April 22-May 5: Julia Child, Jonathan Franzen And Herta Muller

Jonathan Franzen presents a collection of recent essays and speeches about everything from his violent encounter with bird poachers in Cyprus to the suicide of his friend and rival David Foster Wallace to the ways technology has changed how people express their love.

Julia Child was a genuine rebel: She took the pretensions that embellished French cuisine and fricasseed them to a fare-thee-well, paving the way for a new era of American food — not to mention blazing a new trail in television. Bob Spitz reveals the history behind the woman who taught America how to cook.

On an icy morning in January 1945, 17-year-old Leo Auberg is deported to a camp in the Soviet Union. He spends the next five years shoveling coal, lugging bricks, mixing mortar and battling an endless calculus of hunger: One shovel load of coal is worth 1 gram of bread. Herta Müller conjures up the distorted world of a labor camp in all its physical and moral absurdity.

In Al Tafar, Iraq, 21-year-old Pvt. John Bartle and 18-year-old Pvt. Daniel Murphy cling to life as their platoon launches a bloody battle for the city. The two men do all they can to protect each other from the forces that are pressing in: the insurgents, physical fatigue and the mental stress that comes from constant danger. As reality begins to blur into a hazy nightmare, Murphy becomes increasingly unmoored from the world around him and Bartle takes actions he could never have imagined.

If your dreams pull you in one direction and your heart in another, which should you follow? This is the question that haunts Kate Meadows, a world champion athlete whose 8-year-old daughter, Sophie, is battling a recurrence of childhood leukemia just as Kate is about to compete for her last chance at an Olympic gold medal. For years, Kate has sacrificed everything for her family and watched her best friend and closest rival, Zoe Castle, conquer the world stage. Kate has never won gold and will have to go through Zoe — who has everything to lose — to get it.