Cincinnati writer Dale Patrick Brown says, in her lively new book Literary Cincinnati, the city “can point to an impressive literary history, but rarely does.” Brown proceeds to remedy the situation with eminently readable accounts of literary figures, homegrown and visiting.  

Although gardeners have always been drawn to the exotic, the authors of this book encourage exactly the opposite approach and eye non-native plants as encroachers. As gardeners themselves, this husband and wife team has transformed their own grounds from a traditional mixture of naturalized and native plants to one that harbors only natives to the benefit of birds, butterflies, bees and other life.  

When Basil Balian was growing up in Iraq, everybody was reading a series of 19th century over-the-top stories of dark deeds and derring-do by a French writer, Pierre Alexis Ponson du Terrail. Rocambole, the unlikely hero of these tales, moves from bad guy to good guy in the course of numerous books charting his story.   

Every once in a blue moon a book comes along that has the power to change the way we see our lives. That is exactly the case with an extraordinary new memoir titled Dust To Dust by Benjamin Busch.  

In January 1982, an elderly white woman in South Carolina named Dorothy Edwards was found murdered inside her home. After a botched investigation by local and state investigators and barely a shred of evidence, Edward Lee Elmore (or “Black Elmo,” as local cops liked to call him) was arrested, charged with the crime, quickly brought to trial, convicted and sentenced to death.  

Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney is a political chameleon: a man of many faces and a past shrouded in mystery, half-truths and secrets. That’s according to The Real Romney, by Boston Globe reporters Michael Kranish and Scott Helman, the first comprehensive biography of the man many believe will be the 2012 Republican presidential nominee.  

If you had a way to travel back in time and change the course of history, what would you do? If you’re Jake Epping, the mild-mannered Maine high school teacher who discovers a portal to the past in Stephen King’s latest classic, 11/22/63, you’d go back half a century and try to prevent the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.  

Dan Chaon grew up in rural Nebraska. Lonely and bored, he took refuge in his uncommonly active imagination. “It was one of those small elevator towns where there were like 15 people who lived there, and I was the only kid even close to my age,” Chaon says by phone from his current home in Cleveland.   

In his compelling new history, The Beauty and The Sorrow: An Intimate History of the First World War, historian Peter Englund has chosen firsthand accounts from 20 very different and disparate individuals who either fought in the war or were touched in some fashion by “The Great War,” as it has been called.  

He calls his own prose “country noir” and writes about a very unique kind of American: people living their lives with nothing left to lose and operating on a level that many have described as “desperate.” Now, with the publication of 12 devastatingly gritty and somewhat surreal short stories in The Outlaw Album, 57-year-old Daniel Woodrell is finally getting the attention and respect that he deserves.   

At her home in Michigan on the occasion of Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and former Punk rocker Patti Smith’s 45th birthday, the multitalented Smith crafted together a modest collection of memories from her childhood, vignettes, poems and tributes to other writers and performers like Sam Shepard.  

Began as one of the boldest and most audacious experiments and inventions in the history of entertainment, MTV has been a dominant force in popular culture since its launch in 1981.    

It takes an intellectual scholar with the knowledge, depth and curiosity of Harvard professor Stephen Greenblatt to take a tale ancient and unknown and turn it into a compelling saga.  

With her tough, tense and taut tale of one rural family’s bitter and bloody fight for survival in the days leading up to Hurricane Katrina, 2011 National Book Award-winner Jesmyn Ward has secured herself a place among such other great Southern writers.  

It’s always a treat when a book comes along that lives up to the hype. That is the case with John Jeremiah Sullivan’s Pulphead, a collection of 14 brilliant experiential essays in which the writer places himself at the center of the story. The 37-year-old Southern-born Sullivan is now being compared with first-person journalists like Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson and David Foster Wallace.