Adelle Waldman has cleverly chosen to tell the story of a younger generation’s romantic chaos not from the perspective of a woman panicked that she’s wasting her prime but from that of a young man trying to enjoy his. Her Nathaniel Piven, a thirty-something-year-old Brooklyn novelist and burgeoning public intellectual, is thoughtful yet careless, open-minded yet absurdly entitled. In trying to understand the source of his self-satisfaction, which is ultimately the source of his power, Waldman has written a book of stately revenge, exposing all that is shallow and oblivious about Nate, and men like him.

I am not in the habit of writing negative reviews. In fact, I’ve never written a predominantly negative review of a book. I just politely decline. But this really awful biography of Martin Amis got under my skin, and its warm reception by about half its reviewers caused that infection to erupt in the form of this review. A long time ago I published a critical biography (of Christopher Isherwood) when he was close to the end of his life. So I understand the problems of combining biography and criticism of a living writer and his work.

On entering a major Nigerian city, you’re likely to encounter some aged signage that welcomes you to the city and encourages you to enjoy yourself. For example, in Calabar, the welcome sign reads, “Welcome to Calabar. Come And Live And Be At Rest.” But in Lagos—Nigeria’s most populous city and its former capital—you get simply, “This Is Lagos.” The subtext is clear: This is a no-nonsense city. Lagos will not coddle you or gush mushy endearments. A common expression here is “shine your eyes,” which loosely translates to “keep your eyes peeled,” or “always have your wits about you.” Lagos

A colorful assortment of international tradespeople, drug-pushers, swindlers, and fraudsters, spammers have become a familiar feature of our digital landscape. Finn Brunton’s investigation of the question of spam, Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet — the problems of defining it, understanding it, and tackling it — takes us to the front of an ongoing and highly sophisticated technological war, a keenly contested territorial struggle for control of the information superhighway.

Whenever I sit down to write about a place that’s become very familiar, my first impulse is to imagine it in the strangest way possible. I try to take in its mood, faces, and streets as if for the first time, and then give them a darker, more obscure, slant. For my new novel Asunder, I aimed to do this above all for the sections set in Paris, a city I’ve been visiting since childhood. This time I went to the city in search of the old “drafts and currents” that still blow through the streets, imprints from the nineteenth

Learning Cairo’s thousand-year history was a requirement at my alma mater, and it was usually taught with a resigned sigh, as if to admit, Al-Qahirah, “the city victorious” had always seen better days. Our professors at the American University of Cairo all seemed to mourn a place we would never know—a city of glamour and glory. But the secret of Cairo is that every generation mourns its brighter days, though in truth, more things stay the same than ever change. This might be why every few decades, revolution draws in the young and idealistic anxious to break the spell. Anyone

Kafka was always burning his stuff, or threatening to, or demanding that others do it for him. He asked at least three women to marry him, but something always came up to thwart the nuptials. (Once it was the beginning of World War I.) One of his obsessions for a time was the sassy Milena Jesenska, who called him Frank. “Frank cannot live,” she wrote to Brod. “Frank does not have the capacity for living. . . . He is absolutely incapable of living, just as he is incapable of getting drunk.”

Even in today’s global Gilded Age, Asia’s 1 percenters are in a class by themselves. No one doubts that the Wall Street banksters and hedgesters are plenty gilded, that the Silicon plutocrats have a certain swagger, that the petro-billionaires of the Persian Gulf or the former U.S.S.R. can buy the sports teams they please. But the new Carnegies, Rockefellers, and Morgans are emerging in Hong Kong, Singapore, Shanghai, and Beijing, the central nodes of the Chinese-speaking world. There the Chinese elite mediates between the Asian hinterlands, where speculation brings undreamed-of returns, and the supposed safe harbors of the West: luxury