Aviel Kanter
J.D. Salinger spent nearly the last sixty years of his life as a recluse, attempting to outrun the fame brought by his celebrated first novel, The Catcher in the Rye (1951). In Thomas Beller’s new biography, J.D. Salinger: The Escape Artist, Salinger’s life appears as a triptych, in which the entire last half of Salinger’s life—but only one story, “Hapworth 16, 1924”—is relegated to the final panel. The first panel includes Salinger’s early stories (1940-1948), and “Slight Rebellion off Madison,” which later formed the basis for Catcher. The second panel describes the height of Salinger’s fame and concludes in 1963, 
What does it mean to have good taste? Is the idea of taste relevant anymore? Music critic Carl Wilson reflects on these questions in 2007’s Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste, a “case study” of Céline Dion. The book is part of Continuum’s 33 1/3 series—pocket-sized books about a single album, usually staples of the rock-crit canon. Let’s Talk About Love takes on new life this year with the publication of an expanded edition that includes thirteen additional essays from well-known writers and musicians. Like his subject, Céline, Wilson is a native Canadian; he has 
The “leaving New York” essay has become its own mini-genre. Joan Didion’s 1967 elegy to her time in the city, “Goodbye to All That,” was the pioneer of the form. In a 2013 collection named after Didion’s piece, twenty-eight writers also share how New York lost its luster. This year, Justin Hocking’s new memoir, The Great Floodgates of the Wonderworld, takes up the tradition, with another look at the ways in which the young and sort-of-young work out a relationship with their “suffocating, selfish mistress,” as Andrew Sullivan has called the city. 
Rabih Alameddine’s latest novel, An Unnecessary Woman, is about Aaliya Sohbi, a 72-year-old recluse and translator. The novel begins with Aaliya accidently dying her hair blue, and covers what seems to be just a few days of her life. Her thoughts are saturated with literature, and often turn to her semi-senile mother, her troubled best friend, Hannah, and the landscape of the ever-changing Beirut. An intricate portrait of a singular character, An Unnecessary Woman brings you right to into the depths of the mind of an introvert, questioning the value of living for literature alone. Alameddine, who was born 
Chang-rae Lee’s new novel On Such a Full Sea takes its title from a line in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, in which the traitor, Brutus, refuses to believe that fate trumps free will: “On such a full sea are we now afloat / And we must take the current when it serves / Or lose our ventures.” Lee’s protagonist, named Fan, draws on a similar sense of purpose in the face of an outcome she seems all but destined to meet.