COLUMNS

International Pastimes: Ronald Jones on coffee and cigarettes

Coffee Table: Barry Schwabsky and Andy Grundberg on new monographs

Market Bull: Andrew Hultkrans on demographic surveillance

Print Run: Tom Vanderbilt on the “new classics”

Gordon Grice on Nabokov’s Blues: The Scientific Odyssey of a Literary Genius, by Kurt Johnson and Steve Coates

Paul Lukas on Tupperware: The Promise of Plastic in 1950s America, by Alison J. Clarke

Jane Harris on Joseph Cornell: Stargazing in the Cinema, by Jodi Hauptman

Lee Smith on Why Read the Classics?, by Italo Calvino, translated by Martin McLaughlin

Lawrence Chua on E-topia: “Urban Life, Jim—But Not As We Know It,” by William J. Mitchell

Erik Davis on The Vampire Lectures, by Laurence A. Rickels

Greil Marcus on The Noir Style, by Alain Silver and James Ursini; and New York Noir: Crime Photos from the Daily News Archive, by William Hannigan

Howard Hampton on “Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!”: A History of Exploitation Films, 1919–1959, by Eric Schaefer

Arthur C. Danto on Balthus: A Biography, by Nicholas Fox Weber

Michael FitzGerald on On Modern American Art: Selected Essays, by Robert Rosenblum

Giovanni Intra on Mike Kelley, by Isabelle Graw, Anthony Vidler, and John Welchman

Jonathan Lethem on O.K. You Mugs: Writers on Movie Actors, edited by Luc Sante and Melissa Holbrook Pierson

Daniel Pinchbeck on Pills-A-Go-Go: A Fiendish Investigation into Pill Marketing, Art, History, and Consumption, by Jim Hogshire

Ann Reynolds on Ansichts Sachen/Viewing Matters, by Hans Haacke

David Toop on Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts, by Douglas Kahn; and The Sound of Painting: Music in Modern Art, by Karin v. Maur