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Melissa Febos graduated from college with straight A's and a prestigious internship. She also led a secret life as a dominatrix. Her new memoir, Whip Smart, details her time working in a sex dungeon in midtown Manhattan. She describes what it was like to work for four years at the upscale S&M house.

After Hustvedt suffered several unexplainable seizure-like episodes that defied conventional medical diagnoses, she decided to chart her experiences — and the murky intersection between mind, brain and body — in a new book, The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves.

Alan Cheuse reviews the newest novel by the Nobel Prize-winning South African author J.M. Coetzee. Summertime is a pseudo-biographical novel based on interviews conducted by an imaginary biographer about the life of a writer named John Coetzee.

Thomas Keller is one of those chefs people speak of with awe. Now, he shares his recipes for caramelized sea scallops, iceberg lettuce slices, rainbow chard and brownies.

When Marine engineer Jonathan Kuniholm returned to his industrial-design shop after a tour of duty in Iraq, one of his first projects was personal: He wanted to improve on the design of the prosthetics he'd been using since he lost part of his right arm in an ambush. Kuniholm and his colleagues founded the Open Prosthetics Project, an open-source collaboration that shares its innovations freely.

In The Invention of Hugo Cabret, author and illustrator Brian Selznick uses a striking combination of text and drawings to tell the story of Hugo, an orphan in Paris, and a reclusive genius from the early days of silent film.

The nation's first public pools were originally built to get rowdy, scantily clad youths out of rivers and lakes and away from the public eye. They eventually became hotbeds of social change. Historian Jeff Wiltse traces public pools' contentious history in Contested Waters: A Social History of Swimming Pools in America.

The Secret Servant is the 10th novel from thriller writer Daniel Silva. Reviewer Alan Cheuse says Silva is perhaps the best home-grown spy novelist among a new generation of writers.

In 1977, two young women on a cross-country bike trip were brutally attacked in an Oregon state park. Strange Piece of Paradise by Terri Jentz, one of the victims, chronicles her search to find out why no one was ever charged in the crime — and to repair her fractured self.

The Photographer is an unusual graphic novel that combines photos and illustrations to tell the story of a photojournalist's harrowing trip to Afghanistan with a medical team from Doctors Without Borders.