The Writer's Afterlife begins jarringly and plainly: "I died typing mid-sentence in a T-shirt and boxer shorts in front of my computer." The unusual opening sets the tone for Richard Vetere's philosophical, self-aware and darkly funny novel.

After dying at 44, Tom Chillo finds himself in the Writer's Afterlife--a special heaven where imagination rules supreme. In what is perhaps a nod to Dante's Inferno, people in this next world are divided into a hierarchy based on their levels of fame. The most well-known reside in the realm of the Eternals, while Tom, who is not quite famous, must wait in the Valley of Those on the Verge. Though his existence there is pleasant, he is haunted with an acute anxiety that will follow him until he either achieves fame or leaves for the "non-artist" heaven. He has only one chance to influence his fate: return to life for one week and do whatever he can to advance his work. After that, he will have to surrender his future to the living.

Vetere is an accomplished playwright, screenwriter, poet and actor. His experience informs The Writer's Afterlife--the quick pace is reminiscent of television, while the punchy dialogue is easy to imagine on a stage. Thematically, the entire novel is a sort of homage to the literary world, with cameos from Shakespeare, Keats, Dickinson and other famous figures, all cavorting blissfully with their fictional creations. It is both an incisively critical look at writers' neurosis and a celebration of literature's transcendent power. --Annie Atherton

On a dare, photographer Robert Capa slips a note under actress Ingrid Bergman's hotel room door, asking her out to dinner--and is astonished when she accepts. So begins Chris Greenhalgh's Seducing Ingrid Bergman, a fictional version of a real-life reckless but tantalizing relationship set against the backdrop of post-war Paris and Hollywood. The two appear at first to be an odd match: Capa, an outwardly lighthearted man who enjoys reading books in the bathtub and frequenting racetracks, and Bergman, a reserved and hesitant film star whose silence conceals a marriage on the rocks and a deep insecurity about her work. Yet the pair managed to keep their relationship secret from Bergman's husband and children for several years.

Appropriately, given Capa's profession, the story is told in scenes that alternate between Capa's first-person point of view and third-person descriptions of Bergman. The result is a story that positions the reader in the same place as the photographer. As audiences did during Bergman's life, readers of Seducing Ingrid Bergman find themselves looking at her--but, thanks to Greenhalgh's storytelling, they'll see an Ingrid Bergman those audiences didn't view on the silver screen.

Seducing Ingrid Bergman allows imagination to fill in the gaps history leaves behind, developing both Capa's and Bergman's characters in a richly detailed narrative that shades into the lyric, offering an intense emotional pull without ever becoming sentimental. --Dani Alexis Ryskamp, blogger at The Book Cricket

The fruit-flavored taffy candy that gives Red Now and Laters its title is a favorite of the novel's protagonist, young Ti' John, or John Paul Boudreaux, Jr. As he tells us, red was the "official color and flavor of all little black boys" in Houston: "If God ain't black then He's red, brother."

When Marcus J. Guillory's stunningly powerful, captivating debut novel starts, the Great Flood of '77 has just hit South Park, one of the poorer neighborhoods in Houston, and life is about "growin' up wet." Ti' John is four, and his dad, John Frenchy, a rodeo cowboy and a healer, is carrying him through the mud. His mom is a devout Catholic who tries her best to keep her young boy away from the ghetto and the violence. The boy has a guide, a spiritual leader, who appears to him, "a dark figure in a tattered gray suit," the ghost of his great-uncle, Jules Saint-Pierre Sonnier, also known as "Nonc." The novel is lush with Ti' John's Creole culture, language and voodoo (some footnotes guide us along).

As it travels back and forth from the Houston "hood" to the Creole world of mid-19th-century Louisiana, we are carried along by a special "voice," as Ti' John shares a joyful coming-of-age tale where "we are not promised angels," but hope "to catch a glimpse of their fluttering wings." --Tom Lavoie, former publisher

Over dinner one night in a Budapest restaurant, U.S. consul Emmett Kohl confronts his wife, Sophie, with his knowledge of her affair with a CIA spy. Before Sophie can overcome her shock, a gunman enters the restaurant and shoots Emmett dead at the table. In the ensuing chaos, the gunman gets away. So begins Olen Steinhauer's The Cairo Affair.

Instead of accompanying her husband's body back to Boston for burial, Sophie eludes her official escorts to return to Cairo, where Emmett was stationed before Budapest. She believes the answer to his murder lies there, and needs to find it to reassure herself her affair did not lead to his death. She contacts her old lover, Stan, for help, but can she trust him--and if not him, then who?

The story is complex and shifts point of view among its major players, but Steinhauer manages to guide readers through the twists and turns without making the plot too dense or confusing, even if one isn't up on current events in Northern Africa. Sophie is unlikable, however: a bored diplomat's wife who makes rash, selfish decisions to add drama to her privileged life without consideration for the consequences. Her awareness of her weakness doesn't mitigate her sometime devastating actions.

Luckily she's only one of the narrators; the others, including an American contractor who works for the embassy in Cairo and an Egyptian agent with the Central Security Forces, are more interesting and sympathetic, people doing their best to retain their humanity in unsettling times. --Elyse Dinh-McCrillis, crime-fiction editor, The Edit Ninja

In Raising Steam, the 40th volume of the Discworld fantasy series, Terry Pratchett takes his famously satirical setting firmly into the modern age of railroads with a tale about technological progress and the need for several influential men and women to shepherd it along, as if it were a newborn not quite capable of entering the world without some clever midwifery.

Ankh-Morpork may be the most populous city in Discworld, but there are plenty of other places that need to connect with each other. Patrician Lord Vetinari is a schemer and planner of the best sort, and he appoints Moist von Lipwig, a former scoundrel and rogue who now runs most of the city's banking and mail services, to take the inventor of the railway system under his wing. The young inventor, Dick Simnel, has improved upon his tragically exploded father's design to create a fully functioning steam engine, which he brings to the big city to show off to potential investors.

Waste disposal magnate Harry King, the richest non-noble in Ankh-Morpork, is initially unimpressed with the device, but knows a good business opportunity when he sees it. Along with von Lipwig and his wife, Simnel and King must see the railroad through, especially as the far-flung race of the Dwarves faces their own possible civil war over tradition versus modernity.

Raising Steam is laugh-out-loud funny while remaining subtle and irreverent, conveying Pratchett's humanist and liberal political views through his delightfully realized fantasy world. --Rob LeFebvre, freelance writer and editor

When Greg Atkinson's collection of food essays and recipes was first published in 1997, it was well before the local and sustainable food movement became as widespread as it is today. The new introduction to this edition reveals an Atkinson who is older, wiser and no less enthusiastic in his support of seasonal produce as he prepares to celebrate the second anniversary of Restaurant Marché, his inspired bistro on Bainbridge Island, Wash.

Much like his inspiration, M.F.K. Fisher, Atkinson writes observant pieces that respect the simplicity and spontaneity of the ingredients. A writer well before he became a chef, Atkinson regards food with the joy and appreciative wonder of first discoveries: learning to cook, cultivating gardens and harvesting the fruits of one's labors, foraging from the land and all the unexpected surprises bound with it. These experiences shape his understanding of food and, more philosophically, life in general. The stories are personal and emotional, a reminiscence into what once was and is now slowly disappearing. He recounts a day of spring cleaning that leads to the discovery of morels in his own backyard and the subsequent pilgrimage into the forest, family in tow, searching for the one item that "evokes the timeliness of the forest, the eternal qualities of spring."

Interspersed among these gems of time and place are recipes that Atkinson has developed and honed, organized by the seasons and simple enough for amateurs to attempt. Despite its age, In Season remains relevant as a statement of what can be possible with time and commitment, and its content is meant to be savored throughout the year. --Nancy Powell, freelance writer and technical consultant

As a college student, Adam Braun participated in the Semester at Sea program, an experience that exposed him to some of the world's most impoverished countries. Everywhere he went, he asked children, "If you could have anything, what would you want most?" The idea was to collect answers like souvenirs, but one child's response--"a pencil"--changed Braun life.

Following that semester, and a later internship with the Cambodian Children's Fund, Braun set his sights on creating an organization to change people's lives. His friends and family encouraged him to pursue a job in finance so he could save money and, after a couple of decades, start a nonprofit. After less than a year with Bain & Co., the global management consulting company, though, Braun realized he couldn't wait.

Divided into sections he labels as mantras, The Promise of a Pencil is a young entrepreneur's memoir, detailing the bumpy but exciting road to his dream. From making a $25 deposit to landing on Forbes's 30 Under 30 list, Adam Braun took a vision and made it a reality. His story is motivating: he enlisted new technologies, made many sacrifices and found supportive mentors and colleagues. It's equally uplifting: he made mistakes, learned hard lessons and persevered in order to do something monumental for those less fortunate.

"Every person has a revolution beating within his or her chest," Adam writes. "I hope this book helps you find yours." The Promise of a Pencil certainly has the potential to do just that. --Jen Forbus of Jen's Book Thoughts

San Francisco in the 1860s was home to what Ben Tarnoff (A Counterfeiter's Paradise) calls " an extraordinary literary scene." The Bohemians is an entertaining, engaging foray into U.S. literary history, with Mark Twain at the head of the pack, closely followed by Bret Harte and the poets Charles Warren Stoddard and Ina Coldbrith. While the Eastern old guard was genteel, moralistic and grandiose, the western Bohemians were ironic and irreverent. They belonged to Bohemia "because they didn't belong anywhere else."

San Francisco, urban and rural, crude yet cultured, with its unmistakably western atmosphere and its thriving publishing tradition, became their perfect home--at least for a while. Twain was an aspiring journalist when he arrived at his "city of startling events" in 1864. Three years later, he published "The Jumping Frog of Calavaras County," with The Innocents Abroad following two years after that. Then he moved back east. Similarly, Harte, the soft-spoken dandy, arrived in San Francisco in 1860, published his breakthough piece, "The Luck of Roaring Camp," and left in 1871.

Stoddard, the gay bookstore clerk whom Jack London called the "Love Man," became co-editor of the Overland Monthly, a welcoming home for all the literary Bohemians. His colleague Coldbrith, by far the most active in the city's literary scene, became California's poet laureate and librarian of the city's famous Bohemian Club. Together, they created a new American literature. --Tom Lavoie, former publisher

In Elusion, authors Claudia Gabel and Cheryl Klam collaborate to create a chilling, strangely plausible dystopian vision.

Living in a noxious futuristic Detroit, Regan is proud of her father for building an elaborate way to escape. Elusion, an alternate reality experience, uses a special visor, wristband and earbuds to generate "a world with plant life and fresh air instead of Florapetro factories, grease clouds, and acid rain." Citizens now dodge the reality of their Standard 7 jobs (7 a.m. to 7 p.m., 7 days a week) in make-believe, digital adventures. When Regan's father is killed in an accident, 17-year-old Patrick, a family friend and protegé, takes over the technical details of the project. It all seems perfectly safe, but just when worldwide distribution rights are granted, accusations begin to fly that Elusion is highly addictive to teenage minds, "more like heroin than a great achievement in science." At first, Regan refuses to believe that her father's creation could pose any danger. But as evidence builds, she begins to question whether teens may be dying from overuse. Helped along by a friend of Patrick, the handsome "man candy" Josh, Regan digs deeply into the mystery surrounding Elusion.

Given society's love affair with handheld devices, readers will not find it too big of a stretch to imagine taking technology to this new, extremely troubling level. This is compelling, accessible science fiction with enough mystery and romance to keep readers hooked and waiting for the sequel. --Lynn Becker, host of Book Talk, the monthly online discussion of children's books for the Society of Children's Book Writers & Illustrators