Nov. 25-Dec. 1: A Scholar, A Singer And Princeton's Dark Secrets

Something suspicious is going on in Princeton, N.J., in the otherwise sleepy year of 1905. Children turn to stone; an underworld opens at the edge of town; snakes squirm up and down walls. What have the people of Princeton done to bring such curses on themselves? In Joyce Carol Oates' gothic novel, fictional characters mix with historical figures — including Woodrow Wilson and Upton Sinclair — as a man on a quest to save his sister confronts the repressed horrors of high society.

A young intelligence officer endures a Nazi concentration camp; an orphan in rural France faces a few profound decisions; a music producer in the 1970s falls in love with a singer who breaks his heart; a man in a Victorian poorhouse remembers with sadness the son he gave away; and a lonely Italian neuroscientist makes a revolutionary discovery — humans have no souls. Out of these five interconnected stories, Sebastian Faulks weaves a novel that explores the changing dimensions of what makes a self.

During the 1980s, singer-songwriter Elton John watched friends and loved ones suffer and die from HIV and AIDS. Struggling with a drug addiction, he says, he did nothing to help people with the disease. That changed after he met Ryan White, a teenage hemophiliac who was shunned by his community after contracting HIV. As the musician's memoir explains, White's struggle and death prompted John to enter rehab, kick his addictions and become a vocal advocate for AIDS research, prevention and treatment.

The linguist and historian Bernard Lewis began his career before World War II, and since then he has both witnessed and participated in many of the tumultuous events in the Middle East. At 96 years old, Lewis looks back on close to a century's worth of work and study, covering issues as wide-ranging and as sensitive as race and slavery in Islam and his role as adviser to former Vice President Dick Cheney — not to mention a few indelible moments with Ted Kennedy and Moammar Gadhafi.