No one has done the voice inside the head, ever present as we dice and chop life’s minutiae into apposite syllables— that “murmur, now precise as the headwaiter’s”—so accurately as Samuel Beckett. He remains the master of depicting mental paralysis, registering with circular syntax (there is always another but, yet, perhaps, or) the provisional, self-consuming logic that mires the soul at the starting line. Beckett achieved a kind of apotheosis of this style in three novels—Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable—all composed in the late ’40s while he was living in France. In these works, as in

“Predictably—and understandably— more pressing problems than saving dirt usually carry the day,” writes David R. Montgomery. But as his new book, Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations, details, we are losing the brown stuff far, far too quickly. Unlike maritime dead zones and radical climate change, cases in which we have little historical knowledge on which to draw, we do have some sense of what happens to civilizations that abuse and lose their dirt. The book’s conclusion takes little comfort in history: “Unless more immediate disasters do us in, how we address the twin problems of soil degradation

The true pleasure of reading any book on rock ’n’ roll comes less in the descriptions of the music—I’ve long felt that rock bios need to be packaged with a CD, to reinforce or introduce the aural ideas presented—than in the personal excesses, the wantonness, the luxury and degradation, for lack of a better phrase. The gold standard of the genre, Peter Guralnick’s magisterial two-volume biography of Elvis Presley, Last Train to Memphis (1994) and Careless Love (1999), fairly wallows in Presley’s enthusiasms for things that aren’t healthy or kind, like a steady stream of amphetamines, and his

“Any mosaic that has survived from the sixth century is treasured,” the authors of Dynamic Splendor aver, in great understatement. What the marvelous two-volume monograph plunders is more than treasure, of course—for it tells in remarkable detail the story of the mosaics in the basilica of Eufrasius at Porecˇ, in the former Yugoslavia. Only Ravenna rivals Porecˇ as an extant example of early–Middle Ages church architecture, and the first volume of Dynamic Splendor wastes no space in describing everything about this two-thousand-year-old Croatian site, from its geographic setting and ecclesiastical

Glaswegian-turned-Londoner Andrew O’Hagan made a name for himself as the deputy editor of the London Review of Books before publishing his nonfiction debut, The Missing, in 1995. In this profound inquiry into the worlds of the vanished— runaways, abductees, murder victims—O’Hagan wove together journalism, family history, and memoir (the project was sparked by curiosity about his grandfather’s disappearance during World War II). Fiction always draws O’Hagan back to Scotland: His first two novels, Our Fathers (1999) and Personality (2003), are multigenerational family sagas. Our Fathers takes

Chance May Crown Thee

APRIL 1–7

Is there anything SHAKESPEARE didn't say? Settle your bets with the new Modern Library edition of the complete works. It comes out just two days after Abrams Books releases Manga Shakespeare: Hamlet, an illustrated guide to muscled melancholy, and Manga Shakespeare: Romeo and Juliet, a tale of star-crossed lovers and their flowy, well-drawn hair. . . . If plays could write, perhaps SAMUEL BECKETTS's Endgame would tell of its journey to London for its premiere at the Royal Court Theatre fifty years past. The playwright had wanted to put it on in France but couldn't

Poets find themselves unnerved every April during National Poetry Month when the noise of consumerism fades a decibel and the media spotlight falls on them. "Too bad for you, beautiful singer," Peter Gizzi laments in his new book, The Outernationale (Wesleyan University Press, $23). How do poets write in a culture enamored of both media spectacle (the Super Bowl, American Idol, a televised war) and unmediated individual expression—YouTube, MySpace, and blogs?

Four of the five poets considered here propose that poetry's role is to critique culture by way of language and form and, in so doing,