Zadie's Beauty, Ellis's Satire, Banville's Sea: New Paperbacks

Zadie's Beauty, Ellis's Satire, Banville's Sea: New Paperbacks

Aug. 3 (Bloomberg) -- Zadie Smith's magnificent ``On Beauty,'' Bret Easton Ellis's kooky satire of confessional autobiography, ``Lunar Park'' and John Banville's cerebral Booker Prize-winning ``The Sea'' are among some of the choice paperback releases in August.

``On Beauty'' by Zadie Smith (Penguin). Smith is considered by many critics to be one of the finest novelists writing in English, and rightly so. Her latest is a superb 21st-century riff on E.M. Forster's ``Howard's End'' that transplants the action to a thinly disguised Harvard, where two families, each headed by a rival Rembrandt scholar, find their lives and children intertwined.

``Lunar Park'' by Bret Easton Ellis (Vintage). The aging bad boy of American letters --- Ellis wrote the controversial ``American Psycho'' --- is back with an edgy satire about a middle-aged novelist named Bret Easton Ellis who, despite his marriage to a Hollywood starlet and fatherhood, still loves drugs and is wracked with phantasmagoric visions that threaten to destroy his sanity and family.

``End of the Line: The Rise and Coming Fall of the Global Corporation'' by Barry C. Lynn (Currency). Relying on examples from General Electric, Dell and Microsoft, Lynn argues that the outsourcing of production to developing nations has put the U.S. economy at risk by leaving it vulnerable to any breakdown in the already fragile global supply chain.

``The Tender Bar'' by J.R. Moehringer (Hyperion). The L.A. Times reporter recalls his 1970s childhood on Long Island and the days he spent at the local tavern, where his Uncle Charlie and his Sinatra-loving sidekicks -- Colt, Bobo and Joey D -- schooled him in the manly arts and looked after him while he matured.

``The Sea'' by John Banville (Vintage). Last year's Man Booker Prize-winning novel portrays a middle-aged Irishman, mourning the loss of his wife, who returns to his seaside childhood home to brood and reminisce. It's literature with a capital ``L'': dense and demanding, but ultimately rewarding.

``The Story of a Life'' by Aharon Appelfeld (Schocken). The treasured septuagenarian writer's memoir of growing up in Romania and then surviving the Holocaust in the Ukraine by escaping from a prison camp and passing himself off as an orphaned gentile, until he emigrated as a refugee to Palestine.

``Mining California: An Ecological History'' by Andrew C. Isenberg (Hill & Wang). If you think California is heaven on earth, you should have seen it before the 19th-century gold rush felled ancient redwood forests, washed away mountains and poisoned rivers with mercury, all vividly depicted in this unsettling history of environmental pillage and its aftermath.

``The Scent of Your Breath'' by Melissa P. (Black Cat). P's first book, the autobiographical erotic coming-of-age story ``100 Strokes of the Brush Before Bed,'' has sold 2 million copies worldwide. In this sequel, Sicilian Melissa is now 19 and living in Rome, where she abandons one lover, finds another, miscarries and carries on.

``Follies of Science: 20th Century Visions of Our Fantastic Future'' by Eric Dregni and John Dregni (Speck Press). Whatever happened to the personal jet packs we were promised by the hyperbolic prognosticators of the last century? This intriguing illustrated book looks back at a world that might have been, but never was.

``A Fictional History of the United States with Huge Chunks Missing'' edited by T Cooper and Adam Mansbach (Akashic Books). Howard Zinn has met his match in this wry and winking account of these United States in 17 chapters, each by a different writer, that starts with the Chinese discovery of America in 1426 and ending with the war to end all wars in 2011.

(Edward Nawotka is a critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)