Once in a while a book appears that’s so bad you want it to be a satire. If you set out to produce a parody of postfeminist mumbo jumbo, adolescent narcissism, excruciating erotic overshares, pseudopoetry, pretentious academic jargon, and shopworn and unshocking “dirty talk,” you could not do better than Unmastered: A Book on Desire, Most Difficult to Tell.

One wishes that Katherine Angel, a historian of female sexual dysfunction at Warwick University, had, in fact, found this tale a little more “difficult to tell.” But Angel can’t stop telling and writing about herself—or about herself

FOR SOME SOUTH AFRICANS, apartheid infiltrated every facet of life. For others, it rarely impinged on the routine comforts of the suburbs. It all depended on which side of the bench one sat. Okwui Enwezor and Rory Bester’s exhaustive exhibition and accompanying catalogue consider the photographic response to apartheid, as well as to the immense bureaucracy that sustained the system for forty-one years. Eighty photographers spanning several generations, from Leon Levson in the 1940s to Thabiso Sekgala in 2009, track the institutionalization and legacy of apartheid across the country’s bloodied

Unheard melodies are sweeter, proposed John Keats, and Craig Dworkin, it seems, can only agree. In his new book, No Medium, Dworkin, a poet and critic who has been among the most active proponents of “conceptual poetry,” treats silent scores and mute records, books with blank pages, white canvases, erased drawings, and other such “foster-children of Silence and slow Time.” He considers, among many other works, Robert Rauschenberg’s “White Paintings” of 1951, Aram Saroyan’s untitled 1968 publication of a ream of blank typing paper, and Tom Friedman’s 1,000 Hours of Staring, 1992–97, an unmarked

It is a Romantic delusion to suppose that writers are likely to have something of interest to say about race relations, nuclear weapons or economic crisis simply by virtue of being writers. There is no reason to assume that a pair of distinguished novelists such as Paul Auster and J. M. Coetzee should be any wiser about the state of the world than a physicist or a brain surgeon, as this exchange of letters between them depressingly confirms.

What ethically challenged billionaire would not welcome the journalistic cosseting of Ben Mezrich? With each new book, Mr. Mezrich becomes increasingly adept at how to use his kid gloves. He is expert at making up conversations he did not hear, sexing up parties he did not attend, pumping up the thrills of getting rich quick and playing down the legal liabilities of characters who may have done a teeny bit of innocent law-bending or moral compromising on their ways to the top.