WHY THIS WORLD: A Biography of Clarice Lispector, by Benjamin Moser. Oxford University, $19.95. Despite a cult following of artists and scholars, the Brazilian novelist Clarice Lispector, who was born in the nightmarish landscape of post-World War I Ukraine and died in Rio de Janeiro in 1977, is little known in the United States. Moser peels away the mythology surrounding Lispector and shows how her development as a writer was closely linked to the story of her turbulent life. Growing up in Brooklyn as "Katya," the clever heroine of Towles's first novel aspires to an all-American inclusion and restyles herself as "Katey" in 1930s Manhattan. A chance encounter in a Greenwich Village jazz bar will propel Katey toward the upper echelons of New York society. DESTINY OF THE REPUBLIC: A Tale of Madness, Medicine, and the Murder of a President, by Candice Millard. Anchor, $16. Millard, whose previous book, "The River of Doubt," concerned Theodore Roosevelt's near-fatal journey of exploration in South America, here examines the turmoil that led to James A. Garfield's election, the lunacy that got him shot and the medical malfeasance that turned a manageable wound into a mortal one. Algonquin, $13.95. Using parallel plot lines, Parker imagines the enigmatic lives of Theodosia Burr Alston, daughter of Aaron Burr and wife of a South Carolina governor, whose ship sank off the coast in 1813; and the last three inhabitants of a barrier island in the Outer Banks, who abandoned their homes and moved to the mainland in the early 1970s. THE MEMORY OF ALL THAT: George Gershwin, Kay Swift, and My Family's Legacy of Infidelities, by Katharine Weber. Broadway, $14. This family portrait includes a host of eccentric characters (Zero Mostel, Ezra Pound) as Weber reflects on her dysfunctional relationship with her father, the peripatetic filmmaker Sidney Kaufman, and the affair between George Gershwin and her grandmother, the Broadway composer Kay Swift. THE CAT'S TABLE, by Michael Ondaatje. Vintage International, $15. Filled with the "coloring and locations of memoir," this mesmerizing novel seems to lead readers through three deeply submerged weeks in Ondaatje's own memory - from the year 1954, when, at age 11, he traveled on an ocean liner from Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) to England. Grouped with the ship's outcasts, Ondaatje's narrator tumbles from one adventure to another, penetrating the vessel's forbidden precincts. WILD COAST: Travels on South America's Untamed Edge, by John Gimlette. Vintage Departures, $16.95. Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana - a tangled knot of jungle, rock and savanna with "mad, gaudy, toxic and exotic" life - are vividly captured in this travelogue. THE KID, by Sapphire. Fifteen years after the publication of her first novel, "Push" - the basis for the 2009 film "Precious" - Sapphire traces the life of Precious" second child, Abdul. As this book opens, Abdul is 9 and Precious has died of AIDS, a loss that haunts him as he is bounced from one bad situation to the next.