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

Much of today’s food writing describes extreme fare, from molecular gastronomists who present bison on a pine branch festooned with candy canes to state-fair vendors who serve deep-fried Twinkies. But what about everyday meals cooked in America’s kitchens, both now and in the past? Mark Kurlansky’s The Food of a Younger Land, a collection of anecdotes, essays, recipes, and food lore gathered in the late 1930s and early ’40s by the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Writers’ Project, reminds us that what we eat and how we fix it is the bread and butter of the people’s history.

Intertwining the stories of Aravind Adiga’s second book, Between the Assassinations, a self-described “novel in stories,” is the blandly anodyne voice of a travel guide writer introducing the visitor to Kittur, a city on the southwest Indian coast where the book is set. The cheerful pabulum of the travel guide’s spiel works as an ironic counterpoint to the boiling class resentment at the forefront of the stories. “After a lunch of prawn curry and rice at the Bunder, you may want to visit the Lighthouse Hill and its vicinity,” suggests our affable guide, but the person going to Lighthouse Hill

Laura Jacobs is an urban miniaturist. In her sleek, pitch-perfect second novel, The Bird Catcher, she lavishes delectable attention on the subtle distinctions wrought by taste, class, money, and style in the city on which she trains her eagle eye. But there is nothing diminutive in her vision: Under the force of her piercing, halogen-bright gaze, the world cracks open, large and luminous.

…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

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.

Rome, November 30, 1820. John Keats, who at the age of twenty-five has less than three months to live, is writing to his friend Charles Brown in England:

The Bush administration sold us a war based on phony intelligence; Bernie Madoff sold investors invisible stocks. The art of peddling snake oil may be age-old, but something about the deceit of recent years makes Clancy Martin’s debut novel, How to Sell, feel very timely. Set amid the Fort Worth jewelry trade, this drug-fueled coming-of-age tale knowingly explores our culture of greed and excess.

Welsh poets may still sense a bardic responsibility to speak for their communities. The relatively new post of national poet, currently held by Gillian Clarke, arises naturally from that tradition. Happily for the incumbent, it brings none of the royalist freight attached to the English “laureate” brand, but there are other pressing expectations. Academi, which sponsors the post, lists on its website the required skills, including “an ability to communicate, to write well and often, and to have a regular route into the magic that makes verse work”. This is an un-nerving job description – not least, that surely mischievous

Charlotte Roche’s controversial novel, Wetlands, is an uneven yet adventurous catalogue of filth, a feminist critique of what cultural theorist Lauren Berlant calls “hygienic governmentality.” In the case of Wetlands, this means a politics housed in the anarchic, messy body of German teenager Helen Memel. Narrating from her hospital bed after hemorrhoid surgery, eighteen-year-old Helen sees herself as a sanitary terrorist, rallying against the deceitfully liberational promises of tampon ads and shaving commercials and of a fascist regime of douching and wiping from front to back.

When he died 99 years ago this week, Mark Twain was this country’s most beloved writer, yet his status as both an author and protean example of the now-familiar pop cultural celebrity seems to grow with each passing decade.