Colin Grant knows how to hook a reader with a compelling set piece. Grant, a BBC radio producer and independent historian, opens his study of the golden age of Jamaican reggae, The Natural Mystics, with a vignette from a 1990 concert at the National Stadium in Kingston. The concert was billed as “The Greatest One-Night Reggae Show on Earth,” but when Bunny Wailer, the last survivor of the most influential reggae band of all time, took to the stage, something disgraceful happened. He was booed off by the young crowd, a hail of bottles smashing around his head.

The Curfew, Jesse Ball’s third and slimmest novel for Vintage, contains within its pages the best sentence the young novelist and poet has yet written: “Is it not on the ground over that very grave that my life proceeds?” It’s a rhetorical question, and the contrast it presents (life and grave) is no accident. Ball is a strange paradox of a writer—his prose is as simple as stage directions but at the same time impenetrable, often because he whittles his sentences to nonsense. At his best, Ball is a virtuoso minimalist, situating only a handful of words poignantly on a

The Arab Spring has produced many an engrossing story of individual courage. But the story of Amina Abdallah Araf al Omari, while certainly daring, inventive, and brash, isn’t exactly inspiring. Amina, the purported author of the blog Gay Girl in Damascus, gained a small, dedicated following to her chronicle of life in Syria, where an uprising begun in late January of this year. Amina became “an unlikely hero of revolt,” as The Guardian put it in a May profile, telling stories of her father protecting her from arrest by Syrian authorities and recounting her struggles to make sense of the

In the long-ago time of the mid-1990s, an earnest pair of radical British intellectuals named Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron surveyed the emerging, and deeply reactionary, dogmas of the Internet age. Barbrook and Cameron explained that this worldview, which they dubbed the “Californian ideology,” hinged on a curious blend of New Left and New Right orthodoxies: culturally tolerant, anti-hierarchical and experimental, it was also punitively neoliberal and profoundly antigovernment in expounding a rigidly libertarian vision of the global economy.

Our brains are made of “three pounds of the most complex material we’ve discovered in the universe,” David Eagleman informs us in Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain. Still, if you remove half of a child’s brain before he is “about 8 years old,” the child will be fine. “Let me repeat that: the child, with only half his brain remaining, is fine.”

The legendary playwright and self-declared “reformed Liberal” explains his turn to Fox News-style politics, writing: “The struggle of the Left to rationalize its positions is an intolerable, Sisyphean burden.”

“Politicians, ugly buildings, and whores all get respectable if they last long enough.” So said malevolent tycoon Noah Cross to Jake Gittes, the gullible gumshoe in Roman Polanski’s Chinatown, a dark hymn to Americans’ limitless capacity for self-delusion in the face of power. Lately, Polanski must be wondering how his old pal Hugh Hefner has managed—with a history scarcely less scandalous than his own—to win respectability and even veneration from quarters that once damned him as little more than a smut peddler, albeit one with a killer sense of style and a terrific head for business. Maybe the seventy-seven-year-old Polanski

“They say that carrying bags is good exercise,” said the poet Jon Cotner to a young woman on the subway, a large shopping bag slung over her shoulder. She looked back at him curiously, then smiled. “Oh yeah?” she said. Five others, including this reporter, had joined Cotner on his expedition, pretending not to watch but taking mental notes on his vocalization, demeanor, bodily gestures, delivery, and success at creating “good vibes.”

It’s always good to revisit the cold war to remind yourself that, despite an orgy of supporting evidence, you’re not living through the most fucked-up period in American history. As J. Hoberman’s factually dense, swiftly narrated history of Hollywood’s symbiosis with the atomic-age body politic makes clear, the cold war was, pace our current moment, the third great battle over the nation’s identity and purpose, trailing only the Revolutionary and Civil Wars in significance.

Arthur Rimbaud wrote the poems that were eventually published under the title Illuminations between the ages of seventeen and twenty. John Ashbery, who has just translated the forty-two poems (plus one fragment) traditionally grouped under that title, is eighty-three. Rimbaud, when he wrote the poems, was at a peak of creativity, moving from formal poetic composition to his long prose confession A Season in Hell (1873), and into the form—the prose poem—with which he is most often associated.