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Sam Savage's first novel, Firmin, chronicled the coming-of-age misadventures of a very literate rat living in a bookstore in Boston's Scollay Square. Garnering praise from authors ("[O]ne of the most enjoyably surprising books I've read for a long time....This really is a book like nothing else," raved Philip Pullman) and critics ("Firmin is a hero in the Dickensian mode...with the sardonic shadings of Vonnegut, and the same explicit tenderness," wrote the Los Angeles Times), it was an unexpected success and a bookseller favorite of 2006.

The Cry of the Sloth, Savage's second novel, is the story of Andrew Whittaker, a slumlord, writer, editor of the barely-surviving literary magazine Soap, and ex-husband, told entirely through Whittaker's own writing. Letters, grocery lists, rental ads, and fragments of fiction make up this "scathingly funny epistolary pastiche" (Publishers Weekly, starred review). The Cry of the Sloth is an arch, hilarious, disturbingly existential novel; Andrew Whittaker is an unforgettable character, and Sam Savage is an extraordinary writer.

We were so impressed that we created a special hardcover edition ...

In her 2003 novel Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood describes a future after humanity had been almost entirely wiped out by a plague. Jimmy, aka Snowman, lives in a wasteland populated by genetically engineered animals gone wild and the Crakers, a race created to be biologically superior to humans but childlike in their simplicity and grace. Snowman's previous life was one of privilege, lived inside the compounds run by the genetics companies and security firms, and he ruminates on his memories and the reasons for humanity's demise. The New Yorker marveled, "Towering and intrepid....Atwood does Orwell one better."

The Year of the Flood opens with two more survivors, Toby and Ren — one defending her position at a defunct health spa, the other trapped in a bio-isolation room at a brothel. Both have previously been members of God's Gardeners, an eco-religious sect dedicated to living sustainably in an increasingly degraded and stratified society, and the novel charts their experiences leading up to the catastrophe. The Year of the Flood masterfully depicts a very different side of the dystopia. Darkly funny, incredibly believable, and surprisingly hopeful, Atwood's new novel is one of her very best.

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Jill Owens: How did you decide to go back to the world of Oryx and Crake for The Year of the Flood?

Margaret Atwood: There are a couple of answers to that. Number one, everybody was asking me what happened right after the end of Oryx and Crake. Since I didn't know, I had to write another book in order to find out.

Number two, a lot of people, having asked me for years, "How come you write so much from the point of view of women?" since I wrote it from the point of view of a man, now asked, "Why did you write it from the point of view of a man?" [Laughter] So you can't win that one.

I thought, All right, what would it be like, if it were from the point of view of women? Also, what would it be like if we went into the world that is something Jimmy only sees out a train window? In other words, the unprotected urban space, unlike his protected urban space. What would that be like? And also, what would the God's Gardeners, who appear in the margins of Oryx and Crake, look like up close? What would that religion actually be like?

All of those things were pretty interesting to me, and there were a couple of characters I was interested in as well, notably Amanda, who was in Oryx and Crake.

Jill: I reread the two books back to back last week, and I was struck by the difference in tone between them.

Atwood: Jimmy is narrating one of them, and he's not a happy bunny.

Jill: I was going to ask if the difference in tone was related to their gender...

Atwood: Well, he's not unhappy because he's a man. He's unhappy because he's not valued in the society in which he has grown up, nor by his parents, particularly.

Jill: And he's isolated.

Atwood: Yes, particularly at the beginning when he's living in a tree.

Jill: He's about as isolated as you can get, really.

Atwood: He does have these other humanoids nearby, but they don't understand him. So, in fact, his state is the emotional state of a certain number of young men who think they're living in trees and that nobody understands them. [Laughter]

Jill: I ran across an older poem of yours, "Elegy for the Giant Tortoises," which begins: "Let others pray for the passenger pigeon, the dodo,/ the whooping crane, the eskimo,/ everyone must specialize," and I thought, in the new book, you're doing the opposite. You're praying for all the extinct animals.

Atwood: As many of them as I could cram in. It's quite a list.

Jill: Do you see that poem as a precursor at all to the new book?

Atwood: It's all part of the same group of interests that have been with me for a long time. Tracing it back, I did grow up amongst the biologists. They were what we would now call early environmentalists; they were early Sierra club, for instance. This kind of interest has been around for a very long time except that it was seen as rather minor — although Teddy Roosevelt, for instance, was a big supporter. It has waxed and waned, during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

I would say environmentalism had some earlier moments where people were preserving parks in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It had probably a low moment in the eighties and nineties of the past century. It had an up moment in the seventies, and it's having an up moment now. But the thinking itself has been around for quite awhile. The people doing the counting and the numbers have been around for quite a while too, and it's true that in 1972, the Club of Rome said, "If we don't change our behavior, in 40 years we're going to be in the following mess." We didn't change our behavior, and that is the following mess that we are now in. So it's not as if people weren't warned and were not told. There was no political will to change anything.

Jill: Adapting and creating the theology for the Gardeners must have been fun, I would think.

Atwood: It was fun, but you know, it's also a trend. There is already with us today a Green Bible. It's got tasteful linen covers, ecologically correct paper, an introduction by Archbishop Tutu, and the green parts are in green. I think that certain wings of Christianity are returning to their roots, and those roots were more biophilic than they became in the seventeenth century, when a mechanistic view was taken of animal life.

Strangely enough, it was Charles Darwin who bucked that trend, in his work on animal emotions. The mechanistic view had it that animals were just automatons. They didn't really have emotional lives; they just had knee-jerk reactions and they were like machines. He denied that. He said they have emotions that are very similar to our emotions. By animals, he didn't mean clams. He meant mammals.

David Sibley's name has become synonymous with birdwatching. The Sibley Guide to Birds, The Sibley Field Guide to Birds of Western North America, and The Sibley Guide to Bird Life and Behavior, among many others, are some of the most respected and well-loved bird guides available today.

In his new work, which was eight years in the making, David Sibley focuses his authoritative eye on trees. Gorgeously illustrated and full of fascinating information, The Sibley Guide to Trees will dramatically change the way you look at your backyard, your neighborhood, and the larger botanical world.

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Jill Owens: How did you decide to focus on trees for this new book?

David Sibley: About seven or eight years ago, I was out on a book-signing tour promoting my newest bird guide, and I was thinking about what I wanted to do next. I decided that I really wanted to do another big book project. That's what I really like to do. I started searching around for what kind of species to cover in my next book; I didn't want to do another, more in-depth bird guide.

There were a couple of reasons that trees came to the top of the list. First, even while I was out there on the road traveling mostly in cities, I was seeing trees every day. Trees are so much a part of our everyday life, even more than birds. It seemed like knowing about trees would be something virtually anyone can put to use every day.

The other part of the decision was that I have always tried to be an all-around naturalist, and to learn as much as I could about other things besides birds. When I thought about field guides, I've always been a little frustrated with the tree guides, because they really work in a way that bird guides have advanced from many decades ago.

Tree identification makes sense because trees are so easy to approach. [Laughter] If you see a tree that looks interesting, you can walk up to it and pull out your 10-power or 20-power hand lens and study the really microscopic features, like the shape of the bud scale, or whether there are hairs on the underside of the leaf or not. There's no time limit; you can take as long as you need to identify it.

The tree guides have never really advanced beyond the stage where bird guides were 100 years ago, where you held the bird in your hand and you went through a key to figure out what it was. Modern bird guides work a lot more on simple pattern matching, just flipping the pages until you see a picture that matches. Gradually, as you use the book more and get more experienced, you internalize that, and one day you'll just look at a bird and know what it is, and not have to look it up in the book.

I wanted a tree guide that would work more in that way, having lots of illustrations and emphasizing the natural groupings and patterns of variation, so that if you're out on a walk and you saw an interesting leaf shape, or an odd fruit, or unusual bark, you could just pull out the book and flip through the pages until you found a picture that matched. I saw an opportunity to create a book that really would be something new, and would be a real contribution to advancing the hobby of tree identification through bringing in some of the advances in bird field guides that hadn't really trickled down to trees.

Over the course of his career, Tracy Kidder has written about the dawn of the computer age, a year in the life of elementary schoolchildren, his experience in Vietnam, a biography of a small town in Massachusetts, and Paul Farmer's medical and humanitarian work in Haiti, to name a few of his subjects. His books have won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, amongst many other awards and honors.

Kidder's incredibly moving and vivid new book, Strength in What Remains, follows and accompanies Deo, survivor of the genocide in Burundi who came to America in the '90s to make a new life for himself. Though Deo had little money and no English language when he landed in New York, he eventually found his way to Columbia University and medical school. Through his account of Deo's ...

Luis Alberto Urrea is a poet, novelist, journalist, and essayist who has been writing about the relationship between the United States and Mexico, amongst other things, for 30 years. His 2004 nonfiction work, The Devil's Highway, is a searing chronicle of the fate of the Yuma 14, 14 men who died in the desert after crossing the border illegally. The Los Angeles Times described it as "superb....Nothing less than a saga on the scale of the Exodus and an ordeal as heartbreaking as the Passion," and it was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.

His next work, The Hummingbird's Daughter, is an epic novel which took him twenty years to write. In shimmering prose, Urrea imagines the life of Teresita, the real-life "Saint of Cabora," who was in fact a relative of his. The Oregonian raved, "The Hummingbird's Daughter is nothing short of miraculous....The story of the saint is told with such love and care that it will make a believer out of anyone."

His latest novel, Into the Beautiful North, is a funny, moving, and gorgeously written tale of a young woman's journey to America, which Booklist calls "an outstanding reading treat." Bookpage claims "It only takes a few pages of Luis Alberto Urrea's thoroughly enjoyable Into the Beautiful North to start you wondering whether this book will break or warm your heart....So which is it?...A little of both, of course." If you haven't yet read this lyrical, generous, and important American writer, his new work is a great place to start. We loved the novel so much that we chose it for Volume 12 of our Indiespensable program.

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Jill Owens: How did Into the Beautiful North begin?

Luis Alberto Urrea: It bubbled up out of misery and exhaustion. The Devil's Highway was so dark and disturbing. And though The Hummingbird's Daughter was a transcendent book, it took 20 years to write it, and a lot of things during the 10 years or so of shamanic explorations I undertook to write it were really
hair-raising and freaky.

I came off all that, and I had written another book for Little, Brown, hoping to break open some of the taboos about barrio macho hetero male life. They felt that it was a little too disturbing. They didn't want to release it at this point in my career, which I thought was funny after doing Devil's Highway, which is nothing but disturbing. But in another way, I thought, "Wow! My childhood was so rough and tough that it's too disturbing to release." I felt like Joe Bad. [Laughter] I'm a real survivor!

After all of that, I realized that I just wanted to have joy. I wanted to have a good time writing. I was hoping that I could address the issues that I usually address, but make myself laugh. I wanted relief. I had a sense that my readers might want to laugh, too.

It also came out of reading tons and tons of immigration-related stuff, which, believe me, is not by choice. It's not something that I want to read about all the time, but people send me a lot of information. I was taken by a story about the towns without men, which is something that's happening all over Mexico.

Or was happening. I'm always fascinated by the disjunct between what's really happening on the ground and the propaganda machine that feeds America alarmist news about immigration. For example, since I finished Devil's Highway, the immigration numbers have been dropping and dropping and dropping. But the fever pitch of racially motivated rage has gotten hotter and hotter, it seems to me. I thought that was strange.

For example, at the time that I wrote Devil's Highway, the border patrol station that I wrote about had 32 or 35 agents. Since the book came out, they now have 350 agents. Homeland Security had to tear down Wellton Station and rebuild it into a big complex — not to hold Mexicans, but to hold new agents! But the actual numbers of immigrants are down in double digits in that sector, and they're down across the board.

All that was fascinating to me, and I thought, "In some sense, I so want to put that issue to rest in my own work, but I probably never will." As a writer, it's like a cat playing with a catnip mouse. You kick around these ideas, and they start to seem amusing and interesting to you, and you start to think, "What would happen if this were to happen in my father's hometown?"
I fictionalized his hometown to get more of the realm of the imagination. I started speculating, "What would happen if the men were gone, and you needed someone to run the town?"

What's going on in Mexico right now is that women are stepping up, sometimes for the first time, and assuming power — political power, educational power, all these roles that were denied them before the men were gone. I like to call it a kind of a groundswell of folk feminism, where women are stepping into this vacuum and actually changing the face of Mexico.

As I was pondering that, I thought, "Who would be a great mayor for that town?" And I thought of my own Aunt Irma, who's the template for crazy Aunt Irma in the book. She really was Mexico's bowling champion.

Jill: I read about her in your memoir, after I'd read the novel, and I thought,
"I recognize this woman..."

Urrea: [Laughter] That's right! A lot of times in my books, I put in — not jokes necessarily, but little grace notes for family or friends. In Hummingbird's Daughter, a whole lot of people caught me out sneaking Rudolfo Anaya into the novel. Rudolfo Anaya has been a godfather to me for so long that it was a nice little tip of the hat to have Rudy Anaya there, or his great-grandfather, saying something sweet to the Hummingbird's daughter, trying to get a date, basically. He got the joke.

Several times in my books there will be characters that sometimes only someone in my family or someone from the villages will recognize and laugh about. It gives the story real life, to me. Of course, it's scandalous in my family that I based a character on Aunt Irma, as mean as she is. [Laughter]

Jill: But she's such a great character, and she's such a strong older female
character, to counterbalance the younger female characters, who are strong in a different way.

Urrea: It's funny. I had an interviewer ask me, "Are you writing chick books?" I said, "Chick books? What's a chick book?" "You keep writing about women," he said. I said, "What's wrong with writing about women?" I don't know. I guess it's because of Hummingbird, in part. But part of the process of Hummingbird was being accepted by the women's healing community in the indigenous world. I didn't really understand the world of medicine, or curanderas. I had some access to that through men, because I have all these brothers who are Oglalas (adoptive brothers, in the loose term of brother), and I have relatives who are Apache, and so forth.

When I was accepted by a couple of communities of women, I was taken in to learn the women's stuff. One of those women said this very simple thing. It was so simple it was brilliant. She said, "You goddamned men. When you want to know something about women, why don't you just ask?" I had this idiotic Western writer's response; I was writing down notes: "Hmm, ask women!" [Laughter] Her follow-up was, "And when we tell you, why don't you listen?" It became really important to me if I was going to write Hummingbird's Daughter to try to do honor to women.

When this story came up, it just so happened that it was about a place abandoned by men. I've said a lot on tour that Americans seem to think that Mexicans have an illegal immigration organ in their body, and at about 13 it starts pumping illegal immigration hormones, so that we know like geese when to take off. We don't! It's not that way. A lot of the people back home are not pleased about what's happened. They're ashamed of it; they're abandoned by it. They're not benefitting the way some people seem to think they are. Certainly Sean Hannity would say they are, but they aren't. I wanted it again to be troubling and sad on many levels, because it's a troubling and sad story, but also funny, because people are funny. We're all funny. Humor unites us. More than any kind of lectures, or preaching on my part, I think humor unites the readers with the characters, and makes you invest in what happens to them.

Deborah Madison has been called the Julia Child of vegetarian cooking (Lynne Rosetto Kasper), a "wizard with fresh produce" (New York Times), and "one of very few people responsible for reinventing and furthering the cause of American home cooking" (Mark Bittman, author of How to Cook Everything).

This fall, the tenth anniversary edition of the bestselling Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone was released, along with the paperback edition of Vegetarian Suppers from Deborah Madison's Kitchen; if you haven't yet had the pleasure of trying Madison's cuisine, these are both excellent ways to begin.

Jill Owens: What's changed about the concept of vegetarian food between the time the first edition came out and the tenth anniversary edition now?

Deborah Madison: I think it's much freer now than it was then. People used to be so nervous about having a vegetarian meal or serving one or going to a vegetarian restaurant; they'd be afraid that it would be kind of a wasted experience. I don't think that's true now. Lots of restaurants have come up with something good to eat that's not based on meat, and I think ...

My first Stephen King book was my also first "adult" book — It, clocking in at over a thousand pages. I read It the way many of King's young readers do — under the covers at night with a flashlight, way past my bedtime. Of course, the book scared me to death. But over the years, it has become apparent that frightening readers, though indisputably one of his strengths, is certainly not the only tool in King's arsenal. His 2000 memoir On Writing is a classic of the genre, filled with pragmatic advice, colorful examples, and a genuine love of language. Novellas such as Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption and short stories like "The Last Rung on the Ladder" have proven that sometimes King's strongest work isn't overt horror at all, that he is just as adept at chronicling the universal themes of love, family, and the human condition.

Lisey's Story is a hybrid of the most effective traits of both: while the novel has supernatural elements and truly horrific moments, this deeply involving love story includes some of King's best prose yet. Lisey is the widow of

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Marilynne Robinson's first novel, Housekeeping, was immediately described as a modern classic and nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Twenty-four years later, her second novel, Gilead, won both the Pulitzer and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and has received almost universal praise. Ron Charles of the Christian Science Monitor marvels, "There are passages here of such profound, hard-won wisdom and spiritual insight that they make your own life seem richer....Gilead [is] a quiet, deep celebration of life that you must not miss." Read the interview here.

Lots of new content in our Kids' pages this week:

It happens every time: customers walk by the display of Robert Sabuda's Winter's Tale, casually flip it open to the first page, and their jaws drop. Since the 1990s, Sabuda has been at the center of a children's pop-up revolution, designing astonishing books including The Wizard of Oz, Alice in Wonderland, and, with Matthew Reinhart (creator of the fabulous new Cinderella: A Pop-Up Fairy Tale), Encyclopedia Prehistorica Dinosaurs: The Definitive Pop-Up! Read Sabuda's Kids' Q&A.

With more than a dozen pop-up books already published, David Carter outdoes himself with his latest paper sculptures in One Red Dot, an interactive visual adventure. Learn about his arachnidan officemate, as well as why it's a good thing he's not a rock star.

Louise Marley has been a professional musician and music teacher for years, so it's no surprise that her novels are similarly musical. In Singer in the Snow, her first for young adults, music literally keeps the people of frosty Nevya alive. Find out what else inspires this multi-talented author.

Meanwhile, Mary (from our Kids' team) offers some advice to ...