Those most likely to read Stephen Batchelor’s new memoir, Confession of a Buddhist Atheist, might find the title redundant. The deity-free character of Buddhism is fairly common knowledge among its enthusiasts in the English-speaking world. The Gautama they have encountered in their various modes of countercultural rebellion comes filtered through the sensibilities of writers such as Hermann Hesse, Allen Ginsberg, and Robert Pirsig. To the crowds drawn to “Eastern” philosophies because “Western” traditions are kind of a drag, the Buddha offers religion without the baggage.

But of course the

Molloy, the hermetic, dyspeptic narrator of Samuel Beckett’s eponymous novel, sits alone in a bare room, apparently imprisoned, filling pages for the “man who comes every week.” The grim scene is as familiar to anyone who knows the Irishman’s world of barren fields and bleak cells as the below photograph of the poet of nothingness, ambling the streets of a beach town wearing short shorts, sandals, and shades, is unsettling. Perhaps photographer François-Marie Banier was also a bit shocked when he recognized and began stalking the vacationing author on the streets of Tangier in 1978. Eventually,

In the run-up to the housing collapse of 2007–2008, houses weren’t merely expensive, they were insanely expensive. Yet just when it seemed that prices couldn’t go higher, some fool would come along and pay an enormous sum for a glorified hovel. You didn’t have to be a genius to realize that American real estate was overvalued. It did, however, take something special to figure out how to make money off the madness. A group of between ten and twenty people did just that, making the bet of a lifetime that author Michael Lewis calls “The Big Short.”

The cast of characters in Lewis’s highly readable

The public expression of contempt for professors is one of our cherished national pastimes and is that rare thing—bipartisan. We need a commander-in-chief, not a law professor, is a Sarah Palin applause line. Recently on its front page the New York Times invoked “the classic image of a humanities professor … tweed jacket, pipe, nerdy, longwinded, secular—and liberal” in a story on a sociological study of the power of typecasting.

From the time I was eight up until a little over a week ago, I truly believed that no one in this world could match my blind infatuation with the oddities, obscenities, and romantic notions of Greek mythology. I will even go so far as to divulge that, at the tender age of ten, after weeping unapologetically in a literature class upon realizing that Persephone would not be able to return to the earthly world because she had eaten six measly pomegranate seeds, I actually begged my mother to buy one of these “mysterious” fruits so I could relish the sensation that enslaved Persephone to Hades,

The West's post-9/11 preference for information-boggle over truth-telling gets a blunt reckoning in The Room and the Chair, Lorraine Adams's forceful follow-up to her well-received 2004 novel, Harbor. Adams sidesteps individual blame for this systemic moral torpor (the events take place at the end of the last administration, but none of the usual suspects are named) in favor of a collective study of an impressively sprawling, prodigiously flawed ensemble. Indeed, The Room and the Chair makes a compelling case that the deteriorating state of reality-based America is a collective effort—and that

The Silver Hearted arrives emblazoned with a jacket blurb by Edmund White, who compares the book favorably to Heart of Darkness. This is true in at least one way: both novels are about a man on a boat. In McConnell’s case, the boat is a “side-wheeler” called the Myrrha, which has been hired by the nameless narrator to help ferry valuable cargo down a nameless river through a nameless country at war. Danger abounds. Snipers line the riverbed; frenzied mobs surge through the streets; storms rip across the surrounding rain forest.

“In the flash of satanic lightning you could glimpse the glassy

The Gin Closet, the first novel by 26-year old Leslie Jamison, begins strikingly: “On Christmas I found Grandma Lucy lying on linoleum. She’d fallen. The refrigerator hummed behind her naked body like a death rattle.” This is a promising opening: dramatic but short of bombastic, lyrical without showing off. But Jamison’s novel, over time, becomes considerably less sure of itself than it first appears. While the author displays keen powers of observation, a clumsy structure and a lack of focus keep her book from achieving cohesiveness.

The novel is narrated in alternating long sections by