The great challenge of nonfiction writing is transforming reality into a compelling story with a strong narrative arc. Bombarded by the characters and conversations of everyday life, the nonfiction writer must constantly discard details that don’t serve their stories, and notice and transcribe the few that do. Some of these titles reflect on the challenge of creating a world that’s as vivid as those in the most memorable novels, while others simply show how it’s done. The Situation and the Story by Vivian Gornick Gornick begins her meditation on nonfiction storytelling by acknowledging that it’s a fraught pursuit. On either

The desire to capture the intersections and overlaps of love and consumer capitalism isn’t new—after all, Fitzgerald packed The Great Gatsby’s doomed romance with God-like billboards, lethal cars, and semi-famous lady golfers nearly a century ago. But in the last fifty-odd years, love, consumer goods, and entertainment have become even more inseparable, making love heavily mediated and harder than ever to locate, let alone describe. But good literature can still shed light on the naked heart beating beneath pop culture’s skin. The following writers have done just that, deconstructing and illuminating the intersections between information overload and twenty-first century romance.

In fiction, video games act as both the harbingers of dystopia and the means of salvation from bleak techno-futures. Between these two poles lies a vast possibility space, something William Gibson formulated with the idea of cyberspace in his 1982 story “Burning Chrome,” a “colorless non-space of the simulation matrix, the electronic consensus-hallucination.” Ultimately, when video games appear in fiction, they embody the hallucinations of those who use them, and illuminate the desires that brought them into being. Luka and the Fire of Life by Salman Rushdie After watching his children marvel at them, Rushdie composed a coming-of-age fantasy in

In theory, nothing should give us greater satisfaction than being fundamentally good, likable human beings. People trust us, tell us secrets, look to us for advice, rave to others about how we helped them that night they drank too much or got a flat tire. In theory, kindness wins us the admiration of those we love and desire, makes us friends, gets us promoted, puts us on the fast track for happy and meaningful lives. And yet, if all this is true, how can we possibly explain the allure of the sinister and immoral characters found throughout literature, and particularly,

“There’s a fascination frantic / In a ruin that’s romantic” – Gilbert and Sullivan, in The Mikado.

The weekend same-sex marriage legislation passed in New York, we celebrated. All kinds of people—straight, gay, bisexual, pansexual, asexual—came out to party, and pundits and politicians proclaimed it a turning point. But as the dust settled in the intervening weeks, sympathetic skeptics have emerged everywhere from the local gay bar to the New York Times Op-Ed page, and their reservations are not your grandmother’s. Since long before same-sex marriage seemed like a viable political option, people of all sexual persuasions have been questioning its desirability, innovating alternate modes of affection and support that often bear little resemblance to the heterosexual

To write fiction is to challenge the most basic of human facts: that we don’t have access to other people’s minds. Authors are more able than most to ignore the audacity of occupying other selves, though—it’s in their job description. And what’s a more obvious challenge than assuming the consciousness of the opposite gender?

In an effort to rebrand themselves as pragmatic exemplars of capitalist utility, art schools have lately emphasized preparing students for the outside world: There are seminars on grant-writing, as well as classes on building and presenting a marketable portfolio. But what about courses on How to Cope With Neglect? Would it be too self-defeating to offer master classes called The Art World is Generally Speaking Not a Meritocracy, or We Can’t Teach You Charisma?

The haunted house has performed a dramatic, if often caricatured, role in the literary and cinematic narratives of the last century. Over time, the once popular “old dark house” tropes were abandoned—or at the very least, relegated to genre fare. Now, in the place of exotic castles and remote mansions (think Walpole’s Otranto or Radcliffe’s Udolpho), apartment blocks, duplexes, tract houses, trailer parks, and roadside motels have become the haunted spaces of the twenty-first century. The contemporary supernatural dwelling is no longer a reliquary of spirits and ghouls, but rather a porous domicile—fractured, urbanized and suburbanized—of other grotesqueries: repressed neuroses;

As any comedian knows, the quickest way to kill a joke is to study it too closely or attempt to explain it. So how can one be serious about comedy? These books manage to capture the fleeting charm of comedy without stepping on the punch line. Chaplin: His Life and Art by David Robinson Robinson’s volume is a magisterial biography for an epic life, written with surprising grace. Like the man he writes about, Robinson has a natural fluency, as well as the ability to wring emotion out of Chaplin’s fluctuations in fortune. “He remembered that as he looked at