A man's bloated, naked body is found floating in Lake Pepin at about the same time that the wife of the town board commissioner is found dead in her home, apparently from a suicide. So begins Mary Logue's seventh Claire Watkins mystery novel. Watkins, deputy sheriff of Pepin County in northern Wisconsin, looks for clues and connections between the two deaths as this homey, "Murder, She Wrote"-type plot unfolds.

During the recent presidential debate, John McCain once again reduced Barack Obama's diplomatic intentions to a desire to take tea with terrorists ("without preconditions!"). To parry his opponent's attack, Obama may have done well to invoke the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 to illustrate just how effective diplomacy can be in defusing an explosive situation. In his new book, One Minute to Midnight, Washington Post reporter Michael Dobbs does just that.

During the 1980s Sonic Youth brought the fringe a little closer to the mainstream, editing the inspiration of Glen Branca's noise symphonies into rock songs of a most unconventional nature. Nationally recognized rock critic David Browne writes knowingly and interestingly about the band's husband-wife core of Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon (who have led an orderly life in the eye of their own musical storm), the sources of the...

Edward R. Murrow's CBS Radio program "This I Believe" originally aired amid the alarm and suspicion of the McCarthy era. More than 50 years later it was revived on NPR during the similarly divisive post-9/11 era. The soothing tones of narrators who prompt reflection rather than dogma has buoyed the spirits of many a radio-listener flagging under the language of fear that's become the lexicon of our age. Last month the second compilation of essays from the series was published, named This I Believe II and edited by program producers Jay Allison and Dan Gediman...

  Allen Ginsberg's Howl & Other Poems, the 50th anniversary of which was celebrated in 2006, is the most famous book by a Beat poet. A close second is A ConeyIsland of the Mind by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, whose fledgling City Lights Press published Howl in 1956 and defended it at the ensuing obscenity trial. That landmark First Amendment case established a legal precedent that protected controversial literary work with "redeeming social significance." In the aftermath of Howl, City Lights became the premiere hip press, faithfully publishing each subsequent book by Ginsberg in its "Pocket Poet Series," which also included luminaries from Kerouac and Corso to...

A few years ago, I had occasion to discuss the early development of The Letters of Allen Ginsberg (Da Capo) with its editor, Bill Morgan. We were having dinner in Manhattan's East Village, and I was curious about how Morgan was faring in the yeoman task of sorting through the mountains of Ginsberg's correspondence. As the poet's bibliographer, Morgan had spent more than a decade sorting through and cataloging Ginsberg's correspondence...

   In 2004 The Wall StreetJournal's Farnaz Fassihi sent an e-mail to friends and family in the States that went 'round the world, a description of just how bad life had gotten in Iraq under the U.S. occupation. The situation may have improved since then, at least provisionally and in degrees, but Waiting for an Ordinary Day stands as a...

It's that time of year again. The clamor of the summer festivals has subsided and the city sets its sights on more edifying offerings than fried cheese curds and bratwursts. Beginning Oct. 5 the Milwaukee Book Festival returns for 10 days of author readings, panel discussions, writing workshops, book-art presentations and a slew of culturally diverse literary events for young and old, hosted by festival partners across the city.

If you think our nation's unmitigated access to countless avenues of exposure might have dulled its appetite for divulging secrets, you're wrong. A project founded in 2004 by part-time artist Frank Warren proves that our society's craving for confession is as strong as ever. And even the curious form of the confessional, a 3-by-5-inch postcard sent without name or address, suggests that neither emerging media nor today's cultural transparency have usurped the suggestive powers of an anonymous, handwritten note.

   In his forward to Diva: Defiance and Passion in Early Italian Cinema (University of Texas Press), filmmaker Guy Maddin writes beautifully, knowingly, about the female stars of Italian film before the coming of sound. Alas, he's not the author of the book. Diva is the work of Angela Dalle Vacche, film studies professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology. A thoughtful and intriguing account of feminine roles in a traditional society in transformation to modernity, Diva is mired nonetheless in academic cultural theory and overlooks anything...