Hot Type

Hail the culture-quakers. Notorious truth-teller Renata Adler swings her big braid with a passion in After the Tall Timber (New York Review Books)—a quiver of her exceptional and unsparing nonfiction. Childless-by-choice authors dare to out themselves in Meghan Daum's provocative anthology Selfish, Shallow and Self-Absorbed (Picador).

The service staff of America's First Families air the linen in Kate Andersen Brower'sThe Residence (HarperCollins). The blondes (Thomas Dunne) in Emily Schultz's novel have fallen prey to a disease that makes them killers. Race, faith, and home intertwine in poet Tracy K. Smith's illuminating memoir, Ordinary Light (Knopf). Amit Chaudhuri'sOdysseus Abroad (Knopf) is a day-long journey with two Indian emigres living in London. Masha Gessen follows the fuse that sparked The Brothers (Riverhead) Tsamaev's plot to bomb the Boston Marathon. Poet Cate Marvin channels the colorful voices of Staten Island in Oracle (Norton). Ann Packer'sThe Chil- dren's Crusade (Scribner) is an artful portrait of a California family. The science-denying society in Jeffrey Rotter'sThe Only Words That Are Worth Remembering (Metropolitan) pays in loneliness. Larry Kramer's magnum opus opens with The American People, Volume 1: Search for My Heart (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). The Third Reich draws to a close in the late Walter Kempowski'sSwansong 1945 (Norton). Roseanne Montillo captures the U.S.'s youngest serial killer in The Wilderness of Ruin (Morrow). Michael Shnayerson gets in the ring with Governor Andrew Cuomo in The Contender (Twelve). Three adults relive childhood sexual abuse in Rafael Yglesias'sThe Wis- dom of Perversity (Algonquin). Marc Peyser and Timothy Dwyer eavesdrop on Hissing Cousins (Nan A. Talese) Eleanor Roosevelt and Alice Roosevelt Longworth. Carol Weston'sAva and Taco Cat (Sourcebooks) is purrfect. Peter Slevin gives Michelle Obama (Knopf) a standing O. Fatima Bhutto's commanding debut, The Shadow of the Crescent Moon (Penguin), unfolds on the Afghan border as the Americans invade. Jill Alexander Essbaum'sHciusfiau (Random House) finds adultery easier than marriage. Irreverent, wise, and boundlessly generous Abigail Thomas tells us What Comes Next and How to Like It (Scribner).

ELISSA SCHAPPELL