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Richard Ford, author of The Sportswriter and Independence Day, has written a new novel entitled The Lay of the Land. Independence Day was the first book to win both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award.

Carl Sandburg received one of his two Pulitzer Prizes for a 1950 compilation of his poems. A new collection focuses on the Midwestern poet's early works, what the editor calls Sandburg's "great period."

What's a "blurker"? Or a "pavement princess"? Or a "plokta"? What does "peeps" mean? Writer Paul Dickson knows. A confessed addict to collecting and identifying slang words, Dickson has written a new and updated dictionary of American slang.

At Washington's Gallaudet University, the nation's only liberal arts school for the deaf, protests against the woman picked to lead the university, Jane Fernandes. Gallaudet officials expected the demonstrations to die down, but bloggers are keeping the issue alive.

In his book Failed Illusions, scholar Charles Gati offers a new assessment of the Hungarian anticommunist uprising of 1956, arguing that the failures were widespread, and the "gap between words and deeds was huge" in the U.S. response.

A slew of recently released books examine U.S. policy and military strategy behind the Iraq war. George Packer, author of 2005's highly acclaimed The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq, reviews some of the latest titles.

When Edward Perkins went to South Africa as the first black U.S. ambassador to the then apartheid nation, he recalls its leader angrily telling him to stay out of the country's affairs. Perkins refused to heed the warning and visited black townships.

When a student showed Alice McDermott a discarded library copy of Katherine Anne Porter's Pale Horse, Pale Rider, stamped "Low Demand," McDermott felt like she'd been punched in the stomach. The title novella in this collection, McDermott says, exhibits "intelligence, wit, heartache, profundity and marvelous prose."

If you see a body floating down the Ganges, it's usually safe to assume it's dead. Devout Hindus deposit the remnants of their dead into the river, as they believe it purifies the soul. But don't be too sure. Body-surfing has arrived in this, the holiest of waterways.

The premise for each story in Robert Olen Butler's new book is disturbing. Severance recalls the last thoughts of those who have been decapitated. St. George, Marie-Antoinette, Medusa, Anne Boyeln Sir Walter Raleigh, the Lady of the Lake ... In Butler's imagining, their last words are poetic and brief, and reveal what is most precious about being alive.