Riverhead

Work Song A Novel Ivan Doig Riverhead: 278 pp., $25.95

The Psychopath Test A Journey Through the Madness Industry Jon Ronson Riverhead: 288 pp., $25.95

The Psychopath Test A Journey Through the Madness Industry Jon Ronson Riverhead: 288 pp., $25.95

A Singular Woman The Untold Story of Barack Obama's Mother Janny Scott Riverhead: 376 pp., $26.95

When the Thrill Is Gone A Leonid McGill Mystery Walter Mosley Riverhead: 360 pp., $26.95

A Singular Woman The Untold Story of Barack Obama's Mother Janny Scott Riverhead: 376 pp., $26.95

The first books to be offered by a new publishing imprint with a strong interest in literary fiction will soon make their way into the swollen stream of spring releases. Introducing Riverhead Books, a division of the Putnam Berkley Group Inc. Riverhead's spring list of nine books turns outward (via novels with strong ethnic themes) and inward (via titles that explore spirituality and healing powers).

The founding editors of Riverhead Books, publisher of Khaled Hosseini's "The Kite Runner," Suze Orman's "The Road to Wealth" and other bestsellers, have left the company. Cindy Spiegel and Julie Grau are to start a new division at Doubleday Broadway, part of Random House Inc. They will begin their new jobs at the end of the month. "Together, they have been responsible for a remarkable number of distinctive books," Doubleday Broadway President Stephen Rubin said.

BACK when Philip K. Dick asked "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" who could have imagined that George Saunders would answer? Or that his reply might be, we are the electric sheep. That, at least, is one implication of "Jon," the longest story (although not by much) in Saunders' new collection of fiction, "In Persuasion Nation."

The deal HBO options Sloane Crosley's bestselling "I Was Told There'd Be Cake," a collection of wry, mordantly funny essays about a twentysomething New Yorker struggling to get by in Manhattan and the bizarre dilemmas she encounters. The players Carolyn Strauss (the former HBO entertainment chief who helped develop "The Sopranos," "Six Feet Under" and other programs) is executive producer under a new production pact at HBO. Crosley is represented by the Denise Shannon Literary Agency and by Creative Artists Agency on film rights.

When the Thrill Is Gone A Leonid McGill Mystery Walter Mosley Riverhead: 360 pp., $26.95

Work Song A Novel Ivan Doig Riverhead: 278 pp., $25.95

Although it centers on the life of Joseph Priestley, the 18th century English chemist and clergyman, Steven Johnson's "The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America" is far from a conventional biography. It is the story of Priestley's ideas -- who inspired them, whom they influenced and how they came to be.

You could no more write a comprehensive book about walking than about breathing or sleeping. But in "The Lost Art of Walking: The History, Science, Philosophy, and Literature of Pedestrianism," Geoff Nicholson -- author of more than a dozen novels as well as, most recently, "Sex Collectors: The Secret World of Consumers, Connoisseurs, Curators, Creators, Dealers, Bibliographers, and Accumulators of 'Erotica' " -- means to try.

REAL ESTATE means a lot in America -- ask the Indians. Or ask some of the first white Californians to be displaced by gentrification. They can't answer, being dead. In 1900, San Francisco outlawed burials within city boundaries. Too much money could be made buying and selling land to waste it on the departed. The dead would have to find somewhere else to forever lay their heads.

BY THE end of "Devil in the Details," Jennifer Traig's 2004 memoir of her obsessive-compulsive childhood, she was liberated from the need to lather her hands raw, scrub surfaces clean of invisible contaminants and pray several hours a day. Her latest book, "Well Enough Alone," picks up where she left off, her obsessive-compulsive disorder mostly under control. Then hypochondria kicks in.

Meg WOLITZER'S 1982 debut novel, "Sleepwalking," focused on the painful transition to adulthood of three college women who share an unhealthy fascination with suicidal female poets. Her eighth and newest, "The Ten-Year Nap," is an exploration of the somnolence that overtakes the lives of four middle-aged New York City mothers who have opted out of careers to stay home with their children.

How many times have you picked up a memoir by some American or European nomad living the good life abroad, and wanted to toss the entire volume out the window after about, oh, two paragraphs? You know the type of book: a self-congratulatory saga of how the middle-aged author, suffering from chronic First World malaise, cashed in his tech stocks, fled the L.A. or New York rat race and escaped to some exquisite little corner of Provence or Marrakech to raise organic squash, commune with natives and find Enlightenment.