Quiz time! Five authors on this week's list go by three names — their first, middle, and last! Can you tell which ones?  

Gentlemen of the Road: A Tale of Adventure by Michael Chabon, Gary Gianni (Illustrator)

The fact that the novel Gentlemen of the Road also gives second billing to an illustrator might be a tip-off to the fun and escapism at the core of Michael Chabon’s latest, a return perhaps to the comic-strip diversion of 2001’s bestseller The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. Indeed, this exotic, picaresque tale of yore — okay, circa the yore 950 A.D. — along the legendary Silk Road traveled by merchants and adventurers through various regions of the Asian continent, has all the ingredients from derring-do to Dumas-approved. Expect cliff-hanging, swashbuckling, usurping, absconding, bamboozling, comeuppance-ing, all larger-than-lifelike.

A Family Christmas, Selected and Edited by Caroline Kennedy

"Mind if I bore a hole in [it] and let the sap run out?" -- Groucho Marx

Perhaps I misjudged. When I gave A Family Christmas a cursed… I mean cursory glance first time around, I admit I was dismissive of it as most likely just another anthology of overly-familiar holiday schmaltz. Then I saw Caroline Kennedy was involved, and remembered she’s always had good editorial instincts, and indeed she expresses a balanced and wide-ranging perspective about the current subject that includes an irreverence along with a seriousness of purpose. "When I began assembling [this] collection, I was skeptical that I would learn anything new about Christmas," she says, "but reading and reflecting on the history and spirit of Christmas brought back many memories, and taught me a great deal. The literature of Christmas ranges from the miraculous to the tragic, the profound to the ridiculous, but always represents the connection to something larger than ourselves."

A personal connection for Caroline included amid the poetry, prose, scriptural readings, and lyrics of A Family Christmas is her childhood Christmas list to Santa Claus and a letter from her father as President to a young girl concerned about Santa's well-being. Other entries — familiar and refreshingly lesser-known gems — include those from David Sedaris, Harper Lee, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Kurt Vonnegut, Ogden Nash, Vladimir Nabokov, Gabriela Mistral, Sandra Cisneros, Calvin Trillin, Marianne Moore, E. B. White, Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, Martin Luther King Jr., Pearl S. Buck, and the gouge-mad Groucho Marx.