Come winter, when New York’s street life grows scarcer and the public parks become frozen stretches you either race through or avoid, my fantasies of suburban life are revived. They began when I was a boy, and I’ve held on to them, I think, out of a deviant nostalgia for a way of life that remains almost as alien to me as that of a farmer. The houses, as I thought of them, were like miniature castles, with their small bubbling furnaces and hideaway rooms. They seemed complete unto themselves, each set in its own apron of soil, with its inviolable border, able to contain the entirety of

“Sometimes, the shortest path between two points is serpentine,” writes Christopher Benfey, a professor and author of several studies of nineteenth-century literature and art, in this digressive mix of memoir, art criticism, and historical essay. It comprises autobiographical recollections, a coming to terms with his aging parents, and an account of his extended family that includes, on his father’s side, the artists Josef and Anni Albers. The book also considers what the North Carolina Piedmont has given to American culture, whether through brickwork and pottery, or the avant-garde

Sarah Manguso’s prose elegy for a friend who died when he jumped onto the tracks as a Metro-North train pulled into the 254th Street station in Riverdale is odd, fragmentary, obstinately unbalanced. On July 23, 2008, musician and software engineer Harris Wulfson checked himself out of a psychiatric ward and died roughly ten hours later, his actions and whereabouts in the intervening hours never accounted for. Manguso admits up front that she has little access to the events leading up to the death. She had been in Rome, on a writing fellowship, for the last year of Wulfson’s life, and

In her introduction to this volume, curator and author Elizabeth Easton argues that the invention and early use of amateur cameras is relevant to the twenty-first century because the technological changes experienced by people using the Kodak around 1900 parallel those that are upending modes of communication in the digital age. Instantaneous, portable, cheap, and easy to use, the Kodak camera allowed everyone to become an image maker, in the process blurring the distinctions between artists and their public—a distinction that is being further eroded today. Easton’s book accompanies a

In the opening pages of Pity the Billionaire, Thomas Frank sounds like he’s reporting on the protests against Wall Street during the fall of 2011. He describes the uproar that spread through the country in the years after a stock-market bubble burst in America’s face, a moment in which unemployment is high and the middle class is demoralized.“Markets disintegrate, layoffs mount, foreclosures begin, and before you know it,” Frank writes, “the people are in the streets, yelling for blood.” But this early scene in Frank’s latest book isn’t a record of the months-long unrest of the various