We may take Milan Kundera for granted, but in his new collection of essays, the author casts an undeniably powerful spell—even if you have no previous knowledge of the artists that he discusses.

Great political movements start from the ground up. A group of citizens, faced with a government they find corrupt or unethical, take to the streets and march through their cities, sowing grassroots dissent through speech, writing, discussion and art. Great rabblerousers have shifted the direction of nations because of a firmly held conviction that the prescribed route is simply wrong.

Two-thirds of the way through Per Petterson’s new novel, its narrator, 37-year-old Arvid Jansen, finds himself up a tree. Perched on a branch of an old pine overhanging his family’s summer house, Arvid mulls a scheme for bridging the emotional gap that divides him from his mother.

In the preface to his translation of John Ruskin’s Sesame and Lilies, Marcel Proust wrote that while some people decorate their rooms with things that reflect their taste, he preferred his room to be a place “where I find nothing of my conscious thoughts, where my imagination is thrilled to plunge into the heart of the not-me.” Anyone who has stood looking at Proust’s reassembled cork-lined bedroom at the Musée Carnavalet in Paris—his armchair, his pigskin cane, his brass bed—and tried, unsuccessfully, to feel kinship with his spirit would be relieved to know that he had such a desultory relationship

Sometimes a book is so inventive, so interesting and capable and creative, that you have to put it down, walk around, take a deep breath, have a beer, and think about things. The book can challenge your idea of what it means to be a fiction writer. And these books tend to make you a little mad; you grapple through them—captivated but enlivened—reminded that there are different ways of doing things, ways you hadn’t imagined.

In 1922, the German mark was shedding value so fast that anyone who visited the country holding a stable foreign currency could live like a kaiser. Ernest Hemingway crossed from France into the German town of Kehl and saw that economics was not wasted on the young. Students had figured out that their francs could take them a long way across the border. “This miracle of exchange makes a swinish spectacle where the youth of the town of Strasbourg crowd into the German pastry shop to eat themselves sick and gorge on fluffy, cream-filled slices of German cake at 5

Music critic Rob Sheffield’s memoir Talking to Girls About Duran Duran appears at first to be founded on a fallacy—that Duran Duran are still huge, and that their ongoing fame speaks to something ineffable about . . . well, not so much the female psyche, but at least something that males want to know about the female psyche. (And which, one hastens to add, they never will: This is the band that sang, “All she wants is, all she wants is,” but, as Sheffield notes, never told us what “she” wanted.)