The intimate lives of writers have always had a special attraction for readers, perhaps because we imagine that people who can shape ideas and arrange scenes on the page should be able to offer us some special insight into how to order our messy off-the-page lives. This has rarely been proven the case—writers often seem less, rather than more, gifted at the mechanics of everyday existence; all the same it has not stemmed our interest in finding out what Sylvia said to Ted or why Simone pimped for Jean-Paul.

It has become a commonplace to say, in the aftermath of the Great Recession, that ‘we are all Keynesians now.’ If this is so, then Keynes’s great biographer, Robert Skidelsky, should have much to say about the recession, its causes and the appropriate cures. And so indeed he does. I share with Skidelsky the view that, while most of the blame for the crisis should reside with those in the financial markets, who did such a poor job both in allocating capital and in managing risk (their key responsibilities), a considerable portion of it lies with the economics profession.

Japanese Noh theater would seem to be an odd subject for William T. Vollmann, were it not for the fact that nothing human is alien to him. Indeed, he is one of the very few writers among us about whom the latter statement can be made without irony. His appetite for all human behavior is so truly omnivorous that the book’s subtitle—Beauty, Understatement and Femininity in Japanese Noh Theater, with some thoughts on Muses (especially Helga Testorf), Transgender Women, Kabuki Goddesses, Porn Queens, Poets, Housewives, Makeup Artists, Geishas, Valkyries and Venus Figurines—is not an exaggeration.

When David Lipsky meets David Foster Wallace, it’s 1996, Infinite Jest has just been released, and Wallace is the most famous literary writer in America. The author is also using a Barney the Purple Dinosaur towel as a bedroom curtain in his Illinois home. On the wall is a poster of Alanis Morissette. “If by some paradox,” he tells Lipsky, a novelist who’s there to profile him for Rolling Stone, “this whole fuss could get me some kind of even just like a five-minute cup of tea with her, that would be more than reward enough.” Later, Wallace will confess to being drawn to “squeaky orgasmic

Many of the pieces in David Grann’s fine collection of articles, The Devil and Sherlock Holmes, read like detective stories, and it would be tempting to categorize this book, whose subtitle promises us “tales of murder, madness, and obsession,” as a work of true crime, albeit one without the breathless exaggerations of that genre. In his first book, the best-selling The Lost City of Z, the writer offered up a true tale of deadly obsession for the ages: the attempts to find a legendary city in the Amazon, and the explorers who vanished searching for it. If that earlier book possessed a certain