Nonfiction

of Monticello

An American Family

By Annette Gordon-Reed

W.W. Norton

Starting with Thomas Jefferson and his slave and mistress Sally Hemings, Gordon-Reed explores master-slave relations in Virginia and the dichotomy of slavery's presence in a society claiming to be based on freedom.

How Fiction Works

By James Wood

Farrar, Straus & Giroux

Wood is our Edmund Wilson, unafraid to approach criticism with the seriousness and intention of art. Here, he looks at fiction's mechanics and aesthetics, arguing in favor of literary realism.

Lincoln

The Biography of a Writer

By Fred Kaplan

Harper

Abraham Lincoln was, Kaplan tells us, "the Twain of politics." In this charming and unexpected biography, he frames a part of the 16th president's greatness in his having a "personality and a career forged in the crucible of language."

Minders of

Make-Believe

Idealists, Entrepreneurs,

and the Shaping of American Children's Literature

By Leonard S. Marcus

Houghton Mifflin

In this enlightening, vivid history, Marcus unravels many of the myths about children's literature. Children's books, he writes, are "messages forged at the crossroads of commerce and culture."

Mustang

The Saga of the Wild Horse in the American West

By Deanne Stillman

Houghton Mifflin

Inspired by the 1998 killing of 34 mustangs near Reno, Stillman's tale of wild horses becomes a saga of the American West that blurs boundaries between essay and reporting, history and literature.

Nixonland

The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America

By Rick Perlstein

Scribner

Richard Nixon, Perlstein tells us, worked on the resentments of the so-called Silent Majority to achieve his power, thus helping facilitate a culture war that we're still fighting in which what separates us, rather than what unites us, defines who we are.

Obscene in

the Extreme

The Burning and Banning

of John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath"

By Rick Wartzman

PublicAffairs

In 1939, the board of supervisors of Kern County banned John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath." A former Times editor and columnist uses that story as a lens on California labor history.

Orange County

A Personal History

By Gustavo Arellano

Scribner