RENEGADE: Henry Miller and the Making of "Tropic of Cancer," by Frederick Turner (Yale University, $24.95.) Turner tells a good story: how Miller's "Tropic of Cancer" came to be written, came to be banned and came to be an American classic. This novel explores the difference between gay and straight sex from the male perspective in ways that seem real and free of cliché. FAITH, LIES, AND THE WAR ON TERROR: The Lives of Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Aafia Siddiqui, by Deborah Scroggins (Harper/HarperCollins, $27.99.) A thoughtful double biography. STANZAS IN MEDITATION: The Corrected Edition, by Gertrude Stein. Edited by Susannah Hollister and Emily Setina (Yale University; paper, $22.) Stein's posthumously published poem is an amazing work - a lively, imaginative modernist epic. SOMETIMES THERE IS A VOID: Memoirs of an Outsider, by Zakes Mda (Penguin Press, $26.95.) The South African novelist and playwright's absorbing autobiography illuminates his wide, worldly life. GOD'S JURY: The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World, by Cullen Murphy (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $27.) A learned argument that the Inquisition is the historical template for the "war on terror." THE ICE BALLOON: S. A Andrée and the Heroic Age of Arctic Exploration, by Alec Wilkinson (Knopf, $25.95.) A fascinating account of a Swede's 1897 attempt to fly a hydrogen balloon to the North Pole. Several women's lives intersect at a South London church in this lyrical novel. BERLIN STORIES, by Robert Walser (New York Review Books; paper, $14.) A Swiss writer's exuberant tales of his experiences in Berlin in the early 1900s.