DAMAGE CONTROL displays Amber Dermont's remarkable gift for portraying characters at crossroads. In “Damage Control,” a young man works at an etiquette school while his girlfriend is indicted for embezzlement. A widow rents herself to elderly women and vacations with them as a “professional grandchild” in “Stella at the Winter Palace.” And in “The Language of Martyrs,” a couple houses a mail-order bride on behalf of the husband’s Russian mother.

Jim Harrison delivers two absorbing studies of men at the opposite ends of adult life, noteworthy both for an absence of illusion and a sympathy that never slips into sentimentality. The stories revisit some of Harrison’s habitual concerns --- the world of nature, Native American myth, the sensual pleasures of food and the persistence of sexual desire --- in his characteristically rugged and entertaining style.

Eighty-two years old, facing emergency heart surgery and his own mortality, Elie Wiesel reflects back on his life. Emotions, images, faces and questions flash through his mind. His family before and during the unspeakable Event. The gifts of marriage and children and grandchildren that followed. In his writing, in his teaching, in his public life, has he done enough for memory and the survivors? Where has his ongoing questioning of God led? Is there hope for mankind?

BOTH FLESH AND NOT gathers 15 of David Foster Wallace’s essays never published in book form, including "Federer Both Flesh and Not," considered by many to be his nonfiction masterpiece; "The (As it Were) Seminal Importance of Terminator 2," which deftly dissects James Cameron's blockbuster; and "Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young," an examination of television's effect on a new generation of writers.

Is there any difference between memory and invention? This question haunts Alexander Cleave, whose stunted acting career is suddenly revived by a movie role portraying a man who may not be who he says he is. Cleave explores memories of his first love affair with his best friend's mother, as well as those of his daughter, lost to a kind of madness of mind and heart that he can only fail to understand.

Harold Silver has spent a lifetime watching his younger brother, George, acquire a wife, two kids, and a beautiful home in the suburbs of New York City. But Harry also knows George has a murderous temper, and when George loses control, the result is an act of violence so shocking that both brothers are hurled into entirely new lives in which they both must seek absolution.

Throughout the course of his ordeal battling esophageal cancer, Christopher Hitchens refused the solace of religion, preferring to confront death with both eyes open. In this riveting account of his affliction, Hitchens poignantly describes the torments of illness, discusses its taboos, and explores how disease transforms experience and changes our relationship to the world around us.

Facing his 63rd winter, Paul Auster sits down to write a history of his body and its sensations --- both pleasurable and painful. Thirty years after the publication of THE INVENTION OF SOLITUDE, in which he wrote so movingly about fatherhood, Auster gives us a second unconventional memoir in which he writes about his mother's life and death.

In the summer of 1938, Hollywood film star Fredric Stahl is on his way to Paris to make a movie for Paramount France. The Nazis know he’s coming; for their purposes, Fredric Stahl is a perfect agent of influence, and they attack him. What they don’t know is that Stahl, horrified by the Nazi war on Jews and intellectuals, has become part of an informal spy service being run out of the American embassy in Paris.

Janet Groth recalls the two decades she spent as a receptionist for The New Yorker in this memoir that details the comings and goings, marriages and divorces, scandalous affairs, failures, triumphs, and tragedies of the eccentric inhabitants of the eighteenth floor. During those single-in-the-city years, Groth tried on many identities, but eventually she would have to leave The New Yorker to find her true self.