Also of interest...the art of the essay

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.”

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

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.”