Also of interest ... in keeping it short

Changing My Mind

by Zadie Smith

(Penguin, $27)

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Zadie Smith’s novels have won more acclaim than they probably deserve, said Ella Taylor in the Los Angeles Times. But the young British author’s “darting intelligence alone” can hold your attention, and this collection of essays reveals her to be “earnestly open” to letting movies, music, and literature shape her aesthetic. She’s most compelling when she undertakes “endearingly wonkish” inquiries into the relative worth of such fellow novelists as Vladimir Nabokov, George Eliot, and David Foster Wallace.

The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis

(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $30)

Lydia Davis sometimes writes single-sentence short stories, said James Wood in The New Yorker. But the chance to see all of her short fiction gathered together reveals that she also has been busy for the past three decades building a body of work that one day just might be recognized as “one of the great, strange American literary contributions.” Again and again in these spare soliloquies, Davis finds bleak humor and pathos in “the overbearing presence of the self.”

Eating the Dinosaur

by Chuck Klosterman

(Scribner, $25)

Pop-culture critic Chuck Klosterman is “too substantial to be dismissed as a shallow hipster” and “too idiosyncratic to be classified,” said Michael MacCambridge in The Wall Street Journal. In this collection, he ponders the Unabomber’s manifesto, the staying power of Abba, and innovations in NFL football. In each piece, he delivers fresh insight into an aspect of our media-saturated lives. His “relentlessly thoughtful prose” may even convince you that our mass entertainments are “more suffused with meaning than ever before.”

What the Dog Saw

by Malcolm Gladwell

(Little, Brown, $28)

Malcolm Gladwell should never be mistaken for a social scientist, said Steven Pinker in The New York Times. Because the author of The Tipping Point comes to many subjects as a novice, he often leaps to conclusions about human behavior that are spectacularly wrong. Still, he’s a “minor genius” at crafting essays that combine friendly prose and surprising anecdotes, and the 19 New Yorker stories collected here show him at his best: The “ratio of fact to fancy” is unusually high.