Bridget Jones's Diary
by Helen Fielding
Paperback/271pp/Penguin
HBS Price: $5.99

Does this fabulously famous book really need a description? Bridget Jones, heroine and voice behind the fictional diary, has been described as a funnier and more literary British Ally McBeal. Bridget Jones's Diary is one self-narrated year in the life of a 30-something woman, relentlessly (and unsuccessfully) self-improving, desperately single, hopelessly familiar. You'll find yourself thinking, "Bridget Jones IS me!" From the New York Times Book Review: "Good-bye Rules Girls, hello Singletons. Endearingly engaging."

The Verificationist
by Donald Antrim
Hardcover/179pp/Knopf
HBS Price: $8.99

The pancake suppers were his idea, Tom the narrator's, that is. In "The Verificationist" Tom and his psychotherapist colleagues get together for a night-long pancake dinner that becomes weirdly unhinged. Before long, Tom has floated up to the ceiling and, from on high, watches as his friendships, marriage, even his professional identity, unfold and unravel -- until he loses his very sense of himself as a man. "It's a book that clatters and whirs like a Rube Goldberg device, spitting out, on every page, perfectly formed pellets of intellection, rude humor, grief and longing." -Dwight Garner, New York Times Book Review.

Blonde
by Joyce Carol Oates
Hardcover/738pp/Ecco Press
HBS Price: $11.99

In her most ambitious work to date, Joyce Carol Oates reimagines the inner, poetic, and spiritual life of Norma Jeane Baker - the child, the woman, the fated celebrity - and tells the story in Norma Jeane's own voice: startling, rich, and shattering. Drawing on biographical and historical sources, Oates evokes the distinct consciousness of the woman and the unsparing reflection of the myth, writing as she has never written before - ecstatic, completely absorbed, inhabited as if by the spirit of her extraordinary subject.

The Gary Snyder Reader: Prose, Poetry, and Translations, 1952-1998
by Gary Snyder
Hardcover/617pp/Counterpoint
HBS Price: $10.99

This monumental collection gathers the essays, travel journals, letters, poems, and translations of one of the most influential voices of the 20th century. Prize-winning poet, environmental activist, Zen Buddhist, earth-householder, and reluctant counterculture guru, Gary Snyder has been a major cultural force in America for five decades. The Reader includes selections from travel journals, interviews, and meditations on Buddhism; poems from "Riprap" through "Mountains and Rivers Without End"; translations of Japanese and Chinese poems.

Off Keck Road
by Mona Simpson
Hardcover/167pp/Knopf
HBS Price: $8.99

In this superb new novella, Mona Simpson reveals the precise costs and rewards of staying put - out of affinity and obligation, out of chance, circumstance, and choice. In Green Bay, WI Bea Maxwell comes of age in the fifties, and Off Keck Road follows her extended circle along the arc of their lives, through their frustrations and occasional successes, well toward old age. A story of family and friends, of change and many generations, it gathers itself around this remarkable woman, who discovers much about the world from her experience in the one place she has always belonged.

Pagan Babies
by Elmore Leonard
Hardcover/263pp/Delacorte Press
HBS Price: $10.99

Father Terry Dunn is a priest in Rwanda with an unlikely past: fugitive, felon, former cigarette-smuggler. He flees Africa fast after demanding some unusual penance from one of his parishioners and returns to Detroit to settle some old scores and meets Debbie, an ex-con turned stand-up comic. It's Debbie who learns the bizarre truth about Terry, who sells him on going in together for a much bigger payoff than either could manage alone...unless the priest is working a con of his own. "The pieces of this crime tale begin falling into place so handily that Mr. Leonard might as well have hung a 'Virtuoso at Work' shingle on his door." -The New York Times

The Bread of Those Early Years
by Heinrich Boll
Paperback/134pp/Northwestern University Press - European Classics Series
HBS Price: $5.99

This is the sort of story that only desperation, privation, and passion can write. Set in immediate post-war Germany, The Bread of Those Early Years recounts a single, pivotal day in the life of young Walter Fendrich when he first discovers love. "Much of its stunning impact derives from Boll's hard-earned awareness that while man doesn't live by bread alone, he doesn't live without bread. 'The Bread of Those Early Years' is a poignant tribute to his skill and vision." -The New York Times Book Review. Heinrich Boll won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1972.

The Girl I Left Behind
by Shusaku Endo
Hardcover/196pp/Peter Owen Press
HBS Price: $5.99

"Everything I have read of Endo's is memorable," commented Anthony Thwaite of The Observer. Graham Greene called him "one of the finest living novelists." This early work by Shusaku Endo is a revivification of youth. It prefigures some of the themes in his later writing: sexual awakening, the callousness of men towards women, nostalgia for the past, fear of the unknown, ambition and inequality. The scenes in this short, compelling tale shift from seediness and opportunism to ultimate fulfillment and tragedy.

Mirrorwork: 50 Years of Indian Writing, 1947-1997
edited by Salman Rushdie and Elizabeth West
Paperback/553pp/Owl Books
HBS Price: $5.99

An anthology of Indian writing, both nonfiction and fiction, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Indian independence. A whole tumultuous continent is reflected here: the billion faces of India, comic and tragic, harsh and beautiful, delicate and grotesque. It is a magic mirror held up to what is hidden as well as what is shown, to dreams and nightmares, to the secret truths of history and of the human heart. Contributors include Salman Rushdie, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Arundhati Roy, Nehru, and Anita Desai.