David Sedaris doesn’t write like a writer. He writes like someone who writes for a living. That’s a different thing, and not necessarily a bad one: Mr. Sedaris can be the life of your two-person party if you turn to his essays for quick, easy diversion and nothing more. But only a man with column space to fill would devote the first eight pages of a book to the experience of having dental work done in France.

Aesthetics is, at its best and at its origins, a form of hunting. Not only a hunt for the beautiful and the sublime, but also for the ensnarement and identification of subtle experiences, ambivalent impressions, and novel sensations. If beauty and truth represent the big game—the promise of freedom, happiness, and peace on earth—the minor aesthetic categories are smaller, but still significant, quarry. Even in the eighteenth century, in the writing of Edmund Burke and Richard Payne Knight, Friedrich Schiller and Schlegel, the philosophy of taste often revolved around the marginal categories of the pretty, the ugly, and the picturesque.

The Yacoubian Building, a 2002 novel by Alaa Al Aswany, weighs heavily on my time in Cairo, informs everything I see here, an unsentimental picture of an exigent, corrupted people. I pass the actual apartment house downtown, less grand than I imagined, occupied in the novel by several strata of Cairo life: a wealthy wheeler-dealer, a rising politician, a closeted gay newspaper editor, the poor who occupy a shantytown of windowless “iron rooms” on the roof, each of the rooms two by two meters square. The tragic beat of events turns monotonous, but the book is politically provocative, a devastating

André Aciman’s third novel, “Harvard Square,” takes place in Cambridge over the long, scorching summer of 1977. A nameless graduate student, a Jew from Egypt, wades through pages of 17th century literature preparing for crucial exams. One day he visits the tiny cluttered Cafe Algiers off Harvard Square and hits it off with a loud and opinionated cabdriver from Tunisia called Kalaj, nicknamed Kalashnikov. A friendship is made and our narrator ends up spending less time in the library and more time enjoying the nightlife and lessons in charming the fairer sex from his new buddy and tutor.

In the half-dozen years since The Omnivore’s Dilemma became the benchmark argument for knowing where the stuff you eat comes from, Michael Pollan has ascended to the top of the locavore food chain. He’s now arguably the most respected, and certainly one of the most visible, proponents of locally grown and sourced food. Alice Waters may have been doing it longer and Eric Schlosser louder, but Pollan’s influence on how we eat and what we think about it—through Omnivore and his subsequent books and articles—has been widespread and profound, enough to reach the ear of our current commander in chief

I went to work for the film industry in 1994. I’d never done it. Oh, I’d dabbled — as a teenager, I’d worked in the mailroom of Creative Artists Agency for a summer — but past that, not really. I was a child of Hollywood, my father was and still is a successful talent agent, and my mother was a well-produced screenwriter. Everybody I knew, every last person I’d grown up with, it seemed, had dutifully entered an industry that’s much like the Mafia in this respect.

This week, trying and failing to absorb the import of the bombings at the Boston Marathon, I let my unmoored thoughts travel away from questions of motive, politics, and ideology, and let them rest and rove in the fictionalized Chechnya conjured by Leo Tolstoy more than a century ago, in his final book, Hadji Murat.

In Karl Marx: A Nineteenth Century Life, Jonathan Sperber’s aim is to present Marx as he actually was—a nineteenth-century thinker engaged with the ideas and events of his time. If you see Marx in this way, many of the disputes that raged around his legacy in the past century will seem unprofitable, even irrelevant.