Paperback Row - NYTimes.com SO MUCH PRETTY, by Cara Hoffman (Simon & Schuster, $16.) The disappearance of a local waitress foments an atmosphere of paranoia in an upstate New York town in Hoffman's first novel, which addresses rural poverty, domestic abuse, teenage violence and pollution. Over the course of 17 years, the story moves among the town's inhabitants, many of whom remain willfully blind to the deeper causes of the tragedy. WILD BILL DONOVAN: The Spymaster Who Created the OSS and Modern American Espionage, by Douglas Waller (Free Press, $16.) Bold and imprudent, William J. Donovan (1883-1959) built the Office of Strategic Services - the C.I.A."s precursor - in the midst of World War II. Waller's entertaining biography recounts the O.S.S."s triumphs and debacles, and Donovan's clashes with his bitter rival, the F.B.I. director J. Edgar Hoover. GRYPHON: New and Selected Stories, by Charles Baxter (Vintage Contemporaries, $16.) Wounded by failing relationships and other traumas, men and women wander the Midwest in these 23 stories, as Norman Rockwell contours give way to something like the chilling starkness in the work of Edward Hopper. Our reviewer, Joyce Carol Oates, described these tales as "poignant and disturbing, and all of them highly readable." NEVER SAY DIE: The Myth and Marketing of the New Old Age, by Susan Jacoby (Vintage, $15.95.) Jacoby, whose previous books include "The Age of American Unreason" and "Freethinkers," tries to deflate our obsession with longevity, which conceals, she argues, an irrefutable truth: extreme old age isn't easy. "Never Say Die" raises tough-minded questions about poverty in old age, dementia, end-of-life care and assisted suicide. Translated by Alexander O. Smith with Elye J. Alexander (Minotaur, $14.99.) In Higashino's ingeniously plotted mystery, a lonely math teacher in Tokyo deduces that the neighbor he worships has murdered her abusive ex-husband and then calmly offers to help her escape the consequences. TO END ALL WARS: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918, by Adam Hochschild (Mariner/Houghton Mifflin, $15.95.) Hochschild's stirring history of World War I concentrates on the losses suffered by Britain's rank and file and on the courage of those, like the philosopher Bertrand Russell, who decided the war was not a just one. "This is a book to make one feel deeply and painfully, and also to think hard," Christopher Hitchens wrote here. In Gibb's novel of contemporary Vietnam, Hanoi's street food and thriving art scene reflect both continuity and change, particularly as experienced by three characters linked by their ties to the founders of a heretical literary journal in the 1950s. HENRY'S DEMONS: Living With Schizophrenia, a Father and Son's Story, by Patrick Cockburn and Henry Cockburn (Scribner, $15.) In this memoir Patrick Cockburn, a war reporter for The Independent of London, and his son Henry - who received a diagnosis of schizophrenia at the age of 20 - offer a panoptic view of the illness and a family's steadfast response to a bewildering condition.