Comparing the rise of the web to the invention of Gutenberg's printing press has become a familiar cliché, and there are few theorists of the internet age still able to wring any new significance from the association. Clay Shirky, however, is one of them. The printing press was expected to prop up the religious culture of the 15th century by making its central texts more widespread. Instead, it encouraged intellectual variety.

Death Is Not an Option, Suzanne Rivecca’s lively, often lovely debut collection, explores how the blind lead the blind. In the tender story “It Sounds Like You’re Feeling,” a blind counselor with a guide dog makes a patient wonder what would happen if the canine lost his vision: “Would another, smaller creature be assigned to it, something with excellent eyesight, a trained raptor maybe, that would lead the way with the dog behind it and [the counselor] behind the dog, the caravan growing and growing as they all aged and deteriorated, on and on like a series of Russian nesting dolls?”

The

After 13 years of marriage, David Pepin, a videogame entrepreneur, finds that a perverse daydream has come true: His wife, Alice, is dead—not from any of the violent ends he imagined for her but from anaphylactic shock after eating peanuts. And he is the prime suspect. Two detectives assigned to the case, Ward Hasteroll (who thinks that Pepin is guilty) and Sam Sheppard (who thinks that he is innocent), have their own marital miseries. Hasteroll's wife is depressed and in bed; Sheppard's wife winds up dead, in bed.

In the eight months that I've lived where I live now, I've probably walked around my neighborhood hundreds of times. I have dogs; my neighbors all know their names, but not mine. I have memorized every front yard, every awning on every business, from the plumbing supply store ("The Water Heater King") to the deli with the big Oregon Lottery sign in front to the punk-rock strip club I live behind. But I don't really remember these walks, or most of them.

Ferdinand Mount has enjoyed an unusually varied career—columnist, novelist and literary editor, head of Margaret Thatcher’s policy unit in Downing Street, and author of a delightful memoir entitled “Cold Cream” that was an unexpected bestseller last year. His new book, “Full Circle”, is an altogether more serious and demanding work, but it is imbued with the same wit as its predecessor and is both entertaining and thought-provoking.