Jürgen Habermas ranks today as the single most important public intellectual in all of Continental Europe. But he is also a formidable philosopher whose major contributions to social and political theory, constitutional law, historical sociology, the history of philosophy, and the philosophy of language (to name only the fields he revisits with greatest frequency) are pitched at such air-gasping heights of difficulty and place such merciless demands upon the reader as to turn away all but the most fearless.

In The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels offered one of history’s best-known characterizations of modernity. In the “bourgeois epoch,” they said, “all fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.”

James Miller teaches “liberal studies” at New York’s New School, and his publishing history neatly embodies the interdisciplinary nature of his trade: He’s penned a social history of rock n’ roll (Flowers in the Dustbin), a study of Foucault (The Passion of Michel Foucault), and a history of social protest (Democracy Is in the Streets). Now, in Examined Lives, he explores questions related to what he deems “the problem of philosophy” in concise bios of 12 essential thinkers ranging from myth-shrouded ancients like Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle to the early moderns like Kant, Emerson, Rousseau, and Nietzsche.

The publication of debut novels by Gary Shteyngart and Lara Vapnyar in the early years of this century heralded the arrival of a literary sub-genre: immigrant fiction specifically about people from the former Soviet Union. For nearly a decade now, a prolific handful of young writers have been describing the challenges of being Russian (or Ukrainian or Georgian or Latvian) newcomers to North America.

At its most philosophically acute, poetry is dumb. Hölderlin deeply believed this truth, titling one of his great poems “Blödigkeit,” or “Stupidity.” Wordsworth was fiercely attached to his own “Idiot Boy,” insisting on publishing the poem against his friend Coleridge’s advice. Especially today, amid a media culture of rampant knowingness, poetry’s dumbness—its ability to cut through false rhetoric and give us the thing itself—may be its most vital and necessary quality.

Since the 2007–2009 “WACK!” exhibition in Los Angeles and New York, there has been a passionate reinvestigation of feminist art. Amelia Jones, to give just one example, wonders in a recent X-Tra magazine essay whether feminist artists have regressed to a desire to “make money out of the bodies (and the bodies-of-work) of women.” What better time, then, to publish Correspondence Course? This letter collection offers insights from many of the artists who started these debates in the first place, Carolee Schneemann in particular. Since the late ’50s, her paintings, installations, and films have examined representations of the female body,

New York City is built on the backs of earnest, reticent, frugal, and ambitious Midwesterners. These are “the settlers” who make up the “Third New York” immortalized in E.B. White’s Here Is New York. Look in the right places and they seem to be everywhere: Minnesotans ordering the cheapest beers on draft at East Village bars, dumpster-diving South Dakotans, Iowans doctoring up ramen with cheap vegetables sold on Chinatown sidewalks. The Third New Yorker, White writes, “accounts for New York’s high-strung disposition, its poetical deportment, its dedication to the arts, and its incomparable achievements.”

In a 1999 London Review of Books essay, the Scottish novelist Andrew O’Hagan recalled stopping one night at the window of the Ferragamo store on Fifth Avenue. On display were a pair of stilettos once owned by Marilyn Monroe, “scarlet satin, encrusted with matching rhinestones,” which put O’Hagan in mind of ruby slippers. After a decade, or perhaps much longer, of contemplating Marilyn, it seems O’Hagan has finally got her—and her little dog, too.

The girl in the photograph wears her black hair tucked behind her ears. Her part is slightly crooked, and there is a small mole low on her throat, right above the top button of her blouse. She might be anywhere between five and ten years old. She’s been posed against a wall or a screen. Stripped of its context, this is a lovely but unremarkable portrait of a small, serious looking girl, an image that’s easy to look at and easy to forget.

For the declaration that he is the greatest living short-story writer in English to have become a cliché, William Trevor must be doing something right.

Alice Neel enjoyed the greatest second act in the history of American art. Her paintings of New York bohemian life earned high praise, especially from leftist critics, during the Great Depression, but she fell into near-total obscurity with the rise of abstract expressionism after World War II.

‘Tis the season, and I suspect there is no one on earth capable of embracing it more festively than David Wondrich. His first book about cocktails, Imbibe! (2007), is a rousing call to the bar in the form of the life and times of pioneering nineteenth-century bartender—and author of The Bartender’s Guide—Jerry Thomas, recipes included. To it he now adds the wildly entertaining and fantastically instructive Punch: The Delights (and Dangers) of the Flowing Bowl (Perigee, $24). Who knew that a book about the history of a drink that is, after all, just “a simple combination of distilled spirits, citrus

If all thinkers are either foxes or hedgehogs, then Kierkegaard was decidedly a hedgehog. By his own emphatic acknowledgment, everything he wrote had a single purpose: to arouse a certain state of mind, or soul, in each of his readers. He called this state of mind “the consciousness of sin.” What he meant by that is something like what Saint Augustine and Martin Luther meant, but not exactly. In the difference lie his originality and his importance for us.