On top of everything else, we now import our human-interest stories from China. Chinese news of the weird—like the recent story of the Shenzhen policeman who drank himself to death at a banquet and was honored for falling in the line of duty—makes US headlines. But longtime New Yorker writer Peter Hessler has always balanced his observations of China’s peculiarities with a sense that the Western world is pretty strange, too. In Country Driving, his latest travelogue, he writes, “Everything depends on perspective,” a platitude that he reinvigorates by viewing China’s modernization from unexpected angles.

Reading The Three Weissmanns of Westport, the new novel by Cathleen Schine, is a curious experience. Even as you turn the pages, following the genteel misadventures of the titular clan—the aging mother, Betty Weissmann, and her two middle-aged, lovelorn daughters, Annie and Miranda—the book seems literally insubstantial, as though it is about to melt or turn to smoke in your hands. This is less on account of the writing, which is undemanding but intelligent, than of the reader’s realization that the book is only a temporary incarnation of itself. Before Schine wrote it, her novel’s story belonged to Jane Austen—anyone

When the filmmaker, painter, ethnographer, occultist, and occasional vagrant Harry Smith died in New York’s Chelsea Hotel in 1991, he left behind 166 boxes of belongings. They contained such treasures as Chinese papier-mâché masks, an illustrated manuscript on string figures (which he noted were “produced by all primitive societies” and “the only universal thing other than singing”), and countless sets of collectible cards, among them Iran-Contra Scandal Trading Cards, the Aleister Crowley Thoth Tarot Deck, and Stardust Casino Playing Cards. The work of the collector is never done, and Smith seemed determined to turn his single-room home into a museum

Gilbert Sorrentino’s last novel, The Abyss of Human Illusion, perfects a technique a decade in the making. In 1997 a story called “Sample Writing Sample” presented literary anecdotes followed by extracurricular endnotes; in 2002 Little Casino, a novel of skewed beauty, featured similar episodes, these about Brooklyn Days—from Bay Ridge love to Coney Island lust—each followed by a brief paragraph of commentary. Abyss marks a return to endnotes, which isolate lines of body text to remark on them after the body itself has concluded.

A Common Pornography is neither common nor, by today’s standards, pornographic. It is more accurate to call Kevin Sampsell’s fragmented, moving memoir a Bildungsroman (albiet a true one). More precisely, for those keeping score at home with their glossary of literary terms, it is a nonfiction Künstlerroman, the story of an artist’s struggle from innocence to experience, in this case from small-town youth to fully fledged, urbane writer. One of the many interesting aspects of the story is that Sampsell never plays up or celebrates this transformation; rather, his story moves from one decisive moment to next until he arrives

Jami Attenberg’s new novel, The Melting Season, begins with a familiar premise: a small-town girl leaves her problems (a broken marriage, a dysfunctional family, and a pregnant teenage sister) behind and sets out for Vegas with a suitcase full of cash. There she makes fast friends with another injured woman who becomes her metaphorical partner in crime à la Thelma and Louise, bolstering her with endless support and encouraging her on the road to recovery. In this sense, the book is a smooth, easy read with breezy dialogue and a seemingly recognizable story, smartly interrupted by the jolt that comes

It’s one of the most famous photos from 1968, a year full of them: two African-American athletes on the medal podium at the Mexico City Olympics, their heads bowed, their fists gloved and raised in the Black Power salute. The International Olympic Committee called it “a deliberate and violent breach” of the games’ spirit, but the athletes, John Carlos and Tommie Smith, remained unflappable. They did it out of respect, they said, for the memory of Malcolm X—and of Martin Luther King Jr.

In the summer of 1967, subscribers to the obscure far-left theoretical journal Socialisme ou Barbarie received notice that it was suspending publication and that its sponsoring organization, familiarly called SOUB, had dissolved. This cannot have come as too great a shock. Two years had passed since the last issue. But the shuttering of SOUB marked the end of an important collective project within the anti-Stalinist left, one whose influence was felt well beyond France.