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The Library of America has just published the first of a two-volume collection of the novels and stories of the late writer William Maxwell, whose writing voice John Updike once described as "one of the wisest and kindest in American fiction."

Music critic Lloyd Schwartz first met poet Elizabeth Bishop when she moved to Cambridge in the early 1970s after living in Brazil for nearly 20 years. Now Schwartz has co-edited a new collection of work by the former U.S. Poet Laureate.

Watching baseball and reading books have a lot in common. Both are made for the summer, require some investment of time and — the best part — involve a great deal of sitting. Alan Schwarz details his three favorite books on America's favorite game.

South Beach is just as tantalizing today as it was in the days of Miami Vice. Mix one part Art Deco, one part Cubanita culture, one part surreal fantasy and you've got a book — or three.

Weekends at Bellevue is psychiatrist Julie Holland's account of her years treating patients in a New York City psychiatric ER. She says one of the hardest parts of her job was figuring out which patients were manic or schizophrenic and which were high on cocaine or methamphetamines.

During his heyday in the early 1970s, shock-rock icon Alice Cooper dressed like a ghoul with a gaunt face and mascara-streaked eyes. His hits included "I'm Eighteen," "School's Out" and "Welcome to My Nightmare." In a memoir — Alice Cooper: Golf Monster, he recounts how he used his obsession with golf to overcome his addiction to alcohol.

When Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times in 1971, the Nixon White House tried to discredit him. Among other things, Nixon loyalists burglarized the office of Ellsberg's psychiatrist. Bud Krogh went to prison for his role in the Ellsberg affair — and he has a new memoir.

David Steinberg was big on the stand-up circuit back in the 1960s and '70s; he appeared on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson more than a hundred times. Now he's host of TV Land's Sit Down Comedy with David Steinberg, on which he interviews other comedians. His new memoir is called The Book of David.

Richard Russo's novel, Bridge of Sighs, is a story about unexceptional people in an unexceptional upstate New York town. Maureen Corrigan says the novel is pound-for-pound the best new fiction on shelves today. Russo won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel Empire Falls, a story about the relationships between people in a small town in Maine.

Historian Drew Gilpin Faust writes that Civil War deaths — both their number and their manner — transformed America. Her new book is This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War.