Both Flesh and Not
by David Foster Wallace (Little, Brown, $27)
“David Foster Wallace’s posthumous career has produced nearly as many books as his live one did,” said Michael Robbins in the Chicago Tribune. Wallace was a groundbreaking essayist who “left the form in a different state,” and this grouping of previously uncollected pieces “scrapes both the barrel and the stars”: A list of unsung novels seems dashed off, while his essay on tennis great Roger Federer shows how the right subject could light up Wallace’s neural pathways “like a carny ride.”
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The Way the World Works
by Nicholson Baker (Simon & Schuster, $25)
Nicholson Baker is the kind of writer who’ll “happily sit and think for 20 pages about, say, the Kindle and what it means,” said John Jeremiah Sullivan in The New York Times. Mostly, you’ll be happy to follow his thoughts. One piece here, written to defend Human Smoke, his book on World War II, sucks power from this otherwise “charmingly miscellaneous” collection. Personally, I prefer him on Daniel Defoe, “or on mowing the lawn, or on playing hyper-violent video games with his son.”
Waiting for the Barbarians
by Daniel Mendelsohn (NYRB, $25)
Daniel Mendelsohn is a bridge figure, said Phillip Lopate in the San Francisco Chronicle. A trained classics scholar, he’s made it his mission to explain Herodotus to readers of The New Yorker and to explain Mad Men to readers of The New York Review of Books. He sometimes “applies too much intellectual elbow grease to a pop phenomenon like Avatar,” but he’s “one of our liveliest, most intelligent cultural critics,” an omnivore who’s “both classicist and mensch.”
Essays in Biography
by Joseph Epstein (Axios, $24)
“One of the best essayists in contemporary American letters” has just made himself “the envy of biographers” everywhere, said Carl Rollyson in The Wall Street Journal. Long-form biographies “take patience to digest,” but in these agile biographical essays, Joseph Epstein displays an uncanny ability to “capture a subject in a memorable 3,000 words.” Whether his attention falls on George Washington or Malcolm Gladwell, Epstein proves to be “a genius of discernment.”
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Also of interest...in picture books for grown-upsfeature How About Never—Is Never Good for You?; The Undertaking of Lily Chen; Meanwhile, in San Francisco; The Portlandia Activity Book
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Author of the week: Karen Russell
feature Karen Russell could use a rest.
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The Double Life of Paul de Man by Evelyn Barish
feature Evelyn Barish “has an amazing tale to tell” about the Belgian-born intellectual who enthralled a generation of students and academic colleagues.
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Book of the week: Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt by Michael Lewis
feature Michael Lewis's description of how high-frequency traders use lightning-fast computers to their advantage is “guaranteed to make blood boil.”
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Also of interest...in creative rebellion
feature A Man Called Destruction; Rebel Music; American Fun; The Scarlet Sisters
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Author of the week: Susanna Kaysen
feature For a famous memoirist, Susanna Kaysen is highly ambivalent about sharing details about her life.
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You Must Remember This: Life and Style in Hollywood’s Golden Age by Robert Wagner
feature Robert Wagner “seems to have known anybody who was anybody in Hollywood.”
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Book of the week: Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson’s Lost Pacific Empire by Peter Stark
feature The tale of Astoria’s rise and fall turns out to be “as exciting as anything in American history.”