James Ellroy’s astonishing Underworld USA Trilogy … is biblical in scale, catholic in its borrowing from conspiracy theories, absorbing to read, often awe-inspiring in the liberties taken with standard fictional presentation, and, in its imperfections and lapses, disconcerting.

“My father may have killed a man.’’ So opens Stephen Elliott’s riveting new book, The Adderall Diaries: A Memoir of Moods, Masochism, and Murder. It’s the sort of line in which Elliott specializes: nakedly manipulative and all but impossible to resist.

We normally think of angels as emissaries from God, incandescent beings that might be mistaken for aliens, or sentimental covers on Hallmark cards. They’re perceived as the good guys, indicated by their everpresent accessory of the halo, practically a synonym for saintliness. But Chris Adrian intends to change that.

In “Cellists”, the final, exquisite story in Kazuo Ishiguro’s new collection, an American woman pretends to be a world-famous cellist and agrees to tutor a promising young Hungarian in her hotel room in an unnamed Italian city. It soon emerges that she cannot play the cello at all: she merely believes she has the potential to be a great cellist. “You have to understand, I am a virtuoso,” she tells him. “But I’m one who’s yet to be unwrapped.” For her, and for many other characters in the book, music represents an ideal self that has little to do with

You could do a lot worse with the next 220 days of your life than to begin each one by reading an entry from the freshly published “A New Literary History of America” — the way generations past used to study a Bible verse daily. You could do a lot worse, but I’m not sure you could do much better; this magnificent volume is a vast, inquisitive, richly surprising and consistently enlightening wallow in our national history and culture.

David Byrne is just a few years older than me, and from his early days with the band Talking Heads to his later work as an international musicologist and producer, he’s been a presence in my cultural life. His new book is a personal, thoughtful odyssey across a dozen cities, places that his busy career has taken him, and places that he in turn has taken his bicycle.

It is impossible to talk about books, nowadays; to talk about books without nostalgia creeping into the discourse; though perhaps, to speak the lingo, perhaps ‘twas always so. Whether the specific tone is wistful, elegiac, defensive, hostile, or whether the talk is of an imminent and lamented end, or of a bitter and defiant survival, or of some type of triumphalist victory in another world, it is difficult to find a discussion of books that does not view the past as some better place. The title alone of the book under discussion, The Late Age of Print, offers all sorts

“I do not know a better training for a writer than to spend some years in the medical profession,” Somerset Maugham once wrote, describing how his training at St. Thomas’s Hospital in London presented him with “life in the raw” — the substance from which fiction writers educe their stories. Our shame and humiliation, our dread, our useless grasping after the divine: indeed, much of modern literature suggests that God is himself infirm, in dire need of eyeglasses and a hearing aid.

The bleak, rapid-fire sentences of Mexican writer Mario Bellatín’s Beauty Salon give the spare novella an airless hyper-immediacy—and a terrible, unstoppable momentum. When a mysterious and incurable disease devastates an unnamed city, a lone transvestite hairdresser finds himself in the unlikely position of caregiver. Trading in his barber chairs and hair dryers for cots and a kerosene cooker, the nameless narrator converts his salon into the Terminal, a haven where shunned and afflicted young men gather to spend their final days.