Book Roundup

Stephanie Nolen's 28 Stories of AIDS in Africa affirms the prevalence and urgency of the virus in light of corrupt, AIDS-denying governments. The Guardian writes, "This is a call to arms, to a battle that we should all have been fighting for a very long time." [Guardian Unlimited]
Kaui Hart Hemmings's debut novel of a patriarch's privleged Hawaiian life–speedboats and beachclubs and alcoholism–torn apart by a terrible accident and gripping middle age. [The New Yorker]
Brooklyn resident Susanna Moore's new novel The Big Girls takes place in a women's prison and describes sexual torture, but this author's sunny, bobo life is anything but dark. [The New York Times]
In The Price of Fire, independent journalist Ben Dangl writes of Bolivia from the time of the indigenous uprisings against Spanish rule through the Evo Morales administration's first year in office. [Z Magazine]
In Leonard Michaels's newly collected stories–"part of that astonishing flowering of American Jewish writing that includes Bellow, Malamud, Mailer and Roth"–sex and betrayal in traditional short-story form give way to an "urban pastoral prose poem" and a collage-like list story of the author's immigrant family and concentration camps. [The Nation]