in good company; Invited for a late-summer weekend.(The Week-End Book from Overlook Press)

The perfect addition to anyone's country house (and guaranteed not to melt en route), The Week-End Book (The Overlook Press), first published in the U.K. in 1924, remains the bon vivant's go-to guide

for making the most of one's leisure time, from instructions on how to mix a Satan's Whisker to rules for playing a game of rounders. An invitation to the sea calls for Lynne Cox's Grayson (Knopf), the Swimming to Antarctica author's wonderfully sweet, slender memoir of a life-changing encounter with a lost baby whale. A music lover is sure to enjoy the fiftieth-anniversary reprinting of Billie Holiday's haunting autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues (Harlem Moon/Broadway Books), while a hostess planning a European tour would no doubt appreciate Patrick Leigh Fermor's newly reissued Mani and Roumeli (NYRB Classics), the incomparably erudite travel writer's swashbuckling takes on Greece. Globe-trotters and armchair adventurers alike will enjoy Selected Letters of Martha Gellhorn (Henry Holt), edited by Caroline Moorehead, which chronicles the indomitable war reporter's life and loves-including her stormy marriage to Ernest Hemingway. And everyone has space on her bookshelf for one of the eminently collectible, wittily designed new Penguin Classics Deluxe Editions: Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, with an introduction by Fast Food Nation author Eric Schlosser; Stella Gibbons's Cold Comfort Farm, with a cover of hilariously hoary characters illustrated by Roz Chast; or The Portable Dorothy ...