Jennifer Gilmore - Golden Country
In Golden Country, a masterful and irreverent reinvention of the Jewish American novel, Jennifer Gilmore captures the exuberance of the American dream while exposing its underbelly -- disillusionment, greed, and the disaffection bred by success. As Gilmore's charmingly flawed characters witness and shape history, they come to embody America's greatness, as well as its greatest imperfections. Spanning the first half of the twentieth century, Golden Country vividly brings to life the intertwining stories of three immigrants seeking their fortunes. Epic and comic, poignant and wise, Golden Country introduces readers to an extraordinary new voice in fiction.

Abigail Thomas - A Three Dog Life
In A Three Dog Life, Thomas chronicles her life after her husband, Rich was hit by a car and his brain was shattered. Subject to rages, terrors, and hallucinations, he must live the rest of his life in an institution. He has no memory of what he did the hour, the day, the year before. This tragedy is the ground on which Abigail had to build a new life. How she built that life is a story of great courage and great change, of moving to a small country town, of a new family composed of three dogs, knitting, and friendship, of facing down guilt and discovering gratitude. It is also about her relationship with Rich, a man who lives in the eternal present, and the eerie poetry of his often uncanny perceptions.

Michael Gates Gill - How Starbucks Saved My Life
At age 64, Michael Gates Gill began his new job—behind the counter of a Starbucks. A former top-ranking ad executive who loses his job and his family, Gill finds self-acceptance and a renewed sense of purpose in the most surprising place. His incredible story is told in How Starbucks Saved My Life, the hotly anticipated memoir and forthcoming film, produced by and starring Tom Hanks.

Ibtisam Barakat - Tasting the Sky - A Palestinian Childhood
Ibtisam S. Barakat is a Palestinian-American writer, poet and educator. Her work centers on healing the hurts of racism, sexism, and the oppression of young people. Tasting the Sky: A Palestinian Childhood , earned a Starred Review in Booklist: “In a spare, eloquent memoir, Barakat recalls life under military occupation. The political upheaval is always in the background, but for young Barakat, much of the drama was in incidents that took place in everyday life. What makes the memoir so compelling is the immediacy of the child's viewpoint, which depicts both conflict and daily life without exploitation or sentimentality. Hazel RochmanCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Court TV's Jane Velez Mitchell - Secrets Can Be Murder
Jane Velez-Mitchell is a notable television news journalist, and can be seen commenting on high-profile cases for CNN, MSNBC, Court TV, Fox News and other national cable TV shows. Velez-Mitchell previously spent more than a decade anchoring and reporting for KCAL-TV in Los Angeles. She also served as a reporter/anchor for eight years at WCBS-TV in New York City. Additionally, Velez-Mitchell spent years as a TV journalist in Philadelphia, Minneapolis and Fort Myers, Florida and is the recipient of a Los Angeles Emmy Award and a New York area Emmy Award. The KCAL-TV newscasts she co-anchored won three Southern California Golden Mike Awards and an Emmy. She also wrote, directed and produced Dancing Through Life, an award-winning documentary. While working at Celebrity Justice, Velez-Mitchell’s reporting earned the show two Genesis Awards from the Humane Society of the United States. Velez-Mitchell will talk about her first book, Secrets Can Be Murder: What America’s Most Sensational Crimes Tell Us About Ourselves.

John E. Douglas - Inside the Mind of BTK
As chief of the FBI’s Investigative Support Unit — the team that tackles the most baffling and senseless of unsolved violent crimes — Douglas is the man who ushered in a new age in behavioral science and criminal profiling. Now, after 25 years of service, he has retired and can finally tell his unique and compelling story in his latest book, Inside the Mind of BTK. This incredible story shows how John Douglas tracked and participated in the hunt for one of the most notorious serial killers in U.S. history. For 31 years a man who called himself BTK (Bind, Torture, Kill) terrorized the city of Wichita, Kansas, sexually assaulting and strangling a series of women, taunting the police with frequent communications, and bragging about his crimes to local newspapers and TV stations. After disappearing for nine years, he suddenly reappeared, complaining that no one was paying enough attention to him and claiming that he had committed other crimes for which he had not been given credit. When he was ultimately captured, BTK was shockingly revealed to be Dennis Rader, a 61-year-old married man with two children.

Gail Tsukiyama - The Street of A Thousand Blossoms
In an exquisitely moving story that spans almost thirty years, Gail Tsukiyama draws us irresistibly into the world of the brothers and the women who love them. It is a world of tradition and change, of heartbreaking loss and surprising hope, and of the impact of events beyond their control on ordinary, decent men and women. Above all, The Street of a Thousand Blossoms is a masterpiece about love and family from a glorious storyteller at the height of her powers.

Janet Fitch - Paint It Black
Following the huge success of Oprah Book Club™ selection, White Oleander , Janet Fitch creates an indelible portrait of a young woman in Paint it Black. Josie Tyrell is a teenage runaway, an artist's model, and an habitué of the '80s LA punk rock scene. She is a white trash escapee from Bakersfield, having left a going nowhere life there. Now, sex, drugs and rock n' roll inform her days and nights. Paint it Black is the perfect title choice because Josie's lover is never coming back, as the song says.

Michael Thomas - Man Gone Down
One of today’s most compelling writers, Michael Thomas willdiscuss his first fiction work, Man Gone Down, a beautifully written, insightful, and devastating first novel. Man Gone Down is about a young black father of three in a biracial marriage trying to claim a piece of the American Dream he has bargained on since youth. On the eve of the unnamed narrator’s thirty-fifth birthday, he finds himself broke, estranged from his white Boston Brahmin wife and three children, and living in the bedroom of a friend’s six-year-old child. Michael Thomas’s writing recalls some of the great American masters, including Ralph Ellison, but his debut is wholly and distinctly an original. Man Gone Down is a dazzling addition to the literature of and about America today.

Alan Weisman - A World Without Us
In The World Without Us, Alan Weisman offers an utterly original approach to questions of humanity's impact on the planet: he asks us to envision our Earth, without us. In this far-reaching narrative, Weisman explains how our massive infrastructure would collapse and finally vanish without human presence; what of our everyday stuff may become immortalized as fossils; how copper pipes and wiring would be crushed into mere seams of reddish rock; why some of our earliest buildings might be the last architecture left; and how plastic, bronze sculpture, radio waves, and some man-made molecules may be our most lasting gifts to the universe.