This little art

THE GREAT BELIEVERS, by Rebecca Makkai. (Viking, $27.) A novel that ricochets between Chicago in the mid-1980s, an era when AIDS was a death sentence, and present-day Paris, where the shadow of its contagion still looms over a mother in search of her errant daughter. THE PERFECT WEAPON: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age, by David E. Sanger. (Crown, $28.) This encyclopedic account by a Times correspondent traces the rapid rise of cyberwarfare capabilities and warns that ideas about how to control them are only beginning to emerge. SLAVE OLD MAN, by Patrick Chamoiseau. Translated by Linda Coverdale. (New Press, $19.99.) Set in plantation-era Martinique, this novel is a kind of action pastoral, tracing a slave's desperate escape from a savage master and his monstrous mastiff. His exhilarating flight evokes the shock of freedom with tactile immediacy. AMERICAN EDEN: David Hosack, Botany and Medicine in the Garden of the Early Republic, by Victoria Johnson. (Liveright, $29.95.) The doctor to the infamous Hamilton-Burr duel also created a legendary botanical garden for early America, now buried far beneath Rockefeller Center. Johnson tells his story. DAMNATION ISLAND: Poor, Sick, Mad & Criminal in 19th-Century New York, by Stacy Horn. (Algonquin, $27.95.) A detailed consideration of the appalling history of the East River penitentiaries and asylums where the city once held its undesirables in forcible exile. ELASTIC: Flexible Thinking in a Time of Change, by Leonard Mlodinow. (Pantheon, $28.95.) "Elastic thinking" is the ability to stretch beyond the bounds of our preconceptions and other deeply held beliefs. Mlodinow tries to understand how this happens in the brain, what it takes to arrive at human creativity, innovation and independent thought. SEARCHING FOR STARS ON AN ISLAND IN MAINE, by Alan Lightman. (Pantheon, $24.95.) In tightly composed essays, a noted astrophysicist and novelist argues that science need not be in conflict with spirituality. An elegant and moving paean to our quest for meaning in an age of reason. THIS LITTLE ART, by Kate Briggs. (Fitzcarraldo, paper, $20.) Briggs, a translator of Roland Barthes, here offers a philosophical meditation on the perils and pleasures of her vocation, one she compares to Robinson Crusoe's efforts to fashion a table - an act of "laboriously remaking an existing thing." FOX & CHICK: The Party and Other Stories, by Sergio Ruzzier. (Chronicle, $14.99; ages 5 to 8.) Friendship can be challenging as well as comforting. The full reviews of these and other recent books are on the web: nytimes.com/books

This beautiful book, part memoir, part love letter, gives a glimpse of the art of translation, as Briggs recounts her struggle to render into English Roland Barthes¿s late lecture courses, La Préparation du roman and Comment vivre ensemble. She attributes her title to Thomas Mann¿s translator Helen Lowe-Porter, who saw translation as a ¿little art,¿ little ¿as distinct from the big ones. Neither very important nor very serious.¿ While differing with Lowe-Porter¿s view, Briggs shows her craft to be fraught with difficulty; one wishes to avoid mistakes, but often the correct interpretation of a sentence requires a deep level of empathy with the author. Translation is the product of ¿the dance of readerly excitement: the smack of an open hand on a desk, abrupt shifts in position, breath quickening or slowing down.¿ Or it occurs in reaction to a sentence or paragraph that ¿you find... has acted upon you.¿ It is in such encounters with the text, and through the text, with the author, that translation happens¿almost, it seems, as the byproduct of an intense intellectual adventure. Lucid and engaging, Briggs¿s book is essential, not just for translators, but anyone who has felt the magic of reading. (Apr.)

DRAGONESE It's Walpurgis-Nacht in the sanatorium and Hans Castorp, the hero of The Magic Mountain, has been made to feel hot and reckless by the atmosphere of carnival. Standing a small distance behind him, in the doorway of the little salon, is Frau Chauchat. She is dressed in a startling gown of thin, dark silk. Was it black? Probably. Or, at most, shot with golden brown. Cut with a modest little neck, round like a school-girl's frock. Hardly so much as to show the base of her throat. Or the collar bones. Or, beneath the soft fringes of her hair, the slightly prominent bone at the back of her neck. But all the while leaving bare to the shoulder her arms. Arms so tender and so full. So cool and so amazingly white, set off against the dark silk of her frock. To such ravishing effect as to make Hans Castorp close his eyes. And murmur, deep within himself: 'O my God!' He had once held a theory about those arms. He had thought, on making their acquaintance for the first time - veiled, as they had been then, in diaphanous gauze - that their indescribable, unreasonable seductiveness was down to the gauze itself. To the 'illusion', as he had called it. Folly! The utter, accentuated, blinding nudity of those arms was an experience now so intoxicating, compared with that earlier one, as to leave our man no other recourse than once again, with drooping head, to whisper, soundlessly: 'O my God!' Excerpted from This Little Art by Kate Briggs All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.