“I Just Shot John Lennon,” screams a headline from the December 9, 1980, edition of the New York Post. (If there’s anything certain in our precarious world, it’s the Post’s hoary sensationalism.) A facsimile of its front page appears as one of the endpapers in CLUB 57: FILM, PERFORMANCE, AND ART IN THE EAST VILLAGE, 1978–1983 (MoMA, $40),a catalogue that documents the sordid and celebratory goings-on of a time and place in Manhattan that seems fresher, queerer, and more illicit than the swipe-right chickenshit assimilationism of New York City today. Club 57 (and sister haunts such as the Mudd

Landing in the cratered, tawdry New York City of the 1970s, Duncan Hannah was a distracted art student who became a fitfully aspiring painter-illustrator. Before maturing into the stylish throwback artist he is today—the Evelyn Waugh of painting, beautifully reimagining Bridesheads past and bygone movie stars—he cut a resplendently androgynous figure on the CBGB scene, as both a born bon vivant and a straight sex object who wouldn’t give his gay patrons a tumble. (“A cocktease,” grumped his disgruntled harassers, who were legion.) At one point, he thought of calling this book Cautionary Tales

Despite its obdurate title—which cribs the catchphrase made famous by Damon Wayans’s outrageous character Homey D. Clown from In Living Color—David Peisner’s Homey Don’t Play That! plays practically everything. It dodges and weaves through the biographies of many people, laying down a cultural history of late-twentieth-century black humor, television, and civil rights, even as its bite-size chapters maintain the brisk, gossipy tone of a celebrity tell-all.

Peisner’s main narrative concerns the rise and fall of the highly unusual, incredibly influential, and wildly popular black-American

Great writers aren’t always “good writers.” Dostoyevsky shamelessly repeats himself. Denis Johnson, as Geoff Dyer once put it (fondly), can seem unsure of how a sentence works, and from the fake elegance of periphrasis Henry James gives us no relief. To go by the evidence of his fiction, Raymond Carver, that Chekhov of the strip mall, had the vocabulary of a twelve-year-old. On every page of Roberto Bolaño there is something to make a copy editor shudder. Easily, we could improve these writers’ sentences, and it is of sentences that literature is built. But we do not wish to “improve” their

“I have always wanted to write the sort of book that I find it impossible to talk about afterward, the sort of book that makes it impossible for me to withstand the gaze of others,” writes Annie Ernaux’s narrator near the end of her 1998 autofiction, Shame. Ernaux takes the sentiment further in the opening lines of her 2008 book, The Possession: “I have always wanted to write as if I would be gone when the book was published. To write as if I were about to die—no more judges.”

This is a thread that ties together much of Ernaux’s writing, one pulled taut by a certain anxiety about truth on one