Pawleys Island Hammock (Houghton Mifflin) by Robert Stone, a spiritual thriller set in Israel, is entertaining and provocative. A historical thriller, The Angel of Darkness (Random House) by Caleb Carr features Lucas and Marcus Isaacson, Jewish detectives who help solve a turn-of-the-century case.

Newly released in paperback editions are two novels both serious and funny, probing inner lives, Eve's Apple (Plume) by Jonathan Rosen, a love story and psychological mystery, related to eating disorders, and Rosalind: A Family Romance (Zoland) by Myra Goldberg, the story of a successful therapist who draws her family together for healing. A Holocaust novel, Fugitive Pieces (Vintage) by Anne Michaels, also available in paperback, may not be typical summer reading but it is a beautifully written meditation on memory.

Science fiction fans will appreciate a new edition of Wandering Stars: An Anthology of Jewish Fantasy and Science Fiction edited by Jack Dann (Jewish Lights), with stories by Isaac Asimov, Harlan Ellison, Bernard Malamud, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Pamela Sargent and others, including William Tenn's "On Venus, Have We Got A Rabbi."

The perfect summer book should fit easily into a beach tote or luggage, but those who don't mind lugging volumes with many pages should consider works by the masters, Bernard Malamud: The Complete Stories (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), Isaac Bashevis Singer's latest posthumous novel, Shadows on the Hudson (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) and Norman Mailer's The Time of Our Time (Random House), a chronological compilation of reportage and fiction selections

Comic strip history is just serious enough so that blaring radios and other sounds of summer won't disturb. Stan Mack's The Story of the Jews: A 4000 Year Adventure (Villard) is a witty pictorial history depicting a chain of related events, in Mack's signature style, both simple and sophisticated. He describes it as "sort of a cross between an illuminated manuscript and a modern web page, with some of the punch of a political cartoon." Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Tony Horwitz offers glimpses of southern Jewish history and Jewish participation in the Civil War as an aspect of his journalistic, sometimes humorous travelogue to the war's continued presence in Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War (Pantheon).

One of the best ways to lose oneself, at the shore or lounging on a fire escape, is by entering the life of another. Several new memoirs highlight Jews with some unusual career paths. Restaurateur and raconteur George Lang, who owns Cafe des Artistes on the Upper West Side, peels back the layers of his life story in Nobody Knows the Truffles I've Seen (Knopf).

Underground Woman: My Four Years as a New York City Subway Conductor (Temple) by Marian Swerdlow provides an insider's account of life on the rails running below our city. Swerdlow, one of the first women conductors, also edited the rank-and-file newsletter, "Hell on Wheels." Included is a glossary of more than 140 subway terms, from "wrap it around," to drive a train as fast as it will go, to "deadheading," a crew riding on a train rather than operating it, a preferable but hard-to-come-by assignment.