Do you find it as obvious as I do that Don DeLillo richly deserves to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature? And right away, as in this year?

The inner workings of the Swedish Academy are opaque, but the one thing everybody knows is that their record of choices for the literature prize is spotty at best and in some cases purblind and scandalous (see: Peter Handke). Their sins of commission—when is the last time anyone said or wrote anything about the laureates Rudolf Eucken, Carl Spitteler, Frans Eemil Sillanpää, Pearl S. Buck, Nelly Sachs, or Dario Fo?—are exceeded only by their sins of

Deacon King Kong (Riverhead, $28) is a warm-blooded free-for-all, a donnybrook, a rumpus, what in baseball lingo would be called a “rhubarb.” And, as it happens, baseball, a steadfast metaphor for democratic ideals, plays a marginal role in James McBride’s bountiful and compassionate comedy of errors, bloopers, and near misses. The generosity of detail and range of emotional life infused in McBride’s vision of working-class Brooklyn at the hinge of the 1960s and 1970s are more characteristic of a nineteenth-century novel than of its counterparts in the twenty-first. And McBride is so adroit at

SET THE NIGHT ON FIRE, written by Mike Davis in collaboration with historian Jon Wiener, is a kind of sequel to City of Quartz, the cultural analysis of Los Angeles Davis published in 1990. In the beginning of CoQ, Davis described the focus of that book as “the history of culture produced about Los Angeles.” And that is true for roughly two hundred pages of CoQ, as Davis reviews the work of California historians like Carey McWilliams (he approves) and “the European reconceptualization of the United States” carried out by Los Angeles transplants like Theodor Adorno (he’s torn). Davis also turns

A man is what he eats. So wrote the nineteenth-century German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach, and such is the premise underlying Ben Katchor’s monumental illustrated book The Dairy Restaurant.

Opening with an image of our earth coalescing from the primordial borscht—and replete with ancient tales, legendary patriarchs, Yiddish-language comic strips, and menus from long-vanished eateries—The Dairy Restaurant is a compendium of curious facts. More than that, it is a learned commentary (if not an encyclopedic midrash) on a particular Jewish American institution that is also, for the author, a lost