When the shortlist for this year’s National Book Award in poetry was announced, the odds-on favorite, Frederick Seidel’s Poems: 1959-2009, was nowhere to be found. Bill Knott raised the alarm on his blog, “Critically acclaimed as the book of the year, and…it’s not even on the NBA shortlist—what’s with that?” Meanwhile, somewhere deep in Brooklyn, the editors of Harper’s and n+1 got together to organize protests and sloganeer. (“Where the hell is Fred Seidel?” they painted on their placards. “Hey, hey, NBA, which rich poet didja spurn today?”)

Earlier this decade, prompted by a lawsuit his father was facing, photographer Mitch Epstein returned to his western Massachusetts hometown. Holyoke had become an unfamiliar landscape in the years since he had left as a young man, so he decided to document the changed circumstances of his parents’ lives. The resultant photographs and video installations in the series “Family Business” can be understood as an attempt to render visual the tectonic social and economic shifts the United States has undergone since midcentury. American Power, Epstein’s new book, attempts something similar, but on a much broader scale. He began with a

Jason Quinn Malott’s debut, The Evolution of Shadows, is a devastating, often dizzying novel of returns and turnarounds. Years after war photographer Gray Banick vanishes in Bosnia, his American, English, and Bosnian friends convene in Sarajevo to solve the mystery of his disappearance, a venture that sends them traveling around the country, seeking hints of him or his remains. Malott’s characters rarely stay in a single timeframe—or a single place—for long: they slip frequently into recollections of lovers and dinners and battles past, making their experience of the present seem just as bumpy, as prone to stalling and sliding backward,

Music has been made by means of technology for nearly as long, if not exactly as long, as music has been made. Except for the voice (as well as the effects of clapping, slapping, and snapping), the sounds we agree to designate as musical rely on the use of tools, whether those tools be sticks, synthesizers, banjoes, electric guitars, or flutes carved from the bones of whales. The contemporary question of what kinds of music rank as technologically borne, then, is less a matter of provenance and more a matter of what kinds of sounds—and what types of tools—we choose

Corporations are struggling in the new millennium to connect with consumers. After all, as we’ve been told over and over again, in the brave new branded world of marketing, business is no longer about selling products or attracting customers; it’s about forging personal relationships. Grant McCracken realized that “the days of a simple-minded marketing, of finding and pushing ‘hot buttons’—these days were over.” And so he conceived the Chief Culture Officer—the eponymous hero of his new book—who “has the weather maps” for the “North Sea [of culture] out of which commotion constantly storms.” The CCO provides a “deeper, slower knowledge”

For all their meticulous attention to the immigrant experience, Ha Jin’s books leave little to the imagination. The narrators and characters in A Good Fall, his new story collection featuring a cast of Chinese immigrants, express their feelings and the reasons for them bluntly. “I’d had two girlfriends before, but each had left me,” states the young man narrating the story “Choice,” and then adds: “The memories of those breakups stung me whenever I attempted to get close to another woman.” In “Children as Enemies,” an ill-treated grandfather laments: “If only I’d had second thoughts about leaving China. It’s impossible

Anyone who haunts the bins of old photographs at flea markets and junk shops knows both the fascination and the dizzying tedium of wading through images from the vanished world. But Luc Sante, in his collection of some 2,500 “real-photo postcards,” has cultivated a sweet spot in photographic history, when early-20th-century Americans enthusiastically gazed at their social vista, a gaze as intense as its small-town horizons were narrow. His Folk Photography: The American Real-Photo Postcard 1905-1930 presents 122 such cards, which were actual darkroom prints, often produced for sale by itinerant photographers or self-appointed documentarians.

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

In Everything Is Illuminated (2002), a character named Jonathan Safran Foer flabbergasts his Ukrainian guide, Alex Perchov. “I’m a vegetarian,” the visiting American declares. “I do not understand,” Alex replies. A dialogue of mutual incomprehension ensues: “’I don’t eat meat.’ ‘Why not?’ ‘I just don’t.’ ‘How can you not eat meat?’ . . . ‘I just don’t. No meat.’ ‘Pork?’ ‘No.’ ‘Meat?’ ‘No meat.’ ‘Steak?’ ‘Nope.’ ‘Chickens?’ ‘No.’ ‘Do you eat veal?’ ‘Oh, God. Absolutely no veal.’ ‘What about sausage?’ ‘No sausage either.’” The starving traveler is forced to feast on two potatoes.

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.