There is something about the Brontë sisters that is enduringly fascinating, something about their strange, gifted, and woefully abbreviated lives (none of them lived to forty) that reads like the stuff of myth. Perhaps it’s the combination of great personal privation and great artistic willfulness, the mixture of geographic isolation and literary renown, that lends their story an elemental note of warring forces both within and without. To think of these three motherless and conspicuously inbred young women—Charlotte, Emily, and Anne—living off in a parsonage on the Yorkshire moors together with an eccentric curate father and an alcoholic brother, in

I can’t remember the last time I used an electric typewriter. It most likely would have been in the course of typing out an address on an envelope—but then again, I can’t readily call to mind the last time I did that with anything other than that old-fashioned technology, the ballpoint pen, which itself is not really all that old school. The mass commercial distribution of the ballpoint pen in the United States dates only to about 1945, which means its triumphal appearance in the writing market occurred just under twenty years before that of the Magnetic Tape Selectric Typewriter,

Authenticity is something we can only imagine these days. In the midst of some deep-relaxation exercise, we might picture small children playing with wooden toys or humble peasants toiling in the fields, but even our inward set pieces feel a little fake. The wooden toys are actually replicas of plastic toys that are, in turn, replicas of cartoon characters featured in blockbuster movies. The humble peasants are really actors imitating what they think hard labor looks like, based on a mix of children’s books about John Henry, Sam Cooke lyrics, and online porn.

In America, the genre of the prison memoir includes Soul on Ice, by Eldridge Cleaver, and George Jackson’s prison letters. It runs through Alexander Berkman’s Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist on its way to memoirs of slavery and indentured servitude. It includes ancient captivity narratives—The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano; Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson—and, with the publication of Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s Guantánamo Diary, it runs right up to our present tense.

It was a dark and stormy night when I broke out crime novelist Sara Paretsky’s recipe for Chicken Gabriella. Replete with fresh figs and several kinds of booze, it is one of the many tantalizing and entertaining choices in the new Mystery Writers of America Cookbook: Wickedly Good Meals and Desserts to Die for (Quirk Books, $25), a collection of recipes from many of America’s top crime writers, including the relatively newly annointed Gillian Flynn as well as old hands like James Patterson, Laura Lippman, and a host of other authors who may not be as well-known but are no

In 1919, C. K. Scott Moncrieff first approached an English publisher with a proposal to translate Du côté de chez Swann, the novel that Marcel Proust had finally been able to see published that same year to a favorable reception in France more than a half decade after he had been forced to pay for a private printing. Scott Moncrieff’s idea went nowhere. The British house he contacted, Constable & Co., wrote back that they had never heard of the author (and bafflingly referred to him as “Prevost”). The lack of commercial interest didn’t, however, deter Scott Moncrieff. Even though

The invention of kitsch, critic Clement Greenberg wrote in 1939, was part and parcel of European industrialization. The continent’s newly dislocated masses found themselves stuck, from Birmingham to Berlin, between an urbane high culture to which they had no connection and a folk culture whose significance was indelibly rooted in the countryside they had left behind, and kitsch, Greenberg argued, was devised to fill this gap. Produced by committee, designed by formula, and motivated by profit, kitsch “pretends to demand nothing of its customers except their money—not even their time.”

Sports books have the unfortunate tendency to treat local pockets of fanaticism as if they were universal. That may be unavoidable; when it comes to the suspenseful movement of balls, titillation is almost always in the eye of the beholder.

SURVEYS BY NATASHA STAGG. SOUTH PASADENA, CA: SEMIOTEXT(E). 176 PAGES. $16.

In “Go Out and Burn Them,” one of the standout stories in Greek writer Christos Ikonomou’s Something Will Happen, You’ll See, a bereaved widower is found climbing into a public trash bin. “Any man who lets his wife die like that,” he tells the passerby who stops him, “deserves to go out with the trash. They can pick me up and recycle me, maybe I’ll come out a more useful man.” It’s a striking expression of guilt, but also a rather absurd one—there was nothing that the widower, Sofronis babra-Tasos, could have done to save his wife. She had a