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Author Anya Von Bremzen's new memoir, Mastering The Art of Soviet Cooking, is a tragic-comic history of a family and a nation as seen through the kitchen window. Everything we ate in the Soviet Union was grown ... by the party state," she says. "So, with the food, inevitably, you ingested the ideology."

Author Leah Hager Cohen says it's time to stop faking your way through conversations. "Once you finally own up to what you don't know, then you can begin to have honest interactions with the people around you," she explains.

As a child, author Koren Zailckas was an introvert with numbed emotions. When her fourth-grade teacher, "Mr. Cool," assigned the works of Edgar Allan Poe, she was horrified. Murder? Torture? How inappropriate! But the terrifying stories and poems transformed her: she says they scared her into life.

Jonathan Lethem's Dissident Gardens sketches a history of the American left that is at once intimate and expansive. Out of the lives of a few conflicted characters, reviewer Mohsin Hamid explains, the book lends depth and emotion to events that affected millions.

Eighty-seven-year-old restaurant critic Marilyn Hagerty gained viral fame last year with a positive review of the Olive Garden in Grand Forks, N.D. Her work has now been collected in a new book, Grand Forks: A History of American Dining in 128 Reviews.

Anya von Bremzen's new memoir is a delicious narrative of memory and cuisine in 20th century Soviet Union. She writes about her family's own history and contemplates the nation's "complicated, even tortured, relationship with food."

Saxophonist Gabe Baltazar is one of the last living links to an era when Asian-Americans began to make a name for themselves in jazz. Now, at the age of 83, he's sharing his story in an autobiography.

In Blowback, Plame channels her expertise in nuclear counterproliferation into a "realistic portrait" of a female covert agent. Plame confesses that there's a lot of downtime in the life of a spy, but still, the CIA is "the world's biggest dating agency."

Tom Perrotta has been called "the Steinbeck of suburbia" for his depictions of self-sabotaging adolescents and foolish middle-class adults. His new book — his first short-story collection in 19 years — is full of strong but repetitive stories, sad tales of failures earnestly yearning to do better.

Rebecca Musser was raised in an extremist, polygamist church. She tells the harrowing story of her childhood, her first marriage, and her escape in her autobiography.