WIT'S end By James Geary. (Norton, $23.95.) Geary takes an unusual - , approach to writing about wit. The chapter on verbal repartee is written as a dramatic dialogue. For the neuroscience of wit, he delivers a scientific paper. A quirky approach for a quirky topic, freak kingdom By Timothy Denevi. (PublicAffairs, $28.) Beyond the drugs and gonzo journalism, Hunter S. Thompson was a fierce opponent of corruption and the authoritarian tendencies of political leaders. This is what most motivated his writing, Denevi argues in a new biography of the bombastic writer, the new order By Karen Bender. (Counterpoint, $26.) A finalist for the National Book Award, lauded for her short stories, Bender returns with a collection that reflects America's new reality. One story takes place after a school shooting, another centers on a woman grappling with unemployment, muck By Dror Burstein, translated by Gabriel Levin. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27.) Burstein is one of the most experimental and exciting Israeli novelists writing today. His new book is a reworking of the Book of Jeremiah tinged with much surreality - there are talking dogs and cunneiform tattoos. heirs of the founders By H. W. Brands. (Doubleday, $30.) Brands, a two-time Pulitzer finalist, has turned to the generation of American political leaders who arrived in the wake of the founding fathers and dominated the first half of the 19th century. The intertwined lives of Daniel Webster, Henry Clay and John Calhoun are examined for all the ways they helped shape the young nation. "One of the odd effects of this exhausting and endless news cycle, for me anyway, is that I am always looking for something else to read. I'm not looking to be distracted so much as absorbed in bold, ambitious books (fiction, typically) filled with big ideas and imaginative characters. You can't get much bigger or bolder than John Irving's a prayer for owen meany, starting with its tiny, eponymous hero - barely 5 feet tall, fully grown - whose high-pitched utterings Irving renders solely in all-caps. 'THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS COINCIDENCE,' Owen declares, matterof-factly, staking out his position on one of the existential questions at the heart of the book, set in small-town New Hampshire in the 1950s and '60s: Are our lives governed by fate or by chance? T am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice,' the novel's narrator - and Owen's best friend - says in the book's opening sentence. Months after finishing A Prayer for Owen Meany,' I find myself suffering a similar fate." - JONATHAN MAHLER, STAFF WRITER, THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE, ON WHAT HE'S READING. |