Every now and then a writer changes the whole map of literature inside my head. The most recent has been the Icelander Sjón, whose work is unlike anything I had read, and very exciting. He was born in 1962 and published his first poetry collection when he was fifteen. He was a founder of the neosurrealist group Medúsa. He has published eight novels and books of poetry, plays, and librettos. He writes lyrics for the Icelandic singer Björk and was nominated for an Oscar for his lyrics for the Lars von Trier film Dancer in the Dark.

Fleming’s Bond was a sadistic racial essentialist prone to rhapsodise about the “sweet tang of rape”. In contrast, Boyd’s Bond is a “careful” lover who is also careful about meting out violence: one assailant is coshed like a cow felled by a “humane killer”. His mission to the warring African state of Zanzarim doesn’t inspire dodgy racial observations.

At the heart of At the Bottom of Everything is Adam Sanecki, an appealing yet somewhat callow Ivy League graduate a few years out of school, living in his hometown, Washington. He has spent years trying not to think about his former best friend, Thomas Pell. Adam’s current antipathy extends to Thomas’s parents: he recalls with a wince that he had even, “one especially, unproud morning, turned and speed-walked out of Safeway because I’d seen Thomas’s dad, or someone who looked like Thomas’s dad, rooting around in the bin of red peppers.”

Over the past thirty years, Geoffrey O’Brien has devoted his attention to many subjects: He is the editor in chief of the Library of America, has published several volumes of poetry, and has surveyed a broad range of cultural provinces in books such as Hardboiled America: Lurid Paperbacks and the Masters of Noir (1981) and Sonata for Jukebox: An Autobiography of My Ears (2005). He has written about multiple art forms and genres, moving effortlessly from Heinrich von Kleist to comic books, from La Traviata to Burt Bacharach. And through it all, he has revealed his love for the movies, proving

In his 2000 memoir, Blood of the Liberals, George Packer mentions a post-collegiate encounter with one of his Yale classmates, a young right-wing pundit who had hired Packer—then dividing his time in Boston between carpentry jobs at construction sites and volunteer stints at a downtown homeless shelter—to build him a bookshelf. This was the mid-1980s, and the conservative was a young man in a hurry, tacking confidently into the post-liberal zeitgeist. He was “an apologist for radical laissez-faire economics and a kind of high-Tory moralism on social issues,” Packer writes, “with an attitude

2500 Random Things About Me Too, originally composed on Facebook, consists of 100 lists, 25 supposedly random items in each bouquet; “random” is a term that Viegener gently interrogates during the course of this autobiographical recitation, which shuns the dungeon of “memoir,” a zone deemed sentimental because of its jejune sequentiality.

Since the age of thirteen or so, my female cohorts and I have defined womanhood through a handy set of quantifiable—or tangible, at least—measures: bra size, dark eyeliner, use of tampons, relative intactness of one’s hymen, smoking, being “eaten out.” From there, the relevant metrics have only accumulated: a double-digit number of sexual partners, being able to fuck like a man, a long-term boyfriend, securing a respectable profession, refusing to go dutch on dates, being able to fuck like a lady, paying rent, and so on. But now, at the precipice of thirty, I’ve found that the single experience