ESSAYS & LITERARY CRITICISM

Malcolm Gladwell, the master of the quirky mashup and incomparable author of The Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers, serves up a feast of his favorite New Yorker pieces in What The Dog Saw (Little Brown, $27.99). The eponymous essay is a profile of the charismatic dog trainer, Cesar Millan; in his signature counterintuitive approach, Gladwell is less interested in Millan than he is in what’s going on inside Millan’s dog’s head, and by the end of the piece, even cat people will be eager to know. Gladwell’s insatiable curiosity about other people’s motivations and desires leads to such diverse ruminations as who’s most likely to be hired, who’s most likely to make a killing in investments, and why there are so many kinds of mustard but only one ketchup. Barbara Meade

A New Literary History Of America (Harvard Univ., $49.95) is an immense critical achievement. The more than 200 essays commissioned by the editors, Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors, capture the plurality of American historical and cultural experience in all its complexity, fluidity, and contradiction. The editors broadly and flexibly interpret “literary,” applying the term not only to texts and authors, but to cultural moments and ideas. A stadium-sized roster of essayists, including Jonathan Lethem, Arnold Rampersad, Kara Walker, and Camille Paglia, explore such disparate topics as Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” the origins of the European concept of a “New World,” and an exploration of “hardboiled” as a state of mind. The book’s amazing diversity is unified by a single thread, which is simply, as Marcus and Sollors state, “speech, in many forms.” Thus, this anthology represents America as an intersection of voices and experiences speaking to each other, calling out, protesting, creating, and recreating anew. This is a vital book for any student (or product) of American culture. Chris McGuire

I think of Hallie Ephron’s The Bibliophile’s Devotional (Adams Media, $16.95) as an amuse bouche of books: each day it offers a small bite of something good. Ephron’s hope is that these tidbits (she calls the book a “tasting menu”) will tempt you to run to your favorite (local independent) bookstore and get one of the books she describes. There are many ways to enjoy this book; you can treat it like a true devotional, reading one page a day, or you can look up significant dates in your life and see which book corresponds. (My birthday is The Hobbit.) You may want to use it to learn about interesting books you’ve never gotten the chance read (so many books so little time!). Or follow it as a ready-made list of must-reads. Susan Skirboll