The average citizen, playing with his or her iPhone, spares not a moment's thought for the scientists who made it possible. Happily, a worthy remedy to this shameful gap in our communal knowledge comes in Frank Close's The Infinity Puzzle. Written with pellucid prose, a keen eye for salient details, a talent for the illuminating metaphor, a passion for the topic, and a novelist's gift for portraiture, narrative, and suspense, this book plumbs the rich roots of our current scientific understanding of how the universe works, down where it all gets fuzzy and weird.

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No amount of prior study or imaginative mental time-travel can prepare the reader for the outré and unsettling sights to be found in Julia Suits's wild and wacky...The Extraordinary Catalog of Peculiar Inventions. Burly, topless businessmen clad in hula skirts and ankle bells. Blindfolded clerks riding a Satan's Derby's worth of mechanical goats. Regally crowned shopkeepers plummeting down trick staircases. Farmers committing suicide by cannonball. The mind reels, as these uncanny vestiges of an extinct realm tease our wits and senses with devilish confusion. Chaos reigns supreme!

In the wake of the North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il's death, suggestions for reading about the enigmatic nation have been circulating via Twitter, including frequent mention of Adam Johnson's forthcoming novel The Orphan Master's Son, which follows a boy from life in the labor camps to work as a professional kidnapper.

Earlier this year the BNR featured a Five Books list of informative titles about Korea -- North and South -- led by Barbara Demick's penetrating study Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea.

The full list of suggestions follows.

 Atlantic contributing editor and BNR contributor Graeme Wood discusses the influence and legacy of Christopher Hitchens.

"Even those who were on the opposite side of any argument from Christopher Hitchens," writes A.C. Grayling, "were compelled to admire the sharpness, control, and extraordinary richness of his mind."

Click "Read More" to see his full rememberence.

The literary world grapples with an enormous loss today:  Journalist, author, and provocateur Christopher Hitchens has died of pneumonia, arising from cancer of the esophagus.  His death was announced by Vanity Fair, where he had been a contributing editor since 1992. 

His reputation was built on his eloquence, his delight in putting entrenched opinions to challenge, and his eager assumption of Orwell's mantle as a defender of truth against ideological distortion. His impact as a stylist -- Hitchens wielded both a deadly wit and an implacable sense of joy in literary combat -- was as large on his fellow writers as his politically unclassifiable positions (he defended atheism as fiercely as he did the War in Iraq) have been on the surrounding culture.

Wondering what to get the chef in your life? We asked Christopher Kimball, founder and editor of America's Test Kitchen and author of such delicious cookbook classics as The Cook's Bible and Fannie's Last Supper, to share with us his Holiday Cookbook Buyer's Guide for 2011. Click to see his mouthwatering choices

The transgressive writer Samuel Delany has theorized that one major reason for the creation of cities in the history of civilization was to provide more and better sex than could be found in pastoral or village settings. By this measure -- and according to the randy evidence found in the endlessly entertaining, illuminating and simply shocking new book by Catharine Arnold, The Sexual History of London, that storied city must be accounted a shining beacon in humanity's progress.

When we asked Stacy Schiff  to share a few favorite reads, the author of Cleopatra obliged with a revealing look at the bookshelf of a biographer -- packed with the lives of  literary and political figures seen up close.

There can be no more dependable indicator that we now all inhabit (or delude ourselves into believing we inhabit) a Philip K. Dick universe (or the shoddy simulacrum thereof) than the appearance of this mammoth volume of Dick's journals, letters, and private stream-of-consciousness essays, which he voluminously generated for a full eight years following his infamous mind-blasting, soul-shattering, paradigm-upsetting cosmic epiphany of 1974. Only waves of patented PKD-style reality distortion could have landed us in our contemporary situation.

This handsome new edition of the classic children's fantasy novel The Phantom Tollbooth comes stuffed with extras in the form of various introductions and appreciations, by such intelligent, perceptive, and young-at-heart literary folks as Maurice Sendak, Michael Chabon, and Philip Pullman. These tidbits are all savory. But the real meat of the package remains Juster's inspired skylarking in the pages of this eternally silly-yet-wise novel, with its pitch-perfect original bramble-bush illustrations by Jules Feiffer. Having an excuse to enjoy this book again, and to introduce it to a new generation of readers, more than justifies investment in a bright, fresh copy!

On Wednesday night, November 16th, the 2011 National Book Awards winners were announced: Jesmyn Ward’s novel Salvage the Bones took the award for fiction, while Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve: How the World Became Modern received the award for nonfiction. Nikky Finney's Head Off and Split won for poetry; Thanhha Lai took the award for young people's literature for Inside Out and Back Again.

Right now Daniel Clowes is voyaging through the prolonged and impressive midpoint of his career, an era which began with Ghost World in 1997 and shows no sign of diminishing. Everything he produces at this juncture is rich with mastery, fertile with invention, and stamped with his ineffable individual touch. The Death-Ray originally appeared in 2004 as issue number 23 of Clowes's periodical comic Eightball. Limited in availability and impact by this format, the story has been rescued by current publication as a luxuriously oversized hardcover. 

Any reader who loved The Men Who Stare at Goats or Sex and Rockets will derive similar joy from this finely wrought survey of gonzo ingenuity in the service of science. These "discoverers" or "paradoxers," as they were called in Victorian times, firmly endorse science's claim to represent an objectively true taproot into the numinous substratum of creation. So these outsider physicists are simply seeking to participate in the same consciousness-raising enlightenment which all the great scientists have experienced. But, bereft of any actual talents and training demanded by the academic and corporate "hegemony," they are forced to perform a kind of "hedge science," like the second-string wizards who can't make it into Hogwarts. 

Neil Gaiman narrates an animated adaptation of James Thurber's classic of dark-humored fantasy.

This year marks the hundredth anniversary of the Loeb Classical Library, and Adam Kirsch is writing a three-part celebration of the influential series in honor of its centenial. In his first essay, Kirsch examined Socrates from the (sometimes unflattering) perspectives of writers other than Plato. This month, he examines the arresting modern relevance of the Annals of the Roman historian Tacitus. 

The fourth time is, apparently, the charm. With The Sense of an Ending, Julian Barnes wins the 2011 Man Booker Prize. The multifaceted writer has been shortlisted three times before, for three wildly different novels -- first in 1984 for his innovative Flaubert's Parrot; fourteen years later for  England, England; and then again for Arthur and George in 2005. In The Sense of an Ending, a man in late middle age finds that a secret from his childhood threatens to overturn the careful architecture of his comfortable life.

The name of Tim Powers has been a secret talisman for a select group of readers for decades. His ardent fans have used that byline as an unfailing compass pointing to contemporary urban fantasies of surpassing elegance, thrills, cleverness, and emotional heft, such as his Fault Lines trilogy or Declare. But Powers has also worked in a historical or steampunk vein, and it is this mode that launched his name into wider spheres of public attention with the adaptation of his novel On Stranger Tides as the latest installment of Johnny Depp's Pirates of the Caribbean series.

The Swedish Academy announced Thursday that the 2011 Nobel Prize in Literature goes to eighty-year-old Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer. In its press release -- itself an almost poetically compressed document -- the Academy said they chose Tranströmer "because, through his condensed, translucent images, he gives us fresh access to reality." Helen Vendler celebrated his work in a 2009 essay in the New York Review of Books, saying: "He looks deep into the pool of the mind until an image looks back at him, and he holds it steady."

For my generation, the gold standard of popular science writing was always Isaac Asimov. In the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, erudite but layman-friendly books on scientific topics were much scarcer than in this current Golden Age, populated by such giants as Brian Greene, Michio Kaku, Richard Dawkins, and Roger Penrose. So when Asimov began his column of scientific journalism in 1958 in the pages of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction -- a feature that was to last for almost thirty-five years, until his death in 1992 -- and thereafter commenced to issue a steady stream of books on a near-infinity of topics, he found an eager audience that adopted him as their helmsman. Jovial, witty, down-to-earth, omniscient, wide-ranging, skeptical, scrupulous, meticulous, and speculative, Asimov always delivered essays that did not so much hold the reader's hand as shine a light ahead while he encouraged you to follow in his bold and brave footsteps. Consequently, for me to assert that a living writer possesses Asimov's virtues is to offer high praise indeed.

In search of the "Los Angeles novel": New York City is teeming with writers -- journalist, novelists, poets, essayists -- all hoping to catch their big break. So it's no surprise that many of our greatest American novels are set in Gotham. Yet there's something refreshing about a fantastic Los Angeles novel as well. The Barbarian Nurseries by Héctor Tobar, which will be featured as a B&N Discover Great New Writers pick this holiday season, is the newest addition to that list. In honor of the publication of his captivating new L.A. novel, we asked Hector to provide his own list of favorite L.A. works. 

Having thoroughly enjoyed Kate Beaton's first collection of wonderfully nonsensical and risible, yet somehow seductively educational comics (her foresworn history degree does not go unemployed in her new artistic career), I went about investigating her website, Hark! A Vagrant, where many of the strips first appeared and where many new ones continue to manifest, and yet I somehow remained clueless as to the derivation and meaning of the title she chose to bestow on her book and site.

If you are the kind of amateur word-lover who is still in mourning over the passing of William Safire, or who readily employs "anagram" as a verb ("[In the Middle Ages] some people believed that a person's character or fate could be discovered by anagramming his or her name."), or who knows that "sotadics" is a synonym for palindromes, then you will immediately fall acronym over hexagram in love with Barry Blake's survey of all the tricky and elusive stunts that words can pull, Secret Language, originally published in 2010 and now appearing in a handy trade paperback edition.

I can easily picture, with my own share of his glee, the enormous smile that must have brightened the face of Paul Hendrickson when he first crystallized his brilliant conceit for organizing his new account of the last thirty years of Ernest Hemingway's life: to use Hemingway's beloved and intimately essential cabin cruiser Pilar as the polestar of the narrative. No wan symbol or factitious theory to serve as blinkered Virgil, but instead a tactile, intensely documented, sensual, action-crammed vessel (the boat hosted some five hundred visitors, famous and otherwise, in its lifetime) that would carry a rich cargo of story.

This month, Craig Thompson returns with Habibi, as different from his award-winning graphic novel Blankets as could be, but nonetheless evocative of the same intelligence, compassion, creative range, and skills. The tale takes place in the desert kingdom of Wanatolia, and it's a curious realm indeed. On the one hand, camel caravans continue to cross the desert in immemorial fashion, slaves are bought and sold, and a sultan straight out of the 1,001 Nights maintains a lush harem, complete with eunuchs and viziers. On the other hand, oil pipelines thread the sands, people wear mirrorshades, and a giant hydroelectric dam and a sprawling modern metropolis form important venues.

A young man -- he was born in Bulgaria in 1982 -- Miroslav Penkov possesses an old soul. Such is the conclusion to be drawn, at least, from the haunting, haunted stories in his debut collection East of the West. They all exhibit an elegiac, melancholy wisdom more fitting for some aged, seasoned Isaac Bashevis Singer or even Tolstoy. They evoke tears, but not a frenzy of wailing; sorrow, but not utter despair. They seem reflective of the period after everything has collapsed, when people realize life continues, post apocalypse, and they must now figure out how to carry on. Of course, the disintegration of the Soviet empire plays a large part in all this.

Rebecca Makkai's The Borrower is one of those rare debut novels that makes an impact through its message as well as its literary achievement. Praised widely for being beautifully written, and chosen by The Daily Beast as a must read, The Borrower chronicles the relationship between a librarian and a ten-year-old patron who turns to her out of confusion about his sexuality. Their adventures take them around the country on a journey that proves both comic and moving -- but more important, Makkai is reaching out to lonely, confused kids everywhere, offering solace in the form of books. Here's her reading list and the video she made explaining her picks. Pass this along to everyone you know -- because they probably know a struggling kid who needs it.

It's always exciting to contemplate the naming of a new poet to the office of U.S. Poet Laureate.  Philip Levine, the 83-year-old Detroit native and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Simple Truth, has been named by the Librarian of Congress as the Poet Laureate for 2011-12. 

In his review of Mr. Levine's last collection, News of the World, our reviewer, Christopher Phelps, wrote: "Levine's is a world where men and women 'buy and sell each other.' It is also "an immense, endless opera punctuated by the high notes of sirens & the basso profundo of trucks & jackhammers & ferries & tugboats."  You can read the full review here.

The recent tragic shootings in Norway by Anders Breivik lend Gary Younge's new book an extra measure of importance and highlight the timely utility of this thoughtful and thought-provoking study, dating even from its pre-Oslo conception by an intrepid journalist with his finger firmly on the zeitgeist. Younge's bold remit is nothing less than the examination of "identity" in all its manifestations -- "religious adherence, chromosomal composition or melanin content," as he wittily phrases it at one point -- and identity's role, for good or ill, in the individual and civic lives of all peoples.