March 22

What happened when English missionaries tried to tame the wilds of Hawaii in the 1800s? I know, I was just wondering the same thing. Thankfully, Sarah Vowell has all the answers in her new non-fiction foray.

To Sound in the Know: Vowell is president of the Board of Directors of Park Slope’s 826NYC tutoring center. And that really is her voice.

You Think That’s Bad By Jim Shepard, out March 22

This new collection of short stories jumps all over the world (New Guinea, the Middle East, the U.S.) and time (Los Alamos, Joan of Arc), while still maintaining Shepard’s distinct voice and point of view.

To Sound in the Know: His last book, Like You’d Understand Anyway, won the

Story Prize and was a National Book Award Finalist.

Sweet Valley Confidential: Ten Years Later… By Francine Pascal, out March 29

Jessica and Elizabeth Wakefield are back… and they’re adults! From the time before OMG, the once teenaged it-girls are now living their complicated, 27-year-old lives.

To Sound in the Know: The Sweet Valley High team has produced 152 (!) books between the original and spin-off series.

Sherry & Narcotics By Nina-Marie Gardner, April 1

In this debut novel, an American grad student goes to London and falls for a poet from Manchester. Might sound like a Reese Witherspoon movie, but there’s addiction, sex and lies… so not really.

To Sound in the Know: Williamsburgh resident Gardner based the novel on her own experiences as a creative-writing grad student in London.

A family of alligator wrestlers that runs a tourist attraction (Swamplandia!) deep in the Everglades falls apart when their star performer dies, leaving behind a 13-year-old to save the day in this quasicoming-of-age tale.

To Sound in the Know: The Washington Heights-based author is one of The New Yorker’s 20 Under 40 (29!), whose first story collection, St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, was a critical success in 2007. Feel free to be jealous.

West of Here By Jonathan Evison, out now

This novel jumps back and forth between 19th-century settlers building a dam in Washington, and their modern-day descendants who want to tear it down to let the fish run free.

To Sound in the Know: As a teenager, Evison was in a punk band that included future members of Pearl Jam and Soundgarden. Who’s the big success now, Vedder?

Smoking Typewriters: The Sixties Underground Press and the Rise of Alternative Media in America By John McMillian, out Feb. 17

Historian (and the proud recipient of a PhD from Columbia) McMillian looks at the rise of the 1960s press, including The East Village Other, and the influence of the industry that evolved from papers being passed out on street corners to having circulations totaling in the millions.

To Sound in the Know: McMillian is currently at work on a book about the rivalry between The Beatles and The Rolling Stones.

Other People We Married By Emma Straub, out Feb. 22

The debut collection of a dozen short stories that takes place in a dozen different locales has earned Straub comparisons to Lorrie Moore.

To Sound in the Know: Straub works at BookCourt in Brooklyn, and also designs posters and other sign-like objects for her company (along with her husband) m e.

When the Killing’s Done: A Novel By T.C. Boyle, out Feb. 22

A Park Service ranger trying to protect an island off the coast of Santa Barbara from invasive animals clashes with a local, dreadlocked businessman in his exploration of humanity’s failing relations with nature, and each other.

To Sound in the Know: Boyle changed his middle name from John to Coraghessan when he was 17, which he says means "Take two and call me in the morning" in Gaelic.

Mr. Funny Pants By Michael Showalter, out Feb. 24

Part memoir, part essay, part random riffs with a dose of meta-gazing on the writing process by this Brooklyn resident.

To Sound in the Know: Showalter, who teaches screenwriting at NYU, was cofounder of The State and Stella and cowrote Wet Hot American Summer.

By Mark Twain, out now

In what will supposedly be the
first of three volumes, the life of Mark Twain will be revealed in full
detail by the man’s own words.

To
Sound in the Know: Twain wouldn’t allow this material to be published
until 100 years after his death because he didn’t want anyone he knew or
their kids to be scandalized. US Weekly does not approve.

Life

By Keith Richards and James Fox, out now

The autobiography of the
Rolling Stone who continues to defy the odds by simply being alive.

To
Sound in the Know: Richards has confessed that he would love to be a
librarian. Makes sense—rock icon, librarian. Really, that could have
gone either way.

Lost
Boys of the Bronx—The Oral History of the Ducky Boys Gang

By James
Hannon, out now

The true story of a gang of preteen kids from the Irish
Bronx who wreaked havoc and formed fierce bonds in the 1960s.

To Sound
in the Know: The Ducky Boys Gang was the basis for Richard Price’s
novel, The Wanderers.

Moonlight Mile

By Dennis Lehane, out now

In this sequel to Gone, Baby, Gone, two
Boston PIs return to find that the 4-yearold kidnapped girl they saved
in the previous novel is now a teenager who has disappeared.

To Sound in the Know: Apparently, Lehane novels are like crack for big name directors—Scorsese (Shutter Island), Eastwood (Mystic River) and Affleck (Gone, Baby, Gone). Let’s guess who’ll take on this one.

Simple
Times: Crafts for Poor People

By Amy Sedaris, out now

Sedaris takes on
the bright side of a terrible economy and, with her characteristic wit,
explores the process of turning junk into craft… or at least less junky
junk.

To Sound in the Know: Sedaris runs Dusty Food Cupcakes, a cupcake
and cheeseball business, out of her Greenwich Village apartment kitchen.

Sunset
Park

By Paul Auster, out now

In his 16th novel, Auster tells the story
of a group of squatters occupying a house in Sunset Park, Brooklyn,
including Miles, who is running from a Lolita-ish love he found in
Florida and the father he hasn’t talked to in years.

To Sound in the
Know: Auster lets go a bit of his usual surrealist bent in this novel.

Decoded

By Jay-Z, out Nov. 16

A twist on the conventional memoir, Jay-Z takes
his lyrics and decodes them as a way to explore the stories from his
childhood in Brooklyn and his life as a worldwide superstar.

To Sound in
the Know: Jay-Z has started a “treasure hunt” where fans follow clues
on a website to find the locations of pages from his book all over NYC.

To Sound in the Know: The truly miserable have been getting their gloomy guidance from Venters at gothic-charm-school.com for over a decade.

The Regulars
By Sarah Stolfa, Out July 1
Stolfa photographed the regular patrons at McGlinchey’s, a bar where she worked in downtown Philly, to create a haunting and visceral collection of the lives of those who belly up nightly. Jonathan Franzen wrote the book’s introduction.

To Sound in the know: Photographer Stolfa used to play the Farfisa organ in beloved punk-soul band The Delta 72.

Will Work For Drugs
By Lydia Lunch, Out July 1
A collection of essays, fiction and interviews from the iconoclastic Teenage Jesus & the Jerks singer and original badass rocker girl.

To Sound in the Know: Lunch’s first was a loose autobiography called Paradoxia: A Predator’s Diary.

American Adulterer
By Jed Mercurio, Out July 7
A novel that imagines the inner turmoil of a philandering and shape-shifting JFK as he tries to fend off the madness surrounding him in the forms of doctors, generals and a coked-up Marilyn Monroe.
To Sound in the Know: Mercurio is trained as a doctor, which helps explain his obsession with JFK’s health (specifically his bowel movements).

Pillhead
By Joshua Lyon, Out July 7
Lyon alternates the chronicles of his own addiction to painkillers with an exploration of pill abuse throughout American culture.
To Sound in the Know:  Lyon got addicted to painkillers after ordering Vicodin over the Internet as part of an article for Jane magazine.

The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook: A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal
By Ben Mezrich, Out July 14
The story behind how two geeks from Harvard changed the face of social networking and the Internet…mostly to meet girls.

To Sound in the Know: Mezrich also plumbed another Massachusetts school—MIT—for the subject of his last book, the best-selling blackjack expose Bringing Down the House.

The Girl Who Played With Fire
By Stieg Larsson, Out July 28
The second part in a trilogy starring bisexual, cyberpunk computer hacker heroine Lisbeth Sander from the recently deceased Swedish novelist.  This is not your grandfather’s detective story hero.

To Sound in the Know: Larsson died of a heart attack before the first novel in the trilogy, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, was published.

Are there any books coming out soon that you’re looking forward to reading?
The new Alexander McCall Smith—I am a sucker for those Botswana books.

What’s the best book you’ve read in the last year?
Other Powers: The Age of Suffrage, Spiritualism, and the Scandalous Victoria Woodhull by Barbara Goldsmith.

Your protaganist, Alice, is a horseplayer. Any good books on the ponies?
Exotic Betting by Steven Crist and Laughing in the Hills by Bill Barich.

Where’s the best place to watch a horse race?
The fourth floor at Aqueduct on a weekday in January or at the rail of beautiful Belmont Park any day other than Belmont Stakes day.

Made From Scratch: Discovering the Pleasure of a Handmade Life
By Jenna Woginrich, Out Dec. 1 A city girl documents her journey from a desk job to a life of self-reliance on a small homestead in Northern Idaho where she trades in consumer culture for raising chickens, growing vegetables and churning her own butter. There are bound to be fantastic hints in here for the budget-tightening going on these fantastic economic times—maybe even some Meghan Daum hasn’t already written. To Sound in the Know:Woginrich has been blogging about her experiences for a while now at the Huffington Post.We hear Arianna makes her churn the butter.

The Man Who Owns the News: Inside the Secret World of Rupert Murdoch
By Michael Wolff, Out Dec. 2 The Vanity Fair columnist uses access to Murdoch, his associates and family to explore the growth of News Corp.Wolff explores both the business battles and the family drama in this exclusive biography. To Sound in the Know: Pre-release protests about the book by Murdoch have been questioned as being a way to either drum up publicity or to firewall himself against any negative portrayals.

Brain Reading We diagnose a century-spanning medical manuscript

In THE FIRST story of Kirsten Menger-Anderson’s new book Doctor Olaf van Schuler’s Brain, we meet a 17th-century doctor in New Amsterdam who divides his time between caring for his mad mother, whom he keeps locked in a cage, and furtively cutting open the skulls of the recently deceased to learn more about how brains function. It is these three things—New York, madness and questionable science—that carry us through the next three centuries.

Menger-Anderson’s book defies classification as novel or short-story collection. It’s a series of stories about a family of doctors descending from van Schuler’s arrival in New Amsterdam in 1664 to the work of Dr. Elizabeth Steenwycks, a medical researcher in modern-day Manhattan.

In between these two points, the family of doctors latches on to a succession of popular but often misguided medical trends, from phrenology to filament baths. More importantly, the doctors use these trends and practices to try and explain the world around them and, as they are using science that will be proven to fail, often fall short.

Some stories star the doctors or the people in their lives, while in others the doctor appears only as a minor character.This removes the lineage from the narrative center of the stories, and at times the doctors fade into the framework becoming more of a background, like the city of New York.The main characters of each story are left as our temporary guide, which provides both the strength and weakness of this book. On the one hand, by casting her net wide across the spectrum of New York citizens, Menger-Anderson paints a pastiche of the struggles of New York life from the adventures of a Huck Finn-esque riverfront rouge of The Baquet to the assimilation of a Lower East Side daughter of immigrants who marries a traditional “American” man in A Spoonful Makes You Fertile.The reader views the world from a variety of vantage points but loses the chance to develop a connection with a hero in a form that seems to offer one— with its presentation of a central familial lineage.Whenever the current generation’s doctor appears, it’s hard to care as much about them as it is about the main character of the current story, and yet in the next story, the blood line will still be there but the main character will be gone. However, there are some wonderful characters in these pages. The narrator of “Salk and Sabin,” probably the strongest standalone story in the book, is a wonderfully realized portrayal of an adolescent girl named Joanie growing up in the streets

of 1950s Greenwich Village. Joanie balances that fine line between childhood and adulthood, between innocence and knowledge, as she navigates an adulterous mother, a communist father, a sensitive younger brother and the beginnings of her own sexual awakenings. Menger-Anderson nails the difficulty of presenting Joanie on the precipice of knowledge without revealing the author’s larger understanding of the world, as well as having a character who beautifully reflects the time period and place in which she is living.

To set stories in periods stretching across centuries, not to mention peppering it with the scientific knowledge of those days, is a difficult task. And yet, Menger- Anderson’s characters are well developed, and her attention to detail—down to the tools used by the generations of doctors— is thorough. She incorporates historical events into the story, everything from the Conspiracy of 1741 to the Attica Prison riots.These events, like the descriptions of a tavern in 1700, create a connection between the reader and New York City itself.

The events may be dark spots in the city’s history—just as the quackery practiced by the doctors doesn’t represent science’s brightest moments—yet Metzger-Anderson presents each of them, as well as the parade of New Yorkers through time, in all of their ambition and pain.

> Doctor Olaf van Schuler’s Brain

by Kirsten Menger-Anderson.

Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. 290

To Sound Like You’ve Read It: Mention that you’re glad that Crime’s protagonist and anti-hero Ray Lennox made the leap from supporting character in Welsh’s Filth.

The War Within: A Super Secret White House History 2006–2008 By Bob Woodward, out Sept. 8 In his fourth book chronicling the Bush years, wunderkind cum-windbagWoodward shines a light on the internal de bates during two controversial years of the Iraq War.

To Sound Like You’ve Read It: Ac knowledge that Woodward has progres sively sharpened his views toward Bush since Bush at War, his first book about the administration.

Hot, Flat and Crowded By Thomas L. Friedman, out Sept. 8 Anyone who has kept up with Fried man’s columns in the New York Times knows the man is obsessed with cli mate change and en ergy revolution. He synthesizes these two into an argument for a “Geo-Greenism” national strategy that will revolutionize America and the world.

To Sound Like You’ve Read It: Blather about how this book will do for the envi ronment what The World is Flat did for globalization. Segue into a conversation about those useless brown paper towels.

Indignation By Philip Roth, out Sept. 15 In his 29th (!) book, Roth tells the Cold War–era tale of the son of a Newark butcher who flees west to college in Winesburg, Ohio, where he hits the books ferociously to avoid the fate of a soldier.

To Sound Like You’ve Read It: Remark that the Winesburg of Roth’s story is not the same town as in Sherwood Anderson’s 1919 classic Winesburg, Ohio. Anderson’s hometown of Clyde, Ohio, was the basis for that book.

Downtown Owl: A Novel By Chuck Kloster man, out Sept. 15 The pop culture commentator and essayist makes his first foray into novels with this multi-char acter story about the community of Owl, a small town in North Dakota.

To Sound Like You’ve Read It: Casually drop that this technically isn’t Kloster man’s fiction debut. In his recent collec tion Chuck Klosterman: IV, he included a novella he’d written while working in Akron, Ohio, titled You Tell Me.

The Given Day By Denis Lehane, out Sept. 22 Lehane returns to Boston, where his bestselling Mystic River took place, but jumps back in time to 1918 for this sprawling epic that tumbles from labor clashes in the streets to baseball battles on the diamond.

To Sound Like You’ve Read It: Note that this wide-ranging story is a departure from the smaller, tightly focused scope of Lehane’s successful thrillers like Mystic River and Shutter Island.

The Other Queen By Philippa Gregory, out Sept. 16 The author of The Other Boleyn Girl brings out a new Other, this time with the story of the im prisonment of Mary, Queen of Scots. The action focuses on Mary’s captivity in the home of the Earl of Shrewsbury and his wife, Bess, where treachery and