Seven-week old Nathaniel Byng doesn’t seem to mind the long, bony finger poking his tummy. In fact, he’s fascinated by the finger (covered almost to the knuckle with a gold and red-stone ring) and the tall, sepulchral figure leaning over him. Anyone over the age of seven weeks might wisely look at the pale face and curtain of black hair, and think: “Death! Get me the hell out of here!” But there are benefits to being blissfully preliterate, and having Nick Cave give you a cuddle is one of them.

It started with the busted tie-rods of a Humvee. It continued with the ill-advised order to split an Army Ranger platoon as the Afghan night was coming on. And it finished, on April 22, 2004, with the death by friendly fire of an exemplary young American. But there it did not really end, because of who this fine man happened to be — Pat Tillman, promising NFL star — and because a virtuosic author decided to write a political firecracker of a book about the “cynical cover-up sanctioned at the highest levels of government” that ensued after his death.

Dan Chaon’s latest novel, Await Your Reply, starts in the middle of a particularly bloody scene: A severed hand on a bed of ice in a Styrofoam cooler is being rushed, along with its owner, to a hospital in Michigan. Chaon offers no further information; the details—teeth chattering, calluses on the fingertips of the hand, “the car pursuing its pool of headlight”—give the action a visceral edge rather than clarify the cause. The events leading up to this situation go unexplained for much of the book. Such is the pattern of this novel: Motivating reasons remain obscure, effects are painfully

Despite their ever-present flora, it’s somewhat false to call the poems in Micrographia “nature poems.” While their topic may be the natural world—sumac and juniper, sparrows, lilacs, jots of fir—the book revolves on a much more ontological axis. An appreciation of nature is present throughout the book, but not the same kind of stillness found in Mary Oliver or Gary Snyder’s quieter verse. Here, nature stands to people as they relate to it (”The butterfly is pinned through its thorax . . . The name affixes to earth.”), not as something set aside elsewhere to be appreciated.

“My life seems like a stranger’s house to me,” writes Werner Herzog late in Conquest of the Useless, less a straightforward diary of 1979-81, when he was working on Fitzcarraldo, than a series of “inner landscapes, born of the delirium of the jungle.” The film tells the story of the title character (played by Herzog’s frequent collaborator Klaus Kinski), a man who dreams of opening an opera house in a remote corner of Peru; to avoid treacherous rapids and natives alike, Fitzcarraldo opts to drag all of his equipment, including an enormous steamship, over a mountain rather than sail around

Homer and Langley Collyer, two human relics from Edith Wharton’s New York, became legendary in late Spring of 1947 when they were discovered dead in their decaying Harlem town house on upper Fifth Avenue, immured behind a reported hundred tons of carefully hoarded debris. Most of that tonnage comprised books, as well as magazines and newspapers from as far back as a quarter century, stacked ceiling high to create a maze of tunnels, culs-de-sac, and trip-wired booby traps—one of which had collapsed on Langley, killing him. (Homer, the first brother to be found, died of apparent starvation; Langley’s rat-nibbled body

In his 2001 novel, Erasure, Percival Everett conjured up the unforgettable Thelonius “Monk” Ellison, a middle-class writer of challenging fiction who enjoys a decidedly quiet (think polite applause) career until, fed up with a publishing industry and reading public interested only in “authentic” black voices and “authentic” black experience, he writes a pseudonymous send-up of street fiction that he thinks is absurd and that the rest of the world thinks is genius.

David Mazzucchelli is not a casual cartoonist. There are no accidents in his comics world; he takes every element into account, from ink and color to paper and binding—which makes the apparent spontaneity and easy naturalism of his work both beguiling and convincing. His pictorial world has expanded over the course of two decades and across a variety of publications and genres, from the noir realism of Daredevil (1984–86) and Batman: Year One (1986–87) to the fablelike tales of Rubber Blanket (1991–93) to the epic character study that is his first graphic novel, Asterios Polyp. The key to these projects

Artists are in the business of simultaneously de-familiarizing and re-familiarizing us with the world around us. “Habit is a great deadener,” Samuel Beckett explained, and art lends us a new pair of spectacles with which to view reality anew.

In the fall of 1936, after a decade of not doing so, this magazine sponsored a poetry prize. Of the 1,800 poems submitted, said the editors of The Nation, “the overwhelming majority were concerned with contemporary social conflicts either at home or abroad.” The winning poem, Wallace Stevens’s “The Men That Are Falling,” was an elegy for soldiers recently killed in the Spanish Civil War