If you like Joan Didion’s writing, her neurasthenic intelligence captivates; if not, its self-involvement—the tendency toward a princess-and-the-pea-like oversensitivity—can become intolerable. Leslie Jamison’s new collection of essays about bodies and their maladies provokes a similar set of responses. The title essay juxtaposes Jamison’s job as a performer who acts out symptoms for medical students with her very real experiences as a patient who undergoes an abortion and heart surgery in the same month; other pieces include a subtle and interesting report on one of ultrarunning’s most difficult

Benjamin Kunkel reflects on what led him to his preoccupation with Marxist—or "Marxish"—political economy, in this excerpt from Utopia or Bust: A Guide to the Present Crisis, his new collection of essays.

To the disappointment of friends who would prefer to read my fiction—as well as of my literary agent, who would prefer to sell it—I seem to have become a Marxist public intellectual. Making matters worse, the relevant public has been a small one consisting of readers of the two publications, the London Review of Books and n+1, where all but one of the essays in Utopia or Bust first appeared,

Very unlikely things happen all the time. In New York, a city of eight million inhabitants, you frequently run into people you know—quite often, it’s the people you least want to run into. Sometimes, poker players get dealt a Royal Flush (the chance of that happening is roughly 1 in 650,000). You’ve probably had the experience of opening a book to the page you were looking for, as I did twice while preparing this review. Less fortunate souls get struck by lightning (1 in 300,000). The creation of life itself was an event so unlikely that it would seem impossible—and yet here we are.

Why is

After reading Eric Charles May’s Bedrock Faith, you may well feel like you’ve lived the whole of your life in Parkland, the South Side Chicago neighborhood where this promising but uneven debut novel is set, circa 1993. Parkland is a tight-knit, god-fearing community, one where nothing goes unnoticed and everyone’s lives are interconnected and in many cases have been for generations.

There is Mrs. Motley, a widowed librarian, who lives in a grand old home—the “house her grandfather had built, and where she’d been raised, and where she’d raised her own children, and where her parents and husband

“These stories are meant to be read in order,” notes the disclaimer that opens Minor’s latest. “This is a book, not just a collection. DON’T SKIP AROUND.” Readers would do well to abide by this petulant command, since Praying Drunk plays out like a concept album for which someone has pondered the arrangement of tracks and how certain tonal or thematic patterns surface, submerge, and reappear. There are epic barnstormers, minor-key ballads, and no small amount of filler. Unfortunately, the collection fails to pull together in a way that truly justifies Minor's opening caveat; despite a commandingly

Beatles enthusiasts, like Dylan fans, seem especially susceptible to what could be called Mystical Completism—the belief that each newly discovered document, each unpublished photo, each additional outtake, represents another step along the path to ultimate enlightenment. As a pursuit, it acknowledges the forest—the variety of approaches from which the band’s chroniclers have come at their boundless subject—but much prefers the trees, those excavated documents and outtakes, over the critical or purely metaphysical.

Mark Lewisohn is the most rigorous practitioner of that literal-minded pursuit,