Francine Prose:

Bob, a waiter at the London pub from which Patrick Hamilton's 1929 novel, The Midnight Bell, takes its title, has saved—from tips, in shillings and pence—eighty pounds. On his days off, Bob likes to stroll past the bank that houses the fortune which, he imagines, will someday enable him to quit the bar and become a writer. But Bob's plans for the future are disrupted when he falls in love with a young, beautiful, ferociously unredeemable prostitute, Jenny Maples. Unlike Bob, the reader soon intuits that Jenny will wind up with most, if not all, of those eighty pounds. But before we can think "Oh, that story," Patrick Hamilton has us too busy worrying about Bob—and about his bank account in particular. As the balance drops and drops again to finance generous "loans," to purchase a new suit, and to pay for a holiday trip to Brighton, we find ourselves anxiously subtracting these increasingly reckless sums from the original eighty as Hamilton evokes (in the reader, if not in his hero) the most upsetting financial panic in literature since Emma Bovary frantically counted and recalculated her debts.

With their intense, and intensely mixed, sympathies for the men and women who haunted the pubs and walked the streets of London's tawdrier districts just before, during, and after World War II, Patrick Hamilton's novels are dark tunnels of misery, loneliness, deceit, and sexual obsession, illuminated by scenes so funny that it takes a while to register the sheer awfulness of what we have just read. In The Plains of Cement (1934), the third novel in the trilogy Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky, about the Midnight Bell and its unhappy patrons, Ella, the barmaid at the pub, adores the handsome Bob. But she is insufficiently pretty and manipulative to attract the sort of self-destructive man at the center of Hamilton's fiction.

Giddy & Malevolent

There’s a theory about German culture that goes something like this: Germans are very good at all sorts of things – making films, making cars, making beer – but in order to be truly popular with a people that like to consider themselves intellectuals, you have to write a book.

Interview: Charlotte Roche

World Made By Hand, by James Howard Kunstler -- a novel of America's post-oil future

Lavinia Greenlaw:

The Importance of Music to Girls is the story of the adventures that music leads us into—how it forms and transforms us. As a soundtrack, it’s there in the background while we go about the thrilling and mortifying business of growing up: raging, falling in love, wanting to change the world. Lavinia Greenlaw turns the volume up loud, and in prose of pure fury and beauty makes us remember how the music came first.

For Greenlaw, music—from bubblegum pop to classical piano to the passionate catharsis of punk rock—is at first the key to being a girl and then the means of escape from all that, a way to talk to boys and a way to do without them. School reports and diary entries reveal the girl behind them searching for an identity through the sounds that compelled her generation. Crushing on Donny Osmond and his shiny teeth, disco dancing in four-inch wedge heels and sparkly eye shadow, being mesmerized by Joy Division’s suicidally brilliant Ian Curtis—Greenlaw has written a razor-sharp remembrance of childhood and adolescence, filtered through the art that strikes us at the most visceral level of all.

The Importance of Music to Girls

The last work of a modern master, however fragmentary, is a matter of public interest and scholarly importance. The nuances of “Laura” and her fate have been hotly debated on bookish Web sites and elsewhere, with Tom Stoppard, for example, calling for the matches and John Banville urging clemency in The Times of London. Now, Dmitri Nabokov has announced that “Laura” will indeed be published, and suggests in a Q. and A. conducted by e-mail with the Week in Review that, in fact, her peril has been exaggerated.

Q.& A. | Dmitri Nabokov

Online profiles and painfully constructed "faves lists" have turned us into a bunch of unwitting snobs. Enough already.

Personal profiles, faves lists, snobbery, books

When Annie Leibovitz's picture of child star Miley Cyrus appeared in Vanity Fair her tween fans - and their parents - went ballistic. The naked back, the satin sheet, the damp hair ... how dare the innocent heroine of the hit series Hannah Montana look so provocative? Germaine Greer dissects the image itself, and we look at the people behind it: the photographer, Annie Leibovitz, and Disney, which markets the billion-dollar actor

Sexing it up

Her New York was a blemished and fallen apple strewn with piles of garbage. Prostitutes and bag ladies walked the streets, junkies staked out abandoned tenements, and children played in vacant lots.

“The city falling apart,” Ms. Freedman said one day recently in recalling that era. “It was great. I used to love to throw the camera over my shoulder and hit the street.”

For reasons involving both changing photographic styles and her personal circumstances, Ms. Freedman faded from the scene in the late 1980s. But at a moment when much of the city is bathed in money and glamour, her work offers a vivid portrait of a metropolis defined by violence, poverty and disarray — a New York that once was.

Through Weegee’s Lens

There's nothing quite so satisfying as an all-knives-out book review, and in her tenure as the lead literary critic for the New York Times, Michiko Kakutani has consistently dished them up. Martin Amis's new book, The Second Plane, was dismissed as "a weak, risible" volume; Nick Hornby's A Long Way Down was condemned as a "maudlin bit of tripe"; and Jonathan Franzen's memoir, The Discomfort Zone, was reviled as "an odious self-portrait of the -artist as a young jackass".

And this approach, while delicious for readers, has naturally won Kakutani enemies. Earlier this week, a Harvard student newspaper reported that Franzen had said that "the stupidest person in New York City is currently the lead reviewer of fiction for the New York Times". Salman Rushdie has described Kakutani as "a weird woman", while Nicholson Baker said that one of her reviews "was like having my liver taken out without anaesthesia".

Rather than blunting her criticism, these counterattacks have made Kakutani one of the world's most influential book reviewers.

Don't mess with Michiko Kakutani

A muxtape.

Anything else is just a waste of time.

Two Minutes and 42 Seconds