New York City might be the only place on earth where you could conceivably date someone for months on end and never be invited into their apartment. But special mention should go to Barry Yourgrau, who managed to keep his soignée food-writer girlfriend (and almost everyone else, even the super) out of his place for five long years. So ashamed was he of his unruly belongings, and yet so deeply attached to them, he tells us in his memoir, Mess: One Man’s Struggle to Clean Up His House and His Act (Norton, $26), that he couldn’t stomach any intruders. When

The reason we love a song usually has to do with longing: for a person, a time, a way of life. That is why my teenage songs have stuck by me. Back then, I did hardly anything but long. This yearning led me to doggedly pursue music and unreasonably identify with what I liked. Jonathan Lethem memorably described this phenomenon in his 2012 essay about the Talking Heads: “I might have wished to wear the album Fear of Music in place of my head so as to be more clearly seen by those around me.” This way of thinking might

Per publishing custom, the first pages of In Other Words, Jhumpa Lahiri’s fifth book and first essay collection, present a selection of critical praise for her previous work. The nature of this praise, all of it pertaining to Lahiri’s 2013 novel The Lowland, is both predictable and particular, with an emphasis on the author’s reputation as “an elegant stylist.” The blurbs celebrate Lahiri’s “legendarily smooth . . . prose style,” her “brilliant language,” and her ability to place “the perfect words in the perfect order.” Beyond the usual hosannas, what emerges is the sense of an author defined by her

I don’t care how much your parents fucking loved you—you’ve got problems. Me, I was abused by an alcoholic father, molested by a neighbor, kidnapped and raped at fifteen, so my PTSD is like a fungus with more PTSD mushrooming on top of it. I go to therapy to tell all these crazy stories over and over till they become just stories. Like a house that grows smaller and smaller out the back window of a car. Luckily, I’m a musician, so I can also write songs about this stuff. I can’t tell you how powerful it is to write

THE WORLD OF CHARLES AND RAY EAMES (Barbican Art Gallery/Rizzoli, $75), with a dust jacket that folds out into a colorful poster in the image-grid style the design duo popularized, may seem like an Eames lounger: Something you can settle into and use to travel back in time to, say, 1956. But don’t get too comfortable. This catalogue is not about midcentury modern furniture and decor, but instead shows how the Eameses communicated their rationalist vision of design: a way to provide “the best for the most for the least,” as they often put it. Even their famous Pacific Palisades

The first essay of Geoff Dyer’s new collection, White Sands, features the perpetually unsatisfied author on a junket to Tahiti. He’s supposed to be writing about Gauguin, whose famous painting Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? gives the piece its title, but—and this will be no surprise to readers of Dyer—he winds up writing about writing about Gauguin. Turns out tropical paradise is no paradise. The trip may be free, but it sure ain’t fun. The food is bad and overpriced; the view from the hotel is compromised; the monuments are just dumb rocks.