As brand-name gear, advertising, and competitive championships changed the look of surfing for the MTV generation in ways both brilliant and vulgar, it was a cruel (endless) summer for some. Sage surf photographer John Witzig spat, “This new generation has no experience of the laid-back hippy trip. Being cool is uncool.” (Was surfing ever uncool?) A new book by Witzig’s contemporary Jeff Divine, photo editor of the Surfer’s Journal, presents yet another point of view. A follow-up to 2006’s Surfing Photographs from the Seventies, Divine’s latest volume is from the 1980s and shot mostly on color-saturated Kodachrome 64 in Southern

Take an apartment. Trash it thoroughly. Strip. Smear yourself with blood, bind your wrists, and bend over a table. Wait for your friends to discover your “corpse.”

In 2005, Binyavanga Wainaina published a piece in Granta mocking the West’s need for African literature to present a uniform, tribal, black, desolate, and desperate homeland called Africa. He strives in his memoir, One Day I Will Write About This Place, to present life as it is and was, not in any fixed notion of “Africa,” but in the places he lived and traveled through: Kenya, South Africa, Lagos, Uganda, the Sudan. He does not present one mythical continent, but rather a fractured, complex, and ever-shifting collection of experiences. Sentence to sentence he jams ideas together, mimicking the way Michael

“We’re closing in on a deal,” my agent told me on the phone. “I’m just turning him upside-down now and shaking him for loose change.”

In the middle of his discussion of an episode of Oprah’s Book Club, Timothy Aubry pauses to wonder, “Why is the expression ‘I don’t get it’ so characteristic of the insecure middlebrow reader?” In a sense, Reading as Therapy: What Contemporary Fiction Does for Middle-Class Readers is his book-length answer to that question. In a strange way, though, Aubry’s question reflects back on itself; we might well ask what it is about the middlebrow reader that’s been, historically, so worrisome to intellectuals. The term middlebrow itself is, for cultural luminaries from Virginia Woolf to Leslie Fiedler, a term of abuse,

Quite often, religion proves every bit as stupid as it is crucial. Which is to say that the sheer preposterousness of a religion—any religion—can serve as a measure of spiritual need. The longing for cosmological certainty is so great that humanity is susceptible to all kinds of bunkum. The sad truth: Our most fundamental trait is foolishness.

Mathias Énard’s Zone—all 500 pages of it—consists of a single sentence. This sentence describes in unsparing detail some of the grisliest atrocities in the history of war—episodes from the Holocaust, the Algerian War of Independence, the War on Terror, and other conflicts. While difficult to stomach, this graphic violence is anything but gratuitous. It is rather the necessary hard evidence for the novel’s astonishing meditation on war and history. Énard plumbs the depths of human cruelty to create a work of extraordinary moral gravity and literary power, a novel that deserves a place among the great works of war literature.