Take it from hedge funder Florian Homm, now a witty fugitive who appears in Lauren Greenfield’s Generation Wealth (Phaidon, $75) hanging out with his bounty hunter pal and his bodyguard: “What you’re sold in this world is a bag of rotten goods. The striving for more and bigger will never, ever lead you to the right place. All of us are following a dream, a toxic dream.”

This sentiment resounds throughout the book from a global chorus of mavens and native informants. Old money to new, we hear from haves, have-nots, wanna-haves, and used-to-haves from Los Angeles to Newport, Rhode Island; Moscow

In the first chapter of Eileen Myles’s Afterglow (a dog memoir), we learn that the author’s pit bull Rosie, whom Myles chose in 1990 from a street litter and cared for until her death sixteen years later, was not always pleased with her owner. Leaving the apartment for the dog run, Myles finds a letter from a “dog lawyer,” who is seeking to file a lawsuit against Myles for crimes committed against Rosie. A reader might ask: Is this letter real, a neighbor’s prank, a figment of Myles’s fertile imagination? But these are the kinds of distinctions that Myles’s shape-shifting narrative obliterates

Hollywood has always been a place of invention and reinvention, a world where outsiders could fashion themselves as architects of American mythology, and where the outsize success stories of dogged scoundrels are celebrated with enthusiasm. Perhaps no studio, and no family, better represents this spirit than Warner Bros., established in the first decades of the twentieth century by the Polish-born Wonskolasor siblings Harry (né Moses), Albert (né Aaron), and Sam (né Szmul), along with their brash little brother Jack (né Jacob), who was born in Canada after the family fled to the New World.

Davis and Stephens set the tone for the Lost Cause interpretation of the Civil War during the next century and more: slavery was merely an incident; the real origin of the war that killed more than 620,000 people was a difference of opinion about the Constitution. Thus the Civil War was not a war to preserve the nation and, ultimately, to abolish slavery, but instead a war of Northern aggression against Southern constitutional rights. The superb anthology of essays, The Myth of the Lost Cause, edited by Gary Gallagher and Alan Nolan, explores all aspects of this myth. The editors intend the

In the weeks before my departure, I spent hours explaining Turkey’s international relevance to my bored loved ones, no doubt deploying the cliché that Istanbul was the bridge between East and West. At first, my family was not exactly thrilled for me; New York had been vile enough in their minds. My brother’s reaction to the news that I won this generous fellowship was something like, “See? I told you she was going to get it,” as if it had been a threat he’d been warning the home front about. My mother asked whether this meant I didn’t want the pretty luggage she’d bought me for Christmas,