QUICK TAKES

According to David E. Sanger'sThe Inheritance (Harmony), Bush is bequeathing Obama a wealth of national-security crises. Pratap Chatterjee charges Halliburton's Army (Nation Books) with war profiteering, cronyism, and punishing whistle-blowers. Ray Bradbury promises We'll Always Have Paris (Morrow). Steven Gaines dwells in a Fool's Paradise (Crown). Catherine Blyth strikes up The Art of Conversation (Penguin). Janice Y. K. Lee premieres with The Piano Teacher (Viking). Damon Galgut unmasks The Imposter (Grove). Kit Reed gets trippy in Enclave (Tor). Catherine Clinton draws out Mrs. Lincoln (Harper). Daniel Sperling and Deborah Gordon rev up Two Billion Cars (Oxford). Mark Schultz, Zander Cannon, and Kevin Cannon sketch The Stuff of Life (Hill and Wang). V.F. contributing editor A. A. Gill plates The English Breakfast (Rizzoli). Bruce Altshuler curates the art exhibitions that made history, from Salon to Biennial (Phaidon). Richard Calvocoressi preserves the work of Lucian Freud on Paper (Rizzoli).

Scientist turned experimental novelist David Eagleman'sSum (Pantheon) envisions a multiplicity of afterlives: pasts relived in shuffle mode, cast in the dreams of others, and—dear God—dictated by our credit reports.

LOVE AND SEX AND DEATH

T. C. Boyle erects the life of cocksure architect Frank Lloyd Wright out of The Women (Penguin) who loved him. Erudite eroticist John Baxter seduces the buy-curious with his A-to-Z orgy of Carnal Knowledge (Harper).

The heroine of Nami Mun's debut is a jaded teenage runaway, Miles from Nowhere (Riverhead). In her eagerly awaited first novel, The Vagrants (Random House), Yiyun Li casts back to the execution of an accused counterrevolutionary woman in a provincial Chinese town. The Battle of Britain is waged anew in Michael Korda'sWith Wings Like Eagles (HarperCollins).

D. J. Taylor reflects on London's glamorously doomed “lost generation” of Bright Young People (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), whose tawdry scandals and press obsession presaged our celebrity-based Kultur. Peter Cowie shines the star of Joan Crawford (Rizzoli), a screen legend who wielded her charm like a bullwhip.

A callow young artist undergoes an Ovidlike metamorphosis in Stacey D'Erasmo's The Sky Below (Houghton Mifflin). Adriana Trigiani is sweet on Very Valentine (HarperCollins). In Dale Peck's diabolical new novel, Body Surfing (Atria), a race of demons ride two boys on a wave of destruction. Newsweek editor-at-large Evan Thomas delivers the scoop on our recent historic election in A Long Time Coming (PublicAffairs). Of all his unpublished novels, Philip K. Dick's favorite son was The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike (Tor). The lives of the folks in John Raymond'sLivability (Bloomsbury) are clouded by longing and lit with rare flashes of grace. Peter Ackroyd's bio of Poe (Doubleday) ensures that though the poet himself is nevermore, his heart beats louder—louder—louder...

The Life Guru

Investigative humorist and V.F. contributing editor Henry Alford has made a career out of infiltrating the land of the Everyman (were that Everyman, say, a cruise-ship entertainer or a hirer of nude housecleaners) and merrily exposing the absurdities of modern life. His mission in How to Live (Twelve) is to solicit wisdom from those with the most life experience under (and over) their Sansabelts—the elderly—including his mother, who suddenly discovers the courage to divorce her husband of 36 years.

While Alford's slaying wit and intellectual nimbleness put him on par with Wilde and Benchley, his personal investment infuses How to Live with an emotional expansiveness uniquely his own. He shows us that wisdom isn't bestowed like a gold watch that rewards years of service. It accrues. And no matter the age, hitting the reset button is always an option.