WHAT HIGH SCHOOLS DON’T TELL YOU (And Other Parents Don’t Want You to Know). By Elizabeth Wissner-Gross. Plume, 300 pages, $15, paperback.

WITH MUSIC AND JUSTICE FOR ALL . By Frye Gaillard. Vanderbilt University Press, 229 pages, $29.95, hardcover.

I’m usually not a fan of short stories, preferring instead to immerse myself in thick volumes and staying awhile with the characters.

Sgt. Wesley Featherstone was a 20-year veteran of the Colma Police Department when he was found dead in his police cruiser at Cypress Lawn Cemetery.

Murder and mayhem once again run rampant in this Atlanta native’s latest thriller.

Life in Italy is operatic.

“Hilarious and utterly irreverent,” “savagely hilarious,” and “brutally funny” are descriptions of praise on the jacket of Alan Black’s first book, “Kick the Balls.”

This book is a fantasy novel that takes place in the island nation of Altania where magick (the author’s spelling) still exists and witches and magicians still live. It is divided into three books.

David Guterson is the author of “Snow Falling on Cedars” and several other books.

Sept. 11, 2001, the day of the great attack on the World Trade Center, was a tactic which could never be used again, literally 71 minutes after its success.

“I’m a realist, I guess, and what I’m interested in is showing the West as it is and has been, not as it might have been and not as imagination has re-created it.” – Wallace Stegner

Americans, if asked, would say they are not imperialists.