VIVIAN MAIER: A PHOTOGRAPHER FOUND (Harper Design, $80) shifts the focus from the faux-romantic idea of Maier as an eccentric recluse (à la Henry Darger) who hoarded never-displayed photographs until she died a pauper’s death and was granted sudden and improbable posthumous stardom. Instead, we see a surprisingly savvy street photographer, who, like Garry Winogrand, Diane Arbus, and Lee Friedlander, honed her vision in 1950s New York. From the late ’50s on, in the guise of a socially invisible Chicagoland nanny, she created thousands of remarkable photographs, devoting her skills to unsentimental

“Authenticity has long been a major interest of mine,” Meghan Daum avows in The Unspeakable, her most recent collection of personal essays. Oprah and Dr. Phil could make the same claim, but Daum has been exploring the topic with a reporter’s eye for detail, and often with acuity, for the past decade and a half. It unites the pieces in My Misspent Youth (2001), her first volume of essays, published when she was thirty-one, in which she dissects “the tendency of contemporary human beings”—herself included—“to live not actual lives but simulations of lives.” In the title essay of that book, which

IN THE WORK of the Argentine writer Julio Cortázar, the shortest distances are often also the greatest: The space between self and other can be maddeningly difficult to traverse. Full of magical transformations, ritual sacrifices, and turbulent prophetic dreams, Cortázar’s writing abounds with troubled pairings, unlikely and uneasy doppelgängers who come apart even as—especially as—they converge. In one of his stories, “The Distances,” a wealthy Argentine woman dreams repeatedly of a Hungarian peasant. When she finally encounters the object of her visions on a bridge in Budapest, she embraces

Poets have long inhabited personas and channeled voices—think of Frank Bidart writing as Vaslav Nijinsky and the child-murderer and necrophiliac Herbert White; Anne Carson writing as the red-winged Geryon, in her verse-novel The Autobiography of Red; Gertrude Stein writing as her companion, Alice, in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. As Bidart suggests in his poem “Advice to the Players,” artists, particularly poets, take on the roles of others to create a “mirror in which we see ourselves.” The late poet and artist Robert Seydel also explored a series of alternate identities, and in the

As if to get it over with, Greil Marcus opens his History of Rock ’n’ Roll in Ten Songs with something resembling an official account: a five-page list of names of the inductees to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, from Chuck Berry to Nirvana to the likely-to-be-inducted Beyoncé and Jay Z. The point is what the list doesn’t give us. It may be “fun enough” to sift through the memorabilia that depict the story of rock ’n’ roll “in the basically familiar way,” as Marcus quotes the artist Allen Ruppersberg saying after a visit to the Hall of Fame. But no simple, linear history—even, or maybe especially,