The recent publication of Nabokov’s index cards in The Original of Laura made me consider the fate of similar projects during the past few centuries. It’s striking how often we novelists are struck down in the middle of writing our weakest work—and yet these novels intrigue because, if only the writer had lived, the book might have really “come together.” As my days dwindle down, I contemplate writing chunks of say, four or five different novels: That’ll make them miss me when I’m gone! And yet what self-respecting writer doesn’t have those four or five novels already, in some drawer

As we hunch over computers in airless office cubicles, many of us wish we could take a break from our daily routine. But vacationing can be an anxious endeavor in its own right. The following books begin with pleasant holidays, but end up delivering something darker and more complex. Or as the perennially grand-touring Miss Lavish muses while strolling the alleys of Florence in E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View: “How delightfully warm! But a wind down the side streets cut like a knife, didn’t it?” Forgetting Elena by Edmund White White’s beautifully written first novel, full of

The history of utopian literature is very nearly the history of civilization. Lewis Mumford claimed in The City in History that the original utopias—those of Plato and Aristotle—were a reaction to the dystopia of Athens, upending the usual argument that dystopia is the result of utopian experimentation gone wrong. In fits and spurts, and in a variety of forms, utopian literature has played a central role in the advent of almost every significant ideology in history, from democracy to fascism. In the contemporary era, when literature seems increasingly disconnected from the real world, the books here offer a reminder that

In the contemporary digital world, where it seems everything has been said, done, and made instantly available, one word might prove to be a useful corrective: Dada. Born in 1916, the anti-art movement continues to influence critics, poets, artists, and tastemakers. Sustained by its many paradoxes, Dada challenges staid institutions with questions that provoke debate and spur artistic production. In the poetic realm, Dada is no less contradictory or revelatory, offering ways of opening up language that have not yet been exhausted. The volumes here are recently published (or translated) doses of Dada’s frenzy; small salvos aimed to disrupt the

Visual art and music are often studied separately, even though seeing and hearing are inexorably linked. What if we could hear the silence in a Vermeer painting? Is it possible to simulate the experience of a certain city by playing its soundscape through loudspeakers in a city on the other side of the world? What would a Brian Eno song look like as a painting? The books listed here examine the myriad connections and convergences between sound and painting, architecture, and film. Sinister Resonance by David Toop “Seeing comes before words,” wrote John Berger in 1972, in the opening of

In the United States, the span of years following World War II was a period of prosperity, growing national influence in the world, and mass access to higher education through the GI Bill. It was a time of optimism and newfound self-regard, and the ordinary life of Americans suddenly seemed a subject of surpassing interest. The books here articulated a new vocabulary with which to reflect America back to itself, but the image they presented was not always pleasing. The country as seen by these writers was materially abundant but spiritually arid, a place of conformity and pervasive underlying anxiety.

Literary authors have always been drawn to boxing, and many have written beautifully about the sport. Despite dire prediction of its demise, boxing persists and, cyclically, thrives; fortunately, over the past half century and more, talented writers have chronicled its appeal while dissecting its ugliness. The nature of the sport—two human beings in competition, distilled to its barest essence—lends itself to contemplation of bigger ideas and deeper meanings. The Sweet Science by A. J. Liebling Liebling’s sharp-eyed, sharp-eared, and sharp-witted tome is the foundation, the boxing book referenced by every other. Although he wrote in a glorious era—the days of

By marrying the intimacy of autobiography with the aesthetic eclecticism of the graphic novel, graphic memoirs occupy the fertile realm between fiction and nonfiction, as well as between literature and art. I first encountered this narrative chimera in the 1990s, when I read Daniel Clowes’s Ghost World, and the feminist zines I found along the windowsills of Boston’s indie bookstores. This underground aesthetic seemed to depict my own disaffected experience and burgeoning politics; since then, I’ve been glad to see long-form graphic storytelling find a larger audience. The following volumes are a small sampling of a rich genre. One Hundred

From the cabaret to the nightclub, from the theater to the ballet, women who perform in public have attracted writers and artists for as long as women have performed in public. Unlike the prostitute, who, as Walter Benjamin once said, is “saleswoman and wares in one,” the chorus girl is not exactly selling herself—she’s selling a dream of who she might be. The gaze that falls on her is sometimes male, sometimes female, sometimes singular, sometimes multiple. Onstage or off, the chorus girl is defined by her relationship to a necessary other—her audience—who, after all, may just be the reader.