Lila

Every Washingtonian ought to have this guide in his glove compartment! Even if you aren’t able to take a full-blown vacation this summer, this TRIPS guide provides dozens of weekends’ worth of new experiences, cultural exchanges and greasy summer food from across the region. Featuring points north and south, the Lonely Planet TRIPS guides provide itineraries that range from a day to a week, each denoted by clear but clever icons and coupled with extras like quotes from locals and playlists for the car: You’ll find a Warhol-themed trip to Pittsburgh, an East Coast food tour that goes from Prince Frederick County to New York City, an upscale take on the Appalachian Trail, a cinematic tour of Baltimore and a heritage music drive through Virginia. Attend to that road trip itch, and you’ll be glad to reap the benefits of living on the culturally bustling East Coast.

When you see a bereaved friend, or sit down to write a note to an acquaintance with a deadly illness, how do you offer something honest and compassionate, rather than fidgety idiocies or—even worse—the wrong thing? I am plagued by my own platitudes. So I am grateful to Elizabeth McCracken. This is not self-help, but a very particular memoir by a witty, canny novelist. Her first pregnancy, in rural France, ended tragically with a stillborn child and her second son was born a year later. Her story is just the length it ought to be: intricately structured and insightfully specific, it leads you from curiosity to compassion, rather than clobbering you with sadness. You'll cry, but then you'll know how to cry with the people around you when their stories turn sad.

Lenin took care not to listen to Beethoven's "Appassionata" piano sonata lest he abandon his Revolutionary severity and take to kissing people. Eva Hoffman draws on this anecdote in Appassionata, a delicate and lyrical novel of ideas. Isabel Merton is a concert pianist on tour across Europe, a sensitive talent with a lot of ambivalence about the fragmented lives of the supple global cosmopolitan set she meets. At a UN reception, she meets an elegant, accentless "ambassador" of un-recognized Chechnya. Anzor and Isabel’s passions and sensibilities intertwine across several European capitals. Exultant scenes in concert halls are interleaved with diary entries prodding the nature and power of music. Anzor’s geopolitical convictions are prodded in counterpoint in this meditation on creativity, honor, violence and meaning.

Every discussion of literature has become, for me, an opportunity to gush about Andrei Platonov: Beginning in the 1920s and persisting into the 1940s, this authentic proletarian chronicled the sincere hopes and keen disappointments of the Soviet project. From the blind railroad conductor in "The Fierce and Beautiful World," to the hunter who leaves the noise of the forest in search of music in "Among Plants and Animals," Platonov’s earnest, even primitive, characterization taps into sophisticated philosophical traditions. The spiritual hunger and raw physicality of these short stories combine in an effort that will long outlast its Soviet context.

Alain de Botton combines the aesthetic precision of Nabokov, the ambitious research prerogatives of John McPhee, and the insistent need—neurotic but not unfunny—to make sense of complexity that made David Foster Wallace such a trusty guide to modernity. Ten distinct chapters look at an immeasurably larger number of modern workplaces. In an effort to answer the question, "when is a job meaningful?" de Botton interrogates a British biscuit company's mid-level managers, attends satellite launches and accounting conferences and, for several months, shadows a career counselor. In one of the book’s photo essays, de Botton witnesses a tuna's bloody death at the hand of an illiterate Maldivian fisherman, then travels back across logistics lines with the fish all the way to the London supermarket where he lies in wait for its final consumer. All this in an effort to see the invisible-in-plain-sight pathways our goods take each day. Amidst the travel reportage and thorough assemblages of facts are provocative meditations on why we work, and why we harbor the hope—unique to our age, de Botton maintains—that our work will make us happy.

The Crack-Up, recently reprinted by New Directions, collects F. Scott Fitzgerald's working journals, essays and letters. There are sketches biographical, as in the eponymous essay, which chronicles his downfall at age thirty-nine, and in his letters (to Eliot, Stein, Wharton). And then there are the sketches literary: snippets of stories and characters and dialogues, which the ever-writing F. Scott kept in working journals alphabetized into unconventional categories. C is for "conversations and things overheard," D is for descriptions of girls," E is for "epigrams," and F is for "feelings and emotions (without girls)." Collected by Edmund Wilson just after Fitzgerald's death, this genre-defying work operates on a variety of levels: it provides insight into the novelist's process, relationships, life, and the works-that-could-have-been, but it's also just the right compromise: flash fiction avant le lettre and from F. Scott!