JAMIE ANDERSON’S An Army of Lovers is a pre-digested compilation of material that would be hard to find in any other single place.

JEANETTE WINTERSON’S latest novel raises two basic questions: What does it mean to be human? And what are the limits of reaching for immortality?

South American Journals, edited by Ginsberg biographer Michael Schumacher, is one of those big important historical documents. Scholars of the Beats and lovers of Ginsberg will find much rich ore to mine here for years to come.

            “The Decay of Lying” was as much a critique of the realism of Victorian literature as it was an argument for the pleasure of artifice in art. For Vivian, the beauty of artifice was precisely what gave art its power. But what of the artist himself? What becomes of literary forgeries, imitations, and outright faked manuscripts when we consider Wilde’s notion of art’s beautiful lies?

            This is the question that Gregory Mackie takes up in his deeply researched and entertaining book …

            Greenwell’s prose shines and shimmers with each page turn. His narrator’s first-person exposition reveals personality via off-handed comments about third parties and their reactions.

IN THE YEARS before the Civil War, Washington, D.C., was “very much a work in progress”: most of its roads were muddy mires, neighborhoods were far apart by horseback, and much of the city sat in a genuine swamp to which most Congressmen had to travel from far away. In Bosom Friends,  Balcerski conveys the roughness of the city in you-are-there detail …