Changing My Mind
by Zadie Smith
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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.
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.
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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.”