…it is difficult not to watch the movie on TV at the foot of his bed. 40” color screen, a jailhouse dolly psychodrama; truncheons and dirty shower scenes. I recognize one of the actresses … Here is the interior of “The Old Poet, Dying,” by August Kleinzahler. The vigil Kleinzahler keeps beside the dying man’s bed is a modern one, too infrequently expressed in poetry, perhaps. Anne Heche makes an appearance, though Kleinzahler declines to have her named (the movie he describes can only be 1994’s “Girls in Prison.”) This, like most of Kleinzahler’s asides, may not be an aside

It doesn’t take a paranoid mind to fret over our state of hyper-marketing. Every Gatorade we buy at Vons, every Bed Bath & Beyond card we’ve registered for, every pop-up ad we’ve accidentally clicked on (only to be infested with spyware) is fed into some mass accounting of our habits, pleasures and vices.

Katherine Anne Porter came from “the soft blackland farming country” of north central Texas. The touch and the smell of that dark earth would stay with her for the rest of her long life. Born in 1890 in Indian Creek—then still a frontier settlement—she died, laden with honors, in 1980, in Silver Spring, Maryland. She lived on the move until well into old age; in a late interview, she calculated that she had resided at more than fifty addresses in her lifetime. She was restlessness incarnate. She married four times, once divorcing within a year, and had numerous love affairs,

The characters in Sarah Rainone’s debut novel, Love Will Tear Us Apart, are cast from familiar molds: the masochistic boor, the aspirant fashion designer, the would-be musician, and the gullible hippie. As the book opens, these four twenty-somethings (none particularly likable) are preparing to gather at a mansion in the fictional burg of Galestown, Rhode Island. The occasion is the marriage of two mutual friends, Dan and Lea, who met in high school in the early ’90s and have spent the years since college pursuing successful careers.

The best one-volume encyclopedia in the world used to be the Columbia Encyclopedia, first published by Columbia University Press in 1935. In our house we have the fifth edition, from 1993, and we still get it out occasionally to look up kings and queens and old-fashioned stuff like that. It’s a lovely book, fat but portable and full of nuggety little entries on most things you can think of. It also has quite a poignant preface, in which the editors talk about the difficulties of updating an encyclopedia in such a fast-changing world: they note how much history, politics, even

Although recent novels have presented sophisticated tales of the 1960s and ’70s political underground—including Dana Spiotta’s Eat the Document, Christopher Sorrentino’s Trance, and Hari Kunzru’s My Revolutions—latter-day radicalism continues to be fetishized, from the recurrent use in fashion and art of a beret-clad, gun-wielding Patty Hearst to Shepard Fairey’s ubiquitous Che Guevara–inspired poster of Barack Obama. But any romantic notion of this revolutionary period is dismantled in Mark Rudd’s memoir, Underground, a sober account of his time as a member of Students for a Democratic Society and its faction the Weathermen and of his seven years as a fugitive from

One day in June 1974, a novice Israeli politician named Ariel Sharon drove into the northern West Bank. In a field of thistles south of the Palestinian city of Nablus, the short, bulky ex-general joined a hundred young activists from a radical right-wing protest movement who were busily setting up a new settlement. The activists’ aim was to ensure that Israel retained permanent rule of the entire West Bank, in defiance of the policy of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who’d taken office just two days before. Sharon, known for his obsession with maps and topography, had personally chosen the spot