How’s this for alternative history: the first humans were female, and they were called the Clefts. Why? I do not know. They lived in harmonious bliss, impregnated every so often by “a fertilizing wind or wave”. It had been like this since before anyone could remember. But then there was this child, a child produced with a terrible defect, a “lumpy swelling”, the likes of which they had never seen before. From this child, rape and murder are born, and love, consensual sex, and babies as we now know them — the first of a new race.

This could only be the work of that zany Doris Lessing, who, at age 88, is one of the most lauded novelists of the 20th century. The Cleft examines the interplay of and inherent friction produced by the two genders, using a vehicle - the creation myth - that is as effective as it is original. NPR’s Alan Cheuse reviewed the novel a few days back, and you should listen to it here.

We as a country like rich people. We’re fascinated by them. Whole magazines, TV series, books and movies are devoted to the badness of the idle rich, and somehow, they never get boring. The latest in the vein is The Descendants, the first novel by Hawaiian writer Kaui Hart Hemmings. Set against the lush backdrop of her native state, the book follows resident rich person Matthew King, a royal descendant and one of the largest landowners in the state. Should be happy, yes? Of course not. One daughter, an ex-model, is a recovering drug addict, the other is a smart-ass attention whore, and his wife lies in a coma after a boat-racing accident, unlikely to reawaken. Matt faces the challenge of rallying family and friends to say their bedside goodbyes, except that one man, the most important man, has not been told: the man she was having an affair with, and quite possibly the one man she truly loved. Discovering that man’s existence, the now-estranged husband has to hit the road with his daughters to find this man, and profound personal change and self-actualization remain close at hand throughout.

How about that for a tale of the upper-class woe?

NPR’s Alan Cheuse reviewed the novel, and what that man says matters! Listen to it here, and be sure to check out the little “Novel Ideas” blurb at the bottom of the page.

As anyone who has set foot in a Barnes and Noble over the past month now knows, Jeffery Eugenides’ Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Middlesex was the Oprah Book Club’s pick for July. As it is now August, I felt I should make one last effort to direct you over to the supplementary material on Oprah’s website, which now includes a fireside chat between O and Eugenides, a Q and A in which reader questions are answered, and Mediterranean-style recipes to serve at YOUR next get-together.

Everything you ever wanted to know is here.

Have you ever been to Provincetown? It’s a hell of a town. Nestled amongst tourist hamlets at the outermost tip of Cape Cod, it has inexplicably become a magnet for bohemian culture and boasts one of the largest gay populations in Massachusetts. Many a vacationing family has unwittingly driven out there only to their very foundations irrevocably rocked.

Hyperbole, yes, but the town still would make a fantastic setting for your first novel, except that Annie Dillard beat you to it. Her latest is called The Maytrees and follows the post-WWII marriage of bohemian couple Toby and Lou Bigelow from its tipsy, when-a-young-man’s-fancy-turns-to-love beginnings to its crumbling, adulterous descent some twenty-five years later.

Described on her barnesandnoble.com author page as being a “gregarious recluse”, Dillard emerged to briefly discuss The Maytrees on NPR over the weekend. Listen to the full interview and read an excerpt.

Philip K. Dick has, in the years since his death in 1982, supplied the basis for more okay/pretty good science fiction than any other person. Ever. Surprisingly, and unjustly, the man that gave us Blade Runner, Minority Report, A Scanner Darkly and Total Recall (among others) is still largely unknown to the general populous. Until now…

Literary hero Jonathan Letham, whose own novel You Don’t Love Me Yet appeared this past March, has edited and republished four of Dick’s novels — The Man in the High Castle, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Ubik, and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? — in one seminal volume: Philip K. Dick: Four Novels of the 1960s.

Letham talked about the project on NPR this past weekend, during which time he cited Dick as a major personal influence and discussed the author’s notoriety in the fledging sci-fi scene (”He’s sort of like what Lenny Bruce was to comedy in the 1960s.”) Listen to the full interview.

Exempted from military service, violinist Gottfried Keller spent the waning days of World War II playing for wounded soldiers, a task he felt was demoralizing and a misuse of his talents. He dared not complain, though, and was rewarded with a trip to nearby labor camp. After meeting briefly with the commander of the camp, Keller begins playing anew, but this time for the inmates, for whom his violin, it is hoped, will inspire hope in otherwise despondent men. As Keller plays the greats, the author Eugene Drucker, unravels his character’s life, revealing the death of his best friend and the Jewish fiancé he fled from at the outset of the war.

Drucker is himself a professional violinist, and his mastery of the instrument informs The Savior, his first novel, all throughout. He appeared yesterday on The Diane Rehm Show. Listen to the full interview.

Jewish terrorism analyst Solomon Rosner lies dead in a hotel in Amsterdam, and it is Gabriel Allon’s job to sift through Rosner’s files. It’s in doing this that Allon discovers two things:

1. Rosner had requested an emergency meeting with Allon’s employers, Israeli Intelligence, not twenty-four hours before his death.
2. The target is the daughter of an American ambassador to the Court of St. James.

Allon appears seconds to late to save the girl from being brutally kidnapped, but reveals his face to her captors, setting in motion of chain of events that ties Allon forever to the girl and places in his hands the fate of Western Europe.

Dan Silva is routinely hailed as one of the most gifted spy novelists alive, and Gabriel Allon, the art-restorer/part-time spy/”the legendary but wayward son of Israeli Intelligence”, is perhaps his best known character. Appearing in no less than seven books so far, Allon has gone to hell and back to give us a thrill, and the seventh, The Secret Servent, is no exception, addressing relevant but touchy issues such as Islamic fundamentalism and the moral boundaries of intelligence and interrogation.

Silva’s been in the news a fair amount this week. NPR reviewer Alan Cheuse says nice things about him here, and Today has , posted the first chapter on its website.

A meteorologist at a local news station writes a novel about a super hurricane. If that isn’t wish fulfillment, I don’t know what is. The meteorologist in question is WABC-TV New York’s Bill Evans, who teamed up with novelist Marianna Jameson to write Category 7 (Subtitle: “It’s the Biggest Storm in History!”). The super hurricane in question is Simone, the product of a mad scientist named Carter Thompson who has learned how to create and guide impossibly huge storm systems. So now Simone is threatening to wipe Manhattan clean off the face of the earth, and only a courageous group of meteorologists can stop it.

And how about this for an apocalyptic first sentence: “Rain lashed through the hellishly hot Saharan sky, hurling itself groundward with chaotic fury only to evaporate before it made contact with the dying earth.”

Read the excerpt here.

Cleveland Indians superstar Jay Alcazar has been accused of his rape, and damned if his manager Howie Traveler is going to leave him high and dry. Before you run to flip on SportsCenter, perhaps you should make a quick stop at the NPR website.

“What! NPR doesn’t cover sports! You’ve gone mad, boy!”

No, you’ve gone mad! NPR recently sat down with sports writer Frank Deford, in whose novel The Entitled, you’ll find Alcazar and Traveler faced with decisions that could end their careers or land them in jail. To complicate things further, Alcazar has been around the bases a few times off the field, too, and when Traveler walks by his player’s hotel room on one such night, he sees that will make him continually question everything he’s put his career on the line for.

And we don’t find out who is right ’til the very end!

When asked why he chose baseball to frame his plot, Deford responded, “the easiest thing to write about and I guess the most fun to write about …. Every day there [are] winners and losers and there’s drama and there’s joy and there’s glamour. And the guys playing it are young, and so lots of times they say all the wrong things.”

True enough. Listen to the interview and read the article here.

It’s hard to believe Jersey bounty hunter Stephanie Plum has been with us for thirteen books now. Have no idea who that is? I didn’t either, until I read a Today excerpt from author Janet Evanovich’s latest book, Lean Mean Thirteen. We find series heroine Plum reunited with her lousy lawyer husband, Dickie Orr, albeit briefly, though, as Orr disappears not fifty pages in, leaving only bloodstains and bullet holes. At the logical top of the list of people who might want Orr dead, Plum sets out to clear her name, and with the aid of super hunky, on-again off-again boyfriend officer Joe Morelli, she discovers just how deep Orr’s lousiness goes.

Need a better reason to read Thirteen? This is a description of Lula, a woman who works in Plum’s cousin’s bail bonds office.

Lula is a black woman with a Rubenesque body and a Vegas wardrobe that’s four sizes too small. She is a former ‘ho, currently working as a file clerk for the office and a wheelman for me … when the mood strikes. Today, she was wearing big fake-fur Sasquatch boots, and her ass was packed into poison-green spandex pants. Her pink sweatshirt had Love Goddess spelled out in sequins across her boobs.

Today calls the novel “daring”, and who am I to disagree?