His vision spreads outward, encompassing ever more of the nuances and frequencies of an urbanized West that has maxed out on chatter and distraction, gorging itself on anxieties about the vanishing past, the splintering present, and the accelerating emergence of the future. It has to expand like this in order to express the burden of shepherding a lone self through a world of mass-consciousness, ruled by media and money, where terror is the only form of awe that has not been stripped and sold for parts.

There isn’t a musician in the world who has performed in public and not given color some consideration, whether in terms of what to wear, DIY photocopied show posters, or slick merch.

The collection focalizes Updike’s mid-to-late career as a man of letters. It also foregrounds his secondary reputation as a consummate art critic.

Michel Houellebecq may be a petty misanthrope and an average prose stylist, but he can also be drop-dead funny.

These tales are harder than the grotesques of Gogol. Borges, too, you suspect, is up to something relatively straightforward compared to Krzhizhanovsky.

One could argue that Gray has been writing his last book for years (and for some years, he’s said as much, though always managing to push out something new and even more "last," like the never-ending last tours of The Who).

No matter how liberal we consider ourselves about the slippery line between memoir and autobiographical fiction – even if we are more Exley than Oprah on the matter – there is still something that seems suspicious about the enterprise of full-on fictional memoir. Is this allowable? Can one simply jump in and narrate the course of another person’s life? Perhaps – if you do it right.

Book lovers love to watch two heavyweights slug it out. Bloodshed, though not necessary, is always welcome.

Wallis knows full well that the icon is not the man in full, nor should it be. The issue with a biography like this is that the legend is so much of the story that debunking myths means the subject loses some of what makes him unique. David Crockett was romanticized in the same way that classic film stars, athletes, and politicians are, and for a similar reason — the legend is inextricably entwined with the actual human being. Not only is there no urgency to demystify, there’s almost no reason to. Sometimes the legend and the person are inextricable for perfectly good reasons.

There’s a lesson in this that might be too awful for us to want to learn, which is that death takes from us not just our lives, but also our right to insist upon a particular version of those lives.

Lost Memory is a novel of the ruin and possible renewal of the Garden of Eden, where “maybe the Internet is the Snake and pornography is the forbidden fruit.”

Nightwoods is not only grippingly cinematic, it’s also unabashedly movie-ready, no less so than Cold Mountain was.

Along the way there will be a duel, a failed assassination attempt, gun-running, Santeria rituals, kidnapping, torture, scorching sex, and, finally, a coveted interview with Fidel Castro. The storytelling has the irresistible pull of a riptide.

In Blue Nights, Didion is once again following her time-tested formula of setting out a fondly held personal mythos and then smashing it, except that this time the mythos is her own vision of herself as a good mother.

Pauline Kael argued about the movies as though her life depended on it. But that’s not what makes this an essential read for all the uninitiated, nor is it her depth of knowledge, her wit, or her ability to turn a line; it’s that she was so often right.

1Q84 is Murakami's finest work: nuanced, brilliant, gripping, philosophical but never tendentious, self-assured, cleverly post-modern yet authentic, and possessed of a haunting surrealism that by this point surely deserves its own adjective: Murakamian?