THE HEMLOCK CUP: Socrates, Athens and the Search for the Good Life, by Bettany Hughes (Vintage, $17.95.) Socrates, an enigma for 25 centuries, left no written legacy, and our knowledge of him comes mainly from three contemporaries - his pupils Plato and Xenophon, and the parodist Aristophanes. Hughes outlines Socrates by illuminating the world as he experienced it; the result is a multifaceted book that includes gritty details of daily life in Athens and a vivid history of the Peloponnesian War. WEST OF HERE, by Jonathan Evison (Algonquin, $15.95.) A multitude of characters, unified in their dreams of prosperity, carve out lives in a fictional outpost on the Olympic Peninsula in this broad-spectrum novel. Beginning on the eve of Washington's statehood in 1889, Evison charts Port Bonita's trajectory over more than 100 years, from bawdy frontier to strip-mall cornucopia. MOBY-DUCK: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists, and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them, by Donovan Hohn (Penguin, $16.) A maritime misfortune - a load of bath toys fell off a storm-wracked container ship in the northern Pacific in 1992 - spurred Hohn to investigate where those rubber toys came from, where they drifted and why. His quest led him into the worlds of shipping conglomerates, Arctic researchers, maverick sailors and Chinese toy factories. VACLAV & LENA, by Haley Tanner (Dial, $15.) Tanner's first novel, about young love in a Russian émigré community in Brooklyn, draws wrenching contrasts between childhood fantasy and the grim world outside. Vaclav, from a noisy, loving home, dreams of fame as a Coney Island magician; Lena, without a family of her own, is marooned in a strange land. TIGER, TIGER, by Margaux Fragoso (Picador, $16.) "Spending time with a pedophile can be like a drug high," Fragoso writes in this memoir of her 15-year relationship with a man she met at a public pool in New Jersey when she was 7 and he was 51. She describes the secrecy that nurtured the relationship, and shows how easily pedophiles can slip into children's lives. PULSE: Stories, by Julian Barnes (Vintage International, $15.) Couples are the beating heart of Barnes's urbane third collection, which examines loss, friendship, sex and, in particular, what it takes for two people to click. "Barnes is among the most adventurous writers - in style, versatility and narrative structure - of his Amis-McEwan-Hitchens generation," Christopher Benfey wrote here. HOW THE END BEGINS: The Road to a Nuclear World War III, by Ron Rosenbaum (Simon & Schuster, $16.) With the means of its own destruction, Rosenbaum cautions, humanity has itself to fear. This bracing book plots the likely origins of a nuclear war in the Middle East, Pakistan or in the tensions and miscommunications between the United States and Russia. THE WEIRD SISTERS, by Eleanor Brown (Berkley, $15.) The siblings who narrate Brown's endearing first novel - staid Rose, fast-living Bean and bohemian Cordy - have become self-reproaching "failures." With their mother battling cancer, the sisters return home to face their parents" frailty and their own personal disappointments.