At 765 pages, Architecture of the Sun, Rizzoli’s lavishly illustrated survey of Los Angeles modernism from 1900 to 1970, is as angular as an Eames building but with the warmth of a Charles and Henry Greene California bungalow. Perched on a coffee table, a monolith of receding straight lines and hard cover, the volume peers over an ocean of pacific blue rug and recalls Pierre Koenig’s famous Case Study #21 house. But like the modernism the book examines, there is more here than form; there is content too.  To give proper due to the buildings and the men who built them, author Thomas Hines needs all the pages he can get.

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Economist Roger E. A. Farmer’s slim but dense book How the Economy Works is slightly mistitled. A better description would be Various Theories of How People Think The Economy Works But Really How The Economy Doesn’t Work Very Well At All. I guess it just didn’t have that ring to it though. Farmer’s text isn’t going to win any awards for its prosody. He writes, like Hemingway, in short declarative sentences but without the poetry. But if you’re looking for a survey of economic theory from Adam Smith and David Hume right up through Fed gnome Alan Greenspan, the book’s a boon.

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It was once said that New York media was run by gays, Jews, and drunks. But if the recent output of memoirs by New York Times food section writers is any indication, though the cabal is definitely gay, it’s also Italian and, thankfully, on the shaky road to recovery. Nevertheless, the two books in question — Frank Bruni’s 2009 memoir Born Round and Kim Severson’s new memoir Spoon Fed: How Eight Cooks Saved My Life — are about as different as two memoirs about gay Italian-American former addict New York Times dining section writers can be.

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Like Chatroulette, Union Atlantic, Adam Haslett’s new novel, boasts the inevitability of a work mainlined to the zeitgeist. It seems to have been plucked fully formed from the ether; or if not from there, then at least from the airwaves of Fox News. Doug Fanning, the book’s whorl of selfishness, need, and greed, is today’s Gordon Gekko — a VP at Union Atlantic, a bank too big to fail that’s terrifyingly plausible. Haslett, whose first book of short stories, You Are Not a Stranger Here, was nominated for both the Pulitzer and the Man Booker Prize, isn’t so much interested in detailing the gold of this man’s crowns as he is in the crumbling of the soul behind his smile.

While in the Navy, Fanning read green blips on a radar screen in the Gulf War, clusters of pixels the coordinates of which, if properly interpreted, meant death for the ship, threat, plane, or people they represented. In civilian life, Fanning makes a killing reading similarly abstract numbers on a screen that mean, somewhere, dollars, yen, billions, profit, or loss. Read More »

When J.D. Salinger died last week at the age of 91, the Twitter- and the literatti aligned to mourn the reclusive writer. Charles McGrath wrote a touching obit in the New York Times; Lillian Ross waxed poetic in The New Yorker and Bret Easton Ellis, tweeted, “Yeah!! Thank God he’s finally dead. I’ve been waiting for this day for-fucking-ever. Party tonight!!!” Ah, the Twitterverse, where Chilon of Sparta’s maxim “Don’t speak ill of the dead” doesn’t apply, as long as you can do it in under 140 characters. We turned to the Twitterverse to see how other luminaries, literary and decidedly unliterary, marked Salinger’s passing*.

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Having already mastered the idioms of an ESL Ukrainian and a young boy with Asperger’s, Jonathan Safran Foer debuts his new voice in Eating Animals, a book-length screed devoted to the evils of meat eating. This voice may be Foer’s real one — his walk-around voice, or his walk-around-Park-Slope-pushing-a-Bugaboo-baby-stroller-in-which-his-new-son, Sasha, happily-munches-on-a-tofu-roll-up voice. It’s conversational to the point of artlessness, passionate to the point of hysteria. It’s scary, intelligent, and incredibly grating. Reading Eating Animals is like getting a colonoscopy: It’s important and salutary and everyone should do it. But if it were just a bit more pleasant, or done with a drop more lube, it would be a lot easier to make it a regular thing.

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