But the excitement stirred by the McSweeney's e-mail had less to do with the booty on offer than with the alarming news that McSweeney's needed to raise money at all. For fans, and for those who follow book-trade news, the e-mail raised the possibility that the much-beloved publisher could become another casualty of a bankruptcy saga that has engulfed the independent-publishing world for six months.

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Zamyatin wrote his masterpiece "We" in 1920-21 as a satire of the tyrannical bent institutionalized Bolshevism was taking -- years before the worst features of the Soviet system truly became apparent. "We" served as the inspiration for George Orwell's "1984," and although Aldous Huxley swore he'd never read "We," his "Brave New World" bears a resemblance to it. ("We" also probably influenced Ray Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451," Ayn Rand's "Anthem," and Ursula K. Le Guin's "The Dispossessed.") And yet Zamyatin's name is rarely mentioned when discussing dystopian literature outside of the classroom. Orwell and Huxley regularly top best-book lists; "Big Brother," "newspeak" and "soma" are a part of our lexicon, but invoking terms from "We" brings up blank looks.

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"Mama's Boy, Preacher's Son" is Jennings' memoir of coming of age, coming out and moving on, told without self-pity. Despite his woeful childhood, his story is a victorious one. Jennings describes abandoning Lewisville for a scholarship to Harvard; becoming a high school history teacher; and establishing, with his students, the first Gay-Straight Alliance student club (there are now over 3,000 around the country) before developing GLSEN. Along the way, he finds out that his family is not as close-minded as he expected: After Jennings comes out to his mother, she quietly starts a PFLAG (Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays) chapter in her small town.

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And so Deepa Mehta became one of India's most visible and controversial filmmakers. Although in the 1970s she emigrated to Toronto, where she shot her first two feature films, her return to India to make "Fire" established her reputation. Now "Water," the third installment in her elements trilogy -- the second was "Earth" (1998), about the nationalism that led to the 1948 partition of India and Pakistan -- is proving to be Mehta's most controversial film to date.

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Worthington, who wouldn't reveal where she lives and works, or her exact age, is a recent graduate of Franciscan University of Steubenville, in Ohio, where she earned a B.A. in theology and a minor in human life studies. She is also opposed to abortion. But NRFC doesn't even address abortion; its sole purpose is to "prove" that the pill and the IUD cause health problems and destroy women's fertility, that condoms lead to the spread of sexually transmitted diseases by making people believe that sex can be completely safe, that contraception destroys marriages by rendering sex an act of pleasure rather than one of procreation. Emboldened by the fact that the president and the two most recent Supreme Court nominees are anti-choice, a recent antiabortion victory in South Dakota, and legislative success restricting access to emergency contraception, groups like NRFC are shifting their focus and resources away from abortion and putting their energy into restricting birth control.

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Although he's only 40, Burroughs' life story seems to contain no end of salable anecdotes: After "Scissors," he published the follow-up memoir "Dry" (2003) and a collection of personal essays, "Magical Thinking" (2004); he writes a monthly autobiographical column for Details (his writing has also appeared in Salon) and frequently contributes to NPR's "Morning Edition." According to his Web site -- a vision of salesmanship that helpfully reminds you on every page that Burroughs is a "#1 BESTSELLING AUTHOR" -- he's also working on a collection of essays and a holiday book. All of this would be only vaguely interesting if Burroughs were regarded as simply a wildly popular mass-market hack. But Burroughs' memoirs consistently generate glowing reviews and flattering comparisons to David Sedaris' work. And yet, he is a terrible writer.

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Parents who thought their children were acquiring valuable social skills at day care discovered that two of the studies, which focused on cognitive and social development in kindergartners and third-graders, found that while kids who spent long hours in child care developed strong reading and math skills, they tended to have poorer social skills than children who stayed at home with a parent. And parents who might have thought that private nannies or family care arrangements -- where a caretaker looks after several kids in a private home -- would be safer for their children, discovered, via the third study, that their kids were 16 times more likely to die than children in child-care centers.

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"Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife" is Roach's answer to that question, or rather it's her exhibit of the various conclusions reached by scientists trying to determine whether part of us lives after our bodies give out. There are no Ouija boards here (well, maybe a couple). Instead, Roach relies on a string of men in lab coats -- the lucky ones armed with high-tech scales and sensors and sound equipment, the not-so-fortunate at least possessing a relentless set of questions and an unshakable conviction that the scientific method can suss out the truth on anything, even that which normally belongs to the realm of religion and mysticism.

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But it wasn't until he became a director, Schreiber says, that he started caring about the critics. When I met to talk with him recently in New York, he noticed a local paper as we sat down.

"Oh, it's a review," he said darkly, and tossed it out of the way. "I never took things personally as an actor," he said. "I never took things personally at all, not until I started doing this."

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A Burmese friend of Larkin's tells the joke, as they're sitting in a tea shop in Mandalay, to signal that their discussion of politics has to come to a close; a couple of men who may or may not be government informers have just sat down at the next table. The scene smacks of the adjective "Orwellian," and in fact, Larkin's tea shop gathering is the meeting of an informal Orwell Book Club she starts in Mandalay. Her purpose in Burma, moreover, is to find out more about the writer whom one Burmese scholar calls "the prophet." As she writes, "In Burma, there is a joke that Orwell wrote not just one novel about the country, but three: a trilogy comprised of 'Burmese Days,' 'Animal Farm' and 'Nineteen Eighty-Four.'"

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The social climber in question is Edith Lavery, "Snobs'" antiheroine. A middle-class exemplar of "the English blonde with large eyes and nice manners," Edith sets her sights on the hallowed, old-money Broughton family and, specifically, the Broughton son, an earl. Despite the displeasure of his mother, Charles Broughton falls head over heels for the lovely and intelligent Edith, and overlooking his dull simplicity and lack of charm, Edith musters enough affection to become his bride.

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"Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close" is the story of Oskar Schell, an eccentric 9-year-old, the kind of child that adults adore and kids love to pick on. Oskar -- like most of the characters in this book -- isn't exactly what you would call a realistic invention, but he is nonetheless an endearing and funny narrator. A sort of male, science-geek version of Eloise, he's precocious and independent, coming and going from his Upper West Side home without much adult interference. He dresses exclusively in white, plays the tambourine as he walks down the street, makes jewelry, obsessively searches the Internet and proclaims his favorite book to be "A Brief History of Time."

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It's a good point, and one that stands as a sort of mantra for pro-porn feminists everywhere. If I want to have sex on camera, who are you to stop me? My body, my choice, damn it! And as several of the other porn stars throughout this book proudly declare, no one has forced them into it. "In all my years in this business, I have never seen coercion," insists Gloria Leonard, another porn star and the pioneer of 976 phone sex. "Ever, ever, ever. You always had the right to say, 'No, I don't want to do this.'"

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"Enchantments," which was translated from Italian by John Casey, takes the form of a memoir in 25 short, thematic chapters, told from the point of view of an unnamed Italian child who moves to Paris with her family. Hers is an idyllic childhood: summers in her family's Tuscan villa, evenings with a kindly nanny named Dame Dame. The girl and her younger sister, Clara, of whom she says, "We're one single being," spend most of their time in pursuit of childish amusement -- campaigning for a new doll, acting out scenes from "Little Women" -- and warring with their older brothers. Her father makes his fortune in Paris and veritably spoils his children; when the girl tells her father she likes horses, he buys her four of them.

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The addiction lasted between the ages of 7 and 10, and it probably would have gone on a bit longer if I hadn't outpaced the publisher. I graduated from the yellow-spined hardback original Nancy Drew Mystery Stories to the digest-size paperback versions, to the spinoff aimed at teen readers, the Nancy Drew Files, which carried higher-stake mysteries and romantic side plots. Eventually I had to box up my collection and make room on my bookshelf for other, more grown-up characters. But even as Nancy Drew moldered in my parents' basement, the teen sleuth still lived in the center of my heart, and became, ultimately, the most forceful role model in my life.

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As James Burge eloquently argues in his new biography of the Middle Ages' most famous couple, "Heloise and Abelard," the 12th century was the beginning of the modern age. The term "Middle Ages" is something of a misnomer; this period was "the beginning of something, not the middle." The word "modern," in fact, came into use at this time. Humanism, the corporation and even the Electoral College have their roots in medieval Europe. Scholarship and philosophy were becoming popular, long before the Renaissance. Amid a population boom and a major cultural shift, the 12th century ancestors of today's conservatives and liberals were sparring over politics, religion and sex.

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Considered one of the raciest tales of British sex-and-drug culture since Irvine Welsh's "Trainspotting," "Brass" has earned Walsh a lot of hype and, because it's so well written, possible staying power as well. Recently, the (London) Observer named her one of the "prodigiously talented young people" who will define the 21st century. Now that the book has been released in the United States, it promises to make Walsh a household name on this side of the Atlantic.

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