David Foster Wallace, who hanged himself in his home last September, wrote about authenticity, self-consciousness and the pursuit of happiness in America. It became a commonplace and then a cliché and then almost a taunt to call him the greatest writer of his generation, yet his project remained only vaguely understood when it was understood at all. With the benefit of time, it will be recognized that Wallace had less in common with Eggers and Franzen than he did with Dostoevsky and Joyce. Against what he believed to be the outmoded theoretical commitments of his predecessors and contemporaries,

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.

A few years

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

…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

Portrait with Keys is the first nonfiction work by South African novelist Ivan Vladislavic, whose relative obscurity in the United States can only be attributed to the fact that none of his five works of fiction have found a publisher here. His status as an unknown, however, is not likely to last; Portrait with Keys is a beautiful book, affecting and ingenious, opening new intellectual vistas onto art and architecture, poetry and urbanism.

In short narrative bursts, Vladislavic brings to life the social and physical complexion of Johannesburg past and present, as well as its place in South

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, often shedding her