Buzz Girl has news on a few new books coming out this year. Here are ones I found interesting.

• The U.S. Poet Laureate has a book of poems coming in April.
• Buzz Girl writes about Ursula K. Le Guin’s new novel, “Unlike anything Le Guin has done before, this is an imagining of Lavinia, the king’s daughter in Vergil’s Aeneid, with whom Aeneas was destined to found an empire.”
• She says there will be a marketing splash made by Master of the Delta by Thomas H. Cook, a “literary mystery by a writer’s writer.” I haven’t heard of Cook, but I’m interested in literary mysteries and strong writing.
• She reports “HarperOne is the new identity for HarperSanFrancisco, publishing books on religion, spirituality and personal growth.” They have a couple books on politics and faith or religion coming soon. First, Jim Wallis thinks he’s gotten something to say in The Great Awakening: Reviving Faith & Politics in a Post-Religious Right America. I don’t care if the “religious right” label goes the way of the world, but if Wallis thinks the country has rejected conservative faith as exercised in government, he needs to get around more.
• Second from HarperOne is God in the White House: A History–1960-2004: How Faith Shaped the Presidency from John F. Kennedy to George W. Bush by Randall Balmer. Could be interesting.
• Bart Ehrman, author of Misquoting Jesus, continues to criticize his Creator and display his twisted faith in secondary sources with a new book, God’s Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question–Why We Suffer. Perhaps this one will inspire several response books too, just as his other one did.

In other news, Andrew Kalvan’s next book is coming this summer. Empire of Lies deals with a man with strong faith and a solid family who came from a violent life which comes back to haunt him. He is thrown into “a murderous conspiracy only he can see and only he can stop—a plot that bizarrely links his private passions to the turmoil of a world at war.”