Fiction and poetry

Crave Radiance

New and Selected Poems 1990-2010

Elizabeth Alexander

Graywolf Press, $28

This collection showcases the poet who read at Barack Obama’s inauguration and includes that poem, “Praise Song for the Day.”

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Full Dark, No Stars

Stephen King

Scribner, $27.99

King’s latest story collection includes a cancer patient’s deal with the devil and a secret at the center of a happy marriage.

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I Still Dream About You

A Novel

Fannie Flagg

Random House, $26

A onetime Southern beauty queen-turned-real estate agent has drastic plans that keep getting thwarted.

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The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey

A Novel

Walter Mosley

Riverhead, $25.95

A 91-year-old in South Central L.A. agrees to a dangerous drug experiment to improve his memory and solve his nephew’s murder.

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My Hollywood

A Novel

Mona Simpson

Alfred A. Knopf, $26.95

A Filipina nanny and her Pacific Palisades employer wrestle with the many dimensions of motherhood.

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Of Love and Evil

A Novel

Anne Rice

Alfred A. Knopf, $24.95

Rice’s “Songs of the Seraphim” cycle continues with a story set in the high Italian Renaissance.

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The Passages of H.M.

A Novel of Herman Melville

Jay Parini

Doubleday, $26.95

The author of “The Last Station” turns his attention from Tolstoy to Herman Melville, using wife Lizzie -- who’s losing faith in her novelist husband -- as a lens.

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Rescue

A Novel

Anita Shreve

Little, Brown, $26.99

A car crash that brings two people together -- a rookie paramedic and a young woman in a totaled car -- resonates 18 years later in their daughter’s volatile life.

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Sunset Park

A Novel

Paul Auster

Henry Holt, $25

The spaces between fathers and sons, and young writers and musicians come together.

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Take One Candle Light

a Room

A Novel

Susan Straight

Pantheon, $23.95

A high-speed car-chase of a novel set in the Other Southern California, an area many won’t recognize.

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The True Memoirs of Little K

A Novel

Adrienne Sharp

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25

Passion, politics and ballet in the court of Czar Nicholas II.

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What I Didn’t See

And Other Stories

Karen Joy Fowler

Small Beer Press, $24

The author of “The Jane Austen Book Club” spins fantastic tales of curses, family submarines and Lincoln’s assassination.

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Work Song

A Novel

Ivan Doig

Riverhead, $25.95

Doig depicts the West that few readers know -- Butte, Mont., and the Anaconda Co., once the copper-mining and smelting centers of a burgeoning U.S. economy.