Sure, the economic collapse of 2008 impoverished many Americans, but it also enriched our language. Back in the days of home-equity-funded Viking Ranges and perpetually solvent 401(k)s, our cultural dictionaries were shockingly bereft of terms like “credit default swap” and “collateralized debt obligation.” One mere global financial panic later, they’re on everyone’s lips. It was only a matter of time, then, before celebrity geographer Richard Florida—who spent the fat years introducing Americans to the “creative class”—arrived on the scene with a trendy new coinage. Too late to christen the

There are more Christians in the United States than in any other country in world history, but much of Christianity makes us queasy. Many of our megachurch preachers choke on the word sin, and when politicians talk of “evildoers” they seem to be speaking a dead language. It’s easy to forget, in this sunny state of theological affairs, that for most Anglo-American believers the concept of evil was once as close at hand as a taxicab on Fifth Avenue or Piccadilly Circus. We hailed it not only to navigate the twists and turns of war and crime but also to reckon with our personal calamities. Evil

Two new war memoirs, one from a reporter and one from a former army officer, describe close to nothing at all but do so with urgency. Violent images flash by, lives are shattered, the end. You might be inclined to wonder about the difference between observer and participant reports on war, but those distinctions evaporate on the page. Prosecuting strategically senseless war with a muddled premise in an unfamiliar social and political landscape seems to make everyone—even soldiers in the field—into oddly detached observers. In these disjointed accounts, people are just pulling the trigger and

Bringing together Marx and Freud in a united theoretical front was an urgent task for radicals throughout much of the twentieth century, with benefits that would flow to historical materialism and psychoanalysis alike. The stakes were already clear in Wilhelm Reich’s ill-fated efforts of the 1920s and ’30s: The central but under-developed notion of class consciousness (about which Marx himself had written just a few suggestive pages) might be put on better footing by annexing a theory of the mind that was, after all, materialist in its basic assumptions. And revolutionary expropriation would

FICTION

Lee Rourke’s first novel, THE CANAL (Melville House, June), features an unnamed, bored first-person protagonist, but the book doesn’t have the quirky and solipsistic observations that solitude spawns and that many debut novelists cram onto the page. For lack of anything better to do, the narrator quits his job and sits each day by a London canal. A woman stranger soon joins him and relates a story that pierces his apathy: “I was uncomfortable with what she was saying . . . yet she excited me that moment more than I ever thought possible.”

Michelle Hoover’s THE QUICKENING (Other Press,

In the 1960s, John Waters was an admirer of a lesbian stripper in Baltimore named Lady Zorro. “She just came out nude and snarled at her fans, ‘What the fuck are you looking at?’ To this day,” Waters writes in his splendid new book, “Zorro is my inspiration.”

This kind of dual portraiture surfaces throughout Role Models, with Waters’s appreciations of Ivy Compton-Burnett, Little Richard, Leslie Van Houten, Tennessee Williams, Cy Twombly, and Bobby Garcia revealing as much about his idols as they do about him. The thread that links these varied but extreme personalities is of course the raunchy