Strangely enough, this exploration of one of the most private of writing endeavors is likely to send readers off in a zillion different directions. Thomas Mallon's survey of diarists throughout the ages introduces us to the most personal writings of more than 100 diarists, including Samuel Pepys, Leonardo da Vinci, Virginia Woolf, and Lee Harvey Oswald. Mallon divides the diarists into seven categories--chroniclers, travelers, pilgrims, creators, apologists, confessors, and prisoners--that he uses as a basis for his inquiries into the nature of these apparently private writings. (From the start Mallon admits that "I still don't believe that one can write to oneself for many words more than get used in a note tacked to the refrigerator saying 'Buy bread.' ") Glimpsing the many, vastly different lives that have been thrown together on these pages is fascinating in and of itself, but Mallon's thoughts about the whys and wherefores of diary-keeping are what make his dense prose so worth reading.

A Book of One's Own: People and Their Diaries (Picador Books)

Literature & Fiction

Thomas Mallon

United States

Picador, London

Mrs. Paine's Garage: And the Murder of John F. Kennedy

Biographies & Memoirs

Historical

Knopf Group Electronic Pub

A New York Times Editor's ChoiceBandbox is a hugely successful magazine - a glamorous monthly cocktail of 1920s obsessions from the stock market to radio to gangland murder - edited by the bombastic Jehoshaphat "Joe" Harris. The defection of Harris's most ambitious protègè has plunged Bandbox into a death struggle with a new competitor on the newsstand. But there's more to come in this dazzling, hilarious novel that captures the heart and soul of New York in the Jazz Age. 
 Available only in Americana 4 and 5.

Bandbox

Contemporary

Thorndike Press

[This is the Audiobook CD Library Edition in vinyl case.][Read by Joe Barrett] From one of our most esteemed historical novelists comes a remarkable retelling of the Watergate scandal, as seen through a kaleidoscope of its colorful perpetrators and investigators. For all the monumental documentation that Watergate generated -- uncountable volumes of committee records, court transcripts, and memoirs -- it falls at last to a novelist to perform the work of inference (and invention) that allows us to solve some of the scandal's greatest mysteries -- who did erase those eighteen-and-a-half minutes of tape? -- and to see this gaudy American catastrophe in its human entirety. In Watergate, Thomas Mallon conveys the drama and high comedy of the Nixon presidency through the urgent perspectives of seven characters we only thought we knew before now. Praised by Christopher Hitchens for his splendid evocation of Washington, Mallon achieves with Watergate a scope and historical intimacy which surpasses even that attained in his previous novels and turns a third-rate burglary into tumultuous, first-rate entertainment.

Watergate: A Novel (Library Edition)

Blackstone Audio,Inc.

[Read by Joe Barrett] From one of our most esteemed historical novelists comes a remarkable retelling of the Watergate scandal, as seen through a kaleidoscope of its colorful perpetrators and investigators. For all the monumental documentation that Watergate generated -- uncountable volumes of committee records, court transcripts, and memoirs -- it falls at last to a novelist to perform the work of inference (and invention) that allows us to solve some of the scandal's greatest mysteries -- who did erase those eighteen-and-a-half minutes of tape? -- and to see this gaudy American catastrophe in its human entirety. In Watergate, Thomas Mallon conveys the drama and high comedy of the Nixon presidency through the urgent perspectives of seven characters we only thought we knew before now. Praised by Christopher Hitchens for his splendid evocation of Washington, Mallon achieves with Watergate a scope and historical intimacy which surpasses even that attained in his previous novels and turns a third-rate burglary into tumultuous, first-rate entertainment.

Watergate: A Novel

[Read by Christopher Lane] From the author of the acclaimed novel Watergate comes a galvanizing new novel about the tumultuous administration of the most consequential and enigmatic president of modern times -- Ronald Reagan. Finale takes listeners to the political gridiron of Washington in 1986, the wealthiest enclaves of Southern California, and the volcanic landscape of Iceland, where the president engages in two almost apocalyptic days of negotiation with Mikhail Gorbachev. Along with Soviet dissidents, illegal arms traders, and antinuclear activists, the novel's memorable characters include Margaret Thatcher, Jimmy Carter, Pamela Harriman, John W. Hinckley, and even Bette Davis, with whom the president long ago appeared on screen. Several figures -- including a humbled, crafty Richard Nixon; the young, brilliantly acerbic Christopher Hitchens; and an anxious, astrology-dependent Nancy Reagan -- become the eyes through which listeners see the last convulsions of the Cold War, the AIDS epidemic, a clash of ideologies, and a political revolution. At the center of it all -- but forever out of reach -- is Reagan himself, whose genial remoteness confounds his subordinates, his children, and the citizens who elected him.

Finale: A Novel of the Reagan Years

Literary

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