Molloy, the hermetic, dyspeptic narrator of Samuel Beckett’s eponymous novel, sits alone in a bare room, apparently imprisoned, filling pages for the “man who comes every week.” The grim scene is as familiar to anyone who knows the Irishman’s world of barren fields and bleak cells as the below photograph of the poet of nothingness, ambling the streets of a beach town wearing short shorts, sandals, and shades, is unsettling. Perhaps photographer François-Marie Banier was also a bit shocked when he recognized and began stalking the vacationing author on the streets of Tangier in 1978. Eventually, the lurking gave way

Many of the pieces in David Grann’s fine collection of articles, The Devil and Sherlock Holmes, read like detective stories, and it would be tempting to categorize this book, whose subtitle promises us “tales of murder, madness, and obsession,” as a work of true crime, albeit one without the breathless exaggerations of that genre. In his first book, the best-selling The Lost City of Z, the writer offered up a true tale of deadly obsession for the ages: the attempts to find a legendary city in the Amazon, and the explorers who vanished searching for it. If that earlier book

For a musical style once purported to suck and still decried as mindless, disco has spawned a lot of thoughtful writing, especially in the past decade. In 2004, Tim Lawrence published the lovingly researched Love Saves the Day, a history set primarily in gay 1970s New York clubs such as David Mancuso’s invite-only Loft, generally considered the music’s birthplace. A year later, Peter Shapiro brought out Turn the Beat Around, which was heavier on both social context—the “Rotting Apple” of ’70s New York—and discussion of the songs, some of which you’ve probably never heard of: one passage sifts through dozens

FICTION

Those most likely to read Stephen Batchelor’s new memoir, Confession of a Buddhist Atheist, might find the title redundant. The deity-free character of Buddhism is fairly common knowledge among its enthusiasts in the English-speaking world. The Gautama they have encountered in their various modes of countercultural rebellion comes filtered through the sensibilities of writers such as Hermann Hesse, Allen Ginsberg, and Robert Pirsig. To the crowds drawn to “Eastern” philosophies because “Western” traditions are kind of a drag, the Buddha offers religion without the baggage.

“To be Prada is to be perfect in every way,” reads one of the few examples of actual prose in Prada (Abrams, $125), the luxury-goods company’s latest and largest coffee-table book. It’s an image-heavy tome about image, and words are relegated to captions. The form makes clear what no corporate-authorized text could be expected to state outright: Prada, no differently from any other global brand, traffics in image.

“How did people sit in the Middle Ages?” It is a remarkable question—disarmingly simple yet potentially sweeping. A precocious child might pose something of the sort to a flustered parent—and the child minder in question would absently wave off the inquiry or simply ignore it.

It sounds like the setup for a joke: Don Juan, chased by a leather-clad couple on a motorcycle, somersaults over a fence and into the garden of a French country inn. He stays at the inn for seven days, regaling the innkeeper with tales of his travels and trysts. But this is no joke; it’s the beguiling narrative arc of Peter Handke’s peculiar new novel, Don Juan: His Own Version.

During the 2009 holiday shopping rush, a popular computer maker encountered an embarrassing problem—its vaunted facial-recognition program failed to register black faces. Much of the ensuing media discussion noted that such software was still in its infancy. It makes sense that computers would be confused about race. After all, their creators are often equally clueless.

Fresh from having resigned his pulpit in the Second Unitarian Church, and after briefly considering becoming a botanist, Ralph Waldo Emerson decided to try his hand at philosophy. His 1836 pamphlet, Nature, contains a theory of history, an ethics, a philosophy of language, and an aesthetics. The system, if we can call it that, is a sort of Orphic pantheism. Among its teachings are that nature is a hieroglyph of our minds, that there exists an “occult relation between man and the vegetable,” and that we “expand and live in the warm day, like corn and melons.” The book hits