In the new essay collection Icon (edited Amy Scholder; published by the Feminist Press), writers discuss their relationships with public figures they’ve idolized, obsessed over, worried about, and been inspired by. Contributors include Mary Gaitskill (who pays homage to Linda Lovelace), Johanna Fateman (on Andrea Dworkin), and Kate Zambreno (on Kathy Acker), among others. The pieces vividly blend biography and autobiography, moving from tribute to confessional and back again. In the essay excerpted here, Justin Vivian Bond writes about Estee Lauder model Karen Graham’s serene and reassuring appearance. The “state of grace” it suggested helped Bond “escape into an image

Friendswood, Texas, a small town near the Gulf of Mexico, is well acquainted with the apocalyptic. When Rene Steinke’s novel of the same name opens, a hurricane has just devastated the area, and the shift in the water table has pushed a container of rusty-pink corrosive liquid to the surface from its secret home deep within the ground. “Hurricanes come with the territory, right?” local realtor Hal Holbrook says, trying to downplay the climate to a pair of wary buyers. Hal is less willing to acknowledge that virulent toxic waste is just as much a part of the area’s identity

Ugliness was fun for a while, but then it got too real. After kitsch—which bottomed, or perhaps topped, out in the middle of the last century—came a dark commercial anti-kitsch, an ugly so enveloping and horrid that it couldn’t be celebrated. Mass culture and aspirational brand culture drove right into each other, merging into a hideous beast that vomits Target “designer” lines and QVC frocks and polyester “fleece” blankets in sunny colors. There’s nothing charming about the ugliness that governs how we buy what we live with now. All that’s worse is the production regime under which it’s all made.

In reviews of works of fiction, the word “Chekhovian” tends to lie somewhere between “subtle,” “nonviolent,” and “boring.” If a story collection isn’t funny, it’s Chekhovian. If it’s wistful and no one smashes anything, it’s Chekhovian. Hearing the word makes one think that somewhere out there must be a hugely influential writer, Bill Chekhov, who lives in a constant state of lowkey sadness.

St. Petersburg used to be a familiar place for Russians and non-Russians alike. It is so recognizable—even clichéd—as a setting for the high drama and intrigue of nineteenth-century Russian literary classics that one recent Russian novel features a first-person shooter videogame called Dostoevsky’s Petersburg. As Petrograd, we know it as the cradle of the Revolution, the backdrop for Eisenstein; as Leningrad, the tale of its suffering during the murderous Siege of Leningrad by Nazi and Finnish troops in 1941-44 is part of the common tragic legacy of World War II.

There must be dozens of books on the Declaration of Independence written from every conceivable point of view—historical, political, theoretical, philosophical, and textual—but no one has ever written a book on the Declaration quite like this one. If we read the Declaration of Independence slowly and carefully, Danielle Allen believes, then the document can become a basic primer for our democracy. It can be something that all of us—not just scholars and educated elites but common ordinary people—can participate in, and should participate in if we want to be good democratic citizens.

“So what is the prophet Cohen telling us? And why do we listen so intently?” Liel Leibovitz asks at the outset of A Broken Hallelujah, his moving portrait of the songwriter and poet Leonard Cohen. The author pursues the answers to these questions with the diligence and reverence of a religious scholar. Thank God. But Leibovitz recognizes that Cohen deserves more than mere rock biography, and so he structures A Broken Hallelujah around the premise that his subject is, indeed, a modern-day prophet.

Panic in a Suitcase is the story of Ukrainian immigrants who come to the United States after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, but it would be reductive to call Yelena Akhtiorskaya’s extraordinary debut a traditional immigrant novel. Historically, immigrant novels have tended to be about motion, transition, adjustment. In The Rites of Passage, anthropologist Arnold van Gennup explained major life transitions as occurring in a three-fold progression. The first stage is separation, a departure from the familiar: You leave home, are forced out of childhood, change status. The last stage describes ownership and assimilation: you take office, mature, discover