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.

The narrator, Bobby Clark, is a troubled Canadian teen who gets booted from high school for stealing a case of class rings. “This place is for good people,” the principal says. “You are not a good

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

At its worst, the travel memoir can be formulaic to the extreme. A typical narrative begins with the author’s nagging sense of mediocrity and boredom, which then feeds into a desire for adventure and change, and often culminates in some form of the New Agey idiom “wherever you go, there you are.” Rachel Cusk’s latest book follows this formula to a point before turning it roundly on its head. The Last Supper is not only an account of the author’s journey to Italy, it is also a meditation on art and autonomy. Fearful of falling into a dull, dreary routine, Cusk and her husband sell their house

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.

One can’t

On one level, Wounded Cities reads as a personal lament for a world supposedly at peace before September 11. On another, it is a personal inquiry into the consciousness of increased terrorism across the globe since that day. Retrospection and apprehension share an uncomfortable space in this beautiful book. Its author, Leo Rubinfien, is a middle-class New Yorker now in his mid-fifties. His family moved into an apartment only a few blocks from the World Trade Center shortly before it was attacked. At his window, he witnessed the crime while his wife was on her brief walk to her job. Throughout

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince will seem curiously lonely when it arrives in theaters this July. For the first time since the film series premiered in 2001 with Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, no one is anticipating a new Potter novel by J. K. Rowling, the books having run their course two years ago. The films still have a ways to go; after Half-Blood Prince, Warner Bros. plans to split the final installment, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, into two films and release them in 2010 and 2011. The stated reason is that the company wants to do the book justice, but one might be

Christopher Caldwell claims Reflections on the Revolution in Europe is not a lecture to Europeans about how to handle their Islam problem. But his analysis leaves room for only one conclusion. White Europeans need to start fighting fire with fire, shed their exalted notions of multiculturalism and human rights, find religion and civilizational purpose, and, for good measure, dig back a few centuries to rediscover arranged marriage so they can start matching immigrants baby for baby. They might also consider sending all those Muslims—referred to occasionally as “invaders” and colonizers—back

The first time I thought of a plant as wicked, I realized I had crossed over into some fanatic realm of botanical empathy, joining ranks with plant enthusiasts so allied to particular species that it had become their personal responsibility—destiny, perhaps—to protect good plants, those susceptible sentient beings, against leafy villainy. By contract, of course, a gardener is a guardian assigned to protect a chosen plot from its hostile environment. But I discovered just how fervently humans impose a moral construct on the Plantae kingdom when a docent, in whose education program I was enrolled,