The body is absurd. The sounds, smells, textures, impulses, tics, blemishes, engorgements, excretions of our organs—these make up the outrageous conditions of our animal existence, from infancy to old age. We suffer the daily indignities, surprises, and wonders of the flesh because we are stuck with this imperfect vessel. No wonder we make so many dick jokes.

In Why is the Penis Shaped Like That? And Other Reflections On Being Human, research psychologist and science writer Jesse Bering aims to understand the function of human attributes through the lens of evolutionary psychology. In considering

There is nothing like like a novel set in the recent past to remind you of how quickly things change. In 2005, if a novelist had published a book that hinged on the murder of a Jewish American journalist by Islamic terrorists in Iraq, it would have been read as a political novel, a war novel, a post-9/11 novel—and, of course, a roman a clef about Daniel Pearl, who was murdered in 2002 in Pakistan. Seven years later, Joshua Henkin has published just such a book in The World Without You, which is set in 2005 on the anniversary of the murder of Leo Frankel, whose story closely mirrors Pearl’s.

Often, we make sense of our lives by making sense of other people’s lives. We strive to understand our mother or father or sister or spouse; sometimes a child; even a stranger, someone we never actually knew. Sometimes we turn to places—a city, a town, a country—home. Sometimes we turn to things—substances, a hobby, a game. And sometimes we turn to books.

The first great book I ever read, and the only great book I’ve read as many as five or six times since, is Ulysses. That said, I still don’t understand it completely. Perhaps that’s why I return to it.

I did so again last June, when, as I

While abstract ideas of “power” and “politics” are catnip to contemporary literary figures, the actual exercise of political power in the American electoral process tends to be their analytic kryptonite. But things were not ever thus. Michael Szalay’s fascinating new book, Hip Figures, reminds us of a time, not long ago, when literary intellectuals set great store by mainstream political parties, and vice versa. Szalay’s book focuses on the postwar era—a high-water mark, he contends, for the mutual influence of mainstream politics and American fiction. “In the decades following the Second World

Hali Felt’s quite wonderful new book disqualifies itself as a true biography for a reason that will jar any reader who feels protective of the traditional rules of nonfiction writing. Simply put, parts of it are fictional. There are several key moments in this absorbing account of the life and career of marine cartographer Marie Tharp when Felt, a first-time book author with a flowing and vivid prose style, invents scenes to fill out otherwise sizable gaps in Tharp’s life story: “I want to give [Marie’s] story a little palpable emotion, even if it isn’t hers, to try to keep her whole, a little