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.

Do people who tote around thousands of sonically flattened, Pro Tooled songs in their iPods know that most of what they’re hearing is closer to a computer program than it is to music? Nowadays, pop music is mainly fast food to be gobbled on the go, to be heard through earbuds or on portable docks with plug-in speakers. As long as it sounds good enough, nobody seems to mind.

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

After a run of books with increasingly decrepit protagonists, Paul Auster’s 13th novel returns to a highly recognizable “young Auster” cipher and some metafictional gamesmanship. Adam Walker is a literature student at Columbia with French fluent enough to translate medieval Provençal verse. An aspiring poet, Walker is strapped for cash but avoiding his affluent parents. It’s 1967, and his college ambition, as much as anything in this impoverished period of life, is to beat the draft.

The Greek historian Thucydides has long been a favorite of American secretaries of state. For George Marshall, the History of the Peloponnesian War illustrated many of the diplomatic pitfalls of the cold war. A generation later, framed on Colin Powell’s State Department desk was the more ambiguous and ultimately ironic paraphrase of Thucydides: “Of all manifestations of power, restraint impresses men most.”

Nick Cave, post-punk’s self-styled dark prince, has long walked the razor’s edge between balladry and literature. Beginning as early as 1983 with the release of The Birthday Party’s “The Bad Seed” EP, which featured the song “Swampland,” whose mad visionary of a narrator prefigures Euchrid Euchrow, the central character in Cave’s not unaccomplished 1989 Southern gothic pastiche And the Ass Saw the Angel, and continuing with The Bad Seeds’ moody, heroin-haunted fourth and fifth albums, “Your Funeral, My Trial” (1986) and “Tender Prey,” (1988) that showcase, respectively, tales of moribund, carnival nags and convicted killers who may or may not

This week, Mayor Mike Bloomberg used choice language in describing the state of play at the World Trade Center site. Over and against those who complain that the administration has been sitting on its hands for much of the last eight years, Bloomberg demurred, “Larry [Silverstein, the developer] has everybody by the proverbials—he really does.”

After his scrappy and occasionally amusing head-banger memoir Fargo Rock City hit stores in 2001, Chuck Klosterman soon morphed from bucolic hair-metal apologist to city-slicker pop anthropologist: The native North Dakotan moved to New York and become the voice of anti-elitism at elite print-media juggernauts such as Spin, Esquire, and Sports Illustrated. This privileged position required him to dive deeper for salvageable meaning in the Dumpsters of popular culture, even while continuing to reject anything reeking of “alternative” exclusivity.