In prose at once evocative and restrained, the seven stories in Jess Row’s debut collection, The Train to Lo Wu (2005), gave rich, full life to Hong Kong in the years just after the British handover to the Chinese. Having spent some time in Hong Kong myself, it was my belief that Row’s quietly desperate characters—natives, mainland Chinese, ex-pat artists, and the global business class—were simply attuned to the loneliness of the fast-moving, atomized megalopolis. (The Mongkok district, for example, boasts the world’s highest population density, but you can spend an entire day there without speaking a word, or even

Among the many sources of humiliation I either learned about or was forced to relive while reading Wayne Koestenbaum’s Humiliation (Picador, $14): having a tiny penis or any form of smallness, soiling oneself or virtually any other physical process, writing or being written about, being jealous, being cheated on, being Googled, being mistaken for the wrong gender, being Michael Jackson, electroshock therapy, impotence, hair loss, inadvertent erections in awkward circumstances, smelling like liverwurst, vomiting onstage before a musical performance, voyeuristic curiosity about death, failing to visit a dying colleague in the hospital, and being photographed after you’re dead. The list,

“As smoking gives us something to do with our hands when we aren’t using them,” Dwight Macdonald wrote in 1957, “Time gives us something to do with our minds when we aren’t thinking.” What leads us here, Macdonald asks, to the banal, boxed trifles of popular journalism? What, exactly, is to be gained by a three-hundred-word once-over of “World News”? Do we seek, as Macdonald concedes to be Time’s singular benefit, “practice in reading”? Perhaps we crave immersion in a warm bath of facts, to “have the little things around, like pets,” to collect “them as boys collect postage stamps.”

For her sixtieth birthday, Jane Fonda decided she wanted to make a short video about her life to “discover its themes.” When she asked her daughter, documentarian Vanessa Vadim, to help her, Vanessa said, “Why don’t you just get a chameleon and let it crawl across the screen?”

India’s economic ascent has launched a flurry of books, most of them touting neoliberalism’s power to not only propel the country out of poverty but to chase away its unsightly caste and class divisions, its nasty penchant for pogroms and female feticide. Siddhartha Deb’s very fine The Beautiful and the Damned tells a darker story, focusing on the boom’s seamy side: the scoundrels and profiteers, and the millions of farmers and migrant workers crushed beneath the juggernaut of “progress.” “The modernity of India,” he writes drily, is “an ambiguous phenomenon.” His point is that even as India has seen an

The innocuous title hardly suggests the actual meaning of the phrase nor the brutality of the story that it introduces. This is The Things They Carried for women in Iraq. Set at Camp Bucca, the largest US prison in Iraq, in 2003, during the early days of Operation Iraqi Freedom, the novel makes this war come alive as Things made Vietnam a grisly reality.

At Koenji Station, Tengo boarded the Chuo Line inbound rapid-service train. The car was empty. He had nothing planned that day. Wherever he went and whatever he did (or didn’t do) was entirely up to him. It was ten o’clock on a windless summer morning, and the sun was beating down. The train passed Shinjuku, Yotsuya, Ochanomizu, and arrived at Tokyo Central Station, the end of the line. Everyone got off, and Tengo followed suit. Then he sat on a bench and gave some thought to where he should go. “I can go anywhere I decide to,” he told himself.

“Kipling’s case is curious. For glory, but also as an insult, Kipling has been equated with the British Empire,” wrote Jorge Luis Borges in 1941, and, some seventy years later, the curiosity of Kipling’s case still persists. On the one hand it’s tempting and safe to pigeon-hole him as the author of The Jungle Book for children and the poem “If — ,” that corny, beautiful, Buddha-like exhortation to stoicism and self-control. On the other, there are those who, like James Joyce, choose to condemn Kipling for “semi-fanatic” ideas about patriotism and race and consider him barely worth reading. An

How do you write a biography of David Bowie? How do you pin down a grasshopper aesthete whose core belief is that the only thing worse than looking the same twice is sounding the same twice?