In the store: $13.50 Online: $11.25 (plus S/H) Publisher's price: $15.00 Available January 3

"Thank goodness, then, for Claire Dederer, who has written the book we all need: the long-awaited funny, smart, clear-headed, thoughtful, truthful, and inspiring yoga memoir. To simplify my praise: I absolutely loved this book."--Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love

In the store: $23.40 Online: $19.50 (plus S/H) Publisher's price: $26.00 Available January 10

Pak Jun Do is the haunted son of a lost mother--a singer "stolen" to Pyongyang--and an influential father who runs Long Tomorrows, a work camp for orphans. There the boy is given his first taste of power, picking which orphans eat first and which will be lent out for manual labor. Recognized for his loyalty and keen instincts, Jun Do comes to the attention of superiors in the state, rises in the ranks, and starts on a road from which there will be no return.

Considering himself "a humble citizen of the greatest nation in the world," Jun Do becomes a professional kidnapper who must navigate the shifting rules, arbitrary violence, and baffling demands of his Korean overlords in order to stay alive. Driven to the absolute limit of what any human being could endure, he boldly takes on the treacherous role of rival to Kim Jong Il in an attempt to save the woman he loves, Sun Moon, a legendary actress "so pure, she didn't know what starving people looked like."

In the store: $23.35 Online: $19.45 (plus S/H) Publisher's price: $25.95 Available January 17

At first it's just Jews--then everyone. People are leaving their families to survive. Sam's wife, Claire, is already stricken and near death. In a year or two, as she grows into adulthood, their daughter, Esther, too, will become a victim. Sam and Claire decide to leave Esther on her own, hoping a "cure" will miraculously appear. Sam's car is waved off the road at a government-run laboratory where horrific tests are being conducted to create non-lethal speech. Throngs bang on the doors to be subject volunteers; they're all carried out half-dead. When Sam realizes what's going on, he makes a desperate escape, vowing that if he dies it will be with his family, the only refuge of sanity and love.

In the store:$13.50 Online (plus S/H): $13.50 Publisher's price: $15.00 Available Now

Songs of My Families, A Thirty-Seven-Year Odyssey from Korea to America and Back follows the double life of a Korean girl, Lee Myonghi, who was adopted by an American family in 1971, when she was five years old. On the plane to America with another young adoptee, the two girls were accidentally switched, and each American family adopted the wrong child. When the switch was discovered some weeks later, Myonghi's new parents refused to give her up. They named her Kelly Jean.

Meanwhile, Kelly's Korean parents eventually realized that they had been lied to. They believed that she would go to school in America and return home, not be adopted into another family. They searched for her, but because of the mix-up they could not find their daughter.

Thirty-six years after she last saw her family--after Kelly gave up her own first daughter for adoption--her birth family managed to find her. In 2008, Kelly went back to Korea and reconnected with her mother, her dying father, her four siblings, and the culture and community into which she had been born. Then, in 2010, Kelly found the beloved daughter she had given up 24 years earlier.

Told with refreshing honesty, Songs of My Families is the moving story of two generations of women forced to make agonizing choices as they coped with harsh economic realities and personal crises. It is also an affirmation of the strength of family, the importance of one's cultural heritage, and the enduring power of love.

Kelly Fern graduated from the University of Minnesota with a B.A. in European Studies. She is a behavioral detection officer for the Department of Homeland Security and a French language interpreter. Kelly lives with her husband and their two children in Minneapolis.

Bring your Twin Cities Literary Punch Card to this event and collect a punch. Collect a dozen punches, and your card becomes a $15.00 gift certificate. Find more events on the Twin Cities Literary Calendar.

In the store:$22.50 Online (plus S/H): $18.75 Publisher's price: $25.00 Available Now

In Pity the Billionaire: The Unlikely Resurgence of the American Right (available January 3, 2012), Thomas Frank, the great chronicler of American paradox, examines the peculiar mechanism by which dire economic circumstances have delivered wildly unexpected political results. Economic catastrophe usually brings social protest and demands for change--or at least it's supposed to. But when Thomas Frank set out in 2009 to look for expressions of American discontent, all he could find were loud demands that the economic system be made even harsher on the recession's victims and that society's traditional winners receive even grander prizes. The American Right, which had seemed moribund after the election of 2008, was strangely reinvigorated by the arrival of hard times. The Tea Party movement demanded not that we question the failed system but that we reaffirm our commitment to it. Republicans in Congress embarked on a bold strategy of total opposition to the liberal state.

Using firsthand reporting, a deep knowledge of the American Right, and a wicked sense of humor, he gives us the first full diagnosis of the cultural malady that has transformed collapse into profit, recast the Founding Fathers as heroes from an Ayn Rand novel, and enlisted the powerless in a fan club for the prosperous. The conclusions Frank reaches are startling, original, and profound.

Thomas Frank is the author of What's the Matter with Kansas?, The Wrecking Crew, and One Market Under God. A former opinion columnist for The Wall Street Journal, Frank is the founding editor of The Baffler and a monthly columnist for Harper's. He lives outside Washington, D.C.

Bring your Twin Cities Literary Punch Card to this event and collect a punch. Collect a dozen punches, and your card becomes a $15.00 gift certificate. Find more events on the Twin Cities Literary Calendar.

In the store:$11.21 Online (plus S/H): $13.45 Publisher's price: $14.95 Available Now

Hand Me Down My Walking Cane is the first novel from Carla Hagen. It is the first fictional look at the real-life 1930s resettlement when the inhabitants of Faunce, Minnesota, and other towns located in what is now the Beltrami Island State Forest were relocated to larger, less remote towns. The resettlement was the largest of its kind in Minnesota and one of the largest in the US. Hagen, a native of Lake of the Woods County, grew up listening to her elders speak of the old pioneers who settled the area.

At the height of the Great Depression, Faunce Ridge, a tiny village on the Minnesota-Canadian border, is declared a rural slum by Roosevelt's New Deal government. Hometown boy, Emil Rousseau, is sent to photograph the poverty of his childhood neighbors to sell Congress on resettlement. Told from the perspective of Emil, his childhood sweetheart Rose, madam Sadie, and bootlegger Magnus, Hand Me Down My Walking Cane speaks to the mystical pull of this harsh and beautiful place while bringing to vivid life the history of the borderland.

Carla Hagen is a practicing senior attorney for the Hennepin County Attorney's Office. She lives with her husband LeRoy and her cat Tob, in St. Paul. She also occasionally co-hosts Coraz�n Latino, a Latin music show on KFAI, with Eve MacLeish. For more information, visit www.carlahagen.com.

Bring your Twin Cities Literary Punch Card to this event and collect a punch. Collect a dozen punches, and your card becomes a $15.00 gift certificate. Find more events on the Twin Cities Literary Calendar.

• Tuesday, January 3, 7:00pm, at the School II (600 Market St, Chanhassen)
• Tuesday, January 10, 7:00pm, at the Aster Cafe (125 SE Main Street, St Anthony Main, Minneapolis; call 612/379-3138 for table reservations)
• Tuesday, January 17, 6:00pm, at the Amsterdam Bar & Hall (6 W Sixth St, Saint Paul)