Joan Baez once observed of Bob Dylan’s music that it either left you indifferent or went “way, way deep.” A similar claim, on a far lesser scale of renown, could be made for Nick Drake, the English singer-songwriter who produced three exquisite but largely unnoticed albums between 1969 and 1972, sank into depression, and died of a prescription-drug overdose in 1974. Until his rediscovery a little over a decade ago, his music remained the preserve of the happy few, revered by those who had found their way to it and ignored by everyone else. Even now, a compendium of Drake

Carl Van Vechten was, by the late 1920s, “the nation’s unrivaled expert on the Negro, the man who had unveiled to the world the remarkable truth about the United States’ hidden artistic genius.” He was also one of New York City’s great narcissists. And he managed to distinguish himself even within this self-enamored group by carefully crafting his image for posterity—hoarding great stockpiles of material related to himself and feeding them to Yale and to the New York Public Library. So he is recognized as the connective tissue between Lincoln Kirstein and Gertrude Stein and Langston Hughes and the Fitzgeralds

Early in Noah Isenberg’s biography of the legendary filmmaker Edgar G. Ulmer—ultimate auteur of the desperate, no-budget, seventy-minute feature, the proverbial Eisenstein of Poverty Row—the author plucks the phrase “fever swamp” from one of the director’s later efforts, a purple western called The Naked Dawn (1955). The farther Isenberg dives into the blissfully cursed recesses of that swamp, the more Ulmer’s career seems like a perverse figment of a cigar-chomping imp’s imagination. It might have sprung fully deformed from an unproduced Coen brothers script (The Amazing Transparent Director) or lost chapters from Kafka’s Amerika.

IN THE WORK of the Argentine writer Julio Cortázar, the shortest distances are often also the greatest: The space between self and other can be maddeningly difficult to traverse. Full of magical transformations, ritual sacrifices, and turbulent prophetic dreams, Cortázar’s writing abounds with troubled pairings, unlikely and uneasy doppelgängers who come apart even as—especially as—they converge. In one of his stories, “The Distances,” a wealthy Argentine woman dreams repeatedly of a Hungarian peasant. When she finally encounters the object of her visions on a bridge in Budapest, she embraces the woman and watches, helpless, as her double walks off in

Reviewing is easy, but history can be hard. I mean that Michael Mewshaw’s Sympathy for the Devil, his reminiscence of Gore Vidal, proves easy to praise—swift, canny, sensitive, and unafraid. But Vidal himself, two years after his death, poses more of a challenge. Was his accomplishment literary, finally? Or does he owe his status more to his public persona, and his gifts as a well-spoken cultural gadfly? Such celebrity carries its own weight, to be sure; most writers would gladly give up a masterpiece for a fraction of Vidal’s fame. Nonetheless, the nature of that fame ought to be examined,

The French writer Emmanuel Carrère wrote several novels before finding his home in the more ambiguous genre of novelistic nonfiction. His work often explores the perils of self-invention and the fraught relationship between fact and fiction. The Adversary (2000), for example, tells the story of a mediocre man who was so desperate to please that he created a fictitious life for himself. When his lies started to unravel, he killed his family so they wouldn’t be disappointed in him. Eduard Limonov, the subject of Carrère’s newly translated “pseudo-biography,” Limonov, is a different kind of fabulist: the hero of his own

Diane Cook’s debut collection, Man V. Nature, strikes a disarming balance between quirk and claustrophobic sadness. In the opening story, a woman is removed from the house she shared with her late husband and taken to a shelter for widows and divorcées that, with its barbwire fences, is essentially a prison. Forced to take part in “moving on” seminars, the residents are denied even private expression of their grief as they wait to be assigned a new husband. In form, “Moving On” could be by one of Cook’s fellow social surrealists: Aimee Bender, George Saunders, or Steven Millhauser, all clear

In 1976, Viv Albertine was a twenty-two-year-old Brit punk looking to shock and awe the general populace: “I walk around in little girls’ party dresses, hems slashed and ragged, armholes torn open to make them bigger, the waistline up under my chest. . . . Pippi Longstocking meets Barbarella meets juvenile delinquent. Men look at me and they are confused, they don’t know whether they want to fuck me or kill me. This sartorial ensemble really messes with their heads. Good.”