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The Settlement Cook Book is largely forgotten today. But in its time, Lizzie Black Kander's book exposed Jewish homemakers transplanted from Eastern Europe to the American way of cooking — and living.

Adam Haslett's debut novel pits a retired history teacher against the young banker trying to build a garish house on her father's land. Reviewer Heller McAlpin calls Haslett's book "a literary go-kart."

Once asked to write a full story in six words, legend has it that novelist Ernest Hemingway responded: "For Sale: baby shoes, never worn." In this spirit, Smith Magazine invited writers "famous and obscure" to distill their own life stories into a single sentence. It All Changed in an Instant is the fourth collection of six-word memoirs from the magazine.

ALEC: The Years Have Pants, by Eddie Campbell, collects the artist's comics about his alter ego, in biographical order. Critic Glen Weldon says the massive volume brings notes of sadness to the surface of Campbell's charming stories.

Just as wars over oil played a major role in 20th century history, a new book makes a convincing case that many 21st century conflicts will be fought over water.

Author Gail Godwin's novel, Unfinished Desires, spins a tale of love, envy and reckoning at a Catholic girls' school in North Carolina. Reviewer Jane Ciabattari says the book is a "spellbinding psychological ghost story, near operatic in intensity."

Citizens of London is Lynne Olson's history of three Americans who helped steer the United States toward World War II. Edward R. Murrow, Averell Harriman and John Gilbert Winant sold the war to the American public and to President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Louise Erdrich's new novel, Shadow Tag, is the story of a woman who writes two diaries — one that she knows her husband is reading, and one that she keeps secret. As she manipulates her husband, their marriage falls apart.

Joshua Ferris (Then We Came To The End) studies the monster within in The Unnamed. Lush language limns a Soviet childhood of privation and paranoia in A Mountain of Crumbs.

President Obama recently announced plans to spend nearly $100 billion in 2011 solely on job creation. The proposed budget is aimed at reducing the nation's employment rate of 10 percent. But in a new book, labor activist Gabriel Thompson explores the current job market and takes a look at some of the least-desired jobs that always seem available. Host Michel Martin talks to Thompson about his time spent working undercover in the lettuce fields of Arizona, at an Alabama chicken plant and as a delivery boy in New York City, as chronicled in the book, Working in the Shadows: A Year Doing Jobs (Most) Americans Won't Do.