I am not in the habit of writing negative reviews. In fact, I’ve never written a predominantly negative review of a book. I just politely decline. But this really awful biography of Martin Amis got under my skin, and its warm reception by about half its reviewers caused that infection to erupt in the form of this review. A long time ago I published a critical biography (of Christopher Isherwood) when he was close to the end of his life. So I understand the problems of combining biography and criticism of a living writer and his work.

On entering a major Nigerian city, you’re likely to encounter some aged signage that welcomes you to the city and encourages you to enjoy yourself. For example, in Calabar, the welcome sign reads, “Welcome to Calabar. Come And Live And Be At Rest.” But in Lagos—Nigeria’s most populous city and its former capital—you get simply, “This Is Lagos.” The subtext is clear: This is a no-nonsense city. Lagos will not coddle you or gush mushy endearments. A common expression here is “shine your eyes,” which loosely translates to “keep your eyes peeled,” or “always have your wits about you.” Lagos does

A colorful assortment of international tradespeople, drug-pushers, swindlers, and fraudsters, spammers have become a familiar feature of our digital landscape. Finn Brunton’s investigation of the question of spam, Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet — the problems of defining it, understanding it, and tackling it — takes us to the front of an ongoing and highly sophisticated technological war, a keenly contested territorial struggle for control of the information superhighway.

Whenever I sit down to write about a place that’s become very familiar, my first impulse is to imagine it in the strangest way possible. I try to take in its mood, faces, and streets as if for the first time, and then give them a darker, more obscure, slant. For my new novel Asunder, I aimed to do this above all for the sections set in Paris, a city I’ve been visiting since childhood. This time I went to the city in search of the old “drafts and currents” that still blow through the streets, imprints from the nineteenth century that have survived layers of renovation and polish. So I let myself

The detective novel The Cuckoo’s Calling by Robert Galbraith — who was unmasked a few days ago as a pseudonym for J. K. Rowling of Harry Potter fame — doesn’t provide the reader with many clues to its author’s real identity. There are no wizards, witches or dementors in this novel; no magic or sorcery in its plot. Instead, the book is set in an all-Muggles London and features a disheveled, Columbo-esque detective named Cormoran Strike who takes on a case that plunges him into a posh world of supermodels, rock stars, movie producers and social-climbing wives.

Call it the travelogue paradox: In books that purport to be about the perils and pleasures of life on the road, travel itself is typically no more than pretext. The real story being told has to with the self and its tentative steps into some great unknown. A travelogue is ultimately a coming-of-age story with its thumb stuck out.

Ulli Lust’s graphic memoir of the time she spent hitchhiking and otherwise relying on the kindness of strangers in Austria and Italy makes little pretense of caring about the locales. When Ulli, a punked-out and disaffected seventeen-year-old from a middle-class

It took the American novelist Lionel Shriver a long time to get our attention. Her first six books, published in the course of two decades, were met with a critical shrug and sales that Shriver later described as “in the toilet.” Her seventh, an epistolary novel narrated by the mother of a school shooter, was rejected by thirty publishers before a small house in England (Shriver’s adopted homeland) paid her all of two thousand pounds for the manuscript.

“Who is Curtis Harrington, and what other films has he made?” This was asked by an audience member after a screening of Harrington’s What’s the Matter with Helen? , a drolly macabre thriller about two middle-aged women operating a dance school in ’30s Los Angeles. In Nice Guys Don’t Work in Hollywood, Harrington sets down this query as evidence of his fated obscurity—though the filmmaker’s anecdote-rich posthumously published autobiography goes some ways toward answering both questions, and will hopefully earn his work recognition from a new audience.

It may seem absurd that the director of