A selection of summaries from The New York Times Book Review: THE UNNAMED, by Joshua Ferris. (Reagan Arthur/Back Bay/Little, Brown, $13.99.) The hero of Ferris' second novel can't stop walking -- for miles and miles, away from his work at a high-powered law firm, away from his loving wife and troubled daughter. No doctor or psychiatrist has been able to diagnose his 'walking thing,' which becomes progressively worse. 'What does it mean?' our reviewer, Jay McInerney, asked. 'Tim's affliction might be a metaphor for addiction, for careerism.' But he found fault with Ferris' descriptions of the hero's misadventures: 'not bad writing, but ... not good storytelling.' ENGAGING THE MUSLIM WORLD, by Juan Cole. (Palgrave Macmillan, $17.) In this 'field guide to the politics of modern Islam,' as David E. Sanger called it in the Book Review, Cole, a historian at the University of Michigan, explores what he sees as the twin dynamic of 'Islam Anxiety' in the United States and 'America Anxiety' in the Muslim world. 'The bigoted way in which some politicians have dealt with Islam' is bound to fail, he says. The French scholar Gilles Kepel writes, 'The war between George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden defeated both of its protagonists.' In BEYOND TERROR AND MARTYRDOM: The Future of the Middle East, translated by Pascale Ghazaleh (Belknap/Harvard University, $17.95), Kepel notes the similarities between the neoconservative and jihadist 'grand narratives,' with their emphasis on eradicating evil and creating an idealized state. FUN WITH PROBLEMS: Stories, by Robert Stone. (Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $13.95.) These stories are filled with benders and adulteries and even crimes, but their central struggle is the battle between head and heart. Stone's characters are dangerous mostly to themselves, and they are not especially likable as they wrestle with their demons. But at least they realize it. A VILLAGE LIFE, by Louise Glueck. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $13.) This 11th collection of poems by Glueck, a Pulitzer Prize winner, unfolds tales from an imagined country town. In a stylistic departure, she uses the village as a lens to examine the lives within, which counterpoint the memories of her life without. THE END OF OVEREATING: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite, by David A. Kessler. (Rodale, $15.99.) As head of the Food and Drug Administration, Kessler accused cigarette makers of manipulating nicotine content to make their product more addictive. Here he finds some similarities with the food industry. Industrial chefs, he says, artfully layer fat on sugar on salt on fat to trigger the release of the brain chemical dopamine, leading to a kind of 'conditioned hypereating.' Food companies 'design food for irresistibility,' he notes. 'It's been part of their business plan.' ONCE ON A MOONLESS NIGHT, by Dai Sijie. Translated by Adriana Hunter. (Anchor, $14.95.) An obsessive search for a missing half of a mutilated Buddhist sutra in China is at the center of this 'strange and beautiful' novel, as our reviewer, Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow, put it. Sijie has a fertile imagination and an ability to create striking images and vignettes. MODERNISM: The Lure of Heresy From Baudelaire to Beckett and Beyond, by Peter Gay. (Norton, $21.95.) Modernism 'has had a good long run,' Gay, a historian of the European Enlightenment, concludes in this sweeping survey of the poets, playwrights, painters and architects who set out in the mid-19th century to rewrite the rules of art. Its two main impulses, he says, are 'the lure of heresy' and a compulsion to explore the artist's interior world. This is familiar territory, but Gay is prodigiously well informed and a graceful writer. THE CASE FOR GOD, by Karen Armstrong. (Anchor, $16.95.) In this engaging examination of Western religious thought, Armstrong, a former nun, seeks to rescue the idea of God from militant atheists and literal-minded adherents alike. She emphasizes the pursuit of an ineffable presence rather than the search for theological correctness, like those premodern thinkers who understood faith as a practice, not a system -- an approach that is compatible with a liberal, scientific society, she says. This is 'an eloquent case for the ancient roots of the liberal approach to faith,' Ross Douthat wrote in the Book Review. WHY THE DREYFUS AFFAIR MATTERS, by Louis Begley. (Yale University, $16.) Begley deftly retells the story of the Dreyfus Affair and explicitly connects it to our time, lucidly explaining its complicated legal and political turns and using his novelistic skills to invoke Dreyfus' suffering. He urges contemporary writers to address the damage done to 'the fabric of American society by the crimes and abuses of the Bush administration committed in the course of its pursuit of the war on terror.' EVIL FOR EVIL, by James R. Benn. (Soho, $14.) Billy Boyle, a rookie Irish cop from South Boston who is the hero of Benn's series of World War II mysteries, is challenged when he is assigned to investigate a theft of weapons, possibly by the IRA, from a depot in Northern Ireland. 