Edna O’Brien’s fourth novel, August Is a Wicked Month (1965), displayed one of the best author photographs of the 20th century. It’s reprinted on the cover of Country Girl, Ms. O’Brien’s new memoir. It depicts the young author, cigarette clasped between her middle fingers, glancing to her left at some unseen provocation. The photograph is suggestive of both innocence and experience. It seems to promise: This girl is trouble.

Joel Dicker, a 27-year-old Swiss novelist, is the talk of the town in his native city of Geneva. Dicker’s second book, La Vérité sur l’affaire Harry Quebert (ed. Fallois/l’Age d’Homme, Sept. 2012) has won three major literary prizes, including the novelist’s award from the Académie française, and was long-listed last year for France’s Prix Goncourt. At the Frankfurt Book Fair last fall, Harry Quebert was a sensation: one observer compared the buzz surrounding the book to that of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium series. That Dicker is young, handsome, and managed to dethrone Fifty Shades of Grey on the bestseller list of

I went to work for the film industry in 1994. I’d never done it. Oh, I’d dabbled — as a teenager, I’d worked in the mailroom of Creative Artists Agency for a summer — but past that, not really. I was a child of Hollywood, my father was and still is a successful talent agent, and my mother was a well-produced screenwriter. Everybody I knew, every last person I’d grown up with, it seemed, had dutifully entered an industry that’s much like the Mafia in this respect.

There is nowhere left to live in New York. Trust me, I know. Fewer apartments are on the market today in the city than at any time since records began, and if you want one you’d better be able to put up the cash. Manhattan, converted these past 20 years into an antiseptic (that’s Giuliani’s doing) luxury goods emporium (that’s Bloomberg’s), has long been out of reach; the leafier areas of Brooklyn were colonized in the last decade by brunching hordes willing to pay seven figures to live in ironic imitation of their immigrant grandparents.

Rontel is narrated by an unnamed, unemployed loser-hero traversing his way through 21st-century Chicago. The plot goes something like this: the narrator wakes up at his girlfriend’s house, rides the bus to the apartment he shares with his brother and the titular cat, Rontel, looks for a job, plays video games, takes care of a baby in an apartment with a tarantula, talks to homeless people outside a hostage situation, goes to a beekeeping class with his girlfriend, eats pie, waits for the bus. But what makes the book so captivating is the voice: the narrator’s internal monologue (sometimes dialogue)

Not to be read home alone on a stormy night: Going Clear, Lawrence Wright’s scary book about Scientology and its influence, with its accounts of vindictive lawyers and apostate captives confined in the “Hole,” a building that held dozens of people at a time. It’s a true horror story, the most comprehensive among a number of books published on the subject in the past few years, many of them personal accounts by people who have managed to escape or were evicted from the clutches of a group they came to feel was destroying them.

To begin with the most obvious of philosophical questions, What is pornography? The problem of definition is well known and often invoked as part of the argument against the legal repression of pornographic materials. If we decide to censor, the worry goes, what will be the fate of works by artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe and Norman Mailer? What should be done about ad campaigns like those of Victoria’s Secret, which openly draw on soft-core tropes, and American Apparel, which invokes the semiotics of amateur “teen” hard-core sites? Won’t we have to censor more things than necessary? I encounter this

The term egghead has mostly been retired to the Hall of Lost Insults, hung up alongside Poindexter and gomer in the “Making Fun of Nerds” section. But as Aaron Lecklider’s surprising history Inventing the Egghead shows, the figure of the unworldly and fragile genius showed up across postwar popular culture, in comic pop songs, science fiction, television, and the theater. Lecklider demonstrates how the suddenly omnipresent and mockable egghead was a creature of its time, born of postwar anxieties over Communism, gender roles, and race.

Speak, memory: “Nan’s pussy got damp but not soaking wet,” the musician Richard Hell recalls late in his new autobiography, I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp. “It was slick, like a squeaky rubber duck.” There are many shivery, illicit pleasures in this louche memoir of bygone bands and lost downtown haunts, including the author’s anatomically vivid, clinically surreal descriptions of past conquests. Hell writes of meeting—in a late-’60s poetry class taught by José Garcia Villa—a “sad, hysterical girl with red capillaries on her nose and cheekbones, and large breasts that looked like twin Eeyores.”