Except for its action-packed title, Peter Biskind’s The Sky Is Falling: How Vampires, Zombies, Androids, and Superheroes Made America Great for Extremism doesn’t have much in common with the smack-talking chronicles of Hollywood rebels he’s best known for. A onetime editor at Premiere magazine, he first hit pay dirt twenty years ago with Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock ’N’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood. Only cinephilia’s most stubborn vegans didn’t immediately gobble up that gooey cheeseburger of a book.

Easy Riders, Raging Bulls charts a “Golden Age” sparked by Arthur

The catalogue raisonné Thomas Demand: The Complete Papers (Mack, $85) follows the German sculptor-turned-photographer’s twenty-five-year paper trail—literally. The artist builds and photographs elaborate and eerily convincing life-size scenes entirely from colored paper and cardboard, often drawing inspiration from mass media images. His photos of creepy unpeopled spaces, with titles such as Archive, Staircase, and Room, are misleadingly bland. Büro (Office), 1995, is based on a shot published in the West German newspaper Der Spiegel, showing a generic—yet chaotic—room with a plain desk and

In December 1971, Adrienne Rich, then forty-two, spoke to a roomful of women about what the women’s liberation movement might do for literary study. Like Rich, the women gathered that day were writers, teachers, and scholars. Like her, they had gone to good colleges, studied with famous male scholars, and read canonical male writers; this is how they had learned what literature was and should be. But as women across the country filed charges of sexual discrimination and marched for equality in the streets, they were starting to revise their ideas about literary significance. Like Rich, they

Zines are pretty much over; you can tell because people are nostalgic for them. In Jessica Hopper’s new book, Night Moves, a memoir of her younger years in Chicago’s Wicker Park neighborhood, she describes a trip to Kinko’s to Xerox early issues of her zine, Hit It or Quit It, for reissue:

On the way home, I stopped and picked up the Reader with my first piece in it. I was carrying these two stacks into the house when I realized they were the exact bookends of my writing life. The little fanzine I brought to the Uptown Kinkos in Minneapolis in 1991, because