Rafael Yglesias’s beautiful and disturbing ninth novel concerns the largely companionable twenty-seven-year marriage of Enrique and Margaret Sabas, or more accurately, the first several weeks of their courtship and the last several weeks of Margaret’s life, with a dash of adultery and the death of a parent tossed in to represent the middle bits. The novel is heavily autobiographical—Enrique, like Yglesias, is a literary prodigy, having quit school at sixteen after the publication of his first novel. The story opens five years later, and Enrique, now twenty-one, is living the despondent life of the midlist novelist in a fifth-floor walk-up

If you’re reading this review online, you’ve elected to do so instead of looking at baby pictures, porn, or any number of blogs, vlogs, and feeds—a seemingly limitless collection of media and information. It’s shocking what people will put online. Or, strike that, it’s no longer shocking. In a worryingly short amount of time, many of us have become very comfortable with oversharing our lives and consuming the personal details of others on the Internet. It is this rapid shift that concerns Canadian social critic Hal Niedzviecki in his book The Peep Diaries. Niedzviecki meditates on the changes wrought by

An air of comical amphetamine dependence pervades Martin Millar’s debut novel, Milk, Sulphate, and Alby Starvation. The protagonist, Alby, is a twenty-six-year-old paranoiac and small-time sulphate (i.e., speed) dealer convinced that both Chinese gangsters and the Milk Marketing Board have contracts out on his life. The book’s plot is chopped into raucous little sections that seem to reflect the characters’ short attention spans, while its sentences, in their haste to catalog the chaos, often forgo punctuation entirely. Indeed, one comes to feel thoroughly under the influence of Millar’s lively, hurtling prose.

Had she been a celebrity in our Internet era, her scandalous lifestyle would have caused an even greater frenzy. Still, Lady Idina Sackville managed to stir plenty of shock and controversy in the tabloid newspapers of Edwardian England. Charming, intelligent, rich and seductive, Sackville was a descendant of one of England’s oldest families, taking lovers and husbands as she pleased, eventually marrying and divorcing five times.

Ron Currie Jr. writes fiction that a Hollywood executive might call high-concept. His first book, God Is Dead (2007), imagines life on earth after God has taken human form—in Darfur, no less—and died. His second novel, Everything Matters!, tells the story of a young man called Junior, born in Maine in 1974, who is informed at birth by a voice in his head that the world will end roughly six months after his thirty-sixth birthday. Everything Matters! is largely free of sci-fi trappings and dwells frequently on familiar human dilemmas, but its “What if?”–style premise keeps the story moving. The

“Writers love music,” observes Peter Terzian in his introduction to Heavy Rotation: Twenty Writers on the Albums That Changed Their Lives. “A good ear is almost a requirement of the job; the best writing has voice, has rhythm.” Indeed, John Ashbery has spoken of his poetry’s indebtedness to music, and Samuel Beckett gave precise attention to the cadence of his plays. In Heavy Rotation, however, technical discussions have been traded for highly personal—and highly readable—accounts of the relationship between music and literature.

Millions heard the sound of freedom in the Beatles’ music. Elijah Wald hears a death knell. In the songs of the Fab Four, he argues, pop music completed its decades-long transformation from a kingdom of democratic dance and authorless song to a lonesome land of private pleasures and isolated audiences. The result was segregation along lines of race as well as taste: In the late ’60s, as white rock sought introspection in albums and black pop chased good times on singles, an “increasing divide between rock and soul, listening music and dance music,” developed. Wald writes that the Beatles destroyed

‘Every life has a theme’, wrote Isaac Rosenfeld in an essay on Gandhi. The theme of his own life, and of this biography, was failure. Rosenfeld was born in Chicago in 1918 and with the publication of his novel Passage from Home in 1946 was pronounced a golden boy of American letters. Yet almost nothing followed – critical essays, some short stories, true; but mainly page after page of unfinished manuscripts. Ever increasingly, Rosenfeld was overtaken by his Chicago friend-turned-rival Saul Bellow, who took his crown. Rosenfeld died of a heart attack in 1956, aged thirty-eight. Even the novel Bellow

David Foster Wallace, who hanged himself in his home last September, wrote about authenticity, self-consciousness and the pursuit of happiness in America. It became a commonplace and then a cliché and then almost a taunt to call him the greatest writer of his generation, yet his project remained only vaguely understood when it was understood at all. With the benefit of time, it will be recognized that Wallace had less in common with Eggers and Franzen than he did with Dostoevsky and Joyce. Against what he believed to be the outmoded theoretical commitments of his predecessors and contemporaries, he labored