ANTONELLO'S LION by Steve Katz '56 (Green Integer). Katz, author of Swanny's Ways and Wier & Pouce, is one of America's best experimental writers. The critic Jerome Klinkowitz says that Katz, one of the founders of the Fiction Collective, "pushed innovation farther than any of his contemporaries." In his new novel, a father and son set out on parallel quests. Solomon, obsessed with the Renaissance artist Antonello da Messina, disappears while searching for a lost painting of St. Francis; his son, Nathan, tries to find out what happened. The picaresque narrative brims with humor, arcane lore, pratfalls, and imaginative leaps.

FIRE AND BRIMSTONE by Michael Punke, JD '89 (Hyperion). In 1917, a fire broke out in the Granite Mountain and Speculator mines in Butte,Montana, resulting in the deaths of 164 miners. Punke, a former Washington lawyer, investigates the background of a disaster that catalyzed a series of events: strikes, the lynching of a labor leader, and restrictions on constitutional freedoms under the Montana Sedition Act.

THE HUMBOLDT CURRENTby Aaron Sachs (Viking). Alexander von Humboldt was once a prominent naturalist whose writings were popular in nineteenth-century America. His fame is now far eclipsed by that of Charles Darwin, and later scholars have dismissed his tendency toward mystical romanticism. Sachs, professor of history and American studies at Cornell, attempts to reclaim Humboldt as the first ecologist by examining the work of four other naturalists--J. N. Reynolds, Clarence King, George Wallace Melville, and John Muir--who pursued Humboldt's stated goal to "recognize the general connections that link organic beings."

TRIPPING by B. H. Friedman '48 (Provincetown Arts Press). Friedman, novelist, playwright, and the first biographer of Jackson Pollock, met Harvard psychologist Timothy Leary in 1961 and became a subject in his research on psilocybin and LSD.Welcoming the promise of a new mental and mystical awareness, Friedman wrote reports of his experiences to Leary. Though he had reservations about some of Leary's later behavior, Friedman maintains that psychedelic drugs allow some users to gain clearer self-understanding.

SEEKING REFUGE by María Cristina García (University of California Press). Civil wars in Central America killed a quarter of a million people during the period 1974–1996 and drove more than two million to seek refuge in Mexico, the United States, and Canada. García, an associate professor of history at Cornell, argues that the leaders of these three countries were more interested in free trade than addressing the crisis. She describes how non-governmental organizations aided the refugees and provided a voice for the dispossessed, and how current national security issues affect migrants' human rights.

Recently Published | Fiction

4% FAMOUS by Deborah Schoeneman '99 (Shaye Areheart Books). Schoeneman's first novel draws on her experience as a gossip columnist for the New York Observer as she follows three gossip columnists through the chaos of Manhattan celebrity life.

UNCHARTED WATERS by Leslie Bulion '79 (Peachtree Publishers). Jonah Lander spends the summer with his uncle at a seaside cabin, where he learns to confront his fears and live honestly.

DOUBLETHINKby J. E. Schwartz '76 (Raise the Bar Press). In 2012, Joe Winston is a successful attorney in Silicon Valley when a donation to the wrong charity begins his descent from a have to a have-not.

Recently Published | Poetry

RED SUMMER by Amaud Jamaul Johnson, MPS '98 (Tupelo Press). In his debut collection, which won the 2004 Dorset Prize, Johnson writes of love, violence, and how "the dead remind the living of the coming of storms." Johnson is an assistant professor of English at the University of Wisconsin,Madison.

Recently Published | Non-fiction

A KINDER, GENTLER AMERICA by Mary Caputi '79, PhD '88 (University of Minnesota Press). A professor of political science at California State University, Long Beach, analyzes how longing for the era of "the greatest generation" actually exposes disillusionment with the present.

THINK GLOBAL, FEAR LOCAL by David Leheny, PhD '98 (Cornell University Press). Leheny posits that when states abide by international agreements to clamp down on transnational crime and tighten security, they respond not to an amorphous international problem but rather to deeply held local fears.

CHINESE MEDICINE MEN by Sherman Cochran (Harvard University Press). The Hu Shih Professor of Chinese History at Cornell examines the role of medical entrepreneurs in pre-socialist China in constructing a consumer culture.

FASTER! I'M STARVING! by Kevin Mills '93 and Nancy Mills '64 (Gibbs Smith). A mother and son team shows the secrets to cooking quick and nutritious meals in the time it takes for a sitcom plot to be revealed.

VIRTUAL VOYAGES, edited by Jeffrey Ruoff '85 (Duke University). Film scholars discuss how travel imagery in movies blurs the distinctions between genres and heightens awareness of cinema as a technology for moving through space and time.

THE EAGLE AND THE VIRGIN,edited by Mary Kay Vaughan '64 and Stephen E. Lewis (Duke University Press). After the Mexican Revolution, the government enlisted artists and intellectuals in the effort to cultivate a distinctly Mexican identity. Two historians examine the massive nation-building project Mexico undertook between 1920 and 1940.

SUBJECT SIAM by Tamara Loos, PhD '99 (Cornell University Press). Unlike its Southeast Asian neighbors, Thailand was never colonized by an imperial power.However, Loos describes how its sovereignty was nevertheless limited by imperial nations while domestically its leaders pursued control in the Muslim south.

GET A FREELANCE LIFE by Margit Feury Ragland '94 (Three Rivers Press). A former assistant editor at CAM presents insider advice on all aspects of a freelance writing career.

THE COVENANT WITH BLACK AMERICA, edited by Tavis Smiley (Third World Press). Tyrone Taborn '81 wrote the chapter that deals with African Americans and the racial digital divide.

WOMEN AND GENDER EQUITY IN DEVELOPMENT THEORY AND PRACTICE, edited by Jane S. Jaquette, PhD '71, and Gale Summerfield (Duke University Press). Contributors explore the consequences of women's land ownership and the need to challenge cultural traditions that impede women's ability to assert their legal rights.

CERVANTES IN ALGIERS by María Antonia Garces (Vanderbilt University Press).Miguel de Cervantes was captured by Barbary pirates after the Battle of Lepanto and spent five years (1575–80) in Algerian prisons. Garces, an associate professor of Hispanic studies at Cornell and herself a former hostage of Colombian guerillas, examines the lingering effects this traumatic experience had on Cervantes's writing.

CHILDREN OF COYOTE, MISSIONARIES OF SAINT FRANCIS by Steven W. Hackel, PhD '94 (University of North Carolina Press). As Spanish colonization reduced their numbers, California's Indians congregated in missions, where the Franciscans instituted unfamiliar systems of labor and punishment. After Franciscan rule ended in the 1830s, many Indians regained land and found strength in their ancestral cultures.

SELLING TECHNOLOGY by Asaf Darr, PhD '97 (Cornell University Press). Darr, a senior lecturer in organizational studies at the University of Haifa, Israel, argues that our cultural stereotypes of sales work, shaped during the industrial era and through popular images, no longer apply to the changing nature of sales in an information economy.