Christie Hodgen’s new novel, Elegies for the Brokenhearted, reminds us that an elegy is a mix of sorrow and exuberance, like an upbeat tune with rueful lyrics. It’s narrated by Mary Murphy, a self-described “mope . . . loner . . . drag . . . slouch,” living in a nameless postindustrial New England city. Early in the novel, a fourteen-year-old Mary, at a nearby beach with her family, contemplates a trio of British punks causing a stir on the boardwalk and wonders “what it would be like to walk through the world and leave a wake behind you, the

Comparing the rise of the web to the invention of Gutenberg’s printing press has become a familiar cliché, and there are few theorists of the internet age still able to wring any new significance from the association. Clay Shirky, however, is one of them. The printing press was expected to prop up the religious culture of the 15th century by making its central texts more widespread. Instead, it encouraged intellectual variety.

Anthony Doerr burst onto the literary scene in 2003 with The Shell Collector, a critically hailed volume consisting of eight exquisite stories. After a compelling detour into nonfiction, and a novel, Doerr has returned with a second collection, one that signals his arrival as an important American voice.

Sloane Crosley’s debut essay collection, I Was Told There’d Be Cake, earned her the sort of accolades that pave the way for disappointment and backlash at the very murmur of a second book. There were blurbs from Jonathan Lethem and A.M. Homes, raves in every magazine that covered the book, and comparisons to Dorothy Parker, Nora Ephron, Fran Lebowitz, and King Midas. It was a lot to live up to on the second go-around. Crosley, however, is that rare kind of young writer for whom no one wishes failure, and her second offering is an affirmative giggle in the face

From cries of “Long live dynamite!” to arguments for vegetarianism, the anarchist cause has been a very broad church. Often naive and under-theorized – although it has always had highly intelligent proponents and sympathizers, a current example being Noam Chomsky – anarchism has also been dogged by a reputation for ill-directed violence, leading to what Alex Butterworth describes as “the movement’s pariah status in perpetuity”.

Félix Fénéon, whose Novels in Three Lines was collected and translated by Luc Sante in 2007, made trenchant literature out of the twelve hundred news blurbs he wrote anonymously in a seven-month stint for the newspaper Le Matin in 1906. Now, Joanna Neborsky pairs fever-dream-like collage with his early-twentieth-century Tweets in this illuminated volume, proving that tabloids can be timeless. Fénéon was an anarchist, suspected terrorist, aesthete, and dandy who worked the paper’s night shift, sifting through stories and reports and penning notes on accidents, fads, and technological breakthroughs in a succinct and witty style. Neborsky illustrates twenty-eight of his

During the most recent edition of the World Cup in 2006, 16.9 million Americans watched the quadrennial soccer tournament’s final game on TV — more than those who tuned in to the NBA playoffs that year. Soccer is growing in the United States, especially because ours is one of only seven national teams to have qualified for all of the last six World Cups. And right now there is little chance of escaping talk about it — even in the United States.