Landing in the cratered, tawdry New York City of the 1970s, Duncan Hannah was a distracted art student who became a fitfully aspiring painter-illustrator. Before maturing into the stylish throwback artist he is today—the Evelyn Waugh of painting, beautifully reimagining Bridesheads past and bygone movie stars—he cut a resplendently androgynous figure on the CBGB scene, as both a born bon vivant and a straight sex object who wouldn’t give his gay patrons a tumble. (“A cocktease,” grumped his disgruntled harassers, who were legion.) At one point, he thought of calling this book Cautionary Tales. He was a Gatsby-in-training who was

It felt inevitable that in Rick Bragg’s new food memoir I would come across a recipe instruction like this one: “If you want crispier possum, bake uncovered for about 30 minutes.” Before I started reading, I’d checked in with a Southern friend, who immediately proclaimed, unprompted, that if there wasn’t a chapter on possum in The Best Cook in the World: Tales from My Momma’s Table (Knopf, $29), it basically didn’t qualify as a book about Southern food. There was no way that Bragg, lyrical chronicler of twentieth-century life in the foothills of Alabama, where he grew up, was going

Thirty years ago, the movers and shakers featured in Brand New: Art and Commodity in the 1980s (Rizzoli , $55) were right on that gutting-edge where the serrated teeth of subversion and critique met the hard white underbelly of reification. Barbara Kruger, Sherrie Levine, and the ever-present Jeff Koons were among the rising stars playing amid the “floating signifiers” of cultural politics, the danse macabre of appropriation and disapprobation. All this is intelligently contextualized via the time lines and essays in these pages—Bob Nickas’s shout-out to the shitkickin’ perspicacity of Donald Barthelme’s 1987 Levine evaluation, très cool! But . .

Vladimir Nabokov saw the beginnings of literature in a familiar idiom. He imagined a boy “running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels.” The child was shouting, reasonably and referentially enough, “Wolf, wolf.” But this alone was not literature. “Literature was born,” Nabokov says, “on the day when a boy came crying wolf, wolf and there was no wolf behind him.”

“Old Nat.” You hear people calling Nat Turner that to this day, even though he was barely past thirty when he was executed for leading the single most effective slave uprising of antebellum America. Black people over the decades since that summer-of-1831 rebellion in Virginia have claimed a kind of exclusive intimacy with “Old Nat” in song and folklore. More than a martyr for generations of African Americans before and after Emancipation, he has been an heirloom, a talisman, a cautionary tale, a heroic paradigm. Because so little has been known of the real Nat Turner beyond the “Confessions” transcribed

The artist and writer David Wojnarowicz was an outsider, autodidact, and key figure in the East Village art scene in the 1980s. He died of aids in 1992, after a life of creating explicit, beautiful artwork in opposition to the savage, censorious Right. He saw America as the site of a mass slaughter, a land of violent xenophobes trying to create “a one tribe nation.” His work, often called transgressive, is in fact transcendent, full of love and grace and rage, and anarchist at its core. David Wojnarowicz: History Keeps Me Awake at Night (Whitney Museum of American Art/Yale University