Within a Sky Full of Earth

FICTION
Man Gone Down
By Michael Thomas. Black Cat/Grove/Atlantic, paper. This first novel explores the fragmented personal histories behind four desperate days in a black writer’s life.

Out Stealing Horses
By Per Petterson. Translated by Anne Born. Graywolf Press. In this short yet spacious Norwegian novel, an Oslo professional hopes to cure his loneliness with a plunge into solitude.

The Savage Detectives
By Roberto Bolaño. Translated by Natasha Wimmer. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. A craftily autobiographical novel about a band of literary guerrillas.

Then We Came to the End
By Joshua Ferris. Little, Brown & Company. Layoff notices fly in Ferris’s acidly funny first novel, set in a white-collar office in the wake of the dot-com debacle.

Tree of Smoke
By Denis Johnson. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. The author of “Jesus’ Son” offers a soulful novel about the travails of a large cast of characters during the Vietnam War.

NON FICTION
Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone
By Rajiv Chandrasekaran. Alfred A. Knopf; Vintage, paper. The author, a Washington Post journalist, catalogs the arrogance and ineptitude that marked America’s governance of Iraq.

Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression
By Mildred Armstrong Kalish. Bantam Books. Kalish’s soaring love for her childhood memories saturates this memoir, which coaxes the reader into joy, wonder and even envy.

The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court
By Jeffrey Toobin. Doubleday. An erudite outsider’s account of the cloistered court’s inner workings.

The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History
By Linda Colley. Pantheon Books. Colley tracks the “compulsively itinerant” Marsh across the 18th century and several continents.

The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century
By Alex Ross. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. In his own feat of orchestration, The New Yorker’s music critic presents a history of the last century as refracted through its classical music.