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.

In Karl Marx: A Nineteenth Century Life, Jonathan Sperber’s aim is to present Marx as he actually was—a nineteenth-century thinker engaged with the ideas and events of his time. If you see Marx in this way, many of the disputes that raged around his legacy in the past century will seem unprofitable, even irrelevant.

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

Benjamin Lytal makes these archetypes his own in his fearless, serious and impressive first novel, A Map of Tulsa. The novel is not only about girl, town, youth and book; it is also — as most interesting works of art are — a comment on their mythology. We may still be a young country of unquenchable yearning, and men will always moon for the first girls of their dreams, but it’s harder today to sum up the character of the nation through one’s pining for Sally from Algebra II.