Complete book coverage for Sept. 20, 2009

Her new memoir, ‘The Possibility of Everything,’ chronicles a tumultuous period in the life of an earth mother.

It’s the underworld of the 1960s and 1970s. Murder. Blood. Sex. Power. Style. Lingo. Terse sentences. Vintage Ellroy.

The author continues his fascination with characters seemingly destined to hold their own lives at arm’s length. But the insights they might have gleaned aren’t lost on the reader.

They could be divine or neural -- John Geiger’s ‘The Third Man Factor’ and Rami Shapiro’s ‘The Angelic Way’ consider the possibilities.

A poet in search of the proper form for his self-expression.

A look back, from middle age, on a man’s life in a sequence of poems.

A playful, bawdy, ingenious experiment in storytelling via the old-fashioned joke.

Dutch psychologist and primatologist Frans de Waal, using primate tendencies as a model, contends that humans are hard-wired for compassion.

‘The Collector’; ‘Shop Class as Soulcraft’

Fiction Weeks on list1.A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore (Knopf : $25.95) A naive Midwestern college coed takes a job as a nanny for a recently adopted toddler.1 2.Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins (Scholastic Press: $17.99) The winners of the annual Hunger Games face the consequences of their victory.1 3.The Help by Kathryn Stockett (Putnam: $24.95) The lives of a maid, a cook and a college graduate become intertwined while changing a Mississippi town. 15 4.Homer & Langley by E.L.

Fiction 1. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson ($14.95) 2.