How is it that a poet can do almost nothing new in a succession of books and yet still sound utterly awake to the fresh possibilities of language? This is the question that John Ashbery’s work has posed for at least the last fifteen years. The criticisms one can make of Planisphere, his twenty-fifth collection of new poems, are obvious and hardly original: Ashbery is writing more of the same kinds of poems he has been at for decades—short, disjunctive lyrics, fragmentary voice-collages, quirky lists, abortive philosophical tirades, oblique meditations on mortality. He is no longer thinking vigorously—as he did

New York City’s Two Columbus Circle is a sprightly forty-five years old, but it has already had quite a career. The ten-story tower opened in 1964 as the Gallery of Modern Art, endowed by supermarket magnate Huntington Hartford and designed by proto-pomo architect Edward Durell Stone. The gallery, a reflection of Hartford’s recherché, antimodernist tastes, bombed, and in 1969 he palmed the building off on Fairleigh Dickinson University, which used it as an academic pied-à-terre. That was short-lived as well, and the city took it over as office space. In 1998, the municipal bureaucracy departed, and the building sat shuttered

I cannot recall a book title that was less well-shaped to its subject. Far from being a “skeptic,” Arthur Koestler was a man not merely convinced but actively enthused by practically any intellectual or political or mental scheme that came his way. When he was in the throes of an allegiance, he positively abhorred doubt, which he sometimes called “bellyaching.” If he was ever dubious about anything, one could say in his defense, it was at least about himself. He was periodically paralyzed by self-reproach and insecurity, and once wrote a defensive third-person preface to one of his later novels

If there’s one thing Andre Agassi wants you to know about the game of tennis, it’s that he hates it. That is the takeaway from his new autobiography, Open, where he states on page one and throughout the book how much he loathes the game. His animosity for the sport comes as no surprise given his early immersion in it. His maniac of a father—Mike Agassi, a former boxer from Iran who brandishes a gun in road-rage moments—subjects the young Agassi to an inhuman twenty-five hundred balls a day, fired from a customized cannon. Later, in his early teens, the

In February 1980, just out of his latest stint in California’s juvenile prison system, 19-year-old Kenneth Hartman, drunk and stoned, punched and stomped a homeless man into unconsciousness in a park outside Long Beach. Arrested the following day, Hartman overhears that his victim is dead and enters a new category of criminal: murderer.

“There was a time when intelligent people used literature to think,” wrote Amy Bellette in a letter in Philip Roth’s 2007 novel Exit Ghost. “That time is coming to an end.” How enthusiastically Roth himself endorsed this position was not entirely unambiguous – Bellette, an elderly woman whose mental processes had been ravaged by a brain tumour, might in any case have been acting as the mouthpiece of a long-dead writer – but he put the words out there, folding them into a larger argument about the ethics and intellectual purpose of literary biography and the perils of mistaking gossip

Possessed of both imaginative empathy and an astringent wit, rigorously nonjudgmental yet armed with a state-of-the-art bullshit detector, Zadie Smith’s nonfiction glimmers with the same cultural and emotional acuity that illuminated her novels White Teeth and On Beauty. In Changing My Mind, a collection of criticism, essays, and reviews for outlets such as The New Yorker and the U.K. Guardian, her instincts are expansive, inclusive, democratic, yet fiercely personal.

The premise of Under the Dome is very simple: an invisible and impenetrable barrier of unknown provenance envelops the small Maine town of Chester’s Mill, instantly transforming this latter-day Grover’s Corners into a snow globe. The dome is in place by page three, and thereafter things start going to hell. About 980 pages later, they get there. Under the Dome is sprawling, messy, bizarre, infuriating, intermittently wonderful, and above all else, addictive. It’s Our Town meets No Exit, on a scale that makes Bleak House look like Of Mice and Men; a deeply flawed pop gem that’s hard to classify

Near the middle of the Inferno, the poet Brunetto Latini tells Dante, “If you follow your star, you cannot fail to reach a glorious port.” The scene is doubly poignant. The first prick comes with Brunetto’s encouragement of his former student, a gesture of generosity that Dante answers with a gratitude that “will be found, as long as I live, in my language.” The second and more lasting poignancy arrives when we remember that Brunetto is speaking from a script of Dante’s devising. The teacher says what he says because those are the words his student wanted to hear.

George Packer, a staff writer for the New Yorker since 2003, is plainly a master of his craft. The eight years’ worth of reporting collected in his new anthology, Interesting Times—culled from the New Yorker as well as several other general-interest magazines—showcases his eye for the telling detail: “The children’s legs swelled for lack of salt,” he notes in recounting the plight of a family from Sierra Leone chased into the bush by marauding rebels. The anthology also nicely points up his ear for the cutting and memorable quote: “We’re like a frigging organ transplant that’s rejected,” an army officer

After 78 years of life, 14 collections of short stories, and prizes too numerous to list, it’s not surprising that Canadian writer Alice Munro should turn her attention towards old age and death. The characters that populate the 10 stories of her latest collection are mostly women—though a few are men—who are not yet incapacitated by old age, but who have many more years behind them than they have ahead. Thoughts of mortality have crept into much of Munro’s work over the years; in this case, however, death not only lurks in the dark spaces of her stories, but prowls