As the theater critic John Lahr once wrote, “Only when [Noel] Coward is frivolous does he become in any sense profound.” There’s proof of this throughout Barry Day’s new book, The Noel Coward Reader, a selection of Coward’s plays, lyrics, poetry, short stories, radio broadcasts, and excerpts from his diaries and letters. Here, Coward shifts between his “frivolous” best work, and his more serious (but less successful) attempts to make art that would endure beyond the tastes of the moment. As Day writes, Coward “was a great writer—except when he was trying to be a great writer.”

For centuries, writers have sat on benches and made up stories about passersby. Vasily Grossman, Andrei Platonov, and Semyon Lipkin would do this while sitting opposite Platonov’s apartment building in Moscow in the 1930s. Lipkin, the least known of the trio, recounts that the stories Grossman invented were matter-of-fact, journalistic, whereas Platonov’s, rarely grounded in the practical, were more concerned with a character’s interiority, which was “both unusual and simple, like the life of a plant.” This distinction also applies to their prose: Platonov created worlds, and Grossman, the more traditional writer, adamantly stuck to the World. But while Platonov

Howard Jacobson has just won the 2010 Man Booker Prize for his novel The Finkler Question. Today, Bookforum looks back at his 2007 book, Kalooki Nights.

Not far into the second part of Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes offers a lexical bouquet to the photographer responsible for the sepia print of his late mother, Henriette, at age five, in which floated “something like an essence of the Photograph.” What the “unknown photographer of Chennevières-sur-Marne” left behind was “a supererogatory photograph which contained more than what the technical being of photography can reasonably offer.” Supererogatory: That strange modifier, obliquely Barthesian to the core, seems at first like little more than a flourish, a bit of writerly lagniappe, but the more you think about it, the more pivotal this

Simon Reynolds’s collection of interviews and essays, Totally Wired, sheds further light on the author’s definitive book on post-punk, 2006’s Rip It Up and Start Again. In its best chapters, Totally Wired is so conversational and discursive that it’s possible to get lost in all the interconnections, gossip, and reminiscences without having read Rip It Up first. The irony here, of course, is that Reynolds—now in Los Angeles after nearly two decades in New York (and, full disclosure, a friend)—has railed at length against rock history’s tendency to “auto-cannibilise its own necrotic myth-flesh.”

“I hate ‘classical music’: not the thing but the name,” writes Alex Ross in the opening chapter of his new book, Listen to This. “It traps a tenaciously living art in a theme park of the past. It cancels out the possibility that music in the spirit of Beethoven could still be created today . . . [the] phrase is a masterpiece of negative publicity, a tour de force of anti-hype.”

What do you call a revival that never ends? Over the past two decades, publishers have added three biographies of H. L. Mencken—Mencken: A Life by Fred Hobson, The Skeptic: A Life of H. L. Mencken by Terry Teachout, and Mencken: The American Iconoclast by Marion Elizabeth Rodgers—to the three or four that had already been released. Over that same period, Mencken, who died in 1956 at the age of seventy-five, has been more prolific than many living authors. We’ve seen the release of a volume of memoirs (My Life as Author and Editor), a journal Mencken kept between 1930

The French poet Paul Valéry (1871-1945) once said that he could never write a novel because sooner or later he would find himself setting down such a sentence as “The marquise went out at five o’clock.” Why did the marquise leave at five? he wondered. Why not at six or seven? In fact, why did she go out at all? And why a “marquise”? Why not a duchess or a washerwoman? The arbitrary nature of narrative devices irked Valéry; they pretended to an authority that was, at bottom, a sham. They invited us to treat mere fancy as hard fact.

The narrator of Emma Donoghue’s “Room” is a 5-year-old boy who leads a busy life. “We have thousands of things to do every morning,” Jack tells the reader, and he seems to mean it. Jack is a smart, eager kid with a great imagination and unlimited energy. But he and his mother have been trapped in the 11-by-11-foot room of the title since the day he was born.