I've received a few review copies in the mail recently that I thought are worth mentioning and that I'll be reading in the upcoming weeks. I lucked out and won two via Library Thing's Early Reviewer Program. 
I don't always throw my name in the hat, but lately they've had some really good choices, so I feel fortunate that I've won a couple.
I've already started reading Emily Post: Daughter of the Gilded Age, Mistress of American Manners by Laura Claridge. Did you know Emily Post was divorced? She was born shortly after the Civil War, lived through the Gilded Age, two World Wars and died in the 1960s. I always had this idea that Emily Post was a proper spinster-ish sort of lady, so it will be interesting to see how this biography challenges my ideas and perceptions.
From Library Thing I also received a copy of Irene Dische's The Empress of Weehawken. I think I'm going to have a running theme with my books as the main character in this book is recounting her memoirs of her "narrow escape with her Jewish husband from the Nazis, and the perilous voyage to the New World of New Jersey". This sounds like a mother-daughter tale as much as anything else.
Today I came home to a package with two books. One is yet another biography, Lily Tuck's Woman of Rome: A Life of Elsa Morante. This time Italian author Elsa Morante is the subject. She's an important figure in Italian literature. I've long wanted to read her work and have had a couple of her novels on my shelves for ages. The biography starts out:
"Elsa Morante was not amiable, she was not genial, she was not sweet or always nice. She was not a woman with whom one could have a casual conversation or speak about mundane things. She took offense easily, she made quick and final judgments, she constantly tested her friends. A truth teller, she tended to say hurtful things, She was immensely talented, passionate, often impossible, courageous, quarrelsome, witty, ambitious, generous. She loved Mozart, she loved children, animals--especially cats, Siamese cats. She detested any sort of artifice, posturing, falsehood, she detested misuse of power. She once admitted that she detested biography. The biographer, she claimed, always divulged what one is not."
That one paragraph has already reeled me in, though Elsa is going to have to wait on the pile until I 
finish a few other books first.
And one of the books is a novel. I was tempted first by the cover of Frances de Pontes Peebles's The Seamstress, but it sounded unusual as well. It is set in 1930s Brazil about two sisters who follow widely divergent paths. And of course anything about needlework (the sisters are seamstresses) will always catch my eye.
I've already got a few other review copies that I need to catch up on. I told myself I wouldn't take anymore until they were read, but sometimes the temptation is too much to bear.