Turkish poet Kerim Alakuolu, who goes by the acrostic Ka, returns to his homeland from political exile in Germany as a favor to a journalist friend from his youth.  He spends three days in the downtrodden northeastern city of Kars (kar means "snow"), covering municipal elections.  Never married, the middle-aged Ka, who has neither written a poem nor made love in four years, has ulterior motives: to reunite with his muse and with pek, an uncommonly beautiful woman from his student-movement days.

Throughout Ka's stay a blizzard rages, symbolizing the insularity of the city's inhabitants and also their blind faith, whether religious or secular.  Largely a meditation on the clash and meld of Western and Eastern values, embodied by the geographic happenstance of Turkey - literally a landmass bridge between Europe and the Middle East - Snow also confronts the writer's role in witnessing and recording history.

A Gemini and an unwitting double agent, Ka is embraced by a panoply of political and governing factions, ranging from Kurdish separatist guerillas to the quasi-feminist "head-scarf girls."  Set against the backdrop of 20th-century Turkish wars and skirmishes relayed in fleeting precis, the novel is alternately farcical and overwrought.

Snow reads best when the depths of Ka's poetic strivings unfold.  "It's because we failed to find happiness in poetry that we find ourselves longing for the shadow of politics," Ka thinks.  A presumed atheist flirting with faith, he repeatedly insists that snow reminds him of God.  During his sojourn in Kars, Ka composes 19 nearly flawless poems, which come to him effortlessly, as if divinely received, but which vanish like snowflakes when Ka's notebook goes missing.

Pamuk, a visiting scholar at Bard College, has been compared by critics to Mann, Proust, and Kafka.  In Snow, he invents political intrigues and love triangles worthy of a modernist epic, though stylistically dipped in meta-postmodernity.  Though uneven, Pamuk's fifth novel nevertheless has much to reveal about contemporary Turkish life, as if, in the author's words, "pausing from time to time to admire the huge snowflakes, the endless repetition of an ordinary miracle."

Pamuk will lecture on "Melancholy Tristesse: Landscape of Istanbul," in the Bertelsmann Campus Center at Bard College Tuesday, October 5, at 7 pm.  (845) 758-6822.

- Pauline Uchmanowicz

Bellevue, Harlem, Hell's Kitchen, and the New York City Morgue are not places one tends to associate with humor and poetry, and in fact, there's very little that's conventionally pretty about the whirlwind tour of late `70s Manhattan that veteran 911 paramedic Maggie Dubris gives us in Skels.  A skel, in EMT/cop parlance, is a street person, and that's the world that paramedic Orlie Breton finds herself thrown into in her first weeks on the job.

Orlie is great company, hip and good-hearted.  Her roommate plays guitar with a drag queen's band called Weenie and the Hummers.  Her sometime-boyfriend Neal is an inventor and "light artist," working feverishly to perfect a Rube Goldberg sounding machine he calls a "holographer."  As for Orlie herself, she dreams of living in Paris in the 1800s.  "Even the army then had a special division, composed solely of artists.  The streets were riddled with artists and poets, musicians, philosophers, all of them on fire with the desire to create unspeakable beauty.  I had this dream that one day I too would create something so bright I would vanish into its glow, but lately all I seemed to be able to do was write Ambulance Call Reports."

Nevertheless, enchantment - in the person of a mysterious albino poet, and a series of surreal adventures that range from the horrific to the ludicrous - is headed Orlie's way, despite the rather seedy bureaucracy of the ambulance system.  Infusing the grimmest Manhattan landscapes with poetry and synchronicity, Dubris conjures a Big Apple that is much more genuine than any picture on the evening news.  Bodegas and alleyways, the voodoo shop and the encampments of the homeless, the grim depths of a subway tunnel where a man lies cut in half - Orlie handles everything and everyone with a wide-eyed native intelligence.

Supporting characters - her ambulance partners, her roommate, a high school acquaintance named Charlene Geribaldi who's been reinvented as exotic porn starlet Melissa Mounds - are vivid and real; even the corrupt ones are resoundingly and somehow beautifully human.  The action is a roller coaster ride: readers are just catching their breath from a scene of graphic horror when a belly laugh sneaks up on the next page.

Dubris has published poetry and stories; this is her first novel, and I for one can't wait for more.  Skels digs deep into the Manhattan underworld and forges something luminous and ultimately hopeful and loving.

- Anne Pyburn

No matter how hard you try to run from love, it may just nip you in the privates when you least expect it.  Who'd expect, for example, that an up-and-coming young screenwriter would find himself besotted with a rough-trade hooker he picked up in a dive?

Certainly not Ron Nyswaner, who didn't realize quite how the blond "storm trooper" who caught his eye would rock his world.  But from the first, something about the connection between Nyswaner (screenwriter of the film Philadelphia, among other credits) and Johann resonates.

What follows is a wild ride through LA, Key West, and Woodstock at breakneck speed, fueled by dangerous drugs, passion - and an almost inexpressible affection.  After all, as Nyswaner reminds himself after his first experience with Johann, one doesn't kiss a pro on the lips.  It would be an intrusion.

Yet Johann, too, seems drawn beyond the norm to the unassuming, intelligent man who hires his services, yet can't help but be interested in who he really is.  "Usually, they hire me as a Master.  I order them around.  I beat them.  It makes me tired.  I wear a leather mask.  It gets sweaty.  The next day my face is dry and full of pimples," Johann confides.

Something about Johann's candor and presence draws Nyswaner as the superficialities of Hollywood life do not, and the two share moments reminiscent of a head-on collision between William Burroughs and Jean Genet.  In between their interludes, we are given a sense of what led Nyswaner towards self-destruction, letting Johann lead him - or is he leading Johann?  - deeper into a quagmire of crack and crystal meth that feels too good even as it's going from bad to worse.

Johann meets an untimely end, and there are surprises aplenty - and, believe it or not, belly laughs - for the reader and for Nyswaner as he seeks a proper goodbye to a supposed outcast who has come to mean the world to him.  Blue Days, Black Nights is a quintessential human journey, bravely and gracefully told.

Ron Nyswaner will appear at the Colony Cafe in Woodstock on Sunday, October 17, at 2pm.

- Anne Pyburn

Nursery rhymes, both traditional and retold versions, are ubiquitous in children's book publishing.  However, while the quantity of nursery rhyme books continues to grow, the quality of their presentations varies widely, from unimaginatively reissued standards to retellings that have been made so quirky they are nearly unrecognizable.  Among the multitudes of nursery rhyme re-presenters and deconstructionists, Kingston's Iza Trapani is that rare breed of children's author/illustrators who gets it right in her adaptations of simple (and to adult ears, sometimes silly), time-honored rhymes to suit the sophistications of contemporary kids.  In fact, Trapani has made a career of retelling and illustrating nursery rhymes that are popular among early elementary school educators, parents, and kids alike for being both familiar and extraordinary.  Trapani's published retold nursery rhymes - which include How Much Is That Doggie In the Window?, Mary Had a Little Lamb, and Baa Baa Black Sheep - are filled with as much respect for their age-old wisdom as with innovation.  Her books are natural and unpretentious, yet warm in content, language, and accompanying watercolor illustrations, all of which contain enough whimsical detail to bring kids back again and again.  And Trapani does a fair amount of esteem-boosting - the books' heroes and heroines, the adventures they go on, and the young readers themselves are all depicted as extraordinary and special - without sounding syrupy.

Trapani's latest project has been to take three of her most popular previously published titles (The Itsy Bitsy Spider; Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star; and Row, Row, Row Your Boat) and turn them into sing-along and read-along versions, complete with page-turn signals.  Each repackaging includes a square soft-cover book and accompanying CD featuring Trapani and eight kids singing along to the book's rhyme.  In each of the books, Trapani begins with the original short rhyme and builds it into a story.

Itsy Bitsy and the girl who follows him, as well as the bears in the rowboat, are not only cute, but thoughtful beings who value experience.  Yet my personal favorite is Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star, in which a little girl notices the night sky, flies off holding onto a small, smiling, gilded star "to the places only rockets go," taking a spin around Saturn before falling sweetly back to sleep.

- Susan Piperato

In the richly detailed, fast-paced Gunpowder, local writer Jack Kelly manages to break your heart and excite your mind.  With fascinating anecdotes and thorough research, he reveals how gunpowder has shaped civilization.

Before we understood anything about it, we had gunpowder.  For almost 900 years, the recipe was the inherited secret of artisan families, royal patent holders, and isolated manufacturers.  It relied on the cultivation of rot and manure for saltpeter, crude mining for sulfur, and mere fire for the charcoal that bound the two.

Gunpowder predates the Enlightenment, the Renaissance, Protestantism, Colonialism, Industrialism - even science itself.  And it was pivotal to - if not responsible for - all these developments.  It's Kelly's particular insight that powder meant the inevitable end of feudalism.  Disgruntled serfs with crude rockets made short work of wealthy lords.  Grand armor and expensive horseflesh were no match for "leaden messengers."  Kelly recounts harrowing battles, from medieval Japan's 10,000 arquebusiers to hellish killing pits in the Civil War.  The development of powder and arms is well described, with some surprises: French nationalization of gunpowder in the 1700s prefigures the assembly line.

The modern concept of nation states was also wrought by gunpowder.  Before cannons came into widespread use, castle walls fell rarely.  Shifting feudal alliances suddenly needed fortresses with fields of fire and impact-absorbing construction, so power and wealth consolidated.

Ironies abound.  Alchemy was disdained by even early powder developers, since sober practicality was requisite when small errors meant death.  Powder made war more deadly, yet the gun enabled revolution, ensuring the advancement of freedom.  Benjamin Robins, who founded the science of ballistics in 1742, was a Quaker.  His spiral grooves in the bore stabilized the flight of bullets - and increased their deadly toll.  The year he published his manual on gunnery, the Prussians estimated they fired 260 rounds for every Austrian killed in battle.  The "refinement" of the firing line, in 1584 by the Dutch leader Maurice, defined warfare through World War I, and made hamburger of soldiers in the name of efficient firepower.

Bacon, Da Vinci, the DuPonts, and scores more intersect with "the pernicious art" of gunpowder.  Kelly never slows down to pad stories, making judicious use of his sources.  The result feels like a long weekend with an erudite, fascinating house guest.  His short book has depth, and challenges the liberal reader with the complexities of our dark, explosive history.

- Greg Correll

From Betty Friedan's "Are Women Wasting Time in College?"  (killed by McCall's in 1958 for its controversial premise that women were, in fact, not wasting their time getting a higher education), to Carlo Wolff's 2003 spanking of Mitch Albom's The Five People You Meet in Heaven (spiked by the Detroit Free Press after it had hired Wolff, a freelancer, specifically because it wanted to avoid a conflict of interest with a staff-written review of its star columnist), Killed is a collection of 24 articles you weren't supposed to read.  Killed pulls back the curtain on the wizards of publishing and reveals the sordid details of how what we read is shaped by unseen forces.  (Each article is prefaced by an illuminating introduction by the writer explaining how his or her piece met its demise.)

Wallis' compendium is also a critique of editors and publishers, who often lack the spine to stand up to advertisers, potential lawsuits, and controversy.  Case in point: In July 1993, TV producer Jon Entine was contacted by franchisees and current and former employees of The Body Shop.

They claimed that behind the green business and fair-trade façade of the company lurked some ugly facts about the company's business model and the company's founder, Anita Roddick, who USA Today dubbed "The Mother Teresa of Capitalism."  Entine spent the next year writing an article for Vanity Fair, interviewing scores of people and researching the company's business practices and product ingredients.  During that time, The Body Shop caught wind of the upcoming article and threatened to sue Vanity Fair.  The magazine killed the piece, viewing the risk of publishing it, no matter how accurate, as too financially risky.

Why is this collection important?  Consider this: At a party recently, I told some friends - all of us loyal Body Shop consumers - about Entine's exposé of The Body Shop.  Not surprisingly, no one knew of the disconnect between The Body Shop's PR and its actual business practices.  How could they, since VF spiked the article?  And there are 23 other pieces just like it in Killed.

David Wallis will appear at Ariel Booksellers in New Paltz on Friday, October 22, at 7pm.

- Brian K. Mahoney