Anna Karenina
by Leo Tolstoy
Viking, $40.00 / HBS $32.00

A dynamic new translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, this is the first new translation to appear in forty years. Includes an illuminating introduction and careful explanatory notes by the translators.

The Art of Scandal: The Life of Isabella Stewart Gardner
by Douglass Shand-Tucci
HarperPerrenial, $15.00 pb / HBS $12.00

This biography is the first to portray the extraordinary life and times of Isabella Stewart Gardner, muse and mentor to musicians, painters, writers, and scholars such as Henry James, John Singer Sargent, and T.S. Eliot.

Georgiana: Duchess of Devonshire
by Amanda Foreman
Modern Library, $15.95 pb / HBS $12.76

Foreman's Whitbread Prize-winning biography offers a rich, rollicking picture of late-eighteenth century British aristocracy and the intimate story of a woman who, for a time, was its undisputed leader. "Georgiana bursts from the pages of Amanda Foreman's dazzling biography like the force of nature she undoubtedly was--passionate, political, addicted to gambling, and drunk on life. This is a stunning book about an astonishing woman."--Simon Schama

Housekeeping
by Marilynne Robinson
Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, $12.00pb / HBS $9.60

The story of Ruth, who grows up, with her sister Lucille, under the care of her grandmother, two comically fumbling great-aunts, and the transient sister of her dead mother. Housekeeping is a quiet, humorous book that turns eccentricity into poetry, praises the orphan in us all, and transforms everyday life into a kind of sacred myth.

The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
Edited by Karen V. Kuknil
Anchor, $18.00 pb / HBS $14.40

For the first time in publication are the complete, uncensored journals of poet Sylvia Plath that she kept during the last 12 years of her life. Sixty percent of this book is material that has never been made public before, and more fully reveals Plath's personal and literary struggles. "This book has an immediacy that will only add to Plath's iconic reputation."--Harpers and Queen (London)

Mother Jones: The Most Dangerous Woman in America
by Elliott J. Gorn
Farrar, Straus& Giroux, $27.00 / HBS $21.60

The definitive biography of an extraordinary hero of the labor movement. Gorn makes it clear why, in the words of Eugene V. Debs, Mother Jones "has won her way into the hearts of the nation's toilers, and will be lovingly remembered by their children and their children's children forever."

Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette
by Judith Thurman
Ballantine, $18.95 pb / HBS $15.16

For all her flamboyance and celebrity as France's bestselling novelist--a virtual Madonna of the belle epoque--Colette is a woman who fiercely resists being known. Drawing upon a wealth of heretofore untapped sources, including many unpublished letters, Thurman gives us Colette's life and work with unprecedented psychological insight, human drama, and historical perspective.