A Dangerous World Of Hackers And Ninjas

Nick Harkaway is the author of Angelmaker.

The moment I opened the book, I was snared by the now-iconic first line: "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel." I knew that color; the U.K. had only four TV channels and they didn't broadcast through the night. When nothing was on, the cathode ray screen was a kind of numinous anthracite, the closest thing it could manage to black. If you want to be clever about it — at the time it was a comparison way beyond me — you could call it "darkness visible." Neuromancer lives in that space: It is contradiction, bifurcation, penumbra.

The protagonist, Case, is a burnout. He was a hacker, but he crossed the wrong people, and they crippled his nervous system so that he could no longer work with cyberspace (Gibson made up the word; this book heavily influenced how people imagine data online). Case is living on his luck, and that luck is running out; he's been to the best doctors and they can't fix him, so he's a middleman now, brokering deals for drugs and illegal software.

Until Molly comes along, and her boss, Armitage, offering a deal: Make a run in cyberspace, a really major hack. He'll get cured, get paid. Sweet deal. But in the grand tradition of crime thrillers, the job is more complicated than it seems, and Case is going to be crossing some dangerous people and some very thick red lines.

Despite the breakneck urgency of the action, the hard-boiled story drips with laconic cool. I had never met that before: Hammett, Chandler and Elmore Leonard came later for me. Neuromancer introduced a demimonde of back alleys, sodium streetlamps and the kind of club where you can buy firearms with your whiskey. It whispered of transgression, of sex and booze, and license.

Nick Harkaway is also the author of The Gone-Away World.

Courtesy of Rory Lindsay

The other fictions that framed my world were basically benign. I'd seen Tron and loved it. I was a Star Wars fan. I liked hobbits and the Three Musketeers. But Han Solo wouldn't last 10 minutes in Night City; Frodo would be hooked on a drug with a seven-syllable name inside of an hour. This was a world between the primary color fictions I'd seen and the dangerous nuclear age reality I lived in: In the 1980s it was pretty much established that Britain would burn in the first exchanges of a war between NATO and the Warsaw Pact.

Inevitably, I fell for Molly, the street samurai with mirrors over her eyes and razors in her fingers. In my mind she had a husky, Lauren Bacall voice made from coffee and cigarettes — and I was right. If Bacall's character from To Have and Have Not taught English to Michelle Yeoh's martial artist from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, you'd get someone like Molly.

Even now, she's a rarity. More often than not, Molly is what's missing from contemporary stories of any sort: a woman who is complete unto herself. She didn't need a male senior partner. In fact, she was more connected and streetwise than Case, and more alert to the danger they were both in. Wherever she went, Molly was in charge. In 1985, you could look a long time without finding that anywhere else.

And in a middle-class British school, you could go even longer without hearing the name Marcus Garvey, the Pan-African and black nationalist political leader who influenced Martin Luther King, Haile Selassie and Malcolm X — and the orbit-dwelling Rastafari nation Case and the others encounter in their search for answers. A decade before Google, I had to look Garvey up in the encyclopedia.

Add that to ninjas, amphetamines, extreme body modification, catsuits, gangs, governmental misdeeds, high decadence, Strangelove-esque soldiers and psychotic computers: Neuromancer was and is a treasure house of dangerous ideas.

And yet at the same time, it is secretly a very gentle book. Amid all the grime and grim, it's not hard to know where to put your sympathy or your trust. The bad are bad, the good are good. So despite all this, it's not an unsuitable book for a kid, just a challenging and eye-opening one. And unlike so many improving and notionally educational books, it's stylish, adult, exciting and fun. It's a door to a greater world.

PG-13 is produced and edited by the team at NPR Books.

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Diana Vreeland's Rise To 'Empress Of Fashion'

Diana Vreeland had a troubled childhood; her mother often told her she was ugly. But she later became editor-in-chief of American Vogue and one of the country's most revered fashion icons. Her life is captured in the new biography, Empress of Fashion: A Life of Diana Vreeland. Host Michel Martin talks with author Amanda Mackenzie Stuart.

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A Child Of The Slums Becomes A 'Queen' Of Chess

Simon & Schuster

A Story of Life, Chess, and One Extraordinary Girl's Dream of Becoming a Grandmaster

by Tim Crothers

Hardcover, 232 pages | purchase

close The Queen of KatweA Story of Life, Chess, and One Extraordinary Girl's Dream of Becoming a GrandmasterTim Crothers

Phiona Mutesi is a teenager living in Katwe, the biggest and possibly toughest slum in Uganda's capital city. She's also a rising star in competitive chess.

Her story is told in the book The Queen of Katwe: A Story of Life, Chess and One Extraordinary Girl's Dream of Becoming a Grandmaster.

But when she first started the game, Mutesi wasn't hungry for glory; she was just hungry. A local chapter of a Christian charity hosted a chess program, and it lured Mutesi, her brother and other children with the promise of a meal.

"Our family didn't have money, and we were yearning to get some food. We didn't have food at home," she tells NPR's Michel Martin. "My brother knew about chess, and he could go to the chess program to get a cup of porridge."

The kids in Katende's chess group were all struggling. "Almost 97 percent of the children don't go to school at all," says Mutesi's coach and mentor, Robert Katende. "When you're in a survival situation, the parents or guardians have to choose whether to waste their money on education or to find a way to feed the family."

Mutesi herself had never seen or heard of chess. There isn't even a word for it in her native language. But Katende says she was a natural talent. "She has a special — I call it — a gene." He also acknowledges that her difficult life in Katwe helped develop Mutesi's competitive streak. "I notice that she's very aggressive, because, you know, it's like, when you're determined."

Despite these obstacles, after this year's Chess Olympiad in Istanbul, Turkey, Mutesi qualified for an official World Chess Federation title: Woman Candidate Master.

Katende says Mutesi's success is an inspiration for everyone around her. "She's really transformed her entire family, because they have come to realize that they can make it in life, they have gained hope," he says. "So many children are now coming on the program, and they're optimistic that maybe one day they can also get out of the slum."

Mutesi says her dream is to conquer the world of chess and then make the world better for her community. "I want to be a grandmaster," she says, "and I want to be a doctor so I can help my family — and I want to help slum kids."

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Dec. 31-Jan. 6: A Whodunit, A Mountain Survival And A JFK Affair

Fiction and nonfiction releases from P.D. James; Dave Barry and Alan Zweibel; Jim Davidson and Kevin Vaughan; and Mimi Alford.

P.D. James' novel is "a glorious plum pudding of a whodunit," says NPR book critic Maureen Corrigan. It's also the veteran British mystery writer's tribute to one of her favorite authors, Jane Austen. Or, as Corrigan puts it, "Think Pride and Prejudice meets Clue." The two authors have much in common: Corrigan observes, "Money, one of Austen's chief themes, certainly lies at the heart of many a crime in James' mysteries." But more profoundly, James "ferrets out the alternative noir tales that lurk in the corners of Pride and Prejudice, commonly thought of as Austen's sunniest novel. Ruinous matches, the Napoleonic Wars, early deaths, socially enforced female vulnerability: Austen keeps these shadows at bay, while James noses deep into them."

Humorist Dave Barry is one of the men responsible for Talk Like a Pirate Day, while Alan Zweibel is a former Saturday Night Live writer best known for Roseanne Roseannadanna's trenchant commentaries. They cannot claim to have produced the great American novel together, but their comic adventure, Lunatics, "is almost certainly the best novel ever written about a forensic plumber and a pet store owner who, together, managed to destroy and then repair much of the known world," according to NPR's Robert Siegel. In the novel, the two characters collide in a swiftly escalating series of events that will send them running for their lives, pursued by the police, soldiers, terrorists, subversives, bears and a man dressed as Chuck E. Cheese.

"This well-plotted survival tale about climbing partners and a deadly fall into a crevasse will certainly slake your 127 Hours craving," writes critic Rachel Syme. Written 19 years after the fact, The Ledge recounts a mountain climbing accident on Mount Rainier. After taking an 80-foot tumble that fatally pulled his best friend, Mike Price, down with him, author Jim Davidson climbed out of a crevasse with his lifeless partner still attached to a rope. Syme writes, "With the help of award-winning Denver Post journalist Kevin Vaughan, Davidson transforms his horrific experience into a graceful, poised narrative that spares no gory detail but never feels mawkish."

Now a grandmother, former White House intern Mimi Alford details an 18-month affair with President John F. Kennedy in her memoir Once Upon A Secret. Alford writes that her affair began when she was19, in the summer of 1962, with an invitation to the White House swimming pool. "Suffice it to say that Alford writes that she was a virgin when she and the president consummated their relationship, and it happened in Jackie Kennedy's bedroom," writes NPR's Eyder Peralta. Her last meeting with the president was seven days before his assassination. She writes: "He took me in his arms for a long embrace and said, 'I wish you were coming with me to Texas.' And then he added, 'I'll call you when I get back.' I was overcome with sudden sadness. 'Remember, Mr. President, I'm getting married.' "

Charlotte Abbott edits "New in Paperback." A contributing editor for Publishers Weekly, she also leads a weekly chat on books and reading in the digital age every Friday from 4-5 p.m. ET on Twitter. Follow her at @charabbott or check out the #followreader hashtag.

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2012 In Review: 4 Great Graphic Novels We Haven't Told You About Yet

Ok, same drill as last Friday's post about my favorite ongoing comics series of 2012: We've highlighted a lot of great graphic novels over the past year, many of which belong on "Best of 2012" lists. But instead of ginning up new ways to tell you those books are good, I'll simply link you back to what we've said before about Building Stories, Sailor Twain, The Underwater Welder, The Hypo, Marbles, Are You My Mother, God and Science: The Return of the Ti-Girls, and Drama, Crackle of the Frost, Little White Duck, and Gloriana.

So I figured I'd use this space, as the last hours of 2012 tick down to midnight, to play catch-up and highlight four of this year's great graphic novels that we haven't gotten around to covering. This, like last Friday's list of ongoing series, consists of more personal choices - the books I found myself pressing into friends' hands over and over again.

In his 2010 graphic novel The Wrong Place, Belgian artist Brecht Evans used vibrantly colorful ink washes to convey the chaotic scrum of urban life. We followed his main character through a cityscape in which every dance club, art gallery, wine bar and apartment building offered up cut-away-views of the figures who joylessly toiled and rutted within.

In The Making Of, Evans uses similar techniques to expose and satirize the pretentions and preposterousness of the art world. Struggling artist Petersen travels to a small village for its first biennial, only to find to his horror that the local art community is much less sophisticated than he imagines himself to be. As he rallies them behind his grand project, all the while offering condescending lectures on the nature of art, tensions mount. Evens playfully underscores Petersen's obtuseness by repeatedly arranging the book's characters and landscapes in tableaux that evoke familiar works by Picasso, Chagall, Van Gogh and others, only to have Petersen completely ignore them. A funny, smart and gorgeously rendered book.

To describe the plots of Lilli Carré's short stories, which combine steel-trap plotting with the emotional logic of dreams, might make them sound formulaic. A critic awakes from an accident to find he has been robbed of his powers of discernment. A woman finds a doppelganger is taking over her life. A girl hears a phantom marching band in her head and longs for it to stop – until the day it suddenly does.

But these aren't the steel-trap ironic twists of Serling and O. Henry. Carre offers up her characters and situations with a detached, non-judgmental and entirely un-ironic deftness. Her artwork is elegant, deceptively simple, and not a little bit creepy, filled with discomfiting undercurrents that carry storylines down weird and twisty turns.

"These hot winds," muses one character, moments after dropping her child off at school, "what a bother. I suppose I could give in just for a minute or two...." and promptly, unceremoniously, allows herself to be lifted into the air. The whole collection has the feel of a dream in which remembering how to fly is as simple as forgetting that you can't.

In the first volume of Shimura Takako's Wandering Son, we met fifth-grader Shuichi, a boy who wants to be a girl, and his friend Yoshino, a girl who wants to be a boy. In that first book, their secret was shared by only one mutual friend, and the world in which they could be themselves was small and relatively safe.

In Volume Two, however, the outside world begins to intrude, and the stakes rise considerably. The events depicted are the familiar, everyday traumas of school life –locker room taunts, inappropriate crushes, etc. – but in Shimura's quiet, closely observed telling, we feel how much Shuichi and Yoshino's secret adds layers of tension, confusion and dread. Translator Matt Thorn reminds us in a brief essay that Wandering Son is not the kind of manga in which a happy ending is guaranteed, and that transgendered children in Japan face very different cultural challenges than those in the West. You'll thus be grateful for the moments of realistic, untempered joy Shimura allows her two protagonists here, as you wait with nervous anticipations for the travails that lie ahead for them in subsequent volumes.

Maggie is a smart, self-assured tomboy whose world is in flux. Her mother has disappeared. After years of being homeschooled, she's entering high school, where, she soon learns, her three older brothers have lives of their own. Plus there's that whole thing with the ghost she keeps seeing in the town's graveyard.

Faith Erin Hicks has a knack for finding affinities between the familiar reality of high school, with its tribulations that bedevil many a YA protagonist, and the supernatural world, which exists on the level of symbols and metaphor (she showed as much in the sharp-eyed and clever The War at Ellsmere in 2008). Her latest graphic novel finds Hicks exerting even greater control of her gifts; here, the parallels she draws do more than simply advance the plot, they show us something crucial about Maggie. The lesson she learns by novel's end isn't a particularly tidy one, because the world is a good deal more complex than she realized. That's what makes Friends With Boys my favorite coming-of-age tale of the year.

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Death Of The (Predatory) Salesman: These Days, It's A Buyer's Market

The Surprising Truth About Moving Others

by Daniel H. Pink

Hardcover, 260 pages | purchase

close To Sell Is HumanThe Surprising Truth About Moving OthersDaniel H. Pink

The familiar image of the salesman in American culture hasn't always been a flattering one. Just think of Alec Baldwin as the verbally abusive "motivator" of two real estate salesmen in Glengarry Glen Ross.

Daniel H. Pink, author of the new book To Sell is Human, says that this relentless, predator-style approach to selling has become outdated. He believes that the art of sales has changed more in the past 10 years than it did in the previous century.

Pink joins NPR's David Greene to talk about the effect the Internet has had on selling and why he believes almost all American white-collar workers are now in sales.

On why the brutal, Glengarry Glen Ross style of selling has become outdated

"Well, most of what we know about sales was built for a world of information asymmetry — the seller always had more information than the buyer. Twenty years ago, when [David] Mamet wrote that play that [was] made into a movie, when you walked into a Chevy dealer, the Chevy dealer knew a heck of a lot more about cars than you ever could ... you didn't have the adequate information. And so this is why we have the principle of caveat emptor, buyer beware. You gotta beware when the other guy knows a lot more than you.

"Well, something curious has happened in the last 10 years in that you can walk into a car dealership with the invoice price of the car, something that even the salesmen/women at car dealers didn't know too long ago. And so in a world of information parity, or at least something close to it, we've moved — caveat emptor is still good advice, but equally good advice for the sellers is caveat venditor, seller beware."

On why he thinks "we're all in sales"

"There's an idea out there that salespeople have actually been obliterated by the Internet, which is just not supported by the facts. In 2000 ... about 1 in 9 American workers worked in sales. That is, their job was to convince someone else to buy something. So then, what's happened over the last 12 years? Explosion of new technologies. Today, 1 in 9 American workers works in sales. But I think what's interesting is that if you look at that other 8 in 9, they're in sales, too. That is, a huge percentage of what white-collar workers do on the job is what I call nonsales selling — persuading, influencing, convincing other people to part with resources. Pitching ideas in meetings, asking the boss for a raise, trying to raise money from investors. And so, at some level, we're all in sales now."

Daniel H. Pink is the author of five books about the changing world of work, including A Whole New Mind and Drive.

Rebecca Drobis/Courtesy of Riverhead Hardcover Daniel H. Pink is the author of five books about the changing world of work, including A Whole New Mind and Drive.

Rebecca Drobis/Courtesy of Riverhead Hardcover

On why the best salespeople are "ambiverts," not extroverts

"We have this myth that extroverts are better salespeople. As a result, extroverts are more likely to enter sales; extroverts are more likely to get promoted in sales jobs. But if you look at the correlation between extroversion and actual sales performance — that is, how many times the cash register actually rings — the correlation's almost zero. It's really quite remarkable.

"Let's think about a spectrum, and say, on a scale from 1 to 7, where 1 is extremely introverted, 7 is extremely extroverted: The 6s and 7s — the people who get hired, the gregarious, backslapping types of the stereotype — they're not very good. OK, now, why? ... They're just spending too much time talking. ... They don't know when to shut up. They don't listen very well; they're not attuned to the other person; they sometimes can overwhelm people.

"Now ... does that mean that introverts are better? No. The 1s and 2s, they're not very good either. They often are not assertive enough. They're skittish about striking up conversations. What this new research — and it's very exciting, it's accepted for publication but actually not published yet — [says] is the people who do the best are what social psychologists call ambiverts. ... Not totally extroverted, not totally introverted. The 3s, 4s, and 5s. They know when to shut up; they know when to speak up. They know when to push; they know when to hold back. And so the best people at convincing, persuading others, whether in a traditional sales environment or in these other kinds of environments, are these ambiverts."

On the link between improvisational theater skills and selling

"One of the abilities that matters most is this ability of improvisation — that is, if your perfectly attuned, superclear pitch goes awry, as it will, how do you respond? And the principles of improvisational theater help us out on that, things like saying 'Yes, and' instead of 'Yes, but,' ... It's constructive rather than deconstructive.

"[In one improvisational exercise] I had to sit face-to-face with this actually pretty senior executive at a television network, and he had to tell me something that was bothering him, and I had to look him in the eye when he told me that, but I couldn't respond to him for 15 seconds. ... The idea ... is that we tend to move too quickly, and what the best salespeople of any kind know is that it's really about listening; it's really about understanding the other person's perspective, hearing what they're really saying, and one really profound way to do that is to slow down."

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Listen Up! Audiobooks For Every Taste

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If you're feeling overwhelmed by the holiday rush — too swamped, even, to spend an afternoon reading those books you got for Christmas, we have some recommendations for you — but these are audiobooks, so you can listen while you multitask.

Robin Whitten is the editor and founder of AudioFile magazine. Her list of the year's best audiobooks begins with a selection that might while away the hours on a long family road trip. "Toothiana is one of William Joyce's books that's in the Guardians of Childhood series," she tells NPR's David Greene. "He has the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny and St. Nicholas, who all become superheroes through these various books."

"It is so inventive and imaginative, and it's great for storytelling," she adds. And that storytelling quality is part of what makes a good audiobook. "Oftentimes, episodic stories and mysteries ... in fiction, it's easier to see how audiobooks and the audio medium work."

There is a nonfiction selection on Whitten's list: Jon Meacham's Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power, which chronicles the third president's life in an immersive style reminiscent of good fiction. Whitten adds that the book also benefits from the voice of a good reader. "You can be that involved [with the book] as you see the words on the page, but in audio, the narrator helps place you there."

Some audiobooks have celebrity narrators — for example, Colin Firth can be heard reading The End of the Affair by Graham Greene. "For a lot of people who've never really considered or been interested in an audiobook, they think, 'Oh, I love Colin Firth, I love his voice' ... and so they may try something," Whitten says. "And they also may not really know who Graham Greene is ... but they're attracted to it, so they're going to give it a try." Firth's voice is beautiful, she adds, "and he has a really special way of being inside the story, which is actually a personal, I think, a personal favorite of his ... it's in your head, as if he's telling just you."

Fiction

The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach
Read by Holter Graham

Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter
Read by Edoardo Ballerini

Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel
Read by Simon Vance

Biography and History

Charles Dickens: A Life by Claire Tomalin
Read by Alex Jennings

Cronkite by Douglas Brinkley
Read by George Guidall

Nonfiction and Culture

Abundance by Steve Kotler and Peter Diamandis
Read by Arthur Morey

Arguably by Christopher Hitchens
Read by Simon Prebble

Mystery and Suspense

An American Spy by Olen Steinhauer
Read by David Pittu

The Beautiful Mystery by Louise Penny
Read by Ralph Cosham

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Author Ben Fountain's Book Picks For 2013

Thorne Anderson

Last spring, weekends on All Things Considered spoke with author Ben Fountain just as he released his widely acclaimed first novel, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk. Later in the year, it was nominated for the National Book Award.

We asked Fountain to share with us what he's looking forward to in the book world next year. He says he's read about 25 books for release in 2013 and tells host Jacki Lyden, "The state of American fiction is really strong, at least from where I'm standing."

"First and foremost it's a mother-and-son story. It's the story of a single mother whose son goes to the naval academy and ends up becoming a Navy Seal. It moves from a mother and son story to a war story ... A really wrenching, and unflinching, I would say, war story."

"It has a lot of the things that I am interested in - politics, power. The big external forces in our lives that play such a big role in our interior lives, and that intersection between the individual and the larger forces in the world. [The main character] Jacqueline, she's a refugee from the Liberian Civil War ... and she has lost literally everything except the clothes on her back — her family, her home. Basically what she has is her memories and her wits, and these memories, especially of her family, they sustain and torment her as she tries to survive ... So, you know, this book, the writing is extraordinary. When I say extraordinary, I don't mean it's pretty or gorgeous for gorgeousness sake. Maksik, he is really getting down deep into, you know, the nature of human experience and the nature of love, and the nature of loss. And line by line, the power accumulates in this book is kind of like a stealth tsunami."

"We are talking about the guy who invented Ripley's Believe It or Not! I would say Robert Ripley is a true American original. He invented himself, and along the way invented huge chunks of American culture. He was right there at the beginning of cartooning, tabloid news ... So much of what we recognize as, you know, just the background of our lives and American culture — you know, sensationalism and celebrity news — Ripley was right there at the beginning of it. He built an entire entertainment conglomerate around himself. At one time he was, you know, an extremely wealthy man. He went all over the world in search of the exotic and the strange, and the weird, and he also had a pretty racy personal life. He had a harem long before Hugh Hefner ever thought of the Playboy Mansion."

"Linda Bamber is a professor of English at Tufts University in Boston, and most of the stories in the collection take off from various Shakespeare plays — Othello, and Antony and Cleopatra, Henry IV, As You Like It. And she takes them in these amazing directions. In one story, the heroine of As You Like It leaves her play and ends up dating all the three principle men of Henry IV. In another, the entire cast of Othello is now a college English department, and Desdemona is the chairman, and Othello is the only minority member, and Iago is in there as well, you know, making trouble as always ... I mean, I have never read anything quite like these stories. They have attitude, and they shake things up. They are playful, and inventive, and funny, and Bamber gets the entire world into each one of her stories."

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Close The Year Out With Some Best-Selling Last Words

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People often make lists of the greatest opening lines in fiction, but closing lines really appeal to me. They're your final moments with a book and can help you remember and treasure it forever.

The last weekend of the year seems an appropriate time to consider the final words of our favorite novels and short stories. Here are some that I'm especially fond of:

NPR librarian Kee Malesky has been dubbed "the source of all human knowledge" by NPR's Scott Simon. The author of the books All Facts Considered and Learn Something New Every Day: 365 Facts to Fulfill Your Life, she shares her adventures from the reference desk in this series called Kee Facts.

The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald
"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

Middlemarch
George Eliot
"But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive, for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts, and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life and rest in unvisited tombs."

Still Life With Woodpecker
Tom Robbins
"But I can and will remind you of two of the most important facts I know: (1) Everything is part of it. (2) It's never too late to have a happy childhood."

The Good Earth
Pearl Buck
""Rest assured, our father, rest assured. The land is not to be sold.' But over the old man's head they looked at each other and smiled."

The Dharma Bums
Jack Kerouac
"Then I added 'Blah,' with a little grin, because I knew that shack and that mountain would understand what that meant, and turned and went on down the trail back to this world."

Angela's Ashes
Frank McCourt
"I stand on the deck with the Wireless Officer looking at the lights of America twinkling. He says, 'My God, that was a lovely night, Frank. Isn't this a great country altogether?' 'Tis.'"

The Haunting of Hill House
Shirley Jackson
"Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone."

The Dead
James Joyce
"His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead."

The Silence of the Lambs
Thomas Harris
"But the face on the pillow, rosy in the firelight, is certainly that of Clarice Starling, and she sleeps deeply, sweetly, in the silence of the lambs."

The World According to Garp
John Irving
"In the world according to her father, Jenny Garp knew, we must have energy. Her famous grandmother, Jenny Fields, once thought of us as Externals, Vital Organs, Absentees, and Goners. But in the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases." (Note: John Irving has told interviewers that he always writes the last lines of his novels first.)

What last lines would you share from your favorite books? Please add yours to the comments section below.

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Courage And Curiosity: The Best Heroines Of 2012

Nishant Choksi

The most dangerous trait a woman can possess is curiosity. That's what myths and religion would have us believe, anyway. Inquisitive Pandora unleashed sorrow upon the world. Eve got us kicked out of paradise. Blight on civilization it may be, but female curiosity is a gift to narrative and the quality my five favorite heroines of the year possess in spades.

These women come to us from history, from a novel, from the pages of a diary and from an ancient poem. They're women who want to know things, who want to devour the world. Refreshingly, they aren't primarily defined by their desire to love or be loved — or even to be especially lovable — these are sublimely stubborn women, frequently at odds with themselves and always at odds with their times. They're on quests. Which isn't to say that these quests are necessarily successful (the heroines of one particular book were flamboyant failures). The outcome is immaterial; the wanting is all.

In 1983, the French artist Sophie Calle found a lost address book on a street in Paris. She rang up the people listed and asked about the owner of the book, whom she calls Pierre D. ("I will try to discover who he is without ever meeting him.") She published her findings in a newspaper — to the outrage of the real Pierre, who threatened to sue. Calle agreed to hold off republishing the pieces until after his death.

Pierre died in 2005, and this book is now available in English. I'd foolishly worried that there would be something self-consciously whimsical, something Amelie about the project. But from the outset, Calle's inquiry is too serious and strange and plain difficult. A few people refuse to speak to her. Others agree to meet Calle, but can't recall Pierre. The testimonies add up; our quarry comes into focus then blurs again: He lives alone. His hair went white the week his mother died. He has conventional sexual fantasies. He wears ill-fitting clothes, like a clown. Assembling a personality from these shards is intoxicating, a bit like solving a mystery, a bit like falling in love. But whom are we falling in love with? Is it Pierre? Or is it our guide? The book includes photographs of the people, paintings and places dear to Pierre. The most arresting portrait is of a young woman — could it be Calle? — in profile, hiding her face behind long dark hair, inscrutable to the last.

The second volume of Susan Sontag's posthumously published journals picks up in New York in the '60s with the writer's reputation established and romantic life in shambles. It's a book in fragments: the "hot exhalations of the mind," images that gave her pleasure (the "pale pinkish brown color of stone houses" in Corsica), and some scabrous self-criticism. We see Sontag lie to herself ("I've constructed a life in which I can't be profoundly distressed or upset by anyone") and arrive at painful personal realizations.

Most of all, these journals are a portrait of a woman who was the custodian of her intellect. "I've got this thing — my mind. It gets bigger, its appetite is insatiable," she writes, and these pages — rife with lists of books to read, films she's seen, and words to learn — record how she fed it. The critic Daniel Mendelsohn wrote that Sontag burst on to the literary scene, "a cultural-critical Athena, armored with a vast erudition, bristling with epigrams". This book reminds us of the daily diligence this display required. "Buy a dictionary the size of an elephant," she ordered herself. "A writer, like an athlete, must 'train' every day. What did I do today to keep in 'form'?"

Lisa Cohen gives us three stylish, independent heroines for the price of one in her triptych of women, once famous, now forgotten: Esther Murphy, a spellbinding conversationalist who never managed to produce the books her public so eagerly awaited; Madge Garland, a gifted editor at British Vogue; and Mercedes de Acosta, the "first celebrity stalker" who became the lover of the most glamorous women of her time, including Marlene Dietrich, Isadora Duncan and Greta Garbo. The three women, who were intimates, moved in the lively and quarrelsome lesbian circles of early 20th-century New York, Paris and London, and Cohen vividly brings this world to life. She also makes an original and persuasive case for her subjects' métiers, the fleeting, trivialized forms of cultural production: conversation, collecting and fashion.

It's a gossipy, gorgeous, near-perfect biography that turns the form inside out. "I have wanted to make these three women visible again," Cohen writes. "But none of them thought herself in need of rescue. Each memorialized herself and colluded in her own invisibility."

Carol Anshaw's taut novel of how a horrific accident propels three siblings on very different courses has many qualities to recommend it. It's sharp and wise and manages the impossible: to write about sex in a genuinely sexy way. But most of all, it has Alice.

Alice is the rumpled, heroic soul of the book — and possibly the year's most purely sympathetic character. An artist desperately in love with her elusive model girlfriend, jittering with need and trauma, she and her sister Carmen are struggling to save their brother from tumbling further into addiction. (Anshaw, whose own brother struggled with addiction, unsparingly depicts what it means to lose a family member to drug dependency.) Hers is a journey of learning to live productively with great guilt, of the solace of work and art and sisterhood (Alice "pitied everyone who didn't have a sister.") Our siblings do much more than merely support us, they hone us, like steel sharpening steel.

In her new book, the poet and classicist Anne Carson remixes Sophocles' great tragedy, Antigone, with Hegel, Virginia Woolf and strains from her own life. The book is hand lettered, and Bianca Stone's surreal illustrations tell a story of their own: beautiful girls with cinderblock heads, tottering furniture, a shovel, a ladder, red thread pinioning a horse's hooves, red thread twining around spoons, red thread unspooling over the pages like a long trail of blood.

Antigone, our heroine, is "a person in love with the impossible." She is the daughter of Oidipus and sister to Eteokles and Polyneikes (Carson's own spellings) who have slain each other in battle. She defies her uncle Kreon's order to leave Polyneikes' body unburied, risking death by being buried alive. The book speaks to us in our own language — and cheekily references other interpretations of the play: ("Remember how Brecht had you do the whole play with a door strapped to your back" the chorus asks Antigone) — while matching the horror and heartbreak of the original. Realizing death is near, Antigone says:

"You ask would I have done it for a husband or a child my answer is no I would not. A husband or a child can be replaced but who can grow me a new brother. Is this a weird argument, Kreon thought so but I don't know. The words go wrong they call my piety impiety, I'm alone on my insides I died long ago."

Parul Sehgal is an editor at The New York Times Book Review and a frequent contributor to NPR.

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Short Stories To Savor On A Winter Weekend

Nishant Choksi

Hortense Calisher, a virtuoso of the form, once called the short story "an apocalypse in a teacup." It's a definition that suits the remarkable stories published this year by three literary superstars, and two dazzling newcomers with voices so distinctive we're likely to be hearing from them again. These stories are intense, evocative delights to be devoured singly when you have only a sliver of time, or savored in batches, at leisure, on a winter weekend.

As a lagniappe, begin with Object Lessons, a pairing of 20 contemporary authors with 20 potent classics from the pages of The Paris Review. Among them: Dave Eggers on "Bangkok"; James Salter's time bomb of a love-gone-bitter story; and Aleksandar Hemon on Jorge Luis Borges' cosmic "Funes, the Memorious," about a man cursed with the inability to forget anything.

Then move on to these five, my best collections of 2012:

A mix of new and older stories, spanning 20 years of work by Sherman Alexie, a master storyteller who has been honored with numerous awards. Alexie is constantly experimenting with form, but he never forgets to be funny. He laces his incisive observations about race, class, gender, sex, infidelity, and Indian and non-Indian bigotry with biting wit. Standouts among the older stories: "Indian Country," which opens with a noted Coeur d'Alene author arriving in Montana to learn he's been jilted by a Navajo woman, and "War Dances," the story of a 41-year-old undergoing MRIs and steroid treatments for sudden deafness, which probes a still-painful father-son connection. New stories include the raucous "Midnight Basketball," in which one teammate disses Obama's jump shot, and "Cry Cry Cry," which begins, "Forget crack, my cousin, Junior, said, meth is the new war dancer," and takes the cousins through to Junior's brutal end. These are stories that provoke and illuminate.

This second collection won the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, one of the world's richest prizes for the short story form — and the title story is a stunner. Yes, it's a homage to short story wizard Raymond Carver's classic (substituting "Anne Frank" for "Love"), but the subtleties and wit are Nathan Englander's own. What seems at first to be an ordinary reunion between two high school girlfriends, now married, ends up exploring questions of Jewish identity, Israeli politics, intermarriage and the Holocaust.

Englander's lineage reaches back to Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, but he's less interior, more likely to give us pages of sparkling dialogue than reams of mulling over this or that. He has a natural sense of drama (a play he's written, based on an earlier story, "The Twenty-Seventh Man," opened at New York's Public Theater in November). And his relaxed storytelling voice makes this collection feel intimate, even when he's writing about Israeli history from the Yom Kippur War to today in "Two Hills," which focuses on two matriarchs of the settlement movement, or following the cross-country ramblings of a traveling writer whose crowds have dwindled down to every author's nightmare, a single demented fan who insists he read to him alone.

This collection is made up of 91 little chunks of flash fiction — a form that seems ideally suited to our fragmented times (think short, easily absorbed texts like NPR's Three Minute Fictions). Taken all together, they form a finely etched autobiographical portrait of a family that spans 50 years, and three generations.

At its heart: a woman whose life unfolds within a household role limited by her times. The character called simply "the Doctor's Wife" is a 1950s-era wife and mother living in a small town near Seattle. She cooks for her finicky family, does laundry daily, volunteers for community projects, and oversees her outdoorsy brood — Bob, Ann and Petrea, who calls herself Chrissie until she is college age. Watching helplessly as her fourth child, John, begins wasting away from a mysterious ailment, she "makes housekeeping into an art." Luis Jaramillo's combination of irony, tenderness, and restraint brings to mind Evan Connell's iconic portrait of Kansas City's Mrs. Bridge. As he explores how John's death as a toddler carries emotional echoes into the next generation, Jaramillo surprises us with miniature explosions like this, titled "In Contrast:"

"I was only depressed for, like, 40 years," Petrea says to me.

"Because of John?"

"Because of John."

For decades, the internationally lauded Alice Munro's stories have proven to be dependable pleasures, unparalleled for emotional nuance and depth. This collection, her 13th, includes 10 traditional short stories and four "almost stories" that are intentionally autobiographical, a first for Munro.

She often starts her stories abruptly — "At that time we were living beside a gravel pit," she writes in the haunting story "Gravel," in which that pit figures in a traumatizing childhood tragedy. "Amundsen" begins, "On the bench outside the station I sat and waited," and moves into an idiosyncratic story of thwarted early love set in a wartime TB sanitarium. The kick of Munro's work is, in part, its unpredictability. She interrupts herself, loops back to a chronological beginning, throws in strange images and oddities, and often ends with a sleight of hand that changes the meaning of a story altogether.

Reading "Dear Life" and the three other autobiographical stories, it's tempting to draw connections between Munro's life and her fiction. In these four she reveals the vivid memory for early-childhood moments and the sort of fraught mother-daughter relationship she often examines in her stories. When she describes her growing sense of separation from her mother's point of view, and how over time she began to understand her own inner self, we catch glimpses of the writer-in-the-making. It's a rare insight into a writer's life, and, along with these other recent stories, a treasure for Munro fans.

Claire Vaye Watkins' father, who died when she was 6, was a member of the Charles Manson family who escaped the cult to settle in the Mojave. In 10 stories set in her home state of Nevada (dubbed the "Battle Born" state because it was founded during the Civil War), she takes an unflinching look at the apocalyptic. She writes of a mother's suicide, a father's unnatural love for his daughter, a nuclear test blast that "sends the curse southeast, toward Las Vegas, to my mother's small chest, her lungs and her heart." She describes raw and arid landscapes around Reno, Virginia City, Black Rock and a brothel in Pahrump, where an Italian tourist holes up while waiting to learn if a friend lost in the desert has died. In her opening story, "Ghosts, Cowboys," she reckons with her own heritage, giving us artfully crafted sections on the founding of Reno during the Gold Rush era, the Spahn Ranch where 1950s Westerns were filmed, and her parents' "toxic and silver-gilded love." "And there is still so much I'll never know, no matter how much history I weigh upon myself," she writes.

Watkins has a survivor's gift for identifying the crucial detail, and she's a straight shooter. Each story from this talented writer is wired to detonate.

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Exclusive First Read: 'A Memory Of Light,' By Robert Jordan And Brandon Sanderson

Normally, we avoid dropping our readers into the middle of an established series, but we're making an exception for A Memory of Light, the final volume in one of the most epic, sprawling works of fantasy ever written — Robert Jordan's "Wheel of Time." In progress since 1990, it now stretches to 14 volumes. Jordan himself, tragically, did not live to finish the series; his widow, Harriet, chose fantasy author Brandon Sanderson to complete the last few books after Jordan's death in 2007.

The Wheel of Time books combine the influence of J.R.R. Tolkien with Jordan's background as a military historian and fantasy writer. They take place in a vast and minutely imagined world: Multiple Ages, continents and countries are detailed in these pages, each with their own histories, languages, customs, sayings, food, clothing, ethnic groups, military tactics and more. There is also an extensively developed magic system, with male Asha'man and female Aes Sedai both wielding gendered halves of a force called the Source, or the One Power.

As A Memory of Light opens, we join a sprawling cast of characters as they prepare for the climactic battle of Light against Shadow; a battle that will be fought both magically by the hero Rand, called the Dragon Reborn, and on the battlefield by the armies that have gathered to support him. In this excerpt, a schism has occurred within the Black Tower, Rand's school for male magic users. Androl, a member of the Black Tower, plots to rescue his leader Logain (once a pretender to Rand's position as the Dragon) from the influence of Tower commander Mazrim Taim — who may or may not be up to no good. Nonfans may be a bit lost at this point — but Wheel of Time devotees are in for a treat. A Memory of Light will be published Jan. 8.

A Dangerous Place

"Lord Logain and Taim have indeed patched up their differences," Welyn said, sitting inside the common room of The Great Gathering. He wore bells in his dark braids, and he smiled widely. He always had smiled too much. "Both were worried about the division we've been suffering and agree it isn't good for morale. We need to be focused on the Last Battle. This isn't a time for squabbling."

Androl stood just inside the door, Pevara beside him. It was surprising, how quickly this building—a former warehouse—had been transformed into a tavern. Lind had done her work well. There were a respectable bar and stools, and though the tables and chairs spread through the room didn't match yet, the place could seat dozens. She also had a library with a considerable number of books, although she was very particular about who she allowed to use it. On the second floor, she planned private dining chambers and sleeping rooms for visitors to the Black Tower. Assuming Taim started letting visitors in again.

The room was quite packed, and the crowd included a large number of newer recruits, men who didn't yet fall on either side of the growing dispute—either with Taim and his men, or with those loyal to Logain.

Androl listened to Welyn, feeling chilled. Welyn's Aes Sedai, Jenare, sat beside him, hand resting fondly on his arm. Androl didn't know her well, but he did know Welyn. And this thing with Welyn's face and voice was not the same man.

"We met with the Lord Dragon," Welyn continued." Surveying the Borderlands, preparing for humankind's assault against the Shadow. He has rallied the armies of all nations to his banner. There are none who do not support him, other than the Seanchan, of course—but they have been driven back.

"This is the time, and we will soon be called upon to strike. We need to focus one last time on our skills. The Sword and Dragon will be awarded liberally in the next two weeks. Work hard, and we will be the weapons that break the Dark One's hold upon this land."

Robert Jordan was the pen name of James Oliver Rigney Jr. (1948-2007), who wrote historical romances, Westerns and even a few Conan the Barbarian novels before embarking on the epic "Wheel of Time" series.

Liza Groen Trombi/Locus Publications Robert Jordan was the pen name of James Oliver Rigney Jr. (1948-2007), who wrote historical romances, Westerns and even a few Conan the Barbarian novels before embarking on the epic "Wheel of Time" series.

Liza Groen Trombi/Locus Publications

"You say Logain is coming," a voice demanded. "Why isn't he back yet?"

Androl turned. Jonneth Dowtry stood near Welyn's table. With his arms folded, glowering at Welyn, Jonneth was an intimidating sight. The Two Rivers man often had a friendly way about him, and it was easy to forget that he stood a head taller than you and had arms like those of a bear. He wore his black Asha'man coat, though it had no pins on the high collar—despite the fact that he was as strong in the One Power as any Dedicated.

"Why isn't he here?" Jonneth demanded. "You said that you returned with him, that he and Taim have spoken. Well, where is he?"

Don't push, lad, Androl thought. Let him think we believe his lies!

"He took the M'Hael to visit the Lord Dragon," Welyn said. "Both should be back on the morrow, the day after at the latest."

"Why did Taim need Logain to show him the way?" Jonneth said stubbornly. "He could have gone on his own."

"That boy is a fool," Pevara hissed.

"He's honest," Androl replied quietly, "and he wants honest answers." These Two Rivers lads were a good lot—straightforward and loyal. They weren't particularly practiced in subterfuge, however.

Pevara fell silent, but Androl could feel her as she considered channeling and hushing Jonneth with some bindings of Air. They weren't serious thoughts, just idle fancies, but Androl could sense them. Light! What had they done to one another?

She's in my head, he thought. There's an Aes Sedai, inside my head.

Pevara froze, then glanced at him.

Androl sought the void, that old soldier's trick to help him seek clarity before a battle. Saidin was there, too, of course. He didn't reach for it.

"What did you do?" Pevara whispered. "I can feel you there, but sensing your thoughts is harder."

Well, that was something at least.

"Jonneth," Lind called across the common room, interrupting the lad's next question to Welyn. "Didn't you hear the man saying how much traveling he's been doing? He's exhausted. Let him drink his ale and rest a spell before you pry stories out of him."

Brandon Sanderson is the author of the Mistborn books. He was chosen to complete the Wheel of Time series after Robert Jordan's death.

Micah DeMoux Brandon Sanderson is the author of the Mistborn books. He was chosen to complete the Wheel of Time series after Robert Jordan's death.

Micah DeMoux

Jonneth glanced at her, looking hurt. Welyn smiled deeply as the lad withdrew, pushing his way out of the common room. Welyn continued talking about how well the Lord Dragon was doing, and about how much each of them would be needed.

Androl released the void, feeling more relaxed. He looked around the room, trying to judge who in here he could rely upon. He liked many of these men, and many weren't completely for Taim, yet he still couldn't trust them. Taim had complete control of the Tower now, and private lessons with him and his chosen were coveted by the newcomers. Only the Two Rivers lads could be counted on to give any sort of support to Androl's cause—and most of them other than Jonneth were too unpracticed to be of use.

Evin had joined Nalaam on the other side of the room, and Androl nodded his head to him, sending him out to follow Jonneth into the storm. Nobody was to be alone. That done, Androl listened to Welyn's boasting, and noticed Lind picking her way through the crowd toward him.

Lind Taglien was a short, dark-haired woman; her dress was covered in lovely embroidery. She had always seemed to him a model of what the Black Tower could be. Civilized. Educated. Important.

Men made way for her; they knew not to spill their drinks or start fights in her inn. Lind's anger was not something a wise man ever wanted to know. It was a good thing she ran the place so tightly. In a city full of male channelers, a simple tavern brawl could potentially go very, very wrong.

"Does this bother you as much as it does me?" Lind asked softly as she stepped up beside him. "Wasn't he the one who, just a few weeks back, was talking about how Taim should be tried and executed for some of the things he'd done?"

Androl didn't reply. What could he say? That he suspected that the man they'd known as Welyn was dead? That the entire Black Tower would soon be nothing but these monsters with the wrong eyes, the false smiles, the dead souls?

"I don't believe him about Logain," Lind said. "Something's going on here, Androl. I'm going to have Frask follow him to night, see where he—"

"No," Androl said. "No. Don't." Frask was her husband, a man who had been hired to help Henre Haslin teach swordsmanship in the Black Tower. Taim thought that swordfighting was useless for Asha'man, but the Lord Dragon had insisted that the men be taught.

She eyed him. "You're not saying you believe—"

"I'm saying that we're in great danger right now, Lind, and I don't want Frask making it worse. Do me a favor. Take note of what else Welyn says tonight. Maybe some of it will be useful for me to know."

"All right," she said, sounding skeptical.

Androl nodded toward Nalaam and Canler, who rose and headed over. Rain beat against the rooftop and the porch outside. Welyn kept right on talking, and the men were listening. Yes, it was incredible that he'd swapped sides so quickly, and that would make some suspicious. But many people respected him, and the way he was off just slightly wasn't noticeable unless you knew him.

"Lind," Androl said as she started to walk away.

She glanced back at him.

"You . . . lock this place up tightly to night. Then maybe you and Frask should find your way into the cellar with some supplies, all right? You have a sturdy cellar door?"

"Yes," she said. "For all the good it will do." It wouldn't matter how thick a door was if someone with the One Power came looking.

Nalaam and Canler reached them, and Androl turned to go, only to run directly into a man standing in the doorway behind him, someone he hadn't heard approach. Rain dripped from his Asha'man coat, with the Sword and the Dragon on the high collar. Atal Mishraile had been one of Taim's from the start. He didn't have the hollow eyes; his evil was all his own. Tall, with long golden hair, he had a smile that never seemed to reach his eyes.

Pevara jumped when she saw him, and Nalaam cursed, seizing the One Power.

"Now, now," a voice said. "No need for strife." Mezar stepped in from the rain beside Mishraile. The short Domani man had graying hair and an air of wisdom to him, despite his transformation.

Androl met Mezar's eyes, and it was like looking into a deep cavern. A place where light had never shone.

"Hello, Androl," Mezar said, putting a hand on Mishraile's shoulder, as if the two had been friends for a long time. "Why is it that Goodwoman Lind would need to fear, and shut herself in her cellar? Surely the Black Tower is as safe a place as there is?"

"I don't trust a dark night full of storms," Androl said.

"Perhaps that is wise," Mezar replied. "Yet you go out into it. Why not stay where it is warm? Nalaam, I should like to hear one of your stories. Perhaps you could tell me of the time your father and you visited Shara?"

"It's not that good a story," Nalaam said. "I don't know if I remember it that well."

Mezar laughed, and Androl heard Welyn stand up behind him. "Ah, there you are! I was telling them you'd talk about defenses in Arafel."

"Come listen," Mezar said. "This will be important for the Last Battle."

"Maybe I will return," Androl said, voice cool. "Once my other work is done."

The two stared at one another. To the side, Nalaam still held the One Power. He was as strong as Mezar, but would never be able to face both him and Mishraile—particularly not in a room crammed with people who would probably take the side of the two full Asha'man.

"Don't waste your time with the pageboy, Welyn," Coteren said from behind. Mishraile stepped aside to make room for this third newcomer. The bulky, beady-eyed man pressed a hand against Androl's chest and shoved him aside as he passed. "Oh, wait. You can't play pageboy anymore, can you?"

Androl entered the void and seized the Source.

Shadows immediately started moving in the room. Lengthening.

There weren't enough lights! Why didn't they light more lamps? The darkness invited those shadows in, and he could see them. These were real, each one a tendril of blackness, reaching for him. To pull him into them, to destroy him.

Oh, Light. I'm mad. I'm mad . . .

The void shattered, and the shadows—thankfully—retreated. He found himself shaking, pulling back against the wall, panting. Pevara watched him with an expressionless face, but he could feel her concern.

"Oh, by the way," Coteren said. He was one of Taim's most influential toadies. "Have you heard?"

"Heard what?" Androl managed to force out.

"You've been demoted, pageboy," Coteren said, pointing toward the sword pin. "Taim's orders. As of today. Back to soldier you go, Androl."

"Oh, yes," Welyn called from the center of the room. "I'm sorry I forgot to mention it. It has been cleared with the Lord Dragon, I'm afraid. You never should have been promoted, Androl. Sorry."

Androl reached to his neck, to the pin there. It shouldn't matter to him; what did it really mean?

But it did matter. He'd spent his entire life searching. He'd apprenticed to a dozen different professions. He'd fought in revolts, sailed two seas. All the while searching, searching for something he hadn't been able to define.

He'd found it when he'd come to the Black Tower.

He pushed through the fear. Shadows be burned! He seized saidin again, the Power flooding him. He straightened up, going eye-to-eye with Coteren.

The larger man smiled and seized the One Power as well. Mezar joined him, and in the middle of the room, Welyn stood. Nalaam was whispering to himself in worry, eyes darting back and forth. Canler seized saidin and looked resigned.

Everything Androl could hold—all of the One Power he could muster—flooded into him. It was minuscule compared to the others. He was the weakest man in the room; the newest of recruits could manage more than he could.

"Are you going to make a go of it, then?" Coteren asked softly. "I asked them to leave you, because I knew you'd try it eventually. I wanted the satisfaction, pageboy. Come on. Strike. Let's see it."

Androl reached out, trying to do the one thing he could do, form a gateway. To him, this was something beyond weaves. It was just him and the Power, something intimate, something instinctive.

Trying to make a gateway now felt like trying to scramble up a hundred-foot glass wall with only his fingernails to give him purchase. He leaped, scrambled, tried. Nothing happened. He felt so close: if he could just push a little harder, he could . . .

The shadows lengthened. The panic rose in him again. Teeth gritted, Androl reached to his collar and ripped the pin free. He dropped it on the floorboards before Coteren with a clink. Nobody in the room spoke.

Then, burying his shame under a mountain of determination, he released the One Power and pushed past Mezar into the night. Nalaam, Canler and Pevara followed with anxious steps.

The rain washed over Androl. He felt the loss of that pin as he might have felt the loss of a hand.

"Androl . . ." Nalaam said. "I'm sorry."

Thunder rumbled. They splashed through muddy puddles on the unpaved street. "It doesn't matter," Androl said.

"Maybe we should have fought," Nalaam said. "Some of the lads in there would have supported us; they're not all in his pocket. Once, Father and I, we fought down six Darkhounds—Light upon my grave, we did. If we survived that, we can deal with a few Asha'man dogs."

"We'd have been slaughtered," Androl said.

"But—"

"We'd have been slaughtered!" Androl said. "We don't let them pick the battlefield, Nalaam."

"But there will be a battle?" Canler asked, catching up to Androl on the other side.

"They have Logain," Androl said. "They wouldn't make the promises they're making unless they did. Everything dies—our rebellion, our chances at a unified Black Tower—if we lose him."

"So . . ."

"So we're going to rescue him," Androl said, continuing forward. "Tonight."

Excerpted from A Memory of Light, by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson, copyright 2012 by The Bandersnatch Group, Inc. The phrases "The Wheel of Time" and "The Dragon Reborn," and the snake-wheel symbol are trademarks of The Bandersnatch Group, Inc. A Tor Book Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

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The SciFri Book Club Tours 'The Planets'

The SciFri Book Club is touring the solar system, with Dava Sobel's 2005 The Planets. Call in with a review of the book. Plus Jim Green, director of planetary science at NASA, joins the club to give an update on what's happened planet-wise since the book was published.

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'Miss Subways': A Trip Back In Time To New York's Melting Pot

Hide caption Today, Marcia Kilpatrick has a jazz radio program on public radio in Portland, Ore. Hide caption Kilpatrick was Miss Subways from November 1974 to April 1975. Hide caption Enid Berkowitz Schwarzbaum at home with her artwork in Valley Stream, N.Y., 2008. Hide caption Enid Berkowitz, now in her 80s, was Miss Subways in July 1946. Hide caption Berkowitz suns on the roof where she lived in 1944. Hide caption Peggy Byrne at Church of Our Saviour, New York, N.Y., where she continues to work into her 80s as director of operations. Hide caption Sanora Selsey with her granddaughter at her home in Brooklyn. Hide caption A headshot from Selsey's modeling portfolio in the mid 1960s. Hide caption In 1948, Thelma Porter became the first African-American Miss Subways. Hide caption Miss Subways Dorothy Calaghan poses in a new subway car at Willis Point. Photo by Ed Clarity/NY Daily News Archive/Getty Images/Courtesy of Fiona Gardner

For more than 35 years, riders on the New York City subways and buses during their daily commute were graced with posters of beaming young women. While the women featured in each poster — all New Yorkers — were billed as "average girls," they were also beauty queens in the nation's first integrated beauty contest: Miss Subways, selected each month starting in 1941 by the public and professionally photographed by the country's leading modeling agency.

Photographer Fiona Gardner, captivated by old Miss Subways posters she'd seen, worked with journalist Amy Zimmer to track down 40 of the more than 200 former pageant winners. They've juxtaposed images of those women today with their Miss Subways photographs in their book, Meet Miss Subways. Several former winners featured in the book also shared their stories with the audio documentary project Radio Diaries.

"When you looked at Miss Subways, you were looking at a star, no question about it," Peggy Byrne, a 1952 Miss Subways, told Radio Diaries' Samara Freemark. And when riders gazed at the Miss Subways posters, they were often seeing something more, something unusual: a group of young women far more diverse than other beauty queens at that point in American history.

"Somewhere along the line it occurred to me I had never seen a clearly ethnic name on that poster," says former Miss Subways Enid Berkowitz Schwarzbaum. "My name was distinctively Jewish, and that might have been part of the reason I might have said let's give it a shot. Let's see what happens."

Enid, of course, did go on to take the Miss Subways title in July 1946, when her poster proclaimed that the Hunter College student was "plugging for [a] B.A., but would settle for an M.R.S." — code for a college-educated woman in the market for a husband.

Two years later, Thelma Porter became the first black Miss Subways, more than three decades before Vanessa Williams became the first black Miss America in 1983. Latino and Asian Miss Subways all joined their white Miss Subways counterparts before the pageant ended in 1976.

The Radio Diaries story, airing on All Things Considered, was produced by Samara Freemark, with help from Joe Richman and Ben Shapiro, and edited by Deborah George.

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5 Young Adult Novels That You'll Never Outgrow

Nishant Choksi

This was a strange and wonderful year for young adult fiction — but also a confused and divisive one. We learned that 55 percent of young adult fiction was read by adults. Debates raged over what constituted a young adult novel versus an adult novel. Apologetic grown-ups sneaked into the teen section of the bookstore, passing subversive teens pattering into the adult paranormal and literature and mystery shelves.

For the most part, I let the discussion pass me by. I don't care what a book is classified as: I care that it's good. So it should shock no one that my list of my top five young adult reads includes books I think adults will love too. They don't all contain magic, but I find them all magical.

I'm not generally a fan of historical fiction. I realize this seems somewhat hypocritical, as I was an overeager history major, but often, I find historical fiction more impenetrable than a primary source document. The characters feel either intangible or modern. I get distracted by historical info-dumps; bored by epic scale machinations. So when I got sent a copy of Code Name Verity, I thought, OK, I'll read 20 pages and then I'll give it to my sister. But my sister has not yet gotten this book, because I don't want to let it out of my house. I adored it. In Code Name Verity, two girls join the war effort in World War II Britain. During a mission, they're shot down over France and a lengthy interrogation begins. What sounds like a deeply unpleasant story is actually a frequently wry and astonishingly real portrayal of two best friends. It's hard, but not harrowing. And most importantly, it has stuck with me ever since I picked it up. It is one thing to love a novel. It's another for that love to endure for months. It's the holy grail for this particular reader, and that is why it is my No. 1 read of 2012.

I'm an unashamed lover of movies as well as books, and I have a special place reserved in my black heart for movies that feel like books and vice versa. Nick Hornby and John Green generally live in this zone for me, with characters and plots both walking a fine line between quirky and unbelievable. Jackson Pearce elbows her way into this realm with Purity. In it, Shelby promises her dying mother that she'll listen to her father, love as much as possible, and live without restraint. Innocent-enough promises in theory, but in practice, they lead to all sorts of capers and crises involving best friends, sex and church ladies. The combination of Pearce's humorous voice and the novel's bite-sized length make it easy to hand to most everyone. Like Hornby's and Green's books, I would pick it up for the light and breezy concept, and remember it for the surprisingly poignant character relationships.

Ordinarily I judge young adult novels on the precise same scale I would judge an adult novel. These are not books for children, after all — these are novels for readers who are, in many cases, every bit as sophisticated as myself. There should be no sliding scale. And yet here I am admitting that I loved Endangered because of how it would've affected me as a teen versus now. It's a story about bonobos — a more peaceful relative of the chimpanzee (and us) — but it is also a story about the Democratic Republic of Congo. Sophie, whose mother runs a bonobo sanctuary, rescues a bonobo and ends up on the run with him during a sudden political upheaval. This book reminded me a little bit of those old-fashioned adventure stories I read growing up. There's something a bit timeless about the telling of it, about the girl-and-an-animal element, about the questing for safety. Something familiar. It's not a book that changed my life now, having read about the Congo before. But it would've changed my life then, as a teen. The world would have become a bigger and more terrible place.

*True confession: Eliot Schrefer and I are both published by Scholastic.

Although this young adult novel is a 2011 release, it landed on most people's radars when it snagged the 2012 Michael J. Printz Award in January. Dripping with the dubious charm of a small, Southern town, it tells the story of a boy whose brother goes missing at the same time that a presumed-extinct woodpecker is sighted nearby. The tale of the lost brother and the found bird dance deftly around chapters about a far-removed missionary; the connection between the two makes no sense at all until, suddenly, it does. When I began this book, I had been searching for a novel about helicopters, magic and guns, and I was resentfully aware that this quiet contemporary was not going to be it. So Where Things Come Back had an uphill climb to win my heart. But win my heart it did, despite being devoid of guns, helicopters and magic. This is a good book about a good kid, and it's a good story told remarkably well.

My relationship with high fantasy — fantasy set in another world — has always been tumultuous. Actually, I'd like to refer you to the first item on this list. Everything I said about historical fiction also applies here. Which is why, despite multiple recommendations, I let this debut novel about a half-dragon, half-human girl sit unread on my desk for five months. I'll admit I very much wanted to remain a curmudgeon, but the thorough world-building and specific characters won me over. This city of austere dragons and emotional humans felt complete, as if I could turn down any number of alleys and never find the seams showing. At 480 pages, the novel is satisfyingly plump with politics, religion and prejudice — and a restrained but edifying measure of love. It also has a healthy dose of music (I was unsurprised to discover Rachel Hartman was a fellow admirer of medieval polyphony), and I find I'm very interested to see what Hartman writes next. Teens and adults alike will love to creep down the magical streets of Seraphina's city. I certainly did.

Maggie Stiefvater is the author of the young adult novels Shiver, The Scorpio Races and The Raven Boys.

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