In today's "Lizard Watch," the weekly email blast from Newtonville Books, Tim Huggins, owner and founder of the independent bookstore, and literary man-about-town, announced that he'd sold the place to Mary Cotton, a former employee of the store.

"It's just the right time," Huggins writes. "I felt that the bookstore had arrived at a place where it needed something more and different than I could provide to help it reach the next level of sustainability."

Cambridge-based novelist ALICE HOFFMAN s one of those deeply psychological writers who we depend on to bore into the individual minds of an ill-fated family. Once there, she unearths the sort of romantic desperation and weird, mystical secrets that most households would do anything to keep hidden. For her 19th novel to date, Skylight Confessions, Hoffman focuses on just how much an event of complete randomness can determine one’s fate.

SO LONG, AND GOOD LUCK

Edward R. Murrow hosted the first This I Believe radio program in the 1950s, which he introduced by musing, “What truths can a human being afford to furnish the cluttered nervous room of his mind with, when he has no real idea how long a lease he has on the future?” So very Murrow.

LISA MOORE has already paid her dues in Canada, what with being a bestselling author and a columnist for the Toronto Globe & Mail. Now, she makes her American debut with Alligator, which follows 17-year-old Colleen, who dreams of becoming an eco-terrorist, Colleen’s grief-stricken mother, Beverly, and her career-obsessed Aunt Madeleine.

Option I:

AMONG THE BELIEVERS
In the vibrant San Francisco literary scene, you haven’t made it unless you can play six degrees (or less) to David Eggers. HEIDI JULAVITS can do it in just two. She edits the Believer with author Vendela Vida, who’s married to Eggers, the force behind McSweeney’s and the student writing center 826 Valencia

A supergroup of writers get thoroughly nostalgic over food in Death By Pad Thai: And Other Unforgettable Meals. DOUGLAS BAUER edited this collection of essays by the likes of Andre Dubus III, Sue Miller, and Amy Bloom. Tonight, hear from Bauer and three other contributors: CLAIRE MESSUD has a sudden jolt of selective-memory when it comes down to telling a story about an incredible French meal, and local foodie/short-story eroticist STEVE ALMOND describes a dish of homemade pad thai made with Maine lobster, which, apparently, tastes amazing.

2 gauge plugs? You can do better than that, Stephen Elliott.

The perfect reading material to Yo La Tango’s new album, I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass could be none other than STEPHEN ELLIOTT’s latest, aptly titled My Girlfriend Comes to the City and Beats Me Up. The episodic novel of 11 linked stories follows Theo, who goes from a group home for troubled teens in Chicago to finding literary success in San Francisco.

Don't be jealous!

Why. Does. She. Have. SOMUCHFUCKINGHAIR?!

STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND
We’re tearing through NELL FREUDENBERGER’s debut novel, The Dissident, at a crazy pace, pausing only to marvel at how this white, Harvard educated, ex-New Yorker editorial assistant managed to capture the voice of Yuan Zhao, a Chinese performance artist and political firecracker spending a year in Los Angeles teaching at the St.

A few snippets for your Monday afternoon:

Via Pitchfork:
The list of bands Peter Ellenby has photographed since he began in 1994 reads like the graduation announcement for a whole class full of indie rock elites, from role models such as Sonic Youth, the Flaming Lips, Frank Black, and Mike Watt to the more recent likes of Modest Mouse, Death Cab for Cutie, Bright Eyes, and .

We’ve never catered to the publishing industry’s mentality that short-story collections are the poor man’s novel. In fact, we often prefer them to bulky bestselling hardcovers, and KELLY LINK’s Magic for Beginners is proof that sometimes a brief glimpse can say more than a 200-page staring contest. Link’s nine tales are a tongue-in-cheek twist on sci-fi genre fiction, and even the New Yorker’s on board with how she skillfully weaves in fantastical snapshots of middle-class America.

A criminal lawyer who moonlights as a beer scribe? We feel as if we could trust Andy Crouch to impart real knowledge on subjects like the Constitution and hops. Two themes, in fact, that segue flawlessly into The Good Beer Guide to New England. Here, nearly 100 pubs, bars, and breweries are wittily profiled and rated with the kind of diligence found in the most conscientious of booze hounds.

Screwed over by passion, saved by alcohol: Newtonville has another cathartic double billing of deliciously dysfunctional fiction for the sulkies and sensies. First up is Jami Attenberg and her debut novel, Instant Love, which is about a group of young woman whose love lives are more unpredictable than Paris Hilton’s

From the author of Mystic River comes a collection of tales no cheerier than his intense portrait of crime drama in working-class Dorchester. Whether Dennis Lehane's characters are buckling under the strain of class resentment, cheating on their spouses, or choosing money over reconciliation, Coronado: Stories (five shorts and a two-act play) is yet another brutal glimpse into lives perpetually wrecked by violence and always touched by tragedy.