When you went to a traveling American circus in the nineteenth century, you got scammed. Pay for the freak show, and you’d sometimes be offered the chance, for a bit more money, to see the “Feejee Mermaid.” A real life mermaid! How could you pass this up? You’d pay, walk past the illustrations of some creature out of Hans Christian Andersen, and be greeted by the torso, arms and head of a monkey stitched to the body of a fish. It was compelling taxidermy, but not quite what you paid for.

O: A Presidential Novel is a Feejee Mermaid. Simon & Schuster promoted the book to journalists as an

Nobody, so far as I know, calls Carl Dennis a great innovator, and I would not trust anybody who did. Insofar as he has distinctive gifts—and he certainly does—they are gifts firmly opposed to great innovation, to major endeavors of any sort. It is in the minor efforts, the daily or weekly rewards and tasks that make up most of any life, that Dennis finds his métier.

In Spurious, Lars Iyer, a blogger and Maurice Blanchot scholar, explores the absurd and dysfunctional extremes of male bonding. Evoking literary duos like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, and Othello and Iago, Iyer’s portrait of two insufferable academics fumbling for enlightenment illustrates what the author comically calls the most honorable cruelty: friendship.

More dramaturgic than narrative, Spurious focuses on the prolix conversations of two supercilious Canadian critical theorists, W. and Lars, as they meander across Europe and sift through the history of continental philosophy. W.,

In early 2008, Joyce Carol Oates gave a talk called “The Writer’s (Secret) Life: Woundedness, Rejection, and Inspiration,” about how writers go about transmuting painful life experiences into art. At the heart of her speech was a quote from Hemingway, which Oates found so profound that she cited it twice. “From things that have happened . . . and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you

Modernist America is by no means the last word on its subject, though not for lack of trying. Richard Pells’s book leaps, lunges, gallops, and, once in a while, pirouettes its way toward something very close to a unified field theory of twentieth-century American culture by charting its intersections, polarities, eccentricities, and, most conspicuously, impact on the world at large. This epic of ideas encompasses a cavalcade of mercurial personalities—dreamers, cranks, tinkerers, promoters, troublemakers, deep thinkers, and obsessive-compulsives—moving across Pells’s grand stage as if they were